A fun look at a MM as a rambunctious youth. A look at childhood in the 60’s and 70’s.

Hey Guys!

There’s been a bunch of big earth-shattering changes going on Geo-Politically and domestically. And Though I try to be topical, it’s really freaking out a lot of my MM readership. So I’m going put the brakes on that stuff. Sort of, and get back to some easier stuff to sooth our souls.

And this post is dedicated to Michelle. The stress of moving to a new area, and caring for family has been taking it’s toll. It’s time for a cool look and reminder of whence we came from.

If you didn’t personally live through the 1970s, it’s easy to make assumptions.

You probably picture everyone dressed in bell-bottoms, their shirts unbuttoned down to their navels and their perfectly coiffed shag haircuts not budging as they boogie-woogied all night long.

And while that may be a fairly accurate snapshot—especially the bell-bottoms—it’s by no means the complete picture.

For those who came of age during the grooviest decade in history, memories run deeper than Donna Summer (Ohhhh I love to love ya baby.) and questionable fashion choices. LOL.

But seriously folks…

The best parts of your childhood probably involved things today’s kids will never know

From an article that I picked up and chopped up out of my unedited stash slush box...

The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you now recognize was a privilege to have or experience?”

That question, courtesy of writer Morgan Jerkins, revealed a poignant truth about the changing nature of childhood in the US: The childhood experiences most valued by people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s are things that the current generation of kids are far less likely to know.

That’s not a reference to cassette tapes, bell bottoms, Blockbuster movies, and other items popular on BuzzFeed listicles. Rather, people are primarily nostalgic for a youthful sense of independence, connectedness, and creativity that seems less common in the 21st century.

The Partridge Family.

The childhood privileges that respondents seemed to appreciate most in retrospect fall into four broad categories:

[1] The ability to take risks

“Riding my bike at all hours of the day into the evening throughout many neighborhoods without being stopped or asked what I was doing there,” was one Twitter user’s answer to Jerkins’ question.

Another commenter was grateful for “summer days & nights spent riding bikes anywhere & everywhere with friends, only needing to come home when the streetlights came on,” while yet another recalled “having a peaceful, free-range childhood.”

Countless others cited the freedom to explore—with few restrictions—as a major privilege of their childhood.

American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago.

For many of today’s children, that privilege is disappearing.

American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago. As parents have become increasingly concerned with safety, fewer children are permitted to go exploring beyond the confines of their own backyard.

Some parents have even been prosecuted or charged with neglect for letting their children walk or play unsupervised.

Meanwhile, child psychologists say that too many children are being ushered from one structured activity to the next, always under adult supervision—leaving them with little time to play, experiment, and make mistakes.

That’s a big problem.

Kids who have autonomy and independence are less likely to be anxious, and more likely to grow into capable, self-sufficient adults.

In a recent video for The Atlantic, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, argues that so-called helicopter parents “deprive kids the chance to show up in their own lives, take responsibility for things and be accountable for outcomes.”

That message seems to be gaining traction. The state of Utah, for example, passed a “free-range” parenting law in 2018 meant to give parents the freedom to send kids out to play on their own.

[2] Lots of time with family

Another privilege cited by many Twitter respondents was regular time with their parents—around the dinner table, on weekends, on vacation—and access to meaningful interactions with other family members, especially grandparents.

One respondent wrote “My paternal grandparents were my daycare and their house in the country was my playground.”

Another said, “my Italian grandparents lived on a street with a slew of their brothers and sisters. Nobody had any money. Everyone’s doors were open all day. Coffee always on, something on the stove. Endless stories and laughter. The happiest world.”

In an email to Quartz, Jerkins said that many of the respondents “were talking about having their grandparents around, which I thought was incredibly heartwarming.”

Spending time with grandparents is also an important part of child development: Close grandparent-child relationships have significant mental health benefits both for kids and for grandparents, and encourage prosocial behavior in children.

But in the stressed, tired, and rushed modern American family, time together is a limited resource. A recent Pew survey found that 36% of American parents, for example, felt they spent too little time with their children.

That’s especially true of dads, 63% of whom say that they spend too little time with their kids.

Fondue.

[3] Reading books

Reading is good for children. It makes them more literate, better at math, and more academically successful in general.

So it’s no wonder that a large majority of the respondents to Jerkins’ Twitter question answered cited time for reading as a major privilege of their childhood.

“Books. Hundreds and thousands of them moving through our house—from libraries, bookstores, passed from friends and coworkers of my parents.

No idea too frightening or taboo to discuss or analyze,” one Twitter user wrote. “Books saved my life,” another said.

Today’s teens, however, are reading significantly less than their predecessors. In 1984, 8% of 13-year-olds and 9% of 17-year-olds said they “never” or “hardly ever” read for pleasure.

In 2014, that number had almost tripled, to 22% and 27%. And entire cities have now become “book deserts,” wherein the chances that kids in low-income urban neighborhoods finding children’s books for loan or purchase are slim to none.

[4] A screen-free existence

Gratitude for a childhood free of Facebook and smartphones was another common thread.

“No social media,” one user wrote.

Another user answered: “A childhood without social media, tablets, mobile devices, apps, etc.” “I am so happy and blessed,” she continued, “that I can reflect on a childhood filled with books, board games, Razor scooters, and VHS tapes.”

Freedom from the constraints of an online presence is something that not a lot of US kids get to experience these days.

The latest research from Pew shows that 95% of teens report owning a smartphone or having access to one, and that 45% of teens say they are online on a “near-constant” basis.

That’s a marked change from even three years ago, the last time Pew conducted a survey of teens’ technology use, and found that 24% of teens went online “almost constantly.”

With the technology habits of today’s kids comes an increased risk of isolation, depressoin, and other mental health issues, along with the rise of cyber-bullying. A recent study in the journal Emotion showed that “the more hours a day teens spend in front of screens, the less satisfied they are.”

Reinventing childhood…

It’s only after we grow up that we’re able to recognize all the factors that made us into the people we are today.

Jerkins tells Quartz that she’s grateful for many privileges she was afforded: “Private tutoring. Flute lessons. Tap lessons. Dance and gymnastics lessons. Overnight summer camps. Regular summer camps. Books. Travel. Frequent trips to Disney World.” “I was very lucky,” she wrote.

A safe, healthy childhood is a privilege that far too few children in the US and around the world ever get to experience.

But even children who are lucky enough to grow up in a stable environment may not have the kind of adventurous, family-oriented, independent childhoods that the Twitter users who responded to Jerkins’ question describe.

Kids seem to be all the more unhappy for it. Maybe it’s time for a change.

A time for change…

And with the current state of the world as bizarre and challenging as it is right now, who could blame you for having some serious reappraisals on your life and the lifestyles of your family.

Is it time yet?

When I moved to China, I was stunned how community oriented it was, how the children were all out playing, or working with their parents, or spending time with their grandparents. These were things that I grew up with back when I was young, but that is wholly absent today.

Now, I’m not saying that suddenly everyone needs to get a pet rock, or put on some earth shoes, but maybe we all need to be a little less serious and a little more accommodating.

Let’s look at what it was like when I was growing up…

Taking care of Pet Rocks

A pet rock.
Pretty fucked up. I know. But it wasn’t as really serious as we all make it. It was a sort of shrug, and “let’s fuck with someone” kind of play.

.

So…

In the ’70s, we begged our parents for $4 so that we could buy… a rock. Sure, this makes it sound like ’70s kids were the victims of the biggest con in history—and we were.

But we have no regrets.

I almost bought one as a Christmas gift for my “secret Santa” at work. But I was fortunately persuaded to buy something else. So I bought a gallon (about four liters) of a very, very, very cheap perfume. He he. Well, I was, after all, only 16 years old.

It’s the season. You all had to feel like we do….

Peter Frampton.

We got to feed our Pet Rocks, take them for walks, and even clean up after them, just like a real pet. Call us fools if you must, but we loved our Pet Rocks.

Ah, the ’70s. They really were simpler times.

You know. Between the weed, the acid, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman… it just all seemed normal.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Yeah.

The 1970’s was a a place; a “state of mind”. It really was “dazed and confused.

Like going to a movie theater and being traumatized for months afterwards…

Being afraid to go in the ocean after Jaws

Yikes!

Jaws. A mighty big fish.

All it took was one seriously terrifying movie—Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark fright fest Jaws—to keep an entire generation of children out of the ocean. All of us ’70s kids would scan the water for signs of a shark fin, hearing da-dum, da-dum, da-dum in our heads as we did.

And let’s not forget Linda Blair in the movie “The Exorcist”.

The Exorcist

Yeah. I was on a date with a girl when I watched it, I had to carry her in my arms to the car afterwards. BTW, my old GTO, don’t you know.

My GTO. Sigh.

I do miss my GTO.

Schoolhouse Rock

I myself didn’t like it, but my younger brother and sister did. I guess that is how they ended up learning math and grammar. You know,  from Schoolhouse Rock.

Schoolhouse Rock

These educational animated shorts popped up amid our usual Saturday morning cartoon line-up. And their songs were so darn catchy that we didn’t even mind that they were tricking us into learning.

With educational hits like “Conjunction Junction” and “Three Is a Magic Number,” Schoolhouse Rock probably taught us more than our actual teachers did. Ask anybody who grew up in the ’70s to explain how laws are made in our country and they’ll likely start singing “I’m Just a Bill.”

Oh yeah.

We all wore them…

Tube Socks

Everyone wore tube socks.
.
Everyone.
Tube Socks.

No self-respecting ’70s kid would ever walk out for gym class without a pair of tube socks, preferably one long enough to reach their knees. We all suffered from the same delusion that tube socks made us look athletic and not incredibly silly.

At least we weren’t alone, though. Everyone from Farrah Fawcett to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar made a very convincing case that tube socks were cool.

Yuppur.

Real cool beans.

Worshipping Fonzie

Everyone was into the Fonz.

The Fonz looks at Richie.

Kids didn’t tune in to the sitcom Happy Days because they were nostalgic about the ’50s. They did it to see the Fonz, the coolest character on TV. All across the country, kids would be practicing their Fonzie thumbs up and saying “Ayyyy” with the perfect Henry Winkler inflection.

Then, they would go off and ride their bikes.

Having Tupperware pride

Tupperware

Of course, people still use Tupperware today, but it’s nothing like it was in the ’70s. Our Tupperware was colorful and bold, something that you actually wanted to show off when you opened your lunch at school.

The generation before us even had Tupperware parties to sell these much sought-after storage containers. In the 1970s, you’d have an easier time walking into somebody’s house and stealing a lamp than leaving with their Tupperware. Seriously, we loved it that much.

Using the 8-track player in your car

An 8-track player.

Nobody actually liked 8-track tapes—they were simply the only thing available in the ’70s for recording and listening to music before the cassette came to town. They were incredibly complicated, with four “programs” instead of sides. You had to toggle from program to program, making the whole enterprise hugely annoying and clunky.

In my “neck of the woods”, we had an 8-track player when I was 16 years old and dating my 14 year old girl friend. An FM adapter came when I was 18 years old, and then when I was 19 came the cassette.

Witnessing TV go off the air at night

Then dead air and static. No problem, though. We would just put a few albums on the turntable.

Television station went off the air.

Television wasn’t available 24/7 during our childhood. At around 1 or 2 a.m., most TV stations signed off for the night, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before leaving us with a test card of color bars. Anyone suffering from insomnia didn’t have a lot of options in those days.

Seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time

I watched it with another girl. It was her idea, and after a successful date watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, we went to Butler, PA and watched this gem. She drove. Not me. She had a silver Chevy Chevelle.

Those were the days.

Hot cars. Fun girls.

A large pizza for a $1.

I guess it was in a galaxy a long, time ago. Sigh.

Star Wars

When George Lucas’s space opera first hit movie theaters in 1977, it was unlike anything the world had ever seen. If you ask anyone who saw the original Star Wars in theaters about their experience, they’ll be able to tell you every little detail, right down to how long they waited in line. For a ’70s kid, it’s easy to get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Yeah. I do remember getting on the phone and talking for hours about the movie.

Chatting on the phone for hours.

Practicing the Hustle

Everyone did it. Though many of us deeply regretted it in the morning.

Dancing the Hustle.

Before there was the Macarena, there was the Hustle. When Van McCoy implored us in his 1975 hit to “do the Hustle,” we all knew we had to learn this dance or we’d be left behind.

Sinking our feet into shag carpeting

God. You all have no idea.

Shag Carpeting.

Shag carpets looked hideous, almost like the hair on the head of a gigantic Muppet. And yet, they were also surprisingly cozy on bare feet. The material felt so soft to the touch that it made an entire generation overlook its heinous appearance.

When Marcia Brady moved out of the house, it was probably to an apartment like this…

Groovy.

With enough black laquer, your den would be fit for a villain from Kung Fu.

They just don’t make houses this way any more.

The perfect kitchen for spilling tomato sauce.

Perfect.

Laughing at Saturday Night Live

Went great with beer.

The crew of Saturday Night Live.

If you weren’t old enough to stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live when it first launched in 1975, you probably had an older sibling or a parent who was—and did. The morning after, you’d beg them to recount every hilarious moment, even if you didn’t always understand all the jokes. If nothing else, the merciless torture of a clay figure named Mr. Bill felt like the most brilliant bit in the world.

Doing the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” dance

Yeah. People danced back then.

The Village People.

The Hustle was hardly the only iconic dance to come out of the ’70s. You can immediately tell if somebody came of age during the decade by whether or not they reflexively spell out the letters “Y,” “M,” “C,” and “A” with their arms whenever this Village People song is played.

Growing up with Sesame Street

Sesame Street.

Every child born in the last 50 years has likely been influenced by Sesame Street in some way. But for ’70s kids who got to experience the PBS show from the beginning, the program was a revelation. We were the first generation to fall in love with Big Bird, Grover, Bert, and Ernie, the fictional characters who taught us everything we needed to know growing up.

For me, I was busy watching Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.

Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.

Expressing ourselves with mood rings

It was very cool.

Mood Ring.

This ’70s fashion accessory was also a liquid crystal thermometer, which is how it could “recognize” your emotional state. Blue meant you were calm or relaxed, amber meant you were nervous or anxious, and black meant you were angry. For ’70s kids, showing someone the color of their mood ring was much easier than talking about feelings.

And who can forget…
 

Smashing clackers together

Clackers.

What’s surprising isn’t that ’70s kids loved this toy, which consisted of two heavy acrylic balls attached to string intended to be banged together at full force—it’s that it took years before somebody noticed that clackers produced a lot of shrapnel. In 1976, the United States government finally deemed the toy a “mechanical hazard,” and they were taken off store shelves.

Well.

Well.

It was a different time and a different place. And it’s fine to remember the good, the bad and the truly messed up. But you know, the things that we miss today are the things that we took for granted back then.

If something is going well for you; put it in your affirmations so that it keeps supplying you with good and happy memories. Don’t take it for granted. Things taken for granted often disappear.

To underline and appreciate what you appreciate in your affirmations. It’s not just about your future. It’s also about keeping intact things that matter to you.

You know if more people do this, we would still have $1 pizza pies everywhere, we’d be zooming around in GTO’s, and listening to “real” music.

Right?

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I have more posts in my Happiness Index here…

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Armchair Rocket Scientists, or how anyone can be a Rocketman.

Here, we argue that most of the work regarding chemical propulsion technologies for rockets are not only mature, but the calculations for their design and use are public domain. You just don’t need to be a “rocket scientist” like myself to build a missile. Instead, you can research the internet, find what you need and construct a few rockets in the basement or garage in your house. It’s not all that difficult.

I guess that I am obsolete. LOL.

But you know, the use of rockets to travel the heavens really isn’t a viable technology. Instead gravity repulsion technology, and location encoding teleportation are far better ways and means to traipse around the galaxy. Never the less, the United States government is putting billions of dollars in a space program that uses 1950’s rocket technology to explore the moon. And you too can be part of that as long as you meet the necessary diversity criteria.

Here’s a nice write-up on rocket technology from the point of view of a garage tinkerer. I enjoyed it and maybe you would as well.

The following is an article titled “Open source Rocketry” by Tom written on October 2, 2019. All credit to the author. Posted as found with very little editing.

I recently stumbled across some fascinating videos by amateur rocketeer Joe Barnard, whose BPS.space YouTube channel is chock full of interesting projects.

Armed with a 3D printer, model rocket components and some fairly simple custom electronics, he has created some amazing results.

One interesting video series is his model rocket silo project (more video links given later in the article), including the launch of a fin-less vectored-thrust rocket from that silo that reminds one of a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

What really caught my eye, though, was his three-engine vectored-thrust Falcon Heavy model (the center engine did not ignite during this flight). In that pic (taken from a video linked far below), the thrust vectoring for this fin-less model is clearly visible, particularly with the right-most engine.

Other test flights show more dramatic vectoring, more on this later. To his credit, Joe doesn’t filter out his failures, but instead documents his process, warts and all, including crashes, flameouts, fires, control losses and so on.

Joe’s work is a good example of an idea that has been bubbling around in my head for a while:

Modern technology, particularly open-source software and hardware, can allow implementation of advanced weaponry, at a small nation-state level, on par with first-world military weapons, with only about a decade or two lag, and constrained only by the available budget.

Joe’s rockets are missing three things to add smart missile technology to a small nation: scale, power and control algorithms. The first two are merely budgetary issues; scaling his airframes and engines is merely a checkbook problem, as is mass production.

After a certain point, these things (including off-the-shelf warhead and materials science technology) do not improve much with increasing budgets; economies of scale merely make them cheaper.

The third element, control algorithms, is where all the excitement lies, and is almost free, compared to the other two.

Further, with the rise of open source software (such as various guidance and flight control software packages) and computing hardware (particularly with the introduction of the RISC-V platform), this genie has burst completely out of a naive and arrogant arms control bottle.

The United States, particularly its political class more so than the technologists, has a long and well-documented history of arrogance with presuming a special capability with respect to military technology.

The most famous example of this arrogance was the Manhattan Project, where the political leadership believed that the US-UK nuclear axis would retain a nuclear monopoly for decades, despite warnings from the nuclear engineers and physicists who knew better.

Physics and math work the same for everyone, and once German nuclear physicist Otto Hahn published the results of his 1938 fission experiments, that genie was already out of the bottle.

The rest was just budget and engineering.

Even if Hahn hadn’t published those results, physics at the time was ripe for the discovery of fission, so it would have been discovered independently by many other physicists within months anyway.

Science and invention is like that: ideas get ripe when their time comes, and many minds come to the same conclusions very quickly.

Papers and patents only document “first”, and sometimes only by the slimmest of margins, although that distinction usually doesn’t count for very much, given that the US, not Germany, was the first to use nuclear weapons in war.

Espionage makes a difference, but only in terms of cost and schedule, and even so, early adopters usually pay that toll the heaviest.

A demonstrated fact that a thing can be done is usually enough to spark the innovation while early adopters pay for a lot of redundancy and blind alleys that later adopters do not.

Early adopters also pay for development of processes and practical field models, while later adopters are free to innovate on that foundation at much lower cost, usually by simply studying public photos, videos, official statements and observable deployments.

Early adopters must sift through and pay for a large number of options from a practically unlimited menu, while smaller nation-state later adopters can tailor their efforts to al a carte items specific to their needs.

This is why the US spent decades and untold amounts of R&D and fielding costs to produce stealth and drone technology, while later adopters seem to almost flippantly introduce sufficiently capable options at much less cost and much more quickly.

GPS, cruise missiles, phased array radars, data-linked command and control, stealth-piercing radar, you name it. Same, same, same, same, same.

It has been decades since I have held a security clearance, but during my 1980s-era Naval Academy courses for my Control Systems Engineering degree I was often struck by how modern control algorithms, developed predominately during the 1950s and available as public domain well-published knowledge, can be applied in straight-forward ways to practically any control problem one might imagine.

Advancements in computing technology since then have only affected the speed at which control loops can be operated, and the power requirements to accomplish these tasks. In the case of guided missile technology, the required computing power hit about the size of a thumbnail somewhere in 1982 or so.

The physics of guided missile control are relatively low data rate kinds of problems, so the major advancements since then have been reducing power consumption (and thus reducing size and weight, or alternatively increasing range and payload) and improving sensors and actuators (thus increasing accuracy, maneuverability and survivability), all of which matured in the very early 2000s.

From a controls perspective, all that Joe is missing for his multi-engine vectored-thrust rocket is the idea of a state observer model, from which the actions of all his engines can then be coordinated.

He has the computing power, he has the actuators, he has the sensors.

This one idea, which replaces the individual cookie cutter PID loops, as they are known, is like a hot-rodder replacing stock items from under the hood but otherwise leaving most of the car intact.

The actual control loop details, based on a well-studied missile problem known as the inverted pendulum, have been available for about sixty or seventy years now, and can be simulated and tested fairly well using open-source software tools once the state model for his rocket has been determined.

This latter process is also accessible using open-source software tools and some fairly simple bench and flight model testing to determine various state parameters.

The point is not to criticize or arm-chair manage Joe, the point is that going from Joe’s rockets as they exist today to a small nation-state weapons program is a fairly small and open-source step now, despite having at one time been a large and vainly classified leap from Hitler’s crude ballistic and cruise missiles, jet interceptors and other drawing-board concepts such as surface-to-air missiles.

The math was more or less complete by the mid-1950s, the computational power available by the mid-1980s, and the sensors and actuators readily available in the early 2000s.

These things now, quite literally, no longer require rocket scientists.

As promised, here are the links to some of Joe’s rocket project videos. First the silo development project:

Next, launching the fin-less rocket from the silo:

And finally the impressive Falcon Heavy Model flight #2, with lessons-learned:

Conclusions

The point that I am making is a simple one. When one nation discovered steel, they abandoned their bronze tools, and made steel ones. They also made steel weapons. It wasn’t long afterwards, that everyone (on the civilized planet) were suddenly using steel weapons.

When calculators started to be mass-produced the demise of the slide-rule materialized within a year. It was a global phenomenon.

Cars, aircraft, computers, hamburgers and watches. It’s the same. When a new technology is “invented” and is available to the mass public, it is often duplicated with surprising rapidity.

There are many secrets locked down in the United States right now. These secrets are considered “dangerous”, but I am willing to say that they are not actually physically dangerous so much as they are a threat to the power-wielding oligarchy. Nothing more. I remain optimistic, and hopeful, that some day (maybe not soon, no matter what the “news” might lead you to believe) the technologies would be available to the rest of the world and great substantive changes to our cultures and our civilizations will occur in such a way that our species will benefit.

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Awesome Movies – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – 007 James Bond

This is one of my personal favorite James Bond films. There’s something about a hidden mountain lair staffed with brainwashed beauties, and surrounded by armed henchmen on ski’s that appeals to the teen-aged boy inside of me. Not to mention the idea of wearing a kilt where the women reach underneath and write notes on my inner thighs…

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has often been described as the dark horse of the James Bond franchise, in part due to its atypical ending and for its one-off Bond actor, George Lazenby.

Its reputation unfortunately tied Lazenby’s ill-reception, Majesty has been gaining steady recognition over the last few decades with many now noting it as one of the best Bond films ever produced and some even going so far as labeling it the best.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service will probably always remain the  most controversial entry in the Bond series, thanks both to its  unusually human and romantic story, and the notorious casting of novice  actor George Lazenby as OO7. Some think these elements ruin the film,  while others hail OHMSS as the best Bond ever. I wouldn't go that far in  my praise, but for me this is still one of the classic Bond films, true  to Ian Fleming's original vision and arguably showing OO7 in a more  realistic light than any other film in the franchise.

To get the  Lazenby issue out of the way first, it is certainly true to say that he  lacks the charisma of the man he (temporarily) replaced, Sean Connery,  and his impossibly chiselled jaw is somewhat irritating. However, he  does look the part, and for a first-time actor he turns in a remarkably  assured performance, particularly in the fight scenes but also in Bond's  more tender moments, most notably in the highly emotional finale. If  Lazenby had gone on to make more Bond films (and it was his own decision  not to do so) he could well have developed into a very fine OO7, but as  it is I still find his performance in OHMSS perfectly acceptable, and  not damaging to the film in any way.

The film itself represented a  conscious attempt to get back to Fleming after the increasingly  extravagant antics of Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Director  Peter Hunt, who had edited the classic early Connery films, was very  keen to remain faithful to Fleming's original story, and as a result  OHMSS has an unusually strong emphasis on character and plot, with the  gadgetry and humour found in most Bond films largely jettisoned. 

Rather  like From Russia with Love, OHMSS feels like a real spy adventure, as  Bond tracks Blofeld down and even adopts a disguise as he infiltrates  his arch-enemy's Alpine hideaway, Piz Gloria. Where this film is unique,  however, is in the level of emotion it invests in OO7's relationships  with others. We see this early in the film when Bond quarrels with M and  submits his resignation, a sequence which really brings out the  affection which both M and Moneypenny have for him, but which M  especially prefers to keep concealed. This affection is brought out  again near the end during Bond and Tracy's wedding, when Q sheds his  normal exasperation and shows us his fondness and respect for OO7.

However,  it is of course the relationship between Bond and Tracy which gives the  film its emotional heart. OHMSS sees Bond fall genuinely in love for  the first and only time, and personally I found the film's romantic  scenes both tender and touching, particularly for being so unexpected in  a Bond film. The casting of Diana Rigg as Tracy helps immeasurably in  making us believe in this romance, as she is a rare example of a proper  actress taking on the role of a Bond girl, and her dynamic, spirited  performance makes it easy to see why Bond would fall for her and marry  her. It also helps the film's tragic conclusion, itself unique in the  Bond franchise, pack far more of an emotional punch than might otherwise  have been the case.

Of course, the film has more going for it than just an unusually human Bond.

Hunt  directs with great skill, and the Alpine scenery that dominates the  film looks absolutely stunning. There is no shortage of great action  either, the highlights being a tense and gripping ski chase and an  equally thrilling bobsleigh pursuit. Telly Savalas makes for a very  effective Blofeld, understated and sinister, and his Rosa Klebb-like  henchwoman Irma Bunt is played with relish by Ilse Steppat. There are  also echoes of FRWL in the character of Draco, Tracy's father, who is a  charismatic Bond ally in the style of Kerim Bey. Special mention should  be given to John Barry, who produced his greatest Bond soundtrack for  OHMSS. The opening instrumental theme, with its sombre and foreboding  tone, sets the serious mood of the film, while the classic We Have All  the Time in the World, sung by Louis Armstrong, is the perfect  soundtrack to Bond and Tracy's doomed love.

However, while OHMSS  is undoubtedly a classic Bond film, it just falls short of my personal  top five for two principal reasons. The first of these is that the film  is too long, primarily because the central section, where Bond  infiltrates Piz Gloria in disguise, is dragged out for far longer than  was necessary. Blofeld's plan to use beautiful women as carriers of a  devastating eco-virus is the other main weakness, because it is totally  preposterous and does not fit into the film's serious nature. I must  admit also that, good as Lazenby is, I do wish Connery had agreed to  make this film, because with him on board, and a little more editing, I  think it could have been the best Bond ever, even beating FRWL. As it  is, OHMSS is still a very strong film, its bold deviations from the Bond  formula paying off handsomely. It is just a crying shame that it did  not perform better at the Box Office, because this would encourage the  Bond producers to shift to the high-camp, comic style that would  dominate the franchise during the 1970s; sadly, it would be more than a  decade before a serious, Flemingesque Bond would reappear on the big  screen. 

-  Orpington 

How true are these statements? Is it really just the one with the bad James Bond whose ultimate saving grace is that it’s forgettable; or, has it truly earned its place in the top echelons of the 007 series alongside From Russia with Love, Goldfingerand 2006’s Casino Royale?

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
People used to dress better, carry themselves better and smoke better than they do today. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
[Major Spoiler Alert] On Her Majesty’s Secret Service finds James Bond (Lazenby) desperately trying to track down head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) following the events of You Only Live Twice.

His trail having run cold after two fruitless years of searching, M (Bernard Lee) removes him from the case.

Distraught and obsessed, Bond takes a leave of absence and accepts an offer from criminal mastermind Marc-Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) for a clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts in exchange for a marriage to his only daughter, Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg).

Bond, having previously saved Tracy from a suicide attempt, accepts and soon finds himself in the Swiss Alps where Blofeld is devising a new international blackmail plot revolving around a gaggle of brainwashed beauties.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Imagine having a secret lair populated with a bevy of girls from all over the world, and all that on top of an enormous mountain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

From this point, the second half of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service continues as a practical nonstop chase as Bond attempts to escape Blofeld’s mountainous fortress.

 Let me give it to you straight, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is an  absolute, 100% triumph. All the elements work well, firstly there is  Peter Hunt's direction. Hunt should have been handed the Directors reins  on a Bond movie long before this. He adds action and excitement and  blends this in the most stilted and calm manor. In truth On Her  Majesty's Secret Service is a return to the less Gadget and Comic Book  laden world of the likes of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, and  echoes the Flemmingesque thriller world of Dr No and From Russia With  Love. Those who dont like the first two additions to the Bond series  dont flinch, On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a strenghth and style  beaming with enegy and excitement twinned with realism. never seen in a  Bond Film before or since.

This will always be remembered as  George Lazenby's go at Bond. It is also remenbered as the one Bond that  flopped at the box office. Well, on a budget of $9million and with  worldwide grosses of $80million, hopefully the notion of disapointment  will disapeer. There is also the fact that the Video and DVD versions of  the movie consistently outsell all other Bond Titles worldwide. George  Lazenby is an absolute revelation as Bond. I had my doubts but was still  interested to see how he did. Lazenby rivals Connery in the Romantic  and Action scenes and does pretty well with the dramatic scenes. In  truth he is the most under-rated Bond. He makes a very believable  Flemmingesque Playboy. He looks good in a tuxedo, on ski's, with women,  in punch ups. Lazenby is helped by a strong support cast. Diana Rigg is  beautifull and very believable as the Contessa, Tracy, with whom our  James falls in love with, and eventually marries. Rigg displays a full  range of acting and beauty to make her the most memorable of Bond Girls,  and for one, wich i dont mean to sopil, inparticular. Telly Savalas is a  very creepy, chilling and enjoyable Blofeld. It could be said that he  is the most memorable of Blofeld's. He is obviously having the time of  his life with the part and it is a pitty he didn't play the character in  future outings. There is also the return of M, Q in a rather quiet  outing this time, and a Moneypenny, heart broken at the notion Bond  could marry anybody other than herself.

Now, if you add to all  the above some of the finest action set pieces in motion picture history  you have an idea of the scale of this epic. The Alpine sets, and Skiing  and Bobsled chases really bring out the purest sense of adventure. On  Her Majesty's Secret Service is the most memorable Bond Movie from my  Childhood. I remember watching this one Christmas eve with my  Grandparents, and their house looked very much like Blofelds Alpine  Fortress [Without the Ladies, alas]. The movie has really thrilling ski  chases, you really do believe a man can ski, and once more think you are  skiing with him.This is very much THE Christmas Bond movie. It is also  soaked with some delightful christmas themes by the master John Barry,  composing perhaps his best Bond theme. We Have All the Time in the  world, sung by Louis Armstrong is a beautifuly moving song, made all the  more so by Tracy's fate at the end of the movie. There is also Barry's  rousing On Her Majesty's Secret Service Theme, unlike anything ever  heared in cinema's or movies before.

But it is the realism  between the characters and the story that helps make On Her Majesty's  Secret Service work. By far the most under-rated of the Bond movies, and  a strong contender for the Best Bond Movie of all time. This is the  greatest. Bond movies should try to be to be like this in future. Go and  see it for yourself, dont listen to the the negative reviews. You have  all the time in the world. 

- Dock-Ock 

From incredible ski pursuits to bell tower brawls and icy crash derby car races, Bond is pushed to his most vulnerable, breathless limit as he barely dodges a never-ending army of goons in fantastic (and, at one point, literal) cliffhanger fashion.

When he is eventually tracked down by Tracy, she is as much a reprieve to Bond as she is to the audience.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I well remember this movie where the hero, James Bod, sits wearing a kilt and surrounded by very attentive women who hang on every word he utters. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Unfortunately, their escape is only half successful as Blofeld causes a massive avalanche that blankets both Bond and Tracy leading to her capture as a hostage.

With M powerless to sanction an official rescue, Bond teams up with Draco to launch a full scale assault on Blofeld (which includes an awesome shot of Bond sliding across an ice covered walkway belly first into battle with a machine gun!).

After a bobsled run leaves Blofeld supposedly dead, Bond, realizing his true feelings for Tracy, marries her leading to a heartbreaking denouement as Blofeld enacts one last act of revenge and has her viciously murdered minutes into their honeymoon.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
In these older movies you could be very sensual, with a hint of sexuality, but not resort to overt crude sex. Here we have one of the chicks giving James Bond her room number. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a showcase of how to properly execute an epic Bond film.

Gone are the fantasy and over-the-top machinations of spaceship hijacks, rocket cigarettes, and secret volcano bases from the last film.

Though the overall threat level may be reduced comparatively, Blofeld’s plan remains one of global devastation keeping the stakes up to par with the two previous films but with a far more grounded approach (despite the ludicrous nature of the brainwashed girls being utilized for biological warfare).

The Best Bond?  Yeah, I think so. Like most people who are interested in James Bond, I  saw the films over and over on TV before I read any of the books. I then  got round to buying Casino Royale, and being knocked out by it - this  was somewhat different to Moonraker and all that Roger Moore stuff. So I  read the books in their sequence, seriously the best way, and by the  time OHMSS came round, I had a pretty good idea of who James Bond was.  And, I'm sorry to inform all the Seanophiles, James Bond is not Connery,  Moore, Dalton (though he came close, but is Welsh..)or Brosnan. Oddly  enough, given the choices, he's kind of like George Lazenby.

Sure,  Sean Connery was suave, sexy, and spoke rather curiously, Timothy  Dalton had the serious side sorted, Brosnan is sophisticated etc, Roger  Moore.. well, another time, maybe.

George Lazenby, maybe due to  his lack of experience, (though why is his debut so widely mulled over  in that respect.... it's not something that most actors are subjected  to?) is not so at ease with his surroundings, not so cocksure that  everything is going to work out fine as the others, and this is the real  James Bond. The one in the books. You can almost believe in this one.  And when things don't work out fine, you feel a weird familiarity with  him. He's just a man, though admittedly he's disproportionately talented  at a pretty impressive range of activities, from skiing to flying,  swordsmanship, shooting people, jumping out of things, carnal endeavours  etc.. Oh no, sorry, that's me. Well, anyway, I'm quite tired now. OHMSS  is the best of the films, though From Russia With Love contains  possibly the finest fight scene of all and maybe the best trio of  baddies (including a slightly peripatetic Blofeld)and is Connery's best.

George  Lazenby is the best Bond, because his talents - a certain naturalistic  charm, physical dexterity, and a capacity for possible failure - are  used brilliantly, and he is closer by far than any of the others to the  book-Bond.

There you go.

Oh, and Diana Rigg is the best  'Bond girl', though that description is not very fair to her, We Have  All The Time In The World is the best Bond song, and the theme tune is  possibly John Barry's finest work.. let alone being the best Bond title  theme.

There you go again.

Thanks for reading, and if you happen to disagree, well... you're wrong. Cheers. 

- qholway 

More significant is Bond’s personal journey at the heart of the picture which effectively sells the danger present.

Moreover, Majesty presents one of the rare instances where Bond is a true underdog – the metaphoric St. George vs. the dragon.

The desperate barrage of near misses is practically overwhelming and, for the first time since a few hints in Dr. No, we witness a Bond that is almost overcome with fear.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the gals on top of the isolated mountain. They are quite entranced by the appearance of James bond into their lair. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Heck, at one point, as 007 is trying to avoid Blofeld’s goons in a crowd, he accidentally runs into a polar bear-suited man brandishing a camera.

 Like "From Russia With Love," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is  filled with mysterious characters and realistic action… Blofeld's plot  involves germ warfare and his stronghold this time is a converted Swiss  allergy clinic… The film is loaded with action—ski chases, bobsled  chases, car chases, helicopter attacks, fights in the surf, fights in  the hotel, fights in the office… Peter Hunt succeeded in distracting the  audience from noticing that a new Bond was on duty… 

The new  Bond pauses to take a finger of caviar... Dom Perignon'57 and five-star  Hennessey brandy are his mouthwashes of choice... He discovers that he  lived with his aunt in Pett Buttom, and his family motto is 'The World  Is Not Enough.' He impersonates a genealogist to gain entrance to Piz  Gloria... He wants to take the head of SPECTRE to Augsburg (West  Germany) to verify certain records regarding his claim to a title... He  spurns a Mafioso one million gold dowry; uses telescopic sight from a  sniper's rifle to spot a beautiful young woman on the beach; wipes away a  Contessa's tears; drives his Aston Martin wearing a hat and smoking a  cigarette, and turns to the viewer saying in perfect seriousness, "This  never happened to the other fella."

The sixth Bond film takes  place all over Europe with a united nations of glamorous babes called  'angels of death,' where 007 finally meets his female match, falls in  love, and gets married… The motion picture is an emotional story that  reveals more of the world of 007…

It starts with Bond, ready to  resign from the Secret Service for being taking off Operation Bedlam...  With John Barry's best music, Bond reminds us of a whole bunch of  familiar faces... He begins to look over his mementos which include  Honey's knife belt from 'Dr. No,' and the strangler watch from 'From  Russia with Love.' The sequences from all the previous Bond films  reinforced the idea that this new Bond is still a member of the same  team, a man who answers to a crusty retired Admiral, and still is  engaged in sexy banter with a loving secretary...

It is Draco's  daughter though, the ravishing Tracy (Diana Rigg), who adds a bit of  class to the role of the Bond girl, and makes the film quiet  interesting... Tracy is the troubled woman who steals Bond's heart...  She is a spoiled woman wandering fully clothed into the sea... She is  dangerous with her red Ford Cougar, a broken bottle, and at the baccarat  table...

Gabriele Ferzetti is one of the most sympathetic Mafia  dons ever to charm the screen… Draco likes the fact that Bond is  interested in his daughter, and he's determined to help her find the  right husband… 

Telly Savalas' Blofeld does reveal sides to his  character previously unseen: the class snobbery—which M remarks upon,  and the vanity which Tracy flatters to force him off his guard, and his  irritation with one of his skiers who ends up in a tree... Posing as a  world-famous allergist, this bald arch-villain would only give up his  deadly scheme throughout the world if offered a complete pardon for past  crimes and a title...

Irma Bunt was perfectly portrayed by  German actress Ilse Steppat, who, unfortunately died soon after the  film's release… She is Blofeld's second-in-command, who keeps the  Count's attractive 'patients' under control...

Angela Scoular (Ruby) becomes Bond's first conquest when she writes her room number in lipstick on 007's inner thigh…

Moneypenny  (Lois Maxwell) hands her boss a request for two weeks leave rather than  Bond's dictated resignation... Her act results at once funny, moving  and warm: 'What would I do without you?' ask both Bond and M separately  once she's settled their contretemps...

"On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" features Barry's exquisite song, "We Have All the Time in the  World," which is sung with real emotion by Louis Armstrong... 

- Nazi_Fighter_David 

Lazenby’s bug-eyed overreaction at the sight is enough to make Bruce Campbell proud!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Of course, James Bond seduces, and is seduced by a large number of very attractive chicks. All who want some of what he has to give. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Regardless, this approach leads to a far more gripping adventure and one that perfectly lays the basis for the film’s tragic ending.

Much has been said about George Lazenby’s performance in this film.

Is he the natural successor to Sean Connery? Very few (if any) would say so; however, what he lacks in charm and screen presence, he makes up for in sheer earnestness.

His most redeeming quality is that, outside of Daniel Craig, he is the best brawler in the franchise delivering vicious uppercuts and thoroughly selling all his fight scenes – particularly an early rousing mano a mano hotel fight.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The boss, very manly, with a bow tie and pipe. Ah, me thinks that you wouldn’t be able to do this today in modern progressive London. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Beyond his athleticism (he would later train with Bruce Lee himself), Lazenby’s best scenes are centered on character actions that diverged significantly from anything associated with Connery’s portrayal – particularly Bond’s tender proposal to Tracy and his tearful reaction to her death.

In these fleeting scenes, Lazenby more-or-less succeeds in delivering a poignant, sincere performance.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Being a secret spy is hard work. If you are not killing people, you are off seducing them. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

If anything, what really bogs down Lazenby the most is the vestige of Connery.

Unlike Roger Moore who was given the opportunity to make Bond his own, Lazenby is put in the unenviable position of trying to emulate him.

 Having been a huge Bond fan since I was a mere lad in the early '80s, I  still don't know why I just recently saw this film for the first time in  2010. I suppose I must blame the fact that it is criminally underrated  and under promoted. It's very rarely shown on TV except on holiday  Bondathons (I love those!) and casual fans typically know nothing of it.  I've always considered myself more than just a casual Bond fan, so I  finally ordered the Ultimate Edition DVD recently and I INSTANTLY ranked  this among the all time greats of the series. Wish I had seen it  earlier, but no matter, I will view it many more times over the  years....

Lazenby's Bond was much more realistic and true to the  novels, a human being that is far more talented than most, but not a  superhero and in this movie not armed with numerous gadgets. He  certainly played the role with dignity and it's a shame he didn't return  for at least one more. But I am glad that Roger Moore was able to enter  the series in his prime shortly after this rather than waiting until  later, so it worked out.

Beautiful places have always been an  integral part of Bond films, and it doesn't get more beautiful than the  Swiss Alps. I'm going to make a point of visiting Blofeld's headquarters  (a real restaurant) one of these days. It must have been quite an  undertaking to build it in such an isolated place as they discussed in  the DVD extras. I also love Bond's modernized Aston Martin in this film  and the look of the film in general is just fantastic. And for home  theater owners, the avalanche scene sounds absolutely amazing on a  powerful system! I thought pictures on the wall in my theater room were  going to fall! 

SPOILERS: This film is unique in that Bond falls  in love marries for the only time in the entire series, but being Bond,  it was bound to end badly. A touching scene, the only real one in the  entire Bond series actually. His wife was a very memorable and  charismatic Bond girl and now I can put into context the visit that  Roger Moore made in the beginning of For Your Eyes Only. 

Bottom line, if you're a Bond fan, having this in your collection is mandatory. 

- Enforcer686 

From the awkward kilt get-up to some awful puns noticeably ADR’d in at the last minute (not to mention a badly conceived pre-credits fourth wall break that bizarrely refers to Connery as the “other fella”), the film may as well have been called In Sir Connery’s Public Shadow.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the great selection of gals on the top of the mountain. They all have their charms and are very attracted to a man with manly charms. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

It doesn’t help that in an attempt to hammer into viewers that this is indeed the same James Bond as Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is full of constant call backs to the previous films, such as Bond looking over his office keepsakes from Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball

 I must admit I initially never gave this entry much of a chance.   Whenever it was on TV I tried to watch it, but I just couldn't get into  it.  Then last year, I saw a widescreen tape version on sale and decided  to buy it. When I finished watching it I was sorry I had ignored it for  so long.  It's very good.  I thought Lazenby did a good job as Bond,  and Savalas turned in equally good work as Bond's nemesis.  And Rigg is  as sharp as she is lovely. This is one for the collection. 

- cmt-2 
On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
James Bond meeting some of the gals on the mountain top. He’s quite the hit with the ladies. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

…a dwarf randomly whistling the tune from Goldfinger, and, most egregiously, a credit sequence that focuses on Connery-less clips from the preceding entries in the series!

 To understand the controversy behind `On Her Majesty's Secret Service,'  one must understand the events so impacting the spy genre by the time of  its production in 1969.  After the back to back tremendous successes of  `Goldfinger' and `From Russia With Love,' every hack producer and  distributor rushed to make spy movies.  

There were serious ones (`The  Spy That Came in From the Cold,' `The Ipcress File'), satirical ones  (`Our Man Flint,' `The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,' `Get Smart' ), and  incredibly silly ones (`The Silencers,' `Last of the Secret Agents,'  `Casino Royale').  `Casino Royale' was especially damaging, since it was  (VERY LOOSELY) based on a Fleming novel, and used the character of  James Bond, 007.  

In fact, in `Casino Royale,' nearly EVERYBODY played  `James Bond'.  `If we don't know what we are doing, how will the enemy,'  was the explanation `James Bond' (David Niven) gave to explain why MI6  was calling all its agents `James Bond'.  

To protect their franchise,  the producers of the `real' James Bond movies emphasized in their  promotion `Sean Connery IS James Bond.'   In a demonstration of   `gratitude,' Connery up and quit the series, leaving `On Her Majesty's  Secret Service,' which was shortly to go into production, without a  `Bond.'  

Arguably the most ambitious and difficult to shoot of  ALL the Bond films (at least to that time), it's a miracle ANYTHING  works in OHMSS. Much of the time it works VERY well, though the shaky  underpinnings of the first hour frequently threaten to undo it.  There  is so much choppy editing and dubbed dialogue, one begins to suspect he  is watching a foreign film. 

The second hour plus works much better, all  the more surprising since it was shot first. One reason may be that the  film went WAY over both shooting schedule and budget, and there was  enough made up `bad' press to put a great deal of pressure on the  producers, first time director, Peter Hunt and star, George Lazenby.  

In  the middle of it all, Lazenby's publicist announced that Lazenby was  not going to do another Bond (Lazenby is credible when he says that  announcement was not his idea. One suspects, from the bonus material,  that Cubby Broccoli planted that story to discredit Lazenby, should the  film fail). Add to all this the films' tacked-on, unhappy ending  (planned to be the prologue for `Diamonds are Forever'), which plays  completely against the humor of earlier moments, and it's a wonder the  film was NOT a dismal failure.  

Quite the contrary, OHMSS is one of the  BEST of the Bond films, filled with nonstop action, outstanding stunts,  incredible sound, the best score (along with `Goldfinger') and a  credible enough romance to lend it genuine poignancy.  Lazenby overcame  many tremendous handicaps: having to replace one of the best known and  popular actors in the world; he was 28, younger than  Connery when he  made `Dr. No'; he was completely inexperienced as an actor  (OHMSS was  Lazenby's FIRST movie, not just his first starring role); his accent  (thick Australian outback) and the INCREDIBLE physical demands (Lazenby  did many of his own stunts).  

Considering all this, Lazenby is downright  remarkable.  Certainly, in my opinion he is better than either the  snooty Timothy Dalton or the lightweight Roger Moore were in ANY of  their outings as Bond.. 

The bonus feature on the DVD concludes with  strong evidence that Lazenby became a scapegoat, despite the eventual  financial success of OHMSS. Lazenby, refreshingly displays no bitterness  that his career nearly ended as soon as it began.  He's had a  reasonably busy career playing character roles and we have OHMSS. Not a  bad deal at all. 

- Bob-45 

This backfires in a couple of ways: 1.) it keeps reminding the audience of Connery and henceforth how much better he was in the role and, 2.) it establishes the film in a firm continuity with what has happened before – a continuity that the film blatantly breaks by disregarding the fact that Blofeld and Bond have met before!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The girls are mesmerized by his appearance, mannerisms and behavior. Every man wants to be like James Bond. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

The Bond producers had shortsightedly adapted Ian Fleming‘s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. trilogy out of order (Majesty is actually the dark middle chapter between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice) causing significant narrative issues and also robbing the natural revenge-bent conclusion that You Only Live Twice aptly provided (akin to releasing Return of the Jedi before The Empire Strikes Back and attempting to place a band-aid on the story issues).

In the books, this was the first instance of Bond and Blofeld meeting face-to-face and since this was a more faithful adaptation, a choice was made to not have the characters recognize each other despite meeting at the conclusion of the last film (a choice easily unraveled by the opening credit flashbacks to Twice!).

 This is one of my favorite Bond's.  It has the best story and most  closely resemble the original novel.  It has become notorious for  featuring a one-time Bond, George Lazenby, but it surpasses most of the  later films.

Lazenby gets far too much criticism.  As a first  time actor, he is quite good.  Yes, his performance is mixed, but so are  several other actors, many with far more experience.  More time should  have been put into acting classes and rehearsal for Lazenby, to prepare  him for the role.  Instead, they concentrated on his look and  mannerisms.  This has been one of the failing aspects to the films; the  emphasis on sight rather than substance.

Diana Rigg is fantastic  as Tracy, which is to be expected.  Who else but Emma Peel could marry  James Bond? (wonder what Mr. Peel thought, or Steed, for that matter.)   Rigg is the first, and arguably the last real actress to play the female  lead in a Bond film.  Most are chosen for their looks and their  performance rarely rises above looking sexy.  Rigg has the looks and sex  appeal, but she also has the acting chops and tends to dominate any  scene she is in.

Telly Savalas was an interesting, yet mixed  choice for Blofeld.  He is quite charming, but not very menacing.  He  was far deadlier in the Dirty Dozen. Blofeld was far more effective  before he was seen in the series. Imagination was always far better than  reality.  Savalas seems more like a gangster than a megalomaniac.   Since I saw this after Kojak, I kept waiting for him to say, "who loves  ya baby?"

The stunts are fantastic and act in service to the  plot.  The ski chase is gripping and the tension builds throughout.   Although it becomes obvious in several scenes that Diana Rigg is doubled  by a man, it is not too distracting.

Ultimately, the story  raises this above the level of most Bond films.  The plot moves along at  a quick pace and there are few sidelines.  The jokes are kept to a  minimum and character is stressed.  The actions scenes are eye catching,  but never out of place.  The threat is believable and the final  resolution to Blofeld's plans works.  

Spoiler: The director has  said he would have preferred to open Diamonds Are Forever with Tracy's  death, and then lead to the search for Blofeld. I disagree.  I think the  death scene is one of Lazenby's best and it carries quite an impact.   It let's you know that Bond must return to his work to gain vengeance.  I  think DAF should have opened with a flashback to the scene and then the  hunt for Blofeld.  If the death had not occurred at the end of OHMSS,  then the opening of DAF would feel like a cheat, much like the opening  of the second Austin Powers film.  It would just seem like an excuse to  get rid of the wife and return to business as usual. 

- grendelkhan 

The only slim explanation is that Bond is in disguise (which consists of a pair of glasses – the epitome of incognito espionage – and a different accent) and that Blofeld has cut off his earlobes in the hopes of achieving a prestigious title. 

But hey, if it works for Superman, maybe it works for Bond too.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A good secret agent is a professional in and out of bed. Here we have him catching up on some business relations. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Continuity issues aside, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides yet another positive up-step in the series in the form of Telly Savalas – hands down the best Blofeld to date (Christolph Waltz included).

Smart, menacing, and conniving, Savalas’ Blofeld is the anti-Bond, every bit as charming and clever as our hero. 

On the surface, he may not look as memorable as Donald Pleasence‘s take on the character, but he is far more effective and a true threat to Bond.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Telly Savalas makes a great villain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Diana Rigg is as beautiful as she is brilliant as Tracy.

It never rings false that this is the woman that finally snags Bond’s heart.

Vulnerable but with a subdued fire ready to spring, Rigg is terrific, managing to effortlessly lift the struggling Lazenby in every scene they share.

I have read some of the negative reviews for this movie and I have to  say that I agree with NONE of them except for the slightly unnecessary  two and a half hour length. 

Regardless, this doesn't ruin On Her  Majesty's Secret Service in any way to warrant a serious complaint as  far as I'm concerned. As with the positive reviews this film received, I  agree with most all of them. For one, George Lazenby replacing Sean  Connery as Bond may have displeased some but I think he did just as good  of a job and would not have minded a bit if he became the next Bond for  a few more films. 

This movie also had some enjoyable action scenes;  some of which would later get mimicked in future Bond installments. The  bond girl is by far one of the best. 

To be a little more specific, this  bond girl plays a significant part in the Bond series as a whole that no  other bond girl shares. However, I won't reveal why that is because I  don't usually give spoilers for the courtesy of those who haven't seen  the films that I review. 

The ending alone for this movie got several  mixed reviews but I can say with certainty that had it not ended the way  it did, the Bond franchise might have come to an end. 

- thomas-williamson-ga 

Likewise, once they partner up in the second half escape, they make a memorable, natural team (I especially like Bond stealing kisses as she mercilessly drives enemy cars off the road!).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I’m not really a great fan of his plaid coat, but after all it’s another time and place. You need to take that into consideration. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Her wedding day demise (a death that shrewdly bookends a film that began with her suicide attempt) is a tragedy brought to fruition almost solely due to her indelible charisma – a gutsy move from the Bond producers whose films were mostly known for escapist fun.

Keeping in line with the grittier productions of the time such as Bonnie and ClydeMidnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service presented a natural, contemporary progression for the Bond series – a turn that was regrettably rejected in a 180° about face with the campy Diamonds Are Forever two years later.

Peter Hunt, stepping into the director’s chair after editing all the previous Bond pictures, shapes one of the most stylized film in the series.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) is the first Bond film to replace  Sean Connery and the only film which Australian actor George Lazenby  portrays the role of James Bond. 

This film is probably the most faithful  adaption to the Bond novels, giving the film a sense of realism and  drama. 

James Bond is on a search for his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld  (portrayed by Telly Savalas) who had merely escaped his death from the  previous film, You Only Live Twice (1967). 

He encounters a beautiful  countess named Tracy (portrayed by Diana Rigg) who is the daughter of  Marc Ange Draco (portrayed by Gabrielle Fazzetti), boss of a huge crime  organization called the Union Corse. 

Due to Bond's detour, M (Bernard  Lee) suspends him from the mission, Bond responds to almost resigning  from the Secret Service as he is saved by Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) who  writes to M that he was going to take a several-week vacation. 

As Bond  falls in love with Tracy, he also finds connections to Blofeld through a  College of Arms professor, Sir Hillary Bray (portrayed by George  Baker). 

Apparently Blofeld is disguising as a Count running a clinic in  the Swiss Alps that supposedly cures allergies of all kinds. Bond  infiltrates Blofeld's base disguising as Hillary Bray, encountering  beautiful girl patients ("Angels of Death") from various countries. 

Bond  discovers the psychic therapy the patients go through while sleeping  with one of the patients. 

Bond's cover gets blown and is captured by  Blofeld, who reveals his plan to spread a pandemic that could wipe out  the world through his "cured" patients. 

Bond escapes the base through an  elaborate and well-choreographed ski chase as he encounters Tracy who  helps him escape from Blofeld's crew. 

Later that night, Bond proposes to  Tracy (something we will never see in a Bond film) and plans to quit  his job after this mission. Unfortunately, their time is cut short as  Blofeld kidnaps Tracy after another ski chase. 

Bond and Draco rescues  Tracy and blows up Blofeld's facility. Blofeld breaks his neck during a  bobsled chase with Bond, but manages to survive. Bond and Tracy get  married and are happily driving down the road until a sudden machine gun  fire from Blofeld's henchman Irma Bunt (portrayed by Ilse Steppat)  fatally hits Tracy. 

The film ends with Bond in tears (another thing  we'll never see in a Bond film) over his blood-shed Bride, as he murmurs  to a traffic cop that "We had all the time in the World". 

This  film was financially successful, but did not make a profit as much as  its predecessors did. 

The critical response was somewhat positive, but  was negative towards Lazenby's portrayal of James Bond. I would give a  lot of credit to the filmmakers (especially director Peter Hunt) who  polished Lazenby into a fine Bond. 

Considering how Lazenby did not have  any acting experience prior to this film, I would give him credit for  portraying that very emotional and tender side of Bond. 

Lazenby also  matched that physique of a Bond, as it is portrayed through the  excellently choreographed fight sequences. Despite those feats, Lazenby  quit the role of Bond from a bad career advice from his agent who saw no  future into the Bond films. 

I would also praise Lazenby for not  parroting Connery's take on Bond, as most actors would most-likely  parrot their predecessor's approach to the character. 

This film would  not have been as good if Connery was portraying his rough and  cold-hearted edge of Bond. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a great  film with great action, story, and music that defines the true essence  and pleasure of a Bond film. 

- bock_g 

Some of the shots, composed by cinematographer Michael Reed, are incredible with a particular focus on reflections such as Bond wistfully recalling Tracy’s kidnapping while looking through a window…

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The ski scenes are what everyone remembers this movie by. I however am a bit strange and instead remember it for the secret lair filled with a bevy of chicks. That was what really appealed to me as a teen-aged boy. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Suggestive of the story further delving into Bond as a human being (this is, after all, the film where we finally learn more about his history and family motto, “The World is Not Enough”), these artistic touches help accent the story rather than existing only to call attention to themselves.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
There’s nothing like showing a little bit of cleavage to get a man’s attention up. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

As mentioned before, Lazenby excels during the action scenes – sequences that run the gamut of creative staging and editing. Although there are a few minor quibbles such as Hunt’s preference for fast motion editing, the film’s set-pieces provide a sustained high-level of excitement with a few creative twists thrown in for good measure (such as a chase through evergreen forest with Bond on one ski).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
It’s the romance and seductions scenes that the older James Bond flicks are remembered for. Today, there is an overload of hyper-action, and a near dearth of male-oriented seduction. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming’s tenth 007 novel, is one of the most faithful adaptations in the Bond film series – very much a welcome sight after the Roald Dahl-scripted fantasy of You Only Live Twice.

As such, there aren’t many significant differences between the source and screen. By the same token, the film version follows the same path as From Russia with Love and Goldfinger with some minor improvements to the novel.

For example, the book has both Bond and Tracy successfully escaping Blofeld’s forces in Switzerland.

 Once, at the library, I had a flashback of something my history teacher  once told me.  "Without Soviet Union, we wouldn't have had a lot of  things." Then, someone mentioned, accurately, that Bond films owe their  existence to the hammer and the sickle.  Then he said, "Pooh, the Bond  FILMS!  Read the BOOKS.  They're good stuff.  The films are just bunch  of women and gadgets." So I went to look for Ian Fleming, and the title  that caught my eye was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is  recognized as one of the best books in the series.  I started reading  the book.  I was surprised at how slow pace and dark it was, and how  Bond wasn't this confident, suave character who always knows what to do.   Sean Connery is not, I repeat, not, Ian Fleming's James Bond.  Of  course, he is the best film version of James Bond, but he is too good a  suave character to be Bond.  I can't imagine a superspy who'd say  "Yeesss" as Connery does.

I must say, more than anyone, George  Lazenby is the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels.  He is like Bond in  the books, trying to be smooth but always somewhat unsure.  He has a  command of the screen, that he isn't afraid to tell you he's there.  The  biggest gripe I have about Pierce Brosnan is how he sometimes doesn't  get a grip of things on set and his somewhat higher, softer voice (and  also how he pumps endless rounds of automatic fire upon enemies who have  a propensity for getting hit while he himself has to be missed by  endless rounds of enemy fire).  Lazenby has a voice that I imagine Bond  would certainly have.  I certainly don't think he was a bad Bond.  I  think he WAS Bond.  The other four actors have played their versions of  Bond, but Lazenby is the only believable, human, imperfect James Bond.   And his lines aren't that bad, come on.  The only poorly delivered line  was, "He had lots of guts."  I think he should have delivered that with a  bit more Connery, but that's a minor detail.

The stunts are  great and so is the scenery, and the only bad cinematics are in the ski  scenes when they show closeups from the front.  They look very fake, but  that must be forgiven for 1969 when it was made.  They did not have  Handicams and they certainly did not have Photoshop to blend projected  images as well as we can nowadays.  But they certainly do not distract  the excitement from some of the best snow scenes in 007 films.  The ski  chases which became trademark of James Bond started here.  It's funny  how in the book, Bond is very worried about skiing, since he's rusty  from not having skied for a long time.  The sled chase is excellent  also.

OHMSS is the only film where Bond drinks beer and gets  married.  Which brings me up to the next point, that Diana Riggs as  Tracy Draco (later Bond) happens to be perhaps the best Bond girl ever.   Without doubt, she is full of excitement and danger, not afraid to  strap on a couple of skis amid gunfire and avalanche.  Certainly not a  certain Natalya Simonova.  She is Bond's identical counterpart,  experienced but having gotten nothing out of relationships, and quite a  driver also.  She's the only Bond girl to really connect with the  audience, to make herself more important in comparison to Bond, but  that's part of the excellent novel on which the movie is based. Whatever  happens to her touches the audience more than whatever happens to Bond  (who, as we all know, will always somehow make it).  Her surprise  appearance at the Christmas celebration brightens up everything in an  instant, and the ending is probably the only genuinely sad scene in all  20 of the Bond films.

The opening scene is great in terms of  action, but I found it rather disappointing that for no apparent reason,  baddies want to kill Bond.  The book does it a lot better, and it  wouldn't have been much more difficult to do what the book did, although  that would not have provided the proper material to introduce the new  Bond with the immortal, "This never happened to the other fellow."  See,  how it is told in the novel is he spies on Tracy as she tries to drown  herself, and by this time Bond knows her.  He is spied on by Draco's men  who take him in, and the rest of the story is told in flashback, with a  car chase leading up to the casino scene and rendezvous, without all  this fighting mysterious bad guys in between.  But I thought the opening  sequence was quite good, even with the change-up.  It's just, with what  proof does Bond try to rescue Tracy?  She could have been just going  out for a swim.  It makes much more sense when he has already met Tracy.  Yet some of the additions to the movie are good, such as having Tracy  with Blofeld when SPECTRE headquarters is attacked.  It makes it that  much more personal.

This is my first review on IMDB, and OHMSS  gets a well-deserved 10 out of 10.  Bond in kilts, hypnosis, world  domination, and Blofeld's cat combine to make it a worthy experience.   Lazenby was not the best Bond, but perhaps the only real Bond.  OHMSS is  easily the best Bond film, and dare I say, the ONLY Bond film. 

- wontgetfooled622 

This leads to an implausible and less motivated reason for Bond to seek out Draco’s assistance for an all out assault on Blofeld’s base – especially since the novel has M sanctioning the attack rather than having his hands tied.

This has the unfortunate effect of keeping Bond’s personal initiative lower in addition to unwisely omitting Tracy from the narrative for a significant amount of time.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A skiing scene. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Despite the overall polish to the novel’s film adaptation, there are a couple of missteps.

For instance, both the book and movie begin with Tracy’s beach suicide attempt; however, the book doesn’t present the event as randomly as the movie suggests. The novel spells out that not only has Bond met with Tracy but that they’ve already spent the night together (a scene that takes place later in the film). Guess the producers opted not to have the first woman George Lazenby slept with in the franchise attempt to kill herself afterword!

The novel’s approach to this opening is far superior.

Going by the movie, the scene plays out as not only coincidental but totally incomprehensible when you put all the pieces together.

Bond randomly follows a girl to a beach, stalks her with a rifle scope, somehow deduces that she is trying to commit suicide rather than a swim (which would have been supremely awkward if he was mistaken), rescues her, and then is attacked by her bodyguards (who really only had one job to do!)?

It could be implied that Bond had been tracking her due to her parental ties and possible Blofeld lead but the film later suggests otherwise.

While certainly not as egregious as Thunderball‘s pile of coincidences, this is certainly one of the weakest narrative points in the film.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) in my opinion was the best film  of the series. I felt that George Lazenby was unfairly slagged by the  critics for his performance. He did the best that he could. His acting  fit very well for his character.

The direction moved the film at  an even pace. The action set pieces were impressive and Diana Rigg was  hot. Telly Savalas was excellent as Blofield, he gave the character a  suave touch. But you call tell that underneath his mack daddy act he was  all business, and violent business indeed.

Everything about this  movie had a cool aura to it. The stunt scenes were amazing (for it's  era) and the cinematography was beautifully shot. I had one bone to pick  with the film. The in jokes got a bit heavy handed. Other than that  it's a fun film. Too bad George Lazenby was demoted to B-Movie hell  after this flick (at least he got a three picture deal with Golden  Harvest where he made three classic action films).

I have to give this movie a high recommendation. If you love the James Bond series you'll enjoy this one. 

- Captain_Couth 

Outside of a few flaws here and there, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is very much one of the best in the series. Lazenby isn’t as bad as has been often ascribed and while it would have been interesting to see his continuation in further films had he not backed out, it is doubtful if the series as a whole would have continued as successfully as it did without him.

Though it’s a great shame that Connery didn’t get the opportunity to play Bond in this film, which saw a return to form to the more cloak and dagger thriller efforts of the earliest entries in the series, considering his fatigued performances in You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever this may have turned out for the best.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service is directed by Peter Hunt and adapted to  screenplay by Richard Maibaum from the novel written by Ian Fleming. It  stars George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Ilse Steppat, Yuri  Borienko and Gabriele Ferzetti. Music is by John Barry and  cinematography by Michael Reed.

Bond 6 and 007 is obsessed with  locating SPECTRE supremo Ernst Stavro Blofeld. After rescuing beautiful  Countess Tracy di Vincenzo from suicide, this brings Bond into contact  with her father, Marc Ange Draco, who agrees to help Bond find Blofeld  in exchange for 007 courting Tracy. Blofeld is located in the  Switzerland Alps at Piz Gloria, where he is masterminding a fiendish  plot involving biological extinction of food group species'. Bond will  need to use all his wits to stop the plan from being executed, he also  has big matters of the heart to contend to as well...

Connery  gone, but not for good as it turned out, so into the tuxedo came George  Lazenby, an Australian model with no previous acting experience of note.  It would be Lazenby's only stint as 007, badly advised by those around  him that Bond had no future in the upcoming 70s, his head swelling with  ego by the day (something he readily admits and regrets), Lazenby  announced he would only be doing the one James Bond film. The legacy of  OHMSS is the most interesting in the whole Bond franchise, for where  once it was reviled and wrongly accused of being a flop, it now, over 40  years later, is regarded as being one of the finest entries in the  whole series. Yes it is still divisive, I have seen some fearful  arguments about its worth, but generations of critics and film makers  have come along to laud it as essential Bond and essential Fleming's  Bond at that.

Everything about OHMSS is different to what  Connery's Bond had become, the gadgets are gone and heaven forbid, Bond  got a heart and fell in love. He was a man, with real aggression, real  emotions and forced to use brain and brawn instead of mechanical  trickery. Changes in the production department, too, wasn't just about  Lazenby's appearance. Peter Hunt, previously the Bond film's editor,  directed his one and only Bond film, and Michael Reed on cinematography  also appears for the one and only time. New Bond, new era, but reviews  were mixed and in spite of making a profit of over $73 million  Worldwide, this was considerably down on previous films. The reviews  didn't help, with much scorn poured on Lazenby for not being Connery,  but really it's hard to imagine anyone coming in and not getting beat  with that particular stick! Box office take wasn't helped by the film's  length, at over 2 hours 10 minutes, this restricted the number of  showings in theatres, something that should be greatly noted.

Away  from Bond anyway, OHMSS is a stunning action thriller in its own right.  From the opening beach side fist fight, where uppercuts lift men off  their feet and drop kicks propel them backwards, to helicopter attacks,  bobsleigh pursuits (resplendent with punches and flinging bodies), ski  chases and a car chase in the middle of a stock car race: on ice!  There's enough pulse pumping action here to fill out two Bond movies.  But the Bond aspects are magnificent as well. Lazenby has wonderful  physicality and throws a mean punch, he cuts a fine figure of a man and  he's acting inexperience isn't a problem in the hands of the astute  Hunt. Lazenby is matched by Rigg as Tracy, the best Bond girl of them  all, she's no bimbo, she's tough (fighting off a guy with a broken  bottle), smart yet vulnerable, funny and heart achingly beautiful, her  interplay with Lazenby is brilliantly executed, so much so that when the  devastating finale arrives it has extra poignancy. A scene that closes  the film on a downbeat note and remains the most emotional scene ever  put into a Bond movie.

Savalas finally gives us a villain who can  compete with Bond on a physical level, making the fight between them an  evenly matched and believable one. He lacks Pleasance's sinister  fizzog, though the bald pate and Grecian looks marks Savalas out as an  imposing foe as well. The Swiss Alps setting is gorgeous, with Reed  capturing the scope magnificently, while some of his colour lensing in  the interiors soothe the eyes considerably. Barry's score is one of his  best, lush romantic strains accompany Tracy and James, operatic  overtures dart in and out of the Swiss scenery and the James Bond theme  is deftly woven into the action sequences. Louis Armstrong's beautiful  "We Have All The Time In The World" features prominently, perfectly  romantic and forever to be thought of as part of the Bond Universe.  Finally it's the great writing that gives us the best sequence involving  the trifecta of Bond, Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and M (Bernard Lee). 5  minutes of class that gives Moneypenny an acknowledged importance in the  relationship between the two men in her life. It's just one of a number  of truly excellent scenes in the greatest Bond film of them all. 10/10 

- hitchcockthelegend 

With the best Blofeld, one of the strongest Bond girls, a great script, edge-of-your seat action and suspense, and possibly the best musical score in the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a winner providing a natural sense of pathos that the succeeding 007 films have rarely been able to reproduce.

Musings…

Did you know that this is the only fully Christmas-themed Bond film, complete with an original holiday song “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” (a song that makes Disney‘s “It’s a Small World” seem macho by comparison)? Heck, if Die Hard can be considered a Christmas movie, why not a Bond film?

Who  knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of  super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?
Who knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?

One odd note: as Tracy is revealing to her father that she is genuinely falling love with Bond, the scene keeps cutting to 007 ogling a playmate centerfold (a centerfold that he actually rips out and keeps!).

True love indeed!

While the shocking ending has been revered as one of the series’ most dramatic moments, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides another contender just minutes before.

Since Dr. No, the Bond films had established a hat-tossing trick that would introduce the flirty repertoire between 007 and Moneypenny.

 "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a sadly under-appreciated Bond film  which is stylishly-directed and features an outstanding score, like  most of these early Bond films. Other than a silly self-referential line  in the teaser and some sappy romantic montages, "On Her Majesty's  Secret Service" is a thrilling adventure which sees Bond traveling to  the Swiss Alps to encounter villains and partake in dangerous action  sequences.

It sounds like a Bond film, alright, but this is  actually quite different from the formulaic films one would later expect  from the series, and the sort of film Bond was gravitating towards with  "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice". It certainly delivers on the  promise of sexual innuendo and lots of provocatively dressed women, but  it's a different sort of Bond in that it seems to be more straight-faced  and harsh, culminating in what is probably the saddest Bond ending.  It's also probably the closest to Fleming's version of Bond outside of  "Casino Royale", although "The Living Daylights" was also somewhat  similar to the literary Bond. As a Fleming fan it is nice to see the  Bond series take after the books. 

Lazenby, who has been  frequently criticized and is many people's least favorite Bond, actually  does a decent job of the role. He's nowhere near as good as Connery, of  course, but I thought that other than the scenes where he tried to  seriously emote, he carried the film with his charisma and physical  presence. I strongly believe he should have continued in the role.  Lazenby fits the content of the film, which is certainly far more down  to Earth than many other Bond films, and focuses heavily on hand-to-hand  combat in the action scenes, which is somewhat refreshing after the  overblown (entertaining, but seriously outrageous) action scenes in "You  Only Live Twice". This is a genuinely good script, with a solid plot,  good dialogue, and good characterization. 

It's not just a  throwaway action flick, it's an excellent espionage thriller with a  strong dramatic core, and as fun as things like "Goldfinger" certainly  are, it's nice to see one of these movies treat women as more than mere  sex objects, and it's interesting to see a Bond girl paired with a Bond  who reacts as a human would and not a cartoon character. Diana Rigg is  probably my favorite Bond girl. She gives a strong performance and is  helped by an excellent script which gives her a fair amount to do. 

By  staying closer to the source material, "On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" dramatically improves on its two predecessors and features some  of the best locations in the series, although I admit my familiarity  with the majority of the Swiss shooting locations gives me a nostalgic  view of things. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a strong contender  for the title of best Bond film. 

-  ametaphysicalshark 

As the wedded Bond and Tracy approach his Aston Martin DBS, he turns towards a teary-eyed Moneypenny and affectionately tosses her his hat.

It’s a quiet, beautiful moment between the two characters.

Perhaps a case of eerie foreshadowing, Lazenby’s gun-barrel sequence is the only one in the series where the dripping blood completely washes away Bond from the screen!

Conclusion

This is great escapist fun. It’s perfect for boys and men of all ages, and women like it too.

If you are bored, and want to kill some time, this movie will put you into a world and environment that is both exciting and refreshing. It’s a great romp into another universe.


I do hope that you enjoyed his article. I have others in my Movie Index here…

MOVIES

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“Correspondence Course” (Full Text) by Raymond F. Jones

I like this story. It’s a story that I read years ago, and it contains elements that I really like. (If you care.) It’s just a story, but it’s a fun story, and I hope that you (the reader) will appreciate it.

THE OLD lane from the farmhouse to the letter box down by the road was the same dusty trail that he remembered from eons before. The deep summer dust stirred as his feet moved slowly and haltingly. The marks of his left foot were deep and firm as when he had last walked the lane, but where his right foot moved there was a ragged, continuous line with irregular depressions and there was the sharp imprint of a cane beside the dragging footprints.

He looked up to the sky a moment as an echelon of planes from the advanced trainer base fifty miles away wheeled overhead. A nostalgia seized him, an overwhelming longing for the men he had known —and for Ruth.

He was home; he had come back alive, but with so many gone who would never come back, what good was it?

With Ruth gone it was no good at all. For an instant his mind burned with pain and his eyes ached as if a bomb-burst had blinded him as he remembered that day in the little field hospital where he had watched her die and heard the enemy planes overhead.

Afterwards, he had gone up alone, against orders, determined to die with her, but take along as many Nazis as he could.

But he hadn’t died. He had come out of it with a bullet-shattered leg and sent home to rust and die slowly over many years.

He shook his head and tried to fling the thoughts out of his mind. It was wrong. The doctors had warned him—

He resumed his slow march, half dragging the all but useless leg behind him. This was the same lane down which he had run so fast those summer days so long ago. There was a swimming hole and a fishing pond a quarter of a mile away. He tried to dim his vision with half-shut eyes and remember those pleasant days and wipe out all fear and bitterness from his mind.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mr. McAfee, the rural postman, was late, but Jim Ward could see his struggling, antique Ford raising a low cloud of dust a mile down the road.

Jim leaned heavily upon the stout cedar post that supported the mailbox and when Mr. McAfee rattled up he managed to wave and smile cheerily.

Mr. McAfee adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose with a rapid trombone manipulation.

“Bless me, Jim, it’s good to see you up and around!”

“Pretty good to be up.” Jim managed to force enthusiasm into his voice. But he knew he couldn’t stand talking very long to old Charles McAfee as if everything had not changed since the last time.

“Any mail for the Wards, today?”

The postman shuffled the fistful of mail. “Only one.”

Jim glanced at the return address block and shrugged. “I’m on the sucker lists already. They don’t lose any time when they find out there’s still bones left to pick on. You keep it.”

He turned painfully and faced toward the house. “I’ve got to be getting back. Glad to have seen you, Mr. McAfee.”

“Yeah, sure, Jim. Glad to have seen you. But I . . . er . . . got to deliver the mail—” He held the letter out hopefully.

“O.K.” Jim laughed sharply and grasped the circular.

He went only as far as the giant oak whose branches extended far enough to overshadow the mailbox. He sat down in the shade with his back against the great bole and tried to watch the echelon still soaring above the valley through the rifts in the leaf coverage above him. After a time he glanced down at the circular letter from which his fingers were peeling little fragments of paper. Idly, he ripped open the envelope and glanced at the contents. In cheap, garish typograph with splatterings of red and purple ink the words seemed to be trying to jump at him.

SERVICEMAN—WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

You have come back from the wars. You have found life different than you knew it before, and much that was familiar is gone. But new things have come, new things that are here to stay and are a part of the world you are going to live in.

Have you thought of the place you will occupy? Are you prepared to resume life in the ways of peace?

WE CAN HELP YOU

Have you heard of the POWER CO-ORDINATOR? No, of course you haven’t because it has been a hush-hush secret source of power that has been turning the wheels of war industries for many months. But now the secret of this vast source of new power can be told, and the need for hundreds, yes, thousands of trained technicians—such as you, yourself, may become—will be tremendous in the next decade.

LET US PROVE TO YOU

Let us prove to you that we know what we are talking about. We are so certain that you, as a soldier trained in intricate operations of the machines of war, will be interested in this almost miraculous new source of power and the technique of handling it that we are willing to send you absolutely FREE the first three lessons of our twenty-five lesson course that will train you to be a POWER CO-ORDINATOR technician.

Let us prove it to you. Fill out the inclosed coupon and mail it today!

Don’t just shrug and throw this circular away as just another advertisement. MAIL THE COUPON NOW!

Jim Ward smiled reminiscently at the style of the circular. It re­minded him of Billy Hensley and the time when they were thirteen. They sent in all the clipped and filled-out coupons they could find in magazines. They had samples of soap and magic tricks and catalogues and even a live bird came as the result of one. They kept all the stuff in Hensley’s attic until Billy’s dad finally threw it all out.

Impulsively, in whimsical tribute to the gone-forever happiness of those days, Jim Ward scratched his name and address in pencil and told the power co-ordinators to send him their three free lessons.

Mr. McAfee had only another mile to go up the road before he came to the end and returned past the Ward farm to Kramer’s Forks. Jim waited and hailed him.

“Want to take another letter?”

The postman halted the clattering Ford and jumped down. “What’s that?”

Jim repeated his request and held up the stamped reply card.

“Take this with you?”

Mr. McAfee turned it over and read every word on the back of the card. “Good thing,” he grunted. “So you’re going to take a corre­spondence course in this new power what-is-it? I think that’s mighty fine, Jim. Give you new interests—sort of take your mind off things.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jim struggled up with the aid of his cane and the bole of the oak tree. “Better see if I can make it back to the house now.”

All the whimsy and humor had suddenly gone out of the situation.

It was a fantastically short time—three days later—that Mr. Mc­Afee stopped again at the Ward farm. He glanced at the thick en­velope in his pack and the return address block it bore. He could see Jim Ward on the farmhouse porch and turned the Ford up the lane. Its rattle made Jim turn his head and open his eyes from the thought­less blankness into which he had been trying to sink. He removed the pipe from his mouth and watched the car approach.

“Here’s your course,” shouted Mr. McAfee. “Here’s your first lesson!”

“What lesson?”

“The correspondence course you sent for. The power what-is-it? Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Jim. “I’d forgotten all about it. Take the thing away. I don’t want it. It was just a silly joke.”

“You hadn’t ought to feel that way, Jim. After all, your leg is going to be all right. I heard the Doc say so down in the drugstore last night. And everything is going to be all right. There’s no use of letting it get you down. Besides—I got to deliver the mail.”

He tossed the brown envelope on the porch beside Jim. “Brought it up special because I thought you’d be in a hurry to get it.”

Jim smiled in apology. “I’m sorry, Mac. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll study it good and hard this morning right here on the porch.”

Mr. McAfee beamed and nodded and rattled away. Jim closed his eyes again, but he couldn’t find the pleasing blankness he’d found before. Now the screen of his mind showed only the sky with thunder­ing, plummeting engines—and the face of a girl lying still and white with closed eyes.

Jim opened his eyes and his hands slipped to his sides and touched the envelope. He ripped it open and scanned the pages. It was the sort of stuff he had collected as a boy, all right. He glanced at the paragraph headings and tossed the first lesson aside. A lot of obvious stuff about comparisons between steam power and waterfalls and electricity. It seemed all jumbled up like a high school student’s essay on the development of power from the time of Archimedes.

The mimeographed pages were poorly done. They looked as if the stencils had been cut on a typewriter that had been hit on the type faces with a hammer.

He tossed the second lesson aside and glanced at the top sheet of the third. His hand arrested itself midway in the act of tossing this lesson beside the other two. He caught a glimpse of the calculations on an inside page and opened up the booklet.

There was no high school stuff there. His brain struggled to remember the long unused methods of the integral calculus and the manipulation of partial differential equations.

There were pages of the stuff. It was like a sort of beacon light, dim and far off, but pointing a sure pathway to his mind and getting brighter as he progressed. One by one, he followed the intricate steps of the math and the short paragraphs of description between. When at last he reached the final page and turned the book over and scowled heavily the sun was halfway down the afternoon sky.

He looked away over the fields and pondered. This was no elementary stuff. Such math as this didn’t belong in a home study correspondence course. He picked up the envelope and concentrated on the return address block.

All it said was: M. H. Quilcon Schools, Henderson, Iowa. The lessons were signed at the bottom with the mimeographed reproduc­tions of M. H. Quilcon’s ponderous signature.

Jim picked up lesson one again and began reading slowly and carefully, as if hidden between the lines he might find some mystic message.

By the end of July his leg was strong enough for him to walk without the cane. He walked slowly and with a limp and once in a while the leg gave way as if he had a trick knee. But he learned quickly to catch himself before he fell and he reveled in the thrill of walking again.

By the end of July the tenth lesson of the correspondence course had arrived and Jim knew that he had gone as far as he could alone. He was lost in amazement as he moved in the new scientific wonderland that opened up before him. He had known that great strides had been made in techniques and production, but it seemed incredible that such a basic discovery as power co-ordination had been producing war machines these many months. He wondered why the principle had not been applied more directly as a weapon itself—but he didn’t understand enough about it to know whether it could or not. He didn’t even understand yet from where the basic energy of the system was derived.

The tenth lesson was as poorly produced as the rest of them had been, but it was practically a book in its thickness. When he had finished it Jim knew that he had to know more of the background of the new science. He had to talk to someone who knew something about it. But he knew of no one who had ever heard of it. He had seen no advertisements of the M. H. Quilcon Schools.

Only that first circular and these lessons.

As soon as he had finished the homework on lesson ten and had given it into Mr. McAfee’s care Jim Ward made up his mind to go down to Henderson, Iowa, and visit the Quilcon School.

He wished he had retained the lesson material because he could have taken it there faster than it would arrive via the local mail channels.

The streamliner barely stopped at Henderson, Iowa, long enough to allow him to disembark. Then it was gone and Jim Ward stared about him.

The sleepy looking ticket seller, dispatcher, and janitor eyed him wonderingly and spat a huge amber stream across his desk and out the window.

“Looking for somebody, mister?”

“I’m looking for Henderson, Iowa. Is this it?” Jim asked dubiously.

“You’re here, mister. But don’t walk too fast or you’ll be out of it. The city limits only go a block past Smith’s Drugstore.”

Jim noticed the sign over the door and glanced at the inscription that he had not seen before: Henderson, Iowa, Pop. 8o6.

“I’m looking for a Mr. M. H. Quilcon. He runs a correspondence school here somewhere. Do you know of him?”

The depot staff shifted its cud again and spat thoughtfully. “Been here twenty-nine years next October. Never heard a name like that around here, and I know ’em all.”

“Are there any correspondence schools here?”

“Miss Marybell Anne Simmons gives beauty operator lessons once in a while, but that’s all the school of that kind that I know of.”

Disconcerted, Jim Ward murmured his thanks and moved slowly out of the station. The sight before him was dismaying. He wondered if the population hadn’t declined since the estimate on the sign in the station was made.

A small mercantile store that sagged in the middle faced him from across the street. Farther along was a tiny frame building labeled Sheriff’s Office. On his side Jim saw Smith’s Drugstore a couple of hundred feet down from the station with a riding saddle and a patented fertilizer displayed in the window. In the other direction was the combined postoffice, bank and what was advertised as a newspaper and printing office.

Jim strode toward this last building while curious watchers on the porch of the mercantile store stared at him trudging through the dust.
The postmistress glanced up from the armful of mail that she was sorting into boxes as Jim entered. She offered a cheery hello that seemed to tinkle from the buxom figure.

“I’m looking for a man named Quilcon. I thought you might be able to give me some information concerning him.”

Kweelcon?” She furrowed her brow. “There’s no one here by that name. How do you spell it?”

Before he could answer, the woman dropped a handful of letters on the floor. Jim was certain that he saw the one he had mailed to the school before he left.

As the woman stooped to recover the letters a dark brown shadow streaked across the floor. Jim got the momentary impression of an enormous brown slug moving with lightning speed.

The postmistress gave a scream of anger and scuffled her feet to the door. She returned in a moment.

“Armadillo,” she explained. “Darn thing’s been hanging around here for months and nobody seems to be able to kill it.” She resumed putting the mail in the boxes.

“I think you missed one,” said Jim. She did not have the one that he recognized as the one he’d mailed.

The woman looked about her on the floor. “I got them all, thank you. Now what did you say this man’s name was?”

Jim leaned over the counter and looked at the floor. He was sure—But there was obviously no other letter in sight and there was no place it could have gone.

“Quilcon,” said Jim slowly. “I’m not sure of the pronunciation myself, but that’s the way it seemed it should be.”

“There’s no one in Henderson by that name. Wait a minute now. That’s a funny thing—you know it was about a month ago that I saw an envelope going out of here with a name something like that in the upper left corner. I thought at the time it was a funny name and wondered who put it in, but I never did find out and I thought I’d been dreaming. How’d you know to come here looking for him?”

“I guess I must have received the mail you saw.”

“Well, you might ask Mr. Herald. He’s in the newspaper office next door. But I’m sure there’s no one in this town by that name.”

“You publish a newspaper here?”

The woman laughed. “We call it that. Mr. Herald owns the bank and a big farm and puts this out free as a hobby. It’s not much, but everybody in town reads it. On Saturday he puts out a regular printed edition. This is the daily.”

She held up a small mimeographed sheet that was moderately legible. Jim glanced at it and moved towards the door. “Thanks, anyway.”

As he went out into the summer sun there was something gnawing at his brain, an intense you-forgot-something-in-there sort of feeling. He couldn’t place it and tried to ignore it.

Then as he stepped across the threshold of the printing office he got it. That mimeographed newssheet he had seen—it bore a startling resemblance to the lessons he had received from M. H. Quilcon. The same purple ink. Slightly crooked sheets. But that was foolish to try to make a connection there. All mimeographed jobs looked about alike.


Mr. Herald was a portly little man with a fringe around his bald­ness. Jim repeated his inquiry.

“Quilcon?” Mr. Herald pinched his lips thoughtfully. “No, can’t say as I ever heard the name. Odd name—I’m sure I’d know it if I’d ever heard it.”

Jim Ward knew that further investigation here would be a waste of time. There was something wrong somewhere. The information in his correspondence course could not be coming out of this half dead little town.

He glanced at a copy of the newssheet lying on the man’s littered desk beside an ancient Woodstock. “Nice little sheet you put out there,” said Jim.

Mr. Herald laughed. “Well, it’s not much, but I get a kick out of it, and the people enjoy reading about Mrs. Kelly’s lost hogs and the Dorius kid’s whooping cough. It livens things up.”

“Ever do any work for anybody else—printing or mimeographing?”
“If anybody wants it, but I haven’t had an outside customer in three years.”

Jim glanced about searchingly. The old Woodstock seemed to be the only typewriter in the room.

“I might as well go on,” he said. “But I wonder if you’d mind letting me use your typewriter to write a note and leave in the post-office for Quilcon if he ever shows up.”

“Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

Jim sat down before the clanking machine and hammered out a brief paragraph while Mr. Herald wandered to the back of the shop. Then Jim rose and shoved the paper in his pocket. He wished he had brought a sheet from one of the lessons with him.

“Thanks,” he called to Mr. Herald. He picked up a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper and shoved it in his pocket with the typed sheet.


On the trip homeward he studied the mimeographed sheet until he had memorized every line, but he withheld conclusions until he reached home.

From the station he called the farm and Hank, the hired man, came to pick him up. The ten miles out to the farm seemed like a hundred. But at last in his own room Jim spread out the two sheets of paper he’d brought with him and opened up lesson one of the correspondence course.

There was no mistake. The stencils of the course manuals had been cut on Mr. Herald’s ancient machine. There was the same nick out of the side of the o, and the b was flattened on the bulge. The r was minus half its base.

Mr. Herald had prepared the course.

Mr. Herald must then be M. H. Quilcon. But why had he denied any knowledge of the name? Why had he refused to see Jim and admit his authorship of the course?

At ten o’clock that night Mr. McAfee arrived with a special delivery letter for Jim.

“I don’t ordinarily deliver these way out here this time of night,” he said. “But I thought you might like to have it. Might be something important. A job or something, maybe. It’s from Mr. Quilcon.”

“Thanks. Thanks for bringing it, Mac.”

Jim hurried into his room and ripped open the letter. It read:

Dear Mr. Ward:

Your progress in understanding the principles of power co-ordination are
 exceptional and I am very pleased to note your progress in connection 
with the tenth lesson which I have just received from you.

An unusual opportunity has arisen which I am moved to offer you. There 
is a large installation of a power co-ordination engine in need of vital
 repairs some distance from here. I believe that you are fully qualified
 to work on this machine under supervision which will be provided and 
you would gain some valuable experience. The installation is located 
some distance from the city of Henderson. It is about two miles out on 
the Balmer Road. You will find there the Hortan Machine Works at which 
the installation is located. Repairs are urgently needed and you are the
 closest qualified student able to take advantage of this opportunity 
which might lead to a valuable permanent connection. Therefore, I 
request that you come at once. I will meet you there.

Sincerely,

M. H. Quilcon

For a long time Jim Ward sat on the bed with the letter and the sheets of paper spread out before him. What had begun as a simple quest for information was rapidly becoming an intricate puzzle.

Who was M. H. Quilcon?

It seemed obvious that Mr. Herald, the banker and part-time newspaper publisher, must be Quilcon. The correspondence course manuals had certainly been produced on his typewriter. The chances of any two typewriters having exactly the same four or five disfigure­ments in type approached the infinitesimal.

And Herald—if he were Quilcon—must have written this letter just before or shortly after Jim’s visit. The letter was certainly a product of the ancient Woodstock.

There was a fascination in the puzzle and a sense of something sinister, Jim thought. Then he laughed aloud at his own melodrama and began repacking the suitcase. There was a midnight train he could get back to Henderson.

It was hot afternoon again when he arrived in the town for the second time. The station staff looked up in surprise as he got off the train.

“Back again? I thought you’d given up.”

“I’ve found out where Mr. Quilcon is. He’s at the Hortan Machine Works. Can you tell me exactly where that is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s supposed to be about two miles out of town on Balmer Road.”

“That’s just the main street of town going on down through the Willow Creek district. There’s no machine works out there. You must be in the wrong state, mister. Or somebody’s kidding you.”

“Do you think Mr. Herald could tell me anything about such a machine shop. I mean, does he know anything about machinery or things related to it?”

“Man, no! Old man Herald don’t care about nothing but money and that little fool paper of his. Machinery! He can’t hook up any­thing more complicated than his suspenders.”

Jim started down the main street toward the Willow Creek district. Balmer Road rapidly narrowed and turned, leaving the town out of sight behind a low rise. Willow Creek was a glistening thread in the midst of meadow land.

There was no more unlikely spot in the world for a machine works of any kind, Jim thought. Someone must be playing an utterly fan­tastic joke on him. But how or why they had picked on him was mystifying.
At the same time he knew within him that it was no joke. There was a deadly seriousness about it all. The principles of power co-ordination were right. He had slaved and dug through them enough to be sure of that. He felt that he could almost build a power co-ordinating engine now with the proper means—except that he didn’t understand from where the power was derived!

In the timelessness of the bright air about him, with the only sound coming from the brook and the leaves on the willow trees beside it, Jim found it impossible to judge time or distance.

He paced his steps and counted until he was certain that at least two miles had been covered. He halted and looked about almost determined to go back and re-examine the way he had come.

He glanced ahead, his eyes scanning every minute detail of the meadowland. And then he saw it.

The sunlight glistened as if on a metal surface. And above the bright spot in the distance was the faintly readable legend:

HORTAN MACHINE WORKS

Thrusting aside all judgment concerning the incredibility of a machine shop in such a locale, he crossed the stream and made his way over the meadow toward the small rise.

As he approached, the machine works appeared to be merely a dome-shaped structure about thirty feet in diameter and with an open door in one side. He came up to it with a mind ready for any­thing. The crudely painted sign above the door looked as if it had been drawn by an inexpert barn painter in a state of intoxication.

Jim entered the dimly lit interior of the shop and set his case upon the floor beside a narrow bench that extended about the room.
Tools and instruments of unfamiliar design were upon the bench and upon the walls. But no one appeared.

Then he noticed an open door and a steep, spiral ramp that led down to a basement room. He stepped through and half slid, half walked down to the next level.

There was artificial lighting by fluorescent tubes of unusual con­struction, Jim noticed. But still no sign of anyone. And there was not an object in the room that appeared familiar to him. Articles that vaguely resembled furniture were against the walls.

He felt uneasy amid the strangeness of the room and he was about to go back up the steep ramp when a voice came to him.

“This is Mr. Quilcon. Is that you, Mr. Ward?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“I am in the next room, unable to come out until I finish a bit of work I have started. Will you please go on down to the room below? You will find the damaged machinery there. Please go right to work on it. I’m sure that you have a complete understanding of what is necessary. I will join you in a moment.”

Hesitantly, Jim turned to the other side of the room where he saw a second ramp leading down to a brilliantly lighted room. He glanced about once more, then moved down the ramp.

The room was high-ceilinged and somewhat larger in diameter than the others he had seen and it was almost completely occupied by the machine.

A series of close-fitting towers with regular bulbous swellings on their columns formed the main structure of the engine. These were grouped in a solid circle with narrow walkways at right angles to each other passing through them.

Jim Ward stood for a long time examining their surfaces that rose twenty feet from the floor. All that he had learned from the curious correspondence course seemed to fall into place. Diagrams and drawings of such machines had seemed incomprehensible. Now he knew exactly what each part was for and how the machine operated.

He squeezed his body into the narrow walkway between the towers and wormed his way to the center of the engine. His bad leg made it difficult, but he at last came to the damaged structure.

One of the tubes had cracked open under some tremendous strain and through the slit he could see the marvelously intricate wiring with which it was filled. Wiring that was burned now and fused to a mass. It was in a control circuit that rendered the whole machine functionless, but its repair would not be difficult, Jim knew.

He went back to the periphery of the engine and found the controls of a cranelike device which he lowered and seized the cracked sleeve and drew off the damaged part.

From the drawers and bins in the walls he selected parts and tools and returned to the damaged spot.

In the cramped space he began tearing away the fused parts and wiring. He was lost and utterly unconscious of anything but the fas­cination of the mighty engine. Here within this room was machine capacity to power a great city.

Its basic function rested upon the principle of magnetic currents in contrast to electric currents. The discovery of magnetic currents had been announced only a few months before he came home from the war. The application of the discovery had been swift.

And he began to glimpse the fundamental source of the energy supplying the machine. It was in the great currents of gravitational and magnetic force flowing between the planets and the suns of the universe. As great as atomic energy and as boundless in its resources, this required no fantastically dangerous machinery to harness. The principle of the power co-ordinator was simple.

The pain of his cramped position forced Jim to move out to rest his leg. As he stood beside the engine he resumed his pondering on the purpose it had in this strange location. Why was it built there and what use was made of its power?

He moved about to restore the circulation in his legs and sought to trace the flow of energy through the engine, determine where and what kind of a load was placed upon it.

His search led him below into a third sub-basement of the building and there he found the thing he was searching for, the load into which the tremendous drive of the engine was coupled.

But here he was unable to comprehend fully, for the load was itself a machine of strange design, and none of its features had been covered in the correspondence course.

The machine upstairs seized upon the magnetic currents of space and selected and concentrated those flowing in a given direction.

The force of these currents was then fed into the machines in this room, but there was no point of reaction against which the energy could be applied.

Unless—

The logical, inevitable conclusion forced itself upon his mind. There was only one conceivable point of reaction.

He stood very still and a tremor went through him. He looked up at the smooth walls about him. Metal, all of them. And this room—it was narrower than the one above—as if the entire building were tapered from the dome protruding out of the earth to the basement floor.
The only possible point of reaction was the building itself. But it wasn’t a building.

It was a vessel.

Jim clawed and stumbled his way up the incline into the engine room, then beyond into the chamber above. He was halfway up the top ramp when he heard the voice again.

“Is that you, Mr. Ward? I have almost finished and will be with you in a moment. Have you completed the repairs? Was it very difficult?”

He hesitated, but didn’t answer. Something about the quality of that voice gave him a chill. He hadn’t noticed it before because of his curiosity and his interest in the place. Now he detected its unearthly, inhuman quality.

He detected the fact that it wasn’t a voice at all, but that the words had been formed in his brain as if he himself had spoken them.

He was nearly at the top of the ramp and drew himself on hands and knees to the floor level when he saw the shadow of the closing door sweep across the room and heard the metallic clang of the door. It was sealed tight. Only the small windows—or ports—admitted light.

He rose and straightened and calmed himself with the thought that the vessel could not fly. It could not rise with the remainder of the repair task unfinished—and he was not going to finish it; that much was certain.

“Quilcon!” he called. “Show yourself! Who are you and what do you want of me?”

“I want you to finish the repair job and do it quickly,” the voice replied instantly. “And quickly—it must be finished quickly.”

There was a note of desperation and despair that seemed to cut into Jim. Then he caught sight of the slight motion against the wall beside him.
In a small, transparent hemisphere that was fastened to the side of the wall lay the slug that Jim had seen at the postoffice, the thing the woman had called an “armadillo.” He had not even noticed it when he first entered the room. The thing was moving now with slow pulsations that swelled its surface and great welts like dark veins stood out upon it.
From the golden-hued hemisphere a maze of cable ran to instru­ments and junction boxes around the room and a hundred tiny pseudo-pods grasped terminals inside the hemisphere.

It was a vessel—and this slug within the hemisphere was its alien, incredible pilot. Jim knew it with startling cold reality that came to him in waves of thought that emanated from the slug called Quilcon and broke over Jim’s mind. It was a ship and a pilot from beyond Earth—from out of the reaches of space.

“What do you want of me? Who are you?” said Jim Ward.

“I am Quilcon. You are a good student. You learn well.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to repair the damaged engine.”

There was something wrong with the creature. Intangibly, Jim sensed it. An aura of sickness, a desperate urgency came to his mind.

But something else was in the foreground of Jim’s mind. The horror of the alien creature diminished and Jim contemplated the miracle that had come to mankind.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said quietly. “Tell me how to build a ship like this for my people and I will fix the engines for you.”

“No! No—there is no time for that. I must hurry—”

“Then I shall leave without any repairs.”

He moved toward the door and instantly a paralyzing wave took hold of him as if he had seized a pair of charged electrodes. It relaxed only as he stumbled back from the door.

“My power is weak,” said Quilcon, “but it is strong enough for many days yet—many of your days. Too many for you to live without food and water. Repair the engine and then I shall let you go.”

“Is what I ask too much to pay for my help?”

“You have had pay enough. You can teach your people to build power co-ordinator machines. Is that not enough?”

“My people want to build ships like this one and move through space.”

“I cannot teach you that. I do not know. I did not build this ship.”

There were surging waves of troubled thought that washed over his mind, but Jim Ward’s tenseness eased. The first fear of totally alien life drifted from his mind and he felt a strange affinity for the creature. It was injured and sick, he knew, but he could not believe that it did not know how the ship was built.

“Those who built this ship come often to trade upon my world,” said Quilcon. “But we have no such ships of our own. Most of us have no desire to see anything but the damp caves and sunny shores of our own world. But I longed to see the worlds from which these ships came.

“When this one landed near my cave I crept in and hid myself. The ship took off then and we traveled an endless time. Then an accident to the engine killed all three of those who manned the ship and I was left alone.

“I was injured, too, but I was not killed. Only the other of me died.” Jim did not understand the queer phrase, but he did not break into Quilcon’s story.

“I was able to arrange means to control the flight of the ship, to prevent its destruction as it landed upon this planet, but I could not repair it because of the nature of my body.”

Jim saw then that the creature’s story must be true.

It was obvious that the ship had been built to be manned by beings utterly unlike Quilcon.

“I investigated the city of yours near by and learned of your ways and customs. I needed the help of one of you to repair the ship. By force I could persuade one of you to do simple tasks, but none so complex as this requires.

“Then I discovered the peculiar customs of learning among you. I forced the man Herald to prepare the materials and send them to you. I received them before the person at the postoffice could see them. I got your name from the newspapers along with several others who were unsatisfactory.

“I had to teach you to understand the power co-ordinator because only by voluntary operation of your highest faculties will you be able to understand and repair the machine. I can assist but not force you to do that.”

The creature began pleading again. “And now will you repair the engine quickly. I am dying—but shall live longer than you—it is a long journey to my home planet, but I must get there and I need every instant of time that is left to me.”

Jim caught a glimpse of the dream vision that was the creature’s home world. It was a place of security and peace—in Quilcon’s terms. But even its alienness did not block out the sense of quiet beauty that Quilcon’s mind transmitted to Jim’s.

They were a species of high intelligence. Exceptionally developed in the laws of mathematics and theory of logic, they were handicapped in bodily development from inquiring into other fields of science whose existence was demonstrated by their logic and their mathematics. The more intellectual among them were frustrated creatures whose lives were made tolerable only by an infinite capacity for stoicism and adaptation.

But of them all, Quilcon was among the most restless and rebellious and ambitious. No one of them had ever dared such a journey as he had taken. A swelling pity and understanding came over Jim Ward.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said desperately. “I’ll repair the engine if you’ll let me have its principles. If you don’t have them, you can get them to me with little trouble. My people must have such a ship as this.”

He tried to visualize what it would mean to Earth to have space flight a century or perhaps five centuries before the slow plodding of science and research might reveal it.

But the creature was silent.

“Quilcon—” Jim repeated. He hoped it hadn’t died.

“I’ll bargain with you,” said Quilcon at last. “Let me be the other of you, and I’ll give you what you want.”

“The other of me? What are you talking about?”

“It is hard for you to understand. It is union—such as we make upon our world. When two or more of us want to be together we go together in the same brain, the same body. I am alone now, and it is an unendurable existence because I have known what it is to have another of me.

“Let me come into your brain, into your mind and live there with you. We will teach your people and mine. We will take this ship to all the universes of which living creatures can dream. It is either this or we both die together, for too much time has gone for me to return. This body dies.”

Stunned by Quilcon’s ultimatum, Jim Ward stared at the ugly slug on the wall. Its brown body was heaving with violent pulsations of pain and a sense of delirium and terror came from it to Jim.

“Hurry! Let me come!” it pleaded.

He could feel sensations as if fingers were probing his cranium looking, pleading for entrance. It turned him cold.

He looked into the years and thought of an existence with this alien mind in his. Would they battle for eventual possession of his body and he perhaps be subjected to slavery in his own living corpse?

He tried to probe Quilcon’s thoughts, but he could find no sense or intent of conquest. There were almost human amenities inter­mingled with a world of new science and thought.

He knew Quilcon would keep his promise to give the secrets of the ship to the men of Earth. That alone would be worth the price of his sacrifice—if it should be sacrifice.

“Come!” he said quietly.

It was as if a torrent of liquid light were flowing into his brain. It was blinding and excruciating in its flaming intensity. He thought he sensed rather than saw the brown husk of Quilcon quiver in the hemisphere and shrivel like a brown nut.

But in his mind there was union and he paused and trembled with the sudden great reality of what he knew. He knew what Quilcon was and gladness flowed into him like light. A thought soared through his brain: Is sex only in the difference of bodily function and the texture of skin and the tone of voice?

He thought of another day when there was death in the sky and on the Earth below, and in a little field hospital. A figure on a white cot had murmured, “You’ll be all right, Jim. I’m going on, I guess, but you’ll be all right. I know it. Don’t miss me too much.”

He had known there would be no peace for him ever, but now there was peace and the voice of Quilcon was like that voice from long ago, for as the creature probed into his thoughts its inherent adaptability matched its feelings and thought to his and said, “Everything is all right, isn’t it, Jim Ward?”

“Yes . . . yes it is.”

The intensity of his feelings almost blinded him. “And I want to call you Ruth, after another Ruth—”

“I like that name.” There was shyness and appreciation in the tones, and it was not strange to Jim that he could not see the speaker, there was a vision in his mind far lovelier than any Earthly vision could have been.

“We’ll have everything,” he said. “Everything that your world and mine can offer. We’ll see them all.”

But like the other Ruth who had been so practical, this one was, too.

“First we have to repair the engine. Shall we do it, now?”

The solitary figure of Jim Ward moved toward the ramp and disappeared into the depths of the ship.

The End

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

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Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson

This is the full text of the classic story by Shirley Jackson titled “The Lottery”. This story used to be taught in schools all over the nation until politically correct progressives banned it. Today, only “old timers” such as myself, remember this story. Please enjoy it for what it is.

The main character.
The Lottery a story by Shirley Jackson.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 20th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother’s grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.

The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called. “Little late today, folks. ” The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three-legged stool, and the stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, “Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?” there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers’ coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office. and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make up–of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this p3rt of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans, with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. “Clean forgot what day it was,” she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. “Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,” Mrs. Hutchinson went on, “and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running. ” She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, “You’re in time, though. They’re still talking away up there. “

Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through: two or three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, “Here comes your, Missus, Hutchinson,” and “Bill, she made it after all. ” Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully. “Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie. ” Mrs. Hutchinson said, grinning, “Wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe?” and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson’s arrival.

“Well, now. ” Mr. Summers said soberly, “guess we better get started, get this over with, so’s we can go back to work. Anybody ain’t here?”

“Dunbar. ” several people said. “Dunbar. Dunbar. “

Mr. Summers consulted his list. “Clyde Dunbar. ” he said. “That’s right. He’s broke his leg, hasn’t he? Who’s drawing for him?”

“Me. I guess,” a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. “Wife draws for her husband. ” Mr. Summers said. “Don’t you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?” Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.

“Horace’s not but sixteen yet. ” Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. “Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year. “

“Right. ” Sr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, “Watson boy drawing this year?”

A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. “Here,” he said. “I m drawing for my mother and me. ” He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like “Good fellow, lack. ” and “Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it. “

“Well,” Mr. Summers said, “guess that’s everyone. Old Man Warner make it?”

“Here,” a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. “All ready?” he called. “Now, I’ll read the names–heads of families first–and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”

The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said, “Adams. ” A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. “Hi. Steve. ” Mr. Summers said, and Mr. Adams said. “Hi. Joe. ” They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.

“Allen. ” Mr. Summers said. “Anderson… Bentham. “

“Seems like there’s no time at all between lotteries any more. ” Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row.

“Seems like we got through with the last one only last week. “

“Time sure goes fast” Mrs. Graves said.

“Clark… Delacroix. “

“There goes my old man. ” Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.

“Dunbar,” Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women said. “Go on, Janey,” and another said, “There she goes. “

“We’re next. ” Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand, turning them over and over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.

“Harburt… Hutchinson. “

“Get up there, Bill,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed.

“Jones. “

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery. “

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. ‘ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody. “

“Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs. Adams said.

“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools. “

“Martin. ” And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. “Overdyke… Percy. “

“I wish they’d hurry,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. “I wish they’d hurry.”

“They’re almost through,” her son said.

“You get ready to run tell Dad,” Mrs. Dunbar said.

Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, “Warner. “

“Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,” Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. “Seventy-seventh time. “

“Watson. ” The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, “Don’t be nervous, Jack,” and Mr. Summers said, “Take your time, son. “

“Zanini. “

After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers, holding his slip of paper in the air, said, “All right, fellows. ” For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. “Who is it?,” “Who’s got it?,” “Is it the Dunbars?,” “Is it the Watsons?” Then the voices began to say, “It’s Hutchinson. It’s Bill,” “Bill Hutchinson’s got it. “

“Go tell your father,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!”

“Be a good sport, Tessie,” Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, “All of us took the same chance. “

“Shut up, Tessie,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“Well, everyone,” Mr. Summers said, “that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time. ” He consulted his next list. “Bill,” he said, “you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?”

“There’s Don and Eva,” Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. “Make them take their chance!”

“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,” Mr. Summers said gently. “You know that as well as anyone else. “

“It wasn’t fair,” Tessie said.

“I guess not, Joe,” Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. “My daughter draws with her husband’s family; that’s only fair. And I’ve got no other family except the kids. “

“Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it’s you,” Mr. Summers said in explanation, “and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that’s you, too. Right?”

“Right,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“How many kids, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked formally.

“Three,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“There’s Bill, Jr. , and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me. “

“All right, then,” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you got their tickets back?”

Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. “Put them in the box, then,” Mr. Summers directed. “Take Bill’s and put it in. “

“I think we ought to start over,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. “I tell you it wasn’t fair. You didn’t give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that. “

Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box, and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground, where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.

“Listen, everybody,” Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.

“Ready, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children, nodded.

“Remember,” Mr. Summers said, “take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave. ” Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. “Take a paper out of the box, Davy,” Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. “Take just one paper. ” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you hold it for him. ” Mr. Graves took the child’s hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.

“Nancy next,” Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box “Bill, Jr. ,” Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out. “Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

“Bill,” Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.

“It’s not the way it used to be,” Old Man Warner said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be. “

“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave’s. “

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr. , opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.

“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill. “

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

“All right, folks. ” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly. “

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up. “

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you. “

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone. ” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

The End

Other links

Commentary

When I was in school, many of my classmates preferred to read the Cliff-notes version so that they could pass the tests, rather than just simply read the story for themselves. What an absolute waste. You pass a class, but learn nothing.

In a like way, you can go on the internet today, and read what other people have to think about this story. Yup. That’s progressive “group think” for you. Get consensus, then follow the herd. Be a mindless drone, why don’t you?

Your reaction to this story is important. It is unique and that uniqueness is what makes YOU special. Embrace it and treasure it.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
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Tomatos
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Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
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Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
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A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
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Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
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Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
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1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

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Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.

Articles & Links

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Glory Road (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

This is the full Text of the novel by Robert Heinlein.

Of all the science fiction that is out there in the world, the fiction that is the closest approximation to the way things REALLY work in this universe is not something from Star Trek, or Star Wars. It is instead more like the Robert Heinlein novel “Glory Road”.

That is a very stark truth. Pay attention. Here, I present this novel in it’s entirety to the reader to consider.

Glory Road

Robert A. Heinlein

BRITANNUS (shocked): 
Caesar, this is not proper. 

THEODOTUS (outraged): 
How? 

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): 
Pardon him Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. 
 
Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II 
-George Bernard Shaw

Chapter 1

I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosion . . . no Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercials . . . no Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes–no income tax. The climate is the sort that Florida and California claim (and neither
has), the land is lovely, the people are friendly and hospitable to strangers, the women are beautiful and amazingly anxious to please-

I could go back. I could-

It was an election year with the customary theme of anything you can do I can do better, to a background of beeping sputniks. I was twenty-one but couldn’t figure out which party to vote against.

Instead I phoned my draft board and told them to send me that notice.

I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it’s not his choice. Nevertheless I love my country. Yes, I do, despite propaganda all through school about how patriotism is obsolete. One of my great-grandfathers died at Gettysburg and my father made that long
walk back from Chosen Reservoir, so I didn’t buy this new idea. I argued against it in class–until it got me a “D,” in Social Studies, then I shut up and passed the course.

But I didn’t change my opinions to match those of a teacher who didn’t know Little Round Top from Seminary Ridge.

Are you of my generation? If not, do you know why we turned out so wrong-headed? Or did you just write us off as “juvenile delinquents?”

I could write a book. Brother! But I’ll note one key fact: After you’ve spent years and years trying to knock the patriotism out of a boy, don’t expect him to cheer when he gets a notice reading:

GREETINGS: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States-

Talk about a “Lost Generation!” I’ve read that post-World-War-One jazz–Fitzgerald and Hemingway and so on–and it strikes me that all they had to worry about was wood alcohol in bootleg liquor. They had the world by the tail–so why were they crying?

Sure, they had Hitler and the Depression ahead of them. But they didn’t know that. We had Khrushchev and the H-bomb and we certainly did know.

But we were not a “Lost Generation.” We were worse; we were the “Safe Generation.” Not beatniks. The Beats were never more than a few hundred out of millions. Oh, we talked beatnik jive and dug cool sounds in stereo and disagreed with Playboy’s poll of jazz musicians just as earnestly as if it mattered. We
read Salinger and Kerouac and used language that shocked our parents and dressed (sometimes) in beatnik fashion. But we didn’t think that bongo drums and a beard compared with money in the bank. We weren’t rebels. We were as conformist as army worms. “Security” was our unspoken watchword.

Most of our watchwords were unspoken but we followed them as compulsively as a baby duck takes to water. “Don’t fight City Hall.” “Get it while the getting is good.” “Don’t get caught.” High goals, these, great moral values, and they all mean “Security.” “Going steady” (my generation’s contribution to the American Dream) was based on security; it insured that Saturday night could never be the loneliest night for the weak. If you went steady, competition was eliminated.

But we had ambitions. Yes, sir! Stall off your draft board and get through college. Get married and get her pregnant, with both families helping you to stay on as a draft-immune student. Line up a job well thought of by draft boards, say with some missile firm. Better yet, take postgraduate work if your folks (or hers) could afford it and have another kid and get safely beyond the draft–besides, a doctor’s degree was a union card, for promotion and pay and retirement.

Short of a pregnant wife with well-to-do parents the greatest security lay in being 4-F. Punctured eardrums were good but an allergy was best. One of my neighbors had a terrible asthma that lasted till his twenty-sixth birthday. No fake–he was allergic to draft boards. Another escape was to convince an army psychiatrist that your interests were more suited to the State Department than to the Army. More than half of my generation were “unfit for military service.”

I don’t find this surprising. There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods–pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. That’s conscription even if you call it “selective service” and pretty it up with USOs and “veterans’ benefits”–it’s tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits.

I am not being holier-than-thou; I was after that same three-car garage myself.

However, my folks could not put me through college. My stepfather was an Air Force warrant officer with all he could handle to buy shoes for his own lads. When he was transferred to Germany just before my high school senior year and I was invited to move in with my father’s sister and her husband, both of
us were relieved.

I was no better off financially as my uncle-in-law was supporting a first wife–under California law much like being an Alabama field hand before the Civil War. But I had $35 a month as a “surviving dependent of a deceased veteran.” (Not “war orphan,” which is another deal that pays more.) My mother
was certain that Dad’s death had resulted from wounds but the Veterans Administration thought differently, so I was just a “surviving dependent.”

$35 a month did not fill the hole I put in their groceries and it was understood that when I graduated I would root for myself. By doing my military time, no doubt–But I had my own plan; I played football and finished senior year season with the California Central Valley secondary school record for yards gained and a broken nose–and started in at the local State College the next fall with a job “sweeping the gym” at $10 more a month than that pension, plus fees.

I couldn’t see the end out my plan was clear: Hang on, teeth and toenails, and get an engineering degree. Avoid the draft and marriage. On graduation get a deferred-status job. Save money and pick up a law degree, too–because, back in Homestead, Florida, a teacher had pointed out that, while engineers made money, the big money and boss jobs went to lawyers. So I was going to beat the game, yes, sir! Be a Horatio Alger hero. I would have headed straight for that law degree but for the fact that the college did not offer law.

At the end of the season my sophomore year they deemphasized football.

We had had a perfect season–no wins. “Flash” Gordon (that’s me–in the sports write-ups) stood one in yardage and points; nevertheless Coach and I were out of jobs. Oh, I “swept the gym” the rest of that year on basketball, fencing, and track, but the alumnus who picked up the tab wasn’t interested in a basketball player who was only six feet one. I spent that summer pushing an idiot stick and trying to line up a deal elsewhere. I turned twenty-one that summer, which chopped that $35/month, too. Shortly after Labor Day I fell back on a previously prepared position, i.e., I made that phone call to my draft board.

I had in mind a year in the Air Force, then win a competitive appointment to the Air Force Academy–be an astronaut and famous, instead of rich.

Well, we can’t all be astronauts. The Air Force had its quota or something. I was in the Army so fast I hardly had time to pack.

So I set out to be the best chaplain’s clerk in the Army; I made sure that “typing” was listed as one of my skills. If I had anything to say about it, I was going to do my time at Fort Carson, typing neat copies while going to night school on the side.

I didn’t have anything to say about it. Ever been in Southeast Asia? It makes Florida look like a desert. Wherever you step it squishes. Instead of tractors they use water buffaloes. The bushes are filled with insects and natives who shoot at you. It wasn’t a war–not even a “Police Action.” We were “Military Advisers.” But a Military Adviser who has been dead four days in that heat smells the same way
a corpse does in a real war.

I was promoted to corporal. I was promoted seven times. To corporal.

I didn’t have the right attitude. So my company commander said. My daddy had been a Marine and my stepfather was Air Force; my only Army ambition had been to be a chaplain’s clerk Stateside. I didn’t like the Army. My company commander didn’t like the Army either; he was a first lieutenant who hadn’t
made captain and every time he got to brooding Corporal Gordon lost his stripes.

I lost them the last time for telling him that I was writing to my Congressman to find out why I was the only man in Southeast Asia who was going to be retired for old age instead of going home when his time was up–and that made him so mad he not only busted me but went out and was a hero, and then he was dead. And that’s how I got this scar across my broken nose because I was a hero, too, and should have received the Medal of Honor, only nobody was looking.

While I was recovering, they decided to send me home.

Major Ian Hay, back in the “War to End War,” described the structure of military organizations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.

But when she is at her desk, she sometimes puts down her knitting and picks a name passing across her desk and does something nice. You have seen how I was whipsawed by the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments; this time the Fairy Godmother Department picked Pfc. Gordon.

Like this–When I knew that I was going home as soon as my face healed (little brown brother hadn’t sterilized his bolo), I put in a request to be discharged in Wiesbaden, where my family was, rather than California, home of record. I am not criticizing little brown brother; he hadn’t intended me to heal at all–and he would have managed it if he hadn’t been killing my company commander and too hurried to do a good job on me. I hadn’t sterilized my bayonet but he didn’t complain, he just sighed and came apart, like a doll with its sawdust cut. I felt grateful to him; he not only had rigged the dice so that I got out of the Army, he also gave me a great idea.

He and the Ward surgeon–The Surgeon had said, “You’re going to get well, son. But you’ll be scarred like a Heidelberg student.”

Which got me thinking–You couldn’t get a decent job without a degree, any more than you could be a plasterer without being a son or nephew of somebody in the plasterers’ union. But there are degrees and degrees. Sir Isaac Newton, with a degree from a cow college such as mine, would wash bottles for Joe Thumbfingers–if Joe had a degree from a European university.

Why not Heidelberg? I intended to milk my G.I. benefits; I had that in mind when I put in that too hasty call to my draft board.

According to my mother everything was cheaper in Germany. Maybe I could stretch those benefits

into a doctor’s degree. Herr Doktor Gordon, mit scars on der face from Heidelberg yet!–that would rate an extra $3,000 a year from any missile firm.

Hell, I would fight a couple of student duels and add real Heidelberg scars to back up the dandy I had. Fencing was a sport I really enjoyed (though the one that counted least toward “sweeping the gym”). Some people cannot stand knives, swords, bayonets, anything sharp; psychiatrists have a word for it:
aichmophobia. Idiots who drive cars a hundred miles an hour on fifty-mile-an-hour roads will nevertheless panic at the sight of a bare blade.

I’ve never been bothered that way and that’s why I’m alive and one reason why I kept being bucked back to corporal. A “Military Adviser” can’t afford to be afraid of knives, bayonets, and such; he must cope with them. I’ve never been afraid of them because I’m always sure I can do unto another what he is planning to do unto me.

I’ve always been right, except that time I made the mistake of being a hero, and that wasn’t too bad a mistake. If I had tried to bug out instead of staying to disembowel him, he would have chopped my spine in two. As it was, he never got a proper swing at me; his jungle cutter just slashed my face as he came
apart–leaving me with a nasty wound that was infected long before the helicopters came. But I never felt it. Presently I got dizzy and sat down in the mud and when I woke up, a medic was giving me plasma.

I rather looked forward to trying a Heidelberg duel. They pad your body and arm and neck and put a steel guard on your eyes and nose and across your ears–this is not like encountering a pragmatic Marxist in the jungle. I once handled one of those swords they use in Heidelberg; it was a light, straight saber, sharp on the edge, sharp a few inches on the back–but a blunt point! A toy, suited only to make pretty scars for girls to admire.

I got a map and whaddayuh know!–Heidelberg is just down the road from Wiesbaden. So I requested my discharge in Wiesbaden.

The ward surgeon said, “You’re an optimist, son,” but initialed it. The medical sergeant in charge of paperwork said, “Out of the question, Soldier.” I won’t say money changed hands but the endorsement the hospital’s C.O. signed read FORWARDED. The ward agreed that I was bucking for a psycho; Uncle Sugar does not give free trips around the world to Pfcs.

I was already so far around that I was as close to Hoboken as to San Francisco–and closer to Wiesbaden. However, policy called for shipping returnees back via the Pacific. Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can’t be ignored.

The Fairy Godmother Department woke up and touched me with its wand.

I was about to climb aboard a bucket called the General Jones bound for Manila, Taipei, Yokohama, Pearl, and Seattle when a dispatch came granting my USAREUR, Heidelberg, Germany, by available military transportation, for discharge, at own request see reference foxtrot. Accumulated leave could be
taken or paid, see reference bravo. Subject man was authorized to return to Zone Interior (the States) any time within twelve months of separation, via available military transportation at no further expense to the government. Unquote.

The paper-work sergeant called me in and showed me this, his face glowing with innocent glee. “Only there ain’t no ‘available transportation,’ Soldier–so haul ass aboard the General Jones. You’re going to Seattle, like I said.”

I knew what he meant: The only transport going west in a long, long time had sailed for Singapore thirty-six hours earlier. I stared at that dispatch, thinking about boiling oil and wondering if he had held it back just long enough to keep me from sailing under it.

I shook my head. “I’m going to catch the General Smith in Singapore. Be a real human type, Sarge, and cut me a set of orders for it.”

“Your orders are cut. For the Jones. For Seattle.”

“Gosh,” I said thoughtfully. “I guess I had better go cry on the chaplain.” I faded out fast but I didn’t see the chaplain; I went to the airfield. It took five minutes to find that no commercial nor U.S. military flight was headed for Singapore in time to do me any good.

But there was an Australian military transport headed for Singapore that night. Aussies weren’t even “military advisers” out often were around, as “military observers.” I found the planes skipper, a flight leftenant, and put the situation to him. He grinned and said, “Always room for one more bloke. Wheels up shortly after tea, likely. If the old girl will fly.”

I knew it would fly; it was a Gooney Bird, a C-47, mostly patches and God knows how many millions of miles. It would get to Singapore on one engine if asked. I knew my luck was in as soon as I saw that grand old collection of masking tape and glue sitting on the field.

Four hours later I was in her and wheels up.

I checked in aboard USMTS General Smith the next morning, rather wet–the Pride of Tasmania had flown through storms the night before and a Gooney Birds one weakness is that they leak. But who minds clean rain after jungle mud? The ship was sailing that evening which was grand news.

Singapore is like Hong Kong only flat; one afternoon was enough. I had a drink in the old Raffles, another in the Adelphi, got rained on in the Great World amusement peak walked through Change Alley with a hand on my money and the other on my orders–and bought an Irish Sweepstakes ticket.

I don’t gamble, if you will concede that poker is a game of skill. However this was a tribute to the goddess of fortune, thanks for a long run of luck. If she chose to answer with $140,000 US, I wouldn’t throw it in her face. If she didn’t . . . well, the tickets face value was one pound, $2.80 US; I paid $9.00 Singapore, or $3.00 US–a small gesture from a man who had just won a free trip around the world–not
to mention coming out of the jungle still breathing.

But I got my three dollars’ worth at once, as I fled out of Change Alley to avoid two dozen other walking banks anxious to sell me more tickets, Singapore dollars, any sort of money–or my hat if I let go of it–reached the street, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me to the boat landing. This was a victory of spirit over flesh because I had been debating whether to snatch the chance to ease enormous biological back pressure. Good old Scarface Gordon had been an Eagle Scout awfully long and Singapore is one of the Seven Sinful Cities where anything may be had.

I am not implying that I had remained faithful to the Girl Next Door. The young lady back home who had taught me most about the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, with an amazing send-off the night before I was inducted, had “Dear-Johnned” me in basic training; I felt gratitude but no loyalty. She got married
soon after, now has two children, neither of them mine.

The real cause of my biological unease was geographical. Those little brown brothers I had been fitting, with and against, all had little brown sisters, many of whom could be had for a price, or even pour l’amour ou pour le sport.

But that had been all the local talent for a long time. Nurses? Nurses are officers–and the rare USO entertainer who got that far from Stateside was even more thoroughly blocked off than were nurses.

I did not object to little brown sisters because they were brown. I was as brown as they were, in my face, except for a long pink scar. I drew the line because they were little.

I was a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle and no fat, and I could never convince myself that a female four feet ten inches tall and weighing less than ninety pounds and looking twelve years old is in fact a freely consenting adult. To me it felt like a grim sort of statutory rape and produced psychic impotence.

Singapore looked like the place to find a big girl. But when I escaped from Change Alley, I suddenly didn’t like people, big or little, male or female, and headed for the ship–and probably saved myself from pox, Cupid’s catarrh, soft chancre, Chinese rot, saltwater itch, and athletes foot–the wisest decision I
had made since, at fourteen, I had declined to wrestle a medium-sized alligator.

I told the driver in English what landing I wanted, repeated it in memorized Cantonese (not too well; its a nine-toned language, and French and German are all I had in school), and showed him a map with the landing marked and its name printed in English and drawn in Chinese.

Everybody who left the ship was given one of these maps. In Asia every cab driver speaks enough English to take you to the Red Light district and to shops where you buy “bargains.” But be is never able to find your dock or boat landing.

My cabbie listened, glanced at the map, and said, “Okay, Mac. I dig it,” and took off and rounded a corner with tires squealing while shouting at peddle cabs, coolies, children, dogs. I relaxed, happy at having found this cabbie among thousands.

Suddenly I sat up and shouted for him to stop.

I must explain something; I can’t get lost.

Call it a “psi” talent, like that study they study at Duke. Mother used to say that sonny had a “bump of direction.” Call it what you will, I was six or seven before I realized that other people could get lost. I always know which way is north, the direction of the point where I started and how far away it is. I can
head straight back or retrace my steps, even in dark and jungle. This was the main reason why I was always promoted back to corporal and usually shoved into a sergeant’s job. Patrols I headed always came back–the survivors, I mean. This was comforting to city boys who didn’t want to be in that jungle anyhow.

I had shouted because the driver had swung right when he should have swung left and was about to cut back across his own trade

He speeded up.

I yelled again. He no longer dug English.

It was another mile and several tunas later when he had to stop because of a traffic jam. I got out and he jumped out and started screaming in Cantonese and pointing at the meter in his cab. We were surrounded by Chinese adding to the din and smaller ones plucking at my clothes. I kept my hand on my
money and was happy indeed to spot a cop. I yelled and caught his eye.

He came through the crowd brandishing a long staff. He was a Hindu; I said to him, “Do you speak English?”

“Certainly. And I understand American.” I explained my trouble, showed him the map, and said that the driver had picked me up at Chaise Alley and been driving in aides.

The cop nodded and talked with the driver in a third language–Malayan, I suppose. At last the cop said, “He doesn’t understand English. He thought you said to drive to Johore.”

The bridge to Johore is as far as you can get from the anchorage and still be on the Island of Singapore. I said angrily, “The hell he doesn’t understand English!”

The cap shrugged. “You hired him, you must pay what is on the taximeter. Then I will explain to him where you wish to go and arrange a fixed fee.”

“I’ll see him in hell first!”

“That is possible. The distance is quite short–in this neighborhood. I suggest that you pay. The waiting time is mounting up.”

There comes a time when a man must stand up for his rights, or he can’t bear to look at himself in a mirror to shave. I had already shaved, so I paid–$18.50 Sing., for wasting an hour and ending up farther from the landing. The driver wanted a tip but the cop shut him up and then let me walk with him.

Using both hands I hung onto my orders and money, and the Sweepstakes ticket folded in with the money. But my pen disappeared and cigarettes and handkerchief and a Ronson lighter. When I felt ghost fingers at the strap of my watch, I agreed to the cops suggestion that he had a cousin, an honest man,
who would drive me to my landing for a fixed–and moderate–fee.

The “cousin” turned out to be just coming down the street; half an hour later I was aboard ship. I shall never forget Singapore, a most educational city.

Chapter 2

Two months later on the French Riviera. The Fairy Godmother Department watched over me across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and clear to Napoli. I lived a healthy life, exercising and getting tan every morning, sleeping afternoons, playing poker at night. There are many people who do not. Know
the odds (poor, but computable) for improving a poker hand in the draw, but are anxious to learn. When we got to Italy I had a beautiful tan and a sizable nest egg.

Early in the voyage someone went broke and wanted to put a Sweepstakes ticket into the game. After some argument Sweepstakes tickets were made valuta at a discount, $2.00 USA per ticket. I finished the trip with fifty-three tickets.

Hitching a flight from Napoli to Frankfurt took only hours. Then the Fairy Godmother Department handed me back to the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments.

Before going to Heidelberg I ducked over to Wiesbaden to see my mother, my stepfather and the kids–and found that they had just left for the States, on their way to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska.

So I went to Heidelberg to be processed, and looked the town over while the led tape unwound.

Lovely town–Handsome castle, good beer, and big girls with rosy cheeks and shapes like Coca-Cola bottles–Yes, this looked like a nice place to get a degree. I started inquiring into rooms and such, and met a young kraut wearing a studenten cap and some face scars as ugly as mine–things were looking up.

I discussed my plans with the first sergeant of the transient company.

He shook his head. “Oh, you poor boy!”

Why? No G.I. benefits for Gordon–I wasn’t a veteran.

Never mind that scar. Never mind that I had killed more men in combat than you could crowd into a–well, never mind. That thing was not a “war” and Congress had not passed a bill providing educational benefits for us “Military Advisers.”

I suppose this was my own fault. All my life there had been “G.I. benefits”–why, I had shared a bench in chem lab with a veteran who was going to school on the G.I. Bill.

This fatherly sergeant said, “Don’t take it hard, son. Go home, get a job, wait a year. They’ll pass it and date it bade, almost certainly. You’re young.”

So here I was on the Riviera, a civilian, enjoying a taste of Europe before using that transportation home. Heidelberg was out of the question. Oh, the pay I hadn’t been able to spend in the jungle, plus accumulated leave, plus my winnings at poker, added up to a sum which would have kept me a year in
Heidelberg. But it would never stretch enough for a degree. I had been counting on that mythical “G.I. Bill” for eating money and on my cash as a cushion.

My (revised) plan was obvious. Grab that top home before my year was up–grab it before school opened. Use the cash I had to pay board to Aunt and Uncle, work next summer and see what turned up. With the draft no longer hanging over me I could find some way to sweat out that last year even if I couldn’t be “Heir Doktor Gordon.”

However, school didn’t open until fall and here it was spring. I was damn well going to see a little of Europe before I applied nose to grindstone; another such chance might never come.

There was another reason for waiting; those Sweepstakes tickets. The drawing for horses was coming up.

The Irish Sweepstakes starts as a lottery. First they sell enough tickets to paper Grand Central Station. The Irish hospitals get 25 percent and are the only sure winners. Shortly before the race they draw for horses. Let’s say twenty horses are entered. If your ticket fails to draw a horse, its wastepaper. (Oh, there are minor consolation prizes.)

But if you do draw a horse, you still haven’t won. Some horses won’t start. Of those that do, most of them chase the other horses. However, any ticket that draws any horse at all, even a goat that can barely walk to the paddock, that ticket suddenly acquires a value of thousands of dollars between the drawing
and the race. Just how much depends on how good the horse is. But prizes are high and the worst horse in the field has been known to win.

I had fifty-three tickets. If one of them drew a horse, I could sell that ticket for enough to put me through Heidelberg.

So I stayed and waited for the drawings.

Europe needn’t be expensive. A youth hostel is luxury to a man who has come out of the boondocks of Southeast Asia and even the French Riviera isn’t expensive if you approach it from underneath. I didn’t stay on La Promenade des Anglais; I had a tiny room four floors up and two kilometers back, and the shared use of some plumbing. There are wonderful night clubs in, Nice but you need not patronize them as the floor show at the beaches is as good . . . and free. I never appreciated what a high art the fan dance can be until the first time I watched a French girl get out of her clothes and into her bikini in plain sight of citizens, tourists, gendarmes, dogs–and me–all without quite violating the lenient French mores concerning “indecent exposure.” Or only momentarily.

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

The beaches are terrible. Rocks. But rocks are better than jungle mud and I put on trunks and enjoyed the floor show and added to my tan. It was spring, before the tourist season and not crowded, but it was warm and summery and dry. I lay in the sun and was happy and my only luxury was a deposit box with
American Egress and the Paris edition of the N.Y. Herald Tribune and The Star’s & Stripes. These I would glance over to see how the Powers-that-be were mismanaging the world, then look for what was new in the unWar I had just been let out of (usually no mention, although we had been told that we were
“saving civilization”), then get down to important matters, i.e., news of the Irish Sweepstakes, plus the possibility that The Stars & Stripes might announce that it had all been a hideous dream and I was entitled to educational benefits after all.

Then came crossword puzzles and “Personal” ads. I always read “Personals”; they are a naked look into private lives. Things like: ‘M.L. phone R.S. before noon. Money.’ Makes you wonder who did what to whom, and who got paid?

Presently I found a still cheaper way to live with an even better floor show. Have you heard of l’Il du Levant? It is an island off the Riviera between Marseilles and Nice, and is much like Catalina. It has a village at one end and the French Navy has blocked off the other for guided missiles; the rest of it is hills and beaches and grottoes. There are no automobiles, nor even bicycles. The people who go there don’t want to be reminded of the outside world.

For ten dollars a day you can enjoy luxury equal to forty dollars a day in Nice. Or you can pay five cents a dry for camping and live on a dollar a day–which I did–and there are good cheap restaurants anytime you get tired of cooking.

It is a place that seems to have no rules of any sort. Wait a minute; there is one. Outside the village, Heliopolis, is a sign: LE NU INTEGRAL EST FORMELLEMENT INTERDIT. (“Complete nakedness is strictly forbidden.”)

This means that everyone, man or woman, must put on a little triangle of cloth, a cache-sexe, a G-string, before going inside the village.

Elsewhere, on beaches and in camping grounds and around the island, you don’t have to wear a damned thing and nobody does.

Save for the absence of automobiles and clothes, the Isle of the Levant is like any other bit of back-country France. There is a shortage of fresh water, but the French don’t drink water and you bathe in the Mediterranean and for a franc you can buy enough fresh water for half a dozen sponge baths to rinse cm the salt. Take the train from Nice or Marseilles, get off at Toulon and take a bus to Lavandou, then by boat (an hour and a few minutes) to l’Ile du Levant–then chuck away your cares with your clothes.

I found I could buy the Herald-Trib, a day old, in the village, at the same place (“Au Minimum,” Mme. Alexandre) where I rented a tent and camping gear. I bought groceries at La Brise Marine and camped above La Plage des Grottes, close to the village, and settled down and let my nerves relax while I enjoyed the floor show.

Some people disparage the female form divine. Sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters. All gals are good to look at (including little brown sisters even though they scared me); the only difference is that some look better than others. Some were fat and some were skinny and some were old
and some were young. Some looked as if they had stepped straight out of Les Folies Bergeres. I got acquainted with one of those and I wasn’t far off; she was a Swedish girl who was a “nue” in another Paris revue. She practiced English on me and I practiced French on her, and she promised to cook me a Swedish dinner if I was ever in Stockholm and I cooked her a dinner over an alcohol lamp and we got giggly on vin ordinaire, and she wanted to know how I had acquired my scar and I told some lies. Marjatta was good for an old soldiers nerves and I was sad when she had to leave.

But the floor show went on. Three days later I was sitting on Grotto Beach, leaning against a rock and working the crossword puzzle, when suddenly I got cross-eyed trying not to stare at the most stare-able woman I have ever seen in my life.

Woman, girl–I couldn’t be sure. At first glance I thought she was eighteen, maybe twenty; later when I was able to look her square in her face she still looked eighteen but could have been forty. Or a hundred and forty. She had the agelessness of perfect beauty. Like Helen or Troy, or Cleopatra. It seemed
possible that she was Helen of Troy but I knew she wasn’t Cleopatra because she was not a redhead; she was a natural blonde. She was a tawny toast color allover without a hint of bikini marks and her hair was the same shade two tones litter. It flowed, unconfined, in graceful waves down her back and seemed never to have been cut.

She was tall, not much shorter than I am, and not too much litter in weight. Not fat, not fat at all save for that graceful padding that smoothes the feminine form, shading the muscles underneath–I was sure there were muscles underneath; she carried herself with the relaxed power of a lioness.

Her shoulders were broad for a woman, as broad as her very female hips; her waist might have seemed thick on a lesser woman, on her it was deliciously slender. Her belly did not sag at all but carried the lovely double-domed curve of perfect muscle tone. Her breasts–only her big rib cage could carry such
large ones without appearing too much of a good thing, they jutted firmly out and moved only a trifle when she moved, and they were crowned with rosy brown confections that were frankly nipples, womanly and not virginal.

Her navel was that jewel the Persian poets praised.

Her legs were long for her height; her hands and feet were not small but were slender, graceful. She was graceful in all ways; it was impossible to think of her in a pose ungraceful. Yet she was so lithe and limber that, like a cat, she could have twisted herself into any position.

Her face–How do you describe perfect beauty except to say that when you see it you can’t mistake it? Her lips were full and her mouth rather wide. It was faintly curved in the ghost of a smile even when her features were at rest. Her lips were red but if she was wearing makeup of any sort it had been applied so skillfully that I could not detect it–and that alone would have made her stand out, for that was a year all other females were wearing “Continental” makeup, as artificial as a corset and as bold as a doxy’s smile.

Her nose was straight and large enough for her face, no button. Her eyes-

She caught me staring at her. Certainly women expect to be locked at and expect it unclothed quite as much as when dressed for the ball. But it is rude to stare openly. I had given up the fight in the first ten seconds and was trying to memorize her, every line, every curve.

Her eyes locked with mine and she stared back and I began to blush but couldn’t look away. Her eyes were so deep a blue that they were dark, darker than my own brown eyes.

I said huskily, “Pardonnez-moi, ma’m’selle,” and managed to tear my eyes away.

She answered, in English, “Oh, I don’t mind. Look all you please,” and looked me up and down as carefully as I had inspected her. Her voice was a warm, fall contralto, surprisingly deep in its lowest register.

She took two steps toward me and almost stood over me. I started to get up and she motioned me to stay seated, with a gesture mat assumed obedience as if she were very used to giving orders. “Rest where you are,” she said. The breeze carried her fragrance to me and I got goose flesh all over. “You are American.”

“Yes.” I was certain she was not, yet I was equally certain she was not French. Not only did she have no trace of French accent but also–well, French women are at least slightly provocative at all times; they can’t help it, it’s ingrained in the French culture. There was nothing provocative about this woman–except that she was an incitement to riot just by existing.

But, without being provocative, she had that rare gift for immediate intimacy; she spoke to me as a very old friend might speak, friends who knew each other’s smallest foibles and were utterly easy tete-a-tete. She asked me questions about myself, some of them quite personal, and I answered all of them, honestly, and it never occurred to me that she had no right to quiz me. She never asked my name, nor I hers–nor any question of her.

At last she stopped and looked me over again, carefully and soberly. Then she said thoughtfully, “You are very beautiful,” and added, “Au ‘voir”–turned and walked down the beach into the water and swam away.

I was too stunned to move. Nobody had ever called me “handsome” even before I broke my nose. As for “beautiful!”

But I don’t think it would have done me any good to have chased her, even if I had thought of it in time. That gal could swim.

Chapter 3

I stayed at the plager until sundown, waiting for her to come back. Then I made a hurried supper of bread and cheese and wine, got dressed in my G-string and walked into town. There I prowled bars and restaurants and did not find her, meanwhile window-peeping into cottages wherever shades were not drawn. When the bistros started shutting down, I gave up, went back to my tent, cursed myself for eight kinds of fool– (why couldn’t I have said, “What’s your name and where do you live and where are you staying here?”)–sacked in and went to sleep.

I was up at dawn and checked the plage, ate breakfast, checked the plage again, got “dressed” and went into the village, checked the shops and post office, and bought my Herald-Trib.

Then I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life: I had drawn a horse.

I wasn’t certain at first, as I did not have those fifty-three serial numbers memorized. I had to run back to my tent, dig out a memorandum and check–and I had! It was a number that had stuck in mind because of its pattern: #XDY 34555. I had a horse!

Which meant several thousand dollars, just how much I didn’t know. But enough to put me through Heidelberg . . . if I cashed in on it at once. The Herald-Trib was always a day late there, which meant the drawing had taken place at least two days earlier–and in the meantime that dog could break a leg or be scratched nine other ways. My ticket was important money only as long as “Lucky Star” was listed as a starter.

I had to get to Nice in a hurry and find out where and how you got the best price for a lucky ticket. Dig the ticket out of my deposit box and sell it!

But how about “Helen of Troy”?

Shylock with his soul-torn cry of “Oh, my daughter! Oh, my ducats!” was no more split than I.

I compromised. I wrote a painful note, identifying myself, telling her that I had been suddenly called away and pleading with her either to wait until I returned tomorrow, or at the very least, to leave a note telling me how to find her. I left it with the postmistress along with a description–blond, so tall, hair this long, magnificent poitrine–and twenty francs with a promise of twice that much if she delivered it and got an answer. The postmistress said that she had never seen her but if cette grande blonde ever set foot in the village the note would be delivered.

That left me just time to rush back, dress in off-island clothes, dump my gear with Mme. Alexandre, and catch the boat. Then I had three hours of travel time to worry through.

The trouble was that Lucky Star wasn’t really a dog. My horse rated no farther down than fifth or sixth, no matter who was figuring form. So? Stop while I was ahead and take my profit?

Or go for broke?

It wasn’t easy. Let’s suppose I could sell the ticket for $10,000. Even if I didn’t try any fancy footwork on taxes, I would still keep most of it and get through school.

But I was going to get through school anyway–and did I really want to go to Heidelberg? That student with the dueling scars had been a slob, with his phony pride in scars from fake danger.

Suppose I hung on and grabbed the big one, £50,000, or $140,000-

Do you know how much tax a bachelor pays on $140,000 in the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free?

$103,000, that’s what he pays. That leaves him $37,000.

Did I want to bet about $10,000 against the chance of winning $37,000–with the odds at least 15 to 1 against me?

Brother, that is drawing to an inside straight. The principle is the same whether it’s 37 grand, or jacks-or-better with a two-bit limit.

But suppose I wangled some way to beat the tax, thus betting $10,000 to win $140,000? That made the potential profit match the odds–and $140,000 was not just eating money for college but a fortune that could bring in four or five thousand a year forever.

I wouldn’t be “cheating” Uncle Sugar; the USA had no more moral claim on that money (if I won) than I had on the Holy Roman Empire. What had Uncle Sugar done for me? He had clobbered my father’s life with two wars, one of which we weren’t allowed to win–and thereby made it tough for me to get through college quite aside from what a father may be worth in spiritual intangibles to his son (I didn’t know, I never would know!)–then he had grabbed me out of college and had sent me to fight another unWar and damned near killed me and lost me my sweet girlish laughter.

So how is Uncle Sugar entitled to clip $103,000 and leave me the short end? So he can “lend” it to Poland? Or give it to Brazil? Oh, my back!

There was a way to keep it all (if I won) legal as marriage. Go live in little old tax-free Monaco for a year. Then take it anywhere.

New Zealand, maybe. The Herald-Trib had had the usual headlines, only more so. It looked as if the boys (just big playful boys!) who run this planet were about to hold that major war, the one with ICBMs and H-bombs, any time now.

If a man went as far south as New Zealand there might be something left after the fallout fell out.

New Zealand is supposed to be very pretty and they say that a fisherman there regards a five-pound trout as too small to take home.

I had caught a two-pound trout once.

About then I made a horrible discovery. I didn’t want to go back to school, win, lose, or draw. I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or “security.” There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.

Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.

Oh, I wasn’t about to hole up in a monastery. I still wanted-

What did I want?

I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break
some lances, Then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilling of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.

I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.

I had had one chance–for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be–And I had known it . . . aha I had let it slip away.

Maybe one chance is all you ever get.

The train pulled into Nice.

In the American Express office I went to the banking department and to my deposit box, found the ticket and checked the number against the Herald-Trib–XDY 34555, yes! To stop my trembling, I checked the other tickets and they were wastepaper, just as I thought. I shoved them back into the DOX and asked to see the manager.

I had a money problem and American Express is a bank, not just a travel bureau. I was ushered into the manager’s office and we exchanged names. “I need advice,” I said. “You see, I hold one of the winning Sweepstakes tickets.”

He broke into a grin. “Congratulations! You’re the first person in a long time who has come in here with good news rather than a complaint.”

“Thanks. Uh, my problem is this. I know that a ticket that draws a horse is worth quite a bit up until the race. Depending on the horse, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “What horse did you draw?”

“A fairly good one. Lucky Star–and that’s what makes it tough. If I had drawn H-Bomb, or any of the three favorites–Well, you see how it is. I don’t know whether to sell or hang on, because I don’t know how to figure the odds. Do you know what is being offered for Lucky Star?”

He fitted his finger tips together. “Mr. Gordon, American Express does not give tips on horse races, nor broker the resale of Sweepstakes tickets. However–Do you have the ticket with you?”

I got it out and handed it to him. It had been through poker games and was sweat-marked and crumpled. But that lucky number was unmistakable.

He looked at it. “Do you have your receipt?”

“Not with me.” I started to explain that I had given my stepfathers address–and that my mail had been forwarded to Alaska. He cut me off. “That’s all right.” He touched a switch. “Alice, will you ask M’sieur Renault to step in?”

I was wondering if it really was all right. I had had the savvy to get names and new billets from the original ticket holders and each had promised to send his receipt to me when he got it–but no receipts had reached me. Maybe in Alaska–I had checked on this ticket while at the lockbox; it had been bought by a sergeant now in Stuttgart. Maybe I would have to pay him something or maybe I would have to break his arms.

M. Renault looked like a tired schoolteacher. “M’sieur Renault is our expert on this sort of thing,” the manager explained. “Will you let him examine your ticket, please?” The Frenchman looked at it, then his eyes lit up and be reached into a pocket, produced a jeweler’s loupe, screwed it into his eye. “Excellent!” he said approvingly. “One of the best. Hong Kong, perhaps?

“I bought it in Singapore.”

He nodded and smiled. “That follows.”

The manager was not smiling. He reached into his desk and brought out another Sweepstakes ticket and handed it to me. “Mr. Gordon, this one I bought at Monte Carlo. Will you compare it?”

They looked alike to me, except for serial numbers and the fact that his was crisp and clean. “What am I supposed to look for?”

“Perhaps this will help.” He offered me a large reading glass.

A Sweepstakes ticket is printed on special paper and has an engraved portrait on it and is done in several colors. It is a better job of engraving and printing than many countries use for paper money.

I learned long ago that you can’t change a deuce into an ace by staring at it. I handed back his ticket. “Mine is counterfeit.”

“I didn’t say so, Mr. Gordon. I suggest you get an outside opinion. Say at the office of the Bank of France.”

“I can see it. The engraving lines aren’t sharp and even on mine. They’re broken, some places. Under the glass the print job looks smeared.” I turned. “Right, M’sieur Renault?”

The expert gave a shrug of commiseration. “It is beautiful work, of its sort.”

I thanked them and got out. I checked with the Bank of France, not because I doubted the verdict but because you don’t have a. leg cut off, nor chuck away $140,000, without a second opinion. Their expert didn’t bother with a loupe. “Contrefait” he announced. “Worthless.”

It was impossible to get back to l’Ile du Levant that night. I had dinner and then looked up my former landlady. My broom closet was empty and she let me have it overnight. I didn’t lie awake long.

I was not as depressed as I thought I should be. I felt relaxed, almost relieved. For a while I had had the wonderful sensation of being rich–and I had had its complement, the worries of being rich–and both sensations were interesting and I didn’t care to repeat them, not right away.

Now I had no worries. The only thing to settle was when to go home, and with living so cheap on the island there was no hurry. The only thing that fretted me was that rushing off to Nice might have caused me to miss “Helen of Troy,” cette grande blonde! Si grande . . . si belle . . . si majestueuse! I fell asleep thinking of her.

I had intended to catch the early train, then the first boat. But the day before had used up most of the money on me and I had goofed by failing to get cash while at American Express. Besides, I had not asked for mail. I didn’t expect any, other than from my mother and possibly my aunt–the only close friend I had had in the Army had been killed six months back. Still, I might as well pick up mail as long as I had to wait for money.

So I treated myself to a luxury breakfast. The French think that a man can face the day with chicory and milk, and a croissant, which probably accounts for their unstable politics. I picked a sidewalk cafe by a big kiosk, the only one in Nice that stocked The Stars & Stripes and where the Herald-Trib would be on sale as soon as it was in; ordered a melon, cafe complet for TWO, and an omelette aux herbes fines; and sat back to enjoy life.

When the Herald-Trib arrived, it detracted from my sybaritic pleasure. The headlines were worse than ever and reminded me that I was still going to have to cope with the world; I couldn’t stay on l’Ile du Levant forever.

But why not stay there as long as possible? I still did not want to go to school, and that three-car-garage ambition was as dead as that Sweepstakes ticket. If World War III was about to shift to a rolling boil, there was no point in being an engineer at six or eight thousand a year in Santa Monica only to be caught in the fire storm.

It would be better to live it up, gather ye rosebuds, carpe that old diem, with dollars and days at hand, then–Well, join the Marine Corps maybe, like my dad.

I refolded the paper to the “Personals” column.

They were pretty good. Besides the usual offers of psychic readings and how to learn yoga and the veiled messages from one set of initials to another there were several that were novel. Such as-

REWARD!! Are you contemplating suicide? Assign to me the lease on your apartment and I will make your last clays lavish. Box 323, H-T

Or: Hindu gentleman, non-vegetarian, wishes to meet cultured European, African, or Asian lady owning sports car. Object: improving international relations. Box 107

How do you do that in a sports car?

One was ominous–Hermaphrodites of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Tel. Opera 59-09

The next one started: ARE YOU A COWARD?

Well, yes, certainly. If possible. If allowed a free choice. I read on:

ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, 17, rue Dante, Nice, 2me etage, appt. D.

I read that requirement about face and figure with strong relief. For a giddy moment it had seemed as if someone with a skewed sense of humor had aimed a shaggy joke right at me. Somebody who knew my habit of reading the “Personals.”

That address was only a hundred yards from where I was sitting. I read the ad again.

Then I paid the addition, left a careful tip, went to the kiosk and bought The Stars & Stripes, walked to American Express, got money and picked up my mail, and on to the railroad station. It was over an hour until the next train to Toulon, so I went into the bar, ordered a beer and sat down to read.

Mother was sorry I had missed them in Wiesbaden. Her letter itemized the children’s illnesses, the high prices in Alaska, and expressed regret that they had ever had to leave Germany. I shoved it into my pocket and picked up The Stars & Stripes.

Presently I was reading: ARE YOU A COWARD?–same ad, right to the end.

I threw the paper down with a growl.

There were three other letters. One invited me to contribute to the athletic association of my ex-college; the second offered to advise me in the selection of my investments at a special rate of only $48 a year; the last was a plain envelope without a stamp, evidently handed in at American Express.

It contained only a newspaper clipping, starting: ARE You A COWARD?

It was the same as the other two ads except that in the last sentence one word had been underlined: You must apply in person-

I splurged on a cab to rue Dante. If I hurried, there was time to untangle this hopscotch and still catch the Toulon train. No. 17 was a walk-up; I ran up and, as I approached suite D, I met a young man coming out. He was six feet tall, handsome of face and figure, and looked as if he might be a hermaphrodite.

The lettering on the door read: DR. BALSAMO–HOURS BY APPOINTMENT, in both French and English. The name sounded familiar and vaguely phony out I did not stop to figure it out; I pushed on in.

The office inside was cluttered in a fashion known only to old French lawyers and pack rats. Behind the desk was a gnome-like character with a merry smile, hard eyes, the pinkest face and scalp I’ve ever seen, and a fringe of untidy white hair. He looked at me and giggled. “Welcome! So you are a hero?” Suddenly he whipped out a revolver half as long as he was and just as heavy and pointed it at me. You could have driven a Volkswagen down its snout.

“I’m not a hero,” I said nastily. “I’m a coward. I just came here to find out what the joke is.” I moved sideways while slapping that monstrous piece of ordnance the other way, chopped his wrist, and caught it. Then I handed it back to him. “Don’t play with that thing, or I’ll shove it up your deposition. I’m in a hurry. You’re Doctor Balsamo? You ran that ad?”

“Tut, tut,” he said, not at all annoyed. “Impetuous youth. No, Doctor Balsamo is in there.” He pointed his eyebrows at two doors on the left waft, then pushed a bell button on his desk–the only thing in the room later than Napoleon. “Go in. She’s expecting you.”

” ‘She’? Which door?”

“Ah, the Lady or the Tiger? Does it matter? In the long run? A hero will know. A coward will choose the wrong one, being sure that I lie. Allez-y! Vite, vite! Schnell! Get the lead out, Mac.”

I snorted and jerked open the right-hand door.

The doctor was standing with her back to me at some apparatus against the far wall and she was wearing one of those white, high-collared jackets favored by medical men. On my left was a surgeon’s examining table, on my right a Swedish-modern couch; there were stainless-steel and glass cabinets, and some framed certificates; the whole place was as up-to-date at the outer room was not.

As I closed the door she turned and looked at me and said quietly, “I am very glad that you have come.” Then she smiled and said softly, “You are beautiful,” and came into my arms.

Chapter 4

About a minute and forty seconds and several centuries later “Dr. Balsamo-Helen of Troy” pulled her mouth an inch back from mine and said, “Let me go, please, then undress and lie on the examining table.” I felt as if I had had nine hours of sleep, a needle shower, and three slugs of ice-cold akvavit on an empty stomach. Anything she wanted to do, I wanted to do. But the situation seemed to call for witty repartee. “Huh?” I said.

“Please. You are the one, but nevertheless I must examine you.”

“Well . . . all right,” I agreed. “You’re the doctor,” I added and started to unbutton my shirt. “You are a doctor? Of medicine, I mean.” “Yes. Among other things.”

I kicked out of my shoes. “But why do you want to examine me?”

“For witches’ marks, perhaps. Oh, I shan’t find any, I know. But I must search for other things, too. To protect you.”

That table was cold against my skin. Why don’t they pad those things? “Your name is Balsamo?”

“One of my names,” she said absently while gentle fingers touched me here and there. “A family name, that is.”

“Wait a minute. Count Cagliostro!”

“One of my uncles. Yes, he used that name. Though it isn’t truly his, no more than Balsamo. Uncle Joseph is a very naughty man and quite untruthful.” She touched an old, small scar. “Your appendix has been removed.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let me see your teeth.”

I opened wide. My face may not be much but I could rent my teeth to advertise Pepsodent. Presently she nodded. “Fluoride marks. Good. Now I must have your blood.”

She could have bitten me in the neck for it and I wouldn’t have minded. Nor been much surprised. But she did it the ordinary way, taking ten cc. from the vein inside my left elbow. She took the sample and put it in that apparatus against the wall. It chirred and whirred and she came back to me. “Listen,

Princess,” I said.

“I am not a princess.”

“Well . . . I don’t know your first name, and you inferred that your last name isn’t really ‘Balsamo’–and I don’t want to call you ‘Doc.’ ” I certainly did not want to call her “Doc”–not the most beautiful girl I had ever seen or hoped to see . . . not after a kiss that had wiped out of memory every other kiss I had ever received. No.

She considered it. “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

“Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party

dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

“I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?”

I thought about it. I certainly was not going to dig up “Flash–I am not a comic strip. The Army nickname I had held longest was entirely unfit to hand to a lady. At that I preferred it to my given name. My daddy had been proud of a couple of his ancestors–but is that any excuse for hanging “Evelyn Cyril” on a male child? It had forced me to Team to fight before I learned to read.

The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.”

” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,” and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name. Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice.

“No, no! Not ‘Oscar’–‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’ For this.”

“Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster. Scar and Star.” She barely touched the scar. “Do you dislike your hero’s mark? Shall I remove it?”

“En? Oh, no. I’m used to it now. It lets me know who it is when I see myself in a mirror.”

“Good. I like it, you wore it when I first saw you. But if you change your mind, let me know.” The gear against the wall went whush, chunk! She turned and took a long strip from it, then whistled softly while she studied it.

“This won’t take long,” she said cheerfully and wheeled the apparatus over to the table. “Hold still while the protector is connected with you, quite still and breathe shallowly.” She made half a dozen connections of tubes to me; they stuck where she placed them. She put over her head what I thought was a fancy stethoscope but after she got it on, it covered her eyes.

She chuckled. “You’re pretty inside, too, Oscar. No, don’t talk.” She kept one hand on my forearm and I waited.

Five minutes later she lifted her hand and stripped off the connections. “That’s all,” she said cheerfully. “No more colds for you, my hero, and you won’t be bothered again by that flux you picked up in the jungle. Now we move to the other room.”

I got off the table and grabbed at my clothes. Star said, “You won’t need them where we are going. Full kit and weapons will be provided.”

I stopped with shoes in one hand and drawers in the other. “Star–”

“Yes, Oscar?”

“What is this all about? Did you run that ad? Was it meant for me? Did you really want to hire me for something?”

She took a deep breath and said soberly, “I advertised. It was meant for you and you only. Yes, there is a job to do . . . as my champion. There will be great adventure . . . and greater treasure . . . and even greater danger–and I fear very much that neither one of us will live through it.” She looked me in the eyes. “Well, sir?”

I wondered how long they had had me in the locked ward. But I didn’t tell her so, because, if that was where I was, she wasn’t there at all. And I wanted her to be there, more than I had ever wanted anything. I said, “Princess . . . you’ve hired yourself a boy.”

She caught her breath. “Come quickly. Time is short.” She led me through a door beyond the Swedish modern couch, unbuttoning her jacket, unzipping her skirt, as she went, and letting garments fall anywhere. Almost at once she was as I had first seen her at the plage.

This room had dark walls and no windows and a soft light from nowhere. There were two tow couches side by side, black they were and looking like biers, and no other furniture. As soon as the door was dosed behind us I was suddenly aware that the room was aching, painfully anechoic; the bare walls gave back no sound.

The couches were in the center of a circle which was part of a large design, in chalk, or white paint, on bare floor. We entered the pattern; she turned and squatted down and completed one line, closing it–and ft was true; she was unable to be awkward, even hunkered down, even with her breasts drooping
as she leaned over.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A map to take us where we are going.”

“It looks more like a pentagram.”

She shrugged. “All right, it is a pentacle of power. A schematic circuit diagram would be a better tag. But, my hero, I can’t stop to explain it. Lie down, please, at once.”

I took the right-hand couch as she signed me, but I couldn’t let ft be. “Star, are you a witch?”

“If you like. Please, no talking now.” She lay down, stretched out her hand. “And join hands with me, my lord; it is necessary.”

Her hand was soft and warm and very strong. Presently the light faded to red, then died away. I slept.

Chapter 5

I woke to singing birds.

Her hand was still in mine. I turned my head and she smiled at me. “Good morning, my lord.”

“Good morning. Princess.” I glanced around. We were still lying on those black couches but they were outdoors, in a grassy dell, a clearing in trees beside a softly chuckling stream–a place so casually beautiful that it looked as if it had been put together leaf by leaf by old and unhurried Japanese gardeners.

Warm sunshine splashed through leaves and dappled her golden body. I glanced up at the sun and back at her. “Is it morning?” It had been noonish or later and that sun ought to DC–seemed to be–setting, not rising-

“It is again morning, here.”

Suddenly my bump of direction spun like a top and I felt dizzy. Disoriented–a feeling new to me and very unpleasant. I couldn’t find north.

Then things steadied down. North was that way, upstream–and the sun was rising, maybe nine in the morning, and would pass across the north sky. Southern Hemisphere. No sweat.

No trick at all–Just give the kook a shot of dope while examining him, lug him aboard a 707 and jet him to New Zealand, replenishing the Mickey Finn as needed. Wake him up when you want him.

Only I didn’t say this and never did think it. And it wasn’t true.

She sat up. “Are you hungry?”

I suddenly realized that an omelet some hours ago–how many? –was not enough for a growing boy. I sat up and swung my feet to the grass. “I could eat a horse.”
She grinned. “The shop of La Societe Anonyme de Hippopnage is closed I’m afraid. Will you settle for trout? We must wait a bit, so we might as well eat. And don’t worry, this place is defended.”

” ‘Defended’?”

“Safe.”

“All right. Uh, how about a rod and hooks?”

“I’ll show you.” What she showed me was not fishing tackle but how to tickle fish. But I knew how. We waded into that lovely stream, just pleasantly cool, moving as quietly as possible, and picked a place under a bulging rock, a place where trout like to gather and think–the fishy equivalent of a gentlemen’s club.

You tickle trout by gaining their confidence and then abusing it. In about two minutes I got one, between two and three pounds, and tossed it onto the bank, and Star had one almost as large. “How much can you eat?” she asked.

“Climb out and get dry,” I said. “I’ll get another one.”

“Make it two or three,” she amended. “Rufo will be along.” She waded quietly out.

“Who?”

“Your groom.”

I didn’t argue. I was ready to believe seven impossible things before breakfast, so I went on catching breakfast. I let it go with two more as the last was the biggest trout I’ve ever seen. Those beggars fairly queued up to be grabbed.

By then Star had a fire going and was cleaning fish with a sharp rock. Shucks, any Girl Scout or witch can make fire without matches. I could myself, given several hours and plenty of luck, just by rubbing two dry cliches together. But I noticed that the two short biers were gone. Well, I hadn’t ordered them. I
squatted down and took over cleaning the trout.

Star came back shortly with fruits that were apple-like but deep purple in color and with quantities of button mushrooms. She was carrying the plunder on a broad leaf, like canna or ti, only bigger. More like banana leaves.

My mouth started to water. “If only we had salt!”

“I’ll fetch it. It will be rather gritty. I’m afraid.”

Star broiled the fish two ways, over the fire on a forked green stick, and on hot flat limestone where he fire had been–she kept brushing the fire along as she fed it and placed fish and mushrooms sizing where it had been. That way was best, I thought. Little fine grasses turned out to be chives, local style, and tiny clover tasted and looked like sheep sorrel. That, with the salt (which was gritty and coarse and may have been licked by animals before we got it–not that I cared) made the trout the best I’ve ever tasted. Well, weather and scenery and company had much to do with it, too, especially the company.

I was trying to think of a really poetic way of saying, “How about you and me shacking up right here for the next ten thousand years? Either legal or informal–are you married?” when we were interrupted. Which was a shame, for I had thought up some pretty language, all new, for the oldest and most practical
suggestion in the world.

Old baldy, the gnome with the oversized six-shooter, was standing behind me and cursing.

I was sure it was cursing although the language was new to me. Star turned her head, spoke in quiet reproval in the same language, made room for him and offered him a trout. He took it and ate quite a bit of it before he said, in English, “Next time I won’t pay him anything. You’ll see.”

“You shouldn’t try to cheat him, Rufo. Have some mushrooms. Where’s the baggage? I want to get dressed.”

“Over there.” He went back to wolfing fish. Rufo was proof that some people should wear clothes. He was pink all over and somewhat potbellied. However, he was amazingly well muscled, which I had never suspected, else I would have been more cautious about taking that cannon away from him. I decided that
if he wanted to Indian-wrestle, I would cheat.

He glanced at me past a pound and a half of trout and said, “Is it your wish to be outfitted now, my lord?”

“Huh? Finish your breakfast. And what’s this ‘my lord’ routine? Last time I saw you you were waving a gun in my face.”

“I’m sorry, my lord. But She said to do it . . . and what She says must be done. You understand.”

“That suits me perfectly. Somebody has to drive. But call me ‘Oscar.’ ”

Rufo glanced at Star, she nodded. He grinned. “Okay, Oscar. No hard feelings?”

“Not a bit.”

He put down the fish, wiped his hand on his thigh, and stuck it out. “Swell! You knock em down, I’ll stomp on ’em.”

We shook hands and each of us tried for the knuckle-cracking grip. I think I got a little the better of it, but I decided he might have been a blacksmith at some time.

Star looked very pleased and showed dimples again She had been lounging by the fire; looking line a hamadryad on her coffee break; now she suddenly reached out and placed her strong, slender hand over our clasped fists. “My stout friends,” she said earnestly. “My good boys. Rufo, it will be well.”

“You have a Sight?” he said eagerly.

“No, just a feeling. But I am no longer worried.”

“We can’t do a thing,” Rufo said moodily, “until we deal with Igli.”

“Oscar will dicker with Igli.” Then she was on her feet in one smooth motion. “Stuff that fish in your face and unpack. I need clothes.” She suddenly looked very eager.

Star was more different women than a platoon of WACs–which is only mildly a figure of speech. Right then she was every woman from Eve deciding between two fig leaves to a modern woman whose ambition is to be turned loose in Nieman-Marcus, naked with a checkbook. When I first met her, she had seemed rather a sobersides and no more interested in clothes than I was. I’d never had a chance to be interested in clothes. Being a member of the sloppy generation was a boon to my budget at college, where blue jeans were au fait and a dirty sweat shirt was stylish.

The second time I saw her she had been dressed, but in that lab smock and tailored skirt she had been both a professional woman and a warm friend. But today–this morning whenever that was–she was increasingly full of Bubbles. She had delighted so in catching fish that she had had to smother squeals of glee. And she had then been the perfect Girl Scout, with soot smudged on her cheek and her hair pushed back out of hazard of the fire while she cooked.

Now she was the woman of all ages who just has to get her hands on new clothes. I felt that dressing Star was like putting a paint job on the crown jewels–but I was forced to admit that, if we were not to do the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” bit right in that dell from then on till death do us part, then clothes of some sort, if only to keep her perfect skin from getting scratched by brambles, were needed.

Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.

And opened it again.

And Kept on opening it–And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed. Since I was nicknamed “Truthful James” as soon as I learned to talk and am widely known to have won the hatchet every February 22nd all through school, you must now conclude that I was the victim of an illusion caused by hypnosis and/or drugs.

Me, I’m not sure. Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory, and anyone who has had the doubtful privilege of seeing a fat woman get in or out of a tight girdle knows that this is true in practice, too. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.

The first thing he dragged out was a big teakwood chest. Star opened it and started pulling out filmy lovelies.

“Oscar, what do you think of this one?” She was holding a long, green dress against her with the skirt draped over one hip to display it. “Like it?”

Of course I liked it. If it was an original–and somehow I knew that Star never wore copies–I didn’t want to think about what it must have cost. “It’s a mighty pretty gown,” I told her. “But–Look, are we going to be traveling?”

“Right away.”

“I don’t see any taxicabs. Aren’t you likely to get that torn?”

“It doesn’t tear. However, I didn’t mean to wear it; I just meant to show it to you. Isn’t it lovely? Shall I model it for you? Rufo, I want those high-heeled sandals with the emeralds.”

Rufo answered in that language he had been cursing in when he arrived. Star shrugged and said, “Don’t be impatient, Rufo; Igli will wait. Anyhow, we can’t talk to Igli earlier than tomorrow morning; milord Oscar must learn the language first.” But she put the green gorgeousness back in the chest.

“Now here is a little number,” she went on, holding it up, “which is just plain naughty: it has no other purpose.”

I could see why. It was mostly skirt, with a little bodice that supported without concealing–a style favored in ancient Crete, I hear, and still popular in the Overseas Weekly, Playboy, and many night clubs. A style that turns droopers into bulgers. Not that Star needed it.

Rufo tapped me on the shoulder. “Boss? Want to look over the ordnance and pick out what you need?”

Star said reprovingly, “Rufo, life is to be savored, not hurried.”

“We’ll have a lot more life to savor if Oscar picks out what he can use best.”

“He won’t need weapons until after we reach a settlement with Igli.” But she didn’t insist on showing more clothes and, while I enjoyed looking at Star, I like to check over weapons, too, especially when I might have to use them, as apparently the job called for.

While I had been watching Star’s style show, Rufo had laid out a collection that looked like a cross between an army-surplus store and a museum–swords, pistols, a lance that must have been twenty feet long, a flame-thrower, two bazookas flanking a Tommy gun, brass knucks, a machete, grenades, bows and arrows, a misericorde-

“You didn’t bring a slingshot,” I said accusingly.

He looked smug. “Which kind do you like, Oscar? The forked sort? Or a real sling?”

“Sorry I mentioned it. I can’t hit the floor with either sort.” I picked up the Tommy chopper, checked that it was empty, started stripping it. It seemed almost new, just fired enough to let the moving parts work in. A Tommy isn’t much more accurate than a pitched baseball and hasn’t much greater effective range. But it does have virtues–you hit a man with it, he goes down and stays down. It is short and not too heavy and has a lot of firepower for a short time. It is a bush weapon, or for any other sort of close-quarters work.

But I like something with a bayonet on the end, in case the party gets intimate–and I like that something to be accurate at long range in case the neighbors get unfriendly from a distance. I put it down and picked up a Springfield–Rock Island Arsenal, as I saw by its serial number, but still a Springfield. I feel the way about a Springfield that I do about a Gooney Bird; some pieces of machinery are ultimate perfection of their sort, the only possible improvement is a radical change in design.

I opened the bolt, stuck my thumbnail in the chamber, looked down the muzzle. The barrel was bright and the lands were unworn–and the muzzle had that tiny star on it; it was a match weapon!

“Rufo, what sort of country will we be going through? Like this around us?”

“Today, yes. But–” He apologetically took the rifle out of my hands. “It is forbidden to use firearms here. Swords, Knives, arrows–anything that cuts or stabs or mauls by your own muscle power. No guns.”

“Who says so?”

He shivered. “Better ask Her.”

“If we can’t use them, why bring them? And I don’t see any ammunition around anyhow.”

“Plenty of ammunition. Later on we will be at–another place–where guns may be used. If we live that long. I was just showing you what we have. What do you like of the lawful weapons? Are you a bowman?”

“I don’t know. Show me how.” He started to say something, then shrugged and selected a bow, slipped a leather guard over his left forearm, picked out an arrow. “That tree,” he said, “the one with the white rock at the foot of it. I’ll try for about as high off the ground as a man’s heart.”

He nocked the shaft, raised and bent and let fly, all in one smooth motion.

The arrow quivered in the tree trunk about four feet off the ground.

Rufo grinned. “Care to match that?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I could not, except by accident. I had once owned a bow, a birthday present. I hadn’t hit much with it and soon the arrows were lost. Nevertheless I made a production out of selecting a bow, and picked the longest and heaviest.

Rufo cleared his throat apologetically. “If I may make a suggestion, that one will pull quite hard–for a beginner.”

I strung it. “Find me a leather.”

The leather slipped on as if it had been made for me and perhaps it had. I picked an arrow to match, barely looked at it as they all seemed straight and true. I didn’t have any hope of hitting that bloody tree; it was fifty yards away and not over a foot thick. I simply intended to sight a bit high up on the trunk and hope that so heavy a bow would give me a flattish trajectory. Mostly I wanted to nock, bend, and loose all in one motion as Rufo had done–to look like Robin Hood even though I was not.

But as I raised and bent that bow and felt the power of it, I felt a surge of exultance–this tool was right for me! We fitted.

I let fly without thinking.

My shaft thudded a hand’s breadth from his.

“Well shot!” Star called out.

Rufo looked at the tree and blinked, then looked reproachfully at Star. She looked haughtily back. “I did not,” she stated. “You know I would not do that. It was a fair trial . . . and a credit to you both.”

Rufo looked thoughtfully at me. “Hmm–Would you care to make a small bet–you name the odds–that you can do that again?”

“I won’t bet,” I said. “I’m chicken.” But I picked up another arrow and nocked it. I liked that bow, I even liked the way the string whanged at the guard on my forearm; I wanted to try it, feel married to it, again.

I loosed it.

The third arrow grew out of a spot between the first two, but closer to his. “Nice bow,” I said. “I’ll keep it. Fetch the shafts.”

Rufo trotted away without speaking. I unstrung the bow, then started looking over the cutlery. I hoped that I would never again have to shoot an arrow; a gambler can’t expect to draw a pat hand every deal–my next shot would likely turn around like a boomerang.

There was too much wealth of edges and points, from a two-handed broadsword suitable for chopping down trees to a little dagger meant for a lady’s stocking. But I picked up and balanced them all . . . and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur.

I’ve never seen one quite like it so I don’t know what to call it. A saber, I suppose, as the blade was faintly curved and razor sharp on the edge and sharp rather far back on the back. But it had a point as deadly as a rapier and the curve was not enough to keep it from being used for thrust and counter quite as well as chopping away meat-axe style. The guard was a bell curved back around the knuckles into a semi-basket but cut away enough to permit full moulinet from any guard.

It balanced in the forte less than two inches from the guard, yet the blade was heavy enough to chop bone. It was the sort of sword that feels as if it were an extension of your body.

The grip was honest sharkskin, molded to my hand. There was a motto chased onto the blade but it was so buried in curlicues that I did not take time to study it out. This girl was mine, we fitted! I returned it and buckled belt and scabbard to my bare waist, wanting the touch of it and feeling like Captain John
Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks, and the Gascon and his three friends all in one.

“Will you not dress, milord Oscar?” Star asked.

“Eh? Oh, certainly–I was just trying it on for size. But–Did Rufo fetch my clothes?”

“Did you, Rufo?”

“His clothes? He wouldn’t want those things he was wearing in Nice!”

“What’s wrong with wearing Lederhosen with an aloha shirt?” I demanded.

“What? Oh, nothing at all, milord Oscar,” Rufo answered hastily. “Live and let live I always say. I knew a man once who wore–never mind. Let me show you what I fetched for you.”

I had my choice of everything from a plastic raincoat to full armor. I found the latter depressing because its presence implied that it might be needed. Except for an Army helmet I had never worn armor, didn’t want to, didn’t know how–and didn’t care to mix with rude company that made such protection desirable.

Besides, I didn’t see a horse around, say a Percheron or a Clydesdale, and I couldn’t see myself hiking in one of those tin suits. I’d be slow as crutches, noisy as a subway, and hot as a phone booth. Sweat off ten pounds in five miles. The quilted longjohns that go under that ironmongery would have been too much
alone for such beautiful weather; steel on top would turn me into a walking oven and leave me too weak and clumsy to fight my way out of a traffic ticket.

“Star, you said that–” I stopped. She had finished dressing and hadn’t overdone it. Soft leather hiking shoes–buskins really–brown tights, and a short green upper garment halfway between a jacket and a skating dress. This was topped by a perky little hat and the whole costume made her look like a musical corner version of an airline hostess, smart, cute, wholesome, and sexy.

Or maybe Maid Marian, as she had added a double-curve bow about half the size of mine, a quiver, and a dagger. “You,” I said, “look like why the riot started.”

She dimpled and curtsied. (Star never pretended. She knew she was female, she knew she looked good, she liked it that way.) “You said something earlier,” I continued, “about my not needing weapons just yet. Is there any reason why I should wear one of these space suits? They don’t look comfortable.”

“I don’t expect any great danger today,” she said slowly. “But this is not a place where one can call the police. You must decide what you need.”

“But–Damn it. Princess, you know this place and I don’t. I need advice.”

She didn’t answer. I turned to Rufo. He was carefully studying a treetop. I said, “Rufo, get dressed.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Milord Oscar?”

“Schnell! Vite, vite! Get the lead out.”

“Okay.” He dressed quickly, in an outfit that was a man’s version of what Star had selected, with shorts instead of tights.

“Arm yourself,” I said, and started to dress the same way, except that I intended to wear field boots. However, there was a pair of those buskins that appeared to be my size, so I tried them on. They snuggled to my feet like gloves and, anyway, my soles were so hardened by a month barefooted on l’Ile du Levant that I didn’t need heavy boots.

They were not as medieval as they looked; they zipped up the front and were marked inside Fabrique en France.

Pops Rufo had taken the bow he had used before, selected a sword, and had added a dagger. Instead of a dagger I picked out a Solingen hunting knife. I looked longingly at a service .45, but didn’t touch it. If “they,” whoever they were, had a local Sullivan Act, I would go along with the gag.

Star told Rufo to pack, then squatted down with me at a sandy place by the stream and drew a sketch map–route south, dropping downgrade and following the stream except for short cuts, until we reached the Singing Waters. There we would camp for the night.

I got it in my head. “Okay. Anything to warn me about? Do we shoot first? Or wait for them to bomb us?”

“Nothing that I expect, today. Oh, there’s a carnivore about three times the size of a lion. But it is a great coward; it won’t attack a moving man.”

“A fellow after my own heart. All right, we’ll keep moving.”

“If we do see human beings–I don’t expect it–it might be well to nock a shaft . . . but not raise your bow until you feel it is necessary. But I’m not telling you what to do, Oscar; you must decide. Nor will Rufo let fly unless he sees you about to do so.”

Rufo had finished packing. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. We set out. Rufo’s little black box was now rigged as a knapsack and I did not stop to wonder how he could carry a couple of tons on his shoulders. An anti-grav device like Buck Rogers, maybe. Chinese coolie blood. Black magic. Hell, that teakwood chest alone could not have fitted into that backpack by a factor of 30 to I, not to mention the arsenal and assorted oddments.

There is no reason to wonder why I didn’t quiz Star as to where we were, why we were there, how we had got there, what we were going to do, and the details of these dangers I was expected to face. Look, Mac, when you are having the most gorgeous dream of your life and just getting to the point, do you stop to tell yourself that it is logically impossible for that particular babe to be in the hay with you–and thereby wake yourself up? I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible.

So I chucked logic.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. “Logic” proved that airplanes can’t fly and that H-bombs wont work and that stones don’t fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn’t happen yesterday won’t happen tomorrow.

I liked the situation. I didn’t want to wake up, whether in bed, or in a headshrinker ward. Most especially I did not want to wake up still back in that jungle, maybe with that face wound still fresh and no helicopter. Maybe little brown brother had done a full job on me and sent me to Valhalla. Okay, I
liked Valhalla.

I was swinging along with a sweet sword knocking against my thigh and a much sweeter girl matching my strides and a slave-serf-groom-something sweating along behind us, doing the carrying and being our “eyes-behind.” Birds were singing and the landscape had been planned by master landscape architects
and the air smelled sweet and good. If I never dodged a taxi nor read a headline again, that suited me.

That longbow was a nuisance–but so is an M-l. Star had her little bow slung, shoulder to hip. I tried that, but it tended to catch on things. Also, it made me nervous not to have it ready since she had admitted a chance of needing it. So I unslung it and carried it in my left hand, strung and ready.

We had one alarum on the morning hike. I heard Rufo’s bowstring go thwung! –and I whirled and had my own bow ready, arrow nocked, before I saw what was up.

Or down, rather. A bird like a dusky grouse but larger. Rufo had picked it off a branch, right through the neck. I made note not to compete with him again in archery, and to get him to coach me in the fine points.

He smacked his lips and grinned. “Supper!” For the next mile he plucked it as we walked, then hung it from his belt.

We stopped for lunch one o’clockish at a picnic spot that Star assured me was defended, and Rufo opened his box to suitcase size, and served us lunch: cola cuts, crumbly Provencal cheese, crusty French bread, pears, and two bottles of Chablis. After lunch Star suggested a siesta. The idea was appealing; I had eaten heartily and shared only crumbs with the birds, but I was surprised. “Shouldn’t we push on?”

“You must have a language lesson, Oscar.”

I must tell them at Ponce de Leon High School the better way to study languages. You lie down on soft grass near a chuckling stream on a perfect day, and the most beautiful woman in any world bends over you and looks you in the eyes. She starts speaking softly in a language you do not understand.

After a bit her big eyes get bigger and bigger . . . and bigger . . . and you sink into them.

Then, a long time later, Rufo says, “Erbas, Oscar, ‘t knila voorsht.”

“Okay,” I answered, “I am getting up. Don’t rush me.”

That is the last word I am going to set down in a language that doesn’t fit our alphabet. I had several more lessons, and won’t mention them either, and from then on we spoke this lingo, except when I was forced to span gaps by asking in English. It is a language rich in profanity and in words for making love, and richer than English in some technical subjects–but with surprising holes in it. There is no word for “lawyer” for example.

About an hour before sundown we came to the Singing Waters.

We had been traveling over a high, wooded plateau. The brook where we had caught the trout had been joined by other streams and was now a big creek. Below us, at a place we hadn’t reached yet, it would plunge over high cliffs in a super-Yosemite fall. But here, where we stopped to camp, the water had cut a notch into the plateau, forming cascades, before it took that dive.

“Cascades” is a weak word. Upstream, downstream, everywhere you looked, you saw waterfalls–big ones thirty or fifty feet high, little ones a mouse could have jumped up, every size in between. Terraces and staircases of them there were, smooth water green from rich foliage overhead and water white as whipped cream as it splashed into dense foam.

And you heard them. Tiny falls tinkled in silvery soprano, big falls rumbled in basso profundo. On the grassy alp where we camped it was an ever-present chorale; in the middle of the falls you had to snout to make yourself heard.

Coleridge was there in one of his dope dreams:

And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething-

Coleridge must have followed that route and reached the Singing Waters. No wonder he felt like killing that “person from Porlock” who broke in on his best dream. When I am dying, lay me beside the Singing Waters and let them be the last I hear and see.

We stopped on a lawn terrace, flat as a promise and soft as a Kiss, and I helped Rufo unpack. I wanted to learn how he did that trick with the box. I didn’t find out. Each side opened as naturally and reasonably as opening up an ironing board–and then when it opened again that was natural and reasonable, too.

First we pitched a tent for Star–no army-surplus job, this; it was a dainty pavilion of embroidered silk and the rug we spread as a floor must have used up three generations of Bukhara artists. Rufo said to me, “Do you want a tent, Oscar?”

I looked up at the sky and over at the not-yet-setting sun. The air was milk warm and I couldn’t believe that it would rain. I don’t like to be in a tent if there is the least chance of surprise attack. “Are you going to use a tent?”

“Me? Oh, no! But She has to have a tent, always. Then, more likely than not. She’ll decade to sleep out on the grass.”

“I won’t need a tent.” (Let’s see, does a “champion” sleep across the door of his lady’s chamber, weapons at hand? I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of such things; they were never mentioned in “Social Studies.”)

She returned then and said to Rufo, “Defended. The wards were all in place.”

“Recharged?” he fretted.

She tweaked his ear. “I am not senile.” She added, “Soap, Rufo. And come along, Oscar; that’s Rufo’s work.”

Rufo dug a cake of Lux out of that caravan load and gave it to her, then looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a bar of Life Buoy.

The Singing Waters are the best bath ever, in endless variety. Still pools from footbath size to plunges you could swim in, sitz baths that tingled your skin, shower baths from just a trickle up to free-springing jets that would beat your brains in if you stood under them too long.

And you could pick your temperature. Above the cascade we used, a hot spring added itself to the main stream and at the base of this cascade a hidden spring welled out icy cold. No need to fool with taps, just move one way or the other for the temperature you like–or move downstream where it evened out to temperature as gently warm as a mother’s kiss.

We played for a while, with Star squealing and giggling when I splashed her, and answering it by ducking me. We both acted like kids; I felt like one, she looked like one, and she played rough, with muscles of steel under velvet.

Presently I fetched the soap and we scrubbed. When she started shampooing her hair, I came up behind her and helped. She let me, she needed help with the lavish mop, six times as much as most gals bother with these days.

That would have been a wonderful time (with Rufo busy and out of the way) to grab her and hug her, then proceed ruggedly to other matters. Nor am I sure that she would nave made even a token protest; she might have cooperated heartily.

Hell, I know she would not have made a “token” protest. She would either have put me in my place with a cold word or a clout in the ear–or cooperated.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even start.

I don’t know why. My intentions toward Star had oscillated from dishonorable to honorable and back again, but had always been practical from the moment I laid eyes on her. No, let me put it this way: My intentions were strictly dishonorable always, but with utter willingness to convert them to honorable, later, as soon as we could dig up a justice of the peace.

Yet I found I couldn’t lay a finger on her other than to help her scrub the soap out of her hair.

While I was puzzling over this, both hands buried in heavy blond hair and wondering what was stopping me from putting my arms around that slender-strong waist only inches away from me, I heard a piercing whistle and my name–my new name. I looked around.

Rufo, dressed in his unlovely skin and with towels over his shoulder, was standing on the bank ten feet away and trying to cut through the roar of water to get my attention.

I moved a few feet toward him. “How’s that again?” I didn’t quite snarl.

“I said, ‘Do you want a shave?’ Or are you growing a beard?”

I had been uneasily aware of my face cactus while I was debating whether or not to attempt criminal assault, and that unease had helped to stop me–Gillette, Aqua Velva, Burma Shave, et al., have made the browbeaten American male, namely me, timid about attempting seduction and/or rape unless freshly planed off. And I had a two-day growth.

“I don’t have a razor,” I called back.

He answered by holding up a straight razor.

Star moved up beside me. She reached up and tried my chin between thumb and forefinger. “You would be majestic in a beard,” she said. “Perhaps a Van Dyke, with sneering mustachios.”

I thought so too, if she thought so. Besides, it would cover most of that scar. “Whatever you say. Princess.”

“But I would rather that you stayed as I first saw you. Rufo is a good barber.” She turned toward him. “A hand, Rufo. And my towel.”

Star walked back toward the camp, toweling herself dry–I would have been glad to help, if asked. Rufo said tiredly, “Why didn’t you assert yourself? But She says to shave you, so now I’ve got to–and rush through my own bath, too, so She won’t be kept waiting.”

“If you’ve got a mirror, I’ll do it myself.”

“Ever used a straight razor?”

“No, but I can learn.”

“You’d cut your throat, and She wouldn’t like that. Over here on the bank where I can stand in the warm water. No, no! Don’t sit on it, lie down with your head at the edge. I can’t shave a man who’s sitting up.” He started working lather into my chin.

“You know why? I learned how on corpses, that’s why, making them pretty so that their loved ones would be proud of them. Hold still! You almost lost an ear. I like to shave corpses; they can’t complain, they don’t make suggestions, they don’t talk back–and they always hold still. Best job I ever had. But now you take this job–” He stopped with the blade against my Adam’s apple and started counting his troubles.

“Do I get Saturday off? Hell, I don t even get Sunday off! And look at the hours! Why, I read just the other day that some outfit in New York–You’ve been in New York?”

“I’ve been in New York. And get that guillotine away from my neck while you’re waving your hands like that.”

“You keep talking, you’re bound to get a little nick now and then. This outfit signed a contract for a twenty-five hour week. Week! I’d like to settle for a twenty-five hour day. You know how long I’ve been on the go, right this minute?”

I said I didn’t.

“There, you talked again. More than seventy hours or I’m a liar! And for what? Glory? Is there glory in a little heap of whitened bones? Wealth? Oscar, I’m telling you the truth; I’ve laid out more corpses than a sultan has concubines and never a one of them cared a soggy pretzel whether they were bedecked in rubies the size of your nose and twice as red . . . or rags. What use is wealth to a dead man? Tell me, Oscar, man to man while She can’t hear: Why did you ever let Her talk you into this?”

“I’m enjoying it, so far.”

He sniffed. “That’s what the man said as be passed the fiftieth floor of the Empire State Building. But the sidewalk was waiting for him, just the same. However,” he added darkly, “until you settle with Igli, it’s not a problem. If I had my kit, I could cover that scar so perfectly that everybody would say, ‘Doesn’t he look natural?’ ”

“Never mind. She likes that scar.” (Damn it, he had me doing it!)

“She would. What I’m trying to get over is, if you walk the Glory Road, you are certain to find mostly rocks. But I never chose to walk it. My idea of a nice way to live would be a quiet little parlor, the only one in town, with a selection of caskets, all prices, and a markup that allowed a little leeway to show
generosity to the bereaved. Installment plans for those with the foresight to do their planning in advance–for we all have to die, Oscar, we all have to die, and a sensible man might as well sit down over a friendly glass of beer and make his plans with a well-established firm he can trust.”

He leaned confidentially over me. “Look, milord Oscar . . . if by any miracle we get through this alive, you could put in a good word for me with Her. Make Her see that I’m too old for the Glory Road. I can do a lot to make your remaining days comfortable and pleasant . . . if your intentions toward me are comradely.”

“Didn’t we shake on it?”

“Ah, yes, so we did.” He sighed. “One for all and all for one, and Pikes Peak or Bust. You’re done.”

It was still light and Star was in her tent when we got back–and my clothes were laid out. I started to object when I saw them but Rufo said firmly, “She said ‘informal’ and that means black tie.”

I managed everything, even the studs (which were amazing big black pearls), and that tuxedo either had been tailored for me or it had been bought off the rack by someone who knew my height, weight, shoulders, and waist. The label inside the jacket read The English House, Copenhagen.

But the tie whipped me. Rufo showed up while I was struggling with it, had me lie down (I didn’t ask why) and tied it in a jiffy. “Do you want your watch, Oscar?”

“My watch?” So far as I knew it was in a doctors examining room in Nice. “You have it?”

“Yes, sir. I fetched everything of yours but your”–he shuddered–“clothes.”

He was not exaggerating. Everything was there, not only the contents of my pockets but the contents of my American Express deposit box: cash, passport, I.D., et cetera, even those Change Alley Sweepstakes tickets.

I started to ask how he had gotten into my lockbox but decided not to. He had had the key and it might have been something as simple as a fake letter of authority. Or as complex as his magical black box. I thanked him and he went back to his cooking.

I started to throw that stuff away, all but cash and passport. But one can’t be a litterbug in a place as beautiful as the Singing Waters. My sword belt had a leather pouch on it; I stuffed it in there, even the watch, which had stopped.

Rufo had set up a table in front of Star’s dainty tent and rigged a light from a tree over it and set candles on the table. It was dark before she came out . . . and waited. I finally realized that she was waiting for my arm. I led her to her place and seated her and Rufo seated me. He was dressed in a plum-colored footman’s uniform.

The wait for Star had been worth it; she was dressed in the green gown she had offered to model for me earlier. I still don’t know that she used cosmetics but she looked not at all like the lusty Undine who had been ducking me an hour earlier. She looked as if she should be kept under glass. She looked like Liza Doolittle at the Ball.

“Dinner in Rio” started to play, blending with the Singing Waters.

White wine with fish, rose wine with fowl, red wine with roast–Star chatted and smiled and was witty. Once Rufo, while bending over to me to serve, whispered, “The condemned ate heartily.” I told him to go to hell out of the corner of my mouth.

Champagne with the sweet and Rufo solemnly presented the bottle for my approval. I nodded. What would he have done if I had turned it down? Offered another vintage? Napolean with coffee. And cigarettes.

I had been thinking about cigarettes all day. These were Benson & Hedges No. 5 . . . and I had been smoking those black French things to save money.

While we were smoking, Star congratulated Rufo on the dinner and he accepted her compliments gravely and I seconded them. I still don’t know who cooked that hedonistic meal. Rufo did much of it but Star may have done the hard parts while I was being shaved.

After an unhurried happy time, sitting over coffee and brandy with the overhead light doused and only a single candle gleamed on her jewels and lighting her face. Star made a slight movement back from the table and I got up quickly and showed her to her tent. She stopped at its entrance. “Milord Oscar–”

So I kissed her and followed her in-

Like hell I did! I was so damned hypnotized that I bowed over her hand and kissed it. And that was hat.

That left me with nothing to do but get out of that borrowed monkey suit, hand it back to Rufo, and get a blanket from him. He had picked a spot to sleep at one side of her tent, so I picked one on the other and stretched out. It was still so pleasantly warm that even one blanket wasn’t needed.

But I didn’t go to sleep. The truth is, I’ve got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway–but it wasn’t helping that I could see light in Stars tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.

The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.

I got up and went around the tent. “Psst! Rufo.”

“Yes, milord.” He was up fast, a dagger in his hand.

“Look, is there anything to read around this dump?”

“What sort of thing?”

“Anything, just anything. Words in a row.”

“Just a moment.” He was gone a while, using a flashlight around that beachhead dump of plunder. He came back and offered me a book and a small camp lamp. I thanked him, went back, and lay down.

It was an interesting book, written by Albertus Magnus and apparently stolen from the British Museum. Albert offered a long list of recipes for doing unlikely things: how to pacify storms and fly over clouds, how to overcome enemies, how to make a woman be true to you-

Here’s that last one: “If thou wilt that a woman bee not visions nor desire men, take the private members of a Woolfe, and the haires which doe grow on the cheekes, or the eye-brows of him, and the hairs which bee under his beard, and burne it all, and give it to her to drinke, when she knowethe not, and she shal desire no other man.”

This should annoy the “Woolfe.” And if I were the gal, it would annoy me, too; it sounds like a nauseous mixture. But that’s the exact formula, spelling and all, so if you are having trouble keeping her in line and have a “Woolfe” handy, try it. Let me know the results. By mail, not in person.

There were several recipes for making a woman love you who does not but a “Woolfe” was by far the simplest ingredient. Presently I put the book down and the light out and watched the moving silhouette on that translucent silk. Star was brushing her hair.

Then I quit tormenting myself and watched the stars, I’ve never learned the stars of the Southern Hemisphere; you seldom see stars in a place as wet as Southeast Asia and a man with a bump of direction doesn’t need them.

But that southern sky was gorgeous.

I was staring at one very bright star or planet (it seemed to have a disk) when suddenly I realized it was moving.

I sat up. “Hey! Star!”

She called back, “Yes, Oscar?”

“Come see! A sputnik. A big one!”

“Coming.” The light in her tent went out, she joined me quickly, and so did good old Pops Rufo, yawning and scratching his ribs. “Where, milord?” Star asked.

I pointed. “Right there! On second thought it may not be a sputnik; it might be one of our Echo series. It’s awfully big and bright.”

She glanced at me and looked away. Rufo said nothing. I stared at it a while longer, glanced at her.

She was watching me, not it. I looked again, watched it move against the backdrop of stars.

“Star,” I said, “that’s not a sputnik. Nor an Echo balloon. That’s a moon. A real moon.”

“Yes, milord Oscar.”

“Then this is not Earth.”

“That is true.”

“Hmm–” I looked back at the little moon, moving so fast among the stars, west to east.

Star said quietly, “You are not afraid, my hero?”

“Of what?”

“Of being in a strange world.”

“Seems to be a pretty nice world.”

“It is,” she agreed, “in many ways.”

“I like it,” I agreed. “But maybe it’s time I knew more about it. Where are we? How many light-years, r whatever it is, in what direction?”

She sighed. “I will try, milord. But it will not be easy; you have not studied metaphysical geometry–nor many other things. Think of the pages of a book–” I still had that cookbook of Albert the Great under my arm; she took it. “One page may resemble another very much. Or be very different. One page can be so close to another that it touches, at all points–yet have nothing to do with the page against it. We are as close to Earth–right now–as two pages in sequence in a book. And yet we are so far away that light-years cannot express it.”

“Look,” I said, “no need to get fancy about it. I used to watch ‘Twilight Zone.’ You mean another dimension. I dig it.”

She looked troubled “That’s somewhat the idea but–”

Rufo interrupted. “There’s still Igli in the morning.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “If we have to talk to Igli in the morning, maybe we need some sleep. I’m sorry. By the way, who is Igli?”

“You’ll find out,” said Rufo.

I looked up at that hurtling moon. “No doubt. Well, I’m sorry I disturbed you all with a silly mistake. Good night, folks.”

So I crawled back into my sleeping sills, like a proper hero (all muscles and no gonads, usually), and they sacked in too. She didn’t put the light back on, so I had nothing to look at but the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I had fallen into a book.

Well, I hoped it was a success and that the writer would keep me alive for lots of sequels. It was a pretty nice deal for the hero, up to this chapter at least. There was Dejah Thoris, curled up in her sleeping silks not twenty feet away.

I thought seriously of creeping up to the flap of her tent and whispering to her that I wanted to ask a few questions about metaphysical geometry and like matters. Love spells, maybe. Or maybe just tell her that it was cold outside and could I come in?

But I didn’t. Good old faithful Rufo was curled up just the other side of that tent and he had a disconcerting habit of coming awake fast with a dagger in his hand. And he liked to shave corpses. As I’ve said, given a choice. I’m chicken.

I watched the hurtling moons of Barsoom and fell asleep.

Chapter 6

Singing birds are better than alarm clocks and Barsoom was never like this. I stretched happily and smelled coffee and wondered if there was time for a dip before breakfast. It was another perfect day, blue and clear and the sun just up, and I felt like killing dragons before lunch. Small ones, that is.

I smothered a yawn and rolled to my feet. The lovely pavilion was gone and the black box mostly repacked; it was no bigger than a piano box. Star was kneeling before a fire, encouraging the coffee. She was a cavewoman this morning, dressed in a hide that was fancy but not as fancy as her own. From an ocelot, maybe. Or from du Pont.

“Howdy, Princess,” I said. “What’s for breakfast? And where’s your chef?”

“Breakfast later,” she said. “Just a cup of coffee for you now, too hot and too black–best you be bad tempered. Rufo is starting the talk with Igli.” She served it to me in a paper cup.

I drank half a cup, burned my mouth and spat out grounds. Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover. This stuff was no better than grade four.

I stopped then, having caught sight of Rufo. And company, lots of company. Along the edge of our terrace somebody had unloaded Noah’s Ark. There was everything there from aardvarks to zebus, most of them with long yellow teeth.

Rufo was facing this picket line, ten feet this side and opposite a particularly large and uncouth citizen. About then that paper cup came apart and scalded my fingers.

“Want some more?” Star asked.

I blew on my fingers. “No, thanks. This is Igli?”

“Just the one in the middle that Rufo is baiting. The rest have come to see the fun, you can ignore them.”

“Some of them look hungry.”

“Most of the big ones are like Cuvier’s devil, herbivorous. Those outsized lions would eat us–if Igli wins the argument. But only then. Igli is the problem.”

I looked Igli over more carefully. He resembled that scion of the man from Dundee, all chin and no forehead, and he combined the less appetizing features of giants and ogres in ‘The Red Fairy Book’. I never liked that book much.

He was vaguely human, using the term loosely. He was a couple of feet taller than I am and outweighed me three or four hundred pounds but I am much prettier. Hair grew on him in clumps, like a
discouraged lawn; and you just knew, without being told, that he had never used a man’s deodorant for manly men. The knots of his muscles had knots on them and his toenails weren’t trimmed.

“Star,” I said, “what’s the nature of the argument we have with him?”

“You must kill him, milord.”

I looked back at him. “Can’t we negotiate a peaceful coexistence? Mutual inspection, cultural exchange, and so forth?”

She shook her head. “He’s not bright enough for that. He’s here to stop us from going down into the valley–and either he dies, or we die.”

I took a deep breath. “Princess, I’ve reached a decision. A man who always obeys the law is even stupider than one who breaks it every chance. This is no time to worry about that local Sullivan Act. I want the flame-thrower, a bazooka, a few grenades, and the heaviest gun in that armory. Can you show me how to dig them out?”

She poked at the fire. “My hero,” she said slowly, “I’m truly sorry–but it isn’t that simple. Did you notice, last night when we were smoking, that Rufo lighted our cigarettes from candles? Not using even so much as a pocket lighter?”

“Well . . . no. I didn’t give it any thought.”

“This rule against firearms and explosives is not a law such as you have back on Earth. It is more than hat; it is impossible to use such things here. Else such things would be used against us.”

“You mean they won t work?”

“They will not work. Perhaps ‘hexed’ is the word.”

“Star. Look at me. Maybe you believe in hexes. I don’t. And I’ll give you seven to two that Tommy uns don’t, either. I intend to find out. Will you give me a hand in unpacking?”

For the first time she looked really upset. “Oh, milord, I beg of you not to!”

“Why not?”

“Even the attempt would be disastrous. Do you believe that I know more about the hazards and dangers–and laws–of this world than you do? Will you believe me when I say that I would not have you
die, that in solemn truth my own life and safety depend on yours? Please!”

It is impossible not to believe Star when she lays it on the line. I said thoughtfully, “Maybe you’re right–or that character over there would be carrying a six-inch mortar as a side arm. Uh, Star, I’ve got a still better idea. Why don’t we high tail it back the way we came and homestead that spot where we caught the fish? In five years well have a nice little farm. In ten years, after the word gets around, we’ll have a nice little motel, too, with a free-form swimming pool and a putting green.”

She barely smiled. “Milord Oscar, there is no turning back.”

“Why not? I could find it with my eyes closed.”

“But they would find us. Not Igli but more like him would be sent to harry and kill us.”

I sighed again. “As you say. They claim motels off the main highway are a poor risk anyhow. There’s a attle-axe in that duffel. Maybe I can chop his feet off before he notices me.” She shook her head again. I said, “What’s the matter now? Do I have to fight him with one foot in a ucket? I thought anything that cut or stabbed–anything I did with my own muscles–was okay?”

“It is okay, milord. But it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Igli can’t be killed. You see, he is not really alive. He is a construct, made invulnerable for this one urpose. Swords or knives or even axes will not cut him; they bounce off. I have seen it.”

“You mean he is a robot?”

“Not if you are thinking of gears and wheels and printed circuits. ‘Golem’ would be closer. The Igli is an imitation of life.” Star added, “Better than life in some ways, since there is no way–none that I know of–to kill him. But worse, too, as Igli isn’t very bright nor well balanced. He has conceit without judgment. Rufo is working on that now, warming him up for you, getting him so mad he can’t think straight.”

“He is? Gosh! I must be sure to thank Rufo for that. Thank him too much. I think. Well, Princess, what m I supposed to do now?”

She spread her hands as if it were all self-evident. “When you are ready, I will loose the wards–and then you will kill him.”

“But you just said–” I stopped. When they abolished the French Foreign Legion very few cushy billets were left for us romantic types. Umbopa could have handled this. Conan, certainly. Or Hawk Carse. Or even Don Quixote, for that thing was about the size of a windmill. “All right. Princess, let’s get on with it. Is it okay for me to spit on my hands? Or is that cheating?”

She smiled without dimpling and said gravely, “Milord Oscar, we will all spit on our hands; Rufo and I will be fighting right beside you. Either we win . . . or we all die.”

We walked over and joined Rufo. He was making donkeys ears at Igli and shouting, “Who’s your father, Igli? Your mother was a garbage can but who’s your father? Look at him! No belly button!
Yaaa!”

Igli retorted, “Your mother barks! Your sister gives green stamps!”–but rather feebly, I thought. It was plain that that remark about belly buttons had cut him to the quick–he didn’t have one. Only reasonable, I suppose.

The above is not quite what either of them said, except the remark about the belly button. I wish I could put it in the original because, in the Nevian language, the insult is a high art at least equal to poetry. In fact the epitome of literary grace is to address your enemy (publicly) in some difficult verse form, say the sestina, with every word dripping vitriol.

Rufo cackled gleefully. “Make one, Igli! Push your finger in and make one. They left you out in the rain and you ran. They forgot to finish you. Call that thing a nose?” He said in an aside to me, in English, “How do you want him. Boss? Rare? Or well done?”

“Keep him busy while I study the matter. He doesn’t understand English?”

“Not a bit.”

“Good. How close can I go to him without getting grabbed?”

“Close as you like as long as the wards are up. But, Boss–look. I’m not supposed to advise you–but when we get down to work, don’t let him get you by the plums.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“You be careful.” Rufo turned his head and shouted, “Yaaa! Igli picks his nose and eats it!” He added, “She is a good doctor, the best, but just the same, you be careful.”

“I will.” I stepped closer to the invisible barrier, looked up at this creature. He glared down at me and made growling noises, so I thumbed my nose at him and gave him a wet, fruity Bronx cheer. I was downwind and it seemed likely that he hadn’t had a bath in thirty or forty years; he smelled worse than a locker room at the half.

It gave me a seed of an idea. “Star, can this cherub swim?”

She looked surprised. “I really don’t know.”

“Maybe they forgot to program him for it. How about you, Rufo?”

Rufo looked smug. “Try me, just try me. I could teach fish. Igli! Tell us why the sow wouldn’t kiss you!”

Star could swim like a seal. My style is more like a ferryboat but I get there. “Star, maybe that thing can’t be killed but it breathes. It’s got some sort of oxygen metabolism, even if it burns kerosene. If we held his head underwater for a while–as long as necessary–I’ll bet the fire would go out.”

She looked wide-eyed. “Milord Oscar . . . my champion . . . I was not mistaken in you.”

“It’s going to take some doing. Ever play water polo, Rufo?”

“I invented it.”

I hoped he had. I had played it–once. Like being ridden on a rail, it is an interesting experience–once. “Rufo, can you lure our chum down toward the bank? I take it that the barrier follows this line of furry and feathery friends? If it does, we can get him almost to that high piece of bank with the deep pool under it–you know, Star, where you dunked me the first time.”

“Nothing to it,” said Rufo. “We move, he’ll come along.”

“I d like to get him running. Star, how long does it take you to unswitch your fence?”

“I can loose the wards in an instant, milord.”

“Okay, here’s the plan. Rufo, I want you to get Igli to chasing you, as fast as possible–and you cut out and head for that high bank just before you reach the stream. Star, when Rufo does that, you chop off the barrier–loose the wards–instantly. Don’t wait for me to say so. Rufo, you dive in and swim like hell; don’t let him grab you. With any luck, if Igli is moving fast, as big and clumsy as he is he’ll go in, too, whether he means to or not. But I’ll be pacing you, flanking you and a bit behind you. If Igli manages to put on the brakes, I’ll hit him with a low tackle and knock him in. Then we all play water polo.”

“Water polo I have never seen,” Star said doubtfully.

“There won’t be any referee. All it means this time is that all three of us jump him, in the water, and shove his head under and keep it there–and help each other to keep him from shoving our heads under. Big as he is, unless he can outswim us he’ll be at a terrible disadvantage. We go on doing this until he is limp and stays limp, never let him get a breath. Then, to make sure, well weigh him down with stones–it won’t matter whether he’s really dead or not. Any questions?”

Rufo grinned like a gargoyle. “This is going to be fun!”

Both those pessimists seemed to think that it would work, so we got started. Rufo shouted an allegation about Igli’s personal habits that even Olympia Press would censor, then dared Igli to race him,
offering an obscene improbability as a wager.

It took Igli a lumbering long time to get that carcass moving but when he did get rolling, he was faster than Rufo and left a wake of panicked animals and birds behind him. I’m pretty fast but I was hard pushed to hold position on the giant, flanking and a few paces back, and I hoped that Star would not loose the wards if it appeared that Igli might catch Rufo on dry land.

However, Star did loose the wards just as Rufo cut away from the barrier, and Rufo reached the bank and made a perfect racing dive without slowing down, all to plan.

But nothing else was.

I think Igli was too stupid to twig at once that the barrier was down. He kept on a few paces after Rufo had gone left oblique, then did cut left rather sharply. But he had lost speed and he didn’t have any trouble stopping on dry land.

I hit him a diving tackle, illegal and low, and down he went–but not over into the water. And suddenly I had a double armful of struggling and very smelly Golem.

But I had a wildcat helping me at once, and quickly thereafter Rufo, dripping wet, added his vote.

But it was a stalemate and one that we were bound to lose in time. Igli outweighed all of us put together and seemed to be nothing but muscle and stink and nails and teeth. We were suffering bruises, contusions, and flesh wounds–and we weren’t doing Igli any damage, Oh, he screamed like a TV grunt & groaner every time one of us twisted an ear or bent back a finger, but we weren’t really hurting him and he was decidedly hurting us. There wasn’t a chance of dragging that hulk into the water.

I had started with my arms around his knees and I stayed that way, of necessity, as long as I could, while Star tried to weigh down one of his arms and Rufo the other. But the situation was fluid; Igli
thrashed like a rattler with its back broken and was forever getting one limb or another free and trying to gouge and bite. It got us into odd positions and I found myself hanging onto one callused foot, trying to twist it off, while I stared into his open mouth, wide as a bear trap and less appetizing. His teeth needed
cleaning.

So I shoved the toe of his foot into his mouth.

Igli screamed, so I kept on shoving, and pretty soon he didn’t have room to scream. I kept on pushing.

When he had swallowed his own left leg up to the knee, be managed to wrench his right arm loose from Star and grabbed at his disappearing leg–and I grabbed his wrist. “Help me!” I yelped to Star.

“Push!”

She got the idea and shoved with me. That arm went into his mouth to the elbow and the leg went farther in, quite a bit of the thigh. By, then Rufo was working with us and forced Igli’s left hand in past his cheek and into the jaws. Igli wasn’t struggling so hard by then, short on air probably, so getting the toe of his right foot started into his mouth simply required determination, with Rufo hauling back on his hairy nostrils while I bore down with a Knee on his chin and Star pushed.

We kept on feeding him into his mouth, gaining an inch at a time and never letting up. He was still quivering and trying to get loose when we had him rolled up clear to his hips, and his rank armpits about to disappear.

It was like rolling a snowball in reverse; the more we pushed, the smaller he got and the more his mouth stretched–ugliest sight I ever have seen. Soon he was down to the size of a medicine ball . . . and then a soccer ball . . . then a baseball and I rolled him between my palms and kept pushing, hard.

–a golf ball, a marble, a pea . . . and finally there was nothing but some dirty grease on my hands.

Rufo took a deep breath. “I guess that’ll teach him not to put his foot in his mouth with his betters. Who’s ready for breakfast?”

“I want to wash my hands first,” I said.

We all bathed, using plenty of soap, then Star took care of our wounds and had Rufo treat hers, under her instructions. Rufo is right; Star is the best medic. The stuff she used on us did not sting, the cuts closed up, the flexible dressings she put over them did not have to be changed, and fell off in time with no infection and no scars. Rufo had one very bad bite, about forty cents’ worth of hamburger out of his left buttock, but when Star was through with him, he could sit down and it didn’t seem to bother him.

Rufo fed us little golden pancakes and big German sausages, popping with fat, and gallons of good coffee. It was almost noon before Star loosed the wards again and we set out for our descent down the cliff.

Chapter 7

The descent beside the great waterfall into Nevia valley is a thousand feet and more than sheer; the cliff overhangs and you go down on a line, spinning slowly like a spider. I don’t advise this; it is dizzy-making and I almost lost those wonderful pancakes.

The view is stupendous. You see the waterfall from the side, free-springing, not wetting the cliff, and falling so far that it shrouds itself in mist before it hits bottom. Then as you turn you face frowning cliff, then a long look out over a valley too lush and green and beautiful to be believed–marsh and forest at the
foot of the cliff, cultivated fields in middle distance a few miles away, then far beyond and hazy at the base but sharp at the peaks a mighty wall of snow-covered mountains.

Star had sketched the valley for me. “First we fight our way through the marsh. After that it is easy going–we simply have to look sharp for blood kites. Because we come to a brick road, very nice.”

“A yellow brick road?” I asked.

“Yes. That’s the clay they have. Does it matter?”

“I guess not. Just don’t make a hobbit of it. Then what?”

“After that we’ll stop overnight with a family, the squire of the countryside there. Good people, you’ll enjoy them.”

“And then the going gets tough,” Rufo added.

“Rufo, don’t borrow trouble!” Star scolded. “You will please refrain from comments and allow Oscar to cope with his problems as he comes to them, rested, clear-eyed, and unworried. Do you know
anyone else who could have handled Igli?”

“Well, since you put it that way . . . no.”

“I do put it that way. We all sleep in comfort tonight. Isn’t that enough? You’ll enjoy it as much as anyone.”

“So will you.”

“When did I ever fail to enjoy anything? Hold your tongue. Now, Oscar, at the root of the cliff are the Horned Ghosts–no way to avoid them, they’ll see us coming down. With luck we won’t see any of the Cold Water Gang; they stay back in the mists. But if we have the bad luck to encounter both, we may have the good luck that they will fight each other and let us slip away. The path through the marsh is tricky; you had best study, this sketch until you know it. Solid footing is only where little yellow flowers
grow no matter how solid and dry a piece looks. But, as you can see, even if you stay carefully on the safe bits, there are so many side trails and dead ends that we could wander all day and be trapped by darkness–and never get out.”

So here I was, coming down first, because the Horned Ghosts would be waiting at the bottom. My privilege. Wasn’t I a “Hero”? Hadn’t I made Igli swallow himself?

But I wished that the Horned Ghosts really were ghosts. They were two-legged animals, omnivorous. They ate anything, including each other, and especially travelers. From the belly up they were described to me as much like the Minotaur; from there down they were splayfooted satyrs. Their upper limbs were short arms but without real hands–no thumbs.

But oh those horns! They had horns like Texas longhorns, but sticking up and forward.

However, there is one way of converting a Horned Ghost into a real ghost. It has a soft place on its skull, like a baby’s soft spot, between those horns. Since the brute charges head down, attempting to impale you, this is the only vulnerable spot that can be reached. All it takes is to stand your ground, don’t flinch, aim for that one little spot–and hit it.

So my task was simple. Go down first, kill as many as necessary to insure that Star would have a safe spot to land, then stand fast and protect her until Rufo was down. After that we were free to carve our way through the marsh to safety. If the Cold Water Gang didn’t join the party-

I tried to ease my position in the sling I was riding–my left leg had gone to sleep–and looked down. A hundred feet below the reception committee had gathered.

It looked like an asparagus patch. Of bayonets.

I signaled to stop lowering. Far above me, Rufo checked the line; I hung there, swaying, and tried to think. If I had them lower me straight into that mob, I might stick one or two before I myself was
impaled. Or maybe none–The only certainty was that I would be dead long before my friends could join me.

On the other hand, besides that soft spot between the horns, each of these geeks had a soft underbelly, just made for arrows. If Rufo would lower me a bit-

I signaled to him. I started slowly down, a bit jerkily, and he almost missed my signal to stop again. I had to pull up my feet; some of those babies were a-snorting and a-ramping around and shoving each other for a chance to gore me. One Nijinsky among them did manage to scrape the sole of my left buskin, giving me goose flesh clear to my chin.

Under that strong inducement I pulled myself hand over hand up the line far enough to let me get my feet into the sling instead of my fanny. I stood in it hanging onto the line and standing on one foot and then on the other to work pins and needles out. Then I unslung my bow and strung it. This feat would have been worthy of a trained acrobat–but have you ever tried to bend a bow and let fly while standing in a bight at one end of a thousand-foot line and clinging to the line with one hand?

You lose arrows that way. I lost three and almost lost me.

I tried buckling my belt around the line. That caused me to hang upside down and lost me my Robin Hood hat and more arrows. My audience liked that one; they applauded–I think it was applause–so, for an encore, I tried to shift the belt up around my chest to enable me to hang more or less straight down–and maybe get off an arrow or two.

I didn’t quite lose my sword.

So far, my only results had been to attract customers (“Mama, see the funny man!”) and to make myself swing back and forth like a pendulum.

Bad as the latter was, it did give me an idea. I started increasing that swing, pumping it up like a playground swing. This was slow wore and it took a while to get the hang of it, as the period of that
pendulum of which I was the weight was over a minute–and it does no good to try to hurry a pendulum; you have to work with it, not against it. I hoped my friends could see well enough to guess what I was doing and not foul it up.

After an unreasonably long time I was swinging back and forth in a flattish arc about a hundred feet fang, passing very fast over the heads of my audience at the bottom of each swing, slowing to a stop at the end of each swing. At first those spike heads tried to move with me, but they tired of that and squatted near the midpoint and watched, their heads moving as I swung, like spectators of a slow-motion tennis match.

But there is always some confounded innovator. My notion was to drop off at one end of this arc where it just missed the cuff and make a stand there with my back to the wall. The ground was higher there, I would not have so far to drop. But one of those horned horrors figured it out and trotted over to that end of the swing. He was followed by two or three more.

That settled it; I would nave to drop off at the other end. But young Archimedes figured that out, too. He left his buddies at the cliff face and trotted after me. I pulled ahead of him at the low point of the swing–but slowed down and he caught up with me long before I reached the dead point at the end. He had only a hundred feet to do in about thirty seconds–a slow walk. He was under me when I got there.

The odds wouldn’t improve; I kicked my feet clear, hung by one hand and drew sword during that too-slow traverse, and dropped off anyway. My notion was to spit that tender spot on his head before my feet touched the ground.

Instead, I missed and he missed and I knocked him sprawling and sprawled right after him and rolled to my feet and ran for the cuff face nearest me, poking that genius in his belly with my sword without stopping.

That foul blow saved me. His friends and relatives stopped to quarrel over who got the prime ribs before a clot of them moved in my direction. This gave me time to set my feet on a pile of scree at the base of the cliff, where I could play “King of the Castle,” and return my sword and nock an arrow.

I didn’t wait for them to rush me. I simply waited until they were close enough that I could not miss, took a bead on the wishbone of the old bull who was leading them, if he had a wishbone, and let that shaft go with every pound of that heavy bow.

It passed through him and stuck into one behind him.

This led to another quarrel over the price of chops. They ate them, teeth and toenails. That was their weakness: all appetite and too little brain. If they had cooperated, they could have had me in one rush when I first hit the ground. Instead they stopped for lunch.

I glanced up. High above me, Star was a tiny spider on a thread; she grew rapidly larger. I moved crabwise along the wall until I was opposite the point, forty feet from the cliff, where she would touch ground.

When she was about fifty feet up, she signaled Rufo to stop lowering, drew her sword and saluted me. “Magnificent, my Hero!” We were all wearing swords; Star had chosen a dueling sword with a 34″ blade–a big sword for a woman but Star is a big woman. She had also packed her belt pouch with medic’s supplies, an ominous touch had I noticed, but did not, at the time.

I drew and returned her salute. They were not bothering me yet, although some, having finished lunch or having been crowded out, were milling around and looking me over. Then I sheathed again, and nocked an arrow. “Start pumping it up. Star, right toward me. Have Rufo lower you a bit more.”

She returned sword and signaled Rufo. He let her down slowly until she was about nine feet off the ground, where she signaled a stop. “Now pump it up!” I called out. Those bloodthirsty natives had forgotten me; they were watching Star, those not still busy eating Cousin Abbie or Great-Uncle John.

“All right,” she answered. “But I have a throwing line. Can you catch it?”

“Oh!” The smart darling had watched my maneuvers and had figured out what would be needed. “Hold it a moment! Ill make a diversion.” I reached over my shoulder, counted arrows by touch–seven. I had started with twenty and made use of one; the rest were scattered, lost.

I used three in a hurry, right, left, and ahead, picking targets as far away as I dared risk, aiming at midpoint and depending on that wonderful bow to take those shafts straight and flat. Sure enough, the crowd went for fresh meat like a government handout. “Now!”

Ten seconds later I caught her in my arms and collected a split-second kiss for toll.

Ten minutes later Rufo was down by the same tactics, at a cost of three of my arrows and two of Star’s smaller ones. He had to lower himself, sitting in the bight and checking the free end of the line under both armpits; he would have been a sitting duck without help. As soon as he was untangled from the line, he started jerking it down off the cliff, and faking it into a coil.

“Leave that!” Star said sharply. “We haven’t time and it’s too heavy to carry.”

“I’ll put it in the pack.”

“No.”

“It’s a good line,” Rufo persisted. “We’ll need it.”

“You’ll need a shroud if we’re not through the marsh by nightfall.” Star turned to me. “How shall we arch, milord?”

I looked around. In front of us and to the left a few jokers still milled around, apparently hesitant about getting closer. To our right and above us the great cloud at the base of the Tails made iridescent lace in the sky. About three hundred yards in front of us was where we would enter the trees anjust beyond the marsh started.

We went downhill in a tight wedge, myself on point, Rufo and Star following on flank, all of us with arrows nocked. I had told them to draw swords if any Homed Ghost got within fifty feet.

None did. One idiot came straight toward us, alone, and Rufo knocked him over with an arrow at twice that distance. As we came up on the corpse Rufo drew his dagger. “Let it be!” said Star. She eemed edgy.

“I’m just going to get the nuggets and give them to Oscar.”

“And get us all killed. If Oscar wants nuggets, he shall have them.”

“What sort of nuggets?” I asked, without stopping.

“Gold, Boss. Those blighters have gizzards like a chicken. But gold is all they swallow for it. Old ones ield maybe twenty, thirty pounds.”

I whistled.

“Gold is common here,” Star explained. “There is a great heap of it at the base of the falls, inside the loud, washed down over eons. It causes fights between the Ghosts and the Cold Water Gang, ecause
the Ghosts have this odd appetite and sometimes risk entering the cloud to satisfy it.”

“I haven’t seen any of the Cold Water Gang yet,” I commented.

“Pray God you don’t,” Rufo answered.

“All the more reason to get deep into the marsh,” Star added. “The Gang doesn’t go into it and even the Ghosts don’t go far in. Despite their splay feet, they can be sucked under.”

“Anything dangerous in the swamp itself?”

“Plenty,” Rufo told me. “So be sure you step on the yellow flowers.”

“Watch where you put your own feet. If that map was right, I won’t lose us. What does a Cold Water Gangster look like?”

Rufo said thoughtfully, “Ever seen a man who had been drowned for a week?” I let the matter drop.

Before we got to the trees I had us sling bows and draw swords. Just inside the cover of trees, they jumped us. Horned Ghosts, I mean, not the Cold Water Gang. An ambush from all sides, I don’t know how many. Rufo killed four or five and Star at least two and I danced around, looking active and trying to survive.

We had to climb up and over bodies to move on, too many to count.

We kept on into the swamp, following the little golden pathfinder flowers and the twists and turns of the map in my head. In about half an hour we came to a clearing big as a double garage. Star said faintly, “This is far enough.” She had been holding one hand pressed to her side but bad not been willing to stop until then, although blood stained her tunic and all down the left leg of her tights.

She let Rufo attend her first, while I guarded the bottleneck into the clearing. I was relieved not to be asked to help, as, after we gently removed her tunic, I felt sick at seeing how badly she had been gored–and never a peep out of her. That golden body–hurt!

As a knight errant, I felt like a slob.

But she was chipper again, once Rufo had followed her instructions. She treated Rufo, then treated me–half a dozen wounds each but scratches compared with the rough one she had taken.

Once she had me patched up she said, “Milord Oscar, how long will it be until we are out of the marsh?”

I ran through it in my head. “Does the going get any worse?”

“Slightly better.”

“Not over an hour.”

“Good. Don’t put those filthy clothes back on. Rufo, unpack a bit and well have clean clothes and more arrows. Oscar, well need them for the blood kites, once we are out of the trees.”

The little black box filled most of the clearing before it was unfolded enough to let Rufo get out clothes and reach the arsenal. But clean clothes and lull quiver made me feel like a new man, especially after Rufo dug out a half liter of brandy and we split it three ways, gurglegurgle! Star replenished her medic’s pouch, then I helped Rufo fold up the luggage.

Maybe Rufo was giddy from brandy and no lunch. Or perhaps from loss of blood. It could have been just the bad luck of an unnoticed patch of slippery mud. He had the box in his arms, about to make the last closure that would fold it to knapsack size, when he slipped, recovered violently, and the box sailed out of his arms into a chocolate-brown pool.

It was far out of reach. I yelled, “Rufo, off with your belt!” I was reaching for the buckle of mine.

“No, no!” screamed Rufo. “Stand back! Get clear!”

A corner of the box was still in sight. With a safety line on me I knew I could get it, even if there was no bottom to the pool. I said so, angrily.

“No, Oscar!” Star said urgently. “He’s right. We march. Quickly.”

So we marched–me leading. Star breathing on my neck, Rufo crowding her heels.

We had gone a hundred yards when there was a mud volcano behind us. Not much noise, just a bass rumble and a slight earthquake, then some very dirty rain. Star quit hurrying and said pleasantly, “Well, that’s that.”

Rufo said, “And all the liquor was in it!”

“I don’t mind that,” Star answered. “Liquor is everywhere. But I had new clothes in there, pretty ones, Oscar. I wanted you to see them; I bought them with you in mind.”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about a flame-thrower and an M-1 and a couple of cases of ammo. And the liquor, of course.

“Did you hear me, milord?” she persisted. “I wanted to wear them for you.”

“Princess,” I answered, “you have your prettiest clothes right with you, always.”

I heard the happy chuckle that goes with her dimples. “I’m sure that you have often said that before. And no doubt with great success.”

We were out of the swamp long before dark and hit the brick road soon after. Blood kites are no problem. They are such murderous things that if you shoot an arrow in the direction of one of their dives, a kite will swerve and pluck it out of the air, getting the shaft right down its gullet. We usually recovered the arrows.

We were among plowed fields soon after we reached the road and soon the blood kites thinned out. Just at sundown we could see outbuildings and the lights in the manor where Star said that we would spend the night.

Chapter 8

Milord Doral ‘t Giuk Dorali should have been a Texan. I don’t mean that the Doral could have been mistaken for a Texan but he had that you-paid-for-the-lunch-I’ll-pay-for-the-Cadillacs xpansiveness.

His farmhouse was the size of a circus tent and as lavish as a Thanksgiving dinner–rich, sumptuous, fine carvings and inlaid jewels. Nevertheless it had a sloppy, lived-in look and if you didn’t watch where you put your feet, you would step on a child’s toy on a broad, sweeping staircase and wind up with a broken collarbone. There were children and dogs underfoot everywhere and the youngest of each weren’t housebroken. It didn’t worry the Doral. Nothing worried the Doral, he enjoyed life.

We had been passing through his fields for miles (rich as the best Iowa farmland and no winters; Star told me they produced four crops a year)–but it was late in the day and an occasional field hand was all we saw save for one wagon we met on the road. I thought that it was pulled by a team of two pairs of horses. I was mistaken; the team was but one pair and the animals were not horses, they had eight legs each.

All of Nevia valley is like that, the commonplace mixed with the wildly different. Humans were humans, dogs were dogs–but horses weren’t horses. Like Alice trying to cope with the Flamingo, every time I thought I had it licked, t would wiggle loose.

The man driving those equine centipedes stared but not because we were dressed oddly; he was dressed as I was. He was staring at Star, as who wouldn’t? The people working in fields had mostly been dressed in sort of a lava-lava. This garment, a simple wraparound tied off at the waist, is the equivalent in Nevia of overalls or blue jeans for both men and women; what we were wearing was equal to the Gray Flannel Suit or to a woman s basic black. Party or formal clothes–well, that’s another matter.

As we turned into the grounds of the manor we picked up a wake of children and dogs. One kid ran ahead and, when we reached the broad terrace in front of the main house, milord Doral himself came out the great front door. I didn’t pick him for lord of the manor; he was wearing one of those short sarongs, was barefooted and bareheaded. He had thick hair, shot with gray, an imposing beard, and looked like General U. S. Grant.

Star waved and called out, “Jock! Oh, Jocko!” (The name was “Giuk,” but I caught it as “Jock” and Jock he is.)

The Doral stared at us, then lumbered forward like a tank, “Ettyboo! Bless your beautiful blue eyes! Bless your bouncy little bottom! Why didn’t you let me know?” (I have to launder this because Nevian idioms don’t parallel ours. Try translating certain French idioms literally into English and you’ll see what I mean. The Doral was not being vulgar; he was being formally and gallantly polite to an old and highly respected friend.)

He grabbed Star in a hug, lifted her off her feet, kissed her on both cheeks and on the mouth, gnawed one ear, then set her down with an arm around her. “Games and celebrations! Three months of holiday! Races and rassling every day, orgies every night! Prizes for the strongest, the fairest, the wittiest–”

Star stopped him. “Milord Doral–”

“Eh? And a prize of all prizes for the first baby born–”

“Jocko darling! I love you dearly, but tomorrow we must ride. All we ask is a bone to gnaw and a corner to sleep in.”

“Nonsense! You can’t do this to me.”

“You know that I must.”

“Politics be damned! I’ll die at your feet, Sugar Pie. Poor old Jocko’s heart will stop. I feel an attack coming right now.” He felt around his chest. “Someplace here–”

She poked him in the belly. “You old fraud. You’ll die as you’ve lived, and not of heartbreak. Milord Doral–”

“Yes, milady?”

“I bring you a Hero.”

He blinked. “You’re not talking about Rufo? Hi, Rufe, you old polecat! Heard any good ones lately? Get back to the kitchen and pick yourself a lively one.”

“Thank you, milord Doral.” Rufo “made a leg,” bowing deeply, and left us.

Star said firmly, “If the Doral please.”

“I hear.”

Star untangled his arm, stood straight and tall and started to chant:

“By the Singing Laughing Waters

“Came a Hero Fair and Fearless.

“Oscar hight this noble warrior,

“Wise and Strong and never daunted,

“Trapped the Igli with a question,

“Caught him out with paradoxes,

“Shut the Igli’s mouth with Igli.

“Fed him to him, feet and fingers!

“Nevermore the Singing Waters . . .

It went on and on, none of it lies yet none of it quite true–colored like a press agent’s handout. For example, Star told him that I had killed twenty-seven Horned Ghosts, one with my bare hands. I don’t remember that many and as for “bare hands,” that was an accident. I had just stabbed one of those vermin as another one tumbled at my feet, shoved from behind. I didn’t have time to get my sword clear, so I set a foot on one horn and pulled hard on the other with my left hand and his head came apart like snapping a wishbone. But I had done it from desperation, not choice.

Star even ad-libbed a long excursus about my father’s heroism and alleged that my grandaddy had led the chaise at San Juan Hill and then started in on my great-grandfathers. But when she told him how I had picked up that scar that runs from left eye to right jaw, she pulled out all the stops.

Now look, Star had quizzed me the first time I met her and she had encouraged me to tell her more during that long hike the day before. But I did not give her most of the guff she was handing the Doral. She must have had the Surete, the FBI, the Archie Goodwin on me for months. She even named the team we had played against when I busted my nose and I never told her that.

I stood there blushing while the Doral looked me up and down with whistles and snorts of appreciation. When Star ended, with a simple: “Thus it happened,” he let out a long sigh and said, “Could we have that part about Igli over again?”

Star complied, chanting different words and more detail. The Doral listened, frowning and nodding approval. “A heroic solution,” he said. “So he’s a mathematician, too. Where did he study?”

“A natural genius, Jock.”

“It figures.” He stepped up to me, looked me in the eye and put his hands on my shoulders. “The Hero who confounds Igli may choose any house. But he will honor my home by accepting hospitality of roof . . . and table . . . and bed?”

He spoke with great earnestness, holding my eye; I had no chance to look at Star for a hint. And I wanted a hint. The person who says smugly that good manners are the same everywhere and people are just people hasn’t been farther out of Podunk than the next whistle stop. I’m no sophisticate but I had been around enough to learn that. It was a formal speech, stuffed with protocol, and called for a formal answer.

I did the best I could. I put my hands on his shoulders and answered solemnly, “I am honored far beyond any merit of mine, sir.”

“But you accept?” he said anxiously.

“I accept with all my heart.” (“Heart” is close enough. I was having trouble with language.)

He seemed to sigh with relief. “Glorious!” He grabbed me in a bear hug, kissed me on both cheeks, and only some fast dodging kept me from being kissed on the mouth.

Then he straightened up and shouted, “Wine! Beer! Schnapps! Who the dadratted tomfoolery is supposed to be chasing? I’ll skin somebody alive with a rusty file! Chairs! Service for a Hero! Where is everybody?”

That last was uncalled for; while Star was reciting what a great guy I am, some eighteen or fifty people had gathered on the terrace, pushing and shoving and trying to get a better look. Among them must have been the personnel with the day’s duty because a mug of ale was shoved into my hand and a four-ounce
glass of 110-proof firewater into the other before the boss stopped yelling. Jocko drank boilermaker style, so I followed suit, then was happy to sit down on a chair that was already behind me, with my teeth loosened, my scalp lifted, and the beer just starting to put out the fire.

Other people plied me with bits of cheese, cold meats, pickled this and that, and unidentified drinking food all tasty, not waiting for me to accept it but shoving it into my mouth if I opened it even to say “Gesundheit!” I ate as offered and soon it blotted up the hydrofluoric acid.

In the meantime the Doral was presenting his household to me. It would have been better had they worn chevrons because I never did get them straightened out as to rank. Clothes didn’t help because, just as the squire was dressed like a field hand, the second scullery maid might (and sometimes did) duck back in and load herself with golden ornaments and her best party dress. Nor were they presented in order of rank.

I barely twigged as to which was the lady of the manor, Jocko’s wife–his senior wife. She was a very comely older woman, a brunette carrying a few pounds extra but with that dividend most fetchingly distributed. She was dressed as casually as Jocko out, fortunately, I noticed her because she went at nce to greet Star and they embraced warmly, two old friends. So I had my ears spread when she was presented to me a moment later–as (and I caught it) the Doral (just as Jocko was the Doral) but with the feminine ending.

I jumped to my feet, grabbed her hand, bowed over it and pressed it to my lips. This isn’t even faintly a Nevian custom but it brought cheers and Mrs. Doral blushed and looked pleased and Jocko grinned proudly.

She was the only one I stood up for. Each of the men and boys made a leg to me, with a bow; all the gals from six to sixty curtsied–not as we know it, but Nevian style. It looted more like a step of the Twist. Balance on one foot and lean back as far as possible, then balance on the other while leaning forward, all the while undulating slowly. This doesn’t sound graceful but it is, and it proved that there was not a case of arthritis nor a slipped disk anywhere on the Doral spread.

Jocko hardly ever bothered with names. The females were “Sweetheart” and “Honeylamb” and “Pretty Puss” and he called all the males, even those who seemed to be older than he was, “Son.”

Possibly most of them were his sons. The setup in Nevia I don’t fully understand. This looked like a feudalism out of our own history–and maybe it was–but whether this mob was the Doral’s slaves, his serfs, his hired hands, or all members of one big family I never got straight. A mixture, I think. Titles didn’t mean anything. The only title Jocko held was that he was singled out by a grammatical inflection as being THE Doral instead of just any of a couple of hundred Dorals. I’ve scattered the tag “milord” here and there in this memoir because Star and Rufo used it, but it was simply a courteous form of address paralleling one in Nevian. “Freiherr” does not mean “free man, and “monsieur” does not mean “my lord”–these things don’t translate well. Star sprinkled her speech with “milords” because she was much too polite to say “Hey, Mac!” even with her intimates.

(The very politest endearments in Nevian would win you a clout in the teeth in the USA.)

Once all hands had been presented to the Gordon, Hero First Class, we adjourned to get ready for the banquet that Jocko, cheated of his three months of revelry, had swapped for his first intention. It Split me off from Star as well as from Rufo; I was escorted to my chambers by my two valettes.

That’s what I said. Female. Plural. It is a good thing that I had become relaxed to female attendants in men’s washrooms, European style, and still more relaxed by Southeast Asia and l’Ile du Levant; they don’t teach you how to cope with valettes in American public schools. Especially when they are young
and cute and terribly anxious to please . . . and I had had a long, dangerous day. I learned, first time out on patrol, that nothing hikes up that old biological urge like being shot at and living through it.

It there had been only one, I might have been late to dinner. As it was, they chaperoned each other, though not intentionally, I believe. I patted the redhead on her fanny when the other one wasn’t looking and reached, I thought, an understanding for a later time.

Well, having your back scrubbed is fun, too. Shorn, shampooed, shined, shaved, showered, smelling like a belligerent rose, decked out in the fanciest finely since Cecil B. deMille rewrote the Bible, I was delivered by them to the banquet hall on time.

But the proconsul’s dress uniform I wore was a suit of fatigues compared with Star’s getup. She had
lost all her pretty clothes earlier in the day but our hostess had been able to dig up something.

First a dress that covered Star from chin to ankle–like plate glass. It seemed to be blue smoke, it clung to her and billowed out behind. Underneath was “underwear.” She appeared to be wrapped in twining ivy–but this ivy was gold, picked out in sapphires. It curved across her beautiful belly, divided into strands and cupped her breasts, the coverage being about like a bikini minimum but more startling and much more effective.

Her shoes were sandals in an S-curve of something transparent and springy. Nothing appeared to hold them on, no straps, no clips; her lovely feet, bare, rested on them. It made her appear as if she were on tiptoe about four inches off the floor.

Her great mane of blond hair was built up into a structure as complex as a full-rigged ship, and studded with sapphires. She was wearing a fortune or two of sapphires here and there on her body, too; I won’t itemize.

She spotted me just as I caught sight of her. Her face lit up and she called out, in English, “My Hero, you are beautiful!”

I said “Uh–”

Then I added, “You haven’t been wasting your time, either. Do I sit with you? I’ll need coaching.”

“No, no! You sit with the gentlemen, I sit with the ladies. You won’t have any trouble.”

This is not a bad way to arrange a banquet. We each had separate low tables, the men in a row facing the ladies, with about fifteen feet between them. It wasn’t necessary to make chitchat with the ladies and they all were worth looking at. The Lady Doral was opposite me and was giving Star a run for the Golden Apple. Her costume was opaque some places but not the usual places. Most of it was diamonds. I believe they were diamonds; I don’t think they make rhinestones that big.

About twenty were seated; two or three times that many were serving, entertaining, or milling around. Three girls did nothing but see to it that I did not starve nor die of thirst–I didn’t have to learn how to use their table tools; I never touched them. The girls knelt by me; I sat on a big cushion. Later in the evening Jocko lay flat on his back with his head in a lap so that his maids could pop food into his mouth or hold a cup to his lips.

Jocko had three maids as I did; Star and Mrs. Jocko had two each; the rest struggled along with one apiece. These serving maids illustrate why I had trouble telling the players without a program. My hostess and my Princess were dressed fit to kill, sure–but one of my flunkies, a sixteen-year-old strong contender for Miss Nevia, was dressed only in jewelry but so much of it that she was more “modestly” dressed than Star or Doral Letva, the Lady Doral.

Nor did they act like servants except for their impassioned determination to see that I got drunk and stuffed. They chattered among themselves in teen-age argot and me wisecracks about how big my muscles were, etc., as if I had not been present. Apparently heroes are not expected to talk, for every time I opened my mouth something went into it.

There was always something doing–dancers, jugglers, recitations of poetry–in the space between the tables. Kids wandered around and grabbed tidbits from platters before they reached the tables. One little doll about three years old squatted down in front of me, all big eyes and open mouth, and stared, letting dancers avoid her as best they could. I tried to get her to come to me, but she just stared and played with her toes.

A damsel with a dulcimer strolled among the tables, singing and playing. It could have been a dulcimer, she might have been a damsel.

About two hours along in the feast, Jocko stood up, roared for silence, belched loudly, shook off maids who were trying to steady him, and started to recite.

Same verse, different tune–he was reciting my exploits. I would have thought that he was too drunk to recite a limerick but he sounded off endlessly, in perfect scansion with complex inner rhymes and rippling alliterations, an astounding feat of virtuosity in rhetoric.

He stuck to Star’s story line but embroidered it. I listened with growing admiration, both for him as a poet and for good old Scar Gordon, the one-man army. I decided that I must be a purty goddam hot hero, so when he sat down, I stood up.

The girls had been more successful in getting me drunk than in getting me fed. Most of the food was strange and it was usually tasty. But a cold dish had been fetched in, little frog-like creatures in ice, served whole. You dipped them in a sauce and took them in two bites.

The gal in the jewels grabbed one, dipped it and put it up for me to bite. And it woke up.

This little fellow–call him “Elmer”–Elmer rolled his eyes and looked at me, just as I was about to bite him.

I suddenly wasn’t hungry and jerked my head back.

Miss jewelry Shop laughed heartily, dipped him again, and showed me how to do it. No more Elmer-

I didn’t eat for quite a while and drank more than too much. Every ime a bite was offered me I would see Elmers feet disappearing, and gulp, and have another drink.

That’s why I stood up.

Once up, there was dead silence. The music stopped because the musicians were waiting to see what o improvise as background to my poem.

I suddenly realized that I didn’t have anything to say.

Not anything. There wasn’t a prayer that I could adlib a poem of thanks, a graceful compliment to my

host–m Nevian. Hell, I couldn’t have done it in English.

Star’s eyes were on me. She looked gravely confident.

That did it. I didn’t risk Nevian; I couldn’t even remember how to ask my way to the men’s room. So I ave it to ’em, both barrels, in English. Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo.”

As much of it as I could remember, say about four pages. What I did give them was that compelling rhythm and rhyme scheme double-talking and faking on any fluffs and really slamming it on “beating on a table with the handle of a broom! Boom! Boom! Boomlay boom!” and the orchestra caught the spirit and we rattled the dishes.

The applause was wonderful and Miss Tiffany grabbed my ankle and kissed it.

So I gave them Mr. E. A. Foe’s “Bells” for dessert. Jocko kissed me on my left eye and slobbered on my shoulder.

Then Star stood up and explained, in scansion and rhyme, that in my own land, in my own language, among my own people, warriors and artists all, I was as famous a poet as I was a hero (Which was true. Zero equals zero), and that I had done them the honor of composing my greatest work, in the jewels of my native tongue, a fitting thanks to the Doral and house Doral for Hospitality of roof, of table, of bed–and that she would, in time, do her poor best to render my music into their language.

Between us we got the Oscar.

Then they brought in the piece de resistance, a carcass roasted whole and carried by four men. From the size and shape it might have been roast peasant under glass. But it was dead and it smelled wonderful and I ate a lot of it and sobered up. After the roast there were only eight or nine other things, soups and sherbets and similar shilly-shallying. The party got looser and people didn’t stay at their own tables. One of my girls fell asleep and spilled my wine cup and about then I realized that most of the crowd had gone.

Doral Letva, flanked by two girls, led me to my chambers and put me to bed. They dimmed the lights and withdrew while I was still trying to phrase a gallant good night in their language.

They came back, having shucked all jewelry and other encumbrances and posed at my bedside, the Three Graces. I had decided that the younger ones were mama’s daughters. The older girl was maybe eighteen, full ripe, and a picture of what mama must have been at that age; the younger one seemed five years younger, barely nubile, as pretty for her own age and quite self-conscious. She blushed and dropped her eyes when I looked at her. But her sister stared back with sultry eyes, boldly provocative.

Their mother, an arm around each waist, explained simply but in rhyme that I had honored their roof and their table–and now their bed. What was a Hero’s pleasure? One? Or two? Or all three?

I’m chicken. We know that. If it hadn’t been that little sister was about the size of the little brown sisters who had scared me in the past, maybe I could have shown aplomb.

But, hell, those doors didn’t close. Just arches. And Jocko me bucko might wake up anytime; I didn’t know where he was. I won’t say I’ve never bedded a married woman nor a man’s daughter in his own house–but I’ve followed American cover-up conventions in such matters. This flat-footed proposition scared me worse than the Horned Goats. I mean “Ghosts.”

I struggled to put my decision in poetic language.

I didn’t manage it but I put over the idea of negative,

The little girl started to bawl and fled. Her sister looked daggers, snorted. “Hero!” and went after her. Mama just looked at me and left.

She came back in about two minutes. She spoke very formally, obviously exercising great control, and prayed to know if any woman in this house had met with the Hero’s favor? Her name, please? Or could I describe her? Or would I have them paraded so that I might point her out?

I did my best to explain that, were a choice to be made, she herself would be my choice–but that I was tired and wished to sleep alone.

Letva blinked back tears, wished me a hero’s rest, and left a second time, even faster. For an instant I thought she was going to slap me.

Five seconds later I got up and tried to catch her. But she was gone, the gallery was dark.

I fell asleep and dreamt about the Cold Water Gang. They were even uglier than Rufo had suggested and they were trying to make me eat big gold nuggets all with the eyes of Elmer.

Chapter 9

Rufo shook me awake. “Boss! Get up! Right now!”

I buried my head in the covers. “Go way!” My mouth tasted of spoiled cabbage, my head buzzed, and my ears were on crooked.

“Right now! She says to.”

I got up. Rufo was dressed in our Merry Men clothes and wearing sword, so I dressed the same way and buckled on mine. My valettes were not in sight, nor my borrowed finery. I stumbled after Rufo into the great dining hall. There was Star, dressed to travel, and looking grim. The fancy furnishings of the night before were gone; it was as bleak as an abandoned barn. A bare table was all, and on it a joint of meat, cold in congealed grease and a knife beside it.

I looked at it without relish. “What’s that?”

“Your breakfast, if you want it. But I shall not stay under this roof and eat cold shoulder.” It was a tone, a manner, I had never heard from her.

Rufo touched my sleeve. “Boss. Let’s get out of here. Now.”

So we did. Not a soul was in sight, indoors or out, not even children or dogs. But three dashing steeds were waiting. Those eight-legged tandem ponies, I mean, the horse version of a dachshund, saddled and ready to go. The saddle rigs were complex; each pair of legs had a leather yoke over it and the load was distributed by poles flexing laterally, one on each side, and mounted on this was a chair with a back, a padded seat, and arm rests. A tiller rope ran to each armrest.

A lever on the left was both brake and accelerator and I hate to say how suggestions were conveyed to the beast. However, the “horses” didn’t seem to mind.

They weren’t horses. Their heads were slightly equine but they had pads rather than hoofs and were omnivores, not hayburners. But you grow to like these beasties. Mine was black with white
points–beautiful. I named her “Ars Longa.” She had soulful eyes.

Rufo lashed my bow and quiver to a baggage rack behind my chair and showed me how to get aboard, adjust my seat belt, and get comfortable with feet on foot rests rather than stirrups and my back supported–as comfy as first-class seats in an airliner. We took off fast and hit a steady pace of ten miles an hour, single-footing (the only gait longhorses have) but smoothed by that eight-point suspension so that it was like a car on a gravel road.

Star rode ahead, she hadn’t spoken another word. I tried to speak to her but Rufo touched my arm. “Boss, don’t,” he said quietly. “When She is like this, all you can do is wait.”

Once we were underway, Rufo and I knee to knee and Star out of earshot ahead, I said “Rufo, what in the world happened?”

He frowned. “We’ll never know. She and the Doral had a row, that’s clear. But best we pretend it never happened.”

He shut up and so did I. Had Jocko been obnoxious to Star? Drunk he certainly was and amorous he might have been. But I couldn’t visualize Star not being able to handle a man so as to avoid rape without hurting his feelings.

That led to further grim thoughts. If the older sister had come in alone–If Miss Tiffany hadn’t passed out–If my valette with the fiery hair had showed up to undress me as I had understood she would–Oh hell!

Presently Rufo eased his seat belt, lowered his back rest and raised his foot rests to reclining position, covered his face with a kerchief and started to snore. After a while I did the same; it had been a short night, no breakfast, and I had a king-size hangover. My “horse” didn’t need any help; the two held position on Star’s mount.

When I woke I felt better, aside from hunger and thirst. Rufo was still sleeping; Star’s steed was still fifty paces ahead. The countryside was still lush, and ahead perhaps a half-mile was a house–not a lordly manor out a farmhouse. I could see a well sweep and thought of moss-covered buckets, cool and wet and reeking of typhoid–well, I had had my booster shots in Heidelberg; I wanted a drink. Water, I mean. Better yet, beer–they made fine beer hereabouts.

Rufo yawned, put away his kerchief, and raised his seat. “Must have dozed off,” he said with a silly grin.

“Rufo, you see that house?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Lunch, that’s what. I’ve gone far enough on an empty stomach. And I’m so thirsty that I could squeeze a stone and drink the whey from it.”

“Then best you do so.”

“Huh?”

“Milord, I’m sorry–I’m thirsty, too–but we aren’t stopping there. She wouldn’t like it.”

“She wouldn’t, eh? Rufo, let me set you straight. Just because milady Star is in a pet is no reason for me to ride all day with no food or water. You do as you see fit; I’m stopping for lunch. Uh, do you have any money on you? Local money?”

He shook his head. “You don’t do it that way, not here. Boss. Wait another hour. Please.”

“Why?”

“Because we are still on the Doral’s land, that’s why. I don’t know that he has sent word ahead to have us shot on sight; Jock is a goodhearted old blackguard. But I would rather be wearing full armor; a flight of arrows wouldn’t surprise me. Or a drop net just as we turned in among those trees.”

“You really think so?”

“Depends on how angry he is. I mind once, when a man really offended him, the Doral had this poor rube stripped down and tied by his family jewels and placed–no, I can’t tell that one.” Rufo gulped and looked sick. “Big night last night. I’m not myself. Better we speak of pleasant things. You mentioned squeezing whey from a rock. No doubt you were thinking of the Strong Muldoon?”

“Damn it, don’t change the subject!” My head was throbbing. “I won’t ride under those trees and the man who lets fly a shaft at me had better check his own skin for punctures. I’m thirsty.”

“Boss, Rufo pleaded. “She will neither eat nor drink on the Doral’s land–even if they begged her to. And She’s right. You don’t know the customs. Here one accepts what is freely given . . . but even a child is too proud to touch anything begrudged. Five miles more. Can’t the hero who killed Igli before breakfast hold out another five miles?”

“Well . . . all right, all right! But this is a crazy sort of country, you must admit. Utterly insane.” “Mmmm . . .” he answered. “Have you ever been in Washington, D.C.?” “Well–” I grinned wryly. “Touche! And I forgot that this is your native land. No offense intended.”

“Oh, but it’s not. What made you think so?”

“Why–” I tried to think. Neither Rufo nor Star had said so, but–“You know the customs, you speak the language like a native.”
“Milord Oscar, I’ve forgotten how many languages I speak. When I hear one of them, I speak it.”

“Well, you’re not an American. Nor a Frenchman, I think.”

He grinned merrily. “I could show you birth certificates from both countries–or could until we lost our baggage. But, no, I’m not from Earth.”

“Then where are you from?”

Rufo hesitated. “Best you get your facts from Her.”

“Tripe! I’ve got both feet hobbled and a sack over my head. This is ridiculous.”

“Boss,” he said earnestly, “She will answer any question you ask. But you must ask them.”

“I certainly shall!”

“So let’s speak of other matters. You mentioned the Strong Muldoon–”

“You mentioned him.”

“Well, perhaps I did. I never met Muldoon myself, though I’ve been in that part of Ireland. A fine country and the only really logical people on Earth. Facts won’t sway them in the face of higher truth. An admirable people. I heard of Muldoon from one of my uncles, a truthful man who for many years was a ghostwriter of political speeches. But at this time, due to a mischance while writing speeches for rival candidates, he was enjoying a vacation as a free-lance correspondent for an American syndicate specializing in Sunday feature stories. He heard of the Strong Muldoon and tracked him down, taking train from Dublin, then a local bus, and at last Shank’s Mares. He encountered a man plowing a field with a one-horse plow . . . but this man was shoving the plow ahead of himself without benefit of horse, turning a neat eight-inch furrow. ‘Aha!’ said my uncle and called out, ‘Mr. Muldoon!’

“The farmer stopped and called back, ‘Bless you for the mistake, friend!’–picked up the plow in one hand, pointed with it and said, ‘You’ll be finding Muldoon that way. Strong, he is.’

“So my uncle thanked him and went on until he found another man setting out fence posts by shoving them into the ground with his bare hand . . . and in stony soil, it’s true. So again my uncle hailed him as Muldoon.

“The man was so startled he dropped the ten or dozen six-inch posts he had tucked under the other arm. ‘Get along with your blarney, now!’ he called back. You must know that Muldoon lives farther on down this very same road. He’s strong.’

“The next local my uncle saw was building a stone fence. Dry-stone work it was and very neat. This man was trimming the rock without hammer or trowel, splitting them with the edge of his hand and doing the fine trim by pinching off bits with his fingers. So again my uncle addressed a man by that glorious name.

“The man started to speak but his throat was dry from all that stone dust; his voice failed him. So he grabbed up a large rock, squeezed it the way you squeezed Igli–forced water out of it as if it had been a goatskin, drank. Then he said, ‘Not me, my friend. He’s strong, as everyone knows. Why, many is the time that I have seen him insert his little finger–‘ ”

My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.

“You were saying?” I asked.

“Eh? ‘–just to the first joint . . . and hold himself at arm’s length for hours!”

“Rufo,” I said, “I don’t believe it could have been more than a few minutes. Strain on the tissues, and so forth.”

“Boss,” he answered in a hurt tone, “I could take you to the very spot where the Mighty Dugan used to perform this stunt.”

“You said his name was Muldoon.”

“He was a Dugan on his mother’s side, very proud of her he was. You’ll be pleased to know, milord, that the boundary of the Doral’s land is now in sight. Lunch in minutes only.”

“I can use it. With a gallon of anything, even water.”

“Passed by acclamation. Truthfully, milord, I’m not at my best today. I need food and drink and a long siesta before the fighting starts, or I’ll yawn when I should parry. Too large a night.”

“I didn’t see you at the banquet.”

“I was there in spirit. In the kitchen the food is hotter, the choice is better, and the company less formal. But I had no intention of making a night of it. Early to bed is my motto. Moderation in all things. Epictetus. But the pastry cook–Well, she reminds me of another girl I once knew, my partner in a legitimate business, smuggling. But her motto was that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing–and she did. She smuggled on top of smuggling, a sideline of her own unmentioned to me and not taken into account–for I was listing every item with the customs officers, a copy with the bribe, so that they would know I was honest.

“But a girl can’t walk through the gates fat as a stuffed goose and walk back through them twenty minutes later skinny as the figure one–not that she was, just a manner of speaking–without causing
thoughtful glances. If it hadn’t been for the strange thing the dog did in the night, the busies would have nabbed us.”

“What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?”

“Just what I was doing last night. The noise woke us and we were out over the roof and free, but with nothing to show for six months’ hard work but skinned knees. But that pastry cook–You saw her, milord. Brown hair, blue eyes, a widow’s peak and the rest remarkably like Sophia Loren.”

“I have a vague memory of someone like that.”

“Then you didn’t see her, there is nothing vague about Nalia. As may be, I had intended to lead the life sanitary last night, knowing that there would be bloodshed today. You know:

‘Once at night and outen the light;

‘Once in the morning, a new day a-borning’

“–as the Scholar advised. But I hadn’t reckoned with Nalia. So here I am with no sleep and no breakfast and if I’m dead before nightfall in a pool of my own blood, it’ll be partly Nalia’s doing.”

“I’ll shave your corpse, Rufo; that’s a promise.” We had passed the marker into the next county but Star didn’t slow down. “Bye the bye, where did you learn the undertakers trade?”

“The what? Oh! That was a far place indeed. The top of that rise, behind those trees, is a house and that’s where we’ll be having lunch. Nice people.”

“Good!” The thought of lunch was a bright spot as I was again regretting my Boy Scout behavior of the night before. “Rufo, you had it all wrong about the strange thing the dog did in the night.”

“Milord?”

“The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing.”

“Well, it certainly didn’t sound that way,” Rufo said doubtfully.

“Another dog, another far place. Sorry. What I started to say was: A funny thing happened to me on the way to bed last night–and I did lead the life sanitary.”

“Indeed, milord?”

“In deed, if not in thought.” I needed to tell somebody and Rufo was the sort of scoundrel I could trust. I told him the Story of the Three Bares.

“I should have risked it,” I concluded. “And, swelp me, I would have, if that lad had been put to bed–alone–when she should have been. Or I think I would have, regardless of White Shotgun or
jumping out windows. Rufo, why do the prettiest gals always have fathers or husbands? But I tell you the truth, there they were–the Big Bare, the Middle-Sized Bare, and the Littlest Bare, close enough to touch and all of them anxious to keep my bed warm–and I didn’t do a damn thing! Go ahead and laugh. I deserve it.”

He didn’t laugh. I turned to look at him and his expression was piteous. “Milord! Oscar my comrade! Tell me it isn’t true!”

“It is true,” I said huffily. “And I regretted it at once. Too late. And you complained about your night!”

“Oh, my Cod!” He threw his mount into high gear and took off. Ars Longa looked back inquiringly over her shoulder, then continued on.

Rufo caught up with Star; they stopped, short of the house where lunch was to be expected. They waited and I joined them. Star was wearing no expression; Rufo looked unbearably embarrassed.

Star said, “Rufo, go beg lunch for us. Fetch it here. I would speak with milord alone.”

“Yes, milady!” He got out fast.

Star said to me, still with no expression, “Milord Hero, is this true? What your groom reports to me?”

“I don’t know what he reported.”

“It concerned your failure–your alleged failure–last night.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘failure.’ If you want to know what I did after the banquet . . . I slept alone. Period.”

She sighed but her expression did not change. “I wanted to hear it from your lips. To be just.” Then her expression did change and I have never seen such anger. In a low almost passionless voice she began chewing me out:

“You hero. You incredible butter-brained dolt. Clumsy, bumbling, loutish, pimple-peeked, underdone, over-muscled, idiotic–”

“Stop it!”

“Quiet, I am not finished with you. Insulting three innocent ladies offending a staunch–”

“SHUT UP!!!”

The blast blew her hair back. I started in before she could rev up again. “Don’t ever again speak to me that way. Star. Never.”

“But–”

“Hold your tongue, you bad-tempered brat! You have not earned the right to speak to me that way. Nor will any girl ever earn the right. You will always–always!–address me politely and with respect. One more word of your nasty rudeness and I’ll spank you until the tears fly.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Get your hand away from that sword or I’ll take it away from you, down your pants right here on the road, and spank you with it. Till your arse is red and you beg for mercy. Star, I do not fight females–but I do punish naughty children. Ladies I treat as ladies. Spoiled brats I treat as spoiled brats. Star, you could be the Queen of England and the Galactic Overlord all rolled into one–but ONE MORE WORD out of line from you, and down come your tights and you won’t be able to sit for a week. Understand e?”

At last she said in a small voice, “I understand, milord.”

“And besides that. I’m resigning from the hero business. I won’t listen to such talk twice, I won’t work for a person who treats me that way even once.” I sighed, realizing that I had just lost my corporal’s stripes again. But I always felt easier and freer without them.

“Yes, milord.” I could barely hear her. It occurred to me that it was a long way back to Nice. But it didn’t worry me.

“All right, let’s forget it.”

“Yes, milord.” She added quietly, “But may I explain why I spoke as I did?”

“No.”

“Yes, milord.”

A long silent time later Rufo returned. He stopped out of earshot, I motioned him to join us.

We ate silently and I didn’t eat much but the beer was good. Rufo tried once to make chitchat with an impossibility about another of his uncles. It couldn’t have fallen flatter inBoston .

After lunch Star turned her mount–those “horses” have a small turning circle for their wheelbase but t’s easier to bring them full circle in a tight place by leading them. Rufo said, “Milady?”

She said impassively, “I am returning to the Doral.”

“Milady! Please not!”

“Dear Rufo,” she said warmly but sadly. “You can wait up at that house–and if I’m not back in three days, you are free.” She looked at me, looked away. “I hope that milord Oscar will see fit to escort me. But I do not ask it. I have not the right.” She started off.

I was slow in getting Ars Longa turned; I didn’t have the hang of it. Star was a good many bricks down the road; I started after her.

Rufo waited until I was turned, biting his nails, then suddenly climbed aboard and caught up with me. We rode knee to knee, a careful fifty paces behind Star, Finally he said, “This is suicide. You know that, don’t you?”

“No, I didn’t know it.”

“Well, it is.”

I said, “Is that why you are not bothering to say ‘sir’?”

“Milord?” He laughed shortly and said, “I guess it is. No point in that nonsense when you are going to die soon.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“Huh?”

” ‘Huh, milord,’ if you please. Just for practice. But from now on, even if we last only thirty minutes. Because I am running the show now–and not just as her stooge. I don’t want any doubt in your mind as to who is boss once the fighting starts. Otherwise turn around and I’ll give your mount a slap on the rump to get you moving. Hear me?”

“Yes, milord Oscar.” He added thoughtfully, “I knew you were boss as soon as I got back. But I don’t see how you did it. Milord, I have never seen Her meek before. May one ask?”

“One may not. But you have my permission to ask her. If you think it is safe. Now tell me about this ‘suicide’ matter–and don’t say she doesn’t want you to give me advice. From here on you’ll give advice any time I ask–and keep your lip buttoned if I don’t.”

“Yes, milord. All right, the suicide prospects. No way to figure the odds. It depends on how angry the Doral is. But it won’t be a fight, can’t be. Either we get clobbered the instant we poke our noses in . . . or we are safe until we leave his land again, even if he tells us to turn around and ride away.” Rufo looked very thoughtful. “Milord, if you want a blind guess–Well, I figure you’ve insulted the Doral the worst he has ever been hurt in the course of a long and touchy life. So it’s about ninety to ten that, two shakes after we turn off the road, we are all going to be sprouting more arrows than Saint Sebastian.”

“Star, too? She hasn’t done anything. Nor have you.” (Nor I, either, I added to myself. What a country!)

Rufo sighed. “Milord, each world has its own ways. Jock won’t want to hurt Her. He likes Her. He’s terribly fond of Her. You could say that he loves Her. But if he kills you, he has got to loll Her. Anything else would be inhumane by his standards–and he’s a very moral bloke; he’s noted for it. And kill me, too, of course, but I don’t count. He must kill Her even though it will start a chain of events that will wipe him out just as dead once the news gets out. The question is: Does he have to kill you? I figure be has to, knowing these people. Sorry . . . milord.”

I mulled it over. “Then why are you here, Rufo?”

“Milord?”

“You can cut the ‘sirs’ down to one an hour. Why are you here? If your estimate is correct, your one word and one bow can’t affect the outcome. She gave you a fair chance to chicken out. So what is it? Pride? Or are you in love with her?”

“Oh, my God, no!”

Again I saw Rufo really shocked. “Excuse me,” he went on. “You caught me with my guard down.” He thought about it. “Two reasons, I suppose. The first is that if Jock allows us to parley–well. She is quite a talker. In the second place”–he glanced at me–“I’m superstitious, I admit it. You’re a man with luck. I’ve seen it. So I want to be close to you even when reason tells me to run. You could fall in a cesspool and–”

“Nonsense. You should hear my hard-luck story.”

“Maybe in the past. But I’m betting the dice as they roll.” He shut up.

A bit later I said, “You stay here.” I speeded up and joined Star. “Here are the plans,” I told her.

“When we get there, you stay out on the road with Rufo. I’m going in alone.”

She gasped. “Oh, milord! No!”

“Yes.”

“But–”

“Star, do you want me back? As your champion?”

“With all my heart!”

“All right. Then do it my way.”

She waited before answering. “Oscar–”

“Yes, Star.”

“I will do as you say. But will you let me explain before you decide what you will say?”

“Go on.”

“In this world, the place for a lady to ride is by her champion. And that is where I would want to be, my Hero, when in peril. Especially when in peril. But I’m not pleading for sentiment, nor for empty form. Knowing what I now know I can prophesy with certainty that, if you go in first, you will die at once, and I will die–and Rufo–as soon as they can chase us down. That will be quickly, our mounts are tired. On the other hand, if I go in alone–”

“No.”

“Please, milord. I was not proposing, it. If I were to go in alone, I would be almost as likely to die at once as you would be. Or perhaps, instead of feeding me to the pigs, be would simply have me feed the pigs and be a plaything of the pig boys–a fate merciful rather than cold justice in view of my utter degradation in returning without you. But the Doral is fond of me and I think he might let me live . . . as a pig girl and no better than pigs. This I would risk if necessary and wait my chance to escape, for I cannot
afford pride; I have no pride, only necessity.” Her voice was husky with tears.

“Star, Star!”

“My darling!”

“Huh? You said–”

“May I say it? We may not have much time. My Hero . . . my darling.” She reached out blindly, I took her hand; she leaned toward me and pressed it to her breast.

Then she straightened up but kept my hand. “I’m all right now. I am a woman when I least expect it. No, my darling Hero, there is only one way for us to go in and that is side by side, proudly. It is not only safest, it is the only way I would wish it–could I afford pride. I can afford anything else. I could buy you theEiffelTower for a trinket, and replace it when you broke it. But not pride.”

“Why is it safest?”

“Because he may–I say ‘may’–let us parley. If I can get in ten words, he’ll grant a hundred. Then a thousand. I may be able to heal his hurt.”

“All right. But–Star, what did I do to hurt him? I didn’t! I went to a lot of trouble not to hurt him.”

She was silent a while, then–“You are an American.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Jock doesn’t know it.”

“It has, perhaps, everything to do with it. No, America is at most a name to the Doral for, although he has studied the Universes, he has never traveled. But–You will not be angry with me again?”

“Uh . . . let’s call a King’s-X on that. Say anything you need to say but explain things. Just don’t chew me out. Oh, hell, chew me out if you like–this once. Just don’t let it be a habit . . . my darling.”

She squeezed my hand. “Never will I again! The error lay in my not realizing that you are American. I don’t know America , not the way Rufo does. If Rufo had been present–But he wasn’t; he was wenching in the kitchen. I suppose I assumed, when you were offered table and root and bed, that you would behave as a Frenchman would. I never dreamed that you would refuse it. Had I known, I could have spun a thousand excuses for you. An oath taken. A holy day in your religion. Jock would have been disappointed but not hurt; he is a man of honor.”

“But–Damn it, I still don’t see why he wants to shoot me for not doing something I would expect, back home, that he might snoot me for doing. In this country, is a plan forced to accept any proposition a gal makes? And why did she run and complain? Why didn’t she keep it secret? Hell, she didn’t even try. She dragged in her daughters.”

“But, darling, it was never a secret. He asked you publicly and publicly you accepted. How would you feel if your bride, on your wedding night, kicked you out of the bedroom? ‘Table, and roof, and bed.’ You accepted.”

” ‘Bed.’ Star, inAmerica beds are multiple-purpose furniture. Sometimes we sleep in them. Just sleep. I didn’t dig it.”

“I know now. You didn’t know the idiom. My fault. But do you now see why he was completely–and publicly–humiliated?”

“Well, yes, but he brought it on himself. He asked me in public. It would have been worse if I had said No then.”

“Not at all. You didn’t have to accept. You could have refused graciously. Perhaps the most graceful way, even though it be a white lie, is for the hero to protest his tragic inability–temporary or permanent–from wounds received in the very battle that proved him a hero.”

“I’ll remember that. But I still don’t see why he was so astoundingly generous in the first place.”

She turned and looked at me. “My darling, is it all right for me to say that you have astounded me every time I have talked with you? And I had thought I had passed beyond all surprises, years ago.”

“It’s mutual. You always astound me. However, I like it–except one time.”

“My lord Hero, how often do you think a simple country squire has a chance to gain for his family a Hero’s son, and raise it as his own? Can you not feel his gall-bitter disappointment at what you snatched from him after he thought you had promised this boon? His shame? His wrath?”

I considered it. “Well, I’ll be dogged. It happens inAmerica , too. But they don’t boast about it.”

“Other countries, other customs. At the very least, he had thought that he had the honor of a hero treating him as a brother. And with luck he expected the get of a hero for house Doral.”

“Wait a minute! Is that why he sent me three? To improve the odds?”

“Oscar, he would eagerly have sent you thirty . . . if you had hinted that you felt heroic enough to attempt it. As it was, he sent his chief wife and his two favorite daughters.” She hesitated. “What I still don’t understand–” She stopped and asked me a blunt question.

“Hell, no!” I protested, blushing. “Not since I was fifteen. But one thing that put me off was that mere child. She’s one. I think.”

Star shrugged. “She may be. But she is not a child; in Nevia she is a woman. And even if she is unbroached as yet, I’ll wager she’s a mother in another twelvemonth. But if you were loath to tap her, why didn’t you shoo her out and take her older sister? That quaint hasn’t been virgin since she’s had breasts, to my certain knowledge–and I hear that Muri is ‘some dish,’ if that is the American idiom.”

I muttered. I had been thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to discuss it with Star.

She said, “Pardonne-moi, mon cher? Tu as dit?”

“I said I had given up sex crimes for Lent!”

She looked puzzled. “But Lent is over, even on Earth. And it is not, here, at all.”

“Sorry.”

“Still I’m pleased that you didn’t pick Muri over Letva; Muri would have been unbearably stuck-up with her mother after such a thing. But I do understand that you will repair this, if I can straighten it out?” She added, “It makes great difference in how I handle the diplomacies.”

(Star, Star–you are the one I want to bed!) “This is what you wish . . . my darling?”

“Oh, how much it would help!”

“Okay. You’re the doctor. One . . . three . . . thirty–I’ll die trying. But no little kids!” “No problem.

Let me think. If the Doral lets me get in just five words–” She fell silent. Her hand was pleasantly warm. I did some thinking, too. These strange customs had ramifications, some of which I had still shied away from. How was it, if Letva had immediately told her husband what a slob I was-

“Star? Where did you sleep last night?”

She looked around sharply. “Milord . . . is it permitted to ask you, please, to mind your own business?”

“I suppose so. But everybody seems to be minding mine.”

“I am sorry. But I am very much worried and my heaviest worries you do not know as yet. It was a fair question and deserves a fair answer. Hospitality balances, always, and honors flow both ways. I slept in the Doral’s bed. However, if it matters–and it may to you; I still do not understand Americans–I was wounded yesterday, it still bothered me. Jock is a sweet and gentle soul. We slept. Just slept.”

I tried to make it nonchalant. “Sorry about the wound. Does it hurt now?”

“Not at all. The dressing will fall off by tomorrow. However–Last night was not the first time I enjoyed table and roof and bed at house Doral. Jock and I are old friends, beloved friends–which is why I think I can risk that he may grant me a few seconds before killing me.”

“Well, I had figured out most of that.”

“Oscar, by your standards–the way you have been raised–I am a bitch.”

“Oh, never! A princess.”

“A bitch. But I am not of your country and I was reared by another code. By my standards, and they seem good to me, I am a moral woman. Now . . . am I still your darling’?”

“My darling!”

“My darling Hero. My champion. Lean close and kiss me. If we die, I would my mouth be warm with your lips. The entrance is just around this bend.”

“I know.”

A few moments later we rode, swords sheathed and bows unstrung, proudly into the target area.

Chapter 10

Three days later we rode out again.

This time breakfast was sumptuous. This time musicians lined our exit. This time the Doral rode with us.

This time Rufo reeled to his mount, each arm around a wench, a bottle in each hand, then, after busses from a dozen more, was lifted into his seat and belted in the reclining position. He fell asleep, snoring before we set out.

I was kissed good-bye more times than I could count and by some who had no reason to do it so thoroughly–for I was only an apprentice hero, still learning the trade.

It’s not a bad trade, despite long hours, occupational hazards, and utter lack of security; it has fringe benefits, with many openings and rapid advancement for a man with push and willingness to learn. The Doral seemed well pleased with me.

At breakfast he had sung my prowess up to date in a thousand intricate lines. But I was sober and did not let his praises impress me with my own greatness; I knew better. Obviously a little bird had reported to him regularly–but that bird was a liar. John Henry the Steel-Drivin’ Man couldn’t have done what Jocko’s ode said I did.

But I took it with my heroic features noble and impassive, then I stood up and gave them “Casey at the Bat,” putting heart and soul into “Mighty Casey has struck OUT!”

Star gave it a free interpretation. I had (so she sang) praised the ladies of Doral, the ideas being ones associated with Madame Pompadour, Nell Gwyn, Theodora, Ninon de l’Enclos, and Rangy Lil. She didn’t name those famous ladies; instead she was specific, in Nevian eulogy that would have startled Francois Villon.

So I had to come up with an encore. I gave them “Relic’s daughter,” then “Jabberwocky,” with gestures.

Star had interpreted me in spirit; she had said what I would have said had I been capable of extemporizing poetry. Late on the second day I had chanced on Star in the steam room of the manor’s baths. For an hour we lay wrapped in sheets on adjacent slabs, sweating it out and restoring the tissues. Presently I blurted out to her how surprised–and delighted–I was. I did it sheepishly but Star was one to whom I dared bare my soul.

She had listened gravely. When I ran down, she said quietly, “My Hero, as you know, I do not know America. But from what Rufo tells me your culture is unique, among all the Universes.”

“Well, I realize that the USA is not sophisticated in such things, not the way France is.”

” ‘France!’ ” She shrugged, beautifully. ” ‘Latins are lousy lovers.’ I heard that somewhere, I testify that it is true. Oscar, so far as I know, your culture is the only semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art and given the serious study it deserves.”

“You mean the way they treat it here. Whew! ‘Much too good for the common people!’ ”

“No, I do not mean the way it is treated here.” She spoke in English. “Much as I love our friends here, this is a barbarous culture and their arts are barbaric. Oh, good art of its sort, very good; their approach is honest. But–if we live through this, after our troubles are over–I want you to travel among the Universes. You’ll see what I mean.” She got up, folding her sheet into a toga. I’m glad you are pleased, my Hero. I’m proud of you.”

I lay there a while longer, thinking about what she had said. The “highest art”–and back home we didn’t even study it, much less make any attempt to teach it. Ballet takes years and years. Nor do they hire you to sing at the Met just because you have a loud voice.

Why should “love” be classed as an “instinct”?

Certainly the appetite for sex is an instinct–but did another appetite make every glutton a gourmet, every fry cook a Cordon Bleu? Hell, you had to learn even to be a fry cook.

I walked out of the steam room whistling “The Best Things in Life Are Free”–then chopped it off in sudden sorrow for all my poor, unhappy compatriots cheated of their birthright by the most mammoth hoax in history.

A mile out the Doral bade us good-bye, embracing me, kissing Star and mussing her hair; then he and his escort drew swords and remained at salute until we passed over the next rise. Star and I rode knee to knee while Rufo snored behind us.

I looked at her and her mouth twitched. She caught my eye and said demurely, “Good morning, milord.”

“Good morning, milady. You slept well?”

“Very well, thank you, milord. And you?”

“The same, thank you.”

“So? ‘What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?’ ”

” ‘The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing,’ ” I answered with a straight face. “Really? So gay a dog? Then who was that knight I last saw with a lady?” ”

‘Twasn’t night, ’twas brillig.”

“And your vorpal blade went snicker-snack! My beamish boy!”

“Don’t try to pin your jabberwocking on me, you frolicsome wench,” I said severely. “I’ve got friends, I have–I can prove an alibi. Besides, ‘my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’ ”

“And the line before that one. Yes, I know; your friends told me about it, milord.” Suddenly she grinned and slapped me on the thigh and started bellowing the chorus of “Reilly’s Daughter.” Vita Brevis norted; Ars Longa pricked up her ears and looked around reprovingly.

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re shocking the horses.”

“They aren’t horses and you can’t shock them. Have you seen how they do it, milord? In spite of all those legs? First–”

“Hold your tongue! Ars Longa is a lady, even if you aren’t.”

“I warned you I was a bitch. First she sidles up–”

“I’ve seen it. Muri thought it would amuse me. Instead it gave me an inferiority complex that lasted all afternoon.”

“I venture to disbelieve that it was all afternoon, milord Hero. Let’s sing about Reilly then. You lead, I’ll harmonize.”

“Well–Not too loud, we’ll wake Rufo.”

“Not him, he’s embalmed.”

“Then you’ll wake me, which is worse. Star darling, when and where was Rufo an undertaker? And ow did he get from that into this business? Did they run him out of town?”

She looked puzzled. “Undertaker? Rufo? Not Rufo.”

“He was most circumstantial.”

“So? Milord, Rufo has many faults. But telling the truth is not one of them. Moreover, our people do ot have undertakers.”

“You don’t? Then what do you do with leftover carcasses? Can’t leave them cluttering the parlor. Untidy.”

“I think so, too, but our people do just that: keep them in the parlor. For a few years at least. An overly sentimental custom but we are a sentimental people. Even so, it can be overdone. One of my great aunts kept all her former husbands in her bedchamber–a dreadful clutter and boring, too, because she talked about them, repeating herself and exaggerating. I quit going to see her.”

“Well. Did she dust them?”

“Oh, yes. She was a fussy housekeeper.”

“Uh–How many were there?”

“Seven or eight, I never counted.”

“I see. Star? Is there black-widow blood in your family?”

“What? Oh! But, darling, there is black-widow blood in every woman.” She dimpled, reached over and patted my knee. “But Auntie didn’t kill them. Believe me, my Hero, the women in my family are much too fond of men to waste them. No, Auntie just hated to let them go. I think that is foolish. Look forward, not back.”

” ‘And let the dead past bury its dead.’ Look, if your people keep dead homes around the house, you must have undertakers. Embalmers at least. Or doesn’t the air get thick?”

“Embalming? Oh, no! Just place a stasis on them once you’re sure they are dead. Or dying. Any schoolboy can do that.” She added, “Perhaps I wronged Rufo. He has spent much time on your
Earth–he likes the place, it fascinates him–and he may have tried undertaking. But it seems to me an occupation too honest and straightforward to attract him.”

“You never did tell me what your people eventually do with a cadaver.”

“Not bury it. That would shock them silly.” Star shivered. “Even myself and I’ve traveled the

Universes, learned to be indifferent to almost any custom.”

“But what?”

“Much what you did to Igli. Apply a geometrical option and get rid of it.”

“Oh. Star, where did Igli go?”

“I couldn’t guess, milord. I had no chance to calculate it. Perhaps the ones who made him know. But I hink they were even more taken by surprise than I was.”

“I guess I’m dense. Star. You call it geometry; Jocko referred to me as a ‘mathematician.’ But I did what was forced on me by circumstances; I didn’t understand it.”

“Forced on Igli, you should say, milord Hero. What happens when you place an insupportable strain on a mass, such that it cannot remain where it is? While leaving it nowhere to go? This is a schoolboy problem in metaphysical geometry and the eldest proto-paradox, the one about the irresistible force and the immovable body. The mass implodes. It is squeezed out of its own world into some other. This is often the way the people of a universe discover the Universes–but usually as disastrously as you forced it on Igli; it may take millennia before they control it. It may hover around the fringes as ‘magic’ for a long time, sometimes working, sometimes failing, sometimes backfiring on the magician.”

“And you call this ‘mathematics’?”

“How else?”

“I’d call it magic.”

“Yes, surely. As I told Jocko, you have a natural genius. You could be a great warlock.”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t believe in magic.”

“Nor do I,” she answered, “the way you put it. I believe in what is.”

“That’s what I mean, Star. I don’t believe in hocus-pocus. What happened to Igli–I mean, ‘what ppeared to happen to Igli’–could not have happened because it would violate the law of conservation of mass-energy. There must be some other explanation.”

She was politely silent.

So I brought to bear the sturdy common sense of ignorance and prejudice. “Look, Star, I’m not going to believe the impossible simply because I was there. A natural law is a natural law. You have to admit that.”

We rode a few rods before she answered, “May it please milord Hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be.

Either way, it is what it is. Le voila! Behold it, self-demonstrating. Das Ding an sich. Bite it. It is. Ai-je raison? Do I speak truly?”

“That’s what I was saying! The universe is what it is and can’t be changed by jiggery-pokery. It works by exact rules, like a machine.” (I hesitated, remembering a car we had had that was a hypochondriac. It would “fall sick,” then “get well” as soon as a mechanic tried to touch it.) I went on firmly, “Natural law
never takes a holiday. The invariability of natural law is the cornerstone of science.”

“So it is.”

“Well?” I demanded.

“So much the worse for science.”

“But–” I shut up and rode in huffy silence.

Presently a slender hand touched my forearm, caressed it. “Such a strong sword arm,” she said softly.

“Milord Hero, may I explain?”

“Talk ahead,” I said. “If you can sell me, you can convert the Pope to Mormonism. I’m stubborn.”

“Would I have picked you out of hundreds of billions to be my champion were you not?”

” ‘Hundreds of billions?’ You mean millions, don’t you?”

“Hear me, milord. Indulge me. Let us be Socratic. I’ll frame the trick questions and you make the tupid answers–and we’ll learn who shaved the barber. Then it will be your turn and I’ll be the silly stooge. Okay?”

“All right, put a nickel in.”

“Very well. Question: Are the customs at house Doral the customs you used at home?”

“What? You know they aren’t. I’ve never been so flabbergasted since the time the preacher’s daughter took me up into the steeple to show me the Holy Ghost.” I chuckled sheepishly. “I’d be blushing yet but I’ve burned out my fuses.”

“Yet the basic difference between Nevian customs and yours lies in only one postulate. Milord, there axe worlds in which males kill females as soon as eggs are laid–and others in which females eat males even as they are being fructified–like that black widow you made cousin to me.”

“I didn’t mean that, Star.”

“I was not offended, my love. An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey; I have none. Oscar, would you find such worlds stranger than this one?”

“You’re talking about spiders or some such. Not people.”

“I speak of people, the dominant race of each its world. Highly civilized.”

“Ugh!”

“You will not say ‘ugh’ when you see them. They are so different from us that their home life cannot atter to us. Contrariwise, this planet is very like your Earth–yet your customs would shock old Jocko out of song. Darling, your world has a custom unique in the Universes. That is, the Twenty Universes known to me, out of thousands or millions or googols of universes. In the known Twenty Universes only Earth has this astounding custom.”

“Do you mean “War”?”

“Oh, no! Most worlds have warfare. This planet Nevia is one of the few where lolling is retail, rather than wholesale. Here there be Heroes, killing is done with passion. This is a world of love and slaughter, both with gay abandon. No, I mean something much more shocking. Can you guess?”

“Uh . . . television commercials?”

“Close in spirit, but wide of the mark. You have an expression ‘the oldest profession.’ Here–and in all ther known worlds–it isn’t even the youngest. Nobody has heard of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. We few who visit Earth don’t talk about it. Not that it would matter; most people don’t believe travelers’ tales.”

“Star, are you telling me that there is no prostitution elsewhere in the Universe?”

“The Universes, my darling. None.”

“You know,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s going to be a shock to my first sergeant. None at all?”

“I mean,” she said bluntly, “that whoring seems to have been invented by Earth people and no thers–and the idea would shock old Jocko into impotence. He’s a straitlaced moralist.”

“I’ll be damned! We must be a bunch of slobs.”

“I did not mean to offend, Oscar; I was reciting facts. But this oddity of Earth is not odd in its own context. Any commodity is certain to be sold–bought, sold, leased, rented, bartered, traded, discounted, price-stabilized, inflated, bootlegged, and legislated–and a woman’s ‘commodity’ as it was called on Earth in franker days is no exception. The only wonder is the wild notion of thinking of it as a commodity. Why, it so surprised me that once I even–Never mind. Anything can be made a commodity. Someday I
will show you cultures living in spaces, not on planets–nor on fundaments of any sort; not all universes have planets–cultures where the breath of life is sold like a kilo of butter in Provence. Other places so crowded that the privilege of staying alive is subject to tax–and delinquents are killed out of hand by the
Department of Eternal Revenue and neighbors not only do not interfere, they are pleased.”

“Good God! Why?”

“They solved death, milord, and most of them won’t emigrate despite endless roomier planets. But we were speaking of Earth. Not only is whoring unknown elsewhere, but its permutations are
unknown–dower, bridal price, alimony, separate maintenance, all the variations that color all Earth’s institutions–every custom related even remotely to the incredible notion that what all women have an endless supply of is nevertheless merchandise, to be hoarded and auctioned.”

Ars Longa gave a snort of disgust. No, I don’t think she understood. She understands some Nevian but Star spoke English; Nevian lacks the vocabulary.

“Even your secondary customs,” she went on, “are shaped by this unique institution. Clothing–you’ve noticed that there is no real difference here in how the two sexes dress. I’m in tights this morning and you are in shorts but had it been the other way around no one would have noticed.”

“The hell they wouldn’t! Your tights wouldn’t fit me.”

“They stretch. And body shyness, which is an aspect of sex-specialized clothing. Here nakedness is as unnoteworthy as on that pretty little island where I found you. All hairless peoples sometimes wear clothing and all peoples no matter how hirsute wear ornaments–but nakedness taboo is found only where flesh is merchandise to be packaged or displayed . . . that is to say, on Earth. It parallels ‘Don’t pinch the grapefruit’ and putting false bottoms in berry boxes. If something is never haggled over, there is no need to make a mystery of it.”

“So if we get rid of clothes we get rid of prostitution?”

“Heavens, no! You’ve got it backwards.” She frowned. “I don’t see how Earth could ever get rid of whoring; it’s too much a part of everything you do.”

“Star, you’ve got your facts wrong. There is almost no prostitution in America.”

She looked startled. “Really? But–Isn’t ‘alimony’ an American word? And ‘gold digger’? And ‘coming-out party’?”

“Yes, but prostitution has almost died out. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to go about finding a whorehouse even in an Army town. I’m not saying that you don’t wind up in the nay. But it’s not commercialized. Star, even with an American girl who is well-known to be an easy make-out, if you offered her five bucks–or twenty–it’s ten to one she would slap your face.”

“Then how is it done?”

“You’re nice to her instead. Take her to dinner, maybe to a show. Buy her flowers, girls are suckers for flowers. Then approach the subject politely.”

“Oscar, doesn’t this dinner and show, and possibly flowers, cost more than five dollars? Or even twenty? I understood that American prices were as high as French prices.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t just tip your hat and expect a girl to throw herself on her back. A tightwad–”

“I rest the case. All I was trying to show was that customs can be wildly different in different worlds.”

“That’s true, even on Earth. But–”

“Please, milord. I won’t argue the virtue of American women, nor was I criticizing. Had I been reared in America I think I would want at least an emerald bracelet rather than dinner and a show. But I was leading up to the subject of ‘natural law.’ Is not the invariability of natural” law an unproved assumption? Even on Earth?”

“Well–You haven’t stated it fairly. It’s an assumption, I suppose. But there has never been a case in which it failed to stand up.”

“No black swans? Could it not be that an observer who saw an exception preferred not to believe his eyes? Just as you do not want to believe that Igli ate himself even though you, my Hero, forced him to?

Never mind. Let’s leave Socrates to his Xanthippe. Natural law may be invariable throughout a universe–seems to be, in rigid universes. But it is certain that natural laws vary from universe to
universe–and believe this you must, milord, else neither of us will live long!”

I considered it. Damn it, where had Igli gone? “Most unsettling.”

“No more unsettling, once you get used to it, than shifting languages and customs as you shift countries.

How many chemical elements are there on Earth?”

“Uh, ninety-two and a bunch of Johnny-Come-Latelies. A hundred and six or seven.”

“Much the same here. Nevertheless a chemist from Earth would suffer some shocks. The elements aren’t quite the same, nor do they behave quite the same way. H-bombs won’t work here and dynamite won’t explode.”

I said sharply, “Now wait! Are you telling me that electrons and protons aren’t the same here, to get down to basics?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. What is an electron but a mathematical concept? Have you tasted one lately? Or put salt on the tail of a wavicle? Does it matter?”

“It damn well would matter. A man can starve as dead from lack of trace elements as from lack of bread.”

“True. In some universes we humans must carry food if we visit them–which we sometimes must, if only to change trains. But here, and in each of the universes and countless planets where we humans live, you need not worry; local food will nourish you. Of course, if you lived here many years, then went back to Earth and died soon after and an autopsy were done with fussiest microanalysis, the analyst might not believe his results. But your stomach wouldn’t care.”

I thought about this, my belly stuffed with wonderful food and the air around me sweet and good–certainly my body did not care if there were indeed the differences Star spoke of.

Then I recalled one aspect of life in which little differences cause big differences. I asked Star about it.

She looked blandly innocent. “Do you care, milord? You will be long gone before it matters to Doral. I thought your purpose these three days was simply to help me in my problem? With pleasure in your work, I realize–you threw yourself into the spirit of the occasion.”

“Damn it, quit pulling my leg! I did it to help you. But a man can’t help wondering.”

She slapped my thigh and laughed. “Oh, my very darling! Stop wondering; human races throughout the Universes can crossbreed. Some crosses fruit but seldom and some mule out. But this is not one of them. You will live on here, even if you never return. You’re not sterile; that was one of many things I checked
when I examined your beautiful body in Nice. One is never sure how the dice will roll, but–I think the Doral will not be disappointed.”

She leaned toward me. “Would you give your physician data more accurate than that which Jocko sang? I might offer a statistical probability. Or even a Sight.”

“No, I would not! Nosy.”

“It is a long nose, isn’t it? As you wish, milord. In a less personal vein the fact of crossbreeding among humans of different universes–and some animals such as dogs and cats–is a most interesting question. The only certainty is that human beings flourish only in those universes having chemistries so similar that
elements that make up deoxyribonucleic acids are so alike as not to matter. As for the rest, every scholar has his theory. Some hold to a teleologic explanation, asserting that Man evolves alike in all essential particulars in every universe that can support him because of Divine Plan–or through blind necessity, depending on whether the scholar takes his religion straight or chases it with soda.

“Some think that we evolved just once–or were created, as may be–and leaked across into other universes. Then they fight over which universe was the home of the race.”

“How can there be any argument?” I objected. “Earth has fossil evidence covering the evolution of man. Other planets either have it or not, and that should settle it.”

“Are you sure, milord? I thought that, on Earth, man’s family tree has as many dotted lines as there are bastards in European royal lines.”

I shut up. I had simply read some popular books. Perhaps she was right; a race that could not agree as to who did what to whom in a war only twenty years back probably didn’t know what Alley Oop did to the upstairs maid a million years ago, when the evidence was only scattered bones. Hadn’t there been hoaxes? The Piltdown Man, or some such?

Star went on, “Whatever the truth, there are leakages between worlds. On your own planet disappearances run to hundreds of thousands and not all are absconders or wife-deserters; see any
police department’s files. One usual place is the battlefield. The strain becomes too great and a man slides through a hole he didn’t know was there and winds up ‘missing in action.’ Sometimes–not often–a man is seen to disappear. One of your American writers, Bierce or Pierce, got interested and collected such cases. He collected so many that he was collected, too. And your Earth experiences reverse leakage, the ‘Kaspar Hausers,’ persons from nowhere, speaking no known language and never able to account for themselves.”

“Wait a minute? Why just people?”

“I didn’t say ‘just people.’ Have you never heard of rains of frogs? Of stones? Of blood? Who questions a stray cat’s origin? Are all flying saucers optical illusions? I promise you they are not; some are poor lost astronauts trying to find their way home. My people use space travel very little, as faster-than-light is the readiest way to lose yourself among the Universes. We prefer the safer method of metaphysical geometries–or ‘magic’ in the vulgar speech.”

Star looked thoughtful. “Milord, your Earth may be the home of mankind. Some scholars think so.”

“Why?”

“It touches so many other worlds. It’s the top of the list as a transfer point. If its people render it unfit for life–unlikely, but possible–it will disrupt traffic of a dozen universes. Earth has had its fairy rings, and Gates, and Bifrost Bridges for ages; that one we used in Nice was there before the Romans came.”

“Star, how can you talk about points on Earth ‘touching’ other planets–for centuries on end? The Earth moves around the Sun at twenty miles a second or such, and spins on its axis, not to mention other motions that add up to an involved curve at unthinkable speed. So how can it ‘touch’ other worlds?”

Again we rode in silence. At last Star said, “My Hero, how long did it take you to learn calculus?”

“Why, I haven’t learned it. I’ve studied it a couple of years.”

“Can you tell me how a particle can be a wave?”

“What? Star, that’s quantum mechanics, not calculus. I could give an explanation but it wouldn’t mean anything; I don’t have the math. An engineer doesn’t need it.”

“It would be simplest,” she said diffidently, “to answer your question by saying ‘magic’ just as you answered mine with ‘quantum mechanics.’ But you don’t like that word, so all I can say is that after you study higher geometries, metaphysical and conjectural as well as topological and judicial–if you care to
make such study–I will gladly answer. But you won’t need to ask.”

(Ever been told: “Wait till you grow up, dear; then you will understand”? As a kid I didn’t like it from grownups; I liked it still less from a girl I was in love with when I was fully grown.)

Star didn’t let me sulk; she shifted the talk. “Some crossbreedings are from neither accidental slippages nor planned travel. You’ve heard of incubi and succubi?”

“Oh, sure. But I never bother my head with myths.”

“Not myths, darling, no matter how often the legend has been used to explain embarrassing situations. Witches and warlocks are not always saints and some acquire a taste for rape. A person who has learned to open Gates can indulge such vice; he–or she–can sneak up on a sleeping person–maid, chaste wife, virgin boy–work his will and be long gone before cockcrow.” She shuddered.

“Sin at its nastiest. If we catch them, we kill them. I’ve caught a few, I killed them. Sin at its worst, even if the victim learns to like it.” She shuddered again.

“Star, what is your definition of ‘sin’?”

“Can there be more than one? Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.”

“How about ‘sinning against God’?” I persisted.

She looked at me sharply. “So again we shave the barber? First, milord, tell me what you mean by

‘God.’ ”

“I just wanted to see if you would walk into it.”

“I haven’t walked into that one in a mort of years. I’d as lief thrust with a bent wrist, or walk a pentacle in clothes. Speaking of pentacles, my Hero, our destination is not what it was three days ago. Now we go to a Gate I had not expected to use. More dangerous but it can’t be helped.”

“My fault! I’m sorry, Star.”

“My fault, milord. But not all loss. When we lost our luggage I was more worried than I dared show–even though I was never easy about carrying firearms through a world where they may not be
used. But our foldbox carried much more than firearms, things we are vulnerable without. The time you spent in soothing the hurt to the Doral’s ladies I spent–in part–in wheedling the Doral for a new kit, almost everything heart could wish but firearms. Not all loss.”

“We are going to another world now?”

“Not later than tomorrow dawn, if we live.”

“Damn it, Star, both you and Rufo talk as if each breath might be our last.”

“As it might be.”

“You’re not expecting an ambush now; we’re still on Doral land. But Rufo is as full of dire forebodings as a cheap melodrama. And you are almost as bad.”

“I’m sorry. Rufo does fret–but he is a good man at your back when trouble starts. As for me, I have been trying to be fair, milord, to let you know what to expect.”

“Instead you confuse me. Don’t you think it’s time you put your cards face up?”

She looked troubled. “And if the Hanging Man is the first card turned?”

“I don’t give a hoot! I can face trouble without fainting–”

“I know you can, my champion.”

“Thanks. But not knowing makes me edgy. So talk.”

“I will answer any question, milord Oscar. I have always been willing to.” “But you know that I don’t know what questions to ask. Maybe a carrier pigeon doesn’t need to know what the war is about–but I feel like a sparrow in a badminton game. So start from the beginning.”

“As you say, milord. About seven thousand years ago–” Star stopped. “Oscar, do you want to know–now all the interplay of politics of a myriad worlds and twenty universes over millennia in arriving at the present crisis? I’ll try if you say, but just to outline it would take more time than remains until we must pass through that Gate. You are my true champion; my life hangs on your courage and skill. Do you want the politics behind my present helpless, almost hopeless predicament–save for you! Or shall I concentrate on the tactical situation?”

(Damn it! I did want the whole story.) “Let’s stick to the tactical situation. For now.”

“I promise,” she said solemnly, “that if we live through it, you shall have every detail. The situation is this: I had intended us to cross Nevia by barge, then through the mountains to reach a Gate beyond the Eternal Peaks. That route is less risky but long.

“But now we must hurry. We will turn off the road late this afternoon and pass through some wild country, and country still worse after dark. The Gate there we must reach before dawn; with luck we may sleep. I hope so, because this Gate takes us to another world at a much more dangerous exit.

“Once there, in that world–Hokesh it is called, or Karth–in Karth-Hokesh we shall be close, too close, to a tall tower, mile high, and, if we win to it, our troubles start. In it is the Never-Born, the Eater
of Souls.”

“Star, are you trying to scare me?”

“I would rather you were frightened now, if such is possible, than have you surprised later. My thought, milord, had been to advise you of each danger as we reached it, so that you could concentrate
on one at a time. But you overruled me.”

“Maybe you were right. Suppose you give me details on each as we come to it, just the outline now. So I’m to fight the Eater of Souls, am I? The name doesn’t scare me; if he tries to eat my soul, he’ll throw up. What do I fight him with? Spit?”

“That is one way,” she said seriously, “but, with luck, we won’t fight him–it–at all. We want what it guards.”

“And what is that?”

“The Egg of the Phoenix.”

“The Phoenix doesn’t lay eggs.”

“I know, milord. That makes it uniquely valuable.”

“But–”

She hurried on. “That is its name. It is a small object, somewhat larger than an ostrich egg and black. If I do not capture it, many bad things will happen. Among them is a small one: I will die. I mention that because it may not seem small to you–my darling! –and it is easier to tell you that one truth than it is to explain the issues.”

“Okay. We steal the Egg. Then what?”

“Then we go home. To my home. After which you may return to yours. Or remain in mine. Or go where you list, through Twenty Universes and myriad worlds. Under any choice, whatever treasure you fancy is yours; you will have earned it and more . . . as well as my heartfelt thanks, milord Hero, and anything you ask of me.”

(The biggest blank check ever written–If I could cash it.) “Star, you don’t seem to think we will live through it.”

She took a deep breath. “Not likely, milord. I tell you truth. My blunder has forced on us a most desperate alternative.”

“I see. Star, will you marry me? Today?”

Then I said, “Easy there! Don’t fall!” She hadn’t been in danger of falling; the seat belt held her. But she sagged against it. I leaned over and put my arm around her shoulders. “Nothing to cry about. Just give me a yes or a no–and I fight for you anyway. On, I forgot. I love you. Anyhow I think it’s love. A funny, fluttery feeling whenever I look at you or think about you–which is mostly.”

“I love you, milord,” she said huskily. “I have loved you since I first saw you. Yes, a ‘funny, fluttery feeling’ as if everything inside me were about to melt down.”

“Well, not quite that,” I admitted. “But it’s probably opposite polarity for the same thing. Fluttery, anyhow. Chills and lightnings. How do we get married around here?”

“But, milord–my love–you always astound me. I knew you loved me. I hoped that you would tell me before–well, in time. Let me hear it once. I did not expect you to offer to marry me!”

“Why not? I’m a man, you’re a woman. It’s customary?”

“But–Oh, my love, I told you! It isn’t necessary to marry me. By your rules . . . I’m a bitch.”

“Bitch, witch, Sing Along with Mitch! What the hell, honey? That was your word, not mine. You have about convinced me that the rules I was taught are barbarous and yours are the straight goods. Better blow your nose–here, want my hanky?

Star wiped her eyes and blew her nose but instead of the yes-darling I wanted to hear she sat up straight and did not smile. She said formally, “Milord Hero, had you not best sample the wine before you buy the barrel?”

I pretended not to understand.

“Please, milord love,” she insisted. “I mean it. There’s a grassy bit on your side of the road, just ahead. You can lead me to it this moment and willingly I will go.”

I sat high and pretended to peer. “Looks like crab grass. Scratchy.”

“Then p-p-pick your own grass! Milord . . . I am willing, and eager, and not uncomely–but you will learn that I am a Sunday painter compared with artists you will someday meet. I am a working woman. I haven’t been free to give the matter the dedicated study it deserves. Believe me! No, try me. You can’t know that you want to marry me.”

“So you’re a cold and clumsy wench, eh?”

“Well . . . I didn’t say that. I’m only entirely unskilled–and I do have enthusiasm.”

“Yes, like your auntie with the cluttered bedroom–it runs in your family, so you said. Let it stand that I ant to marry you in spite of your obvious faults.”

“But–”

“Star, you talk too much.”

“Yes, milord,” she said meekly.

“We’re getting married. How do we do it? Is the local lord also justice of the peace? If he is, there will be no droit du seigneur; we haven’t time for frivolities.” “Each squire is the local justice,” Star agreed thoughtfully, “and does perform marriages, although most Nevians don’t bother. But–Well, yes, he would expect droit du seigneur and, as you pointed out, we haven’t time to waste.”

“Nor is that my idea of a honeymoon. Star–look at me. I don’t expect to keep you in a cage; I know you weren’t raised that way. But we won’t look up the squire. What’s the local brand of preacher? A celibate brand, by choice.”

“But the squire is the priest, too. Not that religion is an engrossing matter in Nevia; fertility rites are all they bother with. Milord love, the simplest way is to jump over your sword.”

“Is that a marriage ceremony where you come from, Star?”

“No, it’s from your world:

‘Leap rogue, and jump whore,

‘And married be forevermore–‘

“–it’s very old.”

“Mmm–I don’t care for the marriage lines. I may be a rogue but I know what you think of whores. What other chances are there?”

“Let me see. There’s a rumormonger in a village we pass through soon after lunch. They sometimes marry townies who want it known far and wide; the service includes spreading the news.”

“What sort of service?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t care, milord love. Married we will be!”

“That’s the spirit! We won’t stop for lunch.”

“No, milord,” she said firmly, “if wife I am to be, I shall be a good wife and not permit you to skip meals.”

“Henpecking already. I think I’ll beat you.”

“As you will, milord. But you must eat, you are going to need your strength–”

“I certainly will!’

“–for fighting. For now I am ten times as anxious that we both live through it. Here is a place for

lunch.” She turned Vita Brevis off the road; Ars Longa followed. Star looked back over her shoulder and dimpled. “Have I told you today that you are beautiful . . . my love!”

Chapter 11

Rufo’s longhorse followed us onto the grassy verge Star picked for picnicking. He was still limp as a wet sock and snoring. I would have let him sleep but Star was shaking him.

He came awake fast, reaching for his sword and shouting, “A moi! M’aidez! Les vaches!” Fortunately some friend had stored his sword and belt out of reach on the baggage rack aft, along with bow, quiver, and our new foldbox.

Then he shook his head and said, “How many were there?”

“Down from there, old friend,” Star said cheerfully. “We’ve stopped to eat.”

“Eat!” Rufo gulped and shuddered. “Please, milady. No obscenity.” He fumbled at his seat belt and fell out of his saddle; I steadied him. Star was searching through her pouch; she pulled out a vial and offered it to Rufo. He shied back.

“Milady!”

“Shall I hold your nose?” she said sweetly.

“I’ll be all right. Just give me a moment . . . and the hair of the dog.”

“Certainly you’ll be all right. Shall I ask milord Oscar to pin your arms?”

Rufo glanced at me appealingly; Star opened the little bottle. It fizzed and fumes rolled out and down.

“Now!”

Rufo shuddered, held his nose, tossed it down.

I won’t say smoke shot out of his ears. But he flapped like torn canvas in a gale and horrible noises came out.

Then he came into focus as suddenly as a TV picture. He appeared heavier and inches taller and had finned out. His skin was a rosy glow instead of death pallor. “Thank you, milady,” he said cheerfully, his oice resonant and virile. “Someday I hope to return the favor.”

“When the Greeks reckon time by the kalends,” she agreed.

Rufo led the longhorses aside and fed them, opening the foldbox and digging out haunches of bloody eat. Ars Longa ate a hundredweight and Vita Brevis and Mors Profunda even more; on the road these beasts need a high-protein diet. That done, he whistled as he set up table and chairs for Star and myself.

“Sugar pie,” I said to Star, “what’s in that pick-me-up?”

“An old family recipe:

‘Eye of newt and toe of frog,

‘Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

‘Adders fork and blind-worm’s sting,

‘Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing–‘ ”

“Shakespeare!” I said. “Macbeth.”

” ‘Cool it with a baboon’s blood–‘ No, Will got it from me, milord love. That’s the way with writers; they’ll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own. I got it from my aunt–another aunt–who was a professor of internal medicine. The rhyme is a mnemonic for the real ingredients which are much more complicated–never can tell when you’ll need a hangover cure. I compounded it last night, knowing that Rufo, for the sake of our skins, would need to be at his sharpest today–two doses, in fact, in case you needed one. But you surprised me, my love; you break out with nobility at the oddest times.”

“A family weakness. I can’t help it.”

“Luncheon is served, milady.”

I offered Star my arm. Hot foods were hot, cold ones chilled; this new foldbox, in Lincoln green embossed with the Doral chop, had equipment that the lost box lacked. Everything was delicious and the wines were superb.

Rufo ate heartily from his serving board while keeping an eye on our needs. He had come over to pour the wine for the salad when I broke the news. “Rufo old comrade, milady Star and I are getting married today. I want you to be my best man and help prop me up.”

He dropped the bottle.

Then he was busy wiping me and mopping the table. When at last he spoke, it was to Star. “Milady,” he said tightly, “I have put up with much, uncomplaining, for reasons I need not state. But this is going too far. I won’t let–”

“Hold your tongue!”

“Yes,” I agreed, “hold it while I cut it out. Will you have it fried? Or boiled?”

Rufo looked at me and breathed heavily. Then he left abruptly, withdrawing beyond the serving board.

Star said softly, “Milord love, I am sorry.”

“What twisted his tail?” I said wonderingly. Then I thought of the obvious. “Star! Is Rufo jealous?”

She looked astounded, started to laugh and chopped it off. “No, no, darling! It’s not that at all.

Rufo–Well, Rufo has his foibles but he is utterly dependable where it counts. And we need him. Ignore it. Please, milord.”

“As you say. It would take more than that to make me unhappy today.”

Rufo came back, face impassive, and finished serving. He repacked without speaking and we hit the road.

The road skirted the village green; we left Rufo there and sought out the rumormonger. His shop, a crooked lane away, was easy to spot; an apprentice was beating a drum in front of it and shouting
teasers of gossip to a crowd of locals. We pushed through and went inside.

The master rumormonger was reading something in each hand with a third scroll propped against his feet on a desk. He looked, dropped feet to floor, jumped up and made a leg while waving us to seats.

“Come in, come in, my gentles!” be sang out. “You do me great honor, my day is made! And yet if I may say so you have come to the right place whatever your problem whatever your need you have only to speak good news bad news every sort but sad news reputations restored events embellished history rewritten great deeds sung and all work guaranteed by the oldest established news agency in all Nevia news from all worlds all universes propaganda planted or uprooted offset or rechanneled satisfaction guaranteed honesty is the best policy but the client is always right don’t tell me I know I know I have spies in every kitchen ears in every bedroom the Hero Gordon without a doubt and your fame needs no heralds milord but honored am I that you should seek me out a biography perhaps to match your
matchless deeds complete with old nurse who recalls in her thin and ancient and oh so persuasive voice the signs and portents at your birth–”

Star chopped him off. “We want to get married.”

His mouth shut, he looked sharply at Star’s waistline and almost bought a punch in the nose. “It is a pleasure. And I must add that I heartily endorse such a public-spirited project. All this modern bundling and canoodling and scuttling without even three cheers or a by-your-leave sends taxes up and profits down that’s logic. I only wish I had time to get married myself as I’ve told my wife many’s the time. Now as to plans, if I may make a modest suggestion–”

“We want to be married by the customs of Earth.”

“Ah, yes, certainly.” He turned to a cabinet near his desk, spun dials. After a bit he said, “Your pardon, gentles, but my head is crammed with a billion facts, large and small, and–that name? Does it start with one ‘R’ or two?”

Star moved around, inspected the dials, made a setting.

The rumormonger blinked. “That universe? We seldom have a call for it. I’ve often wished I had time to travel but business business business–LIBRARY!”

“Yes, Master?” a voice answered.

“The planet Earth, Marriage Customs of–that’s a capital ‘Urr’ and a soft theta.” He added a five-group serial number. “Snap it up!”

In very short time an apprentice came running with a thin scroll. “Librarian says careful how you handle it, Master. Very brittle, he says. He says–”

“Shut up. Your pardon, gentles.” He inserted the scroll in a reader and began to scan.

His eyes bugged out and he sat forward. “Unbeliev–” Then he muttered, “Amazing! Whatever made them think of that!” For several minutes he appeared to forget we were there, simply giving vent to: “Astounding! Fantastic!” and like expressions.

I tapped his elbow. “We’re in a hurry.”

“Eh? Yes, yes, milord Hero Gordon–milady.” Reluctantly he left the scanner, fitted his palms together, and said, “You’ve come to the right place. Not another rumormonger in all Nevia could handle a project this size. Now my thought is–just a rough idea, talking off the top of my head–for the procession we’ll need to call in the surrounding countryside although for the charivari we could make do with just townspeople if you want to keep it modest in accordance with your reputation for dignified simplicity–say one day for the procession and a nominal two nights of charivari with guaranteed noise levels of–”

“Hold it.”

“Milord? I’m not going to make a profit on this; it will be a work of art, a labor of love–just expenses plus a little something for my overhead. It’s my professional judgment, too, that a Samoan pre-ceremony would be more sincere, more touching really, than the optional Zulu rite. For a touch of comedy relief–at no extra charge; one of my file clerks just happens to be seven months along, she’d be glad to run down the aisle and interrupt the ceremony–and of course there is the matter of witnesses to the consummation,
how many for each of you, but that needn’t be settled this week; we have the street decorations to think of first, and–”

I took her arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Yes, milord,” Star agreed.

He chased after us, shouting about broken contracts. I put hand to sword and showed six inches of blade; his squawks shut off.

Rufo seemed to be all over his mad; he greeted us civilly, even cheerfully. We mounted and left. We had been riding south a mile or so when I said, “Star darling–”

“Milord love?”

“That ‘jumping over the sword’–that really is a marriage ceremony?”

“A very old one, my darling. I think it dates back to the Crusades.”

“I’ve thought of an updated wording:

‘Jump rogue, and princess leap,

‘My wife art thou and mine to keep!’

“–would that suit you?”

“Yes, yes!”

“But for the second line you say:

‘–thy wife I vow and thine to keep.’

“Got it?”

Star gave a quick gasp. “Yes, my love!”

We left Rufo with the longhorses, giving no explanation, and climbed a little wooded hill. All of Nevia is beautiful, with never a beer can nor a dirty Kleenex to mar its Eden loveliness, but here we found an outdoor temple, a smooth grassy place surrounded by arching trees, an enchanted sanctuary.

I drew my sword and glanced along it, feeling its exquisite balance while noting again the faint ripples left by feather-soft hammer blows of some master swordsmith. I tossed it and caught it by the forte.

“Read the motto. Star.”

She traced it out. ” ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus!’–‘While we live, let us live!’ Yes, my love, yes!” She kissed it and handed it back; I placed it on the ground.

“Know your lines?” I asked.

“Graved in my heart.”

I took her hand in mine. “Jump high. One . . . two . . . three!”

Chapter 12

When I led my bride back down that blessed hill, arm around her waist, Rufo helped us mount without comment. But he could hardly miss that Star now addressed me as: “Milord husband.” He mounted and tailed in, a respectful distance out of earshot.

We rode hand in hand for at least an hour. Whenever I glanced at her, she was smiling; whenever she caught my eye, the smile grew dimples. Once I asked, “How soon must we keep lockout?”

“Not until we leave the road, milord husband.”

That held us another mile. At last she said timidly, “Milord husband?”

“Yes, wife?”

“Do you still think that I am ‘a cold and clumsy wench’?”

“Mmm . . .” I answered thoughtfully, ” ‘cold’–no, I couldn’t honestly say you were cold. But ‘clumsy’–Well, compared with an artist like Muri, let us say–”

“Milord husband!”

“Yes? I was saying

“Are you honing for a kick in the belly?” She added, “American!”

“Wife . . . would you kick me in the belly?”

She was slow in answering and her voice was very low. “No, milord husband. Never.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. But if you did, what would happen?”

“You–you would spank me. With my own sword. But not with your sword. Please, never with your sword . . . my husband.”

“Not with your sword, either. With my hand. Hard. First I would spank you. And then–”

“And then what?”

I told her. “But don’t give me cause. According to plans I have to fight later. And don’t interrupt me in the future.”

“Yes, milord husband.”

“Very well. Now let’s assign Muri an arbitrary score of ten. On that scale you would rate–Let me hink.”

“Three or four, perhaps? Or even five?”

“Quiet. I make it about a thousand. Yes, a thousand, give or take a point. I haven’t a slide rule.”

“Oh, what a beast you are, my darling! Lean close and loss me–and just wait till I tell Muri.”

“You’ll say nothing to Muri, my bride, or you will be paddled. Quit fishing for compliments. You know hat you are, you sword-jumping wench.”

“And what am I?”

“My princess.”

“Oh.”

“And a mink with its tail on fire–and you know it.”

“Is that good? I’ve studied American idiom most carefully but sometimes I am not sure.”

“It’s supposed to be tops. A figure of speech, I’ve never known a mink that well. Now get your mindon other matters, or you may be a widow on your bridal day. Dragons, you say?”

“Not until after nightfall, milord husband–and they aren’t really dragons.”

“As you described them, the difference could matter only to another dragon. Eight feet high at the houlders, a few tons each, and teeth as long as any forearm–all they need is to breathe flame.”

“Oh, but they do! Didn’t I say?”

I sighed. “No, you did not.”

“They don’t exactly breathe fire. That would kill them. They hold their breaths while flaming. It’s wamp gas–methane–from the digestive tract. It’s a controlled belch, with a hypergolic effect from an enzyme secreted between the first and second rows of teeth. The gas bursts into flame on the way out.”

“I don’t care how they do it; they’re flame-throwers. Well? How do you expect me to handle them?”

“I had hoped that you would have ideas. You see,” she added apologetically, “I hadn’t planned on it, I didn’t expect us to come this way.”

“Well–Wife, let’s go back to that village. Set up in competition with our friend the rumormonger–I’ll bet we could outgabble him.”

“Milord husband!”

“Never mind. If you want me to kill dragons every Wednesday and Saturday, I’ll be on call. This flaming methane–Do they spout it from both ends?”

“Oh, just the front end. How could it be both?”

“Easy. See next year’s model. Now quiet; I’m thinking over a tactic. Ill need Rufo. I suppose he has killed dragons before?”

“I don’t know that a man has ever killed one, milord husband.”

“So? My princess, I’m flattered by the confidence you place in me. Or is it desperation? Don’t answer, I don’t want to know. Keep quiet and let me think.”

At the next farmhouse Rufo was sent in to arrange returning the longhorses. They were ours, gifts from the Doral, but we had to send them home, as they could not live where we were going–Muri had promised me that she would keep an eye on Ars Longa and exercise her. Rufo came back with a bumpkin mounted on a heavy draft animal bareback–he Kept shifting numbly between second and third pairs of legs to spare the animal’s back and controlled it by voice.

When we dismounted, retrieved our bows and quivers, and prepared to hoof it, Rufo came up. “Boss, Manure Foot craves to meet the hero and touch his sword. Brush him off?”

Rank hath its duties as well as its privileges. “Fetch him.”

The lad, overgrown and fuzz on his chin, approached eagerly, stumbling over his feet, then made a leg so long he almost fell. “Straighten up, son,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Pug, milord Hero,” he answered shrilly. (“Pug” will do. The Nevian meaning was as rugged as Jocko’s jokes.) “A stout name. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A hero, milord! Like yourself.”

I thought of telling him about those rocks on the Glory Road. But he would find them soon enough if ever he tramped it–and either not mind, or turn back and forget the silly business. I nodded approvingly and assured him that there was always room at the top in the Hero business for a lad with spirit–and that the lower the start, the greater the glory . . . so work hard and study hard and wait his opportunity. Keep his guard up but always speak to strange ladies; adventure would come his way. Then I let him touch my sword–but not take it in hand. The Lady Vivamus is mine and I’d rather share my toothbrush.

Once, when I was young, I was presented to a Congressman. He had handed me the same fatherly guff I was now plagiarizing. Like prayer, it can’t do any harm and might do some good, and I found that I was sincere when I said it and no doubt the Congressman was, too. Oh, possibly some harm, as the youngster might get himself killed on the first mile of that road. But that is better than sitting over the fire in your old age, sucking your gums and thinking about the chances you missed and the gals you didn’t
tumble. Isn’t it?

I decided that the occasion seemed so important to Pug that it should be marked, so I groped in my pouch and found a U.S. quarter. “What’s the rest of your name. Pug?”

“Just ‘Pug,’ milord. Of house Lerdki, of course.”

“E. C.” to “Easy” because of my style of broken-field running–I never ran harder nor dodged more than the occasion demanded.

“By authority vested in me by Headquarters United States Army Southeast Asia Command, I, the Hero Oscar, ordain that you shall be known henceforth as Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Wear it proudly.”

I gave him the quarter and showed him George Washington on the obverse. “This is the father of my house, a greater hero than I will ever be. He stood tall and proud, spoke the truth, and fought for the right as he saw it, against fearful odds. Try to be like him. And here”–I turned it over–“is the chop of my house, the house he founded. The bird stands for courage, freedom, and ideals soaring high.” (I didn’t tell him that the American Eagle eats carrion, never tackles anything its own size, and will soon be extinct–it does stand for those ideals. A symbol means what you put into it.)

Pug Easy nodded violently and tears started to flow. I had not presented him to my bride; I didn’t know that she would wish to meet him. But she stepped forward and said gently, “Pug Easy, remember the words of milord Hero. Treasure them and they will last you all your life.”

The lad dropped to his knees. Star touched his hair and said, “Stand, Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Stand tall.”

I said good-bye to Ars Longa, told her to be a good girl and I would be back someday. Pug Easy readed back with longhorses tailed up and we set out into the woods, arrows nocked and Rufo eyes-behind. There was a sign where we left the yellow brick road; freely translated it read: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

(A literal translation is reminiscent of Yellowstone Park: “Warning–the varmints in these woods are not tame. Travelers are warned to stay on the road, as their remains will not be returned to their kin. The Lerdki, His Chop.”)

Presently Star said, “Milord husband–”

“Yes, pretty foots?” I didn’t look at her; I was watching my side and a bit of hers, and keeping an eye overhead as well, as we could be bombed here–something like blood kites but smaller and goes for the eyes.

“My Hero, you are truly noble and you have made your wife most proud.”

“Huh? How?” I had my mind on targets–two kinds on the ground here: a rat big enough to eat cats and willing to eat people, and a wild hog about the same size and not a ham sandwich on him anyplace, all rawhide and bad temper. The hogs were easier targets, I had been told, because they charge straight at you. But don’t miss. And have your sword loosened, you won’t nock a second shaft.

“That lad, Pug Easy. What you did for him.”

“Him? I fed him the old malarkey. Cost nothing.”

“It was a kingly deed, milord husband.”

“Oh, nonsense, diddycums. He expected big talk from a hero, so I did.”

“Oscar my beloved, may a loyal wife point it out to her husband when he speaks nonsense of himself? I have known many heroes and some were such oafs that one would feed them at the back door if their eeds did not claim a place at the table. I have known few men who were noble, for nobility is scarcer far than heroism. But true nobility can always be recognized . . . even in one as belligerently shy about showing it as you are. The lad expected it, so you gave it to him–out noblesse oblige is an emotion felt
only by those who are noble.”

“Well, maybe. Star, you are talking too much again. Don’t you think these varmints have ears?”

“Your pardon, milord. They have such good ears that they hear footsteps through the ground long before they hear voices. Let me have the last word, today being my bridal day. If you are–no, when you are gallant to some beauty, let us say Letva–or Muri, damn her lovely eyes! –I do not count it as nobility; it must be assumed to spring from a much commoner emotion than noblesse oblige. But when you speak to a country lout with pigsty on his feet, garlic on his breath, the stink of sweat all over him, and pimples on his face–speak gently and make him feel for the time as noble as you are and let him hope one day to be your equal–I know it is not because you hope to tumble him.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Boys that age are considered a treat in some circles. Give him a bath, perfume him, curl his hair–”

“Milord husband, is it permitted for me to think about kicking you in the belly?”

“Can’t be court-martialed for thinking, that’s the one thing they can’t take away from you. Okay, I prefer girls; I’m a square and can’t help it. What’s this about Muri’s eyes? Longlegs, are you jealous?”

I could hear dimples even though I couldn’t stop to see them. “Only on my wedding day, milord husband; the other days are yours. If I catch you in sportiveness, I shall either not see it, or congratulate
you, as may be.”

“I don’t expect you’ll catch me.”

“And I trust you’ll not catch me, milord rogue,” she answered serenely.

She did get the last word, for just then Rufo’s bowstring went Fwung! He called out, “Got ‘im!” and then we were very busy. Hogs so ugly they made razorbacks look like Poland-Chinas–I got one by
arrow, down his slobbering throat then fed steel to his brother a frozen second later. Star got a fair hit at hers but it deflected on bone and kept coming and I kicked it in the shoulder as I was still trying to free my blade from its cousin. Steel between its ribs quieted it and Star coolly nocked another shaft and let fly while I was killing it. She got one more with her sword, leaning the point in like a matador at the moment of truth, dancing aside as it came on, dead and unwilling to admit it.

The fight was over. Old Rufo had got three unassisted and a nasty goring; I had a scratch and my bride was unhurt, which I made sure of as soon as things were quiet. Then I mounted guard while our surgeon took care of Rufo, after which she dressed my lesser cut.

“How about it, Rufo?” I asked. “Can you walk?”

“Boss, I won’t stay in this forest if I have to crawl, Let’s mush. Anyhow,” he added, nodding at the worthless pork around us, “we won’t be bothered by rats right away.”

I rotated the formation, placing Rufo and Star ahead with his good leg on the outside and myself taking rear guard, where I should have been all along. Rear guard is slightly safer than point under most conditions but these weren’t most conditions. I had let my blind need to protect my bride personally ffect my judgment.

Having taken the hot spot I then went almost cross-eyed trying not only to see behind but ahead as well, so that I could close fast if Star–yes, and Rufo–got into trouble. Luckily we had a breathing spell in which I sobered down and took to heart the oldest lesson on patrol: You can’t do the other man’s job. Then I gave all my attention to our rear. Rufo, old as he was and wounded, would not die without slaughtering an honor guard to escort him to hell in style–and Star was no fainting heroine. I would bet long odds on her against anyone her own weight, name your weapon or barehanded, and I pity the man who ever tried to rape her; he’s probably still searching for his cojones.

Hogs didn’t bother us again but as evening approached we began to see and oftener to hear those giant rats; they paced us, usually out of sight; they never attacked berserk the way the hogs had; they looked for the best of it, as rats always do.

Rats give me the horrors. Once when I was a kid, my dad dead and Mother not yet remarried, we were flat broke and living in an attic in a condemned building. You could hear rats in the walls and twice rats ran over me in my sleep.

I still wake up screaming.

It doesn’t improve a rat to blow it up to the size of a coyote. These were real rats, even to the whiskers, and shaped like rats save that their legs and pads were too large–perhaps the cube-square law
on animal proportions works anywhere.

We didn’t waste an arrow on one unless it was a fair shot and we zigzagged to take advantage of such openness as the forest had–which increased the hazard from above. However, the forest was so dense that attacks from the sky weren’t our first worry.

I got one rat that tailed too closely and just missed another. We had to spend an arrow whenever they got bold; it caused the others to be more cautious. And once, while Rufo was drawing a bow on one and Star was ready with her sword to back him up, one of those vicious little hawks dived on Rufo.

Star cut him out of the air at the bottom of his stoop. Rufo hadn’t even seen it; he was busy nailing brother rat.

We didn’t have to worry about underbrush; this forest was park-like, trees and grass, no dense undergrowth. Not too bad, that stretch, except that we began to run out of arrows. I was fretting about that when I noticed something. “Hey, up ahead! You’re off course. Cut to the right.” Star had set course for me when we left the road but it was up to me to hold it; her bump of direction was erratic and Rufo’s no better.

“Sorry, milord leader,” Star called back. “The going was a trifle steep.”

I closed in. “Rufo, how’s the leg?” There was sweat on his forehead.

Instead of answering me, he said, “Milady, it will be dark soon.”

“I know,” she answered calmly, “so time for a bite of supper. Milord husband, that great flat rock up ahead seems a nice place.”

I thought she had slipped her gears and so did Rufo, but for another reason. “But, milady, we are far ehind schedule.”

“And much later we shall be unless I attend to your leg again.”

“Better you leave me behind,” he muttered.

“Better you keep quiet until your advice is asked,” I told him. “I wouldn’t leave a Horned Ghost to be eaten by rats. Star, how do we do this?”

The great flat rock sticking up like a skull in the trees ahead was the upper surface of a limestone boulder with its base buried. I stood guard in its center with Rufo seated beside me while Star set out wards at cardinal and semi-cardinal points. I didn’t get to see what she did because my eyes had to be peeled for anything beyond her, shaft nocked and ready to knock it down or scare it off, while Rufo watched the other side. However, Star told me later that the wards weren’t even faintly “magic” but were within reach of Earth technology once some bright boy got the idea–an “electrified fence” without the fence, as radio is a telephone without wires, an analogy that won’t hold up.

But it was well that I kept honest lockout instead of trying to puzzle out how she sat up that charmed circle, as she was attacked by the only rat we met that had no sense. He came straight at her, my arrow past her ear warned her, and she finished him off by sword. It was a very old male, missing teeth and white whiskers and likely weak in his mind. He was as large as a wolf, and with two death wounds still a red-eyed, mangy fury.

Once the last ward was placed Star told me that I could stop worrying about the sky; the wards roofed as well as fenced the circle. As Rufo says, if She says it, that settles it. Rufo had partly unfolded the foldbox while he watched; I got out her surgical case, more arrows for all of us, and food. No nonsense about manservant and gentlefolk, we ate together, sitting or sprawling and with Rufo lying flat to give his leg a chance while Star served him, sometimes popping food into his mouth in Nevian hospitality.

She had worked a long time on his leg while I held a light and handed her things. She packed the wound with a pale jelly before sealing a dressing over it. If it hurt, Rufo didn’t mention it.

While we ate it grew dark and the invisible fence began to be lined with eyes, glowing back at us with the light we ate by, and almost as numerous as the crowd the morning Igli ate himself. Most of them I judged to be rats. One group kept to themselves with a break in the circle on each side; I decided these must be hogs; the eyes were higher off the ground.

“Milady love,” I said, “will those wards hold all night?”

“Yes, milord husband.”

“They had better. It is too dark for arrows and I can’t see us hacking our way through that mob. I’m afraid you must revise your schedule again.”

“I can’t, milord Hero. But forget those beasts. Now we fly.”

Rufo groaned. “I was afraid so. You know it makes me seasick.”

“Poor Rufo,” Star said softly. “Never fear, old friend I have a surprise for you. Again such chance as this, I bought Dramamine in Cannes–you know, the drug that saved the Normandy invasion back on Earth. Or perhaps you don’t know.”

Rufo answered, ” ‘Know’? I was in that invasion, milady–and I’m allergic to Dramamine; I fed fish all the way to Omaha Beach. Worst night I’ve ever had–why, I’d rather be here!”

“Rufo,” I asked, “were you really at Omaha Beach?”

“Hell, yes, Boss. I did all of Eisenhower’s thinking.”

“But why? It wasn’t your fight.”

“You might ask yourself why you’re in this fight, Boss. In my case it was French babes. Earthy and uninhibited and always cheerful about it and willing to learn. I remember one little mademoiselle from Armentieres”–he pronounced it correctly–“who hadn’t been–”

Star interrupted. “While you two pursue your bachelor reminiscences, I’ll get the flight gear ready.” She got up and went to the foldbox.

“Go ahead, Rufo,” I said, wondering how far he would stretch this one.

“No,” he said sullenly. “She wouldn’t like it. I can tell. Boss, you’ve had the damnedest effect on Her. More ladylike by the minute and that isn’t like Her at all. First thing you know She will subscribe to Vogue and then there’s no telling how far it will go. I don’t understand it, it can’t be your looks. No offense meant.”

“And none taken. Well, tell me another time. If you can remember it.”

“I’ll never forget her. But, Boss, seasickness isn’t the half of it. You think these woods are infested. Well, the ones we are coming to–wobbly in the knees, at least I will be–those woods have dragons.”

“I know.”

“So She told you? But you have to see it to believe it. The woods are full of ’em. More than there are
Doyles in Boston. Big ones, little ones, and the two-ton teen-age size, hungry all the time. You may fancy
being eaten by a dragon; I don’t. It’s humiliating. And final. They ought to spray the place with
dragonbane, that’s what they ought to do. There ought to be a law.”

Star had returned. “No, there should not be a law,” she said firmly. “Rufo, don’t sound off about things you don’t understand. Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake any government can make.”

Rufo shut up, muttering. I said, “My true love, what use is a dragon? Riddle me that.”

“I’ve never cast a balance sheet on Nevia, it’s not my responsibility. But I can suggest the imbalances that might follow any attempt to get rid of dragons–which the Nevians could do; you’ve seen that their technology is not to be sneered at. These rats and hogs destroy crops. Rats help to keep the hogs down by eating piglets. But rats are even worse than hogs, on food crops. The dragons graze through these very woods in the daytime–dragons are diurnal, rats are nocturnal and go into their holes in the heat of the day. The dragons and hogs keep the underbrush cropped back and the dragons keep the lower limbs trimmed off. But dragons also enjoy a tasty rat, so whenever one locates a rat hole, it gives it a shot of flame, not always killing adults as they dig two holes for each nest, but certainly killing any babies–and then the dragon digs in and has his favorite snack. There is a long-standing agreement, amounting to a
treaty, that as long as the dragons stay in their own territory and keep the rats in check, humans will not
bother them.”

“But why not kill the rats, and then clean up the dragons?”

“And let the hogs run wild? Please, milord husband, I don’t know all the answers in this case; I simply know that disturbing a natural balance is a matter to be approached with fear and trembling–and a very versatile computer. The Nevians seem content not to bother the dragons.”

“Apparently we’re going to bother them. Will that break the treaty?”

“It’s not really a treaty, it’s folk wisdom with the Nevians, and a conditioned reflex–or possibly instinct–with the dragons. And we aren’t going to bother dragons if we can help it. Have you discussed tactics with Rufo? There won’t be time when we get there.”

So I discussed how to loll dragons with Rufo, while Star listened and finished her preparations. “All right,” Rufo said glumly, “it beats sitting tight, like an oyster on the half shell waiting to be eaten. More dignified. I’m a better archer than you are–or at least as good–so I’ll take the hind end, as I’m not as agile tonight as I should be.”

“Be ready to switch jobs fast if he swings around.”

“You be ready, Boss. I’ll be ready for the best of reasons–my favorite skin.”

Star was ready and Rufo had packed and reslung the foldbox while we conferred. She placed round garters above each knee of each of us, then had us sit on the rock facing our destination. “That oak arrow, Rufo.”

“Star, isn’t this out of the Albertus Magnus book?”

“Similar,” she said. “My formula is more reliable and the ingredients I use on the garters don’t spoil. If you please, milord husband, I must concentrate on my witchery. Place the arrow so that it points at the cave.”

I did so. “Is that precise?” she asked.

“If the map you showed me is correct, it is. That’s aimed just the way I’ve been aiming since we left the road.”

“How far away is the Forest of Dragons?”

“Uh, look, my love, as long as we’re going by air why don’t we go straight to the cave and skip the dragons?”

She said patiently, “I wish we could. But that forest is so dense at the top that we can’t drop straight down at the cave, no elbow room. And the things that live in those trees, high up, are worse than dragons. They grow–”

“Please!” said Rufo. “I’m airsick already and we’re not off the ground.”

“Later, Oscar, if you still want to know. In any case we daren’t risk encountering them–and won’t; they stay up higher than the dragons can reach, they must. How tar to the forest?”

“Mmm, eight and a half miles, by that map and how far we’ve come–and not more than two beyond that to the Cave of the Gate.”

“All right. Arms tight around my waist, both of you, and as much body contact as possible; it’s got to work on all of us equally.” Rufo and I settled each an arm in a hug about her and clasped hands across her tummy. That’s good. Hang on tight.” Star wrote figures on the rock beside the arrow.

It sailed away into the night with us after it.

I don’t see how to avoid calling this magic, as I can’t see any way to build Buck Rogers belts into elastic garters. Oh, if you like, Star hypnotized us, then used psi powers to teleport us eight and a half miles. “Psi” is a better word than “magic”; monosyllables are stronger than polysyllables–see Winston Churchill’s speeches. I don’t understand either word, any more than I can explain why I never get lost. I just think it’s preposterous that other people can.

When I fly in dreams, I use two styles: one is a swan dive and I swoop and swirl and cut didos; the other is sitting Turk fashion like the Little Lame Prince and sailing along by sheer force of personality.

The latter is how we did it, like sailing in a glider with no glider. It was a fine night for flying (all nights in Nevia are fine; it rains just before dawn in the rainy season, they tell me) and the greater moon silvered the ground below us. The woods opened up and became clumps of trees; the forest we were heading for showed black against the distance, much higher and enormously more imposing than the pretty woods behind us. Far off to the left I could glimpse fields of house Lerdki.

We had been in the air about two minutes when Rufo said, “Pa’don me!” and turned his head away. He doesn’t have a weak stomach; he didn’t get a drop on us. It arched like a fountain. That was the only incident of a perfect flight.

Just before we reached the tall trees Star said crisply, “Amech!” We checked like a heli and settled straight down to a three-fanny landing. The arrow rested on the ground in front of us, again dead. Rufo returned it to his quiver. “How do you feel?” I asked. “And how’s your leg?”

He gulped. “Leg’s all right. Ground’s going up and down.”

“Hush!” Star whispered. “Hell be all right. But hush, for your lives!”

We set out moments later, myself leading with drawn sword, Star behind me, and Rufo dogging her, an arrow nocked and ready.

The change from moonlight to deep shadow was blinding and I crept along, feeling for tree trunks and praying that no dragon would be in the path my bump of direction led. Certainly I knew that the dragons slept at night, but I place no faith in dragons. Maybe the bachelors stood watches, the way bachelor baboons do. I wanted to surrender that place of honor to St. George and take a spot farther back.

Once my nose stopped me, a whiff of ancient musk. I waited and slowly became aware of a shape the size of a real estate office–a dragon, sleeping with its head on its tail. I led them around it, making no noise and hoping that my heart wasn’t as loud as it sounded.

My eyes were doing better now, reaching out for every stray moonbeam that trickled down–and something else developed. The ground was mossy and barely phosphorescent the way a rotten log sometimes is. Not much. Oh, very little. But it was the way a darkroom light, almost nothing when you go inside, later is plenty of light. I could see trees now and the ground–and dragons.

I had thought earlier, Oh, what’s a dozen or so dragons in a big forest? Chances are we won’t see one, any more than you cath sight of deer most days in deer country.

The man who gets the all-night parking concession in that forest will make a fortune if he figures out a way to make dragons pay up. We never were out of sight of one after we could see.

Of course these aren’t dragons. No, they are uglier. They are saurians, more like tyrannosaurus rex than anything else–big hindquarters and heavy hind legs, heavy tail, and smaller front legs that they use either in walking or to grasp their prey. The head is mostly teeth. They are omnivores whereas I understand that T. rex ate only meat. This is no help; the dragons eat meat when they can get it, they prefer it. Furthermore, these not-so-fake dragons have evolved that charming trick of burning their own sewer gas. But no evolutionary quirk can be considered odd if you use the way octopi make love as a comparison.

Once, far off to the left, an enormous jet lighted up, with a grunting bellow like a very old alligator. The light stayed on several seconds, then died away. Don’t ask me–two males arguing over a female, maybe. We kept going, but I slowed after the light went out, as even that much was enough to affect our eyes until our night sight recovered.

I’m allergic to dragons–literally, not just scared silly. Allergic the way poor old Rufo is to Dramamine but more the way cat fur affects some people.

My eyes were watering as soon as we were in that forest, then my sinuses started to clog up and before we had gone half a mile I was using my left fist to rub my upper lip as hard as I could, trying to kill a sneeze with pain. At last I couldn’t make it and jammed fingers up my nostrils and bit my lips and the contained explosion almost burst my eardrums. It happened as we were skirting the south end of a truck-and-trailer-size job; I stopped dead and they stopped and we waited. It didn’t wake up.

When I started up, my beloved closed on me, grasped my arm; I stopped again. She reached into her pouch, silently found something, rubbed it on my nose and up my nostrils, then with a gentle push signed that we could move on.

First my nose burned cold, as with Vick’s salve, then it felt numb, and presently it began to clear.

After more than an hour of this agelong spooky sneak through tall trees and giant shapes, I thought we were going to win “home free.” The Cave of the Gate should be not more than a hundred yards ahead and I could see the rise in ground where the entrance would be–and only one dragon in our way and that not in direct line.

I hurried.

There was this little fellow, no bigger than a wallaby and about the same shape, aside from baby teeth four inches long. Maybe he was so young he had to wake to potty in the night, I don’t know. All I know is that I passed close to a tree he was behind and stepped on his tail, and he squealed!

He had every right to. But that’s when it hit the fan. The adult dragon between us and the cave woke up at once. Not a big one–say about forty feet, including the tail.

Good old Rufo went into action as if he had had endless time to rehearse, dashing around to the brute’s south end, arrow nocked and bow bent, ready to loose in a hurry. “Get its tail up!” he called out.

I ran to the front end and tried to antagonize the beast by shouting and waving my sword while wondering how far that flame-thrower could throw. There are only four places to put an arrow into a Nevian dragon; the rest is armored like a rhino only heavier. Those four are his mouth (when open), his eyes (a difficult shot; they are little and piggish), and that spot right under his tail where almost any animal is vulnerable. I had figured that an arrow placed in that tender area should add mightily to that “itching, burning” sensation featured in small ads in the backs of newspapers, the ones that say AVOID SURGERY!

My notion was that, if the dragon, not too bright, was unbearably annoyed at both ends at once, his coordination should go all to hell and we could peck away at him until he was useless, or until he got sick of it and ran. But I had to get his tail up, to let Rufo get in a shot. These creatures, satchel-heavy like old

T. rex, charge head up and front legs up and balance this by lifting the tail.
The dragon was weaving its head back and forth and I was trying to weave the other way, so as not to be lined up if it turned on the flame–when suddenly I got my first blast of methane, whiffing it before it lighted, and retreated so fast that I backed into that baby I had stepped on before, went clear over it, landed on my shoulders and rolled, and that saved me. Those flames shoot out about twenty feet. The grown-up dragon had reared up and still could have fried me, but the baby was in the way. It chopped off the flame–but Rufo yelled, “Bull’s-eye!”

The reason that I backed away in time was halitosis. It says here that “pure methane is a colorless, odorless gas.” The GI tract methane wasn’t pure; it was so loaded with homemade ketones and aldehydes that it made an unlimed outhouse smell like Shalimar.

I figure that Stars giving me that salve to open up my nose saved my life. When my nose clamps down I can’t even smell my upper lip.

The action didn’t stop while I figured this out; I did all my thinking either before or after, not during. Shortly after Rufo shot it in the bull’s-eye, the beast got a look of utter indignation, opened its mouth again without flaming and tried to reach its fanny with both hands. It couldn’t–forelegs too short–but it tried. I had returned sword in a hurry once I saw the length of that flame jet and had grabbed my bow. I had time to get one arrow into its mouth, left tonsil maybe.

This message got through faster. With a scream of rage that shook the ground it started for me, belching flame–and Rufo yelled, “A wart seven!”

I was too busy to congratulate him; those critters are fast for their size. But I’m fast, too, and had more incentive. A thing that big can’t change course very fast, but it can swing its head and with it the flame. I got my pants scorched and moved still faster, trying to cut around it.

Star carefully put an arrow into the other tonsil, right where the flame came out, while I was dodging. Then the poor thing tried so hard to turn both ways at both of us that it got tangled in its feet and fell over, a small earthquake. Rufo sank another arrow in its tender behind, and Star loosed one that passed through its tongue and stuck on the fletching, not damaging it but annoying it dreadfully.

It pulled itself into a ball, got to its feet, reared up and tried to flame me again. I could tell it didn’t like me.

And the flame went out.

This was something I had hoped for. A proper dragon, with castles and captive princesses, has as much fire as it needs, like six-shooters in TV oaters. But these creatures fermented their own methane and couldn’t have too big a reserve tank nor under too high pressure–I hoped. If we could nag one into using all its ammo fast, there was bound to be a lag before it recharged.

Meanwhile Rufo and Star were giving it no peace with the pincushion routine. It made a real effort to light up again while I was traversing rapidly, trying to keep that squealing baby dragon between me and the big one, and it behaved like an almost dry Ronson; the flame flickered and caught, shot out a pitiful six feet and went out. But it tried so hard to get me with that last flicker that it fell over again.

I took a chance that it would be sluggy for a second or two like a man who’s been tackled hard, ran in and stuck my sword in its right eye.

It gave one mighty convulsion and quit.

(A lucky poke. They say dinosaurs that big have brains the size of chestnuts. Let’s credit this beast with one the size of a cantaloupe–but it’s still luck if you thrust through an eye socket and get the brain right off. Nothing we had done up to then was more than mosquito bites. But it died from that one poke. St. Michael and St. George guided my blade.)

And Rufo yelled, “Boss! Git fer home!”

A drag race of dragons was closing on us. It felt like that drill in basic where you have to dig a foxhole, then let a tank pass over you.

“This way!” I yelled. “Rufo! This way, not that! Star!” Rufo skidded to a stop, we got headed the same way and I saw the mouth of the cave, black as sin and inviting as a mother’s arms. Star hung back; I shoved her in and Rufo stumbled after her and I turned to face more dragons for my lady love.

But she was yelling, “Milord! Oscar! Inside, you idiot! I must set the wards!”

So I got inside fast and she did, and I never did chew her out for calling her husband an idiot.

Chapter 13

The littlest dragon followed us to the cave, not belligerently (although I don’t trust anything with teeth that size) out more, I think, the way a baby duck follows anyone who leads. It tried to come in after us, drew back suddenly as its snout touched the invisible curtain, like a kitten hit by a static spark. Then it hung around outside, making wheepling noises.

I began to wonder whether or not Stars wards could stop flame. I found out as an old dragon arrived right after that, shoved his head into the opening, jerked it back indignantly just as the kid had, then eyed us and switched on his flame-thrower.

No, the wards don’t stop flame.

We were far enough inside that we didn’t get singed but the smoke and stink and heat were ghastly and just as deadly if it went on long.

An arrow whoofed past my ear and that dragon gave up interest in us. He was replaced by another who wasn’t convinced. Rufo, or possibly Star, convinced him before he had time to light his blowtorch. The air cleared; from somewhere inside there was an outward draft.

Meanwhile Star had made a light and the dragons were holding an indignation meeting. I glanced behind me–a narrow, low passage that dropped and turned. I stopped paying attention to Star and Rufo and the inside of the cave; another committee was calling.

I got the chairman in his soft palate before he could belch. The vice-chairman took over and got in a brief remark about fifteen feet long before he, too, changed his mind. The committee backed off and bellowed bad advice at each other.

The baby dragon hung around all during this. When the adults withdrew he again came to the door, just short of where he had burned his nose. “Koo-werp?” he said plaintively. “Koo-werp? Keet!” Plainly he wanted to come in.

Star touched my arm. “If milord husband pleases, we are ready.”

“Keet!”

“Right away,” I agreed, then yelled, “Beat it, kid! Back to your mama.”

Rufo stuck his head alongside mine. “Probably can’t,” he commented. “Likely that was its mama we ruined.”

I didn’t answer as it made sense; the adult dragon we had finished off had come awake instantly when I stepped on the kid’s tail. This sounds like mother love, if dragons go in for mother love–I wouldn’t know.

But it’s a hell of a note when you can’t even kill a dragon and feel lighthearted afterwards.

We meandered back into that hill, ducking stalactites and stepping around stalagmites while Rufo led with a torch. We arrived in a domed chamber with a floor glazed smooth by unknown years of calcified deposit. It had stalactites in soft pastel shades near the walls and a lovely, almost symmetrical chandelier from the center but no stalagmite under it. Star and Rufo had stuck lumps of the luminescent putty, which is the common night light in Nevia at a dozen points around the room; it bathed the room in a soft light and pointed up the stalactites.

Among them Rufo showed me webs. “Those spinners are harmless,” he said. “Just big and ugly. They don’t even bite like a spider. But–mind your step!” He pulled me back. “These things are poisonous even to touch. Blindworms. That’s what took us so long. Had to be sure the place was clean before warding it. But now that She is settig wards at the entrances I’ll give it one more check.”

The so-called blindworms were translucent, iridescent things the size of large rattlesnakes and slimy-soft like angleworms; I was glad they were dead. Rufo speared them on his sword, a grisly shishkebab, and carried them out through the entrance we had come in.

He was back quickly and Star finished warding. “That’s better,” he said with a sigh as he started cleaning his blade. “Don’t want their perfume around the house. They rot pretty fast and puts me in mind of green hides. Or copra. Did I ever tell you about the time I shipped as a cook out of Sydney? We had a second mate aboard who never bathed and kept a penguin in his stateroom. Female, of course. This bird was no more cleanly than he was and it used to–”

“Rufo,” said Star, “will you help with the baggage?”

“Coming, milady.”

We got out food, sleeping mats, more arrows, things that Star needed for her witching or whatever, and canteens to fill with water, also from the foldbox. Star had warned me earlier that Karth-Hokesh was a place where the local chemistry was not compatible with human life; everything we ate or drank we must fetch with us.

I eyed those one-liter canteens with disfavor. “Baby girl, I think we are cutting rations and water too fine.”

She shook her head. “We won’t need more, truly.”

“Lindbergh flew the Atlantic on just a peanut butter sandwich,” Rufo put in. “But I urged him to take more.”

“How do you know we won’t need more?” I persisted. “Water especially.”

“I’m filling mine with brandy,” Rufo said. “You divvy with me, I’U divvy with you.”

“Milord love, water is heavy. If we try to hang everything on us against any emergency, like the White Knight, we’ll be too weighted down to fight. I’m going to have to strain to usher through three people, weapons, and a minimum of clothing. Living bodies are easiest; I can borrow power from you both. Once-living materials are next; you’ve noticed, I think, that our clothing is wool, our bows of wood, and strings are of gut. Things never living are hardest, steel especially, yet we must have swords and, if we still had firearms, I would strain to the limit to get them through, for now we need them. However, milord Hero, I am simply informing you. You must decide–and I feel sure I can handle, oh, even half a hundredweight more of dead things if necessary. If you will select what your genius tells you.”

“My genius has gone fishing. But, Star my love, there is a simple answer. Take everything.”

“Milord?”

“Jocko set us out with half a ton of food, looks like, and enough wine to float a loan, and a little water. Plus a wide variety of Nevia’s best tools for killing, stabbing, and mayhem. Even armor. And more things. In that foldbox is enough to survive a siege, without eating or drinking anything from Karth-Hokesh. The beauty of it is that it weighs only about fifteen pounds, packed–not the fifty pounds you said you could swing by straining. I’ll strap it on my own back and won’t notice it. It won’t slow me down; it may armor me against a swing at my back. Suits?”

Star’s expression would have fitted a mother whose child has just caught onto the Stork hoax and is wondering how to tackle an awkward subject. “Milord husband, the mass is much too great. I doubt if any witch or warlock could move it unassisted.”

“But folded up?”

“It does not change it, milord; the mass is still there–still more dangerously there. Think of a powerful spring, wound very tight and small, thus storing much energy. It takes enormous power to put a foldbox through a transition in its compacted form, or it explodes.

I recalled a mud volcano that had drenched us and quit arguing. “All right. I’m wrong. But one question–If the mass is there always, why does it weigh so little when folded?”

Star got the same troubled expression. “Your pardon, milord, but we do not share the language–the mathematical language–that would permit me to answer. As yet, I mean; I promise you chance to study if you wish. As a tag, think of it as a tame spacewarp. Or think of the mass being so extremely far away–in a new direction–from the sides of the foldbox that local gravitation hardly matters.”

(I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her–the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is–and doesn’t forgive ignorance.)

But I was still curious. “Star, is there any way to tell me why some things go through easier than others? Wood easier than iron, for example?”

She looked rueful. “No, because I don’t know myself. Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things–ways that work but often we don’t know why.”

“Much like engineering. Design by theory, then beef it up anyhow.”

“Yes, milord husband. A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.”

“And,” put in Rufo, “a philosopher is a scientist with no thumbs. I’m a philosopher. Best of all professions.”

Star ignored him and got out a sketch block, showed me what she knew of the great tower from which we must steal the Egg of Phoenix. This block appeared to be a big cube of Plexiglas; it looked like it, felt like it, and took thumbprints like it.

But she had a long pointer which sank into it as if the block were air. With its tip she could sketch in three dimensions; it left a thin glowing line whenever she wanted it–a 3-dimensional blackboard.

This wasn’t magic; it was advanced technology–and it will beat the hell out of our methods of engineering drawing when we learn how, especially for complex assemblies such as aviation engines and UHF circuitry–even better than exploded isometric with transparent overlays. The block was about thirty inches on a side and the sketch inside could be looked at from any angle–even turned over and studied from underneath.

The Mile-High Tower was not a spire but a massy block, somewhat like those stepped-back buildings in New York, but enormously larger.

Its interior was a maze.

“Milord champion,” Star said apologetically, “when we left Nice there was in our baggage a finished

sketch of the Tower. Now I must work from memory. However, I had studied the sketch so very long that I believe I can get relations right even if proportions suffer. I feel sure of the true paths, the paths that lead to the Egg. It is possible that false paths and dead ends will not be as complete; I did not study them as hard.”

“Can’t see that it matters,” I assured her. “If I know the true paths, any I don’t know are false ones. Which we won’t use. Except to hide in, in a pinch.”

She drew the true paths in glowing red, false ones in green–and there was a lot more green than red. The critter who designed that tower had a twisty mind. What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg–then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnum’s “This Way to the Egress.”

Other routes went inside and lost you in mazes that could not be solved by follow-the-left-wall. If you did, you’d starve. Even routes marked in red were very complex. Unless you knew where the Egg was guarded, you could enter correctly and still spend this year and next January in fruitless search.

“Star, have you been in the Tower?”

“No, milord. I have been in Karth-Hokesh. But far back in the Grotto Hills. I’ve seen the Tower only from great distance.”

“Somebody must have been in it. Surely your–opponents–didn’t send you a map.”

She said soberly, “Milord, sixty-three brave men have died getting the information I now offer you.”

(So now we try for sixty-four!) I said, “Is there any way to study just the red paths?”

“Certainly, milord.” She touched a control, green lines faded. The red paths started each from one of the three openings, one “door” and two “windows.”

I pointed to the lowest level. “This is the only one of thirty or forty doors that leads to the Egg?”

“That is true.”

“Then just inside that door they’ll be waiting to clobber us.”

“That would seem likely, milord.”

“Hmmm . . .” I turned to Rufo. “Rufe, got any long, strong, lightweight line in that plunder?”

“I’ve got some Jocko uses for hoisting. About like heavy fishing line, breaking strength around fifteen hundred pounds.”

“Good boy!” “Figured you might want it. A thousand yards enough?”

“Yes. Anything lighter than that?”

“Some silk trout line.”

In an hour we had made all preparations I could think of and that maze was as firmly in my head as the alphabet. “Star hon, we’re ready to roll. Want to whomp up your spell?”

“No, milord.”

“Why not? ‘Twere best done quickly.”

“Because I can’t, my darling. These Gates are not true gates; there is always a matter of timing. This one will be ready to open, for a few minutes, about seven hours from now, then cannot be opened again for several weeks.” I had a sour thought. “If the buckos we are after know this, they’ll hit us as we come out.”

“I hope not, milord champion. They should be watching for us to appear from the Grotto Hills, as they know we have a Gate somewhere in those hills–and indeed that is the Gate I planned to use. But this Gate, even if they know of it, is so badly located–for us–that I do not think they would expect us to dare it.”

“You cheer me up more all the time. Have you thought of anything to tell me about what to expect? Tanks? Cavalry? Big green giants with hairy ears?”

She looked troubled. “Anything I say would mislead you, milord. We can assume that their troops will be constructs rather than truly living creatures . . . which means they can be anything. Also, anything may be illusion. I told you about the gravity?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Forgive me. I’m tired and my mind isn’t sharp. The gravity varies, sometimes erratically. A level stretch will seem to be downhill, then quickly uphill. Other things . . . any of which may be illusion.”

Rufo said, “Boss, if it moves, shoot it. If it speaks, cut its throat. That spoils most illusions. You don’t need a program; there’ll be just us–and all the others. So when in doubt, kill it. No sweat.”

I grinned at him. “No sweat. Okay, well worry when we get there. So let’s quit talking.”

“Yes, milord husband,” Star seconded. “We had best get several hours’ sleep.”

Something in her voice had changed. I looked at her and she was subtly different, too. She seemed smaller, softer, more feminine and compliant than the Amazon who had fired arrows into a beast a hundred times her weight less than two hours before.

“A good idea,” I said slowly and looked around. While Star had been sketching the mazes of the Tower, Rufo had repacked what we couldn’t take and–I now noticed–put one sleeping pad on one side of the cave and the other two side by side as far from the first as possible.

I silently questioned her by glancing at Rufo and shrugging an implied, “What now?”

Her answering glance said neither yes nor no. Instead she called out, “Rufo, go to bed and give that leg a chance. Don’t lie on it. Either belly down or face the wall.”

For the first time Rufo showed his disapproval of what we had done. He answered abruptly, not what Star said but what she may have implied: “You couldn’t hire me to look!”

Star said to me in a voice so low I barely heard it, “Forgive him, milord husband. He is an old man, he has his quirks. Once he is in bed I will take down the lights.”

I whispered, “Star my beloved, it still isn’t my idea of how to run a honeymoon.”

She searched my eyes. “This is your will, milord love?”

“Yes. The recipe calls for a jug of wine and a loaf of bread. Not a word about a chaperon. I’m sorry.”

She put a slender hand against my chest, looked up at me. “I am glad, milord.”

“You are?” I didn’t see why she had to say so.

“Yes. We both need sleep. Against the morrow. That your strong sword arm may grant us many morrows.”

I felt better and smiled down at her. “Okay, my princess. But I doubt if I’ll sleep.”

“Ah, but you will!”

“Want to bet?”

“Hear me out, milord darling. Tomorrow . . . after you have won . . . we go quickly to my home. No more waitings, no more troubles. I would that you knew the language of my home, so that you will not feel a stranger. I want it to be your home, at once. So? Will milord husband dispose himself for bed? Lie back and let me give him a language lesson? You will sleep, you know that you will.”

“Well . . . it’s a fine idea. But you need sleep even more than I do.”

“Your pardon, milord, but not so. Four hours’ sleep puts spring in my step and a song on my lips.”

“Well . . . ”

Five minutes later I was stretched out, staring into the most beautiful eyes in any world and listening to

her beloved voice speak softly in a language strange to me . . .

Chapter 14

Rufo was shaking my shoulder. “Breakfast, Boss!” He shoved a sandwich into my hand and a pot of beer into the other. “That’s enough to fight on and lunch is packed. I’ve laid out fresh clothes and your weapons and I’ll dress you as soon as you finish. But snap it up. We’re on in a few minutes.” He was already dressed and belted.

I yawned and took a bite of sandwich (anchovies, ham and mayonnaise, with something that wasn’t quite tomato and lettuce)–and looked around. The place beside me was empty but Star seemed to have just gotten up; she was not dressed. She was on her knees in the center of the room, drawing some large design on the floor.

“Morning, chatterbox,” I said. “Pentacle?”

“Mmm–” she answered, not looking up.

I went over and watched her work. Whatever it was, it was not based on a five-cornered star. It had three major centers, was very intricate, had notations here and there–I recognized neither language nor script–and the only sense I could abstract from it was what appeared to be a hypercube seen face on.
“Had breakfast, hon?”

“I fast this morning.”

“You’re skinny now. Is that a tesseract?”

“Stop it!”

I made a leg. “Your pardon, milady.”

“Don’t be formal with me, darling. Love me anyhow and give me a quick kiss–then let me be.”

So I leaned over and gave her a high-caloric kiss, with mayonnaise, and let her be. I dressed while I finished the sandwich and beer, then sought out a natural alcove just short of the wards in the passage, one which had been designated the men’s room. When I came back Rufo was waiting with my sword belt “Boss, you’d be late for your own hanging.”

“I hope so.”

A few minutes later we were standing on that diagram, Star on pitcher’s mound with Rufo and myself at first and third bases. He and I were much hung about, myself with two canteens and Star’s sword belt (on its last notch) as well as my own, Rufo with Star’s bow slung and with two quivers, plus her medic’s kit and lunch. We each had longbow strung and tucked under left arm; we each had drawn sword. Star’s tights were under my belt behind in an untidy tail, her jacket was crumpled under Rufo’s belt, while her buskins and hat were crammed into pockets–etc. We looked like a rummage sale. But this did leave Rufo’s left hand and mine free. We faced outward with swords at ready, reached behind us and Star clasped us each firmly by hand. She stood in the exact center, feet apart and planted solidly and was wearing that required professionally of witches when engaged in heavy work, i.e., not even a bobby pin. She looked magnificent, hair shaggy, eyes shining, and face flushed, and I was sorry to turn my back.

“Ready, my gallants?” she demanded, excitement in her voice.

“Ready,” I confirmed.

“Ave, Imperatrix, nos morituri te–”

“Stop that, Rufo! Silence!” She began to chant in a language unknown to me. The back of my neck prickled.

She stopped, squeezed our hands much harder, and shouted, “Now!”

Sudden as a slammed door, I find I’m a Booth Tarkington hero in a Mickey Spillane situation.

I don’t have time to moan. Here is this thing in front of me, about to chop me down, so I run my blade through his guts and yank it free while he makes up his mind which way to fall; then I dose his buddy the same way. Another one is squatting and trying to get a shot at my legs past the legs of his squad mates. I’m as busy as a one-armed beaver with paperhangers and hardly notice a yank at my belt as Star recovers her sword.

Then I do notice as she kills the hostile who wants to shoot me. Star is everywhere at once, naked as a frog and twice as lively. There was a dropped-elevator sensation at transition, and suddenly reduced gravitation could have been bothersome had we time to indulge it.

Star makes use of it. After stabbing the laddie who tries to shoot me, she sails over my head and the head of a new nuisance, poking him in the neck as she passes and he isn’t a nuisance any longer.

I think she helps Rufo, but I can’t stop to look. I hear his grunts behind me and that tells me that he is still handing out more than he’s catching.

Suddenly he yells, “Down!” and something hits the back of my knees and I go down–land properly limp and am about to roll to my feet when I realize Rufo is the cause. He is belly down by me and shooting what has to be a gun at a moving target out across the plain, himself behind the dead body of one of our playmates.

Star is down, too, but not fighting. Something has poked a hole through her right arm between elbow and shoulder.

Nothing else seemed to be alive around me, but there were targets four to five hundred feet away and opening rapidly. I saw one fall, heard Zzzzt, smelled burning flesh near me. One of those guns was lying across a body to my left; I grabbed it and tried to figure it out. There was a shoulder brace and a tube which should be a barrel; nothing else looked familiar.

“Like this, my Hero.” Star squirmed to me, dragging her wounded arm and leaving a trail of blood. “Race it like a rifle and sight it so. There is a stud under your left thumb. Press it. That’s all–no windage, no elevation.”

And no recoil, as I found when I tracked one of the running figures with the sights and pressed the stud. There was a spurt of smoke and down he went. “Death ray,” or Laser beam, or whatever–line it up, press the stud, and anyone on the far end quit the party with a hole burned in him.

I got a couple more, working right to left, and by then Rufo had done me out of targets. Nothing moved, so far as I could see, anywhere.

Rufo looked around. “Better stay down, Boss.” He rolled to Star, opened her medic’s kit at his own belt, and put a rough and hasty compress on her arm.

Then he turned to me. “How bad are you hurt, Boss?”

“Me? Not a scratch.”

“What’s that on your tunic? Ketchup? Someday somebody is going to offer you a pinch of snuff. Let’s see it.”

I let him open my jacket. Somebody, using a saw-tooth edge, had opened a hole in me on my left side below the ribs. I had not noticed it and hadn’t felt it–until I saw it and then it hurt and I felt queasy. I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. While Rufo dressed it, I looked around to avoid looking at it.

We had killed about a dozen of them right around us, plus maybe half that many who had fled–and had shot all who fled, I think. How? How can a 60-lb. dog armed only with teeth take on, knock down, and hold prisoner an armed man? Ans: By all-out attack.

I think we arrived as they were changing the guard at that spot known to be a Gate–and had we arrived even with swords sheathed we would have been cut down. As it was, we killed a slew before most of them knew a fight was on. They were routed, demoralized, and we slaughtered the rest, including those who tried to bug out. Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn’t serious, nor anything with rules)–all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.

I had time to examine our late foes; one was faced toward me with his belly open. “Iglis” I would call them, but of the economy model. No beauty and no belly buttons and not much brain–presumably constructed to do one thing: fight, and try to stay alive. Which describes us, too–but we did it faster.

Looking at them upset my stomach, so I looked at the sky. No improvement–it wasn’t decent sky and wouldn’t come into focus. It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings. I looked back at our victims, who seemed almost wholesome compared with that “sky.”

While Rufo was doctoring me, Star squirmed into her tights and put on her buskins. “Is it all right for me to sit up to get into my jacket?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Maybe they’ll think we’re dead.” Rufo and I helped her finish dressing without any of us rising up above the barricade of flesh. I’m sure we hurt her arm but all she said was, “Sling my sword left-handed. What now, Oscar?”

“Where are the garters?”

“Got em. But I’m not sure they will work. This is a very odd place.”

“Confidence,” I told her. “That’s what you told me a few minutes ago. Put your little mind to work believing you can do it.” We ranged ourselves and our plunder, now enhanced by three “rifles” plus side arms of the same sort, then laid out the oaken arrow for the top of the Mile-High Tower. It dominated one whole side of the scene, more a mountain than a building, black and monstrous.

“Ready?” asked Star. “Now you two believe, tool” She scrawled with her finger in the sand. “Go!”

We went. Once in the air, I realized what a naked target we were–but we were a target on the ground, too, for anyone up on that tower, and worse if we had hoofed it. “Faster!” I yelled in Stars ear.
“Make us go faster!”

We did. Air shrilled past our ears and we bucked and dipped and side-slipped as we passed over those gravitational changes Star had warned me about–and perhaps that saved us; we made an evasive target. However, if we got all of that guard party, it was possible that no one in the Tower knew we had arrived.

The ground below was gray-black desert surrounded by a mountain ringwall like a lunar crater and the Tower filled the place of a central peak. I risked another look at the sky and tried to figure it out. No sun. No stars. No black sky nor blue–light came from all over and the “sky” was ribbons and boiling shapes and shadow holes of all colors.

“What in God’s name land of planet is this?” I demanded.

“It’s not a planet,” she yelled back. “It’s a place, in a different sort of universe. It’s not fit to live in.”

“Somebody lives here.” I indicated the Tower.

“No, no, nobody lives here. That was built just to guard the Egg.”

The monstrousness of that idea didn’t soak in right then. I suddenly recalled that we didn’t dare eat or drink here–and started wondering how we could breathe the air if the chemistry was that poisonous. My chest felt tight and started to burn. So I asked Star and Rufo moaned. (He rated a moan or two; he hadn’t thrown up. I don’t think he had.)

“Oh, at least twelve hours,” she said. “Forget it. No importance.”

Whereupon my chest really hurt and I moaned, too.

We were dumped on top of the Tower right after that; Star barely got out “Amech!” in time to keep us from zooming past.

The top was flat, seemed to be black glass, was about two hundred yards square–and there wasn’t a fiddlewinking thing to fasten a line to. I had counted on at least a ventilator stack.

The Egg of the Phoenix was about a hundred yards straight down. I had had two plans in mind if we ever reached the Tower. There were three openings (out of hundreds) which led to true paths to the Egg–and to the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls, the M.P. guarding it. One was at ground level and I never considered it. A second was a couple of hundred feet off the ground and I had given that serious thought: loose an arrow with a messenger line so that the line passed over any projection above that hole; use that to get the strong line up, then go up the line–no trick for any crack Alpinist, which I wasn’t but Rufo was.

But the great Tower turned out to have no projections, real modern simplicity of design–carried too far.

The third plan was, if we could reach the top, to let ourselves down by a line to the third non-fake entrance, almost on level with the Egg. So here we were, all set–and no place to hitch.

Second thoughts are wonderful thoughts–why hadn’t I had Star drive us straight into that hole in the wall?

Well, it would take very fine sighting of that silly arrow; we might hit the wrong pigeonhole. But the important reason was that I hadn’t thought of it.

Star was sitting and nursing her wounded arm. I said, “Honey, can you fly us, slow and easy, down a couple of setbacks and into that hole we want?”

She looked up with drawn face. “No.”

“Well. Too bad.”

“I hate to tell you–but I burned out the garters on that speed run. They won’t be any good until I can recharge them. Not things I can get here. Green mug-wort, blood of a hare–things like that.”

“Boss,” said Rufo, “how about using the whole top of the Tower as a hitching post?”

“How do you mean?”

“We’ve got lots of line.”

It was a workable notion–walk the line around the top while somebody else held the bitter end, then

tie it and go down what hung over. We did it–and finished up with only a hundred feet too little of line out of a thousand yards.

Star watched us. When I was forced to admit that a hundred feet short was as bad as no line at all, she said thoughtfully, “I wonder if Aaron’s Rod would help?”

“Sure, if it was stuck in the top of this overgrown ping-pong table. What’s Aaron’s Rod?”

“It makes stiff things limp and limp things stiff. No, no, not that. Well, that, too, but what I mean is to lay this line across the roof with about ten feet hanging over the far side. Then make that end and the crossing part of the line steel hard–sort of a hook.”

“Can you do it?”

“I don’t know. It’s from The Key of Solomon and it’s an incantation. It depends on whether I can remember it–and on whether such things work in this universe.”

“Confidence, confidence! Of course you can.”

“I can’t even think how it starts. Darling, can you hypnotize? Rufo can’t–or at least not me.”

“I don’t know a thing about it.”

“Do just the way I do with you for a language lesson. Look me in the eye, talk softly, and tell me to remember the words. Perhaps you had better lay out the line first.”

We did so and I used a hundred feet instead of ten for the bill of the hook, on the more-is-better principle. Star lay back and I started talking to her, softly (and without conviction) but over and over again.

Star closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. Suddenly she started to mumble in tongues.

“Hey, Boss! Damn thing is hard as rock and stiff as a life sentence!”

I told Star to wake up and we slid down to the setback below as fast as we could, praying that it wouldn’t go limp on us. We didn’t shift the line; I simply had Star cause more of it to starch up, then I went on down, made certain that I had the right opening, three rows down and fourteen over, then Star slid down and I caught her in my arms; Rufo lowered the baggage, weapons mostly, and followed. We were in the Tower and had been on the planet–correction: the “place”–we had been in the place called Karth-Hokesh not more than forty minutes.

I stopped, got the building matched in my mind with the sketch block map, fixed the direction and location of the Egg, and the “red line” route to it, the true path.

Okay, go on in a few hundred yards, snag the Egg of the Phoenix and go! My chest stopped hurting.

Chapter 15

“Boss,” said Rufo, “Look out over the plain.”

“At what?”

“At nothing,” he answered. “Those bodies are gone. You sure as hell ought to be able to see them, against black sand and not even a bush to break the view.”

I didn’t look. “That’s the moose’s problem, damn it! We’ve got work to do. Star, can you shoot left-handed? One of these pistol things?”

“Certainly, milord.”

“You stay ten feet behind me and shoot anything that moves. Rufo, you follow Star, bow ready and an arrow nocked. Try for anything you see. Sling one of those guns–make a sling out of a bit of line.” I frowned. “We’ll have to abandon most of this. Star, you can’t bend a bow, so leave it behind, pretty as it is, and your quiver. Rufo can sling my quiver with his; we use the same arrows. I hate to abandon my bow, it suits me so. But I must. Damn.”

“I’ll carry it, my Hero.”

“No, any clutter we can’t use must be junked.” I unhooked my canteen, drank deeply, passed it over. “You two finish it and throw it away.” While Rufo drank, Star slung my bow. “Milord husband? It weighs nothing this way and doesn’t hamper my shooting arm. So?”

“Well–If it gets in your way, cut the string and forget it. Now drink your fill and we go.” I peered

down the corridor we were in–fifteen feet wide and the same high, lighted from nowhere and curving away to the right, which matched the picture in my mind. “Ready? Stay closed up. If we can’t slice it, shoot it, or shaft it, we’ll salute it.” I drew sword and we set out, quick march.

Why my sword, rather than one of those “death ray” guns? Star was carrying one of those and knew more about one than I did. I didn’t even know how to tell if one was charged, nor had I judgment in how long to press the button. She could shoot, her bowmanship proved that, and she was at least as cool in a fight as Rufo or myself.

I had disposed weapons and troops as well as I knew how. Rufo, behind with a stock of arrows, could use them if needed and his position gave him time to shift to either sword or Buck Rogers “rifle” if his judgment said to–and I didn’t need to advise him; he would.

So I was backed up by long-range weapons ancient and ultramodern in the hands of people who knew how to use them and temperament to match–the latter being the more important. (Do you know how many men in a platoon actually shoot in combat? Maybe six. More likely three. The rest freeze up.) Still, why didn’t I sheathe my sword and carry one of those wonder weapons?

A properly balanced sword is the most versatile weapon for close quarters ever devised. Pistols and guns are all offense, no defense; close on him fast and a man with a gun can’t shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and you’ll be spitted like a roast pigeon–unless you have a blade and can use it better than he can.

A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can’t be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.

But most of all (and this was the real reason) to grasp the Lady Vivamus and feel her eagerness to bite gave me courage in a spot where I was scared spitless.

They (whoever “they” were) could shoot us from ambush, gas us, booby-trap us, many things. But they could do those things even if I carried one of those strange guns. Sword in hand, I was relaxed and unafraid–and that made my tiny “command” more nearly safe. If a C.O. needs to carry a rabbit’s foot, he should–and the grip of that sweet sword was bigger medicine than all the rabbits’ feet in Kansas.

The corridor stretched ahead, no break, no sound, no threat. Soon the opening to the outside could no longer be seen. The great Tower felt empty but not dead; it was alive the way a museum is alive at night, with crowding presence and ancient evil. I gripped my sword tightly, then consciously relaxed and flexed my fingers.

We came to a sharp left turn. I stopped short. “Star, this wasn’t on your sketch.”

She didn’t answer. I persisted, “Well, it wasn’t. Was it?”

“I am not sure, milord.”

“Well, I am. Hmm–”

“Boss,” said Rufo, “are you dead sure we entered by the right pigeonhole?”

“I’m certain. I may be wrong but I’m not uncertain–and if I’m wrong, we’re dead pigeons anyhow. Mmm–Rufo, take your bow, put your hat on it, stick it out where a man would IOOK around that corner if he were standing–and time it as I do look out, but lower down.” I got on my belly.

“Ready . . . now!” I sneaked a look six inches above the floor while Rufo tried to draw fire higher up.

Nothing in sight, just bare corridor, straight now.

“Okay, follow me! We hurried around the corner.

I stopped after a few paces. “What the hell?”

“Something wrong Boss?”

“Plenty.” I turned and sniffed. “Wrong as can be. The Egg is up that way,” I said, pointing, “maybe two hundred yards–by the sketch block map.”

“Is that bad?”

“I’m not sure. Because it was that same direction and angle, off on the left, before we turned that corner. So now it ought to be on the right.”

Rufo said, “Look, Boss, why don’t we just follow the passageways you memorized? You may not remember every little–”

“Shut up. Watch ahead, down the corridor. Star, stand there in the corner and watch me. I’m going to try something.”

They placed themselves, Rufo “eyes ahead” and Star where she could see both ways, at the right-angle bend. I went back into the first reach of corridor, then returned. Just short of the bend I closed my eyes and kept on.

I stopped after another dozen steps and opened my eyes. “That proves it,” I said to Rufo.

“Proves what?”

“There isn’t any bend in the corridor.” I pointed to the bend.

Rufo looked worried. “Boss, how do you feel?” He tried to touch my cheek.

I pulled back. “I’m not feverish. Come with me, both of you.” I led them back around that right angle some fifty feet and stopped. “Rufo, loose an arrow at that wall ahead of us at the bend. Lob it so that it hits the wall about ten feet up.”

Rufo sighed but did so. The arrow rose true, disappeared in the wall. Rufo shrugged. “Must be pretty soft up there. You’ve lost us an arrow. Boss.”

“Maybe. Places and follow me.” We took that corner again and here was the spent arrow on the floor somewhat farther along than the distance from loosing to bend. I let Rufo pick it up; he looked closely at the Doral chop by the fletching, returned it to quiver. He said nothing. We kept going.

We came to a place where steps led downward–but where the sketch in my head called for steps leading up. “Mind the first step,” I called back. “Feel for it and don’t fall.”

The steps felt normal, for steps leading downward–with the exception that my bump of direction told me that we were climbing, and our destination changed angle and distance accordingly. I closed my eyes for a quick test and found that I was indeed climbing, only my eyes were deceived. It was like one of those “crooked houses” in amusement parks, in which a “level” floor is anything but level–like that but cubed.

I quit questioning the accuracy of Star’s sketch and tracked its trace in my head regardless of what my eyes told me. When the passageway branched four ways while my memory showed only a simple branching, one being a dead end, I unhesitatingly closed my eyes and followed my nose–and the Egg stayed where it should stay, in my mind.

But the Egg did not necessarily get closer with each twist and turn save in the sense that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points–is it ever? The path was as twisted as guts in a belly; the architect had used a pretzel for a straight edge. Worse yet, another time when we were climbing “up”
stairs–at a piece level by the sketch–a gravitational anomaly caught us with a lull turn and we were suddenly sliding down the ceiling.

No harm done save that it twisted again as we hit bottom and dumped us from ceiling to floor. With both eyes peeled I helped Rufo gather up arrows and off we set again. We were getting close to the lair of the Never-Born–and the Egg.

Passageways began to be narrow and rocky, the false twists tight and hard to negotiate–and the light began to fail.

That wasn’t the worst. I’m not afraid of dark nor of tight places; it takes a department store elevator on Dollar Day to give me claustrophobia. But I began to hear rats.

Rats, lots of rats, running and squeaking in the walls around us, under us, over us. I started to sweat and was sorry I had taken that big drink of water. Darkness and closeness got worse, until we were crawling through a rough tunnel in rock, then inching along on our bellies in total darkness as if tunneling out of Chateau d’If . . . and rats brushed past us now, squeaking and chittering.

No, I didn’t scream. Star was behind me and she didn’t scream and she didn’t complain about her wounded arm–so I couldn’t scream. She patted me on the foot each time she inched forward, to tell me that she was all right and to report that Rufo was okay, too. We didn’t waste strength on talk.

I saw a faint something, two ghosts of light ahead, and stopped and stared and blinked and stared again. Then I whispered to Star, “I see something. Stay put, while I move up and see what it is. Hear me?”

“Yes, milord Hero.”

“Tell Rufo.”

Then I did the only really brave thing I have ever done in my life: I inched forward. Bravery is going on anyhow when you are so terrified your sphincters won’t hold and you can’t breathe and your heart threatens to stop, and that is an exact description for that moment of E. C. Gordon, ex-Pfc. and hero by trade. I was fairly certain what those two faint lights were and the closer I got the more certain I was–I could smell the damned thing and place its outlines.

A rat. Not the common rat that lives in city dumps and sometimes gnaws babies, but a giant rat, big enough to block that rat hole but enough smaller than I am to have room to maneuver in attacking me–room I didn’t have at all. The best I could do was to wriggle forward with my sword in front of me and try to Keep the point aimed so that I would catch him with it, make mm eat steel–because if he dodged past that point I would have nothing but bare hands and no room to use them. He would be at my face.

I gulped sour vomit and inched forward. His eyes seemed to drop a little as if he were crouching to charge.

But no rush came. The lights got more definite and wider apart, and when I had squeezed a foot or two farther I realized with shaking relief that they were not rat’s eyes but something else–anything, I didn’t care what.

I continued to inch forward. Not only was the Egg in that direction but I still didn’t know what it was and I had best see before telling Star to move up.

The “eyes” were twin pinholes in a tapestry that covered the end of that rat hole. I could see its embroidered texture and I found I could look through one of its imperfections when I got up to it.

There was a large room beyond, the floor a couple of feet lower than where I was. At the far end, fifty feet away, a man was standing by a bench, reading a book. Even as I watched he raised his eyes and glanced my way. He seemed to hesitate.

I didn’t. The hole had eased enough so that I managed one foot under and lunged forward, brushing the arras aside with my sword. I stumbled and bounced to my feet, on guard.

He was at least as fast. He had slapped the book down on the bench and drawn sword himself, advanced toward me, while I was popping out of that hole. He stopped, knees bent, wrist straight, left arm back, and point for me, perfect as a fencing master, and looked me over, not yet engaged by three or four feet between our steels.

I did not rush him. There is a go-for-broke tactic, “the target,” taught by the best swordmasters, which consists in headlong advance with arm, wrist, and blade in full extension–all attack and no attempt to parry. But it works only by perfect timing when you see your opponent slacken up momentarily.

Otherwise it is suicide.

This time it would have been suicide; he was as ready as a tomcat with his back up. So I sized him up while he looked me over. He was a smallish neat man with arms long for his height–I might or might not have reach on him, especially as his rapier was an old style, longer than Lady Vivamus (but slower thereby, unless he had a much stronger wrist)–and he was dressed more for the Paris of Richelieu than for Karth-Hokesh. No, that’s not fair; the great black Tower had no styles, else I would have been as out of style in my fake Robin Hood getup. The Iglis we had killed had worn no clothes.

He was an ugly cocky little man with a merry grin and the biggest nose west of Durante–made me think of my first sergeant’s nose, very sensitive he was about being called “Schnozzola.” But the resemblance stopped there; my first sergeant never smiled and had mean, piggish eyes; this man’s eyes were merry and proud.

“Are you Christian?” he demanded.

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. Blood’s blood, either way. If Christian you be, confess. If pagan, call your false gods. I’ll allow you no more than three stanzas. But I’m sentimental, I like to know what I’m killing.”

“I’m American.”

“Is that a country? Or a disease? And what are you doing in Hoax?”

” ‘Hoax’? Hokesh?”

He shrugged only with his eyes, his point never moved. “Hoax, Hokesh–a matter of geography and accent; this chateau was once in the Carpathians, so ‘Hokesh’ it is, if ’twill make your death merrier.
Come now, let us sing.”

He advanced so fast and smoothly that he seemed to apport and our blades rang as I parried his attack in sixte and riposted, was countered–remise, reprise, beat-and-attack–the phrase ran so smoothly, so long, and in such variation that a spectator might have thought that we were running through Grand Salute.

But I knew! That first lunge was meant to kill me, and so was his every move throughout the phrase. At the same time he was feeling me out, trying my wrist, looking for weaknesses, whether I was afraid of low line and always returned to high or perhaps was a sucker for a disarm. I never lunged, never had a chance to; every part of the phrase was forced on me, I simply replied, tried to stay alive.

I knew in three seconds that I was up against a better swordsman than myself, with a wrist like steel yet supple as a striking snake. He was the only swordsman I have ever met who used prime and octave–used them, I mean, as readily as sixte and carte. Everyone learns them and my own master made me practice them as much as the other six–but most fencers don’t use them; they simply may be forced into them, awkwardly and just before losing a point.

I would lose, not a point, but my life–and I knew, long before the end of that first long phrase, that my life was what I was about to lose, by all odds.

Yet at first clash the idiot began to sing!

“Lunge and counter and thrust,

“Sing me the logic of steel!

“Tell me, sir, how do you feel?

“Riposte and remise if you must

“In logic long known to be just.

“Shall we argue, rebut and refute

“In enthymeme clear as your eye?

“Tell me, sir, why do you sigh?

“Tu es fatigue, sans doute?

“Then sleep while I’m counting the loot.”

The above was long enough for at least thirty almost successful attempts on my life, and on the last word he disengaged as smoothly and unexpectedly as he had engaged.

“Come, come, lad!” he said. “Pick it up! Would let me sing alone? Would die as a clown with ladies watching? Sing! –and say good-bye gracefully, with your last rhyme racing your death rattle.” He banged his right boot in a flamenco stomp. “Try! The price is the same either way.”

I didn’t drop my eyes at the sound of his boot; it’s an old gambit, some fencers stomp on every advance, every feint, on the chance that the noise will startle opponent out of timing, or into rocking back, and thus gain a point. I had last fallen for it before I could shave.

But his words gave me an idea. His lunges were short–full extension is fancy play for foils, too dangerous for real work. But I had been retreating, slowly, with the wall behind me. Shortly, when he re-engaged, I would either be a butterfly pinned to that wall, or stumble over something unseen, go arsy-versy, then spiked like wastepaper in the park. I didn’t dare leave that wall behind me.

Worst, Star would be coming out of that rat hole behind me any moment now and might be killed as she emerged even if I managed to kill him at the same time. But if I could turn him around–My beloved was a practical woman; no “sportsmanship” would keep her steel stinger out of his back.

But the happy counter-thought was that if I went along with his madness, tried to rhyme and sing, he might play me along, amused to hear what I could do, before he killed me.

But I couldn’t afford to stretch it out. Unfelt, he had pinked me in the forearm. Just a bloody scratch that Star could make good as new in minutes–but it would weaken my wrist before long and it disadvantaged me for low line: Blood makes a slippery grip.

“First stanza,” I announced, advancing and barely engaging, foible-a-foible. He respected it, not attacking, playing with the end of my blade, tiny counters and leather-touch parries.

That was what I wanted. I started circling right as I began to recite–and he let me:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

“Agreed to rustle cattle.

“Said Tweedledum to Tweedledee

“I’ll use my nice new saddle.”

“Come, come, my old!” he said chidingly. “No stealing. Honor among beeves, always. And rhyme and scansion limp. Let your Carroll fall trippingly off the tongue.”

“I’ll try,” I agreed, still moving right. “Second stanza-

“I sing of two lasses in Birmingham,

“Shall we weep at the scandal concerning them?”-

–and I rushed him.

It didn’t quite work. He had, as I hoped, relaxed the tiniest bit, evidently expecting that I would go on with mock play, tips of Hades alone, while I was reciting.

It caught him barely off guard but he failed to fall back, parrying strongly instead and suddenly we were in an untenable position, corps-a-corps, forte-a-forte, almost tete-a-tete.

He laughed in my face and sprang back as I did, landing us back en garde. But I added something. We had been fencing point only. The point is mightier than the edge but my weapon had both and a man
used to the point is sometimes a sucker for a cut. As we separated I flipped my blade at his head.

I meant to split it open. No time for that, no force behind it, but it sliced his right forehead almost to
eyebrow. “Touche” he shouted. “Well struck. And well sung. Let’s have the rest of it.”

“All right,” I agreed, fencing cautiously and waiting for blood to run into his eyes. A scalp wound is the bloodiest of flesh wounds and I had great hopes for this one. And swordplay is an odd thing; you don’t really use your mind, it is much too fast for that. Your wrist thinks and tells your feet and body what to do, bypassing your brain–any thinking you do is for later, stored instructions, like a programmed computer.

I went on:

“They’re now in the dock
“For lifting the–”

No help to me–A right-handed fencer hates to take on a southpaw; it throws everything out of balance, whereas a southpaw is used to the foibles of the right-handed majority–and this son of a witch was just as strong, just as skilled, with his left hand. Worse, he now had toward me the eye undimmed by blood.

He pinked me again, in the kneecap, hurting like fire and slowing me. Despite his wounds, much worse than mine, I knew I couldn’t go on much longer. We settled down to grim work.

There is a riposte in seconde, desperately dangerous but brilliant–if you bring it off. It had won me several matches in 6pee with nothing at stake but a score. It starts from sixte; first your opponent counters. Instead of parrying to carte, you press and bind, sliding all the way down and around his blade and corkscrewing in till your point finds flesh. Or you can beat, counter, and bind, starting from sixte, thus setting it off yourself.

Its shortcoming is that, unless it is done perfectly, it is too late for parry and riposte; you run your own chest against his point.

I didn’t try to initiate it, not against this swordsman; I just thought about it.

We continued to fence, perfectly each of us. Then he stepped back slightly while countering and barely
skidded in his own blood.

My wrist took charge; I corkscrewed in with a perfect bind to seconde–and my blade went through his body. He looked surprised, brought his bell up in salute, and crumpled at the knees as the grip fell from his hand. I had to move forward with my blade as he fell, then started to pull it out of him.

He grasped it. “No, no, my friend, please leave it there. It corks the wine, for a time. Your logic is sharp and touches my heart. Your name, sir?”

“Oscar of Gordon.”

“A good name. One should never be killed by a stranger. Tell me, Oscar of Gordon, have you seen Carcassonne?”

“No.”

“See it. Love a lass, kill a man, write a book, fly to the Moon–I have done all these.” He gasped and foam came out of his mouth, pink. “I’ve even had a house fall on me. What devastating wit! What price honor when timber taps thy top? ‘Top?’ tap? taupe, tape–tonsor! –when timber taps thy tonsor. You shaved mine.”

He choked and went on: “It grows dark. Let us exchange gifts and part friends, if you will. My gift first, in two parts: Item: You are lucky, you shall not die in bed.”

“I guess not.”

“Please. Item: Friar Guillaume’s razor ne’er shaved the barber, it is much too dull. And now your gift, my old–and be quick, I need it. But first–now did that limerick end?”

I told him. He said, very weakly, almost in rattle, “Very good. Keep trying. Now grant me your gift, I am more than ready.” He tried to Sign himself.

So I granted him grace, stood wearily up, went to the bench and collapsed on it, then cleaned both blades, first wiping the little Solingen, then most carefully grooming the Lady Vivamus. I managed to stand and salute him with a clean sword. It had been an honor to know him.

I was sorry I hadn’t asked him his name. He seemed to think I knew it.

I sat heavily down and looked at the arras covering the rat hole at the end of the room and wondered why Star and Rufo hadn’t come out. All that clashing steel and talk–I thought about walking over and shouting for them. But I was too weary to move just yet. I sighed and closed my eyes-

Through sheer boyish high spirits (and carelessness I had been chided for, time and again) I had broken a dozen eggs. My mother looked down at the mess and I could see that she was about to cry. So I clouded up too. She stopped her tears, took me gently by the shoulder, and said, “It’s all right, son. Eggs aren’t that important.” But I was ashamed, so I twisted away and ran.

Downhill I ran, heedless and almost flying–then was shockingly aware that I was at the wheel and the car was out of control. I groped for the brake pedal, couldn’t find it and felt panic . . . then did find it–and felt it sink with that mushiness that means you’ve lost brake-fluid pressure. Something ahead in the road and I couldn’t see. Couldn’t even turn my head and my eyes were clouded with something running down into them. I twisted the wheel and nothing happened–radius rod gone.

Screams in my car as we hit! –and I woke up in bed with a jerk and the screams were my own. I was going to be late to school, disgrace not to be borne. Never born, agony shameful, for the schoolyard was empty; the other kids, scrubbed and virtuous, were in their seats and I couldn’t find my classroom. Hadn’t even had time to go to the bathroom and here I was at my desk with my pants down about to do what I had been too hurried to do before I left home and all the other kids had their hands up but teacher was calling on me. I couldn’t stand up to recite; my pants were not only down I didn’t have any on at all if I stood up they would see it the boys would laugh at me the girls would giggle and look away and tilt their noses. But the unbearable disgrace was that I didn’t know the answer!

“Come, come!” my teacher said sharply. “Don’t waste the class’s time, E.G. You Haven’t Studied Your Lesson.”

Well, no, I hadn’t. Yes, I had, but she had written “Problems 1-6” on the blackboard and I had taken that as “1 and 6”–and this was number 4. But She would never believe me; the excuse was too thin. We pay off on touchdowns, not excuses.

“That’s how it is, Easy,” my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. “Yardage is all very well but you don’t make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm.” He pointed at the football on his desk. “There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you–it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet.” His brow wrinkled and he spoke as if trying to be fair. “I won’t say you could have saved things all by yourself. But you do take things too easy. Easy–maybe you need another name. When the road gets rough, you could try harder.” He sighed. “My fault, I should have cracked down. Instead, I tried to be a father to you. But I want you to know you aren’t the only one who loses by this–at my age it’s not easy to find a new job.”

I pulled the covers up over my head; I couldn’t stand to look at him. But they wouldn’t let me alone; somebody started shaking my shoulder. “Gordon!”

“Le’me ‘lone!”

“Wake up, Gordon, and get your ass inside. You’re in trouble.”

I certainly was, I could tell that as soon as I stepped into the office. There was a sour taste of vomit in my mouth and I felt awful–as if a herd of buffaloes had walked over me, stepping on me here and there. Dirty ones.

The First Sergeant didn’t look at me when I came in; he let me stand and sweat first. When he did look up, he examined me up and down before speaking.

Then he spoke slowly, letting me taste each word. “Absent Over Leave, terrorizing and insulting native women, unauthorized use of government property . . . scandalous conduct . . . insubordinate and obscene language . . . resisting arrest . . . striking an M.P.–Gordon, why didn’t you steal a horse? We hang horse thieves in these parts. It would make it all so much simpler.”

He smiled at his own wit. The old bastard always had thought he was a wit. He was half right.

But I didn’t give a damn what he said. I realized dully that it had all been a dream, just another of those dreams I had had too often lately, wanting to get out of this aching jungle. Even She hadn’t been real. My–what was her name? –even her name I had made up. Star. My Lucky Star–Oh, Star, my darling, you aren’t!

He went on: “I see you took off your chevrons. Well, that saves time but that’s the only thing good about it. Out of uniform. No shave. And your clothes are filthy! Gordon, you are a disgrace to the Army of the United States. You know that, don’t you? And you can’t sing your way out of this one. No I.D. on you, no pass, using a name not your own. Well, Evelyn Cyril my fine lad, we’ll use your right name now. Officially.”

He swung around in his swivel chair–he hadn’t had his fat ass out of it since they sent him to Asia, no patrols for him. “Just one thing I’m curious about. Where did you get that? And whatever possessed you to try to steal it?” He nodded at a file case behind his desk.

I recognized what was sitting on it, even though it had been painted with gold gilt the last time I recalled seeing it whereas now it was covered with the special black gluey mud they grow in Southeast Asia. I started toward it. “That’s mine!”

“No, no!” he said sharply. “Burny, burny, boy.” He moved the football farther back. “Stealing it doesn’t make it yours. I’ve taken charge of it as evidence. For your information, you phony hero, the docs think he’s going to die.”

“Who?”

“Why should you care who? Two bits to a Bangkok tickul you didn’t know his name when you clobbered him. You can’t go around clobbering natives just because you’re feeling brisk–they’ve got rights, maybe you hadn’t heard. You’re supposed to clobber them only when and where you are told to.”

Suddenly he smiled. It didn’t improve him. With his long, sharp nose and his little bloodshot eyes I suddenly realized how much he looked like a rat.

But he went on smiling and said, “Evelyn my boy, maybe you took off those chevrons too soon.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. There may be a way out of this mess. Sit down.” He repeated sharply, ” ‘Sit down,’ I said. If I had my way we’d simply Section-Eight you and forget you–anything to get rid of you. But the Company Commander has other ideas–a really brilliant idea that could close your whole file. There’s a raid planned for tonight. So”–he leaned over, got a bottle of Four Roses and two cups out of his desk, poured two drinks–“have a drink.”

Everybody knew about that bottle–everybody but the Company Commander, maybe. But the top sergeant had never been known to offer anyone a drink–save one time when he had followed it by telling his victim that he was being recommended for a general court-martial.

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, take it. Hair of the dog. You’re going to need it. Then go take a shower and get yourself looking decent even if you aren’t, before you see the Company Commander.”

I stood up. I wanted that drink, I needed it. I would have settled for the worst rotgut–and Four Roses is pretty smooth–but I would have settled for the firewater old–what was his name? –had used to burst my eardrums.

But I didn’t want to drink with him. I should not drink anything at all here. Nor eat any-

I spat in his face.

He looked utterly shocked and started to melt. I drew my sword and had at him.

It got dark but I kept on laying about me, sometimes connecting, sometimes not.

Chapter 16

Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up!”

“Le’me lone!”

“You’ve got to wake up. Boss, please wake up.”

“Yes, my Hero–please!”

I opened my eyes, smiled at her, then tried to look around. Kee-ripes, what a shambles! In the middle of it, close to me, was a black glass pillar, thick and about five feet high. On top was the Egg. “Is that it?”

“Yep!” agreed Rufo. “That’s it! He looked battered but gay.

“Yes, my Hero champion,” Star confirmed, “that is the true Egg of the Phoenix. I have tested.”

“Uh–” I looked around. “Then where’s old Soul-Eater?”

“You killed it. Before we got here. You still had sword in hand and the Egg tucked tightly under your left arm. We had much trouble getting them loose so that I could work on you.” I looked down my front, saw what she meant, and looked away. Red just isn’t my color. To take my mind off surgery I said to Rufo, “What took you so long?”

Star answered, “I thought we would never find you!”

“How did you find me?”

Rufo said, “Boss, we couldn’t exactly lose you. We simply followed your trail of blood–even when it dead-ended into blank walls. She is stubborn.”

“Uh . . . see any dead men?”

“Three or four. Strangers, no business of ours. Constructs, most likely. We didn’t dally.” He added,

“And we won’t dally getting out, either, once you’re patched up enough to walk. Time is short.”

I flexed my right knee, cautiously. It still hurt where I had been pinked on the kneecap, but what Star had done was taking the soreness out. “My legs are all right. I’ll be able to walk as soon as Star is through. But”–I frowned–“I don’t relish going through that rat tunnel again. Rats give me the willies.”

“What rats, Boss? In which tunnel?”

So I told him.

Star made no comment. Just went on plastering me and sticking on dressings. Rufo said, “Boss, you did get down on your knees and crawl–in a passage just like all the others. I couldn’t see any sense to it but you had proved that you knew what you were doing, so we didn’t argue, we did it. When you told us to wait while you scouted, we did that, too–until we had waited a long time and She decided that we had better try to find you.”

I let it drop.

We left almost at once, going out the “front” way and had no trouble, no illusions, no traps, nothing but the fact that the “true path” was long and tedious. Rufo and I stayed alert, same formation, with Star in the middle carrying the Egg.

Neither Star nor Rufo knew whether we were still likely to be attacked, nor could we have held off

anything stronger than a Cub Scout pack. Only Rufo could bend a bow and I could no longer wield a sword. However, the single necessity was to give Star time to destroy the Egg rather than let it be captured. “But that’s nothing to worry about,” Rufo assured me. “About like being at ground-zero with an A-weapon. You’ll never notice it.”

Once we were outside it was a longish hike to the Grotto Hills and the other Gate. We lunched as we hiked–I was terribly hungry–and shared Rufo’s brandy and Stars water without too much water. I felt pretty good by the time we reached the cave of this Gate; I didn’t even mind sky that wasn’t sky but some sort of roof, nor the odd shifts in gravitation.

A diagram or “pentacle” was already in this cave. Star had only to freshen it, then we waited a bit–that had been the rush, to get there before that “Gate” could be opened; it wouldn’t be available for weeks or perhaps months thereafter–much too long for any human to live in Karth-Hokesh.

We were in position a few minutes early. I was dressed like the Warlord of Mars–just me and sword belt and sword. We all lightened ship to the limit as Star was tired and pulling live things through would be strain enough. Star wanted to save my pet longbow but I vetoed it. She did insist that I keep the Lady Vivamus and I didn’t argue very hard; I didn’t want ever to be separated from my sword again. She touched it and told me that it was not dead metal, but now part of me.

Rufo wore only his unpretty pink skin, plus dressings; his attitude was that a sword was a sword and he had better ones at home. Star was, for professional reasons, wearing no more.

“How long?” asked Rufo, as we joined hands.

“Count down is minus two minutes,” she answered. The clock in Star’s head is as accurate as my bump of direction. She never used a watch.

“You’ve told him?” said Rufo.

“No.”

Rufo said, “Haven’t you any shame? Don’t you think you’ve conned him long enough?” He spoke with surprising roughness and I was about to tell him that he must not speak to her that way. But Star cut him off.

“QUIET!” She began to chant. Then–“Now!”

Suddenly it was a different cave. “Where are we?” I asked. I felt heavier.

“On Nevia’s planet,” Rufo answered. “Other side of the Eternal Peaks–and I’ve got a good mind to get off and see Jocko.”

“Do it,” Star said angrily. “You talk too much.”

“Only if my pal Oscar comes along. Want to, old comrade? I can get us there, take about a week. No dragons. They’ll be glad to see you–especially Muri.”

“You leave Muri out of this!” Star was actually shrill.

“Can’t take it, huh?” he said sourly. “Younger woman and all that.”

“You know that’s not it!”

“Oh, how very much it is!” he retorted. “And how long do you think you can get away with it? It’s not fair, it never was fair. It–”

“Silence! Count down right now!” We joined hands again and whambo! we were in another place.

This was still another cave with one side partly open to the outdoors; the air was very thin and bitterly cold and snow had sifted in. The diagram was let into rock in raw gold. “Where is this?” I wanted to know.

“On your planet,” Star answered. “A place called Tibet.”

“And you could change trains here,” Rufo added, “if She weren’t so stubborn. Or you could walk out–although it’s a long, tough walk; I did it once.” I wasn’t tempted. The last I had heard, Tibet was in the hands of unfriendly peace-lovers. “Will we be here long?” I asked. “This place needs central heating.” I wanted to hear anything but more argument. Star was my beloved and I couldn’t stand by and hear anyone be rude to her–but Rufo was my blood brother by much lost blood; I owed my life to him several times over.

“Not long,” answered Star. She looked drawn and tired. “But time enough to get this straightened out,” added Rufo, “so that you can make up your own mind and not be carried around like a cat in a sack. She should have told you long since. She–”

“Positions!” snapped Star. “Count down coming up. Rufo, if you don’t shut up, I’ll leave you here and let you walk out again–in deep snow barefooted to your chin.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Threats make me as stubborn as you are. Which is surprising. Oscar, She is–” “SILENCE!”

“–Empress of the Twenty Universes–“

Chapter 17

We were in a large octagonal room, with lavishly beautiful silvery walls.
“–and my grandmother,” Rufo finished.

Not ‘Empress,’ ” Star protested. “That’s a silly word for it.”

“Near enough.” “And as for the other, that’s my misfortune, not my fault.” Star jumped to her feet, no longer looking tired, and put one arm around my waist as I got up, while she held the Egg of the Phoenix with the other.

“Oh, darling I’m so happy! We made it! Welcome home, my Hero!”

“Where?” I was sluggy–too many time zones, too many ideas, too fast.

“Home. My home. Your home now–if you’ll have it. Our home.”

“Uh, I see . . . my Empress.” She stomped her foot. “Don’t call me that!”

“The proper form of address,” said Rufo, “is ‘Your Wisdom.’ Isn’t it, Your Wisdom?”

“Oh, Rufo, shut up. Go fetch clothes for us.”

He shook his head. “War’s over and I just got paid off. Fetch ’em yourself. Granny.”

“Rufo, you’re impossible.”

“Sore at me, Granny?”

“I will be if you don’t stop calling me ‘Granny.’ ” Suddenly she handed the Egg to me, put her arms around Rufo and kissed him. “No, Granny’s not sore at you,” she said softly. “You always were a naughty child and I’ll never quite forget the time you put oysters in my bed. But I guess you came by it honestly–from your grandmother.” She kissed him again and mussed his fringe of white hair. “Granny loves you. Granny always will. Next to Oscar, I think you are about perfect–aside from being an unbearable, untruthful, spoiled, disobedient, disrespectful brat.”

“That’s better,” he said. “Come to think of it, I feel the same way about you. What do you want to wear?”

“Mmm . . . get out a lot of things. It’s been so long since I had a decent wardrobe.” She turned back to me. “What would you like to wear, my Hero?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Whatever you think is appropriate–Your Wisdom.”

“Oh, darling, please don’t call me that. Not ever.” She seemed suddenly about to cry.

“All right. What shall I call you?”

“Star is the name you gave me. If you must call me something else, you could call me your ‘princess.’ I’m not a princess–and I’m not an ’empress’ either; that’s a poor translation. But I like being ‘your princess’–the way you say it. Or it can be ‘lively wench’ or any of lots of things you’ve been calling me.” She looked up at me very soberly. “Just like before. Forever.”

“I’ll try . . . my princess.”

“My Hero.”

“But there seems to be a lot I don’t know.”

She shifted from English to Nevian. “Milord husband, I wished to tell all. I sighed to tell you. And milord will be told everything. But I held mortal fear that milord, if told too soon, would refuse to come with me. Not to the Black Tower, but to here. Our home.”

“Perhaps you chanced wisely,” I answered in the same language. “But I am here, milady wife–my princess. So tell me. I wish it.”

She shifted back to English. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk. But it will take time. Darling, will you hold your horses just a bit longer? Having been patient with me–so very patient, my love! –for so long?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll string along. But, look, I don’t know the streets in this neighborhood, I’ll need some hints. Remember the mistake I made with old Jocko just from not knowing local customs.”

“Yes, dear, I will. But don’t worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones–and this one isn’t primitive.” Rufo dumped then a great heap of clothing at her feet. She turned away, a hand still on my arm, put a finger to her mouth with a very intent, almost worried look. “Now let me see. What shall I wear?”

“Complex” is a relative matter; I’ll sketch only the outlines.

Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not “Empress” and it is not an empire.

I’ll go on calling her “Star” as hundreds of names were hers and I’ll call it an “empire” because no other word is close, and I’ll refer to “emperors” and “empresses”–and to the Empress, my wife.

Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of “natural” laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam’s Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes “places,” where human beings live. I won’t try to say what lives elsewhere.

The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires–yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.

Seven thousand years ago a notion was born for coping with political problems too big to handle. It was modest at first: How could a planet be run without ruining it? This planet’s people included expert cyberneticists but otherwise were hardly farther along than we are; they were still burning the barn to get
the rats and catching their thumbs in machinery. These experimenters picked an outstanding ruler and tried to help him.

Nobody knew why this bloke was so successful but he was and that was enough; they weren’t hipped on theory. They gave him cybernetic help, taping for him all crises in their history, all known details, what was done, and the outcomes of each, all organized so that he could consult it almost as you consult your memory.

It worked. In time he was supervising the whole planet–Center it was, with another name then. He didn’t rule it, he just untangled hard cases.

They taped also everything this first “Emperor” did, good and bad, for guidance of his successor.

The Egg of the Phoenix is a cybernetic record of the experiences of two hundred and three “emperors” and “empresses,” most of whom “ruled” all the known universes. Like a foldbox, it is bigger inside than out. In use, it is more the size of the Great Pyramid.

Phoenix legends abound throughout the Universes: the creature that dies but is immortal, rising ever young from its own ashes. The Egg is such a wonder, for it is far more than a taped library now; it is a print, right down to their unique personalities, of all experience of all that line from His Wisdom IX through Her Wisdom CCIV, Mrs. Oscar Gordon.

The office is not hereditary. Star’s ancestors include His Wisdom I and most of the other wisdoms–but millions of others have as much “royal” blood. Her grandson Rufo was not picked although he shares all her ancestors. Or perhaps he turned it down. I never asked, it would have reminded him of a time one of his uncles did something obscene and improbable. Nor is it a question one asks.

Once tapped, a candidate’s education includes everything from how to cook tripe to highest mathematics–including all forms of personal combat for it was realized millennia ago that, no matter how well he was guarded, the victim would wear better if he himself could fight like an angry buzz saw. I stumbled on this through asking my beloved an awkward question.

I was still trying to get used to the fact that I had married, a grandmother, whose grandson looked older than I did and was even older than he looked. The people of Center live longer than we do anyway and both Star and Rufo had received “Long-Life” treatment. This takes getting used to. I asked Star, “How long do you ‘wisdoms’ live?”

“Not too long,” she answered almost harshly. “Usually we are assassinated.”

(My big mouth–)

A candidate’s training includes travel in many worlds–not all planets-places inhabited by human beings; nobody lives that long. But many. After a candidate completes all this and if selected as heir, postgraduate work begins: the Egg itself. The heir has imprinted in him (her) the memories, the very personalities, of past emperors. He (She) becomes an integration of them. Star-Plus. A supernova. Her Wisdom.

The living personality is dominant but all that mob is there, too. Without using the Egg, Star could recall experiences that happened to people dead many centuries. With the Egg–herself hooked into the cybernet–she had seven thousand years of sharp, just-yesterday memories.

Star admitted to me that she had hesitated ten years before accepting the nomination. She hadn’t wanted to be all those people; she had wanted to go on being herself, living as she pleased. But the methods used to pick candidates (I don’t know them, they are lodged in the Egg) seem almost infallible; only three have ever refused.

When Star became Empress she had barely started the second half of her training, having had imprinted in her only seven of her predecessors. Imprinting does not take long but the victim needs recovery time between prints–for she gets every damned thing that ever happened to him, bad and good: the time he was cruel to a pet as a child and his recalled shame of it in his mature years, the loss of his virginity, the unbearably tragic time that he goofed a really serious one–all of it.

“I must experience their mistakes,” Star told me. “Mistakes are the only certain way to learn.”

So the whole weary structure is based on subjecting one person to all the miserable errors of seven thousand years.

Mercifully the Egg doesn’t have to be used often. Most of the time Star could be herself, no more bothered by imprinted memories than you are over that nasty remark in second grade. Most problems Star could solve shooting from the hip–no recourse to the Black Room and a full hookup.

For the one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don’t do anything.

Always King Log, never King Stork–“Live and let live.” “Let well enough alone.” “Time is the best physician.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”

Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors’ Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don’t demand justice, you too will be judged.

Above all, don’t put serious problems to a popular vote. Oh, there is no rule against local democracy, just in imperial matters. Old Rufo–excuse me; Doctor Rufo, a most distinguished comparative culturologist (with a low taste for slumming)–Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in. many primitive societies . . . but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”

But Rufo claimed to enjoy democracy–any time he felt depressed he sampled Washington, and the antics of the French Parliament were second only to the antics of French women.

I asked him how advanced societies ran things.

His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”

That described the Empress of Twenty Universes: Mostly she didn’t.

But sometimes she did. She might say: “This mess will clear up if you will take that troublemaker there–What’s your name? You with the goatee–out and shoot him. Do it now.” (I was present. They did it now. He was head of the delegation which had brought the problem to her–some fuss between intergalactic trading empires in the VIIth Universe–and his chief deputy pinned his arms and his own delegates dragged him outside and killed him. Star went on drinking coffee. It’s better coffee than we get back home and I was so upset that I poured myself a cup.)

An Emperor has no power. Yet, if Star decided that a certain planet should be removed, people would get busy and there would be a nova in that sky. Star has never done this but it has been done in the past. Not often–His Wisdom will search his soul (and the Egg) a long time before decreeing anything so final even when his hypertrophied horse sense tells him that there is no other solution.

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive–and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity,

never seeking perfection, no Utopias–just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.

Local affairs are local. Infanticide? –they’re your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief–the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.

The Crisis of the Egg started long before I was born. His Wisdom CCIII was assassinated and the Egg stolen at the same time. Some baddies wanted power–and the Egg, by its unique resources, has latent in it key to such power as Genghis Khan never dreamed.

Why should anybody want power? I can’t understand it. But some do, and they did.

So Star came to office hall-trained, faced by the greatest crisis the Empire had ever suffered, and cut off from her storehouse of Wisdom.

But not helpless. Imprinted in her was the experience of seven hypersensible men and she had all the cyber-computer system save that unique part known as the Egg. First she had to find out what had been done with the Egg. It wasn’t safe to mount an attack on the planet of the baddies; it might destroy the Egg.

Available were ways to make a man talk if one didn’t mind using him up. Star didn’t mind. I don’t mean anything so crude as rack and tongs. This was more like peeling an onion, and they peeled several.

Karth-Hokesh is so deadly that it was named for the only explorers to visit it and come back alive. (We were in a “garden subdivision,” the rest is much worse.) The baddies made no attempt to stay there; they just cached the Egg and set guards and booby traps around it and on the routes to it.

I asked Rufo, “What use was the Egg there?”

“None,” he agreed. “But they soon learned that it was no use anywhere–without Her. They needed either its staff of cyberneticists . . . or they needed Her Wisdom. They couldn’t open the Egg. She is the only one who can do that unassisted. So they baited a trap for Her. Capture Her Wisdom, or kill Her–capture by preference, kill Her if need be and then try for key people here at Center. But they didn’t dare risk the second while She was alive.”

Star started a search to determine the best chance of recovering the Egg. Invade Karth-Hokesh? The machines said, “Hell, no!” I would say no, too. How do you mount an invasion into a place where a man not only can’t eat or drink anything local but can’t breathe the air more than a few hours? When a massive assault will destroy what you are after? When your beachheads are two limited Gates?

The computers kept coming up with a silly answer, no matter how the question was framed.

Me.

A “Hero,” that is–a man with a strong back, a weak mind, and a high regard for his own skin. Plus other traits. A raid by a thus-and-so man, if aided by Star herself, might succeed. Rufo was added by a hunch Star had (hunches of Their Wisdoms being equal to strokes of genius) and the machines confirmed this. “I was drafted,” said Rufo. “So I refused. But I never have had any sense where She is concerned, damn it; She spoiled me when I was a kid.”

There followed years of search for the specified man. (Me, again–I’ll never know why.) Meanwhile brave men were feeling out the situation and, eventually, mapping the Tower. Star herself reconnoitered, and got acquainted in Nevia, too.

(Is Nevia part of the “Empire?” It is and it isn’t. Nevia’s planet has the only Gates to Karth-Hokesh other than one from the planet of the baddies; that is its importance to the Empire–and the Empire isn’t important to Nevia at all.)

This “Hero” was most likely to be found on a barbaric planet such as Earth. Star checked, and turned down, endless candidates winnowed from many rough peoples before her nose told her that I might do.

I asked Rufo what chance the machines gave us.

“What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“Well, I know a little of cybernetics.”

“You think you do. Still–There was a prediction. Thirteen percent success, seventeen percent no game–and seventy percent death for us all.”

I whistled. “You should whistle!” he said indignantly. “You didn’t know any more than a cavalry horse knows. You had nothing to be scared of.”

“I was scared.”

“You didn’t have time to be. It was planned so. Our one chance lay in reckless speed and utter surprise. But I knew. Son, when you told us to wait, there in the Tower, and disappeared and didn’t come back, why, I was so scared I caught up on my regretting.”

Once set up, the raid happened as I told it. Or pretty much so, although I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean “magic.” How many times have savages concluded “magic” when a “civilized” man came along with something the savage couldn’t understand? How often is some tag, such as “television,” accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when “magic” would be the honest word?

Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.

But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Oh, yes, putting me to sleep for the first transition was to keep from scaring a savage silly. Nor did the “black biers” cross over–that was posthypnotic suggestion, by an expert: my wife.

Did I say what happened to the baddies? Nothing. Their Gates were destroyed; they are isolated until they develop star travel. Good enough, by the sloppy standards of the Empire. Their Wisdoms never carry grudges.

Chapter 18

Center is a lovely planet, Earth-like but lacking Earth’s faults. It has been retailored over millennia to make it a Never-Never Land. Desert and snow and jungle were saved enough for pleasure; floods and other disasters were engineered out of existence.

It is uncrowded but has a large population for its size–that of Mars but with oceans. Surface gravity is almost that of Earth. (A higher constant, I understand.) About half the population is transient, as its great beauty and unique cultural assets–focus of twenty universes–make it a tourist’s paradise. Everything is done for the comfort of visitors with an all-out thoroughness like that of the Swiss but with technology not known on Earth.

Star and I had residences a dozen places around the planet (and endless others in other universes); they ranged from palaces to a tiny fishing lodge where Star did her own cooking. Mostly we lived in apartments to an artificial mountain that housed the Egg and its staff; adjacent were halls, conference rooms, secretariat, etc. If Star felt like working she wanted such things at hand. But a system ambassador or visiting emperor of a hundred systems had as much chance of being invited into our private home as a hobo at the back door of a Beverly Hills mansion has of being invited into the drawing room.

But if Star happened to like him, she might fetch him home for a midnight snack. She did that once–a funny little leprechaun with four arms and a habit of tap-dancing his gestures. But she did no official entertaining and felt no obligation to attend social affairs. She did not hold press conferences, make speeches, receive delegations of Girl Scouts, lay cornerstones, proclaim special “Days,” make ceremonial appearances, sign papers, deny rumors, nor any of the time-gnawing things that sovereigns and VIPs do on Earth.

She consulted individuals, often summoning them from other universes, and she had at her disposal all the news from everywhere, organized in a system that had been developed over centuries. It was through this system that she decided what problems to consider. One chronic complaint was that the Imperium ignored “vital questions”–and so it did. Her Wisdom passed judgment only on problems she selected; the bedrock of the system was that most problems solved themselves.

We often went to social events; we both enjoyed parties and, for Her Wisdom and Consort, there was endless choice. There was one negative protocol: Star neither accepted nor regretted invitations, showed up when she pleased and refused to be fussed over. This was a drastic change for capital society as her predecessor had imosed protocol more formal than that of the Vatican.

One hostess complained to me about how dull society had become under the new rules–maybe I could do something?

I did. I looked up Star and told her the remark whereupon we left and joined a drunken artists’ ball–a luau!

Center is such a hash of cultures, races, customs, and styles that it has few rules. The one invariant custom was: Don’t impose your customs on me. People wore what they did at home, or experimented with other styles; any social affair looked like a free-choice costume ball. A guest could show up at a swank party stark naked without causing talk–and some did, a small minority. I don’t mean non-humans or hirsute humans; clothes are not for them. I mean humans who would look at home in New York in American clothes–and others who would attract notice even in l’Ile du Levant because they have no hair at all, not even eyebrows. This is a source of pride to them; it shows their “superiority” to us hairy apes,

they are as proud as a Georgia cracker is of his deficiency in melanin. So they go naked oftener than other human races. I found their appearance startling but one gets used to it.

Star wore clothes outside our home, so I did. Star would never miss a chance to dress up, an endearing weakness that made it possible to forget, at times, her Imperial status. She never dressed twice alike and was ever trying something new–and disappointed if I didn’t notice. Some of her choices would cause heart failure even on a Riviera beach. She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off.

One of Star’s most effective outfits was the simplest. Rufo happened to be with us and she got a sudden notion to dress as we had on the Quest of the Egg–and biff, bang, costumes were available, or manufactured to order, as may be; Nevian clothes are most uncommon in Center.

Bows, arrows, and quivers were produced with the same speed and Merry Men were we. It made me feel good to buckle on the Lady Vivamus; she had been hanging untouched on a wall of my study ever since the great black Tower.

Star stood, feet planted wide, fists on hips, head thrown back, eyes bright, and cheeks flushed. “Oh, this is fun! I feel good, I feel young! Darling, promise me, promise me truly, that someday we will again go on an adventure! I get so damn sick of being sensible.”

She spoke English, as the language of Center is ill suited to such ideas. It’s a pidgin language with thousands of years of imports and changes and is uninflected, positional, and flat.

“Suits,” I agreed. “How about it, Rufo? Want to walk that Glory Road?”

“After they pave it.”

“Guff. You’ll come, I know you. Where and when, Star? Never mind ‘where’–just ‘when.’ Skip the party and start right now!”

Suddenly she was not merry. “Darling, you know I can’t. I’m less than a third of the way through my training.”

“I should have busted that Egg when I found it.”

“Don’t be cross, darling. Let’s go to the party and have fun.”

We did. Travel on Center is by apports, artificial “Gates” that require no “magic” (or perhaps still more); one sets destination like punching buttons in an elevator, so there is no traffic problem in cities–nor a thousand other unpleasant things; they don’t let the bones show in their cities. Tonight Star chose to get off short of destination, swagger through a park, and make an entrance. She knows how well tights suit her long legs and solid buttocks; she rolled her hips like a Hindu woman.

Folks, we were a sensation! Swords aren’t worn in Center, save possibly by visitors. Bows and arrows are hen’s teeth, too. We were as conspicuous as a knight in armor on Fifth Avenue.

Star was as happy as a kid playing trick-or-treat. So was I. I felt two axe handles across the shoulders and wanted to hunt dragons.

It was a ball not unlike one on Earth. (According to Rufo, all our races everywhere have the same basic entertainment: get together in mobs to dance, drink, and gossip. He claimed that the stag affair and the hen party are symptoms of a sick culture. I won’t argue.) We swaggered down a grand staircase, music stopped, people stared and gasped–and Star enjoyed being noticed. Musicians got raggedly back to work and guests went back to the negative politeness the Empress usually demanded. But we still got attention. I had thought that the story of the Quest of the Egg was a state secret as I had never heard it mentioned. But, even if known, I still would have expected the details to be known only to us three.

Not so. Everyone knew what those costumes meant, and more. I was at the buffet, sopping up brandy and a Dagwood of my own invention, when I was cornered by Schherazade’s sister, the pretty one. She was of one of the human-but-not-like-us races. She was dressed in rubies the size of your thumb and reasonably opaque cloth. She stood about five-five, barefooted, weighed maybe one twenty and her waist couldn’t have been over fifteen inches, which exaggerated two other measurements that did not need it. She was brunette, with the slantiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She looked like a beautiful cat and looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.

“Self,” she announced.

“Speak.”

“Sverlani. World–” (Name and code–I had never heard of it.) “Student food designer, mathematicosybaritic.”

“Oscar Gordon. Earth. Soldier.” I omitted the I.D. for Earth; she knew who I was.

“Questions?”

“Ask.”

“Is sword?”

“Is.”

She looked at it and her pupils dilated, “Is-was sword destroy construct guard Egg?” (“Is this sword
now present the direct successor in space-time sequential change, aside from theoretical anomalies involved in between-universe transitions, of the sword used to loll the Never-Born?” The double tense of the verb, present-past, stipulates and brushes aside the concept that identity is a meaningless abstraction–is this the sword you actually used, in the everyday meaning, and don’t kid me, soldier. I’m no child.)

“Was-is,” I agreed. (“I was there and I guarantee that I followed it all the way here, so it still is.”)

She gave a little gasp and her nipples stood up. Around each was painted, or perhaps tattooed, the multi-universal design we call “Wall of Troy”–and so strong was her reaction that Ileum’s ramparts crumbled again.

“Touch?” she said pleadingly.

“Touch.”

“Touch twice?” (“Please, may I handle it enough to get the feel of it? Pretty please, with sugar on it! I ask too much and it is your right to refuse, but I guarantee not to hurt it”–they get mileage out of words, but the flavor is in the manner.)

I didn’t want to, not the Lady Vivamus. But I’m a sucker for pretty girls. “Touch . . . twice,” I grudged. I drew it and handed it to her guard foremost, alert to grab it before she put somebody’s eye out or stabbed herself in the foot.

She accepted it gingerly, eyes and mouth big, grasping it by the guard instead of the grip. I had to show her. Her hand was far too small for it; her hands and feet, like her waist, were ultra slender.

She spotted the inscription. “Means?”

Dum vivimus, vivamus doesn’t translate well, not because they can’t understand the idea but because it’s water to a fish. How else would one live? But I tried. “Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.”

She nodded thoughtfully, then poked the air, wrist bent and elbow out. I couldn’t stand it, so I took it from her, dropped slowly into a foil guard, lunged in high line, recovered–a move so graceful that big hairy men look good in it. It’s why ballerinas study fencing.

I saluted and gave it back to her, then adjusted her right elbow and wrist and left arm–this is why ballerinas get half rates, it’s fun for the swordmaster. She lunged, almost pinking a guest in his starboard
ham.

I took it back, wiped the blade, sheathed it. We had gathered a solid gallery. I picked up my Dagwood from the buffet, but she wasn’t done with me. “Self jump sword?”

I choked. If she understood the meaning–or if I did–I was being propositioned the most gently I had ever been, in Center. Usually it’s blunt. But surely Star hadn’t spread the details of our wedding ceremony? Rufo? I hadn’t told him but Star might have.

When I didn’t answer, she made herself clear and did not keep her voice down. “Self unvirgin unmother unpregnant fertile.”

I explained as politely as the language permits, which isn’t very, that I was dated up. She dropped the subject, looked at the Dagwood. “Bite touch taste?”

That was another matter; I passed it over. She took a hearty bite, chewed thoughtfully, looked pleased. “Xenic. Primitive. Robust. Strong dissonance. Good art.” Then she drifted away, leaving me wondering. Inside of ten minutes the question was put to me again. I received more propositions than at any other party in Center and I’m sure the sword accounted for the bull market. To be sure, propositions came my way at every social event; I was Her Wisdom’s consort. I could have been an orangutan and offers still would have been made. Some hirsutes looked like orangutans and were socially acceptable but I could have smelled like one. And behaved worse. The truth was that many ladies were curious about what the Empress took to bed, and the fact that I was a savage, or at best a barbarian, made them more curious. There wasn’t any taboo against laying it on the line and quite a few did.

But I was still on my honeymoon. Anyhow, if I had accepted all those offers, I would have gone up with the window shade. But I enjoyed hearing them once I quit cringing at the “Soda? –or ginger ale?” bluntness; it’s good for anybody’s morale to be asked.

As we were undressing that night I said, “Have fun, pretty things?” Star yawned and grinned. “I certainly did. And so did you, old Eagle Scout. Why didn’t you bring that kitten home?”

“What kitten?”

“You know what kitten. The one you were teaching to fence.”

“Meeow!”

“No, no, dear. You should send for her. I heard her state her profession, and there is a strong

connection between good cooking and good–”

“Woman, you talk too much!”

She switched from English to Nevian. “Yes, milord husband. No sound I shall utter that does not break unbidden from love-anguished lips.”

“Milady wife beloved . . . sprite elemental of the Singing Waters–”

Nevian is more useful than the jargon they talk on Center.

Center is a fun place and a Wisdom’s consort has a cushy time. After our first visit to Star’s fishing lodge, I mentioned how nice it would be to go back someday and tickle a few trout at that lovely place, the Gate where we had entered Nevia. “I wish it were on Center.”

“It shall be.”

“Star. You would move it? I know that some Gates, commercial ones, can handle real mass, but, even so–”

“No, no. But just as good. Let me see. It will take a day or so to have it stereoed and measured and air-typed and so forth. Water flow, those things. But meanwhile–There’s nothing much beyond this wall, just a power plant and such. Say a door here and the place where we broiled the fish a hundred yards beyond. Be finished in a week, or we’ll have a new architect. Suits?”

“Star, you’ll do no such thing.”

“Why not, darling?”

“Tear up the whole house to give me a trout stream? Fantastic!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it is. Anyhow, sweet, the idea is not to move that stream here, but to go there. A vacation.”

She sighed. “How I would love a vacation.”

“You took an imprint today. Your voice is different.”

“It wears off, Oscar.”

“Star, you’re taking them too fast. You’re wearing yourself out.”

“Perhaps. But I must be the judge of that, as you know.”

“As I don’t know! You can judge the whole goddamn creation–as you do and I know it–but I, your husband, must judge whether you are overworking–and stop it.”

“Darling, darling!”

There were too many incidents like that.

I was not jealous of her. That ghost of my savage past had been laid in Nevia, I was not haunted by it
again.

Nor is Center a place such ghost is likely to walk. Center has as many marriage customs as it has cultures–thousands. They cancel out. Some humans there are monogamous by instinct, as swans are said to be. So it can’t be classed as “virtue.” As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation. If there is no temptation, there can be no virtue. But these inflexible monogamists were no hazard. If someone, through ignorance, propositioned one of these chaste ladies, he risked neither a slap nor a knife; she would turn him down and go right on talking. Nor would it matter if her husband overheard; jealousy is never learned in a race automatically monogamous. Not that I ever tested it; to me they looked–and smelled–like spoiled bread dough. Where there is no temptation there is no virtue. But I had chances to show “virtue.” That kitten with the wasp waist tempted me–and I learned that she was of a culture in which females may not marry until they prove themselves pregnable, as in parts of the South Seas and certain places in Europe; she was breaking no taboos of her tribe. I was tempted more by another gal, a sweetie with a lovely figure, a delightful sense of humor, and one of the best dancers in any universe. She didn’t write it on the sidewalk; she just let me know that she was neither too busy nor uninterested, using that argot with skillful indirection.

This was refreshing. Downright “American.” I did inquire (elsewhere) into the customs of her tribe and found that, while they were rigid as to marriage, they were permissive otherwise. I would never do as a son-in-law but the window was open even though the door was locked.

So I chickened. I gave myself a soul-searching and admitted curiosity as morbid as that of any female who propositioned me simply because I was Star’s consort. Sweet little Zhai-ee-van was one of those who didn’t wear clothes. She grew them on the spot; from tip of her nose to her tiny toes she was covered in soft, sleek, gray fur, remarkably like chinchilla. Gorgeous!

I didn’t have the heart, she was too nice a kid.

But this temptation I admitted to Star–and Star implied gently that I must have muscles between my ears; Zhai-ee-van was an outstanding artiste even among her own people, who were esteemed as most talented devotees of Eros.

I stayed chicken. A romp with a kid that sweet should involve love, some at least, and it wasn’t love, just that beautiful fur–along with a fear that a romp with Zhai-ee-van could turn into love and she couldn’t marry me even if Star turned me loose.

Or didn’t turn me loose–Center has no rule against polygamy. Some religions there have rules for and against this and that out this mixture of cultures has endless religions and they cancel each other the way conflicting customs do. Culturologists state a “law” of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”

Rufo didn’t agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable–holes in their heads! –and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out whenever possible.

Back to Topic “A”–Centrists use every sort of marriage contract. Or none. They practice domestic partnership, coition, propagation, friendship, and love–but not necessarily all at once nor with the same person. Contracts could be as complex as a corporate merger, specifying duration, purposes, duties, responsibilities, number and sex of children, genetic selection methods, whether host mothers were to be hired, conditions for canceling and options for extension–anything but “marital fidelity.” It is axiomatic there that this is unenforceable and therefore not contractual.

But marital fidelity is commoner there than it is on Earth; it simply is not legislated. They have an
ancient proverb reading Women and Cats. It means: “Women and Cats do as they please, and men and dogs might as well relax to it.” It has its opposite: Men and Weather which is blunter and at least as old, since the weather has long been under control.

The usual contract is no contract; he moves his clothes into her home and stays–until she dumps them outside the door. This form is highly thought of because of its stability: A woman who “tosses his shoes” has a tough time finding another man brave enough to risk her temper.

My “contract” with Star was no more than that if contracts, laws, and customs applied to the Empress, which they did not and could not. But that was not the source of my increasing unease.

Believe me, I was not jealous.

But I was increasingly fretted by those dead men crowding her mind.

One evening as we were dressing for some whing-ding she snapped at me. I had been prattling about how I had spent my day, being tutored in mathematics, and no doubt had been as entertaining as a child reporting a day in kindergarten. But I was enthusiastic, a new world was opening to me–and Star was always patient.

But she snapped at me in a baritone voice.

I stopped cold. “You were imprinted today!”

I could feel her shift gears. “Oh, forgive me, darling! No, I’m not myself, I’m His Wisdom CLXXXII.”

I did a fast sum. “That’s fourteen you’ve taken since the Quest–and you took only seven in all the years before that. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn yourself out? Become an idiot?”

She started to scorch me. Then she answered gently, “No, I am not risking anything of the sort.”

“That isn’t what I near.”

“What you may have heard has no weight, Oscar, as no one else can judge–either my capacity, or what it means to accept an imprint. Unless you have been talking to my heir?”

“No.” I knew she had selected him and I assumed that he had taken a print or two–a standard precaution against assassination. But I hadn’t met him, didn’t want to, and didn’t know who he was.

“Then forget what you’ve been told. It is meaningless.” She sighed. “But, darling, if you don’t mind, I won’t go tonight; best I go to bed and sleep. Old Stinky CLXXXII is the nastiest person I’ve ever been–a brilliant success in a critical age, you must read about him. But inside he was a bad-tempered beast who hated the very people he helped. He’s fresh in me now, I must keep him chained.”

“Okay, let’s go to bed.”

Star shook her head. ” ‘Sleep,’ I said. I’ll use autosuggestion and by morning you won’t know he’s been here. You go to the party. Find an adventure and forget that you have a difficult wife.”

I went but I was too bad-tempered even to consider “adventures.”

Old Nasty wasn’t the worst. I can hold my own in a row–and Star, Amazon though she is, is not big enough to handle me. If she got rough, she would at last get that spanking. Nor would I fear interference from guards; that had been settled from scratch: When we two were alone together, we were private. Any third person changed that, nor did Star have privacy alone, even in her bath. Whether her guards were male or female I don’t know, nor would she have cared. Guards were never in sight. So our spats were private and perhaps did us both good, as temporary relief.

But “the Saint” was harder to take than Old Nasty. He was His Wisdom CXLI and was so goddam noble and spiritual and holier-than-thou that I went fishing for three days. Star herself was robust and full of ginger and joy in life; this bloke didn’t drink, smoke, chew gum, nor utter an unkind word. You could almost see Star’s halo while she was under his influence.

Worse, he had renounced sex when he consecrated himself to the Universes and this had a shocking effect on Star; sweet submissiveness wasn’t her style. So I went fishing.

I’ve one good thing to say for the Saint. Star says that he was the most unsuccessful emperor in all that
long line, with genius for doing the wrong thing from pious motives, so she learned more from him than
any other; he made every mistake in the book. He was assassinated by disgusted customers after only fifteen years, which isn’t long enough to louse up anything as ponderous as a multi-universe empire.

His Wisdom CXXXVII was a Her–and Star was absent two days. When she came home she explained. “Had to, dear. I’ve always thought I was a rowdy bitch–but she shocked even me.”

“How?”

“I ain’t talkin’, Guv’nor. I gave myself intensive treatment to bury her where you’ll never meet her.”

“I’m curious.”

“I know you are and that’s why I drove a stake through her heart–rough job, she’s my direct ancestor. But I was afraid you might like her better than you do me. That unspeakable trull!”

I’m still curious.

Most of them weren’t bad Joes. But our marriage would have been smoother if I had never known they were there. It’s easier to have a wife who is a touch batty than one who is several platoons–most of them men. To be aware of their ghostly presence even when Star’s own personality was in charge did my libido no good. But I must concede that Star knew the male viewpoint better than any other woman in any history. She didn’t have to guess what would please a man; she knew more about it than I did, from “experience”–and was explosively uninhibited about sharing her unique knowledge.

I shouldn’t complain.

But I did, I blamed her for being those other people. She endured my unjust complaints better than I endured what I felt to be the injustice in my situation vis-a-vis all that mob of ghosts.

Those ghosts weren’t the worst fly in the soup.

I did not have a job. I don’t mean nine-to-five and cut the grass on Saturdays and get drunk at the country club that night; I mean I didn’t have any purpose. Ever look at a male lion in a zoo? Fresh meat on time, females supplied, no hunters to worry about–He’s got it made, hasn’t he?

Then why does he look bored!

I didn’t know I had a problem, at first. I had a beautiful and loving wife; I was so wealthy that there was no way to count it; I lived in a most luxurious home in a city more lovely than any on Earth; everybody I met was nice to me; and best second only to my wonderful wife, I had endless chance to “go to college” in a marvelous and un-Earthly sense, with no need to chase a pigskin. Nor a sheepskin. I need never stop and had any conceivable help. I mean, suppose Albert Einstein drops everything to help with your algebra, pal, or Rand Corporation and General Electric team up to devise visual aids to make something easier for you. This is luxury greater than riches.

I soon found that I could not drink the ocean even held to my lips. Knowledge on Earth alone has grown so out of hand that no man can grasp it–so guess what the bulk is in Twenty Universes, each with its laws, its histories, and Star alone knows how many civilizations.

In a candy factory, employees are urged to eat all they want. They soon stop.

I never stopped entirely; knowledge has more variety. But my studies lacked purpose. The Secret Name of God is no more to be found in twenty universes than in one–and all other subjects are the same size unless you have a natural bent.

I had no bent, I was a dilettante–and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me. So I let most of them go, stuck with math and multi-universe history, quit trying to know it all.

I thought about going into business. But to enjoy business you must be a businessman at heart (I’m

not), or you have to need dough. I had dough; all I could do was lose it–or, if I won, I would never know whether word had gone out (from any government anywhere): Don’t buck the Empress’s consort, we will make good your losses.

Same with poker. I introduced the game and it caught on fast–and I found that I could no longer play it. Poker must be serious or it’s nothing–out when you own an ocean of money, adding or losing a few drops mean nothing.

I should explain–Her Wisdom’s “civil list” may not have been as large as the expenditures of many big spenders in Center; the place is rich. But it was as big as Star wanted it to be, a bottomless well of wealth. I don’t know how many worlds split the tab, but call it twenty thousand with three billion people each–it was more than that.

A penny each from 60,000,000,000,000 people is six hundred billion dollars. The figures mean nothing except to show that spreading it so thin that nobody could feel it still meant more money than I could dent. Star’s non-government of her un-Empire was an expense, I suppose–but her personal expenses, and mine, no matter how lavish, were irrelevant.

King Midas lost interest in his piggy bank. So did I.

Oh, I spent money. (I never touched any–unnecessary.) Our “flat” (I won’t call it a palace)–our home had a gymnasium more imaginative than any university gym; I had a salle d’armes added and did a lot of fencing, almost every day with all sorts of weapons. I ordered foils made to match the Lady Vivamus and the best swordmasters in several worlds took turns helping me. I had a range added, too, and had my bow picked up from that Gate cave in Karth-Hokesh, and trained in archery and in other aimed weapons. Oh, I spent money as I pleased.

But it wasn’t much fun.

I was sitting in my study one day, doing not a damn thing but brood, while I played with a bowlful of jewels.

I had fiddled with jewelry design a while. It had interested me in high school; I had worked for a jeweler one summer. I can sketch and was fascinated by lovely stones. He lent me books, I got others from the library–and once he made up one of my designs.

I had a Calling.

But jewelers are not draft-deferred so I dropped it–until Center.

You see, there was no way for me to give Star a present unless I made it. So I did. I made costume jewelry of real stones, studying it (expert help, as usual), sending for a lavish selection of stones, drawing designs, sending stones and drawings out to be made up.

I knew that Star enjoyed jeweled costumes; I knew she liked them naughty–not in the sense of crowding the taboos, there weren’t any–but provocative, gilding the lily, accentuating what hardly needs it.

The things I designed would have seemed at home in a French revue–but of real gems. Sapphires and gold suited Star’s blond beauty and I used them. But she could wear any color and I used other gems, too.

Star was delighted with my first try and wore it that evening. I was proud of it; I had swiped the design from memory of a costume worn by a showgirl in a Frankfurt night club my first night out of the Army–a G-string deal, transparent long skirt open from the hip on one side and with sequins on it (I used sapphires), a thing that wasn’t a bra but an emphasizer, completely jeweled, and a doohickey in her hair to match. High golden sandals with sapphire heels.

Star was warmly grateful for others that followed.

But I learned something. I’m not a jewelry designer. I saw no hope of matching the professionals who catered to the wealthy in Center. I soon realized that Star wore my designs because they were my gift, just as mama pins up the kindergarten drawings that sonny brings home. So I quit.

This bowl of gems had been kicking around my study for weeks–fire opals, sardonyx, carnelians, diamonds and turquoise and rubies, moonstones and sapphires and garnets, peridot, emeralds, chrysolite–many with no English names. I ran them through my fingers, watching the many-colored fire falls, and felt sorry for myself. I wondered how much these pretty marbles would cost on Earth? I couldn’t guess within a million dollars.

I didn’t bother to lock them up at night. And I was the bloke who had quit college for lack of tuition and hamburgers.

I pushed them aside and went to my window–there because I had told Star that I didn’t like not having a window in my study. That was on arrival and I didn’t find out for months how much had been torn down to please me; I had thought they had just cut through a wall.

It was a beautiful view, more a park than a city, studded but not cluttered with lovely buildings. It was hard to realize that it was a city bigger than Tokyo; its “bones” didn’t show and its people worked even half a planet away.

There was a murmur soft as bees, like the muted roar one can never escape in New York–but softer, just enough to make me realize that I was surrounded by people, each with his job, his purpose, his function.

My function? Consort.

Gigolo!

Star, without realizing it, had introduced prostitution into a world that had never known it. An innocent world, where man and woman bedded together only for the reason that they both wanted to.

A prince consort is not a prostitute. He has his work and it is often tedious, representing his sovereign mate, laying cornerstones, making speeches. Besides that, he has his duty as royal stud to ensure that the line does not die.

I had none of these. Not even the duty of entertaining Star–hell, within ten miles of me were millions of men who would jump at the chance.

The night before had been bad. It started badly and went on into one of those weary pillow conferences which married couples sometimes have, and aren’t as healthy as a bang-up row. We had had one, as domestic as any working stiff worried over bills and the boss.

Star had done something she had never done before: brought work home. Five men, concerned with some intergalactic hassle–I never knew what as the discussion had been going on for hours and they sometimes spoke a language not known to me.

They ignored me, I was furniture. On Center introductions are rare; if you want to talk to someone, you say “Self,” and wait. If he doesn’t answer, walk off. If he does, exchange identities. None of them did, and I was damned if I would start it. As strangers in my home it was up to them. But they didn’t act as if it was my home.

I sat there, the Invisible Man, getting madder and madder.

They went on arguing, while Star listened. Presently she summoned maids and they started undressing her, brushing her hair. Center is not America, I had no reason to feel shocked. What she was doing was being rude to them, treating them as furniture (she hadn’t missed how they treated me).

One said pettishly, “Your Wisdom, I do wish you would listen as you agreed to.” (I’ve expanded the argot.)

Star said coldly, “I am judge of my conduct. No one else is capable.”

True. She could judge her conduct, they could not. Nor, I realized bitterly, could I. I had been feeling angry at her (even though I knew it didn’t matter) for calling in her maids and starting to ready for bed with these lunks present–and I had intended to tell her not to let it happen again. I resolved not to raise that issue.

Shortly Star chopped them off. “He’s right. You’re wrong. Settle it that way. Get out.”

But I did intend to sneak it in by objecting to her bringing “tradespeople” home.

Star beat me to the punch. The instant we were alone she said, “My love, forgive me. I agreed to hear this silly mix-up and it dragged on and on, then I thought I could finish it quickly if I got them out of chairs, made them stand up here, and made clear that I was bored. I never thought they would wrangle another hour before I could squeeze out the real issue. And I knew that, if I put it over till tomorrow, they would stretch it into hours. But the problem was important, I couldn’t drop it.” She sighed. “That ridiculous man–Yet such people scramble to high places. I considered having him fool-killed. Instead I must let him correct his error, or the situation will break out anew.”

I couldn’t even hint that she had ruled the way she had out of annoyance; the man she had chewed out was the one in whose favor she had ruled. So I said, “Let’s go to bed, you’re tired”–and then didn’t have sense enough to refrain from judging her myself.

Chapter 19

We went to bed.

Presently she said, “Oscar, you are displeased.”

“I didn’t say so.”

“I feel it. Nor is it Just tonight and those tedious clowns. You have been withdrawing yourself, unhappy.” She waited.

“It’s nothing.”

“Oscar, anything which troubles you can never be ‘nothing’ to me. Although I may not realize it until I know what it is.”

“Well–I feel so damn useless!”

She put her soft, strong hand on my chest. “To me you are not useless. Why do you feel useless to yourself?”

“Well–look at this bed!” It was a bed the like of which Americans never dream; it could do everything but kiss you good night–and, like the city, it was beautiful, its bones did not show. “This sack, at home, would cost more–if they could build it–than the best house my mother ever lived in.”

She thought about that. “Would you like to send money to your mother?” She beckoned the bedside communicator. “Is Elmendorf Air Force Base of America address enough?”

(I don’t recall ever telling her where Mother lived.) “No, no!” I gestured at the talker, shutting it off. “I do not want to send her money. Her husband supports her. He won’t take money from me. That’s not the point.”

“Then I don’t see the point as yet. Beds do not matter, it is who is in a bed that counts. My darling, if you don’t like this bed, we can get another. Or sleep on the floor. Beds do not matter.”

“This bed is okay. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t pay for it. You did. This house. My clothes. The food I eat. My–my toys! Every damned thing I have you gave me. Know what I am. Star? A gigolo! Do you Know what a gigolo is? A somewhat-male prostitute.”

One of my wife’s most exasperating habits was, sometimes, to refuse to snap back at me when she knew I was spoiling for a row. She looked at me thoughtfully. “America is a busy place, isn’t it? People work all the time, especially men.”

“Well . . . yes.”

“It isn’t the custom everywhere, even on Earth. A Frenchman isn’t unhappy if he has free time; he orders another cafe au lait and lets the saucers pile up. Nor am I fond of work. Oscar, I ruined our evening from laziness, too anxious to avoid having to redo a weary task tomorrow. I will not make that mistake twice.”

“Star, that doesn’t matter. That’s over with.”

“I know. The first issue is rarely the key. Nor the second. Nor, sometimes, the twenty-second. Oscar, you are not a gigolo.”

“What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.”

“No. All this around us–” She waved. “Bed. This beautiful chamber. The food we eat. My clothes and yours. Our lovely pools. The night majordomo on watch against the chance that you or I might demand a
singing bird or a ripe melon. Our captive gardens. All we see or touch or use or fancy–and a thousand times as much in distant places, all these you earned with your own strong hands; they are yours, by right.”

I snorted. “They are,” she insisted. “That was our contract. I promised you great adventure, and greater treasure, and even greater danger. You agreed. You said, ‘Princess, you’ve hired yourself a boy.’ ” She smiled. “Such a big boy. Darling, I think the dangers were greater than you guessed . . . so it has pleased me, until now, that the treasure is greater than you were likely to have guessed. Please don’t be shy about accepting it. You have earned it and more–as much as you are ever willing to accept”

“Uh–Even if you are right, it’s too much. I’m drowning in marshmallows!”

“But, Oscar, you don’t have to take one bit you don’t want. We can live simply. In one room with bed folded into wall if it pleases you.”

“That’s no solution.”

“Perhaps you would like bachelor digs, out in town?”

” ‘Tossing my shoes,’ eh?”

She said levelly, “My husband, if your shoes are ever tossed, you must toss them. I jumped over your

sword. I shall not jump back.” “Take it easy!” I said. “It was your suggestion. If I took it wrong, I’m sorry. I know you don t go back on your word. But you might be regretting it.”

“I am not regretting it. Are you?”

“No, Star, no! But–”

“That’s a long pause for so short a word,” she said gravely. “Will you tell me?”

“Uh . . . that’s just it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell what, Oscar? There are so many things to tell.”

“Well, a lot of things. What I was getting into. About you being the Empress of the whole works, in particular . . . before you let me jump over the sword with you.”

Her face did not change but tears rolled down her cheeks. “I could answer that you did not ask me–”

“I didn’t know what to ask!”

“That is true. I could assert, truthfully, that had you asked I would have answered. I could protest that

I did not ‘let you’ jump over the sword, that you overruled my protests that it was not necessary to offer

me the honor of marriage by the laws of your people . . . that I was a wench you could tumble at will. I could point out that I am not an empress, not royal, but a working woman whose job does not permit her even the luxury of being noble. All these are true. But I will not hide behind them; I will meet your question.” She slipped into Nevian. “Milord Hero, I feared sorely that if I did not bend to your will, you would leave me!”

“Milady wife, truly did you think that your champion would desert you in your peril?” I went on in English, “Well, that nails it to the barn. You married me because the Egg damned well had to be recovered and Your Wisdom told you that I was necessary to the job–and might bug out if you didn’t. Well, Your Wisdom wasn’t sharp on that point; I don’t bug out. Stupid of me but I’m stubborn.” I started to get out of bed.

“Milord love!” She was dying openly.

“Excuse me. Got to find a pair of shoes. See how far I can throw them.” I was being nasty as only a man can be who has had his pride wounded.

“Please, Oscar, please! Hear me first.”

I heaved a sigh. “Talk ahead.”

She grabbed my hand so hard I would have lost fingers had I tried to pull loose. “Hear me out. My beloved, it was not that at all. I knew that you would not give up our quest until it was finished or we were dead. I knew! Not only had I reports reaching back years before I ever saw you but also we had shared joy and danger and hardship; I knew your mettle. But, had it been needed, I could have bound you with a net of words, persuaded you to agree to betrothal only–until the quest was over. You are a romantic, you would have agreed. But, darling, darling! I wanted to many you . . . bind you to me by your rules, so that”–she stopped to sniff back tears–“so that, when you saw all this, and this, and this, and the things you call ‘your toys,’ you still would stay with me. It was not politics, it was low–love romantic and unreasoned, love for your own sweet self.”

She dropped her face into her hands and I could barely hear her. “But I know so little of love. Love is a butterfly that lights when it listeth, leaves as it chooses; it is never bound with chains. I sinned. I tried to bind you. Unjust I knew it was, cruel to you I now see it to be.” Star looked up with crooked smile. “Even Her Wisdom has no wisdom when it comes to being a woman. But, though silly wench I be, I am not too stubborn to know that I have wronged my beloved when my face is rubbed in it. Go, go, get your sword; I will jump back over it and my champion will be free of his silken cage. Go, milord Hero, while my heart is firm.”

“Go fetch your own sword, wench. That paddling is long overdue.”

Suddenly she grinned, all hoyden. “But, darling, my sword is in Karth-Hokesh. Don’t you remember?”

“You can’t avoid it this time!” I grabbed her. Star is a handful and slippery, with amazing muscles. But I’m bigger and she didn’t fight as hard as she could have. Still I lost skin and picked up bruises before I got her legs pinned and one arm twisted behind her. I gave her a couple of hearty spanks, hard enough to print each finger in pink, then lost interest.

Now tell me, were those words straight from her heart–or was it acting by the smartest woman in twenty universes?

Later, Star said, “I’m glad your chest is not a scratchy rug, like some men, my beautiful.”

“I was a pretty baby, too. How many chests have you checked?”

“A random sample. Darling, have you decided to keep me?”

“A while. On good behavior, you understand.”

“I’d rather be kept on bad behavior. But–while you’re feeling mellow–if you are–I had best tell you

another thing–and take my spanking if I must.”

“You’re too anxious. One a day is maximum, hear me?”

“As you will, sir. Yassuh, Boss man. I’ll have my sword fetched in the morning and you can spank me

with it at your leisure. If you think you can catch me. But I must tell this and get it off my chest.”

“There’s nothing on your chest. Unless you count–”

“Please! You’ve been going to our therapists.”

“Once a week.” The first thing Star had ordered was an examination for me so complete as to make an Army physical seem perfunctory. “The Head Sawbones insists that my wounds aren’t healed but I don’t believe him; I’ve never felt better.”

“He, is stalling, Oscar–by my order. You’re healed, I am not unskilled, I was most careful. But–darling, I did this for selfish reasons and now you must tell me if I have been cruel and unjust to you again. I admit I was sneaky. But my intentions were good. However, I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together.”

“Star, what are you prattling about? Women are the source of all folly.”

“Yes, dearest. Because they always have good intentions–and can prove it. Men sometimes act from rational self-interest, which is safer. But not often.”

“That’s because half their ancestors are female. Why have I been keeping doctor’s appointments if I don t need them?”

“I didn’t say you don’t need them. But you may not think so. Oscar, you are far advanced with

Long-Life treatments.” She eyed me as if ready to parry or retreat.

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“You object? At this stage it can be reversed.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” I knew that Long-Life was available on Center but knew also that it was rigidly restricted. Anybody could have it–just before emigrating to a sparsely settled planet. Permanent residents must grow old and die. This was one matter in which one of Star’s predecessors had interfered in local government. Center, with disease practically conquered, great prosperity, and lodestone of a myriad peoples, had grown too crowded, especially when Long-Life sent skyward the average age of death.

This stern rule had thinned the crowds. Some people took Long-Life early, went through a Gate and took their chances in wilderness. More waited until that first twinge that brings awareness of death, then decided that they weren’t too old for a change. And some sat tight and died when their time came.

I knew that twinge; it had been handed to me by a bolo in a jungle. “I guess I have no objection.”

She sighed with relief. “I didn’t know and should not have slipped it into your coffee. Do I rate a spanking?”

“We’ll add it to the list you already rate and give them to you all at once. Probably cripple you. Star, how long is ‘Long-Life’?”

“That’s hard to answer. Very few who have had it have died in bed. If you live as active a life as I know you will–from your temperament–you are most unlikely to die of old age. Nor of disease.”

“And I never grow old?” It takes getting used to.

“Oh, yes, you can grow old. Worse yet, senility stretches in proportion. If you let it. If those around you allow it. However–Darling, how old do I look? Don’t tell me with your heart, tell me with your eyes. By Earth standards. Be truthful, I know the answer.”

It was ever a joy to look at Star but I tried to look at her freshly, for hints of autumn–outer corners of eyes, her hands, for tiny changes in skin–hell, not even a stretch mark, yet I knew she had a grandchild.

“Star, when I first saw you, I guessed eighteen. You turned around and I upped the ante a little. Now, looking closely and not giving you any breaks–not over twenty-five. And that is because your features seem mature. When you laugh, you’re a teen-ager; when you wheedle, or look awestruck, or suddenly delighted with a puppy or kitten or something, you’re about twelve. From the chin up, I mean; from the chin down you can’t pass for less than eighteen.”

“A buxom eighteen,” she added. “Twenty-five Earth years–by rates of growth on Earth–is right on the mark I was shooting at. The age when a woman stops growing and starts aging. Oscar, your apparent age under Long-Life is a matter of choice. Take my Uncle Joseph–the one who sometimes calls himself ‘Count Cagliostro.’ He set himself at thirty-five, because he says that anything younger is a boy. Rufo prefers to look older. He says it gets him respectful treatment, keeps him out of brawls with lounger men–and still lets him give a younger man a shock if one does pick a fight because, as you know, Rufo’s older age is mostly from chin up.”

“Or the shock he can give younger women,” I suggested.

“With Rufo one never knows. Dearest, I didn’t finish telling you. Part of it is teaching the body to repair itself. Your language lessons here–there hasn’t been a one but what a hypno-therapist was waiting to give your body a lesson through your sleeping mind, after your language lesson. Part of apparent age is cosmetic therapy–Rufo need not be bald–but more is controlled by the mind. When you decide what age you like, they can start imprinting it.”

“I’ll think about it. I don’t want to look too much older than you.”

Star looked delighted. “Thank you, dear! You see how selfish I’ve been.”

“How? I missed that point.”

She put a hand over mine. “I didn’t want you to grow old–and die! –while I stayed young.” I blinked at her. “Gosh, lady, that was selfish of you, wasn’t it? But you could varnish me and keep me in the bedroom. Like your aunt.”

She made a face. “You’re a nasty man. She didn’t varnish them.”

“Star, I haven’t seen any of those keepsake corpses around here.”

She looked surprised. “But that’s on the planet where I was born. This universe, another star. Very pretty place. Didn’t I ever say?”

“Star, my darling, mostly you’ve never said.”

“I’m sorry. Oscar, I don’t want to hand you surprises. Ask me. Tonight. Anything.”

I considered it. One thing I had wondered about, a certain lack. Or perhaps the women of her part of

the race had another rhythm. But I had been stopped by the fact that I had married a grandmother–how old? “Star, are you pregnant?”

“Why, no, dear. Oh! Do you want me to be? You want us to have children?”

I stumbled, trying to explain that I hadn’t been sure it was possible–or maybe she was. Star looked troubled. “I’m going to upset you again. I had best tell it all. Oscar, I was no more brought up to luxury than you were. A pleasant childhood, my people were ranchers. I married young and was a simple mathematics teacher, with a hobby research in conjectural and optional geometries. Magic, I mean. Three children. My husband and I got along well . . . until I was nominated. Not selected, just named for examination and possible training. He knew I was a genetic candidate when he married me–but so many millions are. It didn’t seem important.

“He wanted me to refuse. I almost did. But when I accepted, he–well, he ‘tossed my shoes.’ We do it formally there; he published a notice that I was no longer his wife.”

“He did, eh? Mind if I look him up and break his arms?”

“Dear, dear! That was many years ago and far away; he is long dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“In any case he’s dead. Your three kids–one of them is Rufo’s father? Or mother?”

“Oh, no! That was later.”

“Well?”

Star took a deep breath. “Oscar, I have about fifty children.”

That did it. Too many shocks and I guess I showed it, for Star’s face reflected deep concern. She
rushed through the explanation.

When she was named heir, changes were made in her, surgical, biochemical, and endocrinal. Nothing
as drastic as spaying and to different ends and by techniques more subtle than ours. But the result was

that about two hundred tiny bits of Star–ova alive and latent–were stored near absolute zero.

Some fifty had been quickened, mostly by emperors long dead but “alive” in their stored seed–genetic gambles on getting one or more future emperors. Star had not borne them; an heir’s time is too precious. She had never seen most of them; Rufo’s father was an exception. She didn’t say, but I think Star liked to have a child around to play with and love–until the strenuous first years of her reign and the Quest for the Egg left her no time.

This change had a double purpose: to get some hundreds of star-line children from a single mother, and to leave the mother free. By endocrine control of some sort, Star was left free of Eve’s rhythm but in all ways young–not pills nor hormone injections; this was permanent. She was simply a healthy woman who never had “bad days.” This was not for her convenience but to insure that her judgment as the Great Judge would never be whipsawed by her glands. “This is sensible,” she said seriously. “I can remember there used to be days when I would bite the head off my dearest friend for no reason, then burst into tears. One can’t be judicial in that sort of storm.”

“Uh, did it affect your interest? I mean your desire for–”

She gave me a hearty grin. “What do you think?” She added seriously, “The only thing that affects my libido–changes it for the worse, I mean–are . . . is? –English has the oddest structure–is-are those pesky imprintings. Sometimes up, sometimes down–and you’ll remember one woman whose name we won’t mention who affected me so carnivorously that I didn’t dare come near you until I had exorcised her black soul! A fresh imprint affects my judgment as well, so I never hear a case until I have digested the latest one. I’ll be glad when they’re over!”

“So will I.”

“Not as glad as I will be. But, aside from that, darling, I don t vary much as a female and you know it. Just my usual bawdy self who eats young boys for breakfast and seduces them into jumping over swords.” “How many swords?”

She looked at me sharply. “Since my first husband kicked me out I have not been married until I married you, Mr. Gordon. If that is not what you meant, I don’t think you should hold against me things that happened before you were born. If you want details since then, I’ll satisfy your curiosity. Your morbid curiosity, if I may say so.”

“You want to boast. Wench, I won’t pamper it.”

“I do not want to boast! I’ve little to boast about. The Crisis of the Egg left me almost no time in which to be a woman, damn it! Until Oscar the Rooster came along. Thank you, sir.”

“And keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Yes, sir. Nice Rooster! But you’ve led us far from our muttons, dear. If you want children–yes, darling! There are about two hundred and thirty eggs left and they belong to me. Not to posterity. Not to the dear people, bless their greedy little hearts. Not to those God-playing genetic manipulators. Me! It’s all I own. All else is ex offico. But these are mine . . . and if you want them, they are yours, my only dear.”

I should have said, “Yes!” and kissed her. What I did say was, “Uh, let’s not rush it.”

Her face fell. “As milord Hero husband pleases.”

“Look, don’t get Nevian and formal. I mean, well, it takes getting used to. Syringes and things, I suppose, and monkeying by technicians. And, while I realize you don’t have time to have a baby yourself–”

I was trying to say that, ever since I got straightened out about the Stork, I had taken for granted the usual setup, and artificial insemination was a dirty trick to play even on a cow–and that this job, subcontracted on both sides, made me think of slots in a Horn & Hardart, or a mail-order suit. But give me time and I would adjust. Just as she had adjusted to those damned imprints-

She gripped my hands. “Darling, you needn’t!”

“Needn’t what?”

“Be monkeyed with by technicians. And I will take time to have your baby. If you don’t mind seeing my body get gross and huge–it does, it does, I remember–then happily I will do it. All will be as with other people so far as you are concerned. No syringes. No technicians. Nothing to offend your pride. Oh, I’ll have to be worked on. But I’m used to being handled like a prize cow; it means no more than having my hair shampooed.”

“Star, you would go through nine months of inconvenience–and maybe die in childbirth–to save me a few moments’ annoyance?”

“I shall not die, Three children, remember? Normal deliveries, no trouble.”

“But, as you pointed out, that was ‘many years ago.’ ”

“No matter.”

“Uh, how many years?” (“How old are you, woman?” The question I never dared ask.)

She looked upset. “Does it matter, Oscar?”

“Uh, I suppose not. You know more about medicine than I do–”

She said slowly, “You were asking how old I am, were you not?”

I didn’t say anything. She waited, then went on, “An old saw from your world says that a woman is as young as she feels. And I feel young and I am young and I have zest for life and I can bear a baby–or many babies–m my own belly. But I know–oh, I know! –that your worry is not just that I am too rich and occupy a position not easy for a husband. Yes, I know that part too well; my first husband rejected me for that. But be was my age. The most cruel and unjust thing I have done is that I knew that my age could matter to you–and I kept still. That was why Rufo was so outraged. After you were asleep that night in the cave of the Forest of Dragons he told me so, in biting words. He said he knew I was not above enticing young boys but he never thought that I would sink so low as to trap one into marriage without first telling him. He’s never had a high opinion of his old granny, he said, but this time–”

“Shut up, Star!”

“Yes, milord.”

“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!”–and I said it so flatly that I believed it–and do now. “Rufo doesn’t know what I think. You are younger than tomorrow’s dawn–you always will be. That’s the last I want to hear about it!”

“Yes, milord.”

“And knock that off, too. Just say, ‘Okay, Oscar.’ ”

“Yes, Oscar! Okay!”

“Better. Unless you’re honing for another spanking. And I’m too tired.” I changed the subject. “About this other matter–There’s no reason to stretch your pretty tummy if other ways are at hand. I’m a country jake, that’s all; I’m not used to big city ways. When you suggested that you do it yourself, did you mean that they could put you back together the way you were?”

“No. I would simply be host-mother as well as genetic mother.” She smiled and I knew I was making progress. “But saving a tidy sum of that money you don’t want to spend. Those healthy, sturdy women who have other people’s babies charge high. Four babies, they can retire–ten makes them wealthy.”

“I should think they would charge high! Star, I don’t object to spending money. I’ll concede, if you say so, that I’ve earned more than I spend, by my work as a professional hero. That’s a tough racket, too.”

“You’ve earned it.”

“This citified way of having babies–Can you pick it? Boy, or girl?”

“Of course. Male-giving wigglers swim faster, they can be sorted out. That’s why Wisdoms are usually men–I was an unplanned candidate. You shall have a son, Oscar.”

“Might prefer a girl. I’ve a weakness for little girls.”

“A boy, a girl–or both. Or as many as you want.”

“Star, let me study it. Lots of angles–and I don’t think as well as you do.”

“Pooh!”

“If you don’t think better than I do, the cash customers are getting rooked. Mmm, male seed can be stored as easily as eggs?”

“Much easier.”

“That’s all the answer we need now. I’m not too jumpy about syringes; I’ve stood in enough Army queues. I’ll go to the clinic or whatever it is, then we can settle it slowly. When we decide”–I shrugged–“mail the postcard and when it goes clunk! –we’re parents. Or some such. From there on the technicians and those husky gals can handle it.”

“Yes, milo–Okay, darling!”

All better. Almost her little girl face. Certainly her sixteen-year-old face, with new party dress and boys a shivery, delightful danger. “Star, you said earlier that it was often not the second issue out even the twenty-second that matters.”

“Yes.”

“I know what’s wrong with me. I can tell you–and maybe Her Wisdom knows the answer.”

She blinked. “If you can tell me, sweetheart–Her Wisdom will solve it, even if I have to tear the place down and put it back up differently–from here to the next galaxy–or I’ll go out of the Wisdom business!”

“That sounds more like my Lucky Star. All right, it’s not that I’m a gigolo. I’ve earned my coffee and cakes, at least; the Soul-Eater did damn near eat my soul, he knew its exact shape–he . . . it–it knew things I had long forgotten. It was rough and the pay ought to be high. It’s not your age, dearest. Who cares how old Helen of Troy is? You’re the right age forever–can a man be luckier? I’m not jealous of your position; I wouldn’t want it with chocolate icing. I’m not jealous of the men in your life–the lucky stiffs! Not even now, as long as I don’t stumble over them getting to the bathroom.”

“There are no other men in my life now, milord husband.”

“I had no reason to think so. But there is always next week, and even you can’t have a Sight about

that, my beloved. You’ve taught me that marriage is not a form of death–and you obviously aren’t dead, you lively wench.”

“Perhaps not a Sight,” she admitted. “But a feeling.”

“I won’t bet on it. I’ve read the Kinsey Report.”

“What report?”

“He disproved the Mermaid theory. About married women. Forget it. Hypothetical question: If Jocko visited Center, would you still have the same feeling? We should have to invite him to sleep here.”

“The Doral will never leave Nevia.”

“Don’t blame him, Nevia is wonderful. I said If–If he does, will you offer him ‘roof, table, and bed’?”

“That,” she said firmly, “is your decision, milord.”

“Rephrase it: Will you expect me to humiliate Jocko by not returning his hospitality? Gallant old Jocko, who let us live when he was entitled to kill us? Whose bounty–arrows and many things, including a new medic’s kit–kept us alive and let us win back the Egg?”

“By Nevian customs of roof and table and bed,” she insisted, “the husband decides, milord husband.”

“We aren’t in Nevia and here a wife has a mind of her own. You’re dodging, wench.”

She grinned naughtily. “Does that ‘if’ of yours include Muri? And Letva? They’re his favorites, he

wouldn’t travel without them. And how about little what’s-her-name? –the nymphet?”

“I am aware of it, my Hero,” she said levelly. “All I can say is that I intend that this wench shall never give her Hero a moment’s unease–and my intentions are usually carried out. I am not ‘Her Wisdom’ for nothing.”

“Fair enough. I never thought you would cause me that sort of unease. I was trying to show that the task may not be too difficult. Damn it, we’ve wandered off. Here’s my real problem. I’m not good for anything. I’m worthless.”

“Why, my dearest! You’re good for me.”

“But not for myself. Star, gigolo or not, I can’t be a pet poodle. Not even yours. Look, you’ve got a job. It keeps you busy and it’s important. But me? There is nothing for me to do, nothing at all! –nothing better than designing bad jewelry. You know what I am? A hero by trade, so you told me; you recruited me. Now I’m retired. Do you know anything in all twenty universes more useless than a retired hero?”

She mentioned a couple. I said, “You’re stalling. Anyhow they break up the blankness of the male chest. I’m serious, Star. This is the issue that has made me unfit to live with. Darling, I’m asking you to put your whole mind on it–and all those ghostly helpers. Treat it the way you treat an Imperial problem. Forget I’m your husband. Consider my total situation, all you know about me–and tell me what I can do with hands and head and time that is worth doing. Me, being what I am.”

She held still for long minutes, her face in that professional calm she had worn the times I had audited her work. “You are right,” she said at last. “There is nothing worth your powers on this planet.”

“Then what do I do?”

She said tonelessly, “You must leave.”

“Huh?”

“You think I like the answer, my husband? Do you think I like most answers I must give? But you asked me to consider it professionally. I obeyed. That is the answer. You must leave this planet–and me.”

“So my shoes get tossed anyhow?”

“Be not bitter, milord. That is the answer. I can evade and be womanish only in my private life; I cannot refuse to think if I agree to do so as ‘Her Wisdom.’ You must leave me. But, no, no, no, your shoes are not tossed! You will leave, because you must. Not because I wish it.” Her face stayed calm but tears streamed again. “One cannot ride a cat . . . nor hurry a snail . . . nor teach a snake to fly. Nor make a poodle of a Hero. I knew it, I refused to look at it. You will do what you must do. But your shoes will remain ever by my bed, I am not sending you away!” She blinked back tears. “I cannot lie to you, even by silence. I will not say that no other shoes will rest here . . . if you are gone a long time. I have been lonely. There are no words to say how lonely this job is. When you go . . . I shall be lonelier than ever. But you will find your shoes here when you return.”

“When I return? You have a Sight?”

“No, milord Hero. I have only a feeling . . . that if you live . . . you will return. Perhaps many times. But Heroes do not die in bed. Not even this one.” She blinked and tears stopped and her voice was steady. “Now, milord husband, if it please you, shall we dim the lights and rest?”

We did and she put her head on my shoulder and did not cry. But we did not sleep. After an aching time I said, “Star, do you hear what I hear?”

She raised her head. “I hear nothing.”

“The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.”

“Yes. I know that sound.”

“Star, do you like it here?”

“No. It was never necessary that I like it.”

“Look, damn it! You said that I would leave. Come with me!”

“Oh, Oscar!”

“What do you owe them? Isn’t recovering the Egg enough? Let them take a new victim. Come walk the Glory Road with me again! There must be work in my line somewhere.”

“There is always work for Heroes.”

“Okay, we set up in business, you and I. Heroing isn’t a bad job. The meals are irregular and the pay uncertain–out it’s never dull. We’ll run ads: ‘Gordon & Gordon, Heroing Done Reasonable. No job too large, no job too small. Dragons exterminated by contract, satisfaction guaranteed or no pay. Free estimates on other work. Questing, maiden-rescuing, golden fleece located night or day?’ ”

I was trying to jolly her but Star doesn’t jolly. She answered in sober earnest. “Oscar, if I am to retire, I should train my heir first. True, no one can order me to do anything–but I have a duty to train my replacement.”

“How long will that take?”

“Not long. Thirty years, about.”

“Thirty years!”

“I could force it to twenty-five, I think.”

I sighed. “Star, do you know how old I am?”

“Yes. Not yet twenty-five. But you will get no older!”

“But right now I’m still that age. That’s all the time there has ever been for me. Twenty-five years as a pet poodle and I won’t be a hero, nor anything. I’ll be out of my silly mind.”

She thought about it. “Yes. That is true.”

She turned over, we made a spoon and pretended to sleep.

Later I felt her shoulders shaking and knew that she was sobbing. “Star?”

She didn’t turn her head. All I heard was a choking voice, “Oh, my dear, my very dear! If I were even a hundred years younger!”

Chapter 20

I let the precious, useless gems dribble through my fingers, listlessly pushed them aside. If I were only a hundred years older-

But Star was right. She could not leave her post without relief. Her notion of proper relief, not mine nor anyone else’s. And I couldn’t stay in this upholstered jail much longer without beating my head on the bars.

Yet both of us wanted to stay together.

The real nasty hell of it was that I knew–just as she knew–that each of us would forget. Some, anyhow. Enough so that there would be other shoes, other men, and she would laugh again.

And so would I–She had seen that and had gravely, gently, with subtle consideration for another’s feelings, told me indirectly that I need not feel guilty when next I courted some other girl, in some other land, somewhere.

Then why did I feel like a heel?

How did I get trapped with no way to turn without being forced to choose between hurting my beloved and going clean off my rocker?

I read somewhere about a man who lived on a high mountain, because of asthma, the choking, killing land, while his wife lived on the coast below him, because of heart trouble that could not stand altitude. Sometimes they looked at each other through telescopes.

In the morning there had been no talk of Stars retiring. The unstated quid-pro-quo was that, if she planned to retire, I would hang around (thirty years!) until she did. Her Wisdom had concluded that I could not, and did not speak of it. We had a luxurious breakfast and were cheerful, each with his secret thoughts.

Nor were children mentioned. Oh, I would find that clinic, do what was needed. If she wanted to mix
her star line with my common blood, she could, tomorrow or a hundred years hence. Or smile tenderly
and have it cleaned out with the rest of the trash. None of my people had even been mayor of Podunk
and a plow horse isn’t groomed for the Irish Sweepstakes. If Star put a child together from our genes, it
would be sentiment, a living valentine–a younger poodle she could pet before she let it run free. But
sentiment only, as sticky if not as morbid as that of her aunt with the dead husbands, for the Imperium

could not use my bend sinister.

I looked up at my sword, hanging opposite me. I hadn’t touched it since the party, long past, when Star chose to dress for the Glory Road. I took it down, buckled it on and drew it–felt that surge of liveness and had a sudden vision of a long road and a castle on a hill.

What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?

Quit dodging, Gordon! What does a husband owe his wife? This very sword–“Jump Rogue and Princess leap. My wife art thou and mine to keep.” “–for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse . . . to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” That was what I meant by that doggerel and Star had known it and I had known it and knew it now.

When we vowed, it had seemed likely that we would be parted by death that same day. But that didn’t reduce the vow nor the deepness with which I had meant it. I hadn’t jumped the sword to catch a tumble on the grass before I died; I could have had that free. No, I had wanted “–to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part”!

Star had kept her vow to the letter. Why did I have itchy feet?

Scratch a hero and find a bum.

And a retired hero was as silly as those out-of-work kings that clutter Europe.

I slammed out of our “flat,” wearing sword and not giving a damn about stares, apported to our therapists, found where I should go, went there, did what was necessary, told the boss biotechnician that Her Wisdom must be told, and jumped down his throat when he asked questions.

Then back to the nearest apport booth and hesitated–I needed companionship the way an Alcoholics-Anonymous needs his hand held. But I had no intimates, just hundreds of acquaintances. It isn’t easy for the Empress’s cosort to have friends.

Rufo it had to be. But in all the months I had been on Center I had never been in Rufo’s home. Center does not practice the barbarous custom of dropping in on people and I had seen Rufo only at the Residence, or on parties; Rufo had never invited me to his home. No, no coldness there; we saw him often, but always he had come to us.

I looked for him in apport listings–no luck. Then as little with see-speak lists. I called the Residence, got the communication officer. He said that “Rufo” was not a surname and tried to brush me off. I said, “Hold it, you overpaid clerk! Switch me off and you’ll be in charge of smoke signals in Timbuktu an hour from now. Now listen. This bloke is elderly, baldheaded, one of his names is ‘Rufo’ I think, and he is a distinguished comparative culturologist. And he is a grandson of Her Wisdom. I think you know who he is and have been dragging your feet from bureaucratic arrogance. You have five minutes. Then I talk to Her Wisdom and ask her, while you pack!”

(“Stop! Danger you! Other old bald Rufo (?) top compculturist. Wisdom egg-sperm-egg. Five-minutes. Liar and/or fool. Wisdom? Catastrophe!”)

In less than five minutes Rufo’s image filled the tank. “Well!” he said. “I wondered who had enough weight to crash my shutoff.”

“Rufo, may I come see you?”

His scalp wrinkled. “Mice in the pantry, son? Your face reminds me of the time my uncle–”

“Please, Rufo!”

“Yes, son,” he said gently. “I’ll send the dancing girls home. Or shall I keep them?”

“I don’t care. How do I find you?”

He told me, I punched his code, added my charge number, and I was there, a thousand miles around the horizon. Rufo’s place was a mansion as lavish as Jocko’s and thousands of years more sophisticated. I gathered an impression that Rufo had the biggest household on Center, all female. I was wrong. But all female servants, visitors, cousins, daughters, made themselves a reception committee–to look at Her Wisdom’s bedmate. Rufo shooed them away and took me to his study. A dancing girl (evidently a secretary) was fussing over papers and tapes. Rufo slapped her fanny out, gave me a comfortable chair, a drink, put cigarettes near me, sat down and said nothing.

Smoking isn’t popular on Center, what they use as tobacco is the reason. I picked up a cigarette.
“Chesterfields! Good God!”

“Have ’em smuggled,” he said. “But they don’t make anything like Sweet Caps anymore. Bridge sweepings and chpped hay.”

I hadn’t smoked in months. But Star had told me that cancer and such I could now forget. So I lit it–and coughed like a Nevian dragon. Vice requires constant practice.

” ‘What news on the Rialto?’ ” Rufo inquired. He glanced at my sword.

“Oh, nothing.” Having interrupted Rufo’s work, I now shied at baring my domestic troubles.

Rufo sat and smoked and waited. I needed to say something and the American cigarette reminded me of an incident, one that had added to my unstable condition. At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: “Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I’m too urbane to mention it.”

But I had been delighted to meet him, he had spoken English!

I had thought that Star, Rufo, and myself were the only ones on Center who spoke English. We often spoke it. Star on my account, Rufo because he liked to practice. He spoke Cockney like a costermonger, Bostonese like Beacon Hill, Aussie like a kangaroo; Rufo knew all English languages.

This chap spoke good General American. “Nebbi is the name, he said, shaking hands where no one shakes hands, “and you’re Gordon, I know. Delighted to meet you.”

“Me, too,” I agreed. “It’s a surprise and a pleasure to hear my own language.”

“Professional knowledge, my dear chap. Comparative culturologist, linguisto-historo-political. You’re American, I know. Let me place it–Deep-South, not born there. Possibly New England. Overlaid with displaced Middle Western, California perhaps. Basic speech, lower-middle class, mixed.”

The smooth oaf was good. Mother and I lived in Boston while my father was away, 1942-45. I’ll never forget those winters; I wore overshoes from November to April. I had lived Deep South, Georgia and Florida, and in California at La Jolla during the Korean unWar and, later, in college. “Lower-middle class”? Mother had not thought so.

“Near enough,” I agreed. “I know one of your colleagues.”

“I know whom you mean, ‘the Mad Scientist.’ Wonderful wacky theories. But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?”

” ‘Noble Experiment’?” I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. “Oh, that was repealed.”

“Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I was talking about Prohibition.”

“Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion–as if adding zeros could produce a sum. But it was tried in your tribal land on a mammoth scale. Before you were born, no doubt. I thought you meant that even the corpse had been swept away.” He smiled. “Then they still have elections and all that?”

“The last time I looked, yes.”

“Oh, wonderful. Fantastic, simply fantastic. Well, we must get together, I want to quiz you. I’ve been studying your planet a long time–the most amazing pathologies in tile explored complex. So long. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as your tribesmen say.”

I told Rufo about it. “Rufe, I know I came from a barbarous planet. But does that excuse his rudeness? Or was it rudeness? I haven’t really got the hang of good manners here.”

Rufo frowned. “It is bad manners anywhere to sneer at a person’s birthplace, tribe, or customs. A man does it at his own risk. If you kill him, nothing will happen to you. It might embarrass Her Wisdom a little. If She can be embarrassed.”

“I won’t kill him, it’s not that important.”

“Then forget it. Nebbi is a snob. He knows a little, understands nothing, and thinks the universes would be better if he had designed them. Ignore him.”

“I will. It was just–look, Rufo, my country isn’t perfect. But I don t enjoy hearing it from a stranger.”

“Who does? I like your country, it has flavor. But–I’m not a stranger and this is not a sneer. Nebbi was right.”

“Huh?”

“Except that he sees only the surface. Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is–so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

“But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn’t work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing–except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.”

He added, “Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right. This subject I know and I’m not stupid, as Nebbi thinks. He’s right about the futility of ‘adding zeros’–but he doesn’t realize that he is a zero.”

I grinned. “No point in letting a zero get my goat.”

“None. Especially as you are not. Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won’t be one of the nerd. I respect you, and I don’t respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to ‘respect’ and even to ‘love’ the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet
at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn’t a political system, it’s a disease. But be of good cheer; your American politicians are immune to this disease . . . and your customs allow the non-zero elbow room.”

Rufo glanced at my sword again. “Old friend, you didn’t come here to bitch about Nebbi.” “No.” I looked down at that keen blade. “I fetched this to shave you, Rufo.”

“Eh?”

“I promised I would shave your corpse. I owe it to you for the slick job you did on me. So here I am,
to shave the barber.”

He said slowly, “But I’m not yet a corpse.” He did not move. But his eyes did, estimating distance between us. Rufo wasn’t counting on my being “chivalrous”; he had lived too long.

“Oh, that can be arranged,” I said cheerfully, “unless I get straight answers from you.”

He relaxed a touch. “I’ll try, Oscar.”

“More than try, please. You’re my last chance. Rufo, this must be private. Even from Star.”

“Under the Rose. My word on it.”

“With your fingers crossed, no doubt. But don’t risk it, I’m serious. And straight answers, I need them. I want advice about my marriage.”

He looked glum. “And I meant to go out today. Instead I worked. Oscar, I would rather criticize a woman’s firstborn, or even her taste in hats. Much safer to teach a shark to bite. What if I refuse?”

“Then I shave you!”

“You would, you heavy-handed headsman!” He frowned. ” ‘Straight answers–‘ You don’t want them, you want a shoulder to cry on.”

“Maybe that, too. But I do want straight answers, not the lies you can tell in your sleep.”

“So I lose either way. Telling a man the truth about his marriage is suicide. I think I’ll sit tight and see if
you have the heart to cut me down in cold blood.”

“Oh, Rufo, I’ll put my sword under your lock and key if you like. You know I would never draw against you.”

“I know no such thing,” he said querulously. “There’s always that first time. Scoundrels are predictable, but you’re a man of honor and that frightens me. Can’t we handle this over the see-speak?”

“Come off it, Rufo. I’ve nobody else to turn to. I want you to speak frankly. I know that a marriage counselor has to lay it on the line, pull no punches. For the sake of blood we’ve lost together I ask you to advise me. And frankly, of course!”

” ‘Of course,’ is it? The last time I risked it you were for cutting the tongue out of me.” He looked at me moodily. “But I was ever a fool where friendship speaks. Hear, I’ll dicker ye a fair dicker. You talk, I’ll listen . . . and if it should come about that you’re taking so long that my tired old kidneys complain and I’m forced to leave your welcome company for a moment . . . why, then you’ll misunderstand and go away in a huff and we’ll say no more about it. Eh?”

“Okay.”

“The Chair recognizes you. Proceed.”

So I talked. I talked out my dilemma and frustration, sparing neither self nor Star (it was for her sake, too, and it wasn’t necessary to speak of our most private matters; those, at least, were dandy). But I told our quarrels and many matters best kept in the family, I had to.

Rufo listened. Presently he stood up and paced, looking troubled. Once he tut-tutted over the men Star had brought home. “She shouldn’t have called her maids in. But do forget it, lad. She never remembers that men are shy, whereas females merely have customs. Allow Her this.”

Later he said, “No need to be jealous of Jocko, son. He drives a tack with a sledgehammer.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“That’s what Menelaus said. But leave room for give and take. Every marriage needs it.”

Finally I ran down, having told him Star’s prediction that I would leave. “I’m not blaming her for anything and talking about it has straightened me out. I can sweat it out now, behave myself, and be a good husband. She does make terrible sacrifices to do her job–and the least I can do is make it easier. She’s so sweet and gentle and good.”

Rufo stopped, some distance away with his back to his desk. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

“She’s an old bag!”

I was out of my chair and at him at once. I didn’t draw. Didn’t think of it, wouldn’t have anyhow. I wanted to get my hands on him and punish him for talking that way about my beloved.

He bounced over the desk like a ball and by the time I covered the length of the room, Rufo was behind it, one hand in a drawer.

“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Oscar, I don’t want to shave you.”

“Come out and fight like a man!”

“Never, old friend. One step closer and you’re dog meat. All your fine promises, your pleadings. ‘Pull no punches’ you said. ‘Lay it on the line’ you said. ‘Speak frankly’ you said. Sit down in that chair.”

” ‘Speaking frankly’ doesn’t mean being insulting!”

“Who’s to judge? Can I submit my remains for approval before I make them? Don’t compound your broken promises with childish illogic. And would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy. Sit down in that chair.”

I sat down.

“Now,” said Rufo, staying where he was, “you will listen while I talk. Or perhaps you will get up and walk out. In which case I might be so pleased to see the last of your ugly face that that might be that. Or I might be so annoyed at being interrupted that you would drop dead in the doorway, for I’ve much pent
up and ready to spill over. Suit yourself.

“I said,” he went on, “that my grandmother is an old bag. I said it brutally, to discharge your tension–and now you’re not likely to take too much offense at many offensive things I still must say. She’s old, you know that, though no doubt you find it easy to forget, mostly. I forget it myself, mostly, even though She was old when I was a babe making messes on the floor and crowing at the dear sight of Her. Bag, She is, and you know it. I could have said ‘experienced woman’ but I had to rap your teeth with it; you’ve been dodging it even while you’ve been telling me how well you know it–and how you don’t care. Granny is an old bag, we start from there.

“And why should She be anything else? Tell yourself the answer. You’re not a fool, you’re merely young. Ordinarily She has but two possible pleasures and the other She can’t indulge.”

“What’s the other one?”

“Handing down bad decisions through sadistic spite, that’s the one She dare not indulge. So let us be thankful that Her body has built into it this harmless safety valve, else we would all suffer grievously before somebody managed to kill Her. Lad, dear lad, can you dream how mortal tired She must be of most things? Your own zest soured in only months. Think what it must be to hear the same old weary mistakes year after year with nothing to hope for but a clever assassin. Then be thankful that She still pleasures in one innocent pleasure. So She’s an old bag and I mean no disrespect; I salute a beneficent balance between two things She must be to do her job.

“Nor did She stop being what She is by reciting a silly rhyme with you one bright day on a hilltop. You think She has taken a vacation from it since, sticking to you only. Possibly She has, if you have quoted Her exactly and I read the words rightly; She always tells the truth.

“But never all the truth–who can? –and She is the most skillful liar by telling the truth you’ll ever meet. I misdoubt your memory missed some innocent-sounding word that gave an escape yet saved your feelings.

“If so, why should She do more than save your feelings? She’s fond of you, that’s dear–but must She be fanatic about it? All Her training, Her special bent, is to avoid fanaticism always, find practical answers. Even though She may not have mixed up the shoes, as yet, if you stay on a week or a year or twenty and time comes when She wants to. She can find ways, not lie to you in words–and hurt Her conscience not at all because She hasn’t any. Just Wisdom, utterly pragmatic.”

Rufo cleared his throat. “Now refutation and counterpoint and contrariwise. I like my grandmother and love Her as much as my meager nature permits and respect Her right down to Her sneaky soul–and I’ll kill you or anyone who gets in Her way or causes Her unhappiness–and only part of this is that She has
handed on to me a shadow of Her own self so that I understand Her. If She is spared assassins knife or blast or poison long enough, She’ll go down in history as ‘The Great.’ But you spoke of Her ‘terrible sacrifices.’ Ridiculous! She likes being ‘Her Wisdom,’ the Hub around which all worlds turn. Nor do I believe that She would give it up for you or fifty better. Again, She didn’t lie, as you’ve told it–She said ‘if’ . . . knowing that much can happen in thirty year’s, or twenty-five, among which is the near certainty that you wouldn’t stay that long. A swindle.

“But that’s the least of swindles She’s put over on you. She conned you from the moment you first saw Her and long before. She cheated both ways from the ace, forced you to pick the shell with the pea, sent you like any mark anxious for the best of it, cooled you off when you started to suspect, herded you back into line and to your planned fate–and made you like it. She’s never fussy about method and would con the Virgin Mary and make a pact with the Old One all in one breath, did it suit Her purpose. Oh, you got paid, yes, and good measure to boot; there’s nothing small about Her. But its time you knew you were conned. Mind you, I’m not criticizing Her, I’m applauding–and I helped . . . save for one queasy
moment when I felt sorry for the victim. But you were so conned you wouldn’t listen, thank any saints who did. I lost my nerve for a bit, thinking that you were going to a sticky death with your innocent eyes wide. But She was smarter than I am. She always has been.

“Now! I like Her. I respect Her. I admire Her. I even love Her a bit. All of Her, not just Her pretty aspects but also all the impurities that make Her steel as hard as it must be. How about you, sir? What’s your feeling about Her now . . . knowing She conned you, knowing what She is?”

I was still sitting. My drink was by me, untouched all this long harangue.

I took it and stood up. “Here’s to the grandest old bag in twenty universes!”

Rufo bounced over the desk again, grabbed his glass. “Say that loud and often! And to Her, She’d love it! May She be blessed by God, Whoever He is, and kept safe. We’ll never see another like Her, mores the pity! –for we need them by the gross!”

We tossed it down and smashed our grasses. Rufo fetched fresh ones, poured, settled in his chair, and said, “Now for serious drinking. Did I ever tell you about the time my–”

“You did. Rufo, I want to know about this swindle.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I can see much of it. Take that first time we flew–”

He shuddered. “Lets not.”

“I never wondered then. But, since Star can do this, we could have skipped Igli, the Horned Ghosts, the marsh, the time wasted with Jocko–”

“Wasted?”

“For her purpose. And the rats and hogs and possibly the dragons. Flown directly from that first Gate to the second. Right?”

He shook his head. “Wrong.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Assuming that She could fly us that far, a question I hope never to settle, She could have flown us to the Gate She preferred. What would you have done then? If popped almost directly from Nice to Karth-Hokesh? Charged out and fought like a wolverine, as you did? Or said ‘Miss, you’ve made a mistake. Show me the exit from this Fun House–I’m not laughing.’ ”

“Well–I wouldn’t have bugged out”

“But would you have won? Would you have been at that keen edge of readiness it took?”

“I see. Those first rounds were live ammo exercises in my training. Or was it live ammo? Was all that first part swindle? Maybe with hypnotism, to make it feel right? God knows she’s expert. No danger till we reached the Black Tower?”

He shuddered again. “No, no! Oscar, any of that could have killed us. I never fought harder in my life, nor was ever more frightened. None of it could be skipped. I don’t understand all Her reasons. I’m not Her Wisdom. But She would never risk Herself unless necessary. She would sacrifice ten million brave men, were it needed, as the cheaper price. She knows what She’s worth. But She fought beside us with all She has–you saw! Because it had to be.”

“I still don’t understand all of it.”

“Nor will you. Nor will I. She would have sent you in alone, had it been possible. And at that last supreme danger, that thing called ‘Eater of Souls’ because it had done just that to many braves before you . . . had you lost to it, She and I would have tried to fight our way out–I was ready, any moment; I couldn’t tell you–and if we had escaped–unlikely–She would have shed no tears for you. Or not many. Then worked another twenty or thirty or a hundred years to find and con and train anther champion–and fought just as hard by his side. She has courage, that cabbage. She knew how thin our chances were; you didn’t. Did She flinch?”

“No.”

“But you were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, you’re never a puppet, or
you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place


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him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She
searched until She found him . . . and honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? It’s no
common in America.”

“What?” I had to think. Reading ‘King Arthur’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’, and Burroughs wonderful Mars stories–But every kid does that. “When we moved to Florida, I was a Scout. The Scoutmaster was a Frenchman, taught high school. He started some of us lads. I liked it, it was something I did well. Then in college–”

“Ever wonder why that immigrant got that job in that town? And volunteered for Scout work? Or why your college had a fencing team when many don’t? No matter, if you had gone elsewhere, there would have been fencing in a YMCA or something. Didn’t you have more combat than most of your category?”

“Hell, yes!”

“Could have been killed anytime, too–and She would have turned to another candidate already being honed. Son, I don’t know how you were selected, nor now you were converted from a young punk into the hero you potentially were. Not my job. Mine was simpler–just more dangerous–your groom and your ‘eyes-behind.’ Look around. Fancy quarters for a servant, eh?”

“Well, yes. I had almost forgotten that you were supposed to be my groom.”

” ‘Supposed,’ hell! I was. I went three times to Nevia as Her servant, training for it. Jocko doesn’t know to this day. If I went back, I would be welcome, I think. But only in the kitchen.”

“But why? That part seems silly.”

“Was it? When we snared you, your ego was in feeble shape, it had to be built up–and calling you ‘Boss’ and serving your meals while I stood and you sat, with Her, was part of it.” He gnawed a knuckle and looked annoyed. “I still think She witched your first two arrows. Someday I’d like a return match–with Her not around.”

“I may fool you. I’ve been practicing.”

“Well, forget it. We got the Egg, that’s the important thing. And here’s this bottle and that’s important, too.” He poured again. “Will that be all, ‘Boss’?”

“Damn you, Rufo! Yes, you sweet old scoundrel. You’ve straightened me out. Or conned me again, I don’t know which.”

“No con, Oscar, by the blood we’ve shed. I’ve told the truth as straight as I know it, though it hurt me. I didn’t want to, you’re my friend. Walking that rocky road with you I shall treasure all the days of my life.”

“Uh . . . yes. Me, too. All of it.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

“Rufo, I understand her now–as well as an ordinary person can–and respect her utterly . . . and love her more than ever. But I can’t be anybody’s fancy man. Not even here.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to say that. Yes. She’s right She’s always right, damn Her! You must leave. For both of you. Oh, She wouldn’t be hurt too much but staying would ruin you, in time. Destroy you, if you’re stubborn.

“I had better get back–and toss my shoes.” I felt better, as if I had told the surgeon: Go ahead. Amputate.

“Don’t do that!”

“What?”

“Why should you? No need for anything final If a marriage is to last a long time–and yours might, even a very long time–then holidays should be long, too. And off the leash, son, with no date to report back and no promises. She knows that knights errant spend their nights erring, She expects it. It has always been so, un droit de la vocation–and necessary. They just don’t mention it in kiddies’ stories where you come from. So go see what’s stirring in your line of work elsewhere and don’t worry. Come back in four or forty years or something, you’ll be welcome. Heroes always sit at the first table, it s their right. And they come and go as they please, and that’s their right, too. On a smaller scale, you re something like Her.”

“High compliment!”

“On a ‘smaller scale,’ I said. Mmm, Oscar, part of your trouble is a need to go home. Your birthing land. To regain your perspective and find out who you are. All travelers feel this, I feel it myself from time to time. When the feeling comes, I pamper it.”

“I hadn’t realized I was homesick. Maybe I am.”

“Maybe She realized it. Maybe She nudged you. Myself, I make it a rule to give any wife of mine a vacation from me whenever her face looks too familiar–for mine must be even more so to her, looking as I do. Why not, lad? Going back to Earth isn’t the same as dying. I’m going there soon, that’s why I’m clearing up this paper work. Happens we might be there the same time . . . and get together for a drink or ten and some laughs and stories. And pinch the waitress and see what she says. Why not?”

Chapter 21

Okay, here I am.

I didn’t leave that week but soon. Star and I spent a tearful, glorious night before I left and she cried as she kissed me “Au ‘voir” (not “Good-bye”). But I knew her tears would dry once I was out of sight; she knew that I knew and I knew she preferred it so, and so did I. Even though I cried, too.

Pan American isn’t as slick as the commercial Gates; I was bunged through in three fast changes and o hocus-pocus. A girl said, “Places, please”–then whambo!

I came out on Earth, dressed in a London suit, pass-port and papers in pocket, the Lady Vivamus in a kit that did not look like a sword case, and in other pockets drafts exchangeable for much gold, for I found that I didn’t mind accepting a hero’s fee. I arrived near Zurich, I don’t know the address; the Gate service sees to that. Instead, I had ways to send messages.

Shortly those drafts became, numbered accounts in three Swiss banks, handled by a lawyer I had been told to see. I bought travelers checks several places and some I mailed ahead and some I carried, for I had no intention of paying Uncle Sugar 91 percent.

You lose track of time on a different day and calendar; there was a week or two left on that free ride home my orders called for. It seemed smart to take it–less conspicuous. So I did–an old four-engine transport, Prestwick to Gander to New York.

Streets looked dirtier, buildings not as tall–and headlines worse than ever. I quit reading newspapers, didn’t stay long; California I thought of as “home.” I phoned Mother; she was reproachful about my not having written and I promised to visit Alaska as soon as I could. How were they all? (I had in mind that my half brothers and sisters might need college help someday.)

They weren’t hurting. My stepfather was on flight orders and had made permanent grade. I asked her to forward any mail to my aunt.

California looked better than New York. But it wasn’t Nevia. Not even Center. It was more crowded than I remembered. All you can say for California towns is that they aren’t as bad as other places. I visited my aunt and uncle because they had been good to me and I was thinking of using some of that gold in Switzerland to buy him free from his first wife. But she had died and they were talking about a swimming pool.

So I kept quiet. I had been almost ruined by too much money, it had grown me up a bit. I followed the rule of Their Wisdoms: Leave well enough alone.

The campus felt smaller and the students looked so young. Reciprocal, I guess. I was coming out of the malt shop across from Administration when two Letter sweaters came in, shoving me aside. The second said, “Watch it, Dad!”

I let him live.

Football had been re-emphasized, new coach, new dressing rooms, stands painted, talk about a stadium. The coach knew who I was; he knew the records and was out to make a name. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?” I told him I didn’t think so.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Gotta get that old sheepskin! Silliest thing on earth to let your hitch in the Army stop you. Now look–” His voice dropped.

No nonsense about “sweeping the gym,” stuff the Conference didn’t like. But a boy could live with a family–and one could be found. If he paid his fees in cash, who cared? Quiet as an undertaker–“That leaves your GI benefits for pocket money.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Man, don’t you read the papers?” He had it on file: While I was gone, that unWar had been made eligible for GI benefits.

I promised to think it over.

But I had no such intention. I had indeed decided to finish my engineering degree, I like to finish things. But not there.

That evening I heard from Joan, the girl who had given me such a fine sendoff, then “Dear-Johnned” me. I intended to look her up, call on her and her husband; I just hadn’t found out her married name yet. But she ran across my aunt, shopping, and phoned me. “Easy!” she said and sounded delighted.

“Who–Wait a minute, Joan!”

I must come to dinner that very night. I told her “Fine,” and that I was looking forward to meeting the lucky galoot she had married.

Joan looked sweet as ever and gave me a hearty arms-around-my-neck smack, a welcome-home kiss, sisterly but good. Then I met the kids, one crib size and the other toddling.

Her husband was in L.A.

Her sister and brother-in-law stayed for one drink; Joan and her sister put the kids to bed while the brother-in-law sat with me and asked how things were in Europe he understood I was just back and then he told me how things were in Europe and what should be done about them. “You know, Mr. Jordan,” he told me, tapping my knee, “a man in the real estate business like I am gets to be a pretty shrewd judge of human nature has to be and while I haven’t actually been in Europe the way you have haven’t had time somebody has to stay home and pay taxes and keep an eye on things while you lucky young fellows are seeing the world but human nature is the same anywhere and if we dropped just one little bomb on Minsk or Pinsk or one of those places they would see the light right quick and we could stop all this diddling around that’s making it tough on the businessman. Don’t you agree?”

I said he had a point. They left and he said that he would ring me tomorrow and show me some choice lots that could be handled on almost nothing down and were certain to go way up what with a new missile plant coming in here soon. “Nice listening to your experiences, Mr. Jordan, real pleasant. Sometime I must tell you about something that happened to me in Tijuana but not with the wife around ha ha!”

Joan said to me, “I can’t see why she married him. Pour me another drink, hon, a double, I need it. I’m going to turn the oven down, dinner will keep.”

We both had a double and then another, and had dinner about eleven. Joan got tearful when I insisted on going home around three. She told me I was chicken and I agreed; she told me things could have been so different if I hadn’t insisted on going into the Army and I agreed again; she told me to go out the back way and not turn on any lights and she never wanted to see me again and Jim was going to Sausalito the seventeenth.

I caught a plane for Los Angeles next day.

Now look–I am not blaming Joan. I like Joan. I respect her and will always be grateful to her. She is a fine person. With superior early advantages–say in Nevia–she’d be a wow! She’s quite a gal, even so. Her house was clean, her babies were clean and healthy and well cared for. She’s generous and thoughtful and good-tempered.

Nor do I feel guilty. If a man has any regard for a girl’s feelings, there is one thing he cannot refuse: a return bout if she wants one. Nor will I pretend that I didn’t want it, too.

But I felt upset all the way to Los Angeles. Not over her husband, he wasn’t hurt. Not over Joanie, she was neither swept off her feet nor likely to suffer remorse. Joanie is a good kid and had made a good adjustment between her nature and an impossible society.

Still, I was upset.

A man must not criticize a woman’s most womanly quality. I must make it clear that little Joanie was just as sweet and just as generous as the younger Joanie who had sent me off to the Army feeling grand. The fault lay with me; I had changed.

My complaints are against the whole culture with no individual sharing more than a speck of blame. Let me quote that widely traveled culturologist and rake, Dr. Rufo:

“Oscar, when you get home, don’t expect too much of your feminine compatriots. You’re sure to be disappointed and the poor dears aren’t to blame. American women, having been conditioned out of their sex instincts, compensate by compulsive interest in rituals over the dead husk of sex . . . and each one is sure she knows ‘intuitively’ the right ritual for conjuring the corpse. She knows and nobody can tell her any different . . . especially a man unlucky enough to be in bed with her. So don’t try. You will either make her furious or crush her spirit. You’ll be attacking that most Sacred of Cows: the myth that women know all about sex, just from being women.”

Rufo had frowned. “The typical American female is sure that she has genius as a couturiere as an interior decorator, as a gourmet cook, and, always, as a courtesan. Usually she is wrong on four counts. But don’t try to tell her so.”

He had added, “Unless you can catch one not over twelve and segregate her, especially from her mother–and even that may be too late. But don’t misunderstand me; it evens out. The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rattier than the female, murdered sex in your country.”

“What can I do about it?”

“Slip over to France now and then. French women are almost as ignorant but not nearly as conceited and often are teachable.”

When my plane landed, I put the subject out of mind as I planned to be an anchorite a while. I learned in the Army that no sex is easier than a starvation allowance–and I had serious plans.

I had decided to be the square I naturally am, with hard work and a purpose in life. I could have used those Swiss bank accounts to be a playboy. But I had been a playboy, it wasn’t my style.

I had been on the biggest binge in history–one I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t have so much loot. Now was time to settle down and join Heroes Anonymous. Being a hero is okay. But a retired hero–first he’s a bore, then he’s a bum.

My first stop was Caltech. I could now afford the best and Caltech’s only rival is where they tried to outlaw sex entirely. I had seen enough of the dreary graveyard in 1942-45.

The Dean of Admissions was not encouraging. “Mr. Gordon, you know that we turn down more than we accept? Nor could we give you full credit on this transcript. No slur on your former school–and we do like to give ex-servicemen a break–but this school has higher standards. Another thing, you won’t find Pasadena a cheap place to live.”

I said I would be happy to take whatever standing I merited, and showed him my bank balance (one of them) and offered a check for a years fees. He wouldn’t take it but loosened up. I left with the impression that a place might be found for E. C. “Oscar” Gordon.

I went downtown and started the process to make me legally “Oscar” instead of “Evelyn Cyril.” Then I started job hunting.

I found one out in the Valley, as a junior draftsman in a division of a subsidiary of a corporation that made tires, food machinery, and other things–missiles in this case. This was part of the Gordon Rehabilitation Plan. A few months over the drafting board would get me into the swing again and I planned to study evenings and behave myself. I found a furnished apartment in Sawtelle and bought a used Ford for commuting.

I felt relaxed then; “Milord Hero” was buried. All that was left was the Lady Vivamus, hanging over the television. But I balanced her in hand first and got a thrill out of it. I decided to find a salle d’armes and join its club. I had seen an archery range in the Valley, too, and there ought to be someplace where American Rifle Association members fired on Sundays. No need to get flabby-

Meanwhile I would forget the loot in Switzerland. It was payable in gold, not funny money, and if I let it sit. It might be worth more–maybe much more–from inflation than from investing it. Someday it would be capital, when I opened my own firm.

That’s what I had my sights on: Boss. A wage slave, even in brackets where Uncle Sugar takes more than half, is still a slave. But I had learned from Her Wisdom that a boss must train; I could not buy “Boss” with gold.

So I settled down. My name change came through; Caltech conceded that I could look forward to moving to Pasadena–and mail caught up with me.

Mother sent it to my aunt, she forwarded it to the hotel address I had first given, eventually it reached my flat. Some were letters mailed in the States over a year ago, sent on to Southeast Asia, then Germany, then Alaska, then more changes before I read them in Sawtelle.

One offered that bargain on investment service again; this time I could Knock off 10 percent more. Another was from the coach at college–on plain stationery and signed in a scrawl. He said certain parties were determined to see the season start off with a bang. Would $250 per month change my mind? Phone his home number, collect. I tore it up.

The next was from the Veterans Administration, dated just after my discharge, telling me that as a result of Barton vs. United States, et al., it had been found that I was legally a “war orphan” and entitled to $110/month for schooling until age twenty-three.

I laughed so hard I hurt.

After some junk was one from a Congressman. He had the honor to inform me that, in cooperation with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he had submitted a group of special bills to correct injustices resulting from failure to classic correctly persons who were “war orphans,” that the bills had passed under consent, and that he was happy to say that one affecting me allowed me to my twenty-seventh birthday to complete my education inasmuch as my twenty-third birthday had passed before the error was rectified. I am, sir, sincerely, etc.

I couldn’t laugh. I thought how much dirt I would have eaten, or–you name it–the summer I was conscripted if I had been sure of $110 a month. I wrote that Congressman a thank-you letter, the best I knew how.

The next item looked like junk. It was from Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., therefore a pitch for a donation or a hospital insurance ad–but I couldn’t see why anyone in Dublin would have me on their list.

Hospitals’ Trust asked if I had Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes ticket number such-and-such, and its official receipt? This ticket had been sold to J. L. Weatherby, Esq. Its number had been drawn in the second unit drawing, and had been a ticket of the winning horse. J. L. Weatherby had been informed and had notified Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., that he had disposed of ticket to E. C. Gordon, and, on receiving receipt, had mailed it to such party.

Was I the “E. C. Gordon,” did I have the ticket, did I have the receipt? H. T. Ltd. would appreciate an early reply.

The last item in the stack had an A.P.O. return address. In it was an Irish Sweepstakes receipt–and a note; ‘This should teach me not to play poker. Hope it wins you something–J. L. WEATHERBY.’ The cancellation was over a year old.

I stared at it, then got the papers I had carried through the Universes. I found the matching ticket. It was bloodstained but the number was clear.

I looked at the letter. Second unit drawing-

I started examining tickets under bright light. The others were counterfeit. But the engraving of this ticket and this receipt was sharp as paper money. I don’t know where Weatherby bought that ticket, but he did not buy it from the thief who sold me mine.

Second drawing–I hadn’t known there was more than one. But drawings depend on the number of tickets sold, in units of £120,000. I had seen the results of only the first.

Weatherby had mailed the receipt care of Mother, to Wiesbaden, and it must have been in Elmendorf when I was in Nice–then had gone to Nice, and back to Elmendorf because Rufo had left a forwarding address with American Express; Rufo had known all about me of course and had taken steps to cover my disappearance.

On that morning over a year earlier while I sat in a cafe in Nice, I held a winning ticket with the receipt in the mail. If I had looked farther in that Herald-Tribune than the “Personal” ads I would have found the results of the Second Unit drawing and never answered that ad.

I would have collected $140,000, never have seen Star a second time-

Or would Her Wisdom have been balked?

Would I have refused to follow my “Helen of Troy” simply because my pockets were lined with money?

I gave myself the benefit of doubt. I would have walked the Glory Road anyhow!

At least, I hoped so.

Next morning I phoned the plant, then went to a bank and through a routine I had gone through twice

in Nice.

Yes, it was a good ticket. Could the bank be of service in collecting it? I thanked them and left.

A little man from Internal Revenue was on my doorstep-

Almost–He buzzed from below while I was writing to Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd.

Presently I was telling him that I was damned if I would! I’d leave the money in Europe and they could whistle! He said mildly not to take that attitude, as I was just blowing off steam because the IRS didn’t like paying informers’ fees but would if my actions showed that I was trying to evade the tax.

They had me boxed. I collected $140,000 and paid $103,000 to Uncle Sugar. The mild little man pointed out that it was better that way; so often people put off paying and got into trouble.

Had I been in Europe, it would have been $140,000 in gold–but now it was $37,000 in paper–because free and sovereign Americans can’t have gold. They might start a war, or turn Communist, or something. No, I couldn’t leave the $37,000 in Europe as gold; that was illegal, too. They were very polite.

I mailed 10 percent, $3,700, to Sgt. Weatherby and told him the story. I took $33,000 and set up a college trust for my siblings, handled so that my folks wouldn’t know until it was needed. I crossed my fingers and hoped that news about this ticket would not reach Alaska. The L.A. papers never had it, but word got around somehow; I found myself on endless sucker lists, got letters offering golden opportunities begging loans, or demanding gifts.

It was a month before I realized I had forgotten the California State Income Tax. I never did sort out the red ink.

Chapter 22

I got back to the old drawing board, slugged away at books in the evening, watched a little television, weekends some fencing.

But I kept having this dream-

I had it first right after I took that job and now I was having it every night-

I’m heading along this long, long road and I round a curve and there’s a castle up ahead. It’s beautiful, pennants flying from turrets and a winding climb to its drawbridge. But I know, I just know, that there is a princess captive in its dungeon.

That part is always the same. Details vary. Lately the mild little man from Internal Revenue steps into the road and tells me that toll is paid here–10 percent more than whatever I’ve got.

Other times it’s a cop and he leans against my horse (sometimes it has four legs, sometimes eight) and writes a ticket for obstructing traffic, riding with out-of-date license, failing to observe stop sign, and gross insubordination. He wants to know if I have a permit to carry that lance? –and tells me that game laws require me to tag any dragons killed.

Other times I round that turn and a solid wave of freeway traffic, five lanes wide, is coming at me. That one is worst.

I started writing this after the dreams started. I couldn’t see going to a headshrinker and saying, “Look, Doc, I’m a hero by trade and my wife is Empress in another universe–” I had even less desire to lie on his couch and tell how my parents mistreated me as a child (they didn’t) and how I found out about little girls (that s my business).

I decided to talk it out to a typewriter.

It made me feel better but didn’t stop the dreams. But I learned a new word: “acculturated.” It’s what happens when a member of one culture shifts to another, with a sad period when he doesn’t fit. Those Indians you see in Arizona towns, not doing anything, looking in shop windows or just standing. Acculturation. They don’t fit.

I was taking a bus down to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor–Star promised me that her therapy plus that at Center would free me of the common cold–and it has; I don’t catch anything. But even therapists that administer Long-Life can’t protect human tissues against poison gas; L.A. smog was getting me. Eyes burning, nose stopped up–twice a week I went down to get horrid things done to my nose. I used to park my car and go down Wilshire by bus, as parking was impossible close in.

In the bus I overheard two ladies: “–much as I despise them, you can’t give a cocktail party without inviting the Sylvesters.”

It sounded like a foreign language. Then I played it back and understood the words.

But why did she have to invite the Sylvesters?

If she despised them, why didn’t she either ignore them, or drop a rock on their heads?

In God’s name, why give a “cocktail party”? People who don’t like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren’t interested in, drinking drinks they don’t want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won’t notice they aren’t having fun. Why?

I realized that acculturation had set in. I didn’t fit.

I avoided buses thereafter and picked up five traffic tickets and a smashed fender. I quit studying, too. Books didn’t seem to make sense. It warn’t the way I lamed it back in dear old Center.

But I stuck to my job as a draftsman. I always have been able to draw and soon I was promoted to major work.

One day the Chief Draftsman called me over. “Here, Gordon, this assembly you did–”

I was proud of that job. I had remembered something I had seen on Center and had designed it in, reducing moving parts and improving a clumsy design into one that made me feel good. It was tricky and I had added an extra view. “Well?”

He handed it back. “Do it over. Do it right.”

I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to-

He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.”

“Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.

My flat seemed strange at that time on a working day. I started to study ‘Strength of Materials’–and chucked the book aside. Then I stood and looked at the Lady Vivamus.

“Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!” Whistling, I buckled her on, drew blade, felt that thrill run up my arm.

I returned sword, got a few things, traveler’s checks and cash mostly, walked out. I wasn’t going anywhere, just tataway!

I had been striding along maybe twenty minutes when a prowl car pulled up and took me to the station.

Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.

If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.

Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was–by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than–” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.

Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.

I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.

Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.

Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.

It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.

The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?” I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”

“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”

I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport–and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.

Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased–I had bought presents between planes in Seattle–and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.

I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross–only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.

But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.

But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything–ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again well see you.

They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums–and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal-

I said, “Sometime again!”–went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North

Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.

From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune, then went to Paris.

I kept the ad in daily and sat across from the Two Maggots and stacked saucers and tried not to fret. I watched the ma’m’selles and thought about what I might do.

If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, It has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.

Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.

But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon–and means exactly the same.

“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.

“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.

A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?

Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do–and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a thirty-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?

Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn: You can’t get there from here!

I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks-

I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was for warded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fraulein and got over the border almost sans calottes. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him–and he would die defending your rear.

So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!

Got any dragons you need killed?

End

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
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Tomatos
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Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
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Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
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A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
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Make America Great Again.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
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Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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What it was like Growing Up in 1960’s and 1970’s America

Here, I would like to relate a little about what it was like growing up as a boy in Pennsylvania. For, I am a native born American who lived through the 1960’s and through the 1970’s. I am pretty typical for my generation. The 1970’s was the decade of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It ended on a whimper with Jimmy Carter at the helm. Here we talk about the 1960’s and 1970’s and what it was like growing up at that time.

School

I attended elementary school. First I attended a private Catholic school in Connecticut, and then when my father was promoted we moved and I attended a public school in Western Pennsylvania.

Elementary school.
This picture is pretty typical. It is not of my school, but could have well have been. Our teachers were from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and in hindsight, certainly looked the part. Most everyone in my class where white. Our favorite television shows included the Brady Bunch and the Flintstones.

Allowance

Before I started work, I was permitted an allowance. My sisters both received an allowance with no strings attached. Mine was contingent upon my successful completion of my chores, and usually meant that I would get “paid” after I mowed the grass on Saturday (shoveled the drive in the Winter).

Mowing Grass
We had a push lawn mower. My job was to push it. We had apple trees in the back yard, and I would gleefully mow right over those suckers, making apples sauce of many of them. The hornets did love those apples, though. You had to mow quickly or suffer the consequences. Yikes! The picture depicts a boy and girl working on the lawn. Nice picture, but my sisters never helped with my chores. I was taught that they were the “weaker” sex, and that I was the one that had to work.

As a kid, my allowance of $1.00 per week was given to me every Saturday afternoon after the grass was successfully mowed. The hardest part was deciding how to spend it and get the very most out of every penny. Of course, a trip to the corner store for candy always figured into the picture!

One of my favorite treats was Dubble Bubble – a hard piece of pink bubble gum that included a tiny printed comic tucked between the gum and the outer wrapper, all for just a penny. I remember my first experience with inflation – the day when the cost of a piece of my beloved gum increased to 2¢.

Oh, the tragedy!

Another treat was Dixie Cups. These were little plastic containers of vanilla ice cream accompanied by a small, flat, wooden spoon. They had a flat circular cardboard lid that I would pull off and lick the inside top off. They were available at the local candy store (an old soda fountain that was re-purposed as a kind of local Quickie-mart) called Swede’s.  They were tiny – not more than a few bites, really – but we loved them.

Dixie Cups
I used to love eating Dixie cup ice cream. Here is an advertisement from the 1970’s.

The store was small. It had two counters. One, the main counter was were the 1950’s soda fountain was. It was all covered in canvas and unused. At least for maybe ten years. There was an old manual cash register there, and he sold cigarettes, and sundries there at the glass-topped counter.

On the other side was a long counter that resembled the kind of glass counters that you see today at butcher shops. There were shelves and shelves of candy there. We would go and point out this candy, and that candy. He would dutifully get then item, and put it in a small brown paper bag. Then he would carry it to the other counter and ring it up for us.

I will admit that the first thing that we did when we walked out the door was open up that little bag and start eating the candy inside. Heck, by the time we managed the walk home (from the store) most of the candy would be gone. Ha!

Toys & Sports

In the summer we would play softball on the side street (the traffic was really sparse in our town), and tackle football in any one of our many back yards. Basketball was also pretty popular, though I couldn’t dribble for the life of me. Sigh! We had a few class mates that had a hoop in their driveway. We would go there and play.

When I wasn’t playing sports, or “goofing off”, I liked to play “Spaceman” or “Army” with my other friends. I had a plastic “tommygun” that I would “shoot” the other kids with. We also had numerous toys that we would play with. Does anyone remember  Spirograph, Silly Putty, Etch-A-Sketch, Doodle Art, Lite-Brite, Tinkertoys, or Magic Slate? How about Sorry!, Battleship, Clue, or Payday?

I used to play with Clackers (Klackers), but they were banned because they broke your wrist. I also used to play with Jarts, but they were banned because some kids got hurt with them. I used to play with Slinky, but they never lasted more than a few days as we would eventually twist and turn them into unusable junk.

Klackers
Today you have fidget spinner gadgets, back in the 1970’s we had Clackers. We would go back and forth making such a racket with these bad boys. Not to mention using them to hit each other on the head with. Ouch!

Klackers came on the market in the late 60s and lasted into the early 70s.

They were constructed of two acrylic balls on a string with a ring or small handle in the middle.

The point was to get the two balls clicking against each other. If you got really good you could do fancy tricks with them, like build up momentum until they were hitting on the top and bottom in an arc . . . and make a hugely annoying racket.

Kids loved them and they became THE craze of the summer of 1971. But doctors and teachers weren’t so impressed after a frightening succession of serious Klacker accidents.

Unfortunately they allegedly had a nasty habit of shattering or exploding in a shrapnel-like shower and were promptly banned from every school in the western world – but kids all knew it was really a conspiracy from grown-ups because they hated the sound they made!

The similarity between this supremely popular toy and a South American hunting weapon called a bolo did not escape most teenage boys. In this capacity they proved extremely effective. After a nation outbreak of badly bruised arms and black eyes they were pretty much withdrawn from sale. – Nostalgia Central

Hair Styles

My mother sported large “bee hive” style hair, as did just about every mother. I was always trying to wear my hair long. You know, “Beatles” style. But, my father would have none of that.  As a result my middle school popularity had it’s highs and lows determined by whenever my father hauled me off to get a haircut. When my hair was long, and thus fashionable, I was popular. When my hair was short, and thus unfashionable, I was ignored.

A selection of hair styles from the 1970's.
A selection of hair styles from the 1970’s.

I once mentioned this to my uncle who made fun of me and my cousins. Saying that we (snort!) would only care if the girls thought we were cute or not. Well, at our age, it really was important.

In Pittsburgh, where there was a population of negro folk, the hair was in various types of “Afros”. These tended to look like huge balls. Some were quite enormous. I always thought that it was pretty cool to have. They liked to drive these HUGE cars, Lincolns or other high-end vehicles, and would take extra care not to mess up their hair as they went inside the car. LOL.

Bottle Collecting

My favorite thing to do when I was around eight or nine would be to go “bottle collecting”. Here I would go into the local “woods” to dig for “old bottles” (in long disused trash dumps, often 100 years old) that I would then clean and collect.

We had a couple of “dumps” that we frequented. One of the best, with the most impressive bottles, was near the river next to an old railroad spur. It was the home of many a “whittle marked” bottle, old time bitters, and about a hundred thousand Lydia Pinkham bottles. (I guess that the local woman folk must have had a lot of “womanly” problems.)

Our parents let us kids go out and play.

“I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. 

This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life.

My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all.

I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home.

When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”-The Overprotected Kid

As a kid, I would collect all kinds of junk. Not just bottles but all sorts of things.

Ah. My bedroom was a collection of old colorful bottles, scale models of tanks on shelves (and planes hanging from strings from the ceiling), as well as a quite a large collection of paperback books and comics. I had stacks and stacks of magazines. Magazines included “Lost Treasure magazine”, “Men’s Adventure”, “The Good Old Days”, “Mechanics Illustrated”,  “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics”, “Mad Magazine” and “Analog”. In fact, the upstairs bathroom had a closet, and the bottom two shelves were devoted to all sorts of magazines and comic books.

Money and Costs

Things were cheaper then.

In fact, most things could be paid for using coins.  If you ate at a restaurant, you would rarely need to use any bills.  Just a handful of coins (from a coin purse) was all you would need. Indeed, my father carried a coin purse and a money clip.  Wallets didn’t really become popular until the 1970’s. (When inflation had jacked up food prices to obscene levels.)

Slumber party
Another picture from my graduation year. This is a group of strangers, but they could have well been from my High School. The photo was taken in October of 1977. Mid October in Pennsylvania was a breath taking environment. All the trees were changing color and the weather was perfect.

Clothing

I wore bell-bottom slacks and (butterfly collar) polyester shirts in very 1970’s colors. I also had a couple of striped v-neck velour shirts. Every September, at the start of the new school year, my folks would troop us kids into the car and we would get new clothes for school. My mother wanted us to have the most fashionable clothes. My father, being very conservative, wanted traditional and practical clothing.

My sister wore “Gypsy” skirts (brown cheesecloth with crocheted lace at the bottom), Maxi skirts, those jeans with two front zippers, elephant bells, and had both hats and purses made out of recycled jeans. She was a big fan of Donny Osmond as well as David Cassidy and the Partridge family.

Spring 1975
Here is a more or less typical scene at a High School in the middle 1970’s. The only difference from this picture and my memories is that our school buses were yellow.

Polyester was the material of choice and bright colors were everywhere. Everyone in my class were wearing very tight fitting pants and platform shoes. By the time my senior year in High School rolled around in 1977, I was walking around I in a pair of rock-star high-heeled (side zip-up) stage boots.

Meanwhile, most of the girls wore these white high cut boots and low cut (hip hugger) pants. I did absolutely love the hip hugger jeans and the tight, tight, tight fit. This was, of course before the invention (or better yet) popularity of spandex.

High School GIrls.
Here is a photo of some High School girls taken in 1975. They are very typical. The photo was by their teacher who recorded school life during that time period.

By the time I graduated, in 1977, most of my teachers were sporting leisure suit and track suit attire. In pale greens, oranges and yellow flavors, of course. This fashion continued while I continued attending university.

I had a professor of the course “Man and the Natural Environment” who always wore the same light lime green leisure suit, day after day. It was a great class. We discussed how man is using up all the resources this planet has, and that unless we get control of our actions, a world-wide global cooling would result. Yikes! I, for one, did not want to spend my future life in the middle 1980’s inside a giant snow-cone. Burrrrr!

While the more “fashionable” and liberal professors were sporting trendy clothes, my Engineering Professors sported more traditional attire, with wide striped ties and polyester slacks.

Keg party
The movie “Dazed and confused” accurately depicted what life was for the class of 1977 at the end of the Junior year in 1976. The clothing, styles and behaviors were spot on accurate.

Sandals were starting to be popular. Though my father refused to allow us to wear them unless we wore them with socks. I was constantly belittled for this. As all of my socks were white. So at the first opportunity, I got my self a pair of “earth shoes” and didn’t look back.

A lot of men were sporting large sideburns. I tried to grow some, but it looked terrible on my 15 year old face.

Clothing styles
Fashion of the 1970’s. Here the girls wore a great variety of clothes from tight fitting jeans to long billowy dresses.

Mad Magazine

Perhaps one of the most notable aspects of my childhood was the Mad Magazines that I would collect. This was a satire magazine that I would absorb. It was filled with all kinds of articles, comics and things that would interest me (as a kid in the 1970’s). It contained things such as lick and glue stickers. 

Mad Magazine
Mad Magazine. This was a satire magazine that I would absorb. It was filled with all kinds of articles, comics and things that would interest me (as a kid in the 1970’s).

Who can forget the “Spy vs. Spy”, and the gap-toothed idiot mascot Alfred E. Neuman, who famously shrugs and asks “What—me worry?”

I was of the generation of pimply atomic-age readers, and yes they were almost all boys, as I recall, and we absolutely loved this magazine. We ate up everything this magazine put out. We lapped up the “Spicy Abridged Book Club,” with its highlighted editions of God’s Little Acre and Heidi alike.

We roared upon learning that Beetle Bailey wore his Ridgeway cap over his eyes to conceal GET OUT OF VIET NAM! scrawled on his forehead. And, being from Western Pennsylvania, we completely howled with laughter over “Some Really Dangerous Jobs for George Plimpton,” e.g., swimming Lake Erie, his body smothered not with grease but penicillin.  

Other Reads…

Depending on my age, I read voraciously. I would read everything from comic books to paperbacks, to magazines. My uncle gave me a huge stack of “Treasure Magazine” and his related collections of Argosy, True West, and Men’s Adventure.

I would sit there and read (for hours) about the discovery of buried treasures, found discoveries, and the history behind the lost treasures. Some stories concerned stagecoach robberies, other stories told about how Southern families would bury their family wealth to hide it from the Union troops during the Civil War. Yet, other stories would be concerned about how bankers would stealthfully steal gold from the locked vaults in their charge. Yet, not everything was about money.

Other stories concerned the discovery of guns and firearms found under a sagebrush, or the long discarded chest found in an attic or garage. My favorite stories were about the finds that a young kid such as myself would discover in a garage sale or antique store. This might vary from a lost ruby ring to a rare automobile worth millions.

Hiking in the Woods & Bikes

At that time in my life I spent a lot of time hiking in the woods. I would often ride my bike all over town and up and down the back roads and railroad spur lines. In the Spring the air would be fresh with the smells of lush forest canopy. In the Fall, it would be a time of warm “Indian Summers” with red and yellow leaves that would blow in the light breezes.

Old road in the woods.
We would hike and explore the woods all around us. Often we would use railroad tracks, but any road would do. We would often use the old logging access roads where possible, and an occasional abandoned road that was no longer used.

We rode day and night. And, no, we did not wear head-gear, arm pads, knee pads or sunscreen. We were wild and free. If there was a loose board, we would prop it it up and race on the board so that we and our bikes would fly off into the sky. If there were any parents or adults nearby they would stand there and nod approvingly.

That’s how we were. 

1970's bicycle
This style of bicycle was very popular with my generation. This is the “chopper” variant. Note the large rear tire, and the small front tire. Note the hand brakes, and the nice “monkey bar” handles.

I rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire. Every one of my friends owned a bicycle. My sister had one with a white plastic basket in the front. My bike had these long streamers of plastic that plugged into the handles. I eventually tore those things off. But I would put a card (from a deck of cards) and attach it to the bicycle with a wooden clothes pin. That way my bicycle would make some “cool” sounds when I rode fast. It had a huge red circular red reflector on the back, right under the white “banana seat”. Like the GTO I would later drive when I was in High School, the bicycle was an orange color.

During the 1970s and 1960s all children rode bicycles. I had a banana seat bike that I rode.
We would all ride bicycles when we grew up. Which is different than kids today. Instead, today their parents drive them from event to event, instead of expecting them to get there on their own. A 1970s childhood. (Image Source)

My bike was a personal selection. When my father took me to a store to pick it out, I chose a really simple and rugged model. There were no front or rear brakes on the handlebars. To brake, you would just use the pedals. There also weren’t any gears. There was one gear only. It came with a rear view mirror, that soon broke off, and that was about it. My friends all had more complicated bicycles, and over the years, they were perpetually repairing their bikes and trying to fix them. For me, I never had that problem.

We would ride these bikes. Ride and ride them all day. If, in the event we did not have a canteen with us, we would stop and get a drink out of a nearby well or lawn hose.

It’s true, I often drank from a lawn hose in the summer when I was thirsty. It tasted like warm plastic.

If I was off away on a farm, or near a dirt road we would stop at a well and get a drink of spring water. At sometime in the 1960s all wells in Pennsylvania had to be covered up (so that no one would fall into them). Instead the placed these large iron hand-pumps (often painted red of green) that you could pump the water up and drink. The water was free to whomever needed it. Which is so unlike today where even common tap water is bottled by Walmart for a profit.

Loggin Roads.
All the hills around Pittsburgh, Pa. were mined for their coal, and iron ores. Additionally, the hills were treated as renewable resources and logged. Often, as a boy, I would ride the railroad tracks that would be used to transport coal up and down Western Pennsylvania. I would also hike and ride on the logging roads that existed all over Pennsylvania.

I was typical, and not a “bad boy” at all. When my friends started to smoke cigarettes, I refused. When I started to work, and was offered beer by the older boys, I drank and soon discovered that I was a “light weight” and numerous embarrassing events ensued. My friends chewed tobacco and often had a can of “chew” in the back pocket of their jeans (often creating a round circle of wear). I didn’t do this. 

Cub Scouts

I was a cub scout up until I entered my teenage years.  Every week we would attend meetings in the homes of one of the scout mothers (called “Den Mothers”), and they would help us work on our “badges”, and get ready for the various events.  These events included picnics, hikes, plays and social get togethers. 

We would proudly wear our uniform during parades, or on holidays like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or Labor Day.  We would salute the flag in school and lead the Pledge of Allegiance at school in the mornings. (Big change from today, when you have multi-millionaire NFL stars refusing to stand for the US Flag. I find it completely reprehensible and disgusting. But, then I am from the “old school”.)

One of the first things that I got when I joined the Cub Scouts was a blue uniform.  I well remember my mother teaching me how to put on my yellow scarf.  In addition, I got to have my very own hand axe.  It was a Rite of Passage for me.  Here at seven years old, I could carry a hand axe.  I was taught how to use it to cut trees, and how to throw it (just in case I might come across some desperate Indians…).

Boys all had hand axes when they were growing up. It was a part of being a boy in the 1960s and 1970s..
My first axe was given to me when I was a cub scout. I used it throughtout the 1960s and 1970s. I learned how to throw it, and how to use it. It was a rite of passage of all young boys. A boy’s first axe. (Image Source.)

While I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, it was my experiences during the 1970’s, which influenced my personality. Indeed, it is my feelings and experiences that reflect that period in time.

My Sister would Skip Rope

While I was doing all this, my sister would spend hours… and I do mean HOURS. Yes, hours, upon hours, upon HOURS were spent playing what Wikipedia calls Chinese jump rope but which my cohorts and I knew as Chinese skipping.

This was a game played mostly by girls – each of whom had their own set of elastics – though I do remember that every now and then some neighborhood boys might joining in on occasion.

Chinese skipping involved an elaborate set of routines and rules, some of which were made up as they went along (“tag, tag, no erasies!”). I could never figure out all the rules. Also, apparently the presence of “good elastics” (not too thick, not too thin, and just the right amount of tension) were highly coveted treasures.

Walking the Train Tracks

One of the big hobbies at that time was to follow the various spur-lines that snaked in and out of the hills. I grew up in the hills of Western Pennsylvania and there were rail lines all over the area to support the transport of iron, coal, and iron ore. Along each road was typically an access road.

Tunnel
We would often explore the surrounding countryside by riding our bikes or hiking in the woods. The easiest way to access the woods was to follow the train tracks.

The lines would typically follow the valleys and rivers of Western Pennsylvania. They would snake along the curves of the hills and dash in and out of tunnels that were cut in the many hillsides.

We would often place coins on the tracks and let the trains flatten them into a long oval.

Typically, we would hike with a branch that we had chopped using our trusty cub scout hatchet, or cut clean using our blue cub-scout knives. We would walk on the top of the rails and sometimes use the walking stick to support us. We’d kind of get attached to that hiking stick and bring it home with us. However, it was soon discarded and rarely used again.

Stand by me.
Scene from the movie “Stand by me”. It accurately depicted our boyhood adventures in the 1960’s and 1970’s. We would often explore the countryside by following the train tracks.

My one friend Dino always carried a boy scout canteen. It was a circular affair. It looked like two pie tins welded shut, with a black plastic cat at the top. It was typically draped over his shoulder and hung off his back. I, on the other hand, had a surplus World War II canteen. I got it at the local Army and Navy store. It was an aluminum canteen and it did leak. But it held a lot of water, and I certainly needed it. Drinking from the acid-laden streams wasn’t really an option.

Rail in Plum township
Rail line in Plum township near Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania. The rail lines all around my “stomping ground” looked much like this. The lines often followed the water.

Scale Models

One of my favorite hobbies was the building of plastic models. These were often of ships, airplanes and military hardware. I made a few models of cars, but my favorites were of military tanks and figurines.

I had a desk in my bedroom. It was an old desk inherited from my father with four drawers. I used a fold-up “card table” chair to sit at it with. On it was a 1940’s style desk lamp that my parents must have pulled out of the garbage at some time. I had books on the desk, a “multiband” radio where I could listen to FM radio, and a pencil holder made out of a decorated metal coffee cup tin.

At that desk, I would assemble, build and paint my models. It was an enjoyable pursuit. The desk faced the window in the bedroom, and I would often have the windows open, but the shade drawn down about half way. The shades were in the old 1960’s style and were meant to last. They had this kind of “life preserver” style ring hanging on a string that you could pull down to raise or lower the shade.

I needed the fresh air, as the odor from the glue was toxic and would tend to get me all flustered when I used it. I remember once, that my sister was watching her television show and they were really pushing the Rigley Chewing Gum-gum-gum… Rigley chewing gum-gum-gum commercial. It must have been running every ten minutes. I was about going out of my mind with the combination of the toxic glue odor and the subliminal programming of the chewing gum. Ugh!

The airplanes I would hang from the ceiling with string. I would display my collection of tanks and military equipment on shelves alongside my collection of centuries-old bottles. (I was an avoid junk collector and was always on the lookout for discarded bottles that I would collect from ancient trash dumps in the nearby forests.)

I collected Tamiya 1/35 scale military hardware models. I had quite a collection of German vehicles and tanks. At that time, the Japanese model maker Tamiya made the best quality models. They had an innovative introduction process that added new model to the collection every few months.

Tiger I
This is a model of the German Tiger I tank. I had numerous models of this massive beat in various scales. I even had one so complete that the interior was all detailed.

Alas, when I graduated from university I discovered that my mother had thrown away all of my models. She didn’t want all the clutter in the house. I guess one person’s treasure is another person’s trash.

Slang

Hanging out.
If you were fortunate you could get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Mine always seemed to be at a different school district. Good thing…in hindsight. Here’s a groovy couple chillin’ out.

We used a lot of slang that has since become obsolete. The terms “groovy” was mostly used by kids only a few years older than us. As it was being phased out by the time I started to attend High School.

However, “Sock it to me”, and “You bet your sweet bippy! “, “
Verrry eenteresting… ” (both taken from the “Laugh-In” television show) and “My ding-a-ling” were all still pretty popular.

There was a tendency to say “you know” at the end of every sentence, and that just about drove my father off the wall.

Some examples are below…

  • Dig it – Means you really liked it. It was super groovy.
  • Groovy – Means very cool.
  • Cool – Means very nice.
  • Nice -Means very good.
  • Good – means “meh”.
  • Far Out – Means that you dig it and then some.
  • Outta Sight – Means that it was so far out that you couldn’t see it any more.
  • Zonked – Means that you are very tired.
  • Munchies – Means that you are very hungry.
  • Sock it to me! – Means give me some more.
  • Catch you on the flip side. – Means I will see you when I get back.
  • Bogart.‘Bogart’ meant to hold on to a joint too long without passing it– the origin comes from the actor, Humphrey Bogart, who had an iconic style of performing an entire scene with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip for an extraordinarily long time with ‘cool’ effect.
  • Bummer. – Something that is pretty bad.

There are loads of coolhttp://www.inthe70s.com/generated/terms.shtml slang from the 1970’s at THIS website. If you want to check them all out, please enjoy.

Goofing Around

It was a much simpler time. We were all permitted to spend time out of the house. In fact, it was expected. It was a rare person indeed that spent a lot of time at home with their parents. They not only encouraged us to “go out”, but expected it.

So, as a result, we ran a little loose and crazy. We did things that would give parents today heart-attacks, and would probably get people arrested. Those goofs in the movie “Dazed and Confused”, breaking mail boxes, or throwing bowling balls were all part and parcel of growing up. That’s how we rolled.

Goofing off
We were a very care free generation. We were not policed. We had a substantial amount of freedom compared with kids today. We just had fun, played around and got into trouble. That was what it was like.

I’d guess that it was pretty non-politically correct. However, we were just kids. We got into all sorts of trouble. Yet, it was just harmless fun. Today, things have ratcheted up to such a level that just being a white male can get you thrown in jail. Legions of BLM and SJW’s patrol the social media, and people are afraid to be themselves. I guess that is a progressive “paradise” for you.

Me, however, I just want to be left alone with my family. I want my cat on my lap and my dog by my side. I just want to eat my burger and drink my beer in peace.

Anyways… I am the direct result of my childhood. If you don’t like it, you can write a protest blog entry and post it up on Facebook so you and your metro-sexual friends can commiserate together.

Crusing in the truck
Scene from the movie “Dazed and confused”. This film took place in 1976 and described accurately the life in High School at that time. For I too, was a graduate of the class of 1977.

Our Idols

When I was younger, I followed the adventures of Man from Uncle, and watched Gilligan’s Island. As I got older, I started to find new interests in such role models as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. (Arnold Schwarzenegger did not become a movie personality until the 1980’s.)

Eventually, I started to get really interested in girls.

My bedroom was decorated as any boy of my my age would have. It was festooned with models and collections of brick-a-bract and posters on the wall.

I had a poster of Farah Faucett on my wall. She was smiling with this amazing smile, and her huge hair. We all had a crush on her. That as well as Loni Anderson and Rachael Welch . Look at her!

How can you not smile?

Farah Faucett was an attractive actress that was very popular in the 1970s.
Farah Faucett was every 1970s boy’s dream. Just about everyone had a poster of her on our wall or doors in our bedrooms. Farah Faucett was every boys’ dream. (Image Source.)

I had numerous posters on my wall. One was the mandatory “black light” poster on velvet. (It glowed under UV light.)

One was a picture of Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) performing a guitar solo. (I had super imposed a F-14 on it for combined imagery. After all, space and high-performance aircraft and rock n’ roll was my dream.) I, at that time, was a big Robin Trower fan. I liked Traffic, Uriah Heep (come on! Someone must remember them) and Three-dog Night. Of course, Alice Cooper was the top star of my generation. The songs “18” and “School’s Out” ring a bell?

One was a Roger Dean poster (anyone remember the group “Yes”?).

Raquel Welch was a very popular 1960s and 1970s actress that made a big difference in the ideas of beauty and society during the 1960's and 1970's.
Raquel Welch was another popular actress that graced the bedrooms of many a boy during the 1960s and 1970s. (Image Source.)

Let’s not forget other television personalities. I had a real liking for Loni Anderson. She was the blonde haired secretary at the radio station WKRP in Cincinnati.

WKRP
WKRP

I became a fan of Loni Anderson in her role in the television sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”. I think many of my friends did as well. We loved her and watching her on the show was always a highlight. That and the clueless manager who ran the office.

Loni Anderson
Loni Anderson played the role of the attractive secretary in the American sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”.

The Cars

Eventually, I was able to drive. Oh baby, that was a turning point in my life, I’ll tell you what.

Bad Ass
This photo was taken in 1977 on High School property by Joseph Szabo. Obviously the guys had a special attachment to their cars.

This was at the age of 16. As such, I like many of my friends, would get a job. With a job came responsibilities and privileges. For instance, while the law said that I was too young to drink, my parents permitted me to do so. Because, once I obtained a job, I was a man.

Along with that benefit, I now obtained a paycheck. For me, along with many of my friends, took the paycheck and spent it on our car(s). (As well as a portion towards college, beer, and social-herbs…heh heh.) Ah, not to forget the gasoline for the car.

Gasoline prices were raising. It was so frustrating. While we were used to 25 cents for a gallon of gas, it soon climbed up to 30 cents, and then keep on raising. We were very upset about that. I well remember my father writing a letter to our Congressman to “do something” about it. (As if it would have made a difference.)

1970's car culture
My first car was a GTO. I spent all my money on it. My other friends had other vehicles. We would get tires, mufflers, carbs, and decorate the interior with shag carpeting, and a “kick ass” sound system.

Conclusion

This was just some stories about my life growing up. Unfortunately there are very few related stories on the internet. In contrast we can find all sorts of stories about the “hardships” of growing up in the 1960’s. We can read about the injustices against minorities, and about how the nation was broken and needed to move “left” to straighten it out.

It’s a comfortable narrative for the uneducated. However, it isn’t even remotely true. The true realty is something completely different. This is my story. Like it, or hate it. This is the way it was.

No, we didn’t wear helmets, and arm pads when we rode our bikes. yes, there were bruises and an occasional broken arm. Yes smoking was against the law if you were under 14 years old, but we did it anyways. We didn’t die from it, though many had to either quit or seek medical attention. It was our choice. We defined our life.

We defined our life. We did so on our terms. It was our bodies and our lives. We did not need someone to tell us how to behave or act. Though there were hawk nosed busybodies that tried. We made the decisions on our own lives. Not some elected overseer who told us what we could or could not do. And that, boys and girls , is the true lesson of this narrative.

Americans used to be free. It is in our nature. We deserve liberty and freedom. We are the generation that knows what freedom meant. Maybe, judging from the current state of affairs, the LAST generation that experienced it. And, this was our story.

Thank you.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.


A Wish List of Favorite Firearms

Ah… Guns. As an American, I have a distinct interest in firearms. After all, what’s the point in having a Right given to you by God if you don’t exercise it? Here, I’d like to share my thoughts on some of my dream weapons; my favorite firearms. No, I’m not talking about a “Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range” that the Terminator was looking for. But rather some firearms that I have wanted for some time, but regrettably will probably never purchase.

So here’s my dream / wish list.

MP-40

Let me start with one of my long time yearnings…

MP40
The MP 40 (Maschinenpistole 40). As a boy this weapon featured predominantly in all the “War Movies” of the 1960’s

The MP 40 (Maschinenpistole 40) was a submachine gun chambered for the 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge. It was developed in Nazi Germany and used extensively by the Axis powers during the Second World War.

As I was growing up, all of the many, many war movies had actors fighting the Germans who utilized this weapon. They would burst into the room, spraying lead back and forth, back and forth, and the evil Nazi warriors would crumple to the ground. Yikes.

Hero might need to save a beautiful girl.
A hero might be needed to save a beautiful girl. Often at the hands of evil Nazi villains. OK, this guy is not using a Schmeisser. He is using a “tommy gun”. But you can get the general idea, eh?

The MP-40 was designed in 1938 by Heinrich Vollmer with inspiration from its predecessor the MP 38. It was heavily used by German infantrymen (particularly platoon and squad leaders), and by paratroopers, on all of the fronts of World War II.

Its advanced and modern features made it a favorite among soldiers and popular in countries from various parts of the world after the war.

It was often erroneously called “Schmeisser” by the Allies, although Hugo Schmeisser was not involved in the design or production of the weapon. From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.1 million were produced by Erma Werke.

MP-40 closeup
Closeup of the MP-40, showing off the fine lines and blued steel.

Now, I have read somewhere that there was a short limited edition manufacturing run of this weapon sometime in the 1990’s. I also understand that it was chambered in 10mm as well as 9mm calibers. However, I am at a loss as to the circumstances behind this model, or where you can get it. I sure would like to know more about it.

Comment from schurmann…

Small numbers of replica MP-40s were turned out before May 1986: modern-made receiver and original parts kits. Trade jargon for these: “tube guns.”

Further internet sleuthing found this…

Sport Systeme Dittrich in Germany is a manufacturer of a remarkably wide range of reproduction German World War Two small arms (including the FG42, StG-44, G43, MP-3008, MP-35, and VG1-5 as well as the MP-38). 

They have a mixed reputation, as they are magnificently accurate looking reproductions, but the Sturmgewehr in particular suffered from a great deal of parts breakage and reliability problems (in the US, these were imported as the PTR-44 many years ago).

Sport-Systeme Dittrich Kulmbach
Some of the product offerings from Sport-Systeme Dittrich Kulmbach.

For collectors and shooters in the United States, this is generally a moot point, because the Dittrich reproductions are too accurate mechanically to be allowable for import. 

The BD-38 semiauto copy of the MP-38, for instance, is an open-bolt carbine, which is deemed easily convertible to fully automatic under US law (a similar conclusion was reached by the RCMP in Canada).

-Forgotten Weapons

And, another interesting comment from schurmann…

"The first photo purported to be an MP-40 shows an arm missing its folding stock, but the stock is present (folded) in the second image. There have been some latter-day semi-only replicas made without stocks, so they can be “pistols” in compliance with US regulations. 

Despite what one sees in films and on TV, the gun was rarely fired with its stock folded; as an open-bolt submachine gun, its accuracy was never great, and users needed every advantage they could get. 

While we’re addressing film/TV use, it must be stressed that movie guns seem to fire at almost twice the rate of a real MP-40, or perhaps it’s mere sound effects. The actual gun fired only about 450 rds/minute: “chug-chug” more than “rat-a-tat.”"

Regarding the MP40 comments…

Hollywood movies usually (not always, just usually) liked to portray the users of the MP-40 firing “at the hip”, spraying the room (and evil grinning Nazi warriors) indiscriminately. I would imagine that it would have been a terrible waste of bullets. How could you possibly hit anything without sighting your target first?

FG-42

Speaking of fine German weapons, one of my “Dark Horse” dream weapons is the FG-42. This is an interesting design and a very fine weapon. What attracts me to this weapon is the ability to utilize both box and belt feeds.

FG-42
A continued love of German weaponry extends the the relatively unknown FG-42. This was sort of like an early Steiner, in that it could be both box and belt fed.

The FG 42 (German: Fallschirmjägergewehr 42, “paratrooper rifle 42”) is a selective-fire automatic rifle produced in Nazi Germany during World War II.

The weapon was developed specifically for the use of the Fallschirmjäger airborne infantry in 1942. Like the airborne infantry, it was used in very limited numbers.

FG42
Here is the FG-42 in operation. Look at that impressive action. Here it is being held without using the bipod.

It combined the characteristics and firepower of a light machine gun in a lightweight form. It was equipped with a bipedal stand, and was small. It was no larger than the standard-issue Kar 98k bolt-action rifle.

It is considered one of the most advanced weapon designs of World War II. In fact, the FG 42 influenced post-war small arms development. As a result, most of its design was copied by the US Army when they developed the M60 machine gun.

FG-42 and MP-44
Here is a nice photo of the FG42 along with a German MP-44. I too, would like to have a go with the MP-44. I would imagine that it would be like firing a AK-47. But that is just speculation on my part.

Of course, I would love to fire an MP-44. But these are really rare firearms and the ammo is not exactly common. I once saw a MP-44 on display in a museum when I was around 15 years old. I was amazed that it was so large. For some reason, I thought that it would be a little more compact.

Comment on the MP-44 from schurmann…

The MP-44 is indeed astonishingly weighty, and disappointingly unhandy to boot. Recoil is terrible: difficult to believe about such a tiny round fired from such a big gun. There have been recent production runs of ammunition, catering to the collector community.

Back to the FG-42. Here’s a FG-42 with a box magazine…

FG-42 with a box magazine.
Shooting a FG-42 using the box magazine.

"metallicman had better hire a more-experienced technical editor before posting anything further, on this topic (though to judge by some earlier posts of his, he may be immune to embarrassment, and facts.)

FG-42 used box magazines only, never belts. 

It did fire from a closed bolt on semi, and from an open bolt on full auto. The latter is common on air-cooled full-auto arms, to facilitate cooling, and to keep the ammunition out of contact with a hot barrel."

-schurmann

To which, I must retort. This is my personal views on guns I like as a hobbyist. I am not an expert.

Now, with that being said…

Please note that the FG 42 belt fed that I know of is the Light Automatic Machine Gun T44. And that seems to have had a side feeding mechanism similar to the prototype belt fed Kalashnikov. In this case, the Johnson belt fed seems to have a bottom closing mechanism. This would be much like the mechanism used in the HK 21.

Belt-fed FG-42
Belt Fed German FG-42. Never fielded in action, as far as I know of.

It must have been something as the FG42 eventually evolved into the M60 belt-fed LMG. As such the prototype M60 LMG’s were derived from the FG42.

T44
Prototype M60 derived from the FG42 with minor modification. Known as the T44. The belt mechanism was from the MG42.

Additionally, it is my understanding, faulted as it probably is, that the box and feeding mechanisms can be loaded from either the left or the right sides.

Note that the reader was correct. The German army fielded FG-42 was box fed. The belt-fed version was a prototype that eventually became the M60 LMG. History aside, this is an interesting little weapon, and I would not mind firing it.

Fabrique Nationale FN P90

Being a fan of weapons, and my love of science fiction, I was introduced to the P90 through television. Or more precisely the Stargate SG-1 television series. LOL. No kidding, but it is really true.

Though, I am sure that the weapons displayed were all prop replicas, it certainly piqued my interest.

P90
I was introduced to the P90, the same was as I was introduced to the MP40; through television and movies.

The Fabrique Nationale FN P90 is a Belgian-originated “Personal Defense Weapon”. It’s sort of a cross between a submachine gun (SMG) and an assault rifle.

Apparently, the gun was originally developed to arm indirect auxiliary combat units such as vehicle crews, messengers and clerk-type elements outside of active fighting zones.

The P90 is arranged as a “bullpup” assault weapon where the action and magazine feed are concentrated aft of the trigger unit. This allows a full-length barrel to be used with a more compact package. The result of this mating is a fixed, slightly oversized stock with integrated pistol grip and carrying handle.

The P90 supports use of a sound suppressor and this can be coupled with subsonic ammunition for reduced-noise operation. This is a particularly useful feature for clandestine operatives. The weapon also features select-firing through single-shot and full-automatic fire. The including rail system can adapt a variety of optics and aimers as needed.

high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge
high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge

The P90 is engineered to fire the specialized, high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge (SS190 Ball). These cartridges certainly maintain a unique look when placed alongside 9mm and 5.56mm types.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)

Now, what “red blooded” American man doesn’t want a “popper” when the going gets tough? It’s only slightly larger than a pistol, but packs the punch of a machine-pistol.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)
Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)

The Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (“K” = “Kurz” meaning “short”) was developed to specifically meet the needs of special forces, and law enforcement. The basic idea was to provide a compact and concealable firearm with a proven action and capable man-stopping qualities.

The German concern therefore developed the MP5K from its full-sized submachine gun; the ubiquitous HK MP5 series.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)
Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz) with accessories to include silencer, extra magazine and sight.. Though all that cool “stuff” takes away from the advantages of small size and portability.

Steyr MP34

Getting back to my love of fine German weapons. Consider the Steyr MP34. A long-time old friend of mine had inherited one from his father. I think that he picked it out of a mail order catalog back in the 1960’s. It’s a nice and fine little machinegun.

It was great until he had a fight with his ex-wife and lost all of his firearms when she carted them out and dumped them in the middle of the street. When the police were called, they collected the weapons and wouldn’t give them back to him. So sad.

Anyways…

 Steyr MP34
Steyr MP34

The history behind this gen is very interesting.

Restrictions in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles precluded the Germans from developing man-portable automatic weapons. Specifically, German martial firearms could not possess a barrel longer than 4 inches or a magazine capacity of more than eight rounds. This pretty much restricted the Germans of the Weimar Republic to P08 Parabellum pistols and little else.

Eager to expand the state of the art while perhaps preparing for the coming next World War, Rheinmetall acquired the Swiss Solothurn weapons factory in 1929 and began developing the S1-100, which would later become the MP34.

Although ill-suited for mass production, Solothurn did a crack job of developing and prototyping the gun. The MP34 is heavy, but its mass means the gun is remarkably controllable. It’s pretty easy to keep the gun on target even during long bursts of fire. Firing single shots, the gun remains delightfully accurate out to the effective range of the 9mm Parabellum cartridge.

Let’s talk pistols…

The Taurus Judge

Here is a great little revolver that can fire shotgun shells. Imagine that! The Taurus Judge is a unique revolver which can fire either a .45 Long Colt cartridge, or a .410 shotgun shell.

Taurus Judge
Taurus Judge

Loading birdshot in the Taurus Judge might be an acceptable choice for a self defense load. However I think these situations are indeed pretty limited. Birdshot lacks the ability to penetrate deeply enough to reach an attacker’s vital organs, which is the only reliable way of stopping the attacker before it is too late.

I have read that the 2 or 3 00 Buckshot pellets which would fit in a .410 shotgun shell, when fired out of the relatively short barrel of the Taurus Judge, will simply not penetrate the way that 00 Buckshot from a “normal” shotgun would.

Shotgun shells for defense
The firearm blog says that you shouldn’t use shotgun shells for defense.

I do not know what would be the better load for self defense purposes. The .45 long would have better penetration power, but in a panic high-stress situation, the .410 shotgun might be a better selection.

Ruger 22/45 Lite Pistol

Ruger .22
Here is a nice Ruger .22 with a laser sight and silencer. This is a perfect starter pistol that also has some nice practical uses as well.

I first came across this little beauty while I was looking for “gun porn” on Pinterest. A little sleuthing enabled me to identify it as a Ruger 22/45 Lite. Here we see it with a nice silencer, light, and sights. I would buy this beauty in a heartbeat. A great article on this pistol can be found HERE.

The 444 Marlin

This is a dream gun of mine. I had a few co-workers that told me that this little beast really was able to cut through the brush. I believe them, as this is a pretty substantial round.

444 marlin
The 444 Marlin rifle. What a beauty. I’ll tell you what.

Colt M-16A4

When I lived in California I had a collapsible stock AK that I used to cart with me and shoot in the desert. One day, I was introduced to an ArmaLite AR-15 and fell in love with it. It still remains on my wish list.

Historically, when this rifle was first fielded in Vietnam it kept on malfunctioning because it needed more maintenance than the M-14 that the soldiers were used to using. Over the years, training and improved design has resulted in a nice fine little weapon.

Gunny Highway.
Gunny Highway is an ideal that has elements that all men should strive towards. Sometimes the fiction that we see can lead us into behavior ideals that we can adopt as our own.

Beretta Px4 Storm Compact 9mm Pistol

For the need for everyday carry. Nothing beats a well manufactured subcompact that is easy to shoot, and fits the hand well.

Nice pistol
Find a gun that fits the palm of the hand well. This is especially true for the females in your family. Let them practice with it. Practice over an over until they are lethal with it.

The PX4 Storm SubCompact is among the smallest hi-capacity 9mm and .40 S&W polymer framed handguns in the world with 13+1 and 10+1 capacity. By using a polymer frame (like the Glock), the Px4 becomes one of the most manageable subcompact 9mm and .40 S&W pistols on the market.

It is adaptable to right- and left-handed users, has three interchangeable backstraps, a reversible magazine release button and an ambidextrous manual safety lever/decocker positioned on both sides of the slide. In the “safe” position, these also present additional gripping surface for drawing the very short side to the rear.

Walter P99

I always loved this pistol. My father thought that it looked ugly, but my brother, and our best friends all had this pistol and practiced relentlessly using it.

I do miss this little guy. I owned this gun for a spell when I was still living in the Untied States. It handled very well, and I was quite lethal with it. Photo is of the 380 not the 9mm version that I had.

Walter PK 380
Walter pistols allow for different sized hand grips to allow for small hands. Here is a .38 caliber version. I used to have a 9mm version that I was very partial for when I lived in the States.

Of course the pistol is chambered for different cartridges. I know that it is chambered for the 9mm, the 10mm, the .380, and the .22 cartridges.

P99
P99 chambered in the 9mm. A very nice pistol that fits the hand well and that is easy to shoot with accurately.

ZH-05

Now, of course I’m very old-fashioned. I tend to be interested in weapons around 75 years old. But, you know, I like to keep up with the times. As such, there are some really spectacular designs out there.

Here in China, everyone (who loves firearms, that is) has been talking about the new ZH-05.

China has fielding its troops with the new ZH-05. It’s an interesting weapon that combines a 5.56mm assault rife with a computer controlled 20mm grenade launcher (with a max range of 700 meters).

ZH-05
The American and South Korean weapons both have a magazine for the computer controlled grenades while the ZH-05 is a single shot weapon, requiring 20mm rounds to be loaded manually each time. This makes the ZH-05 the lightest of the three weapons, weighing five kg (11 pounds) loaded (with a single 20mm round and a magazine with 20 rounds of 5.8mm ammo).

The ZH-05 has been seen with Chinese marines sent abroad warships working with the Somali anti-piracy patrol. Chinese special operations troops have the ZH-05 and the army ordered several thousand of them so that each four man infantry fire-team will have one.

That puts China ahead of the other two countries (United States and South Korea) with similar weapons. The Chinese version is lighter, simpler and cheaper. Obviously, the Chinese feel the ZH-05 is worth buying and issuing to the troops.

The U.S. began working on this type of weapon back in the 1990s as the OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon) and that mutated into the XM25 (the “X” in XM25 designates a system that is still in development). The South Korean design is the K11. The three weapons are different in important ways.

The American and South Korean weapons both have a magazine for the computer controlled grenades while the ZH-05 is a single shot weapon. Thus much cheaper, easier to maintain, and easier to field.

Links

The Chinese weapons industry is an interesting one. They supply weapons around the world, and also manufacture for the Russian military. I would certainly like to get my hands on some of these beauts and have a go at them.

Conclusion

This is just a fun post chatting about my love for firearms. For a while, I actually worked as an engineer designing weapons, and thus it is both a professional and hobby interest of mine.

As I live in China, I don’t have the opportunity to shoot like I used to. I have to go to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand or Burma to go do my shooting.

The only consolation to this is that I can shoot fully automatic weapons, and many weapons not commonly available in the United States. Which really sucks, as the United States is supposed to be the bastion of freedom.

Maybe, one day, the Progressive left will be defeated by the Conservatives, and some semblance of freedom would start to undo over one hundred years of progressive meddling in the Constitution. One day.

But, I’m not gonna hold my breath. The conservative leadership in America are all dying out, and their current leadership is corrupted and weak. The strongest leader they had was traitor John McCain. Who wasn’t even a conservative, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a RINO.

Asshole

Perhaps Trump might turn things around. However, he is a lone voice in government. He can’t do it all on his own, but that is exactly what it looks like is going on. Each time he trys to do something, a liberal judge reverses it. He says “Hello” and a liberal assault team tries to get him for perjury. It’s simply ridiculous.

I’ll tell you what, if things do not turn around soon, and quickly, there will be a nasty regime change in America. And it will be the progressive communists driving the armored vehicles, and conservatives scattering like rabbits with a handful of  hunting rifles.

DHS vehicle
The DHS is well armed with military grade vehicles, and armor. They are trained to fight on American soil. The Obama administration has been setting up the stages for an armed conflict of Americans against Americans.

Sad. So sad.

Take Aways

  • This is simply a post that describes my interests.
  • It concerns firearms; the RIGHT that I have as an American, to own.
  • They are on my dream (or bucket) list simply because ownership is restricted, access is difficult, or they are too expensive for my budget to afford.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 21NOV18.

The April Witch (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

This is the full text of a very curious story (The April Witch) by Ray Bradbury. It is presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.  Enjoy.

The April Witch

By Ray Bradbury

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a limegreen frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.

It's spring, thought Cecy. I'll be in every living thing in the world tonight.

Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate. Hers was an adapt-ably quick mind flowing unseen upon Illinois winds on this one evening of her life when she was just seventeen.

"I want to be in love," she said.

She had said it at supper. And her parents had widened their eyes and stiffened back in their chairs. "Patience," had been their advice. "Remember, you're remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can't mix or marry with ordinary folk. We'd lose our magical powers if we did. You wouldn't want to lose your ability to 'travel' by magic, would you? Then be careful. Be careful!"

But in her high bedroom, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the colour of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.

"Yes," she sighed. "I'm one of an odd family. We sleep days and fly nights like black kites on the wind. If we want, we can sleep in moles through the winter, in the warm earth. I can live in anything at all - a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. I can leave my plain, bony body behind and send my mind far out for adventure. Now!"

The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.

She saw the warm spring lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colours.

If I can't be in love, myself, because I'm plain and odd, then I'll be in love through someone else, she thought...

+++

Outside a farmhouse in the spring night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well. She was singing.

Cecy fell - a green leaf- into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering, invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl's warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.

Ceсy looked out from the girl's eyes.

She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl's world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.

Does she know I'm here? thought Cecy.

The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.

"Who's there?"

No answer.

"Only the wind," whispered Cecy.

"Only the wind." The girl laughed at herself, but shivered.

It was a good body, this girl's body. It held bones of finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider-wine in this mouth. The lips lay firm on the white, white teeth and the brows arched neatly at the world, and the hair blew soft and fine on her milky neck. The pores knit small and close. The nose tilted at the moon and the cheeks glowed like small fires. The body drifted with feather-balances from one motion to another and seemed always singing to itself. Being in this body, this head, was like basking in a hearth fire, living in the purr of a sleeping cat, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea.

I'll like it here, thought Cecy.

"What?" asked the girl, as if she'd heard a voice.

"What's your name?" asked Cecy carefully.

"Ann Leary." The girl twitched. "Now why should I say that out loud?"

"Ann, Ann," whispered Cecy. "Ann, you're going to be in love."

+++

As if to answer this, a great roar sprang from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in a rig, holding the reins high with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard.

"Is that you, Tom?"

"Who else?" Leaping from the rig, he tied the reins to the fence.

"I'm not speaking to you!" Ann whirled, the bucket in her hands slopping.

"No!" cried Cecy.

Ann froze. She looked at the hills and the first spring stars. She stared at the man named Tom. Cecy made her drop the bucket.

"Look what you've done!"

Tom ran up.

"Look what you made me do!"

He wiped her shoes with a kerchief, laughing.

"Get away!" She kicked at his hands, but he laughed again, and gazing down on him from miles away, Cecy saw the turn of his head, the size of his skull, the flare of his nose, the shine of his eye, the girth of his shoulder, and the hard strength of his hands doing this delicate thing with the handkerchief. Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: "Thank you!"

"Oh, so you have manners?" The smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the horse rose from his clothes into the tender nostrils, and Cecy, far, far away over night meadows and flowered fields, stirred as with some dream in her bed.

"Not for you, no!" said Ann.

"Hush, speak gently," said Cecy. She moved Ann's fingers out toward Tom's head. Ann snatched them back.

"I've gone mad!"

"You have." He nodded, smiling but bewildered. "Were you going to touch me then?"

"I don't know. Oh, go away!" Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

"Why don't you run? I'm not stopping you." Tom got up. "Have you changed your mind? Will you go to the dance with me tonight? It's special. Tell you why later."

"No," said Ann.

"Yes!" cried Cecy. "I've never danced. I want to dance. I've never worn a long gown, all rustly. I want that. I want to dance all night. I've never known what it's like to be in a woman, dancing; Father and Mother would never permit it. Dogs, cats, locusts, leaves, everything else in the world at one time or another I've known, but never a woman in the spring, never on a night like this. Oh, please - we must go to that dance!"

She spread her thought like the fingers of a hand within a new glove.

"Yes," said Ann Leary, "I'll go. I don't know why, but I'll go to the dance with you tonight, Tom."

"Now inside, quick!" cried Cecy. "You must wash, tell your folks, get your gown ready, out with the iron, into your room!"

"Mother," said Ann, "I've changed my mind!"

+++

The rig was galloping off down the pike, the rooms of the farmhouse jumped to life, water was boiling for a bath, the coal stove was heating an iron to press the gown, the mother was rushing about with a fringe of hairpins in her mouth. "What's come over you, Ann? You don't like Tom!"

"That's true." Ann stopped amidst the great fever.

But it's spring! thought Cecy.

"It's spring," said Ann.

And it's a fine night for dancing, thought Cecy.

"... for dancing," murmured Ann, Leary.

+++

Then she was in the tub and the soap creaming on her white seal shoulders, small nests of soap beneath her arms, and the flesh of her warm breasts moving in her hands and Cecy moving the mouth, making the smile, keeping the actions going. There must be no pause, no hesitation, or the entire pantomime might fall in ruins! Ann Leary must be kept moving, doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out! Rub with a towel! Now perfume and powder!

"You!" Ann caught herself in the mirror, all whiteness and pinkness like lilies and carnations. "Who are you tonight?"

"I'm a girl seventeen." Cecy gazed from her violet eyes. "You can't see me. Do you know I'm here?"

Ann Leary shook her head. "I've rented my body to an April witch, for sure."

"Close, very close!" laughed Cecy. "Now, on with your dressing."

The luxury of feeling good clothes move over an ample body! And then the halloo outside.

"Ann, Tom's back!"

"Tell him to wait." Ann sat down suddenly. "Tell him I'm not going to that dance."

"What?" said her mother, in the door.

+++

Cecy snapped back into attention. It had been a fatal relaxing, a fatal moment of leaving Ann's body for only an instant. She had heard the distant sound of horses' hoofs and the rig rambling through moonlit spring country. For a second she thought, I'll go find Tom and sit in his head and see what it's like to be in a man of twenty-two on a night like this. And so she had started quickly across a heather field, but now, like a bird to a cage, flew back and rustled and beat about in Ann Leary's head.

"Tell him to go away!"

"Ann!" Cecy settled down and spread her thoughts.

But Ann had the bit in her mouth now. "No, no, I hate him!"

I shouldn't have left - even for a moment. Cecy poured her mind into the hands of the young girl, into the heart, into the head, softly, softly. Stand up, she thought.

Ann stood.

Put on your coat!

Ann put on her coat.

Now, march!

No! thought Ann Leary.

March!

"Ann," said her mother, "don't keep Tom waiting another minute. You get on out there now and no nonsense. What's come over you?"

"Nothing, Mother. Good night. We'll be home late."

+++

Ann and Cecy ran together into the spring evening.

A room full of softly dancing pigeons ruffling their quiet, trailing feathers, a room full of peacocks, a room full of rainbow eyes and lights. And in the center of it, around, around, around, danced Ann Leary.

"Oh, it is a fine evening," said Cecy.

"Oh, it's a fine evening," said Ann.

"You're odd," said Tom.

The music whirled them in dimness, in rivers of song, they floated, they bobbed, they sank down, they arose for air, they gasped, they clutched each other like drowning people and whirled on again, in fan motions, in whispers and sighs, to "Beautiful Ohio."

Cecy hummed. Ann's lips parted and the music came out.

"Yes, I'm odd," said Cecy.

"You're not the same," said Tom.

"No, not tonight."

"You're not the Ann Leary I knew."

"No, not at all, at all," whispered Cecy, miles and miles away. "No, not at all," said the moved lips.

"I've the funniest feeling," said Tom.

"About what?"

"About you." He held her back and danced her and looked into her glowing face, watching for something. "Your eyes," he said, "I can't figure it."

"Do you see me?" asked Cecy.

"Part of you's here, Ann, and part of you's not." Tom turned her carefully, his face uneasy.

"Yes."

"Why did you come with me?"

"I didn't want to come," said Ann.

"Why, then?"

"Something made me."

"What?"

"I don't know." Ann's voice was faintly hysterical.

+++

"Now, now, hush, hush," whispered Cecy. "Hush, that's it. Around, around."

They whispered and rustled and rose and fell away in the dark room, with the music moving and turning them.

"But you did come to the dance," said Tom.

"I did," said Cecy.

"Here." And he danced her lightly out an open door and walked her quietly away from the hall and the music and the people.

They climbed up and sat together in the rig.

"Ann," he said, taking her hands, trembling. "Ann." But the way he said the name it was as if it wasn't her name. He kept glancing into her pale face, and now her eyes were open again. "I used to love you, you know that," he said.

"I know."

"But you've always been fickle and I didn't want to be hurt."

"It's just as well, we're very young," said Ann.

"No, I mean to say, I'm sorry," said Cecy.

"What do you mean?" Tom dropped her hands and stiffened.

The night was warm and the smell of the earth shimmered up all about them where they sat, and the fresh trees breathed one leaf against another in a shaking and rustling.

"I don't know," said Ann.

"Oh, but I know," said Cecy. "You're tall and you're the finest-looking man in all the world. This is a good evening; this is an evening I'll always remember, being with you." She put out the alien cold hand to find his reluctant hand again and bring it back, and warm it and hold it very tight.

"But," said Tom, blinking, "tonight you're here, you're there. One minute one way, the next minute another. I wanted to take you to the dance tonight for old times' sake. I meant nothing by it when I first asked you. And then, when we were standing at the well, I knew something had changed, really changed, about you. You were different. There was something new and soft, something..." He groped for a word. "I don't know, I can't say. The way you looked. Something about your voice. And I know I'm in love with you again."

"No," said Cecy. "With me, with we."

"And I'm afraid of being in love with you," he said. "You'll hurt me again."

"I might," said Ann.

No, no, I'd love you with all my heart! thought Cecy. Ann, say it to him, say it for me. Say you'd love him with all your heart.

Ann said nothing.

Tom moved quietly closer and put his hand up to hold her chin. "I'm going away. I've got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?"

"Yes," said Ann and Cecy.

"May I kiss you good-bye, then?"

"Yes," said Cecy before anyone else could speak.

He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.

Ann sat like a white statue.

"Ann!" said Cecy. "Move your arms, hold him!"

She sat like a carved wooden doll in the moonlight.

Again he kissed her lips.

"I do love you," whispered Cecy. "I'm here, it's me you saw in her eyes it's me, and I love you if she never will."

He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. He sat beside her. "I don't know what's happening. For a moment there..."

"Yes?" asked Cecy.

"For a moment I thought -" He put his hands to his eyes. "Never mind. Shall I take you home now?"

"Please," said Ann Leary.

+++

He clucked to the horse, snapped the reins tiredly, and drove the rig away. They rode in the rustle and slap and motion of the moonlit rig in the still early, only eleven o'clock spring night, with the shining meadows and sweet fields of clover gliding by.

And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, 'It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on.' And she heard her parents' voices again, faintly, "Be careful. You wouldn't want to lose your magical powers, would you - married to a mere mortal? Be careful. You wouldn't want that."

Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I'd give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn't need to roam the spring nights then, I wouldn't need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I'd need only to be with him. Only him. Only him.

The road passed under, whispering.

"Tom," said Ann at last.

"What?" He stared coldly at the road, the horse, the trees, the sky, the stars.

"If you're ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favour?"

"Perhaps."

"Will you do me the favour of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?" Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.

"Why?"

"She's a good friend. I've told her of you. I'll give you her address. Just a moment." When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. "There it is. Can you read it?"

He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.

"Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Green Town, Illinois," he said.

"Will you visit her someday?" asked Ann.

"Someday," he said.

"Promise?"

"What has this to do with us?" he cried savagely. "What do I want with names and papers?" He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.

"Oh, please promise!" begged Cecy.

"... promise..." said Ann.

"All right, all right, now let me be!" he shouted.

+++

I'm tired, thought Cecy. I can't stay I have to go home. I'm weakening. I've only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, travelling, travelling. But before I go...

"... before I go," said Ann.

She kissed Tom on the lips.

"This is me kissing you," said Cecy.

Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.

Then he put her off the rig and without so much as a good night was driving swiftly down the road.

Cecy let go.

Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.

+++

Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the light go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.

"Tom?" Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. "Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?"

She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. "Tom?" Softly.

Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for " moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.

Conclusion

This was a wonderful story. I hope that reprinting it here gave you, the reader, some pleasure in our crazy, mad and strange world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Articles & Links

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Notes

  1. Transcribed 24OVT18.
  2. Completed, SEO and Published 24OCT18.

What it was like being a kid in the early 1970’s

This is a walk down “memory lane” as I relate what it was like growing up as a young boy in the early 1970’s. I was in my early teenage years. I went to school, watched a lot of television, and played with my friends. Enjoy…

Introduction

As strange as it seems, there is very little on the internet about what it was like growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It’s almost as if it was scrubbed from existence. In it’s place we now have the Obama narrative of a racist nation and terrible injustices. That narrative has nothing to do with reality. It is a scripted lie intended to manipulate people into believing something that just isn’t true.

Here, in my own little way, I would like to relate some stories of what it was like for me growing up as a kid.  For “shits and giggles” I have chosen the year of 1971. It was the last year that I had as a kid before I had to go out and work at 14 in the coal mines.

This narrative takes place in Western Pennsylvania. We lived in a small town about a two hour drive from Pittsburgh. It was a hilly and tree shaded world, with railroad spur lines that snaked in and out of the hills and crossed over viaducts and into tunnels.  I well knew those lines as I would often walk along them with my friends on hikes and adventures.

Allegheny hills
The Allegheny mountains are very beautiful. I miss the beauty of them in the fall, and the joys of canoeing on the river and fishing in the streams.

Visiting my Aunties

Many weekends my parents would drive into Pittsburgh to visit my relatives. Both were from Pittsburgh, though from different areas. We would take turns visiting the families. In the morning we would visit my father’s family, and in the afternoon we would visit my mother’s family.

Polish Hill at dusk.
A evening scene from Polish Hill. Polish Hill is a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is a community that was founded by Polish immigrants that went to Pittsburgh to find work in the Steel Mills there.

Often times, there would be other relatives that would come and say hi. I would see my grandparent’s brothers and sisters, my great aunts and uncles, if you will. And I might be persuaded to go with them to their homes. For some reason, the homes always smelled like bacon and cabbage.

There was always a pot of coffee on the stove. If it was cold they would either reheat it or make a fresh pot. The coffee pot was a percolator design. The water would start to boil and would be forced up through a metal straw into a container that held coffee grounds. You could control how strong the coffee was by the amount of ground in the upper container and how long your brewed the coffee. There was this glass bubble on the top of the coffee pot that you could watch to tell if the coffee was ready or not.

Coffee Pot
This is a very common way of making coffee in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. Every family seemingly had a percolator. This particular picture is very similar to the one that we used at home.

They would almost invariably offer me a cup of coffee and a bowl of what ever is cooking on the stove. There was something always cooking. Sometimes it was spaghetti sauce, sometimes it was chili. Sometimes it was “pigs in a blanket” (pork wrapped up in cabbage). Sometimes it was chicken soup. I could always eat my fill when I visited my aunties.

Of course, every single relative had this painting of “the last supper” on the wall in the kitchen / dining room.

The Last Supper
During my childhood every family had a painting of the Last Supper on their wall. My relatives all had it hanging in the kitchen, but many of my friends had it in the living rooms or the dining room instead.

Everyone also pretty much listened to the same radio station as well. Each kitchen had this little plastic radio (of vintage electronic tubes) that was perpetually tuned to the AM radio station KDKA. Popular Music would often be heard while we were visiting.

Pop Songs

While I was pretty much listening to Jefro Tull, Traffic and other rock groups, my relatives and classmates enjoyed the popular music of the time. In 1971 we were listening to the following. Notable songs are highlighted in BOLD.

Three Dog Night Joy To The World
Rod Stewart Maggie May / (Find A) Reason To Believe
Carole King It’s Too Late / I Feel The Earth Move
Osmonds One Bad Apple
Bee Gees How Can You Mend A Broken Heart
Raiders Indian Reservation
Donny Osmond Go Away Little Girl
John Denver Take Me Home, Country Roads
Temptations Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Dawn Knock Three Times
Janis Joplin Me And Bobby McGee
Al Green Tired Of Being Alone
Honey Cone Want Ads
Undisputed Truth Smiling Faces Sometimes
Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose Treat Her Like A Lady
Rolling Stones Brown Sugar
James Taylor You’ve Got A Friend
Jean Knight Mr. Big Stuff
Lee Michaels Do You Know What I Mean
Joan Baez The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Marvin Gaye What’s Going On
Paul and Linda McCartney Tom Jones
Bill Withers Ain’t No Sunshine
Five Man Electrical Band Signs
Tom Jones She’s A Lady
Free Movement I Found Someone Of My Own
Murray Head and The Trinidad Singers Jesus Christ Superstar
Jerry Reed Amos Moses
Grass Roots Temptation Eyes
Carpenters Superstar
George Harrison My Sweet Lord / Isn’t It A Pity
Donny Osmond Sweet And Innocent
Ocean Put Your Hand In The Hand
Daddy Dewdrop Chick-A-Boom (Don’t Ya Jes’ Love It)
Carpenters For All We Know
Gordon Lightfoot If You Could Read My Mind
Sammi Smith Help Me Make It Through The Night
Carpenters Rainy Days And Mondays
Cher Gypsy, Tramps And Thieves
Jackson 5 Never Can Say Goodbye
Lynn Anderson Rose Garden
Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds Don’t Pull Your Love
Ringo Starr It Don’t Come Easy
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Mr. Bojangles
Fuzz I Love You For All Seasons
Dramatics Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get
Carly Simon That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be
Stevie Wonder If You Really Love Me
Aretha Franklin Spanish Harlem
Helen Reddy I Don’t Know How To Love Him
Osmonds Yo-yo
Aretha Franklin Bridge Over Troubled Water
Partridge Family Doesn’t Somebody Want To Be Wanted
Tommy James Draggin’ The Line
Ike and Tina Turner Proud Mary
Chicago Beginnings / Color My World
Bells Stay Awhile
Stampeders Sweet City Woman
Lobo Me And You And A Dog Named Boo
Paul McCartney Another Day / Oh Woman, Oh Why
Bread If
Marvin Gaye Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
Brewer and Shipley One Toke Over The Line
8th Day She’s Not Just Another Woman
Freda Payne Bring The Boys Home
Rare Earth I Just Want To Celebrate
Delaney and Bonnie and Friends Never Ending Song Of Love
Freddy Hart Easy Loving
Three Dog Night Liar
Honey Cone Stick-up
Mac and Katie Kissoon Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep
Andy Williams Love Story (Where Do I Begin)
Cat Stevens Wild World
Jerry Reed When You’re Hot, You’re Hot
Beginning Of The End Funky Nassau
Olivia Newton-John If Not For You
King Floyd Groove Me
Bobby Goldsboro Watching Scotty Grow
Matthews’ Southern Comfort Woodstock
Judy Collins Amazing Grace
Dave Edmunds I Hear You Knocking
Bee Gees Lonely Days
Fortunes Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again
Who Won’t Get Fooled Again
Denise Lasalle Trapped By A Thing Called Love
Jackson 5 Mama’s Pearl
Buoys Timothy
Partridge Family I Woke Up In Love This Morning
Isaac Hayes Theme From “Shaft”
Gladys Knight and The Pips If I Were Your Woman
Neil Diamond I Am..I Said
Paul Stookey Wedding Song (There Is Love)
Wilson Pickett Don’t Knock My Love, Pt. 1
Doors Love Her Madly
Richie Havens Here Comes The Sun
Wadsworth Mansion Sweet Mary
Brenda and The Tabulations Right On The Tip Of My Tongue
Fifth Dimension One Less Bell To Answer
Doors Riders On The Storm
Perry Como It’s Impossible

The song “Maggie May” was played to death, and radio stations in central Indiana were still playing that song long into the 1990’s. Ugh!

Donny Osmond was terribly popular with my sister and all of her girl friends at the time. Her bedroom was covered in pictures of Donny, and she had her class room textbooks covered in “lunch paper” covers decorated with Donny Osmond related praises.

I first heard “The night they drove ol’ Dixie down” when I was riding with my dad in our car. He was involved in technical sales at the time. I would wait in the car and listen to the radio while reading the “Last Whole Earth Catalog“.

Last Whole Earth Catalog
The Last Whole Earth Catalog was a cultural landmark in the 1970’s. Kevin Kelly, who was editor-in-chief at Whole Earth was looking at an old Whole Earth Catalog came to the realization that it was a 1970s version of a blog.

Tom Jones was very popular with my mother and the mothers of my friends. He had a kind of sex appeal that really appealed to them.

Jesus Christ Superstar hit my generation hard. I cannot express how big an impact this movie made at my church and at my school. It seemed like every family had the album. I went and saw the play and it was really moving.

I saw Jerry Reed sing “Amos Moses” on “Laugh In” or “Sonny and Cher” I don’t remember which. Both were shows that hosted a mixture of singing, dancing and comedy routines that were quite popular in the day.

The song “Gypsy, Tramps And Thieves” was a big hit by Cher. Most people have forgotten about her today. You hear some blurb on the news every now and then, but she was a big thing back in the day. She was super popular.

The song “Don’t Pull Your Love” was very popular and got a substantial amount of airtime. You probably couldn’t get by a day without hearing that song at least once. Other heavily air-played songs included “Mr. Bojangles“.

Everyone in my school watched the Partridge Family . This was a television show about a family that toured schools all over the country and sang at them. Well, they also had a number of hits, as well as a had a following of fans.

The Partridge Family was a television show that was very popular int he 1960's and 1970's.
How can one talk about the 1960’s and 1970’s without mentioning the television show The Partridge Family?

The idea and concept of freedom to explore, of adventure and travel was very popular. The ideals of the 1960’s were fading away, and the 1970’s was a time where people wanted to just go forth and explore the world. The song “Me And You And A Dog Named Boo” was representative of this dream.

If there is one iconic song from that year (heck, for that decade), it is “One Toke Over The Line“. Everyone was listening to it, and everyone related to it. Even my mother who would make the “sigh” and gesture while saying “I guess I’m just one toke over the line…”.

This song “Never Ending Song Of Love” has fallen into obscurity. Yet it reflected the reality of the small town bars and the culture of friendship and love that was indicative of the era.

The song “Riders On The Storm” continued to be popular with me and my classmates long into our college years.

Barbershop

Next to my Father’s parents house was a barbershop. The shop was run by an old man, probably in his 90’s. He lived upstairs above the shop. The barbershop itself was a museum and probably hadn’t changed since the 1940’s.

Barbershop
A barbershop was a place and refuge for men to be men. We could talk about things that interested us , we could talk about sports, girls and life. All barbershops were smoker-friendly places where men could be themselves, free of political correctness and progressive rules.

My father would take me to the barber there and I would get a haircut. I really didn’t want to go because at that time, long hair was fashionable. I would go there and then pout the rest of the day. But, I’ll tell you what, those trips to the barbershop were some of the best memories that I have.

The barbershop was a “men’s only” establishment. On the tables were magazines about hunting, guns and adventure. On the walls were pictures of deer and ducks. There was a full length mirror on the wall that faced two very huge and ornate barber chairs. The barber wore an apron and wore his hair in a style that probably went obsolete in the 1950’s.

Men's magazines.
When we went to the barbershop we would read the men’s adventure magazines that would lie there, as well as the Playboy magazines that would be interspersed with the newspapers and the standing ashtrays.

The chairs were big and comfortable. He would often have friends hang out while he worked. They would sit there smoking cigarettes and watching him cut hair. A small radio would be on and often it would be tuned to a baseball or football game.

The place had it’s own kind of unique smell to it. It was a cross between aftershave and and old house. The barber lived alone as his wife passed on a decade earlier. He just ran the shop until he died. After he passed on, the place was boarded up and then demolished.

Hiking in the Woods

At that time in my life I spent a lot of time hiking in the woods. I would often ride my bike all over town and up and down the back roads and railroad spur lines. In the Spring the air would be fresh with the smells of lush forest canopy. In the Fall, it would be a time of warm “Indian Summers” with red and yellow leaves that would blow in the light breezes.

Railroad tracks.
I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. The hills all around us were wooded and access to them was via back roads and rail lines. As a boy, I would spend a lot of time walking on these tracks and exploring the world around me.

I rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire. Every one of my friends owned a bicycle. My sister had one with a white plastic basket in the front. My bike had these long streamers of plastic that plugged into the handles. I eventually tore those things off. But I would put a card (from a deck of cards) and attach it to the bicycle with a wooden clothes pin. That way my bicycle would make some “cool” sounds when I rode fast. It had a huge red circular red reflector on the back, right under the white “banana seat”. Like the GTO I would later drive when I was in High School, the bicycle was an orange color.

During the 1970s and 1960s all children rode bicycles. I had a banana seat bike that I rode.
We would all ride bicycles when we grew up. Which is different than kids today. Instead, today their parents drive them from event to event, instead of expecting them to get there on their own. A 1970s childhood. (Image Source)

My bike was a personal selection. When my father took me to a store to pick it out, I chose a really simple and rugged model. There were no front or rear brakes on the handlebars. To brake, you would just use the pedals. There also weren’t any gears. There was one gear only. It came with a rear view mirror, that soon broke off, and that was about it. My friends all had more complicated bicycles, and over the years, they were perpetually repairing their bikes and trying to fix them. For me, I never had that problem.

Television Shows

At that time the only television channels that we could watch were CBS, NBC, and ABC. We also had “channel 13” which was a government channel. All of our news, and our entertainment came from these three sources. Since we never had the kind of selection that we have today, we didn’t find anything wrong with it. It was normal for us.

Friday night TV
Here is the complete television selection for Friday night viewing in 1971. It is pretty sparse isn’t it. This is where all American got their news and found out about the world around them.

As sparse as the selection was, we were perpetually glued to the television set. There was usually a movie a night. They were often a few years old, after being shown in the movie theaters. If the movie wasn’t shown in the theaters it would be called a “World Premiere Movie”.

Television was rather primitive.

While we did have a color television, we still needed to walk across the room to change the channel. Imagine that! Remote controls were not available until the mid-1970’s. On top of it were “rabbit ears” until we were able to subscribe to cable in the late 1970’s. My grandmother had her “rabbit ears” with aluminum foil wrapped around it. She said that it improved her reception. Maybe it did. I don’t know, her reception really sucked, so it must have been really, really terrible.

My favorite after-school show was “The Flintstones”. All of my classmates watched it. There were many shows that I watched when I was growing up. It went from the black and white “Diver Dan” series, to the Fireball XL-5, Supercar, and included such staples as Gilligans Island, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E..

I would watch the news reluctantly. For me it was pretty boring.

However, I did follow the news about space. You couldn’t miss it. Everyone was talking about space, and the moon. That is all you heard about as a child of the 1960’s. The television shows also helped to maintain this theme.

As the news that played on the radio concerned our exploration of space and the Vietnam War.  Of course I didn’t know what was going on. It was a takeover of the United States government by dark forces embedded deep inside the United States government. When JFK was shot, my father insisted that I watch the television. He kept telling me that this was the most important thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. He was a lifelong Democrat and he had real concerns that there was more to the story than what the government was saying. Later, after he died and President Trump released the transcripts, it turned out that my father was right after all.

The “Deep State” murdered our President.

“This fucker, johnson should be dug up and pissed on, and torn apart. Every modern ill can be traced to him.” 

-sowhat1929

On Sunday we watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”, and “The FBI” (Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr) after the Walt Disney hour. If I wasn’t watching television, I was building plastic scale models, or experimenting on my Gilbert chemistry (and electrical) sets.

The A. C. Gilbert Company was an American toy company, once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It is best known for introducing the Erector Set to the marketplace. A chemistry set is an educational toy allowing the user (typically a teenager) to perform simple chemistry experiments.

During the Bill Clinton presidency (D) all sales of chemistry, electronics, and mechanical kits were put under investigation as possible routes for “home grown” terroristic activities, and were subsequently suppressed, if not outright banned. Over the Bush years (R), they resurfaced and eked out a small living.  However, by 2017 most hobby kit suppliers went out of business. Ramsey electronics, Heithkit electronics RIP.

At that time in my life, I like the rest of my classmates, watched shows like the Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. These shows were about “us”. It was how we interacted with each other, and our families and our communities. This all began to change when the television media decided to change their programming towards minorities in urban areas. Television began a slow phase away from white families living in suburbia and began to concentrate on poor urban minorities.

The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz that aired from September 26, 1969, to March 8, 1974, on ABC. The series revolves around a large blended family with six children. Considered one of the last of the old-style family sitcoms, the series aired for five seasons and, after its cancellation in 1974, went into syndication in September 1975. While the series was never a critical or ratings success during its original run, it has since become a popular staple in syndication, especially among children and teenaged viewers.

Shows about black people were limited to “Stanford and Son”, and “The Jefferson’s”.

“The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural themed shows, the purge also eliminated several high rating variety shows that had been on CBS since their beginning of television broadcasting. One of the earliest efforts at channel drift, CBS in particular saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban audiences.”

-Wikipedia

The shows we watched were funnier than what you see on television today.  And, maybe, just maybe a little more innocent. “The Bob Newhart Show” was typical. The humor involved day to day situations and NEVER mentioned race (compare that to today), and had a real twisted surrealistic sense of humor. Consider “Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman”, or “Green Acres”. You can find out more here.

Hi my name is larry and this is my brother daryl and my other brother daryl.
Iconic characters from the Bob Newhart show that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Hi! I am Larry, and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl. (Image Source.)

Ah, you’ve got to hear about the three yokel brothers in the (very surrealistic) 80’s “The Bob Newhart show”. I loved these guys. They might have been the highlight of the show. Heck, they could have had their own show (hint. Hint.)

“…discovering that a witch is buried in the basement of their Vermont inn. They want to find out who she was, but they also want her 300-year-old grave dug up and removed. 

The silly-from-next-door tells him he knows some guys who`ll do anything for a buck.

Next thing, three goofy-looking, backwoods brothers from the genetically weak side of Vermont show up. “Oh, Lord!” says Bob, getting a whiff. Larry--the only brother who ever talks--hands Bob their card.

“We`ll do anything for a buck,” it says.”

- Larry, Darryl And Darryl Are `Newhart` Hits

Larry was the spokesman. Darryl and Darryl never spoke except in the classic final episode. No matter how many times Larry met you, he always started off by saying “Hello. I’m Larry. This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl.

They were quite good hearted, and obviously lived a strange, strange life. Afterall, clubbed weasel was their idea of good eatin’. Larry’s totally deadpan delivery of some very bizarre lines was always a highlight of any Newhart episode. “We went to the bakery ’cause they were advertising ‘bear claws’, but it turned out to just be a come-on.

Ah. Good times. Good times.

Movies and television portrayed westerns (with “white men” taming the wilderness), war adventures (mostly involving world war II fighting the evil Nazi army), space exploration (such as Lost in Space, Star Trek, Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds are Go and Land of the Giants), and Spy Adventures (against the Soviet Union or against fictional organizations such as T.H.R.U.S.H.).

Scale Models

One of my favorite hobbies was the building of plastic models. These were often of ships, airplanes and military hardware. I made a few models of cars, but my favorites were of military tanks and figurines.

I had a desk in my bedroom. It was an old desk inherited from my father with four drawers. I used a fold-up “card table” chair to sit at it with. On it was a 1940’s style desk lamp that my parents must have pulled out of the garbage at some time. I had books on the desk, a “multiband” radio where I could listen to FM radio, and a pencil holder made out of a decorated metal coffee cup tin.

At that desk, I would assemble, build and paint my models. It was an enjoyable pursuit. The desk faced the window in the bedroom, and I would often have the windows open, but the shade drawn down about half way. The shades were in the old 1960’s style and were meant to last. They had this kind of “life preserver” style ring hanging on a string that you could pull down to raise or lower the shade.

I needed the fresh air, as the odor from the glue was toxic and would tend to get me all flustered when I used it. I remember once, that my sister was watching her television show and they were really pushing the Rigley Chewing Gum-gum-gum… Rigley chewing gum-gum-gum commercial. It must have been running every ten minutes. I was about going out of my mind with the combination of the toxic glue odor and the subliminal programming of the chewing gum. Ugh!

airplanes hung from the ceiling
I would build the models and paint them. Then, I would carefully hang them from the ceiling. My room was filled with models of various sizes and shapes.

The airplanes I would hang from the ceiling with string. I would display my collection of tanks and military equipment on shelves alongside my collection of centuries-old bottles. (I was an avoid junk collector and was always on the lookout for discarded bottles that I would collect from ancient trash dumps in the nearby forests.)

I collected Tamiya 1/35 scale military hardware models. I had quite a collection of German vehicles and tanks. At that time, the Japanese model maker Tamiya made the best quality models. They had an innovative introduction process that added new model to the collection every few months.

Tiger I
This is a model of the German Tiger I tank. I had numerous models of this massive beast in various scales. I even had one so complete that the interior was all detailed.

Alas, when I graduated from university I discovered that my mother had thrown away all of my models. She didn’t want all the clutter in the house. I guess one person’s treasure is another person’s trash.

Science Fiction

I started reading Science Fiction avidly. With one of the first books being the “Mad Scientist Club”.

The Mad Scientist Club is a series of stories (and books) written in the 1960’s which fueled the imagination and adventures of us children in the 1970’s. (The son of the author has a website. You can visit the website HERE.) These stories inspired me. They inspired my dreams and led me down the path towards technical excellence.

The book cover to the Mad Scientists Club.
The cover from the first book of “The Mad Scientists Club”. This is a classic book for all young children entering their early teens.

The boys in the stories used science to create all sorts of pandemonium and mayhem in their little town. They applied themselves to using science to make devices and gadgets. They played pranks. The books showed how a boy could engineer a device from techniques that they learned in school. They made balloons, talked on ham radios, devised electronics, and they did it all on their very own.

The beauty about all this was that they never asked for help or permission. They took the initiative and did it on their own. They applied themselves.

Indeed, these stories are special. But, don’t take it from me. Read what others have to say.

“This is the best kids book ever.

… In a way it saddens me when I re-read it. I don't think our kids today have as much freedom as these did (or my generation). I remember staying out until dark, riding my bike EVERYWHERE, clubhouses on vacant lots...Or maybe it's responsibility. Kids today have freedom but little responsibility. I'm getting off my soapbox now. but this is a cool book and it will make your kids fall in love with science. I imagine the Mythbusters grew up like this- or maybe their dads did!! ”

-Holly commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

I am afraid that Holly is correct. American children (and adults) don’t have as much freedom as we all used to. (It’s our fault, you know.) These books are for kids and inspires them to accomplish things through study and action. These books are not about getting a group together and finding a group consensus. It’s not about how to cautiously speak so as not to offend anyone. Nope. It is about getting things done and raising hell in the process.

It’s books like these that inspired many of us to study science and engineering. It certainly affected me. It also affected others. I am not the only one who studied about rockets and space…

“This was simply a great childhood book for any inquisitive kid who likes science, haunted houses, dinosaurs, flying machines, etc. I read this book in about seventh or eighth grade and actually a couple of times since. I believe this book helped me on my career to being a rocket scientist but it also gave me many ideas as I was growing up.

Brinley managed to capture the perfect mid-west US town and the guys in the book were great caricatures of fun loving, science minded boys with a bit of good natured mischief up their sleeves. Then Brinley took this setting and boys and produced a series of wonderful stories capturing so many things that so many boys growing up find so intriguing.

I bought a copy recently for a nephew and he was enraptured by it. The follow-ups while good never really reached the level of this first book but were fun in their own right. It will always hold a special memory of growing up back in the '60s.”

-Robert commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

He’s right you know. The stories certainly inspired me.

I like to think that there is inspiration in stories where you find adventure, freedom and independence. These are things that are absolutely missing in the modern realm of politically correct stories. Which, by the way, is a very important point. By following a “Politically Correct” narrative, you retard the growthof young boys. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, you turn men into pussies.

“We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody's become used to saying, "Well, how do we handle it psychologically?" In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you'd be left alone from then on.”

-Clint Eastwood

A parent has a responsibly to PREPARE their children to venture out and grow. They need to go forth and carve a life out of the wilderness. But that is not what is happening today. Instead we have children that never leave the nest. Young men, in the United States, live at home until they are in their 30’s. Instead of investing their time in building, workings, making, and creating, they are too busy looking at cat videos on the Internet while they post their latest latté on Facebook. Boys must be taught to aspire to be Men, not to be a woman’s version of a sensitive man.

Pussies.

No amount of tattoos, unique hair or beard, or cool urban clothing style is going to make you into a Man. It comes from within. Education alone won’t do it. Money and wealth won’t do it. Polite conversation won’t do it. It comes from inside. It comes from deep down inside. It comes from a place that says “you can, and must do what you need to do”. You don’t ask for permission, or consensus. You go out and carve your life out.  Alone.

By clutching on to your children like over protective mothers, the children don’t grow up. Physically they might age, but the brain and the emotions are still that of a young child. How else can you explain the SWJ mentality that demands a protective overseer? Which is what they want, you know. They demand to be coddled and taken care of by a big parental government Bernie Sanders style. Because, that is all that they know. They don’t know how to be independent. We don’t teach that anymore.

These books break us out of that mold…

“A gem. Almost unknown; but one of the most hilarious and memorable laugh-out-loud books you could ask for. It's never mentioned by anyone; it's never recommended, placed on book lists or chosen by reading-groups. This just might be because it's a series of books, which represents a 'philosophy-of-parenting’, which has fallen out of favor. That's my suspicion, anyway.

I mean, just think about it. These stories are about kids who are unmonitored; who are allowed to just go off on summer afternoons and hang out on their own; and do whatever they want.... because they are trusted by their folks. Today, this is the last thing parents want to hear. No one in today's control-freak, micro-managing America wants to imagine that children can be trusted like this.

Books for very young children ('Little Prince' or 'Giving Tree') are in abundance on Goodreads. They're sweet and harmless. There's also a new genre called 'YA' ('young adult'). But guess what? They're all very sanitary, careful, cautious, and timid. Antiseptic. Content-supervised and Content-controlled. They always instruct youngsters on the 'correct' thing to do, the 'sensitive' thing to do, the 'courteous' thing to do...blah blah blah.

'Mad Scientists' is different. Instead of caution, the author praises problem-solving, solidarity, daring, and initiative. It's a book written for kids illustrating how NOT to follow the rules. It’s a book, which shows that rules are made to be flouted.

These stories are from a time when today's endless complexities and anxieties just weren't around. It’s a book that deals with kids just... having fun. I say, there need to be a LOT MORE books like this.

The gang of boys in Brinley's tales are pre-teens; somewhere between 11 and 14. This is a strange interval in a boy's matriculation, when they need to figure out a lot of things about life (and it’s also a time when adults have the least relevant advice to offer). This is the space Brinley plays in: the theme of personal responsibility.

Teens NEED to create a few genuine catastrophes in order to learn the weight of 'cause' vs 'effect'. 'Intention' vs 'outcome'. 'Actions' vs 'harm'. They need to learn the ins-and-outs of friendship and loyalty and paying-one's-dues.

The 'Mad Scientists Club' (this is the name carved on their clubhouse door) demonstrate these themes grandly. These young scamps are precisely in that age where you learn how to make a mess and how you clean it up afterwards. By yourself!

The crazy scenarios which afflict these affable 'troublemakers' reminds us--should remind everyone-- that this process can be fun. Making mistakes and learning from them. The best way --nay, the ONLY way--to shape character.

Far cry from today, huh? Yeah. Today, we don't let kids have 'secret clubs', 'hideouts', codewords, or 'mysterious friends'. We don't let them play with equipment or tools. They must not 'wreck' anything of ours. They're certainly not allowed to 'gallivant all over creation' (love that phrase).

Modern parents are rule-mongers and control freaks. When our kids want to play, we take them to 'Sesame Place' and we monitor their nutrition and we deck them in flashing sneakers and put them in helmets and on leashes. We place them in soccer, swim class, softball, karate, dance, gymnastics.

The result? Modern kids have no idea what real 'freedom' means. We never give it to them. They turn out to be vegetables.

But Brinley's kids show the other way it can be done. This boy's club makes their own fun. They don't 'ask for permission' to do stuff--they just do it! They embrace wildness, zaniness, and unpredictability. The outcome? Well, they aren't brought up on charges from the Department of Homeland Security, for the trouble they cause. That's for sure. This is a part of small town-Americana we've let slip away.

Just one example: in one of the adventures undertaken by the Mad Scientists, they build their own hot-air balloon (using scraps from a local junkyard) and they enter it in the town's annual homemade hot-air balloon race. With no adult supervision at all. Once aloft, (!!) they engaged in an air-battle with their arch-foes and fire potato-cannons and slingshots back'n'forth in mid-air. Finally, they manage to send the enemy gang's balloon into the lake! Can you stand it? I can't friggin' stand it, can you?

This book reminds us that children used to be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves if we let them...if we weren't all scared out of our wits by molesters and semi-automatic weapons and drugs and porn and stalkers and computers, we'd still remember the kind of America found in this hilarious read. It's to our shame that we can't.”

-Feliks commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

Let me simply posit this; to all those men (not to intentionally exclude women, but I am a man addressing myself to other men) who have made something of their life. Maybe you are a barber, a motorcycle mechanic, a car salesman, or a cook, isn’t it true? To make it in this world, you need to stretch your neck out. You need to take risks, bend the rules a little. You need to apply yourself.

Book cover from the New Adventures of the Mad Scientist club.
The cover to the book “The New Adventures of the Mad Scientist Club”. This is the sequel to the first book. It is also good, though personally, I really prefer the first book overall.

Those times when life got tough, did you go and get permission? Did you go and ask for consensus? Did you politely ask for others opinions, or did you just go out and do whatever it took to achieve your goals? Was it easy? Nope, I’ll wager that it was hard, or at least uncomfortable. You might have to make sacrifices. Right? Right???

Part of the need to accomplish these tasks were goals. These goals were like this golden orb that lay there, just out of reach that you needed to obtain. You would work towards those goals. You would keep those goals in mind while you fought and persevered. A goal might be a car. A goal might be the love of your life.

A man is nothing without a goal.

A goal might be something more honorable and important, like saving the world. As everyone can’t be an evil villain like George Soros. Or, a wealthy trillionaire like Bill Gates. Someone needs to wear the mask of a hero…

The Idols

My bedroom was decorated as any boy of my my age would have. It was festooned with models and collections of brick-a-bract and posters on the wall. I had a poster of Farah Faucett on my wall. She was smiling with this amazing smile, and her huge hair. We all had a crush on her. That as well as Loni Anderson and Rachael Welch . Look at her!

How can you not smile?

Farah Faucett was an attractive actress that was very popular in the 1970s.
Farah Faucett was every 1970s boy’s dream. Just about everyone had a poster of her on our wall or doors in our bedrooms. Farah Faucett was every boys’ dream. (Image Source.)

I had numerous posters on my wall. One was the mandatory “black light” poster on velvet. (It glowed under UV light.) One was a picture of Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) performing a guitar solo. (I had super imposed a F-14 on it for combined imagery. After all, space and high-performance aircraft and rock n’ roll was my dream.) One was a Roger Dean poster (anyone remember the group “Yes”?).

Raquel Welch was a very popular 1960s and 1970s actress that made a big difference in the ideas of beauty and society during the 1960's and 1970's.
Raquel Welch was another popular actress that graced the bedrooms of many a boy during the 1960s and 1970s. (Image Source.)

I became a fan of Loni Anderson in her role in the television sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”. I think many of my friends did as well. We loved her and watching her on the show was always a highlight. That and the clueless manager who ran the office.

Loni Anderson
Loni Anderson played the role of the attractive secretary in the American sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”.

Telephones

There were no cell phones; indeed most phones hung on the wall, and fully 50% of them had dials instead of push buttons.  Our home had two phones. One was an old Bakelite black phone from the 1920’s hidden away in the basement. I loved the feeling of it. There was a weight to it that you just couldn’t get during the 1970’s. We also had a “main” phone in the kitchen. It had an extra-long cord. My sister was always “hogging it up”. So one year they bought her a phone for her room. She still spent most of her time on the phone, it’s just that she wasn’t talking in the kitchen all day.

Sunday mornings as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s was very much a time of newspapers, coffee and hot fresh buttered rolls.
Sunday mornings were very much the same during the 1960s and 1970s. This included the children in PJ’s, the coffee, and the pets. Sunday mornings were stereotypical.(Image Source.)

In the house we wore “house clothes” also known as PJ’s, with a robe. Mother would make sure that there was always a pot of coffee brewing, and us kids would always fight over who would get to read the comics section of the paper first.  Of course, our dogs and cats merrily participated in the morning ritual. Picture above is not the ideal, it was the actual.

Global Cooling and the “Green Movement”

Global cooling
We were terrified of the global cooling. Thousands of experts were constantly informing us of the up coming global ice age that would turn Florida into a Siberian wasteland.

In our schools we would go on field trips to clean up the environment. We would go on “collection drives” to collect money for our environment, and we ended up with absolute bushels of money. (Don’t know where it all went, though…) We attended classes on the environment and school rallies to lecture us on the up-coming global cooling that would soon turn the world into a snow cone.

We were terrified!

Every cold day was a sign that the world was plunging into another great ice age. Magazines, the media, and the news all had stories about the coming cold period and the need to raise taxes to save our environment. Experts were paraded on television to teach us the need to raise taxes, and fund more research.

Global Cooling
Here’s a selection of some covers from Time Magazine during the 1970’s. The big concern was about “global cooling” and ho that taxes had to be increased to fund studies so as to stop it.

The “Love Canal” fiasco acted as a terrible “kick start” to the “environmental movement”. Americans began to wake up that we had been really abusing our environment. As such, immediate action had to be taken. And thus the government took action in the only way that it knew how…

  • It set up the EPA, and…
  • Raised taxes.

Which was the entire purpose of the decade long propaganda push; To [1] increase the size and scope of the government, and [2] to raise more taxes to go to Washington D.C..

“What’s it mean, anyway? Do 97% of #Scientists agree that the climate is changing? Actually, everyone agrees with that – that the Earth’s climate changes over time is why we had an ice age. Well, we had an ice age a long time ago. We did not have one after the #Science people promised an ice age in the 1970s. But shhhh! We’re not supposed to mention that.

Want to know what the proposed solution for the ’70s ice age that never arrived was? Give the liberal elite more money and power. Overpopulation was another big crisis in the ’70s too. It never arrived either. The solution to that was to give the liberal elite more money and power. And when they were warning us about acid rain destroying us in the ’80s? The solution to that crisis was also to give the liberal elite more money and power. The ozone hole? Yep, more of our money and power to the liberal elite. Back in the 1990s, the Al Gores of the world were warning us that we had just 10 years left to save the Earth unless … wait for it … we gave the liberal elite more money and power.

Sense some themes?

Each of these crises all had two things in common. Thing One was that none of these doomsdays ever produced the promised doom. Thing Two was that each was a demand to give the liberal elite more money and power.”

Family Meals

One of the things that I have come to appreciate the most was the family meal  that we had when I was growing up as a child. During my early childhood we would hold formal “sit down” meals in the Dining Room. Us children each had our own roles / chores in regards to this. On Sunday we would have the largest and most elaborate meals. Mealtime was the opportunity when we could all talk about our day, our hopes and dreams, and things that interested us.

At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was.

Then, during the 1970’s everything changed. Both of my parents had to work. (You can thank the American Federal Reserve for the decline in the value of the dollar that necessitated the breakup of our families.) A formal family meal was replaced with “help yourself” fix your own meals, out of a pot on the stove, or “make yourself a snack” out of the refrigerator. We would then scrounge something up, and eat it alone watching television.

Communication was via notes on the refrigerator.

Now that I am much older, I can see clearly the value of a family meal as well as a community meal. As such, I now dictatorially enforce an observance of this tradition within my own home.

Fishing with my Father

I will conclude with this little narrative of my experiences in 1971 talking about my father. He used to spend the time and take me and my siblings out to the river to fish. He had a couple of rods and a tackle box that he inherited from his (favorite) uncle. Using it, he taught me how to fish, and how to gut and clean the fish.

While it is a great memory of mine, the best part, and the part that remember most clearly is how he would drive out to the lake or stream, and we would then troop down to the area to fish. He was always on the lookout for isolated and secluded areas to fish in. He yearned for the “perfect spot”. One with deep water and plenty of overhanging limbs and trees that fish can hide in.

Oh, I would go fishing with my friends. They had an assortment of remote cabins, canoes and secret places that always provided us a great deal of pleasure. But, it was the times with my father that mattered the most to me. My friends were always up to something.

via GIPHY

I once had a friend who placed plastic sheeting on his garage floor and dumped a dump truck full of soil on it. He, at age 13, had constructed a worm farm, and he somehow had this crazy idea that he would get “filthy rich” selling worms to the local bait and tackle shops. He did actually manage to sell some. I think he might have made $5 or so. Eventually, he gave up the idea and paid some one to haul the dirt away. His dream of instant millions went bust.

I never became an expert at fishing. I was, I guess you could say, an enthusiastic hobbyist. For me, the time with my father fishing were some of the best moments of my life, and moments that I will treasure until I too, will die.

Conclusion

This was just a little narrative that I wrote about what it was like for me in 1971. It’s a far cry from the United States today. The USA today saddens me. Every time I read the news, I get either depressed or angered. There’s not really too much that I can do about the slide into open civil strife that America is plunging towards, all that I can do is take care of myself and think good thoughts.

This includes what it was like growing up as a boy.

Take Aways

  • Global Cooling was a sham designed to trick Americans into permitting a larger government and giving away more of their money.
  • There were only four television channels that we American had access to in the early 1970’s.
  • The family meal is the most important part of having a family. It is important to nurture and cultivate relationships.
  • Television shows used to focus on American culture instead of bastardized urban minority culture.
  • My favorite memories of my father was when we were fishing together.
  • 1970's living life.
    This is how we rolled. We were allowed to experience life in all it’s ugly and beautiful glory. Life is about living.

Posted On Free Republic

This article was posted on Free Republic in the chat section and collected a number of interesting comments. Many of which, I really do need to write about. Particularly what it was like for my sisters at that time, the cars that we drove, and the cultural things going on in society at that time. You can read the comments HERE.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed first draft 9OCT18.
  2. Completed 10OCT18.
  3. SEO review 10OCT18.
  4. Published 10OCT18.

Robert Heinlein’s “The Long Watch” – Full Text

There are often things that inspire us. This is most especially true when you are young and looking for direction. In my case, I was greatly influenced by the books that I read. My favorites were short-length science fiction “pulps”. These were often paperback books that I could shove in the rear pocket of my bluejeans. I would read them, and often reread them. The authors of these stories varied, but my favorites included Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein.

Here is one such story.

This story illustrates that sometimes, it take one person to take a necessary action. Often that person doesn’t want the role. However, there is no one else who can do it. So that person, out of necessity, must become the hero. He must do the difficult and uncomfortable job because he is the only one who is available.

This story holds special meaning to me.

Introduction

This story was written appeared in the December 1949 American Legion Magazine by Robert Heinlein, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

“The Long Watch” is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is about a military officer who faces a coup d’état by a would-be dictator.

John McClane: Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothin'. You get shot at. Pat on the back, blah blah blah. 'Attaboy.' You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. (I do this) because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so (I'm) doing it. That's what makes you that guy."

Enjoy.

The Long Watch

Nine ships blasted off from Moon Base. Once in space, eight of them formed a globe around the smallest. They held this formation all the way to Earth. 

"The small ship displayed the insignia of an admiral-yet there was no living thing of any sort in her. She was not even a passenger ship, but a drone, a robot ship intended for radioactive cargo. This trip she carried nothing but a lead coffin and a Geiger counter that was never quiet." 

—from the editorial After 
Ten Years, film 38, 
17 June 2009, Archives of the 
N. Y. Times  

I

JOHNNY DAHLQUIST blew smoke at the Geiger counter. He grinned wryly and tried it again. His whole body was radioactive by now. Even his breath, the smoke from his cigarette, could make the Geiger counter scream.

How long had he been here? Time doesn’t mean much on the Moon. Two days? Three? A week? He let his mind run back: the last clearly marked time in his mind was when the Executive Officer had sent for him, right after breakfast—

“Lieutenant Dahlquist, reporting to the Executive Officer.”

Colonel Towers looked up. “Ah, John Ezra. Sit down, Johnny. Cigarette?”

Johnny sat down, mystified but flattered. He admired Colonel Towers, for his brilliance, his ability to dominate, and for his battle record. Johnny had no battle record; he had been commissioned on completing his doctor’s degree in nuclear physics and was now junior bomb officer of Moon Base.

The Colonel wanted to talk politics; Johnny was puzzled.

Finally Towers had come to the point; it was not safe (so he said) to leave control of the world in political hands; power must be held by a scientifically selected group. In short—the Patrol.

Johnny was startled rather than shocked. As an abstract idea, Towers’ notion sounded plausible. The League of Nations had folded up; what would keep the United Nations from breaking up, too, and thus lead to another World War. “And you know how bad such a war would be, Johnny.”

Johnny agreed. Towers said he was glad that Johnny got the point. The senior bomb officer could handle the work, but it was better to have both specialists.

Johnny sat up with a jerk. “You are going to do something about it?” He had thought the Exec was just talking.

Towers smiled. “We’re not politicians; we don’t just talk. We act.”

Johnny whistled. “When does this start?”

Towers flipped a switch. Johnny was startled to hear his own voice, then identified the recorded conversation as having taken place in the junior officers’ messroom. A political argument he remembered, which he had walked out on . . . a good thing, too! But being spied on annoyed him.

Towers switched it off. “We have acted,” he said. “We know who is safe and who isn’t. Take Kelly—” He waved at the loud-speaker. “Kelly is politically unreliable. You noticed he wasn’t at breakfast?”

“Huh? I thought he was on watch.”

“Kelly’s watch-standing days are over. Oh, relax; he isn’t hurt.”

Johnny thought this over. “Which list am I on?” he asked. “Safe or unsafe?”

“Your name has a question mark after it. But I have said all along that you could be depended on.” He grinned engagingly. “You won’t make a liar of me, Johnny?”

Dahlquist didn’t answer; Towers said sharply, “Come now—what do you think of it? Speak up.”

“Well, if you ask me, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. While it’s true that Moon Base controls the Earth, Moon Base itself is a sitting duck for a ship. One bomb—blooie!”

Towers picked up a message form and handed it over; it read: I HAVE YOUR CLEAN LAUNDRY—ZACK. “That means every bomb in the Trygve Lie has been put out of commission. I have reports from every ship we need worry about.” He stood up. “Think it over and see me after lunch. Major Morgan needs your help right away to change control frequencies on the bombs.”

“The control frequencies?”

“Naturally. We don’t want the bombs jammed before they reach their targets.”

“What? You said the idea was to prevent war.”

Towers brushed it aside. “There won’t be a war—just a psy-chological demonstration, an unimportant town or two. A little bloodletting to save an all-out war. Simple arithmetic.”

He put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “You aren’t squeamish, or you wouldn’t be a bomb officer. Think of it as a surgical operation. And think of your family.”

Johnny Dahlquist had been thinking of his family. “Please, sir, I want to see the Commanding Officer.”

Towers frowned. “The Commodore is not available. As you know, I speak for him. See me again—after lunch.”

The Commodore was decidedly not available; the Commodore was dead. But Johnny did not know that.

* * *

Dahlquist walked back to the messroom, bought cigarettes, sat down and had a smoke. He got up, crushed out the butt, and headed for the Base’s west airlock. There he got into his space suit and went to the lockmaster. “Open her up, Smitty.”

The marine looked surprised. “Can’t let anyone out on the surface without word from Colonel Towers, sir. Hadn’t you heard?”

“Oh, yes! Give me your order book.” Dahlquist took it, wrote a pass for himself, and signed it “by direction of Colonel Towers.” He added, “Better call the Executive Officer and check it.”

The lockmaster read it and stuck the book in his pocket. “Oh, no, Lieutenant. Your word’s good.”

“Hate to disturb the Executive Officer, eh? Don’t blame you.” He stepped in, closed the inner door, and waited for the air to be sucked out.

Out on the Moon’s surface he blinked at the light and hurried to the track-rocket terminus; a car was waiting. He squeezed in, pulled down the hood, and punched the starting button. The rocket car flung itself at the hills, dived through and came out on a plain studded with projectile rockets, like candles on a cake. Quickly it dived into a second tunnel through more hills. There was a stomach-wrenching deceleration and the car stopped at the underground atom-bomb armory.

As Dahlquist climbed out he switched on his walkie-talkie. The space-suited guard at the entrance came to port-arms. Dahlquist said, “Morning, Lopez,” and walked by him to the airlock. He pulled it open.

The guard motioned him back. “Hey! Nobody goes in without the Executive Officer’s say-so.” He shifted his gun, fumbled in his pouch and got out a paper. “Read it, Lieutenant.”

Dahlquist waved it away. “I drafted that order myself. You read it; you’ve misinterpreted it.”

“I don’t see how, Lieutenant.”

Dahlquist snatched the paper, glanced at it, then pointed to a line. “See? ‘—except persons specifically designated by the Executive Officer.’ That’s the bomb officers, Major Morgan and me.”

The guard looked worried. Dahlquist said, “Damn it, look up ‘specifically designated’—it’s under ‘Bomb Room, Security, Procedure for,’ in your standing orders. Don’t tell me you left them in the barracks!”

“Oh, no, sir! I’ve got ’em.” The guard reached into his pouch. Dahlquist gave him. back the sheet; the guard took it, hesitated, then leaned his weapon against his hip, shifted the paper to his left hand, and dug into his pouch with his right.

Dahlquist grabbed the gun, shoved it between the guard’s legs, and jerked. He threw the weapon away and ducked into the airlock. As he slammed the door he saw the guard struggling to his feet and reaching for his side arm. He dogged the outer door shut and felt a tingle in his fingers as a slug struck the door.

He flung himself at the inner door, jerked the spill lever, rushed back to the outer door and hung his weight on the handle. At once he could feel it stir. The guard was lifting up; the lieutenant was pulling down, with only his low Moon weight to anchor him. Slowly the handle raised before his eyes.

Air from the bomb room rushed into the lock through the spill valve. Dahlquist felt his space suit settle on his body as the pressure in the lock began to equal the pressure in the suit. He quit straining and let the guard raise the handle. It did not matter; thirteen tons of air pressure now held the door closed.

He latched open the inner door to the bomb room, so that it could not swing shut. As long as it was open, the airlock could not operate; no one could enter.

Before him in the room, one for each projectile rocket, were the atom bombs, spaced in rows far enough apart to defeat any faint possibility of spontaneous chain reaction. They were the deadliest things in the known universe, but they were his babies. He had placed himself between them and anyone who would misuse them.

But, now that he was here, he had no plan to use his temporary advantage.

The speaker on the wall sputtered into life. “Hey! Lieutenant! What goes on here? You gone crazy?” Dahlquist did not answer. Let Lopez stay confused—it would take him that much longer to make up his mind what to do. And Johnny Dahlquist needed as many minutes as he could squeeze. Lopez went on protesting. Finally he shut up.

Johnny had followed a blind urge not to let the bombs—his bombs!—be used for “demonstrations on unimportant towns.” But what to do next? Well, Towers couldn’t get through the lock. Johnny would sit tight until hell froze over.

Don’t kid yourself, John Ezra! Towers could get in. Some high explosive against the outer door—then the air would whoosh out, our boy Johnny would drown in blood from his burst lungs—and the bombs would be sitting there, unhurt. They were built to stand the jump from Moon to Earth; vacuum would not hurt them at all.

He decided to stay in his space suit; explosive decompression didn’t appeal to him. Come to think about it, death from old age was his choice.

Or they could drill a hole, let out the air, and open the door without wrecking the lock. Or Towers might even have a new airlock built outside the old. Not likely, Johnny thought; a coup d’etat depended on speed. Towers was almost sure to take the quickest way—blasting. And Lopez was probably calling the Base right now. Fifteen minutes for Towers to suit up and get here, maybe a short dicker—then whoosh! the party is over.

Fifteen minutes?

In fifteen minutes the bombs might fall back into the hands of the conspirators; in fifteen minutes he must make the bombs unusable.

An atom bomb is just two or more pieces of fissionable metal, such as plutonium. Separated, they are no more explosive than a pound of butter; slapped together, they explode. The complications lie in the gadgets and circuits and gun used to slap them together in the exact way and at the exact time and place required. .

These circuits, the bomb’s “brain,” are easily destroyed—but the bomb itself is hard to destroy because of its very simplicity. Johnny decided to smash the “brains”—and quickly!

The only tools at hand were simple ones used in handling the bombs. Aside from a Geiger counter, the speaker on the walkie-talkie circuit, a television rig to the base, and the bombs themselves, the room was bare. A bomb to be worked on was taken elsewhere—not through fear of explosion, but to reduce radiation exposure for personnel. The radioactive material in a bomb is buried in a “tamper”—in these bombs, gold. Gold stops alpha, beta, and much of the deadly gamma radiation but not neutrons.

The slippery, poisonous neutrons which plutonium gives off had to escape, or a chain reaction—explosion!—would result. The room was bathed in an invisible, almost undetectable rain of neutrons. The place was unhealthy; regulations called for staying in it as short a time as possible.

The Geiger counter clicked off the “background” radiation, cosmic rays, the trace of radioactivity in the Moon’s crust, and secondary radioactivity set up all through the room by neutrons. Free neutrons have the nasty trait of infecting what they strike, making it radioactive, whether it be concrete wall or human body. In time the room would have to be abandoned.

Dahlquist twisted a knob on the Geiger counter; the instrument stopped clicking. He had used a suppressor circuit to cut out noise of “background” radiation at the level then present. It reminded him uncomfortably of the danger of staying here. He took out the radiation exposure film all radiation personnel carry; it was a direct-response type and had been fresh when he arrived. The most sensitive end was faintly darkened already. Half way down the film a red line crossed it. Theoretically, if the wearer was exposed to enough radioactivity in a week to darken the film to that line, he was, as Johnny reminded himself, a “dead duck.”

Off came the cumbersome space suit; what he needed was speed. Do the job and surrender—better to be a prisoner than to linger in a place as “hot” as this.

He grabbed a ball hammer from the tool rack and got busy, pausing only to switch off the television pick-up. The first bomb bothered him. He started to smash the cover plate of the “brain,” then stopped, filled with reluctance. All his life he had prized fine apparatus.

He nerved himself and swung; glass tinkled, metal creaked. His mood changed; he began to feel a shameful pleasure in destruction. He pushed on with enthusiasm, swinging, smashing, destroying!

So intent was he that he did not at first hear his name called.

“Dahlquist! Answer me! Are you there?”

He wiped sweat and looked at the TV screen. Towers’ perturbed features stared out.

Johnny was shocked to find that he had wrecked only six bombs. Was he going to be caught before he could finish? Oh, no! He had to finish. Stall, son, stall! “Yes, Colonel? You called me?”

“I certainly did! What’s the meaning of this?” “I’m sorry, Colonel.”

Towers’ expression relaxed a little. “Turn on your pick-up, Johnny, I can’t see you. What was that noise?”

“The pick-up is on,” Johnny lied. “It must be out of order. That noise—uh, to tell the truth, Colonel, I was fixing things so that nobody could get in here.”

Towers hesitated, then said firmly, “I’m going to assume that you are sick and send you to the Medical Officer. But I want you to come out of there, right away. That’s an order, Johnny.”

Johnny answered slowly. “I can’t just yet, Colonel. I came here to make up my mind and I haven’t quite made it up. You said to see you after lunch.”

“I meant you to stay in your quarters.”

“Yes, sir. But I thought I ought to stand watch on the bombs, in case I decided you were wrong.”

“It’s not for you to decide, Johnny. I’m your superior officer.

You are sworn to obey me.”

“Yes, sir.” This was wasting time; the old fox might have a squad on the way now. “But I swore to keep the peace, too. Could you come out here and talk it over with me? I don’t want to do the wrong thing.”

Towers smiled. “A good idea, Johnny. You wait there. I’m sure you’ll see the light.” He switched off.

“There,” said Johnny. “I hope you’re convinced that I’m a half-wit—you slimy mistake!” He picked up the hammer, ready to use the minutes gained.

He stopped almost at once; it dawned on him that wrecking the “brains” was not enough. There were no spare “brains,” but there was a well-stocked electronics shop. Morgan could jury-rig control circuits for bombs. Why, he could himself—not a neat job, but one that would work. Damnation! He would have to wreck the bombs themselves—and in the next ten minutes.

But a bomb was solid chunks of metal, encased in a heavy tamper, all tied in with a big steel gun. It couldn’t be done—not in ten minutes.

Damn!

Of course, there was one way. He knew the control circuits; he also knew how to beat them. Take this bomb: if he took out the safety bar, unhooked the proximity circuit, shorted the delay circuit, and cut in the arming circuit by hand—then unscrewed that and reached in there, he could, with just a long, stiff wire, set the bomb off.

Blowing the other bombs and the valley itself to Kingdom Come.

Also Johnny Dahlquist. That was the rub.

All this time he was doing what he had thought out, up to the step of actually setting off the bomb. Ready to go, the bomb seemed to threaten, as if crouching to spring. He stood up, sweating.

He wondered if he had the courage. He did not want to funk—and hoped that he would. He dug into his jacket and took out a picture of Edith and the baby. “Honeychile,” he said, “if I get out of this, I’ll never even try to beat a red light.” He kissed the picture and put it back. There was nothing to do but wait.

What was keeping Towers? Johnny wanted to make sure that Towers was in blast range. What a joke on the jerk! Me—sitting here, ready to throw the switch on him. The idea tickled him; it led to a better: why blow himself up—alive?

There was another way to rig it—a “dead man” control. Jigger up some way so that the last step, the one that set off the bomb, would not happen as long as he kept his hand on a switch or a lever or something. Then, if they blew open the door, or shot him, or anything—up goes the balloon!

Better still, if he could hold them off with the threat of it, sooner or later help would come—Johnny was sure that most of the Patrol was not in this stinking conspiracy—and then: Johnny comes marching home! What a reunion! He’d resign and get a teaching job; he’d stood his watch.

All the while, he was working. Electrical? No, too little time. Make it a simple mechanical linkage. He had it doped out but had hardly begun to build it when the loudspeaker called him. “Johnny?”

“That you, Colonel?” His hands kept busy.

“Let me in.”

“Well, now, Colonel, that wasn’t in the agreement.” Where in blue blazes was something to use as a long lever?

“I’ll come in alone, Johnny, I give you my word. We’ll talk face to face.”

His word! “We can talk over the speaker, Colonel.” Hey, that was it—a yardstick, hanging on the tool rack.

“Johnny, I’m warning you. Let me in, or I’ll blow the door off.”

” wire—he needed a wire, fairly long and stiff. He tore the antenna from his suit. “You wouldn’t do that, Colonel. It would ruin the bombs.”

“Vacuum won’t hurt the bombs. Quit stalling.”

“Better check with Major Morgan. Vacuum won’t hurt them; explosive decompression would wreck every circuit.” The Colonel was not a bomb specialist; he shut up for several minutes. Johnny went on working.

“Dahlquist,” Towers resumed, “that was a clumsy lie. I checked with Morgan. You have sixty seconds to get into your suit, if you aren’t already. I’m going to blast the door.”

“No, you won’t,” said Johnny. “Ever hear of a ‘dead man’ switch?” Now for a counterweight—and a sling.”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“I’ve rigged number seventeen to set off by hand. But I put in a gimmick. It won’t blow while I hang on to a strap I’ve got in my hand. But if anything happens to meup she goes! You are about fifty feet from the blast center. Think it over.”

There was a short silence. “I don’t believe you.”

“No? Ask Morgan. He’ll believe me. He can inspect it, over the TV pick-up.” Johnny lashed the belt of his space suit to the end of the yardstick.

“You said the pick-up was out of order.”

“So I lied. This time I’ll prove it. Have Morgan call me.”

Presently Major Morgan’s face appeared. “Lieutenant Dahlquist?”

“Hi, Stinky. Wait a sec.” With great care Dahlquist made one last connection while holding down the end of the yardstick. Still careful, he shifted his grip to the belt, sat down on the floor, stretched an arm and switched on the TV pick-up. “Can you see me, Stinky?”

“I can see you,” Morgan answered stiffly. “What is this nonsense?”

“A little surprise I whipped up.” He explained it—what circuits he had cut out, what ones had been shorted, just how the jury-rigged mechanical sequence fitted in.

Morgan nodded. “But you’re bluffing, Dahlquist, I feel sure that you haven’t disconnected the ‘K’ circuit. You don’t have the guts to blow yourself up.”

Johnny chuckled. “I sure haven’t. But that’s the beauty of it. It can’t go off, so long as I am alive. If your greasy boss, ex-Colonel Towers, blasts the door, then I’m dead and the bomb goes off. It won’t matter to me, but it will to him. Better tell him.” He switched off.

Towers came on over the speaker shortly. “Dahlquist?”

“I hear you.”

“‘There’s no need to throwaway your life. Come out and you will be retired on full pay. You can go home to your family. That’s a promise.”

Johnny got mad. “You keep my family out of this!”

“Think of them, man.”

“Shut up. Get back to your hole. I feel a need to scratch and this whole shebang might just explode in your lap.”

II

Johnny sat up with a start. He had dozed, his hand hadn’t let go the sling, but he had the shakes when he thought about it.

Maybe he should disarm the bomb and depend on their not daring to dig him out? But Towers’ neck was already in hock for treason; Towers might risk it. If he did and the bomb were disarmed, Johnny would be dead and Towers would have the bombs. No, he had gone this far; he wouldn’t let his baby girl grow up in a dictatorship just to catch some sleep.

He heard the Geiger counter clicking and remembered having used the suppressor circuit. The radioactivity in the room must be increasing, perhaps from scattering the “brain” circuits-the circuits were sure to be infected; they had lived too long too close to plutonium. He dug out his film.

The dark area was spreading toward the red line.

He put it back and said, “Pal, better break this deadlock or you are going to shine like a watch dial.” It was a figure of speech; infected animal tissue does not glow—it simply dies, slowly.

The TV screen lit up; Towers’ face appeared. “Dahlquist? I want to talk to you.”

“Go fly a kite.”

“Let’s admit you have us inconvenienced.”

“Inconvenienced, hell—I’ve got you stopped.”

“For the moment. I’m arranging to get more bombs—”

“Liar.”

“—but you are slowing us up. I have a proposition.”

“Not interested.”

“Wait. When this is over I will be chief of the world government. If you cooperate, even now, I will make you my administrative head.”

Johnny told him what to do with it. Towers said, “Don’t be stupid. What do you gain by dying?”

Johnny grunted. “Towers, what a prime stinker you are.

You spoke of my family. I’d rather see them dead than living under a two-bit Napoleon like you. Now go away—I’ve got some thinking to do.”

Towers switched off.

Johnny got out his film again. It seemed no darker but it re-minded him forcibly that time was running out. He was hungry and thirsty—and he could not stay awake forever. It took four days to get a ship up from Earth; he could not expect rescue any sooner. And he wouldn’t last four days—once the darkening spread past the red line he was a goner.

His only chance was to wreck the bombs beyond repair, and get out—before that film got much darker.

He thought about ways, then got busy. He hung a weight on the sling, tied a line to it. If Towers blasted the door, he hoped to jerk the rig loose before he died.

There was a simple, though arduous, way to wreck the bombs beyond any capacity of Moon Base to repair them. The heart of each was two hemispheres of plutonium, their flat surface polished smooth to permit perfect contact when slapped together. Anything less would prevent the chain reaction on which atomic explosion depended.

Johnny started taking apart one of the bombs.

He had to bash off four lugs, then break the glass envelope around the inner assembly. Aside from that the bomb came apart easily. At last he had in front of him two gleaming, mirror-perfect half globes.

A blow with the hammer—and one was no longer perfect. Another blow and the second cracked like glass; he had trapped its crystalline structure just right.

Hours later, dead tired, he went back to the armed bomb. Forcing himself to steady down, with extreme care he disarmed it. Shortly its silvery hemispheres too were useless. There was no longer a usable bomb in the room—but huge fortunes in the most valuable, most poisonous, and most deadly metal in the known world were spread around the floor.

Johnny looked at the deadly stuff. “Into your suit and out of here, son,” he said aloud. “I wonder what Towers will say?”

He walked toward the rack, intending to hang up the hammer. As he passed, the Geiger counter chattered wildly.

Plutonium hardly affects a Geiger counter; secondary infection from plutonium does. Johnny looked at the hammer, then held it closer to the Geiger counter. The counter screamed.

Johnny tossed it hastily away and started back toward his suit.

As he passed the counter it chattered again. He stopped short.

He pushed one hand close to the counter. Its clicking picked up to a steady roar. Without moving he reached into his pocket and took out his exposure film.

It was dead black from end to end.

III

Plutonium taken into the body moves quickly to bone marrow. Nothing can be done; the victim is finished. Neutrons from it smash through the body, ionizing tissue, transmuting atoms into radioactive isotopes, destroying and killing. The fatal dose is unbelievably small; a mass a tenth the size of a grain of table salt is more than enough—a dose small enough to enter through the tiniest scratch. During the historic “Manhattan Project” immediate high amputation was considered the only possible first-aid measure.

Johnny knew all this but it no longer disturbed him. He sat on the floor, smoking a hoarded cigarette, and thinking. The events of his long watch were running through his mind.

He blew a puff of smoke at the Geiger counter and smiled without humor to hear it chatter more loudly. By now even his breath was “hot”—carbon-14, he supposed, exhaled from his blood stream as carbon dioxide. It did not matter.

There was no longer any point in surrendering, nor would he give Towers the satisfaction—he would finish out this watch right here. Besides, by keeping up the bluff that one bomb was ready to blow, he could stop them from capturing the raw material from which bombs were made. That might be important in the long run.

He accepted, without surprise, the fact that he was not unhappy. There was a sweetness about having no further worries of any sort. He did not hurt, he was not uncomfortable, he was no longer even hungry. Physically he still felt fine and his mind was at peace. He was dead—he knew that he was dead; yet for a time he was able to walk and breathe and see and feel.

He was not even lonesome. He was not alone; there were comrades with him—the boy with his finger in the dike, Colonel Bowie, too ill to move but insisting that he be carried across the line, the dying Captain of the Chesapeake still with deathless challenge on his lips, Rodger Young peering into the gloom. They gathered about him in the dusky bomb room.

And of course there was Edith. She was the only one he was aware of. Johnny wished that he could see her face more clearly. Was she angry? Or proud and happy?

Proud though unhappy—he could see her better now and even feel her hand. He held very still.

Presently his cigarette burned down to his fingers. He took a final puff, blew it at the Geiger counter, and put it out. It was his last. He gathered several butts and fashioned a roll-your-own with a bit of paper found in a pocket. He lit it care-fully and settled back to wait for Edith to show up again. He was very happy.

He was still propped against the bomb case, the last of his salvaged cigarettes cold at his side, when the speaker called out again. “Johnny? Hey, Johnny! Can you hear me? This is Kelly. It’s all over. The Lafayette landed and Towers blew his brains out. Johnny? Answer me.”

When they opened the outer door, the first man in carried a Geiger counter in front of him on the end of a long pole. He stopped at the threshold and backed out hastily. “Hey, chief!” he called. “Better get some handling equipment—uh, and a lead coffin, too.”

* * *

"Four days it took the little ship and her escort to reach Earth. Four days while all of Earth's people awaited her arrival. For ninety-eight hours all commercial programs were of} television; instead there was an endless dirge—-the Dead March tram Saul, the Valhalla theme, Going Home, the Patrol's own Landing Orbit.

"The nine ships landed at Chicago Port. A drone tractor removed the casket from the small ship; the ship was then refueled and blasted off in an escape trajectory, thrown away into outer space, never again to be used for a lesser purpose. 

"The tractor progressed to the Illinois town where Lieutenant Dahlquist had been born, while the dirge continued. There it placed the casket on a pedestal, inside a barrier marking the distance of safe approach. Space marines, arms reversed and heads bowed, stood guard around it; the crowds stayed outside this circle. And still the dirge continued. 

"When enough time had passed, long, long after the heaped flowers had withered, the lead casket was enclosed in marble, just as you see it today." 

Conclusion

When George Soros offers you millions of dollars and a lifetime of service by prostitutes as long as you do his bidding, would you do it? Don’t laugh. It happened. Check this out here;

Snopes

What if you could get a nice pension for not teaching High School students the United States Constitution? Or looking the other way, when bills are passed that violate the Bill of Rights? What if by not taking any action, you would get enormous lumps of money and prestige? All you need to do is “be a team player” and “go with the flow”? What if?

Well it has happened. Go here…

How they get away with it

What if you could get a position in government and collect all the top secret documents, and sell them to the highest bidding foreign nation? What if you could get away with it, and have all of the government support you? What if you could get away with it/ Would you do it?

It’s happened. Go here…

Line in the sand

Ultimately the life we live is do to what we do, or what we do not do. The world that we live in today is a direct consequence of our actions, or (in the case of many Americans) our inaction. I think it is high time that we reverse this trend and start standing up for ourselves.

Take Aways

  • Fictional stories are enjoyable to read, but have meaning in important ways.
  • This story was written after World War II, when the idea of a tyrannical government was fresh in the minds of Americans.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 3OCT18
  2. Completed 3OCT18.
  3. SEO 3OCT18.
  4. Published 3OCT18.

A Sound of Thunder (Full Text) A Story by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

A Sound of Thunder” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier’s magazine in the June 28, 1952, issue and Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953.

Ray Bradberry is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “A Sound of Thunder” on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness: 

TIME SAFARI, INC.
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.
WE TAKE YOU THERE.
YOU SHOOT IT.

Warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

"Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?"

"We guarantee nothing," said the official, "except the dinosaurs." He turned. "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He'll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there's a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return."

Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. 

A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand. 

"Unbelievable." Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. "A real Time Machine." He shook his head. "Makes you think, If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He'll make a fine President of the United States." 

"Yes," said the man behind the desk. "We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it's not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith's President now. All you got to worry about is-"

"Shooting my dinosaur," Eckels finished it for him.

"A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we're not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry."

Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying to scare me!"

"Frankly, yes. We don't want anyone going who'll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We're here to give you the severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check's still there. Tear it up."Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers twitched.

"Good luck," said the man behind the desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."

They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

"Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.

"If you hit them right," said Travis on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That's stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain."

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. "Think," said Eckels. "Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois."

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

The sun stopped in the sky.

The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

"Christ isn't born yet," said Travis, "Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler-none of them exists." The man nodded.

"That" - Mr. Travis pointed - "is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith."

He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

"And that," he said, "is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use,

It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn't touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It's an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don't go off it. I repeat. Don't go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there's a penalty. And don't shoot any animal we don't okay."

"Why?" asked Eckels.

They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds' cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

"We don't want to change the Future. We don't belong here in the Past. The government doesn't like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species."

"That's not clear," said Eckels.

"All right," Travis continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"

"Right"

"And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"

"So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"

"So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. 

Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam's grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. 

With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!"

"I see," said Eckels. "Then it wouldn't pay for us even to touch the grass?"

"Correct. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can't be changed by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn't see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don't know. We're guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we're being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can't introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere."

"How do we know which animals to shoot?"

"They're marked with red paint," said Travis. "Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals."

"Studying them?"

"Right," said Lesperance. "I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life's short, When I find one that's going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his side. We can't miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?"

"But if you come back this morning in Time," said Eckels eagerly, you must've bumped into us, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through-alive?"

Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

"That'd be a paradox," said the latter. "Time doesn't permit that sort of mess-a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There's no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us - meaning you, Mr. Eckels - got out alive."

Eckels smiled palely.

"Cut that," said Travis sharply. "Everyone on his feet!"

They were ready to leave the Machine.

The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.

Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.

"Stop that!" said Travis. "Don't even aim for fun, blast you! If your guns should go off - - "

Eckels flushed. "Where's our Tyrannosaurus?"

Lesperance checked his wristwatch. "Up ahead, We'll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint! Don't shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the Path!"

They moved forward in the wind of morning.

"Strange," murmured Eckels. "Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don't exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought of yet."

"Safety catches off, everyone!" ordered Travis. "You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings, Third, Kramer."

"I've hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but now, this is it," said Eckels. "I'm shaking like a kid."

"Ah," said Travis.

Everyone stopped.

Travis raised his hand. "Ahead," he whispered. "In the mist. There he is. There's His Royal Majesty now."

The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

Silence.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"It," whispered Eckels. "It......

"Sh!"

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.

It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit area warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.

"Why, why," Eckels twitched his mouth. "It could reach up and grab the moon."

"Sh!" Travis jerked angrily. "He hasn't seen us yet."

"It can't be killed," Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. "We were fools to come. This is impossible."

"Shut up!" hissed Travis.

"Nightmare."

"Turn around," commanded Travis. "Walk quietly to the Machine. We'll remit half your fee."

"I didn't realize it would be this big," said Eckels. "I miscalculated, that's all. And now I want out."

"It sees us!"

"There's the red paint on its chest!"

The Tyrant Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

"Get me out of here," said Eckels. "It was never like this before. I was always sure I'd come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I've met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of."

"Don't run," said Lesperance. "Turn around. Hide in the Machine."

"Yes." Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.

"Eckels!"

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

"Not that way!"

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote from the events behind.

The rifles cracked again, Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler's hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris,

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.

Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

The thunder faded.

The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily. In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.

"Clean up."

They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

"There." Lesperance checked his watch. "Right on time. That's the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally." He glanced at the two hunters. "You want the trophy picture?"

"What?"

"We can't take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we can take a picture of you standing near it."

The two men tried to think, but gave up, shaking their heads.

They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cushions. They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor. A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

"I'm sorry," he said at last.

"Get up!" cried Travis.

Eckels got up.

"Go out on that Path alone," said Travis. He had his rifle pointed, "You're not coming back in the Machine. We're leaving you here!"

Lesperance seized Travis's arm. "Wait-"

"Stay out of this!" Travis shook his hand away. "This fool nearly killed us. But it isn't that so much, no. It's his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the Path. That ruins us! We'll forfeit! Thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the fool! I'll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. Who knows what he's done to Time, to History!"

"Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt."

"How do we know?" cried Travis. "We don't know anything! It's all a mystery! Get out of here, Eckels!"

Eckels fumbled his shirt. "I'll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!"

Travis glared at Eckels' checkbook and spat. "Go out there. The Monster's next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us."

"That's unreasonable!"

"The Monster's dead, you idiot. The bullets! The bullets can't be left behind. They don't belong in the Past; they might change anything. Here's my knife. Dig them out!"

The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels turned slowly to regard the primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker he shuffled out along the Path.

He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.

"You didn't have to make him do that," said Lesperance.

"Didn't I? It's too early to tell." Travis nudged the still body. "He'll live. Next time he won't go hunting game like this. Okay." He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance. "Switch on. Let's go home."

1492. 1776. 1812.

They cleaned their hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and pants. Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a full ten minutes.

"Don't look at me," cried Eckels. "I haven't done anything."

"Who can tell?"

"Just ran off the Path, that's all, a little mud on my shoes-what do you want me to do-get down and pray?"

"We might need it. I'm warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I've got my gun ready."

"I'm innocent. I've done nothing!"

1999.2000.2055.

The Machine stopped.

"Get out," said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk. Travis looked around swiftly. "Everything okay here?" he snapped.

"Fine. Welcome home!"

Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking through the one high window.

"Okay, Eckels, get out. Don't ever come back." Eckels could not move.

"You heard me," said Travis. "What're you staring at?"

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind ....

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not a little thing like that. No!"

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

"Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who - who won the presidential election yesterday?"

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we-"

He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

There was a sound of thunder.

Comments

And that was that.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 30SEP18.
  3. SEO review 1OCT18.

Kaleidoscope (Full Text) A Story by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

“Kaleidoscope” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It describes the last few moments of a space ship crew that survives a terrible explosion in space.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “Kaleidoscope” on the “Scary for Kids” website, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the “Scary for Kids” website for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it themselves.

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

“Barkley, Barkley, where are you?”

The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night

“Woode, Woode!”

“Captain!”

“Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.”

“Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?”

“I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.”

They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices-all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.

“We’re going away from each other.”

This was true. Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.

A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, on a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.

“Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?”

“It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.”

“An hour, I make it.”

“That should do it,” said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.

“What happened?” said Hollis a minute later.

“The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.”

“Which way are you going?”

“It looks like I’ll hit the moon.”

“It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.” Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.

The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.

“Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, if s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,” said a voice. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, if s a long way down.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?”

“It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh, God, I don’t like it.”

“Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?”

A pause while they fell separate from one another.

“Stimson?”

“Yes.” He replied at last.

“Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.”

“I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.”

“There’s a chance we’ll be found.”

“I must be, I must be,” said Stimson. “I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.”

“It’ s a bad dream,” said someone.

“Shut up!” said Hollis.

“Come and make me,” said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. “Come and shut me up.”

Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.

Falling, falling, falling…

Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.

“Stop it!” The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.

Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

“Hollis, you still there?”

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

“This is Applegate again.”

“All right, Applegate.”

“Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.”

The captain cut in. “That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.”

“Captain, why don’t you shut up?” said Applegate.

“What!”

“You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.”

“See here, Applegate!”

“Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.”

“I’m ordering you to stop!”

“Go on, order me again.” Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, “Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.”

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

“I want to tell you something,” said Applegate. “Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.”

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on, while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.

“Are you angry, Hollis?”

“No.” And he was not. The abstraction has returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.

“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”

“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, “There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,” the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. “Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.”

But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because if s over for you as it is for me, and right now if s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone. “If s all over, Lespere!”

Silence.

“If s just as if it never was, Lespere!”

“Who’s that?” Lespere’s faltering voice.

“This is Hollis.”

He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.

“You’re out here, Lespere. If s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?”

“Yes, it’s better!”

“How!”

“Because I got my thoughts, I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.

And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

“What good does it do you?” he cried to Lespere. “Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than I.”

“I’m resting easy,” said Lespere. “I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.”

“Mean?” Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. “Mean.” He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.

‘Take it easy, Hollis.”

It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson; he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.

“I know how you feel, Hollis,” said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. “I don’t take it personally.”

But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, if s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.

So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were lands of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened op and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.

“Hollis?”

Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.

“This is Applegate again,” said the voice.

“Yes.”

‘I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?”

“Yes.”

“I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.”

Hollis felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.

“Thanks, Applegate.”

“Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.”

“Hey,” said Stone.

“What?” Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.

“I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.”

“Meteors?”

“I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. If s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, if s beautiful, all that metal.”

Silence.

“I’m going with them,” said Stone. “They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.” He laughed.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries. Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

“So long, Hollis.” Stone’s voice, very faint now. “So long.”

“Good luck,” shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

“Don’t be funny,” said Stone, and was gone.

The stars closed in.

Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself… He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.

“So long.”

“Take it easy.”

“So long, Hollis.” That was Applegate.

The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth s atmosphere.

I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.

He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.

When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.

“I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?”

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”

The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. “Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”

Comments

I really enjoyed this story. It’s a little sad when we know that people have died in space and that space is really very unforgiving. If the reader enjoyed this story, then I would suggest reading “The cold equations”.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Released 28SEP18.

Dark They Were and Golden Eyed (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

“Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It was originally published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in August 1949, under the title “The Naming of Names”. It was subsequently included in the short-story collections A Medicine for Melancholy and S is for Space. The story takes place in the near future on Mars, as is the case with many of Bradbury’s stories.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “Dark they were and Golden Eyed” on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it themselves.

Dark They were, And Golden Eyed (The Naming of Names).

By Ray Bradbury

The rocket's metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes. The children looked up at him. His face was cold. "What's wrong?" asked his wife. "Let's get back on the rocket." "Go back to Earth?" "Yes! Listen!"

The wind blew, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone.

He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and lying like children's delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

"Chin up, Harry," said his wife. "It's too late. We've come at least sixty-five million miles or more."

The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. "Here we go," he said - a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

They walked into town.

Their name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Tim, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr.Bittering and Mrs.Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.

"I feel like a salt crystal," he often said, "in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don't belong here. We're Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven's sake, Cora, let's buy tickets for home!"

But she only shook her head. "One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we'll be safe here." "Safe and insane!"

Tick-took, seven o'clock sang the voice clock; time to get up. And they did.

Something made him check everything each morning - warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums - precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the six a.m. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast plate. He forced himself to be convivial.

"Colonial days all over again," he declared. "Why, in another year there'll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we'd fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?"

A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling, Mr.Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

"I don't know," said David. "Maybe there're Martians around we don't see. Sometimes nights I think I hear 'em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won't do something to us for coming here."

"Nonsense!" Mr.Bittering looked out of the windows. "We're clean, decent people." He looked at his children. "All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean." He stared at the hills. "You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It's quite natural. Imagination." He stopped. "You haven't been prowling up in those ruins, have you?"

"No, Papa." David looked at his shoes.

"See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam."

"Just the same," said little David, "I bet something happens."

Something happened that afternoon.

Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly on to the porch.

"Mother, Father - the war, Earth!" she sobbed. "A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!"

"Oh, Harry!" The mother held on to her husband and daughter.

"Are you sure, Laura?" asked the father quietly.

Laura wept. "We're stranded on Mars, for ever and ever!"

For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.

Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hot-ness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, "No, you're lying! The rockets will come back!" Instead, he stroked Laura's head against him and said, "The rockets will get through, some day."

"In five years maybe. It takes that long to build one. Father, Father, what will we do?"

"Go about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep things going until the war ends and the rockets come again."

The two boys stepped out on to the porch. "Children," he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, "I've something to tell you." "We know," they said.

Bittering wandered into the garden to stand alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: 'Tomorrow, if I want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.'

But now: the web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.

He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.

He glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seas left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.

Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.

Mr.Bittering felt very alone in his garden under the Martian sun, bent here, planting Earth flowers in a wild soil.

Think. Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war, the lost rockets.

He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.

He returned to his philosophy of names and mountains. The Earthmen had changed names. Now there were Hormel Valleys, Roosevelt Seas, Ford Hills, Vanderbilt Plateaus, Rockefeller Rivers, on Mars. It wasn't right. The American settlers had shown wisdom, using old Indian prairie names: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Ohio, Utah, Milwaukee, Waukegan, Osseo. The old names, the old meanings.

Staring at the mountains wildly he thought: 'Are you up there? All the dead ones, you Martians? Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We're helpless!'

The wind blew a shower of peach blossoms.

He put out his sun-browned hand, gave a small cry. He touched the blossoms, picked them up. He turned them, be touched them again and again. Then he shouted for his wife.

"Cora!"

She appeared at a window. He ran to her.

"Cora, these blossoms!"

She handled them.

"Do you see? They're different. They've changed! They're not peach blossoms any more!"

"Look all right to me," she said.

"They're not. They're wrong! I can't tell how. An extra petal, a leaf, something, the colour, the smell!"

The children ran out in time to see their father hurrying about the garden, pulling up radishes, onions, and carrots from their beds.

"Cora, come look!

They handled the onions, the radishes, the carrots among them.

"Do they look like carrots?"

"Yes... No." She hesitated. "I don't know."

"They're changed."

"Perhaps."

"You know they have! Onions but not onions, carrots but not carrots. Taste: the same but different. Smell: not like it used to be." He felt his heart pounding, and he was afraid. He dug his fingers into the earth. "Cora, what's happening? What is it? We've got to get away from this." He ran across the garden. Each tree felt his touch. "The roses. The roses. They're turning green!"

And they stood looking at the green roses.

And two days later, Tim came running. "Come see the cow. I was milking her and I saw it. Come on!"

They stood in the shed and looked at their one cow.

It was growing a third horn.

And the lawn in front of their house very quietly and slowly was colouring itself, like spring violets. Seed from Earth but growing up a soft purple.

"We must get away," said Bittering. "We'll eat this stuff and then we'll change - who knows to what. I can't let it happen. There's only one thing to do. Burn this food!"

"It's not poisoned."

"But it is. Subtly, very subtly. A little bit. A very little bit. We mustn't touch it."

He looked with dismay at their house. "Even the house. The wind's done something to it. The air's burned it. The fog at night. The boards, all warped out of shape. It's not an Earthman's house any more."

"Oh, your imagination!"

He put on his coat and tie. "I'm going into town. We've got to do something now. I'll be back."

"Wait, Harry!" his wife cried.

But he was gone.

In town, on the shadowy step of the grocery store, the men sat with their hands on their knees, conversing with great leisure and ease.

Mr.Bittering wanted to fire a pistol in the air.

What are you doing, you fools! he thought. Sitting here! You've heard the news - we're stranded on this planet. Well, move! Aren't you frightened? Aren't you afraid? What are you going to do?

"Hello, Harry," said everyone.

"Look," he said to them. "You did hear the news, the other day, didn't you?"

They nodded and laughed. "Sure. Sure, Harry."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Do, Harry, do? What can we do?"

"Build a rocket, that's what!"

"A rocket, Harry? To go back to all that trouble? Oh, Harry!"

"But you must want to go back. Have you noticed the peach blossoms, the onions, the grass?"

"Why, yes, Harry, seems we did," said one of the men.

"Doesn't it scare you?"

"Can't recall that it did much, Harry."

"Idiots!"

"Now, Harry."

Bittering wanted to cry. "You've got to work with me. If we stay here, we'll all change. The air. Don't you smell it? Something in the air. A Martian virus, maybe; some seed, or a pollen. Listen to me!"

They stared at him.

"Sam," he said to one of them.

"Yes, Harry?"

"Will you help me build a rocket?"

"Harry, I got a whole load of metal and some blueprints. You want to work in my metal shop, on a rocket, you're welcome. I'll sell you that metal for five hundred dollars. You should be able to construct a right pretty rocket if you work alone, in about thirty years."

Everyone laughed.

"Don't laugh."

Sam looked at him with quiet good humour.

"Sam," Bittering said. "Your eyes -"

"What about them, Harry?"

"Didn't they used to be grey?"

"Well, now, I don't remember."

"They were, weren't they?"

"Why do you ask, Harry?"

"Because now they're kind of yellow-coloured."

"Is that so, Harry?" Sam said, casually.

"And you're taller and thinner -"

"You might be right, Harry."

"Sam, you shouldn't have yellow eyes."

"Harry, what colour eyes have you got?" Sam said.

"My eyes? They're blue, of course."

"Here you are, Harry." Sam handed him a pocket mirror. "Take a look at yourself."

Mr.Bittering hesitated, and then raised the mirror to his face.

There were little, very dim flecks of new gold captured in the blue of his eyes.

"Now look what you've done," said Sam, a moment later. "You've broken my mirror."

Harry Bittering moved into the metal shop and began to build the rocket. Men stood in the open door and talked and joked without raising their voices. Once in a while they gave him a hand on lifting something. But mostly they just idled and watched him with their yellowing eyes.

"It's supper-time, Harry," they said.

His wife appeared with his supper in a wicker basket.

"I won't touch it," he said. "I'll eat only food from our deepfreeze. Food that came from Earth. Nothing from our garden."

His wife stood watching him. "You can't build a rocket."

"I worked in a shop once, when I was twenty. I know metal. Once I get it started, the others will help," he said, not looking at her, laying out the blueprints.

"Harry, Harry," she said, helplessly.

"We've got to get away, Cora. We've got to!"

The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea-meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen's settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.

Lying abed, Mr.Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.

The fear would not be stopped. It had his throat and heart. It dripped in a wetness of the arm and the temple and the trembling palm.

A green star rose in the east.

A strange word emerged from Mr.Bittering's lips.

"Iorrt. Iorrt." He repeated it.

It was a Martian word. He knew no Martian.

In the middle of the night he arose and dialled a call through to Simpson, the archaeologist.

"Simpson, what does the word 'Iorrt' mean?"

"Why that's the old Martian word for our planet Earth. Why?"

"No special reason."

The telephone slipped from his hand.

"Hello, hello, hello, hello," it kept saying while he sat gazing out at the green star. "Bittering? Harry, are you there?"

The days were full of metal sound. He laid the frame of the rocket with the reluctant help of three indifferent men. He grew very tired in an hour or so and had to sit down.

"The altitude," laughed a man.

"Are you eating, Harry?" asked another.

"I'm eating," he said, angrily,

"From your deep-freeze?"

"Yes!"

"You're getting thinner, Harry."

"I'm not!"

"And taller."

"Liar!"

His wife took him aside a few days later. "Harry, I've used up all the food in the deep-freeze. There's nothing left. I'll have to make sandwiches using food grown on Mars."

He sat down heavily.

"You must eat," she said. "You're weak."

"Yes," he said.

He took a sandwich, opened it, looked at it, and began to nibble at it.

"And take the rest of the day off," she said. "It's hot. The children want to swim in the canals and hike. Please come along."

"I can't waste time. This is a crisis!" "Just for an hour," she urged. "A swim'll do you good." He rose, sweating. "All right, all right. Leave me alone. I'll come."

"Good for you, Harry."

The sun was hot, the day quiet. There was only an immense staring burn upon the land. They moved along the canal, the father, the mother, the racing children in their swimsuits. They stopped and ate meat sandwiches. He saw their skin baking brown. And he saw the yellow eyes of his wife and his children, their eyes that were never yellow before. A few tremblings shook him, but were carried off in waves of pleasant heat as he lay in the sun. He was too tired to be afraid.

"Cora, how long have your eyes been yellow?" She was bewildered. "Always, I guess." "They didn't change from brown in the last three months?"

She bit her lips. "No. Why do you ask?" "Nevermind." They sat there.

"The children's eyes," he said. "They're yellow, too." "Sometimes growing children's eyes change colour." "Maybe we're children, too. At least to Mars. That's a thought." He laughed. "Think I'll swim."

They leaped into the canal water, and he let himself sink down and down to the bottom like a golden statue and lie there in green silence. All was water, quiet and deep, all was peace. He felt the steady, slow current drift him easily.

If I lie here long enough, he thought, the water will work and eat away my flesh until the bones show like coral. Just my skeleton left. And then the water can build on that skeleton - green things, deep-water things, red things, yellow things. Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change. And isn't that what it is up there!

He saw the sky submerged above him, the sun made Martian by atmosphere and time and space.

Up there, a big river, he thought, a Martian river, all of us lying deep in it, in our pebble houses, in our sunken boulder houses, like crayfish hidden, and the water washing away our old bodies and lengthening the bones and -

He let himself drift up through the soft light.

Tim sat on the edge of the canal, regarding his father seriously.

"Utha," he said.

"What?" asked his father.

The boy smiled. "You know. Utha's the Martian word for 'father'."

"Where did you learn it?"

"I don't know. Around. Utha!"

"What do you want?"

The boy hesitated. "I - I want to change my name."

"Change it?"

"Yes."

His mother swam over. "What's wrong with Tim for a name?"

Tim fidgeted. "The other day you called Tim, Tim, Tim. I didn't even hear. I said to myself, That's not my name. I've a new name I want to use."

Mr.Bittering held to the side of the canal, his body cold and his heart pounding slowly. "What is this new name?" "Linnl. Isn't that a good name? Can I use it? Can I, please?"

Mr.Bittering put his hand to his head. He thought of the rocket, himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, so alone.

He heard his wife say, "Why not?" He heard himself say, "Yes, you can use it." "Yaaa!" screamed the boy. "I'm Linnl, Linnl!" Racing down the meadowlands, he danced and shouted. Mr.Bittering looked at his wife. "Why did we do that?" "I don't know," she said. "It just seemed like a good idea."

They walked into the hills. They strolled on old mosaic paths, beside still-pumping fountains. The paths were covered with a thin film of cool water all summer long. You kept your bare feet cool all the day, splashing as in a creek, wading.

They came to a small deserted Martian villa with a good view of the valley. It was on top of a hill. Blue-marble halls, large murals, a swimming-pool. It was refreshing in this hot summer-time. The Martians hadn't believed in large cities.

"How nice," said Mrs.Bittering, "if you could move up here to this villa for the summer."

"Come on," he said. "We're going back to town. There's work to be done on the rocket."

But as he worked that night, the thought of the cool bluemarble villa entered his mind. As the hours passed, the rocket seemed less important.

In the flow of days and weeks, the rocket receded and dwindled. The old fever was gone. It frightened him to think he had let it slip this way. But somehow the heat, the air, the working conditions - he heard the men murmuring on the porch of his metal shop.

"Everyone's going. You heard?"

"All right. That's right."

Bittering came out. "Going where?" He saw a couple of trucks, loaded with children and furniture, drive down the dusty street.

"Up to the villa," said the man.

"Yeah, Harry. I'm going. So is Sam. Aren't you, Sam?"

"That's right, Harry. What about you?"

"I've got work to do here."

"Work! You can finish that rocket in the autumn, when it's cooler."

He took a breath. "1 got the frame all set up."

"In the autumn is better." Their voices were lazy in the heat.

"Got to work," he said.

"Autumn," they reasoned. And they sounded so sensible, so right.

"Autumn would be best," he thought. "Plenty of time, then."

No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No! "In the autumn," he said. "Come on, Harry," they all said.

"Yes," he said, feeling his flesh melt in the hot liquid air. "Yes, the autumn. I'll begin work again then." "I got a villa near the Tirra Canal," said someone. "You mean the Roosevelt Canal, don't you?" "Tirra. The old Martian name."

"But on the map -"

"Forget the map. It's Tirra now. Now I found a place in the Pillan mountains -"

"You mean the Rockefeller range," said Bittering.

"I mean the Pillan mountains," said Sam.

"Yes," said Bittering, buried in the hot, swarming air. "The Pillan mountains."

Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.

Laura, Tim, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known, Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.

The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.

"It looked just fine in Boston," said the mother. "And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We'll get it when we come back in the autumn."

Bittering himself was quiet.

"I've some ideas on furniture for the villa," he said, after a time. "Big, lazy furniture."

"What about your Encyclopedia! You're taking it along, surely?"

Mr.Bittering glanced away. "I'll come and get it next week."

They turned to their daughter. "What about your New York dresses?"

The bewildered girl stared. "Why, I don't want them any more."

They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.

"Gosh, we're not taking much," he said. "Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!"

He started the truck.

Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say goodbye to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.

Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.

"Hi, Bittering! Here we go!"

The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others travelling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.

"Good-bye, town!" said Mr.Bittering.

"Good-bye, good-bye," said the family, waving to it.

They did not look back again.

Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tyres upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.

At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.

In the quiet autumn, Mr.Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.

"It's time to go back," said Cora.

"Yes, but we're not going," he said, quietly. "There's nothing there any more."

"Your books," she said. "Your fine clothes."

"Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre," she said.

"The town's empty. No one's going back," he said. "There's no reason to, none at all."

The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.

Mr.Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. "Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built."

"They didn't know any better," his wife mused. "Such ugly People. I'm glad they've gone."

They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.

"Where did they go?" he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.

"I don't know," she said.

"We'll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that," he said, calmly. "Now - I'm warm. How about taking a swim?"

They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear running spring water.

Five years later, a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.

"We won the war on Earth! We're here to rescue you! Hey!"

But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theatres was silent. They found a half-finished rocket frame, rusting in an empty shop.

The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

"The town's empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I'm sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir."

"Dark, eh?" mused the captain. "How many?"

"Six, eight hundred, I'd say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women."

"Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement, Lieutenant?"

"They hadn't the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people."

"Strange. You think those Martians killed them?"

"They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir."

"Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we'll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about."

The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumb-tacked to the top of an empty table.

"Lots to be done, Lieutenant." His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. "New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We'll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination."

"What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills - we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favour, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over... are you listening, Lieutenant?"

The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue colour and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.

"What? Oh, yes, sir!"

Conclusion

I do not remember when I first read this story, but I am pretty sure that I was in my early teens. Sometime around 1972 or so, I picked up a paperback without a cover and started to read it. I became enraptured with the book, and brought it home where I scarfed up every juicy morsel inside of it.

I later, cut the brown cardboard backing from a note pad and taped it to the front of the book, making an ugly, but functional cover. Carefully, I wrote the the title of the work “The Martian Chronicles” using a very yellow Bic Banana pen on the cover. Under it, I printed “By Ray Bradbury”.

Bookstores would often get credit for books that they could not sell. To do this, they would tear off the front covers and send them back to the publisher for credit. Behind the bookstores would be bins full of discarded paperback books. Though finding one that you would be interested in was remarkably difficult. You had to go through a couple of hundred books that could represent anything from romance novels, to Westerns, to books on the surviving the future snowball earth as a consequence of global freezing.

Global freezing
During the 1970’s there was a big push to fund efforts to prevent global cooling. I would attend school and we would go out and clean up the neighborhood, and go on fund raising drives to collect money for the cause. The money would be collected in huge apple baskets. There was so much money collected. Baskets and baskets of donated money to prevent global cooling. Now, I don’t know what ever happened to the money. But, I am sure that someone took it and spent it in some way. Anyways, afterwards, we would eat hotdogs at a barn-fire, and sing songs. Typical songs were “If I had a hammer”, and kumbaya.

What I would do is crawl up and into the huge metal dumpster, and dig through boxes and debris to get to the books.

You could get an inkling of what the book’s content would be by looking at the back cover, but it was typically a difficult endeavor. However, for a young boy, who liked to read, climb in and out of dumpsters and get into trouble, it was like mining a treasure trove.

I would typically find four or five books of interest and throw them into my backpack / satchel (that I got at an Army Surplus store) and ride my banana-seat bicycle home. Once at the house, I could read the books at leisure, and out of the collection, I might end up keeping two or three and tossing the rest.

I was the perpetual scavenger. From lost golf balls at the local golf club to digging through the rocks at the nearby pool to look for fossils. My bed room was a collection of all sorts of junk that I would lug home. I had everything from arrowheads to piles of “Mad Magazine”, and “Treasure Magazines” stacked up in the corner. My room had model airplanes hanging from the ceiling by string, to old maps that I liberated out of the ceiling rafters of an old car garage.

I was a typical boy, and Ray Bradberry was a major influence on my life.

Take Aways

  • Ray Bradbury wrote the short story “Dark they were and golden eyed”.
  • His works greatly influenced me was a young boy into my early teens.
  • He contributed to my desire to study aerospace engineering, become a pilot in the Navy, and join MAJestic.
  • His stories are not to be studied, they are to be enjoyed.

FAQ

Q:  What would you do after you read science fiction stories?
A: Typically, I would read at the house. I was a big fan of reading while I was in the bathroom. I would read on both the toilet and while soaking in the tub. I would read in my tree house, or on my bed, or in the living room. I would read on the porch, or in the car while my father was driving us about. I read everywhere.

However, when I wasn’t reading I was typically out walking or hiking. We had various spur lines for the coal-hauling railroad all around us. They would wind in and out of the hills. I would walk those railroad tracks. Often I would walk on top like a balance beam. If a train was near, I would pull out a penny to squash on the track. I would also pick up some of the millions of little black marble-sized dirty balls that were everywhere and throw them into the bushes or into the nearby river. Sometimes I would take out my trusty (blue) cub-scout knife and cut some branches off of a beech tree and chew on the branches as I walked.

I often would walk alone and ponder my life. I might go with a friend or two, or my trusty dog Belle (she was a Siberian Husky). We would walk the spurs and climb the hills. We would talk about televisions shows, the local football game, and things that mattered to us.

Q: Should Ray Bradbury and his works be taught in school?
A: Yes and no. Stories by Bradbury are not something that can used to achieve grades. It is something that has to be absorbed. Therefore, I believe that everyone should be exposed to his work, but it should not be used as a study aid. It’s like pizza. Many people like it, but not everyone. You can study how to make a pizza, but the best thing and the best utility for pizza is to eat it.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 26SEP18.
  2. Completed 28SEP18.
  3. SEO Review 28SEP18.
  4. Published 28SEP18.

The Fog Horn (Full Text) By Ray Bradbury

The Fog Horn” is a 1951 science fiction short story by American writer Ray Bradbury, the first in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. The story was the basis for the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

When Ray started out, the field of science fiction lacked respectability, to say the least. It was the province of the pulps: magazines printed on cheap paper, with lurid covers designed to catch the attention of immature boys. 

He was often dismissed, if not outright ridiculed, by mainstream writers, but quickly learned to ignore his critics. If they didn’t think rockets and dinosaurs were suitable subjects for literature, to hell with them. 

Ray loved that stuff, along with Martians and witches and things that go bump in the night, so that’s what he wrote about. His unique imagination was harnessed within vivid, lyrical prose, and after the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, the literary elite were forced to acknowledge a striking new talent.

As Ray’s stories became more widely published and read, they fueled the imaginations of millions of young people over several generations, many of whom went on to cite his influence as a major reason they became scientists and engineers. 

His stories practically shouted that it wasn’t just okay to dream of rockets and space travel, it was wonderful, mythic, imperative—the highest accomplishment the human race could aspire to.

-The Space Review's tribute to Ray Bradbury

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “The Fog Horn” on the Ray Bradbury.RU  website (in Russian; Рассказ Рэя Брэдбери), and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

The Fog Horn

By Ray Bradbury

Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

"It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.

"Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."

"Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the ladies and drink gin."

"What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?"

"On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

"The mysteries of the sea' said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I fumed cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?"

I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn't said why. "For all our engines and so-called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other's countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet."

"Yes, it's an old world."

"Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you."

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there'd be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

"Sounds like an animal, don't it?" McDunn nodded to himself. "A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year," he said, studying the murk and fog, "something comes to visit the lighthouse."

"The swarms of fish like you said?"

"No, this is something else. I've put off telling you because you might think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar's marked right from last year, tonight's the night it comes. I won't go into detail, you'll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights, I won't question or blame you. It's happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch."

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever bears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'"

The Fog Horn blew.

"I made up that story," said McDunn quietly, "to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes...."

"But - "I said.

"Sssst!" said McDunn. "There!" He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming toward the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the raveling mist. You couldn't see far and you couldn't see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the colour of gray mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then - not a body - but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don't know what I said. I said something.

"Steady, boy, steady," whispered McDunn.

"It's impossible! "I said.

"No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that've changed, become impossible. Us!"

It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk held high and sending a message in primeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

"It's a dinosaur of some sort!" I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

"Yes, one of the tribe."

"But they died out!"

"No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in a word like that."

"What'll we do?"

"Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as swift."

"But here, why does it come here?"

The next moment I had my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

"Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?"

I nodded.

"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its tune, perhaps it's a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.

"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You've got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?"

The Fog Horn blew.

The monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all - the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way."

The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights bit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.

"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more."

The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Let's see what happens," said McDunn.

He switched the Fog Horn off.

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.

The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.

"McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the fingerlike projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a caldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!"

The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!"

We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward us. We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.

Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones.

That and the other sound.

"Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen."

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've rounded the cape.

And so it went for the rest of that night.

The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.

"It fell apart, is all," said Mr. McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm.

There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.

The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. "Just in case," he said.

The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the gray waters and listened to the new hom sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there, by itself.

The monster?

It never came back.

"It's gone away," said McDunn. "It's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting."

I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

I sat there wishing there was something I could say.

Conclusions

I spent much of my childhood being inspired by science fiction works. My favorite authors included Ray Bradberry and Robert Heinlein. The works of Robert Heinlein suited my juvenile belief structures at the time, but Ray Bradberry evoked my emotions.

While I cannot recall when I first encountered this story, I can positively state that my father wanted me to read it. He gave me a collection of Ray Bradberry short stories and told me to read this one in particular. And, so I did. I went into the living room, plopped myself down on the chair (not a lazy-boy) and started reading. I think that I read it non-stop and then went into the kitchen and made a “Dagwood” sandwich, and a big glass of ice-cold milk.

As a young boy I readily consumed every science fiction story that I could get my hands on. I loved reading about spaceships, rockets, strange adventures, time travel and dinosaurs. These were the things that shaped my life. These were the things that made me who I am today.

Take Aways

  • The short story “The Fog Horn” was written by Ray Bradberry.
  • While the story is about the confrontation of a sea beast and a fog horn, it is about much more that that. It is about loneliness and frustration.

FAQ

Q: Why does the sea monster come to the lighthouse?
A: The lighthouse calls to the monster. Somehow it hears the call, and somehow it answers the call. We do not know why it comes forth, nor do we know the motivations of the monster. We can only guess.

Q: What appeal does this story have for the reader?
A: Everyone has experienced loneliness. Everyone has experienced frustration and rejection. Thus, everyone can find compassion and understanding in the emotions of the sea monster.

Q: What makes this story so different from the Godzilla monster movies of the 1960’s?
A: Godzilla, and other monster stories, while they would often have a back-story to explain what they were doing and why, they typically did not explore the emotional aspects of the creature. This story does.  In comparison, instead of being a story about destruction of Tokyo or the collapse of a light-house, this story is one of raw emotion. It is a story that haunts.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 27SEP18.
  3. SEO completed 27SEp18

The Long Rain (Full Text) – Ray Bradbury

The Long Rain” is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1950 as “Death-by-Rain” in the magazine Planet Stories, and then in the collection The Illustrated Man. The story tells of four men who have crashed on a planet where it is always raining. As they try to reach the safety of the Sun Domes, they end up being driven insane by the endless rains.

The story was republished in several collections and was incorporated into a film also titled The Illustrated Man.

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

When Ray started out, the field of science fiction lacked respectability, to say the least. It was the province of the pulps: magazines printed on cheap paper, with lurid covers designed to catch the attention of immature boys. 

He was often dismissed, if not outright ridiculed, by mainstream writers, but quickly learned to ignore his critics. If they didn’t think rockets and dinosaurs were suitable subjects for literature, to hell with them. 

Ray loved that stuff, along with Martians and witches and things that go bump in the night, so that’s what he wrote about. His unique imagination was harnessed within vivid, lyrical prose, and after the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, the literary elite were forced to acknowledge a striking new talent.

As Ray’s stories became more widely published and read, they fueled the imaginations of millions of young people over several generations, many of whom went on to cite his influence as a major reason they became scientists and engineers. 

His stories practically shouted that it wasn’t just okay to dream of rockets and space travel, it was wonderful, mythic, imperative—the highest accomplishment the human race could aspire to.

-The Space Review's tribute to Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradberry 1
An artistic rendering of the sun dome in the distance. Venus in this story, is a planet of continuous rain, dark and deep clouds, and lightening storms. Humans have tried to colonize Venus, but they can only do so in safe enclosures called “sun domes”. There, they survive and live safe against the rainy onslaught of torrential and never-ending water.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

As an side, I would sometimes help Chinese students with their English. At times, I would "assign" them a book to read. One student bought the book, and waited two full months before it arrived, and the first story that he read was this one; "The Long Rain".
When I asked him to describe what it was like, he was all over himself trying to describe an impossible world; a wet world where everything you do was soaked and wet. It was a world where you had to trudge through water, currents, mud and bog to find this elusive sun dome. To this day, years later, he still talks about this story.

I have found this version of the story “The Long Rain” on the wiki.spaces website in PDF format, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

The Long Rain

Ray Bradbury

THE rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

“How much farther, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand.” “Aren’t you sure?”

“How can I be sure?”

“I don’t like this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I’d feel better.” “Another hour or two from here.”

“You really think so, Lieutenant?” “Of course.”

“Or are you lying to keep us happy?” “I’m lying to keep you happy. Shut up!”

The two men sat together in the rain. Behind them sat two other men who were wet and tired and slumped like clay that was melting. The lieutenant looked up. He had a face that once had been brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning to turn white, and perhaps a little green with fungus.

“Don’t be crazy,” said one of the two other men. “It never stops raining on Venus. It just goes on and on. I’ve lived here for ten years and I never saw a minute, or even a second, when it wasn’t pouring.”

“It’s like living under water,” said the lieutenant, and rose up, shrugging his guns into place. “Well, we’d better get going. We’ll find that Sun Dome yet.”

“Or we won’t find it,” said the cynic. “It’s an hour or so.”

“Now you’re lying to me, Lieutenant.”

“No, now I’m lying to myself. This is one of those times when you’ve got to lie. I can’t take much more of this.”

They walked down the jungle trail, now and then looking at their compasses. There was no direction anywhere, only what the compass said. There was a gray sky and rain falling and jungle and a path, and, far back behind them somewhere, a rocket in which they had ridden and fallen. A rocket in which lay two of their friends, dead and dripping rain.

They walked in single file, not speaking. They came to a river which lay wide and flat and brown, flowing down to the great Single Sea. The surface of it was stippled in a billion places by the rain.

“All right, Simmons.”

The lieutenant nodded and Simmons took a small packet from his back which, with a pressure of hidden chemical, inflated into a large boat. The lieutenant directed the cutting of wood and the quick making of paddles and they set out into the river, paddling swiftly across the smooth surface in the rain. The lieutenant felt the cold rain on his cheeks and on his neck and on his moving arms. The cold was beginning to seep into his lungs. He felt the rain on his ears, on his eyes, on his legs.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” he said.

“Who could? Who has? When? How many nights have we slept? Thirty nights, thirty days! Who can sleep with rain slamming their head, banging away. . . . I’d give anything for a hat. Anything at all, just so it wouldn’t hit my head any more. I get headaches. My head is sore; it hurts all the time.”

“I’m sorry I came to China,” said one of the others. “First time I ever heard Venus called China.”

“Sure, China. Chinese water cure. Remember the old torture? Rope you against a wall. Drop one drop of water on your head every half-hour. You go crazy waiting for the next one. Well, that’s Venus, but on a big scale. We’re not made for water. You can’t sleep, you can’t breathe right, and you’re crazy from just being soggy. If we’d been ready for a crash, we’d have brought waterproofed uniforms and hats. It’s this beating rain on your head gets you, most of all. It’s so heavy. It’s like BB shot. I don’t know how long I can take it.”

They crossed the river, and in crossing they thought of the Sun Dome, somewhere ahead of them, shining in the jungle rain. A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house fifteen feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in space at the top of the building where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as they stayed in that house and idled their time.

The lieutenant turned and looked back at the three men using their oars and gritting their teeth. They were as white as mushrooms, as white as lie was. Venus bleached everything away in a few months. Even the jungle was an immense cartoon nightmare, for how could the jungle be green with no sun,with always rain falling and always dusk? The white, white jungle with the pale cheese-colored leaves, and the earth carved of wet Camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools— everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn’t it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last the sea?

“Here we are!”

They leaped out on the farthest shore, splashing and sending up showers. The boat was deflated and stored in a cigarette packet. Then, standing on the rainy shore, they tried to light up a few smokes for themselves, and it was five minutes or so before, shuddering, they worked the inverted lighter and, cupping their hands, managed a few drags upon cigarettes that all too quickly were limp and beaten away from their lips by a sudden slap of rain. They walked on.

“Wait just a moment,” said the lieutenant. “I thought I saw something ahead.” “The Sun Dome?”

“I’m not sure. The rain closed in again. Simmons began to run. “The Sun Dome!” “Come back, Simmons!”

“The Sun Dome!”

Simmons vanished in the rain. The others ran after him.

They found him in a little clearing, and they stopped and looked at him and what he had discovered. The rocket ship. It was lying where they had left it. Somehow they had circled back and were where they had started. In the ruin of the ship green fungus was growing up out of the mouths of the two dead men. As they watched, the fungus took flower, the petals broke away in the rain, and the fungus died.

“An electrical storm must be nearby. Threw our compasses off. That explains it.” “You’re right.”

“What’ll we do now?” “Start out again.”

“Good lord, we’re not any closer to anywhere!” “Let’s try to keep calm about it, Simmons.” “Calm, calm! This rain’s driving me wild!”

“We’ve enough food for another two days if we’re careful.”

The rain danced on their skin, on their wet uniforms; the rain streamed from their noses and ears, from their fingers and knees. They looked like stone fountains frozen in the jungle, issuing forth water from every pore. And, as they stood, from a distance they heard a roar. And the monster came out of the rain.

The monster was supported upon a thousand electric blue legs. It walked swiftly and terribly. It struck down a leg with a driving blow. Everywhere a leg struck a tree fell and burned. Great whiffs of ozone filled the rainy air, and smoke blew away and was broken up by the rain. The monster was a half mile wide and a mile high and it felt of the ground like a great blind thing. Sometimes, for a moment, it had no legs at all. And then, in an instant, a thousand whips would fall out of its belly, white-blue whips, to sting the jungle.

“There’s the electrical storm,” said one of the men. “There’s the thing ruined our compasses. And it’s coming this way.”

“Lie down, everyone,” said the lieutenant. “Run!” cried Simmons.

“Don’t be a fool. Lie down. It hits the highest points. We may get through unhurt. Lie down about fifty feet from the rocket. It may very well spend its force there and leave us be. Get down!”

The men flopped.

“Is it coming?” they asked each other, after a moment. “Coming.”

“Is it nearer?” “Is it nearer?” “Nearer?” “Here she is!”

The monster came and stood over them. It dropped down ten blue bolts of lightning which struck the rocket. The rocket flashed like a beaten gong and gave off a metal ringing. The monster let down fifteen more bolts which danced about in a ridiculous pantomime, feeling of the jungle and the watery soil.

“No, no!” One of the men jumped up. “Get down, yon fool!” said the lieutenant. “No!”

The lightning struck the rocket another dozen times. The lieutenant turned his head on his arm and saw the blue blazing flashes. He saw trees split and crumple into ruin. He saw the monstrous dark cloud turn like a black disk overhead and hurl down a hundred other poles of electricity.

The man who had leaped up was now running, like someone in a great hall of pillars. He ran and dodged between the pillars and then at last a dozen of the pillars slammed down and there was the sound a fly makes when landing upon the grill wires of an exterminator. The lieutenant remembered this from his childhood on a farm. And there was a smell of a man burned to a cinder.

The lieutenant lowered his head. “Don’t look up,” he told the others. He was afraid that he too might run at any moment.

The storm above them flashed down another series of bolts and then moved on away. Once again there was only the rain, which rapidly cleared the air of the charred smell, and in a moment the three remaining men were sitting and waiting for the beat of their hearts to subside into quiet once more.

They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth.

The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

“He shouldn’t have jumped up.” They said it almost at the same time.

Even as they stood over the body it began to vanish, for the vegetation was edging in upon it, little vines and ivy and creepers, and even flowers for the dead.

At a distance the storm walked off on blue bolts of lightning and was gone.

They crossed a river and a creek and a stream and a dozen other rivers and creeks and streams. Before their eyes rivers appeared, rushing, new rivers, while old rivers changed their courses—rivers the color of mercury, rivers the color of silver and milk.

The Single Sea. There was only one continent on Venus. This land was three thousand miles long by a thousand miles wide, and about this island was the Single Sea, which covered the entire raining planet.

The Single Sea, which lay upon the pallid shore with little motion . . . “This way.” The lieutenant nodded south. “I’m sure there are two Sun Domes down that way. “While they were at it, why didn’t they build a hundred more?” “There’re a hundred and twenty of them now, aren’t there?”

“One hundred and twenty-six, as of last month. They tried to push a bill through Congress back on Earth a year ago to provide for a couple dozen more, but oh no, you know how that is. They’d rather a few men went crazy with the rain.”

They started south. The lieutenant and Simmons and the third man, Pickard, walked in the rain, in the rain that fell heavily and lightly, heavily and lightly; in the rain that poured and hammered and did not stop falling upon the land and the sea and the walking people.

Simmons saw it first. “There it is!” “There’s what?”

“The Sun Dome!”

The lieutenant blinked the water from his eyes and raised his hands to ward off the stinging blows of the rain. At a distance there was a yellow glow on the edge of the jungle, by the sea. It was, indeed, the Sun Dome.

The men smiled at each other.

“Looks like you were right, Lieutenant.” “Luck.”

“Brother, that puts muscle in me, just seeing it. Come on! Last one there’s a son-of-a-bitch!” Simmons began to trot. The others automatically fell in with this, gasping, tired, but keeping pace.

“A big pot of coffee for me,” panted Simmons, smiling. “And a pan of cinnamon buns, by God! And just lie there and let the old sun hit you. The guy that invented the Sun Domes, he should have got a medal!”

They ran faster. The yellow glow grew brighter.

“Guess a lot of men went crazy before they figured out the cure. Think it’d be obvious!  Right off.” Simmons panted the words in cadence to his running.  “Rain, rain!  Years ago.  Found a friend.  Of

min.  Out in the jungle.  Wandering around.  In the rain.  Saying over and over, ‘Don’t know enough

to come in outta the rain.  Don’t know enough, to come in, outta the rain.  Don’t know enough –‘  on and on.  Like that. Poor crazy bastard.”

“Save your breath!” They ran.

They all laughed. They reached the door of the Sun Dome, laughing.

Simmons yanked the door wide. “Hey!” he yelled. “Bring on the coffee and buns!” There was no reply.

They stepped through the door.

The Sun Dome was empty and dark. There was no synthetic yellow sun floating in a high gaseous whisper at the center of the blue ceiling. There was no food waiting. It was cold as a vault. And through a thousand holes which had been newly punctured in the ceiling water streamed, the rain fell down, soaking into the thick rugs and the heavy modern furniture and splashing on the glass tables. The jungle was growing up like a moss in the room, on top of the bookcases and the divans. The rain slashed through the holes and fell upon the three men’s faces.

Pickard began to laugh quietly. “Shut up, Pickard!”

“Ye gods, look what’s here for us—no food, no sun, nothing. The Venusians—they did it! Of course!”

Simmons nodded, with the rain funneling down on his face. The water ran in his silvered hair and on his white eyebrows. “Every once in a while the Venusians come up out of the sea and attack a Sun Dome. They know if they ruin the Sun Domes they can ruin us.”

“But aren’t the Sun Domes protected with guns?”

“Sure.” Simmons stepped aside to a place that was relatively dry. “But it’s been five years since the Venusians tried anything. Defense relaxes. They caught this Dome unaware.”

“Where are the bodies?”

“The Venusians took them all down into the sea. I hear they have a delightful way of drowning you. It takes about eight hours to drown the way they work it. Really delightful.”

“I bet there isn’t any food here at all.” Pickard laughed.

The lieutenant frowned at him, nodded at him so Simmons could see. Simmons shook his head and went back to a room at one side of the oval chamber. The kitchen was strewn with soggy loaves of bread, and meat that had grown a faint green fur. Rain came through a hundred holes in the kitchen roof.

“Without food, sir?” Simmons snorted. “I notice the sun machine’s torn apart. Our best bet is to make our way to the next Sun Dome. How far is that from here?”

“Not far. As I recall, they built two rather close together here. Perhaps if we waited here, a rescue mission from the other might——”

“It’s probably been here and gone already, some days ago. They’ll send a crew to repair this place in about six months, when they get the money from Congress. I don’t think we’d better wait.”

“All right then, we’ll eat what’s left of our rations and get on to the next Dome.”

Pickard said, “If only the rain wouldn’t hit my head, just for a few minutes. If I could only remember what it’s like not to be bothered.” He put his hands on his skull and held it tight. “I remember when I was in school a bully used to sit in back of me and pinch me and pinch me and pinch me every five minutes, all day long. He did that for weeks and months. My arms were sore and black and blue all the time. And I thought I’d go crazy from being pinched. One day I must have gone a little mad from being hurt and hurt, and I turned around and took a metal trisquare I used in mechanical drawing and I almost killed that bastard. I almost cut his lousy head off. I almost took his eye out before they dragged me out of the room, and I kept yelling, ‘Why don’t he leave me alone? why don’t he leave me alone?’ Brother!” His hands clenched the bone of his head, shaking, tightening, his eyes shut. “But what do I do now? Who do I hit, who do I tell to lay off, stop bothering me, this damn rain, like the pinching, always on you, that’s all you hear, that’s all you feel!”

“We’ll be at the other Sun Dome by four this afternoon.”

“Sun Dome? Look at this one! What if all the Sun Domes on Venus are gone? What then? What if there are holes in all the ceilings, and the rain coming in!”

“We’ll have to chance it.”

“I’m tired of chancing it. All I want is a roof and some quiet. I want to be alone.” “That’s only eight hours off, if you hold on.”

“Let’s eat,” said Simmons, watching him.

They set off down the coast, southward again. After four hours they had to cut inland to go around a river that was a mile wide and so swift it was not navigable by boat. They had to walk inland six miles to a place where the river boiled out of the earth, suddenly, like a mortal wound. In the rain, they walked on solid ground and returned to the sea.

“I’ve got to sleep,” said Pickard at last. He slumped. “Haven’t slept in four weeks. Tried, but couldn’t. Sleep here.”

They lay out full, propping their heads up so the water wouldn’t come to their mouths, and they closed their eyes.

The lieutenant twitched. He did not sleep.

There were things that crawled on his skin. Things grew upon him in layers. Drops fell and touched other drops and they became streams that trickled over his body, and while these moved down his flesh, the small growths of the forest took root in his clothing. He felt the ivy cling and make a second garment over him; he felt the small flowers bud and open and petal away, and still the rain pattered on his body and on his head. In the luminous night—for the vegetation glowed in the darkness—he could see the other two men outlined, like logs that had fallen and taken upon themselves velvet coverings of grass and flowers. The rain hit his face. He covered his face with his

hands. The rain hit his neck. He turned over on his stomach in the mud, on the rubbery plants, and the rain hit his back and hit his legs.

Suddenly he leaped up and began to brush the water from himself. A thousand hands were touching him and he no longer wanted to be touched. He no longer could stand being touched. He floundered and struck something else and knew that it was Simmons, standing up in the rain, sneezing moisture, coughing and choking. And then Pickard was up, shouting, running about.

“Wait a minute, Pickard!”

“Stop it, stop it!” Pickard screamed. He fired off his gun six times at the night sky. In the flashes of powdery illumination they could see armies of raindrops, suspended as in a vast motionless amber, for an instant, hesitating as if shocked by the explosion, fifteen billion droplets, fifteen billion tears, fifteen billion ornaments, jewels standing out against a white velvet viewing board. And then, with the light gone, the drops which had waited to have their pictures taken, which had suspended their downward rush, fell upon them, stinging, in an insect cloud of coldness and pain.

“Stop it! Stop it!” “Pickard!”

But Pickard was only standing now, alone. When the lieutenant switched on a small hand lamp and played it over Pickard’s wet face, the eyes of the man were dilated, and his mouth was open, his face turned up, so the water hit and splashed on his tongue, and hit and drowned the wide eyes, and bubbled in a whispering froth on the nostrils.

“Pickard!”

The man would not reply. He simply stood there for a long while with the bubbles of rain breaking out in his whitened hair and manacles of rain jewels dripping from his wrists and his neck.

“Pickard! We’re leaving. We’re going on. Follow us.” The rain dripped from Pickard’s ears.

“Do you hear me, Pickard!”

It was like shouting down a well. “Pickard!”

“Leave him alone,” said Simmons. “We can’t go on without him.”

“What’ll we do, carry him?” Simmons spat. “He’s no good to us or himself. You know what he’ll do?

He’ll just stand here and drown.” “What?”

“You ought to know that by now. Don’t you know the story? He’ll just stand here with his head up and let the rain come in his nostrils and his mouth. He’ll breathe the water.”

“That’s how they found General Mendt that time. Sitting on a rock with his head back, breathing the rain. His lungs were full of water.”

The  lieutenant  turned  the  light  back  to  the  unblinking face.  Pickard’s  nostrils  gave  off a  tiny whispering wet sound.

“Pickard!” The lieutenant slapped the face.

“He can’t even feel you,” said Simmons. “A few days in this rain and you don’t have any face or any legs or hands.”

The lieutenant looked at his own hand in horror. He could no longer feel it. “But we can’t leave Pickard here.”

“I’ll show you what we can do.” Simmons fired his gun. Pickard fell into the raining earth.

Simmons said, “Don’t move, Lieutenant. I’ve got my gun ready for you too. Think it over; he would only have stood or sat there and drowned. It’s quicker this way.”

The lieutenant blinked at the body. “But you killed him.”

“Yes, because he’d have killed us by being a burden. You saw his face. Insane.” After a moment the lieutenant nodded. “All right.”

They walked off into the rain. It was dark and their hand lamps threw a beam that pierced the rain for only a few feet. After a half hour they had to stop and sit through the rest of the night, aching with hunger, waiting for the dawn to come; when it did come it was gray and continually raining as before, and they began to walk again.

“We’ve miscalculated,” said Simmons. “No. Another hour.”

“Speak louder. I can’t hear you.” Simmons stopped and smiled. “By Christ,” he said, and touched his ears. “My ears. They’ve gone out on me. All the rain pouring finally numbed me right down to the bone.”

“Can’t you hear anything?” said the lieutenant. “What?” Simmons’s eyes were puzzled. “Nothing. Come on.”

“I think I’ll wait here. You go on ahead.” “You can’t do that.”

“I can’t hear you. You go on. I’m tired. I don’t think the Sun Dome is down this way. And, if it is, it’s probably got holes in the roof, like the last one. I think I’ll just sit here.”

“Get up from there!” “So long, Lieutenant.”

“You can’t give up now.”

“I’ve got a gun here that says I’m staying. I just don’t give a damn any more. I’m not crazy yet, but I’m the next thing to it. I don’t want to go out that way. As soon as you get out of sight I’m going to use this gun on myself.”

“Simmons!”

“You said my name. I can read that much off your lips.” “Simmons.”

“Look, it’s a matter of time. Either I die now or in a few hours. Wait’ll you get to that next Dome, if you ever get there, and find rain coming in through the roof. Won’t that be nice?”

The lieutenant waited and then splashed off in the rain. He turned and called back once, but Simmons was only sitting there with the gun in his hands, waiting for him to get out of sight. He shook his head and waved the lieutenant on.

The lieutenant didn’t even hear the sound of the gun.

He began to eat the flowers as he walked. They stayed down for a time, and weren’t poisonous; neither were they particularly sustaining, and he vomited them up, sickly, a minute or so later.

“Another five minutes,” he told himself. “Another five minutes and then I’ll walk into the sea and keep walking. We weren’t made for this; no Earthman was or ever will be able to take it. Your nerves, your nerves.

He floundered his way through a sea of slush and foliage and came to a small hill. At a distance there was a faint yellow smudge in the cold veils of water.

The next Sun Dome.

Through the trees, a long round yellow building, far away. For a moment he only stood, swaying, looking at it.

He began to run and then he slowed down, for he was afraid. He didn’t call out. What if it’s the same one? What if it’s the dead Sun Dome, with no sun in it? he thought.

He slipped and fell. Lie here, he thought; it’s the wrong one. Lie here. It’s no use. Drink all you want. But he managed to climb to his feet again and crossed several creeks, and the yellow light grew very

bright, and he began to run again, his feet crashing into mirrors and glass, his arms flailing at diamonds and precious stones.

He stood before the yellow door. The printed letters over it said THE SUN DOME. He put his numb hand up to feel it. Then he twisted the doorknob and stumbled in.

He stood for a moment looking about. Behind him the rain whirled at the door. Ahead of him, upon a low table, stood a silver pot of hot chocolate, steaming, and a cup, full, with a marshmallow in it. An beside that, on another tray, stood thick sandwiches of rich chicken meat and fresh-cut tomatoes and green onions. And on a rod just before his eyes was a great thick green Turkish towel, and a bin in which to throw wet clothes, and, to his right, a small cubicle in which heat rays might dry you instantly. And upon a chair, a fresh change of uniform, waiting for anyone—himself, or any lost one—to make use of it. And farther over, coffee in steaming copper urns, and a phonograph from which music was playing quietly, and books bound in red and brown leather. And near the books a cot, a soft deep cot upon which one might lie, exposed and bare, to drink in the rays of the one great bright thing which dominated the long room.

He put his hands to his eyes. He saw other men moving toward him, but said nothing to them. He waited, and opened his eyes, and looked. The water from his uniform pooled at his feet and he felt it drying from his hair and his face and his chest and his arms and his legs.

He was looking at the sun.

It hung in the center of the room, large and yellow and warm. It made not a sound, and there was no sound in the room. The door was shut and the rain only a memory to his tingling body. The sun hung high in the blue sky of the room, warm, hot, yellow, and very fine.

He walked forward, tearing off his clothes as he went.

Some Considerations

This story, like most of the science fiction works that I read in the 1960’s and 1970’s greatly influenced my life. I believe that I first read this story on a lazy fall weekend in late September. The leaves were crisp and just beginning to fall. It was warm, but not hot. It was calm and I was enjoying reading this story on a porch glider that we had on our porch. I just laid there, swinging back and forth, reading this masterpiece.

Early fall
I spent my boyhood in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. It was a place of hills, forests, rivers, and coal mines. I came from a small town. It was peaceful and quiet and everyone knew everyone else.

Conclusions

Today, students pay tuition at colleges and universities to read these stories. They pay enormous amounts of money, and are given tests and handouts to analyze the work. It seems like a fool’s errand to me.

You read for enjoyment, and if it evokes emotions within your very being then it is a work of art. Cherish it.

That’s never going to happen if you read a cliffs notes version so you can get a grade on a test. Life is about living. You can live, or you can follow the herd. I would suggest that you make the most out of your life. I would suggest you start doing it now.

Take Aways

  • The Long Rain is a short story by Ray Bradbury.
  • It is classified as Science Fiction.
  • It takes place on a fictional Venus where it is continuously raining.
  • The story evokes feelings of desperation, strife, fear and longing. Finally culminating in relief.

FAQ

Q: What is this story “The Long Rain” about?
A: The story takes place on a fictional Venus where there is a continuous rain. However, that is not what the story is about. It is about emotions that play when situations are encountered. When I read the story, I am reminded about a time when I was in second grade and walked home from school in the rain. I came home and my mother dried me off, and set me to the table and got me a big hot cup of coca with marsh-mellows in it and a nice warm bowl of tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. The story, by Ray Bradbury, evokes those same feelings.

Q: Why is this story in your blog?
A: I used to bookmark websites that I liked, and I would return to them periodically to read and enjoy. Over time, the websites would disappear, or turn into something else. The search engines, such as Google, would prioritize other (often profit motive) websites before the ones I was interested in. They would also block others that I enjoyed. China blocks many websites, and slows internet traffic to a crawl on others. I no longer have the luxury to simply bookmark something I like. I need to preserve it’s access. Thus I place it herein for my own personal use.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 27SEP18.
  3. SEO Review 27SEP18.
  4. Publish 27SEP18.

Here There Be Tygers by Ray Bradbury

This story was copyrighted in 1951 by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “Here There be Tygers” on The Mother Earth News, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at Mother Earth News for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

Here There Be Tygers by Ray Bradbury

"You have to beat a planet at its own game," said Chatterton." Get in and rip it up, kill its snakes, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, depollinate its air, mine it, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the blazes out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can't trust planets. They're bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far out, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the nightmare world explodes in your face. That's the way to treat them."

The rocket ship sank down toward planet 7 of star system 84. They had traveled millions upon millions of miles; Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied tip, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten-thousandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down toward an alien world.

"No," said Captain Forester."I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It's not my business to rape or ruin anyway, thank God. I'm glad I'm just a rocket man. You're the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I'll just watch. I'll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn't be rocket men. You like to smell new airs, if you're a rocket man, and see new oceans and islands."

"Take your gun along," said Chatterton. "in my holster," said Forester.

They turned to the port together and saw the green world rising to meet their ship."I wonder what it thinks of us?" said Forester.

"It won't like me" said Chatterton "I'll see to it 'It' won't like me. And I don't care. you know, I'm out for the money. Land us over there, will you. Captain; that looks like rich country if I ever saw it."

It was the freshest green color they had seen since childhood.

Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards or cities. It's a sea of green golf links, thought Forester, which goes on forever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ten thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game. A Sunday planet a croquet-lawn world, where,you could lie on your back, clover in your lips, eyes half shut, smiling at the sky, smelling the grass, drowse through an eternal Sabbath, rousing only on occasion to turn the Sunday paper or crack the red-striped wooden ball through the wicket.

"It ever a planet was a woman, this one is/"

"Woman on the outside, man on the inside," said Chatterton. "All hard underneath, all male iron, copper, uranium, black sod. Don't let the cosmetics fool you."

He walked to the bin where the Earth Drill waited. Its great screw-snout glittered bluely, ready to stab seventy feet deep and suck out corks of earth, deeper still with extensions into the heart of the planet Chatterton winked at it"We'll fix your planet, Forester, but good"

"Yes, I know you will," said Forester, quietly,

The rocket landed.

"It's too green, too peaceful," said Chatterton. "I don't like it" He turned to the captain. "We'll go out with our rifles."

"I give orders. If you don't mind"

"Yes, and my company pays our way with millions of dollars of machinery we must protect; quite an investment."

The air on the new planet 7 in star system 84 was good. The port swung wide. The men filed out into the greenhouse world.

The last man to emerge was Chatterton, gun in hand.

As Chatterton set foot to the green lawn, the earth trembled. The grass shook. The distant forest rumbled, The sky seemed to blink and darken imperceptibly, The men were watching Chatterton when it happened.

"An earthquake!"

Chatterton's face paled. Everyone laughed.

"It doesn't like you, Chatterton!"

"Nonsense!"

The trembling died away at last.

"Well," said Captain Forester." It didn't quake for us, so It must be that it doesn't approve of your philosophy."

"Coincidence," Chatterton smiled weakly, "Come on now, on the double, I want the Drill out here in a half hour for a few samplings."

"Just a moment," Forester stopped laughing. "We've got to clear the area first, be certain there're no hostile people or animals, Besides, it isn't every year you hit a planet like this very nice; can you blame us if we want to have a look at it?"

"All right," Chatterton joined them, "Let's get it over with."

They left a guard at the ship and they walked away over fields and meadows, over small hills and into little valleys. Like a bunch of boys out hiking on the finest day of the best summer in the most beautiful year in history, walking in the croquet weather where, if you listened you could hear the whisper of the wooden ball across grass, the click through the wicket, the gentle undulations of voices, a sudden high drift of women's laughter from some ivy shaded porch, the tinkle of ice in the summer tea pitcher.

"Hey," said Driscoll, one of the younger crewmen, sniffing the air, "I brought a baseball and bat; we'll have a game later. What a diamond!"

The men laughed quietly in the baseball season, in the good quiet wind for tennis, in the weather for bicycling and picking wild grapes.

"How'd you like the job of mowing all this?" asked Driscoll.

The men stopped.

"I knew there was something wrong!" cried Chatterton, "This grass: it's freshly cut!

"Probably a species of dichondra: always short."

Chatterton spat on the green grass and rubbed it in with his boot, "I don't like it, I don't like it. If anything happened to us, no one on Earth would ever know. Silly policy: if a rocket fails to return, we never send a second rocket to check the reason why."

"Natural enough," explained Forester, "We can't waste time on a thousand hostile worlds, fighting futile wars. Each rocket represents years, money, lives. We can't afford to waste two rockets if one rocket proves a planet hostile. We go on to peaceful planets, like this one."

"I often wonder," said Driscoll, "What happened to all those lost expeditions on worlds we'll never try again."

Chatterton eyed the distant forest,"They were shot, stabbed, broiled for dinner, Even as we may be, any minute. It's time we got back to work, Captain!

They stood at the top to a little rise.

"Feel," said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely, "Remember how you used to run when you were it kid, and how the wind felt, Like feathers on your arms, You ran and thought any minute you'd fly, but you never quite did."

The men stood remembering, There was a smell of pollen and new rain drying upon a million grass blades.

Driscoll gave a little run. "Feel it, by God, the wind. You know, we never have really flown by ourselves. We have to sit inside tons of metal, away from flying, really. We've never flown like birds fly, to themselves, Wouldn't it be nice to, put your arms out like this —" He extended his arms, "And run." He ran ahead of them, laughing out his idiocy. "And fly!" he cried.

He flew.

Time passed on the silent gold wristwatches of the men standing below, They stared up. And from the sky came a high sound of almost unbelievable laughter.

"Tell him to come down now," whispered Chatterton. "He'll be killed."

Nobody heard. Their faces were raised away front Chatterton: they were stunned and smiling.

At last Driscoll landed at their feet.

"Did you see me?" "I flew!"

They had seen.

"Lets get down, oh, Lord. Lord." Driscoll slapped his knees, chuckling. "I'm a sparrow, I'm a hawk, God bless me. Go on all of you, try it!"

"It's the wind, it picked me up and flew me!" he said, a moment later, gasping, shivering with delight.

"Let's get out of here." Chatterton started turning, slowly in circles, watching the blue sky. "It's a trap, it wants us all to fly in the air. Then it'll drop its all at once and kill us. I'm going back to the ship."

"You'll wait for my order on that," said Forester,

The men were frowning, standing in the warm cool air, while the wind sighed about them. There was a kite sound in the air, a sound of eternal March.

"I asked the wind to fly me." said Driscoll. "And it did!"

Forester waved the others aside. "I'll chance it next. If I'm killed, back to the ship, all of you."

"I'm sorry. I can't allow this, you're the captain," said Chatterton. "We can't risk you." He took out his gun.

"I should have some sort of authority or force here. This game's gone on too long; I'm ordering us back to the ship."

"Holster your gun," said Forester, quietly.

"Stand still you idiot."

Chatterton blinked now at this man, now at that.

"Haven't you felt it'! This world's alive, it has a look to it, it's playing with us, biding its time."

"I'll be the judge of that," said Forester. "You're going back to the ship in a moment, under arrest, if you don't put up that gun."

"If you fools won't come with me, you can die out here. I'm going back, get my samples, and get out."

"Chatterton!"

"Don't try to stop me!"

Chatterton started to run. Then suddenly, he gave a cry.

Everyone shouted and looked up. "There he goes," said Driscoll.

Chatterton was up in the sky.

Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye. Chatterton sat stunned on the side of the hill. The other men sat around him, exhausted and laughing. He would not look at them, he would not look at the sky, he would only feel of the earth, and his arms and his legs and his body, tightening in on himself.

"Oh, wasn't it perfect!" said a man named Koestler.

They had all flown like orioles and eagles and sparrows, and they were all happy.

"Come out of it, Chatterton, it was fun, wasn't it?"' said Koestler.

"It's impossible." Chatterton shut his eyes, tight, tight. "There's only one way for it to do it; it's alive. The air's alive. Like a fist it picked me up. Any minute now, it can kill its all. It's alive."

"All right," said Koestler. "Say it's alive." "And a living thing must have purpose. Suppose the purpose of this world is to make us happy."

As if to add to this, Driscoll came flying up, canteens in each hand. "I found a creek, tested and found pure water, wait'll you try it!"

Forester took a canteen, nudged Chatterton with it, offering a drink. Chetterton shook his head and drew hastily away. He put his hands over his face. "It's the blood of this planet. Living blood. Drink that, put that inside and you put this world inside you to peer out your eyes and listen through your ears. No thanks!"

Forester shrugged and drank.

"Wine!" he said.

"It can't be!"

"It is! Smell it, taste it! A rare white wine!"

"French domestic." Driscoll sipped his.

"Poison," said Chatterton.

They passed the canteens around.

They had idled on through the gentle afternoon, not wanting to do anything to disturb the peace that lay all about them. They were like very young men in the presence of great beauty, of a fine and famous woman, afraid that by some word, some gesture, they might turn her face away, avert her loveliness and her kindly attentions. They had felt the earthquake that had greeted Chatterton, and they did not want earthquake. Let them enjoy this "Day After School Lets Out", this fishing weather. Let them sit under the shade trees or walk on the tender hills, but let them drill no drillings, test no testings, contaminate no contaminations.

They found a small stream which poured into a boiling water pool. Fish, swimming in the cold creek above, fell glittering into the hot spring and floated, minutes later, cooked, to the surface.

Chatterton reluctantly joined the others, eating.

"It'll poison us all. There's always a trick to things like this. I'm sleeping in the rocket tonight. You can sleep out if you want. To quote a map I saw in medieval history: 'Here there be tygers.' Some time tonight when you're sleeping, the tigers and cannibals will show up."

Forester shook his head. "I'll go along with you, this planet is alive. It's a race itself. But it needs us to show off to, to appreciate its beauty. What's the use of a stage full of miracles if there's no audience?"

But Chatterton was busy. He was bent over, being sick.

"I'm poisoned! Poisoned!"

They held his shoulders until the sickness passed. They gave him water. The others were feeling fine.

"Better eat nothing but ship's food from now on," advised Forester. "It'd be safer."

"We're starting work right now." Chatterton swayed, wiping his mouth. "We've wasted a whole day. I'll work alone if I have to. I'll show this infernal place!"

He staggered away toward the rocket.

"He doesn't know when he's well off," murmured Driscoll. "Can't we stop him, Captain?"

"He practically owns the expedition. We don't have to help him, there's a clause in our contract that guarantees refusal to work under dangerous conditions. So . . . do unto this 'Picnic Ground' as you would have it do unto you. No initial-cutting on the trees. Replace the turf on the greens. Clean up your banana peels after you."

Now, below, in the ship there was an immense humming. From the storage port rolled the great shining Drill. Chatterton followed it, calling directions to its robot radio. "This way, here!

"You fool."

"Now!" cried Chatterton.

The Drill plunged its long screw-bore into the green grass. Chatterton waved up at the other men. "Watch this!"

The sky trembled.

The Drill stood in the center of a little sea of grass. For a moment it plunged away, bringing up moist corks of sod which it spat unceremoniously into a shaking analysis bin.

Now the Drill gave a wrenched, metallic squeal like a monster interrupted at its feed. From the soil beneath it slow bluish liquids bubbled up.

Chatterton shouted, "Get back, you fool!"

The Drill lumbered in a prehistoric dance. It shrieked like a mighty train turning on a sharp curve, throwing out red sparks. It was sinking. The black slime gave under it in a dark convulsion.

With a coughing sigh, a series of pants and churnings, the Drill sank into a black scum like an elephant shot and dying, trumpeting, like a mammoth at the end of an age, vanishing limb by ponderous limb into the pit.

"Fool. Fool," said Forester under his breath, fascinated with the scene. "You know what that is, Driscoll? It's tar. The fool machine hit a tar pit!"

"Listen, listen!" cried Chatterton at the Drill, running about on the edge of the oily lake. "This way, over here!"

But like the old tyrants of the earth, the dinosaurs with their tubed and screaming necks, the Drill was plunging and thrashing in the one lake from where there was no returning to bask on the firm and understandable shore.

Chatterton turned to the other men far away. "Do something, someone!"

The Drill was gone.

The tar pit bubbled and gloated, sucking the hidden monster bones. The surface of the pool was silent. A huge bubble, the last, rose, expelled a scent of ancient petroleum, and fell apart.

The men came down and stood on the edge of the little black sea.

Chatterton stopped yelling.

After a long minute of staring into the silent tar pool, Chatterton turned and looked at the hills, blindly, at the green rolling lawns. The distant trees were growing fruit now and dropping it, softly, to the ground.

"I'll show it," he said quietly.

"Take it easy, Chatterton."

"I'll fix it," he said.

"Sit down, have a drink."

"I'll fix it good, I'll show it, it can't do this to me."

Chatterton started off back to the ship.

"Wait a minute now," said Forester.

Chatterton ran. "I know what to do, I know how to fix it!"

"Stop him!" said Forester. He ran, then remembered he could fly. "The A-Bomb's on the ship, if he should get to that . . . ."

The other men had thought of that and were in the air. A small grove of trees stood between the rocket and Chatterton as he ran on the ground, forgetting that he could fly, or afraid to fly, or not allowed to fly, yelling. The crew headed for the rocket to wait for him, the captain with them. They arrived, formed a line, and shut the rocket port. The last they saw of Chatterton he was plunging through the edge of the tiny forest.

The crew stood waiting.

". . . That fool, that crazy guy."

Chatterton didn't come out on the other side of the small woodland.

"He's turned back, waiting for us to relax our guard."

"Go bring him in," said Forester.

Two men flew off.

Now, softly, a great and gentle rain fell upon the green world.

"The final touch," said Driscoll. "We'd never have to build houses here. Notice it's not raining on us. It's raining all around, ahead, behind us. What a world!"

They stood dry in the middle of the blue, cool rain. The sun was setting. The moon, a large one the color of ice, rose over the freshened hills.

"There's only one more thing this world needs."

"Yes," said everyone, thoughtfully, slowly.

"We'll have to go looking," said Driscol. "It's logical, The wind flies us, the trees and streams feed us, everything is alive. Perhaps if we asked for companionship . . . ."

"I've thought a long time, today and other days," said Koestler. "We're all bachelors, been traveling for years, and tired of it. Wouldn't it be nice to settle down somewhere! Here, maybe. On Earth you sweat just to save enough to buy a house, pay taxes; the cities stink. Here, you won't even need a house, with this weather. If it gets monotonous you can ask for rain, clouds, snow, changes. You don't have to work here for anything."

"It'd be boring. We'd go crazy."

"No," Koestler said, smiling. "If life got too soft, all we'd have to do is repeat a few times what Chatterton said: 'Here there be tygers. Listen!'"

Far away, wasn't there the faintest roar of a giant cat, hidden in the twilight forests?

The men shivered.

"A versatile world," said Koestler dryly. "A woman who'll do anything to please her guests, as long as we're kind to her. Chatterton wasn't kind."

"Chatterton. What about him?"

As if to answer this, someone cried from a distance. The two men who had flown off to find Chatterton were waving at the edge of the woods.

Forester, Driscoll, and Koestler flew down alone.

"What's up?"

The men pointed into the forest."Thought you'd want to see this, Captain. It's eerie." One of the men indicated a pathway. "Look here, sir."

The marks of great claws stood on the path, fresh and clear.

"And over here." A few drops of blood. A heavy smell of some feline animal hung in the air.

"Chatterton?"

"I don't think we'll ever find him, Captain."

Faintly, faintly, moving away, now gone in the breathing silence of twilight, came the roar of a tiger.

The men lay on the resilient grass by the rocket and the night was warm. "Reminds me of nights when I was a kid," said Driscoll. "My brother and I waited for the hottest night in July and then we slept on the Court House lawn, counting the stars, talking; it was a great night, the best night of my life." Then he added, "Not counting tonight, of course."

"I keep thinking about Chatterton," said Koestler.

"Don't," said Forester. "We'll sleep a few hours and take off. We can't chance staying here another day. I don't mean the danger that got Chatterton. No. I mean, if we stayed on we'd get to liking this world too much. We'd never want to leave."

A soft wind blew over them.

"I don't want to leave now." Driscoll put his hands behind his head, lying quietly. "And it doesn't want us to leave."

"If we go back to Earth and tell everyone what a lovely planet it is, what then, Captain?' They'll come smashing in here and ruin it."

"No," said Forester idly. "First, this planet wouldn't put up with a full-scale invasion. I don't know what it'd do, but it could probably think of some interesting things. Secondly, I like this planet too much; I respect it. We'll go back to Earth and lie about it. Say it's hostile. Which it would be to the average man, like Chatterton, jumping in here to hurt it. I guess we won't be lying after all."

"Funny thing," said Koestler. "I'm not afraid. Chatterton vanishes, is killed most horribly, perhaps, yet we lie here, no one runs, no one trembles. It's idiotic. Yet it's right. We trust it and it trusts us."

"Did you notice, after you drank just so much of the wine-water, you didn't want more? A world of moderation."

They lay listening to something like the great heart of this earth beating slowly and warmly under their bodies.

Forester thought, I'm thirsty.

A drop of rain splashed on his lips.

He laughed quietly.

I'm lonely, he thought.

Distantly he heard soft, high voices.

He turned his eyes in upon a vision. There was a group of hills from which flowed a clear river, and in the shallows of that river, sending up spray, their faces shimmering, were the beautiful women. They played like children on the shore. And it came to Forester to know about them and their life. They were nomads, roaming the face of this world as was their desire. There were no highways or cities, there were only hills and plains and winds to carry them like white feathers where they wished. As Forester shaped the questions, some invisible answerer whispered the answers. There were no men. These women, alone, produced their race. The men had vanished fifty thousand years ago. And where were these women now? A mile down from the green forest, a mile over on the wine stream by the six white stones, and a third mile to the large river. There, in the shallows, were the women who would make fine wives, and raise beautiful children.

Forester opened his eyes. The other men were sitting up.

"I had a dream."

They had all dreamed.

"A mile flown from the green forest a mile over on the wine stream . . . ."

". . . by the six white stones," said Koestler.

". . . and a third mile to the large river," said Driscoll, sitting there.

Nobody spoke again for at moment. They looked at the silver rocket standing there in the starlight

"Do we walk or fly, Captain?"

Forester said nothing.

Driscoll said, "Captain, let's stay. Let's never go back to Earth. They'll never come and investigate to see what happened to us; they'll think we were destroyed here. What do you say?"

Forester's face was perspiring. His tongue moved again and again on his lips. His hands twitched over his knees. The crew sat waiting.

"It'd be nice," said the captain.

"Sure."

"But . . ." Forester sighed. "We've got our job to do. People invested in our ship. We owe it to them to go back."

Forester got up. The men still sat on the ground, not listening to him.

"It's such a fine, nice, wonderful night," said Koestler.

They stared at the soft hills and the trees and the rivers running off to other horizons.

"Let's get aboard ship," said Forester, with difficulty.

"Captain . . . ."

"Get aboard," he said.

The rocket rose into the sky. Looking back, Forester saw every valley and every tiny lake.

"We should've stayed." said Koestler.

"Yes, I know."

"It's not too late, to turn back."

"I'm afraid it is." Forester made an adjustment on the port telescope. "Look now."

Koestler looked.

The face of the world was changed. Tiger, dinosaurs, mammoths appeared. Volcanoes erupted cyclones and hurricanes tore over the hills in a welter and fury of weather.

"Yes, she was a woman all right," said Forester. "Waiting for visitors for millions of years, preparing herself, making herself beautiful. She put on her best face for us. When Chatterton treated her badly, she warned him a few times, and then, when he tried to ruin her beauty, eliminated him. She wanted to be loved, like every woman, for herself, not for her wealth. So now, after she had offered us everything, we turn our backs. She's the woman scorned. She let us go, yes, but we can never come back. She'll be waiting for us with those . . ." He nodded to the tigers and the cyclones and the boiling seas.

"Captain," said Koestler

"Yes."

"It's a little late to tell you this. But just before we took off, I was in charge of the air lock. I let Driscoll slip away from the ship. He wanted to go. I couldn't refuse him. I'm responsible. He's back there now, on that planet."

They both turned to the viewing port.

After a long while, Forester said. "I'm glad. I'm glad one of us had enough sense to stay."

"But he's dead by now!

"No, that display down there is for us, perhaps a visual hallucination. Under all the tigers and lions and hurricanes, Driscoll is quite safe and alive, because he's her only audience now. Oh, she'll spoil him rotten. He'll lead a wonderful life. He will, while we're slugging it out up and down the system looking for but never finding a planet quite like this again. No. We won't try to go back and rescue Driscoll, I don't think 'she' would let us anyway. Full speed ahead, Koestler, make it full speed."

The rocket leaped forward into greater accelerations.

And just before the planet dwindled away in brightness and mist, Forester imagined that he could see Driscoll very clearly, walking away down from the green forest, whistling quietly, all of the fresh planet around him, a wine creek flowing for him, baked fish lolling in the hot springs, fruit ripening in the midnight trees, and distant forests and lakes waiting for him to happen by. Driscoll walked away across the endless green lawns near the white stones, beyond the forest, to the edge of the large bright river . . . .

Conclusions

Often we are given opportunities that will transform our life. But, out of ignorance, fear, or habit, we ignore the opportunity. It passes us by. Once gone, it is gone forever. We end up regretting our life. We look back with nostalgia for what could have been.

This is the story of mankind and how we have abused the world we live in. This is the story of me, and you, who have passed up wonderful companions, opportunities and adventures, for some trivial reason or the other. This is the story of the bane of our educational system that focuses on goals instead of appreciation of the moments we live.

Appreciate what you have. Be aware of opportunities and take them when they present themselves to you. For only YOU can control your life. This reality is YOURS. Please don’t squander it.

Take Aways

"Here There Be Tygers" is a short story by American writer Ray Bradbury, originally published in the anthology New Tales of Space and Time in 1951. It was later collected in Bradbury's short story collections R is for Rocket and The Golden Apples of the Sun. It deals with a rocket expedition sent to a planet to see whether or not its natural resources can be harvested for the human race. They discover a paradise which seems to provide for them whatever they desire even as they think of it. They ultimately decide to leave the planet and report that it is hostile and of no benefit to humans. 

-Wikipedia
  • The Wikipedia entry above is a pale reflection of the content of the story.
  • Cliff Notes should never be used for short stories. Just read the stories yourself and come to your own conclusions.
  • I hope that this story was as enjoyable for you the reader as it was for myself.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Generated 22SEP18
  2. Conclusion 22SEP18.
  3. SEO REview 22SEP18.
  4. Published 22SEP18.

Allow your Children to Play and Grow (Part 1)

This little post was inspired by a little article titled “Doctor’s Orders; Let children just play” posted in the hot dog-days of summer, August 2018.

The article reinforces a notion that I have that “play is the work of children”. It is how they learn to become an adult. It doesn’t matter if you are a dog, a cat, an elephant, or a monkey, all animals learn from playing.

However, it is more than that, play is individualized free-roaming periods of children playing without supervision. They need to learn to be autonomous. They need to be able to use trial and error. They need to explore the idea of actions have consequences. When a child does not have this environment, they are often retarded in some fundamental areas.

The boy is a natural spectator; he watches parades, fires, fights, football games, automobiles and planes with equal fervor. However, he will not watch a clock.

A boy is a piece of skin stretched over an appetite. However, he eats only when he’s awake.

Boys imitate their Dads in spite of all the efforts to teach them good manners.

Boy’s are very durable.

A boy, if not washed too often and if not kept in a cool quiet place after each accident , will survive broken bones, hornet’s nests, swimming holes and five helpings of pie. Boys love to trade things. They’ll trade fishhooks, marbles, broken knives and snakes for anything that is priceless or worthless.

-Herbert Hoover

Introduction

In the United States today, I see a matriarchal tide that has emasculated men, and have pampered children to a point where they grow up spoiled without discipline. It does not matter if the child is a boy, or a girl, or considers themselves something in between. That is something that is not desirable for the children, families, and society as whole. Children are young and they need to learn basic rules to fit into society. After all, a puppy that is not litter trained, will deposit feces all over the house. A horse that is not “broken” will never let you ride it.

Parental Duty

A parent has a duty to teach their children and not outsource that responsibility to others. Whether it is a babysitter, a community government, or a church, a parent must provide adaptive skills and rules of behavior to their children. Otherwise, the child will become a “misfit”. They will not be able to fit into society.

Yet, a worrisome as this can be, too much supervision is just as dangerous. Too much protection is equally bad. When parents are overly protective of their children, they essentially outsource all of their offspring’s risk management to themselves. Part of growing is learning to judge risk behaviors.

Is that river to wide to swim across? Is the ice too thin to walk on? Is that tree too high to climb? Can I jump off the third story into a kiddy pool of water below?

Children need to be able to make these decisions on their own without reliance on others. Otherwise, the operating assumption is that mom and dad will always be around to keep them from harm. They will grow up expecting others to make those fundamental decisions for them.  They will believe that society and the government, can best decide and tell them how to live.

Children need to be Self Reliant

Rather than making kids dependent on you to keep them safe, prepare them to face and manage risks themselves. This doesn’t mean totally shoving them into things without a safety net. Like how my old school mates learned how to swim – their father simply threw them into the pool. No. I don’t believe in that. Rather, they need a set a staged instructions.

In fact, this system was promoted by Gever Tulley.

Gever Tulley is an American writer, speaker, educator, entrepreneur, and computer scientist. He is the founder of the Brightworks School, Tinkering School, the non-profit Institute for Applied Tinkering, and educational kit maker Tinkering Labs. 

His more recent work centers around the concept of students learning through building projects. He has delivered multiple TED talks on his work, published the book 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), and has contributed articles for many online media outlets.

Gever refers to this system as a “scaffolding” of “planning, practicing by steps, and taking reasonable precautions.” Obviously, the robustness of this scaffolding should be adjusted to your children’s age and level of maturity. You certainly do not want a toddler who can barely stand up trying to cross a city street. As they grow, you (as the parent) can then progressively withdraw the support “scaffolding”.  In this way, they can gain confidence and competence and become able to fend for themselves.

The great Mr. Rogers stated that “play was the work of children”. He was so correct about that. That is how youth learns. It is through play. Little girls learn how to raise babies through play. They play with dolls, they feed the dolls, they play “house”, and they hold “tea parties”. Little boys learn how to work together in group sports. They learn how to build cabins, tree houses, and “forts”. They tear things apart and put things together. Some girls like to do “boy activities”. Some boys like to do “girl activities”. That’s all both ok too.

The point is that play is how children learn.

The term “free play” is permitting children to learn under minimum supervision. Not only is there no supervision, but that the child knows that they are “on their own”. They know and realize that they can do what they feel like doing, but that if something goes wrong, they will be on their own. It is an adventure in risk…

“Free play has little in common with the “play” we give children today. In organized activities, adults run the show. It’s only when the grown-ups aren’t around that the kids get to take over. Play is training for adulthood.”

-The Fragile Generation

You have to teach the children to be independent.

That is not going to happen with you sitting off to the side or within earshot. You need to teach them how to judge risks, and then the decision process on how to take them. I personally believe that the best way to do this is to take these little steps with them together, first.  Then, over time, gradually let them take the risks without you being nearby.

Staged Risks

The keys to engaging in this process in a way that will not only benefit your children, but allay your own anxiety. After all, if you don’t teach your children well, you will get sick over the huge anxiety that you will need to endure. The solution is to introduce risk in graduated phases.

It’s a basic and simple process. The first step in allowing your kids to engage in a “risky” activity is to identify what exactly the risks are. For instance if you fall off of the first step in a ladder, the fall isn’t so bad. If you fall off the fourth step it is worse. They will not want to fall off anything higher. They will not WANT to.  They have learned that risks have consequences.

That’s not going to happen, if you don’t allow your child to get on the ladder. It’s not going to happen when you are there to catch them. They need to experience the consequences. It needs to be visceral.

Once you’ve identified the risks of an activity, you can figure out how to mitigate them. It should be natural for most children.  You fall down from skating on the ice; you will feel bruised and maybe have some torn skin. Let it happen!

My children do not wear arm and knee pads when they go ice skating (though, neither do the other Chinese children either). Let them fall down. Let them learn what happens and the consequences of it.

Falling down is an important part of growing up. Do not coddle and deprive. They must experience the benefits and risks together.

History

Know your history.

Up through the early 20th century, children, even very young ones, worked. They got up early in the morning and did their chores.  They washed up and trudged off to work. Often they worked 12 hours a day in the mines and the factories. They hawked newspapers on grimy street corners, or like my father, shined shoes in front of businesses downtown.

The reader should not misunderstand. There’s nothing really romantic about such child labor. They were not learning. They were not engaged in play. They were doing what they needed to do to survive. They did what they had to do. It was dangerous.

It was dangerous, and yet they survived.

Imagine that!

Consider the youth of the past. When he was seventeen, Jack London (remember him? He wrote the book “The Call of the Wild”.) Signed on to sail with a gaff-rigged schooner bound for seal hunting in the icy Bering Sea. I dare say that if a child did that today, the parents would be locked up in jail. Imagine that! Not even old enough to shave. He walks down to a port, talks to the ship’s mate and gets a job bound for icy North! What balls! Yet those types of things are what build character and makes a parent proud.

Gaff Rigged schooner
Jack London, with his belongings in a satchel walked to the bay and got a job on a gaff-rigged schooner bound for points unknown. He shook hands with the master and signed on. He just did it. What moxie! That is what self-reliance is all about.

This was not someone who grew up around boats. This was not someone who’s father was a fisherman, and who’s classmates all knew how to sail. No. Not in the least. This young man knew absolutely nothing. He knew positively zero. Yet, he knew what he wanted to do. So one day, he packed his bags and left and did it.

It sure beats getting a trophy for coming in 10th place in a sack race.

When he was thirteen, Andrew Jackson (Remember him? He was a President, don’t you know?) served as a courier for American militias fighting in the Revolutionary War. He was thirteen years old. Yet here he was going back and forth between battles and regional headquarters. He carried messages, and if he was ever caught, he would have been tortured and killed. Yet, he did so. At the tender age of thirteen.

Aim small, Miss small.
Here’s a scene from the movie “The patriot” that stunned many of the liberals in the audiences that watched it. They were surprised that small boys would be able to shoot and handle firearms. People, this is a natural rite of passage for young men. It is only recently that r-survivalist strategy has been adopted by the United States government. Boys are not girls. Treat them as the genetically programed humans that they are. Aim small, miss small.

Do you allow your thirteen year old to ride a bicycle unsupervised?

When he was twelve, Louis Zamperini left home to spend the summer living on an Indian reservation and running around in the mountains.  He lived in a wood cabin with a friend the same age and killed his own dinner each night with a rifle.

Louis Silvie "Louie" Zamperini (January 26, 1917 – July 2, 2014) was a US prisoner of war survivor in World War II, a Christian evangelist and an Olympic distance runner. 

Zamperini took up running in high school and qualified for the US in the 5000m race for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He finished 8th in the event. 

In 1941 he was commissioned into the United States Army Air Forces as a Lieutenant. He served as a bombardier in B-24 Liberators in the Pacific. On a search and rescue mission, mechanical difficulties forced Zamperini's plane to crash in the ocean. 

Survive a plane crash
Louis Zamperini crashed in the South Pacific. he survived, but was captured by brutal Japanese forces. He survived the crash, and then he survived his imprisonment. He would have never been able to do so, were he coddled as a child and told not to take risks.

After drifting at sea for 46–47 days (island spotted on the 46th, and arrived on 47th) he landed on the Japanese occupied Marshall Islands and was captured. He was taken to a prison camp in Japan where he was tortured. 

Following the war he initially struggled to overcome his ordeal. Later he became a Christian Evangelist with a strong belief in forgiveness. Zamperini is the subject of two biographical films, the 2014 Unbroken and the 2015 Captured by Grace.

Can your twelve year old child do the same? Do you dare let them live alone in a cabin in the woods? Do you dare let them have and use a gun? Do they know how to survive in the wilds?

If these kids can sail the oceans, serve on the war-front, and live by themselves, then our kids can ride their bikes to school. Maybe, you the reader, disagree with me. Maybe you think that it is just fine to raise your children as “pussies”. After all, I have heard the arguments; it is the new progressive reality. The society has changed, and I am but an old dinosaur. Never the less…

Unfortunately, the landscapes of play and exercise for children have been both literally and metaphorically flattened, if they exist at all in the United States. As many as 40% of schools have either eliminated one or all of their recess periods, not simply to gain more classroom and testing time, but also because of liability concerns. For the same reason, climbing ropes and dodge ball games have been removed from gym class. Can the reader believe this? It’s true! The risk of someone getting hurt is too high; the risk of physical ineptitude doesn’t rate, even though it’s correlated with the risk of obesity.

To prevent my children from turning into emasculated serfs being harvested by the American elite, let me present some things that I permit my children to do…

Take a Train

I really don’t know why I personally think this is a big deal.  Yet, it is.  Every single child that I know, get really excited when they are told that they are going to take the train. There is something far different and exciting about a train.  Yes, I am aware about the excitement in taking an airplane ride for the first time.  Yet, a train is something more than that.  A train ride is special.

Locomotive
Look at this beauty. Observe the lines, the enormity of the great complex mechanical monster. Look at how small the workers look around it. Look at the environment. Absorb what it must have been like, the smells, the muggy air, and the hustle and bustle of the people on the platform in the early morning air.

From the point of view of a child, a train gives you the full (end) experience of travel. They can see what it is like. You buy a ticket, you ride in a seat, and you arrive in your destination. It is easy to understand. It is easy to conceptualize.

That isn’t so clear to a child when they fly. To a child, they have to wait in huge lines, often hours long, to pass through TSA. They have to sit on board, which at least in America is becoming more akin to herding cattle than it is to taking a trip.

Keep an eye on perspective. My father took a train to attend my nieces wedding in New York City. It had been nearly thirty years since he taken a train. His opinion? It was marvelous. They had wide and spacious seats. Plenty of legroom. They could read, play cards, and just nap. He loved it. His wife, enjoyed knitting and listening to the radio. It’s a different way of traveling.

If you, my dear reader, do not understand what I am discussing here then you obviously haven’t rode in a train lately.

Make a Fire

In China you can do just about anything, but finding a place in the woods to build a campfire is not all that easy.  However, it can be done.  Why is this important?  Because building a making a fire is a fundamental requirement of all children since the age of written history.

Young girls learned how to keep the hearths burning.  Not only to keep the household warm, but also to make sure that the food was prepared.

Young boys learned how to survive outside, far away from their home, and that included providing warmth and nourishment through cooking game that they caught.

In America, these are no longer considered important.  As there just isn’t any such thing as gender. Alternatively, societal roles, or the need to live “off the grid” and away from society. The all-knowing American police state will take care of you, don’t you know…

I strongly disagree with the progressive direction of the Obama Presidential mandates. While every other child is being groomed for slavery (or at least serfdom), my children will have the necessary skills to survive away from the American Progressive madness.

For me, I let them play with matches and light candles when they’re really young. Indeed they are pre-school age. This can be done in your house. Buy a set of candles. It might set you back a whole $1. Then, let them practice lighting it. Do it until they are bored. Then try it again and again. Soon, they will tire of it, and not want to play with fire any more.

When you ask them, they will say “Awww, not again!”.

They’ll learn quite a bit. They will learn that fire indeed burns and it hurts. However, with a flame so small, it won’t hurt too much if it glances their skin. When they get to a little older, let them build a fire all by themselves (still with your supervision, of course). A campfire is the best, but if you are in an urban environment, teach them by making candle experiments.

Candle Experimentation

You take an old can; put corrugated cardboard inside so that the spaces (holes) in the can face up.  Pack the cardboard in. I like to wrap them in a circular shape. Line the inner side (of the tin) and then add pieces until there just isn’t any room left. Then melt wax (very cheap) on a stove and pour it in the holes in the cardboard.

Let your child make this candle device. Then allow them to experiment with wax, with cardboard, with fire, with other discarded tins. The cost will be minimal, but if you allow them to do it in the safety of your supervision, it will be beneficial to them.

DIY wax candle kit
You can buy a DIY candle kit to start off with. You can get cardboard everywhere. You have scissors, and matches. Then all you need an open and airy place that is safe and secure. Then let the kids go to town.

Teach them by showing them. Then allow them to make their own.  For a campfire, gather the wood. Cut the branches. Build up tinder. Get it started burning. Children can learn this. Teach them at an early age.

Campfires

Campfires are great, and I just cannot imagine a childhood without one.

Campfire
Fire is a fundamental part of every human child’s life. We should teach and allow the child to explore this most important of elements. We need to take the time out of our day to help them to explore and learn. Let them smell the burning, hear the crackling embers, and enjoy the smoke and embers as they float upwards into the heavens.

Teach your children about how to make a fire. You gather wood. You gather tinder. You clean out a fire pit, and you surround it with rocks. You select the rocks carefully, so no “river rocks” are used. Then you arrange the wood, and start it by tinder. They can participate and help.  In no time, they will be starting the fire on their own.

Let them add sticks and wood to the fire. Let them learn how to make the fire hot, and see the benefits of the hot embers.

It need not only be about making the fire.  It can include such activities as cooking cut-up potatoes in aluminum-foil in the embers. (Easy to make and delicious.  Cut up a potato (after washing it), and an onion. Add salt and pepper and a pad of butter.  Wrap the entire thing in aluminum foil and place it in the embers and let it cook a spell.  It is delicious.)

campfire embers
One of my fondest memories is roasting hotdogs over a evening fire. We did this often as a child. This included such events as cub-scouts, school outings, and trips with my parents. Childhood needs to include campfires as a fundamental element of growing up.

It can include roasting marshmallows on a stick, or hotdogs until they are black and crunchy (the best kind).  My first roasted marshmallow occurred when I was six. It was before first grade. It can be earlier than that, but make sure that you supervise the youngster, as they do need training. Otherwise, they can burn their mouth, or fall into the fire. Yikes!

Fires are a great venue for bonding. It can include talking and telling stories, especially family lore, or hopes and dreams of the children.  You can be a great parent or uncle in these events. Don’t let them pass away. Don’t let them fade into obscurity simply because there is a new app in your cellphone.

By the way. I strongly urge all campfires to be a cellphone free zone.

make coffee on a campfire
Let your children see how easy it is to make tea or coffee on the campfire. Show them how it is done. You can also open up a can of pork and beans and teach them how to cook it on a fire in the embers (opened up) of course. Let them feel some independence, and let them do all the work. This is their experience, don’t hog it all up.

Let them participate in stories, or just allow them to stare into the burning embers and daydream. Let your child know the differences between wet wood, and dry wood.  Let them understand the differences between a pine and a hard wood.  Let them see the difference in making tinder, and how coal can make a fire much hotter. Let them learn what happens to a hotdog on a stick when you cook it deep down inside the hot embers of a fire, and what happens when you don’t.  Let them learn through experience.

I personally find it absolutely laughable that many American parents are so fearful that they will not allow their children to play with fire.  Certainly, no one wants the children to burn up a house or set a field on fire.  Yet, the knowledge of what a fire is, and how it can be controlled is an important learning exercise for children.

“If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling. At “the Land”, spontaneous fires are a frequent occurrence. The park is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager of the Land, describes her job as “loitering with intent.”

-The Land. The Land is an “adventure playground,” though it sounds a little too much like a amusement park. 

In the U.K., such playgrounds arose and became popular in the 1940s, as a result of the efforts of Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect and children’s advocate. 

Allen was disappointed by what she described in a documentary as “asphalt square” playgrounds with “a few pieces of mechanical equipment.” She wanted to design playgrounds with loose parts that kids could move around and manipulate, to create their own makeshift structures. 

But more important, she wanted to encourage a “free and permissive atmosphere” with as little adult supervision as possible. The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.

Although the play-workers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened they’d filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since it opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.)

Here’s the list of benefits for fire:

“It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around, to stare at, it can be a co-operative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to re-live our evolutionary past.”

The risks?

“Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win, because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own.”

-The Overprotected Kid

There is something primeval about fire, the smell of burning wood, and the weight of a metal lighter in your hand. (Disposable lighters are like paper cups of coffee; discardable and plain. To get the “full” experience, do it right.)

Teach them how to make a fire from tinder, and scraps.

Lighter
I personally believe that every father should buy their son a nice traditional lighter. make it memorable and let the son choose the style that best fit’s their personality. This is an important part of growing up.

Show them how to make a fire pit, chop wood, and select the best wood.  Let them know the difference between green-wood, soft-wood, and hard wood. Let them poke the fire and watch the sparks fly. Let them blow on the fire and watch the embers glow and grow.

Alternatives

One of the more memorable events in my life took place during my college years. I was out riding in the “boondocks” with a friend of mine (Sid Custer) in his pickup truck. We were having a great time, and we stopped in the middle of the dirt road for a smoke (not a cigarette) and pee. Neither of us had a lighter. So my friend siphoned some gas out of the tank, put it on a rag he scrounged out of the glove box, and used his pocketknife to create sparks, which quickly set the rag on fire.  We lit up, and continued our merry way. Yes. Men, need to be able to adapt to survive. They need to know, that in a pinch, they can “make do” and adapt.

I never forgot that event.

Later on during other stages of my life, I saw interesting improvisations that enabled people the ability to light up cigarettes. Here are some additional ways to start a fire.  I would suggest that the reader also make a point to their children that fire can be made easily and is not something to fear.

Teach them how to create fires on demand. Teach them how to control fires, and what to do, when a fire gets out of control.

  • Gum Wrapper Fire. This is a very easy method, and commonly used in prison. You take a pack of chewing gum. You remove the silver foil. Then you get a battery (any working battery, but I’ve seen type AA or AAA used effectively), and put the foil so that it touches both ends. Now the fire might start at any point along the foil, so you need to tear away some of the foil to make a narrow gap. That will focus the fire to start there. Make sure you have some tinder ready, as the fire will be short lived. It might last two to three seconds, tops.
  • Ramen Noodle Stove. Take a pack of Ramen noodles. (Remove it from the plastic wrapping.) Pour gasoline, kerosene or any other flammable liquid on the uncooked noodles. Put it on a brick, a rock or other safe surface. Then light carefully (making sure that no gasoline is on anyone’s hands or splashed on the ground nearby). It will act like a “fire starter log”. As such, it will burn for a good spell. Maybe 20 minutes to a half an hour. It makes a great kindling or fire starter, but is also a very good exercise to expose your children to.

All of the suggestions that I have provided here come with a level of danger.  There should be no doubt about that.  However, the point is that danger should be a friend and as the child grows, they can become more familiar with danger and best be able to tame it. You need to teach your children how to confront life, and not shy away from it in fear.

To quote an age-old Peruvian saying; “A life lived in fear is a life not worth living”.

Also quoted in the movie “Strictly Ballroom” (1992). Strictly Ballroom is a 1992 Australian romantic comedy film directed and co-written by Baz Luhrmann. If the reader is confused about why this quote is located here in this manuscript, and what it means in regards to raising children and exposing them to new ideas and skills, then you should watch the movie “Strictly Ballroom”.

Sail a boat

"There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. 

Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

- Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children's book by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932).

This might be a surprise to some readers. It need not be.

gaff rigged cutter
This is a nice photo of a gaff-rigged cutter. A cutter is a boat with a single mast. A gaff-rigged boat is one that has the mast broken into two sections; a top and a bottom. The top section has a smaller sail known as a top-sail. It is useful to get the smallest and tiniest breezes of wind on calm days.

Sailing introduces your child to art, beauty, nature, and teamwork.  You will find them wanting to help furl the sails.  You will find them steer the boat with pride.  You will watch with pride as they point out when the sails are luffing. There is something very freeing about sailing.  You glide along the water, it is almost like flying.  It is soft, quiet and peaceful.

Sails on larger vessels are typically left in place, while it is easier to remove sails from the rigs of smaller vessels. Furling a sail simply means to put the thing away after use. Sails are commonly folded and covered, or rolled into a tubular shape by an onboard mechanism.

In sailing, luffing refers to when a sailing vessel is steered far enough toward the direction of the wind ("windward"), or the sheet controlling a sail is eased so far past optimal trim, that airflow over the surfaces of the sail is disrupted and the sail begins to "flap" or "luff" (the luff of the sail is usually where this first becomes evident). This is not always done in error; for example, the sails will luff when the bow of the boat passes through the direction of the wind as the sailboat is tacked.

A sailboat can also be "luffed" slightly without completely de-powering the sails. Often this occurs on the point of sail known as close hauled, this is sometimes referred to as pinching or "feathering" and is sometimes done deliberately in order to make a more direct course toward an upwind destination (see: "beating to windward"), or to "de-power" a sail on a windy day to maintain control of the sailboat. "Luffing" can also be used to slow or stop a sailboat in a controlled manner. To offset luffing at the top of the sail one should move the sail "lead" forward until the point where the "telltales" break evenly.

In comparison, a household with young children is a noisy and clamorous affair.  There is always noise and contention.  Young children cry and demand.  Sugar and other children exacerbate this situation. However, on the ocean (or in a bay), there is none of this.  The children will calm down and start to fit into the routine and the rhythm of the boat.  Oh, they will get the “sea legs” soon enough.

“The sea hates a coward.”
-  Eugene O’Neill

If the parent is so inclined, they can help the child with sailing lessons.  In each and every case, the parent should make sure that the child knows the basics of swimming (not included in this list, as it is a MAJOR fundamental requirement for all of my children.  They learn how to swim early on.). When in the boat, all children wear life preservers, and all of them must know how to “turn a boat around” to rescue a person during a “man overboard” drill. Try it.  Your children would love it!

gaff-rigged schooner
Here we see a gaff-rigged schooner overtaking a cutter. A schooner is a vessel with two masts. The mast at the stern of the ship is the tallest. Therefore, the vessel has the largest sail area towards the stern of the ship.

Others have written about the beauty of sailing.  Consider Christopher Cross for example.

For those readers who have never sailed, I would seriously suggest that you take the opportunity to do so.  I am not talking about a little puddle boat, but a large sailing vessel with a decent beam and some real size.  It is achievable, as many boat owners offer rides in their sailboats for a very reasonable price as a way to make extra money.

For those of you who have, let me suggest that you invest in a simple boat rather than a new cellphone. In my household, tools and clothing that helps the children learn hold far greater value than what everyone else is doing. You, dear reader, should realize that your High School days are over. Those who have succeeded in life, we NOT the ones who were average and “went with the pack”. Do not allow that temptation to mold your child’s thought process.

Here’s some great links for the convinced and interested reader;

The joy of sailing
The joy of sailing on the Britannia. Everyone should have the opportunity to sail. Everyone should be able to enjoy their life on the water, with friends and companionship.

“There is a special moment in sailing after clearing a harbor and setting the sails, when you turn off the engine and feel the boat lean into the wind and silently pick up speed. In that single quiet moment, all the joys of sailing come to me in a rush: freedom from the work-a-day life ashore, the thrill of travel, the challenge of pitting myself against the forces of the sea.”

- Stephan G. Regulinski

Ride Your Bike Off a Ramp

This was something that I did when I was a kid, and something that horrified my mother. Never the less, I don’t know of anyone who ever died from it.

Bike ramp
A forest bicycle ramp. Obviously a person using this ramp should have some practice and experience first. I have had many friends who would ride their dirt-bikes (motorcycles) in the abandoned strip mines and forests of Western Pennsylvania who had been in accidents, some of which required hospitalization.

It’s a thrill and a brush with danger that is still possible in this too-sterile world. Building and riding off ramps will teach your kids some basic physics and even some construction skills. Let them be kids, for goodness sakes. Don’t end up like that joke-of-a-President Obama who rides a bicycle with helmet and protective padding. Good God!

But…

But… Let’s not leave it at that.  Riding a bike through the woods can be a great adventure.  I certainly enjoyed it as a kid growing up.  Today, in China, bike ride-share has taken the nation by storm, but these bikes are all for urban transport from one location to another.

That is not what I am writing about.

Instead I suggest aggressive bike adventures in the woods.  If you are an American, there is no reason why you can’t explore the old trails and country railroad access trails.  There is no reason why you can’t ride the deserted industrial sites and explore the “off the beaten” path adventures just waiting for there for you.  There is no reason why you can’t ride along long disused railroad tracks, ride up and down abandoned urban complexes, or explore old sections of cracked highway.

“beginning in 2011, Swanson Primary School in New Zealand submitted itself to a university experiment and agreed to suspend all playground rules, allowing the kids to run, climb trees, slide down a muddy hill, jump off swings, and play in a “loose-parts pit” that was like a mini adventure playground.

The teachers feared chaos, but in fact what they got was less naughtiness and bullying—because the kids were too busy and engaged to want to cause trouble, the principal said.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Which brings up another subject…

Explore an Abandoned Building

Ouch!  This is a painful admission. Abandoned sites are dangerous.  You can get hurt or more.  When I was five I walked on a rusty nail protruding from a board in an abandoned house near our place. I had to get some painful shots as a result.

Never the less, I explored many an abandoned building, and went in and out of local railroad tunnels throughout the Western Pennsylvania hills where I lived. I cannot say that I would promote my children doing so, but if I found out about it, I wouldn’t lambast them either. The key is preparation. The children need to know about the dangers before hand, and then with the basic tools and knowledge just let them explore a bit.

When I was in second grade I learned that if you jumped off the second floor of an abandoned building that your feet and legs would hurt.  I learned that old pipes had water, but the water was thick and red with rust.  I learned that nails were everywhere and if you weren’t careful you could step on one and need to go to the doctor and get an injection.  I learned that broken glass is everywhere in an old building and you could get hurt if your touched it.

urban exploration
There is a sub-culture called urban-exploration where young adults enter into abandoned structures for the purpose of photography and exploration. They do not deface, steal or vandalize. I see nothing wrong with this as long as they are careful and not breaking any laws. I would encourage your children to explore…

A good parent allows the child to learn.

A good parent will rather have the child experience a bruise or two rather than live a life in fear, or worse yet, walk straight into danger unawares. As a child, I was petrified of spiders, snakes, frogs, and bees. Over the years, through close contact, I have learned not to be fearful of these things. Let your child learn early. Equip them with the knowledge to live and survive in an often-unfriendly world.

Climb a Rope

Climbing is one of the crucial physical skills everyone should develop. In America, from what I gather, climbing a rope is something that is frowned upon. As is climbing stairs higher than four feet. Have you looked at what constitutes a playground these days?

Now, if schools won’t provide the opportunity for a little physical exercise, then parents ought to. I am way too old to climb, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t make the effort to show how it is done.

In the old days (about 100 years ago), every community had a playground.  These playgrounds consisted of “monkey bars”, swing sets, seesaws, and other simple outdoor childhood entertainments. Typically, they had sand at the bottom of the metal (and often concrete) structures to mitigate any cuts, scrapes or broken bones.  There was sand at the bottom of the monkey bars, sand at the bottom and end of the slides, and sand below the swing sets.

Monkeybars
Children playing on “monkey bars”. Now, pretty much banned throughout the USA by Democrat well-meaning busybodies.

This continued into my parents’ generation and mine as well.  However, over time, the playground equipment became more standardized and mass-produced.  By the time the 1980’s rolled around, there were small community organizations forming to make playgrounds “safer”, “better” and (perhaps) more “educational”.  These “improvements” resulted in making the playgrounds nice and safe and very boring.

Often centering around a “community activist”. This “activist” often had no source of financial income except what manifested as a result of litigation. Litigation was the fruit that justified their activism. Many “well intentioned” changes were just creative ways for an individual or group of individuals to make money without physical labor. Don’t like my opinion? Prove me wrong.

1900 style American playground
Old American playground around 1900. Only the strong survived recess, obviously.

For instance, slides became lower. Instead of two stories high during my parents’ generation, and one story high (8 feet) in my generation, they became four feet high. “Monkey Bars” became smaller and lower to the ground. Even seesaws and swings became smaller, or eliminated all together. These “improvements” were welcomed by all the protective parents in their respective communities, or at least by the most vocal ones.

There was only one problem.

The structures were boring and did not challenge the children.  They were instead only suitable for mentally retarded and handicapped children, infants under the age of two, and overweight mothers. My gosh! Children should be challenged while in a safe environment, not coddled until they become an adult.

Bubble wrap was intended for the protection of inanimate objects. Not for human beings. Protective attire is necessary for close combat, hazardous work, and working with tools. It should not be necessary for transportation, play or dining.

My experience, in life, has been that once the father leaves (dies or simply abandons the household); the mother tends to clutch on to the child. She becomes hyper protective. If the child is unable to go out on their own, this terrible behavior (and self-serving behavior) by the mother completely messes up the child. They become “retarded” in normal development.

Those of you readers who have accomplished anything know exactly what I speak of.

I strongly believe that children, like cats and puppies, should be encouraged to climb, fight, sing, dance, and do other tasks that involve a moderate level of risk.  It is better to climb in a park near your house than on a mountain side hours from a nearby hospital.

Children are permitted to be safe while playing in Chinese playgrounds.
All Chinese playgrounds are supervised to allow the children to play in safety.

I was reminded of this by an event in a local park here in China. There were some children being taught repelling and climbing skills by a small group of instructors.  It turns out that many malls and store complexes in China have these huge climbing complexes of ropes, and netting that children are permitted to go “nuts” over.

They are very popular here, and are well maintained and monitored. They also offer excursions in local parks.  I strongly advise all parents to utilize this resource.

Chinese mall playground
Many Chinese malls have enormous gym arrangements that are supervised for safety. The children can climb and explore. They can climb rope ladders often going up seven or eight stories. They can rappel down ropes and swing from tires hanging by a rope.

These arrangements are a multi-colored mixtures of beams, ropes, hoops, ladders, bars, and free hanging containers. The maze towers upward. Often they are five or six stories high. There is one in GuoMao in the LouHu section of ShenZhen that towers seven stories high. There is one in the JiDa section of ZhuHai that goes all the way up to the fifth floor.

You can watch the children high up, five stories above, walking a balance beam. The only thing saving them is a tethered harness so if they lose their footing, they will not fall (and die). I have seen many a petrified first and second grader carefully exploring this maze of rope and bars. Too bad American parents are too fearful to expose their children to adventure.

Safety for children
In China, safety is always a concern. No one can enter these areas without supervision and protection. For this supervision, there is a small fee that needs to be paid.

The Chinese provide their children with a fine place to climb and explore.  Sure there is an element of risk, but there are trained instructors and safety harnesses and helmets provided. Compare that to a modern American playgound.  There isn’t any risk.  There isn’t any opportunity to explore and have adventure.  It is typically in one or two colors, it consists of a few fences and railings, and some stairs to climb up.  It is also very safe.  It is the opposite of what is available in China.

American playgrounds are perfect for handicapped children and imbeciles. American playgrounds are safe at the expense of play.
Safe American playground is suitable for the most incompetent children and retarded idiots that America can produce.

American playgrounds are designed for idiots. They are ridiculously safe. Soon, someone will complain (I am sure a SJW looking for a financial award) about rain, and demanding that they be shaded and protected from the weather. Maybe the metal components are too hard, and so they will now need to be completely padded, and let’s add a paid child monitor to the mix (paid for with your tax dollars).

Notice that there are no swings, seesaws, slides, monkey bars or merry go-rounds. Too dangerous the SWJ’s (busybodies) state.

Use a Pocket Knife

I never gave any consideration to the importance of a pocket knife. I was just something that I thought all boys had and used. That is, until I saw a Chinese boy looking at them in the (underground Zhuhai) mall…

Learning to use a pocket knife with grandfather
Learning to use a pocket knife with grandpa. What a great opportunity to bond with your children, or grand children, or even great-great grand children. You go out. You sit on the porch. You pick up a twig or stick, and you start carving away.

Shortly afterwards, I read an article titled “The Complete guide to Pocket Knives”. That served as my inspiration, and cracked up a wallet just a little bit…

There’s something manly about your first pocket knife.  It doesn’t have to have 100 blades and a corkscrew, but it should have at least two different blades and maybe a file.

My (second) pocket knife was a red Swiss Army knife with maybe five different blade combinations including a can opener, and rasp. It replaced my boy scout knife that I had, as well as just about every other boy in my school, one Christmas.  It was a gift from my father.

“One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.

Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”

-The Fragile Generation

What? A boy cannot cut up wood? What planet ware we on? And the Chicago police promptly relied him of the tools and escorted him to the safety of his parents? This is friggin’ unbelievable!

“Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. “It’s a safety issue,” explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.”

-The Fragile Generation

Playing on the grass is against safety regulations!

Let me repeat as an underline; “Playing on the grass is against safety regulations.”

This is America.

“And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: “Your child’s old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?”

Absolutely not, the magazine averred: “Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time.” After all, “you want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

-The Fragile Generation

By all means, protect the child’s feelings…(!)

“The principle here is simple: This generation of kids must be protected like none other. They can’t use tools, they can’t play on grass, and they certainly can’t be expected to work through a spat with a friend.

And this, it could be argued, is why we have “safe spaces” on college campuses and millennial's missing adult milestones today. We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe—and they believed us.“

-The Fragile Generation

Ah, it’s a generation of wusses. But, my children will not be part of it. They are taught how to [1] measure the unknown, [2] put aside fears, and [3] utilize tools to accomplish their goals.

Pocket knives are great tools, and all children, boys and girls should learn to use one.  Nothing is better than using it to cut up an apple, or pear.  Use it to cut away branches to make a sling-shot, or make a fine walking stick (a teenage necessity).

If you give your child a knife with different blades, please remember to show them how each blade is used.  Do not simply expect them to understand it by osmosis. (Like my father did.) Show them the screw driver, and the can-opener blade, and let them open a can or two of pork and beans and let it cook on a campfire once opened. The corkscrew won’t come in handy until they are in college.. heh, heh.

Knives have many uses.
Knives have many benefits. This is an important point. Having a knife, being able to explore without fear, making a fire, and being able to climb a rope are things that all of our distant relatives did when they were children. These were things that they were allowed and permitted to do in a Free Society. Today, America is NOT a free society. It is a prison, increasingly populated with people and children bread to act and behave as cattle-serfs. I refuse to let my children become cattle for the oligarchy. Moo.

This being stated, I do not advise knives being brought into American schools.  The days of cub scouts having a pocket knife and bringing it into class is long, long over. Incidentally, a cub-scout pocket knife would be an ideal knife for your child int his regard. I had one when I was a boy. I had it for a while until it was replaced by a red (maybe fake) Swiss army knife.

“As a kid in the 1970’s, almost every boy carried a pocket knife. It wasn’t a weapon or for showing off, unless it was new. Sometimes you had to actually cut something and scissors just wouldn’t do.

When you were bored, you’d whittle a stick or a piece of wood with it. I have a simple walking stick carved by my great grandfather, and I recall the mystique of watching and helping as he sharpened his knife. In my keepsake box, I have a pocket knife of my father and grandfather. Interestingly, along with a Confederate $5 bank note, Lincoln had one in his pocket the night he was shot.”

-CR Smyth

Get a good knife.

You do not need to get the biggest, or the most elaborate knife. A simple knife is the best thing. make sure that it is rugged. Children are difficult on things. Make sure that it has two to three blades that the child can master. Make sure that it fits well in his hand, and that it is beautiful enough so that he will want to carry it around with him.

Explore a Construction Site

China is filled with construction sites. While I don’t advocate kids climbing about on the 60th floor of some new skyscraper, many build sites offer great opportunity for exploration and adventure.  That is fun.  Moreover, dear reader, fun and play is HOW children learn.

While I was growing up, the subdivision I lived in was still under construction, so there were always plenty of partially-built houses to explore. After the construction workers left for the day, my boyhood pals and I would cruise down the street on our bikes to check out their work and poke around the skeletal structures rising from the muddy lots. The ones that were the most fun to explore were the two-story houses. You’d have to climb up the railing-less, unfinished stairs and when you got to the top, you were able to walk to the edge of the second story’s framing and throw stuff down on your buds. What great fun!

One of the first things I learned, I was in second grade at the time, was that if you jumped from the second floor to the ground, it hurt! Ouch!

In America today, kids are not permitted “free range” play. They are constantly under observation and supervision. They are coddled and are not given the opportunity to learn some “hard knocks”. I consider this a very troubling situation, and I do not allow my children to be coddled in this way. It wasn’t always  this way.  Children used to be permitted to play.

Here is a great write up on why public playgrounds became so sterile;

“In 1978, a toddler named Frank Nelson made his way to the top of a 12-foot slide in Hamlin Park in Chicago, with his mother, Debra, a few steps behind him. The structure, installed three years earlier, was known as a “tornado slide” because it twisted on the way down, but the boy never made it that far. He fell through the gap between the handrail and the steps and landed on his head on the asphalt.

A year later, his parents sued the Chicago Park District and the two companies that had manufactured and installed the slide. Frank had fractured his skull in the fall and suffered permanent brain damage. He was paralyzed on his left side and had speech and vision problems. His attorneys noted that he was forced to wear a helmet all the time to protect his fragile skull.

The Nelsons’ was one of a number of lawsuits of that era that fueled a backlash against potentially dangerous playground equipment.

Theodora Briggs Sweeney, a consumer advocate and safety consultant from John Carroll University, near Cleveland, testified at dozens of trials and became a public crusader for playground reform. “The name of the playground game will continue to be Russian roulette, with the child as unsuspecting victim,” Sweeney wrote in a 1979 paper published in Pediatrics. She was concerned about many things—the heights of slides, the space between railings, the danger of loose S-shaped hooks holding parts together—but what she worried about most was asphalt and dirt. In her paper, Sweeney declared that lab simulations showed children could die from a fall of as little as a foot if their head hit asphalt, or three feet if their head hit dirt.

A federal-government report published around that time found that tens of thousands of children were turning up in the emergency room each year because of playground accidents.

As a result, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1981 published the first “Handbook for Public Playground Safety,” a short set of general guidelines—the word guidelines was in bold, to distinguish the contents from requirements—that should govern the equipment. For example, no component of any equipment should form angles or openings that could trap any part of a child’s body, especially the head.

To turn up the pressure, Sweeney and a fellow consultant on playground safety, Joe Frost, began cataloguing the horrors that befell children at playgrounds.

Between them, they had testified in almost 200 cases and could detail gruesome specifics—several kids who had gotten their heads trapped or crushed by merry-go-rounds; one who was hanged by a jump rope attached to a deck railing; one who was killed by a motorcycle that crashed into an unfenced playground; one who fell while playing football on rocky ground. In a paper they wrote together, Sweeney and Frost called for “immediate inspection” of all equipment that had been installed before 1981, and the removal of anything faulty. They also called for playgrounds nationwide to incorporate rubber flooring in crucial areas.

In January 1985, the Chicago Park District settled the suit with the Nelsons. Frank Nelson was guaranteed a minimum of $9.5 million. Maurice Thominet, the chief engineer for the Park District, told the Chicago Tribune that the city would have to “take a cold, hard look at all of our equipment” and likely remove all the tornado slides and some other structures. At the time, a reader wrote to the paper:

“Do accidents happen anymore? … Can a mother take the risk of taking her young child up to the top of a tornado slide, with every good intention, and have an accident? Who is responsible for a child in a park, the park district or the parent? … Swings hit 1-year-old children in the head, I’m sure with dire consequences in some instances. Do we eliminate swings?”

But these proved to be musings from a dying age. Around the time the Nelson settlement became public, park departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet.

In anticipation of lawsuits, insurance premiums skyrocketed.

As the Tribune reader had intuited, the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.

Over the years, the official consumer-product handbook has gone through several revisions; it is now supplemented by a set of technical guidelines for manufacturers. More and more, the standards are set by engineers and technical experts and lawyers, with little meaningful input from “people who know anything about children’s play,” says William Weisz, a design consultant who has sat on several committees overseeing changes to the guidelines.

The handbook includes specific prescriptions for the exact heights, slopes, and other angles of nearly every piece of equipment. Rubber flooring or wood chips are virtually required; grass and dirt are “not considered protective surfacing because wear and environmental factors can reduce their shock absorbing effectiveness.”

“Reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development,” says Joe Frost, an influential safety crusader.

It is no longer easy to find a playground that has an element of surprise, no matter how far you travel. Kids can find the same slides at the same heights and angles as the ones in their own neighborhood, with many of the same accessories.

I live in Washington, D.C., near a section of Rock Creek Park, and during my first year in the neighborhood, a remote corner of the park dead-ended into what our neighbors called the forgotten playground. The slide had wooden steps, and was at such a steep angle that kids had to practice controlling their speed so they wouldn’t land too hard on the dirt. More glorious, a freestanding tree house perched about 12 feet off the ground, where the neighborhood kids would gather and sort themselves into the pack hierarchies I remember from my childhood—little kids on the ground “cooking” while the bigger kids dominated the high shelter.

But in 2003, nearly a year after I moved in, the park service tore down the tree house and replaced all the old equipment with a prefab playground set on rubber flooring. Now the playground can hold only a toddler’s attention, and not for very long. The kids seem to spend most of their time in the sandbox; maybe they like it because the neighbors have turned it into a mini adventure playground, dropping off an odd mixing spoon or colander or broken-down toy car.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Well-wishing “do gooders” “busy-bodies” with a profit angle and political influence ruined the educational benefits of pay for nearly two generations of American children.

There is not too much that I can do about it, except for what I do with my children. And, my dear reader, kindly note that they are permitted to play in a fundamentally non-sterile environment.

Shoot a Slingshot

In a time not too long ago, the archetypal boy had a handmade slingshot dangling from the back of his pocket. Today, most boys have never touched one. Which is a shame because slingshots can provide hours of fun and they’re a great way to introduce firearm safety to your young ones (e.g., only point at what you plan on hitting). Yes, you could just buy your kid a fancy manufactured slingshot on Amazon, but how about exposing them to even more positive danger by letting them make their own? They’ll learn how to handle a saw safely and get to practice some knife wielding skills to boot.

However, depending where you live, possession of a slingshot might be problematic.

Some busybody might call the ATF and insist that your child’s slingshot meets the all the regulations for a projectile weapon, such as barrel length, whether or not it has a “bump stock”, magazine size, and whether or not it appear paramilitary.

If you live in in an area where they shut down lemonade stands run by five year olds, then you might want to reconsider the activities that you permit your child to participate in.  If you live in the USA, I would suggest moving to a place where there are not such idiotic regulations, like Communist China or Thailand. Here you can do anything you want within reason.

Read about this sad state of affairs;

Today, americans can be arrested for the slightest cause. America is no longer free. Policemen and cops will arrest anyone, even children.
Here is an American police officer frisking a child on the television show “Cops” showing how important it is for Americans to obey the law.

This is Part 1 of a Two Part Post

This is part one of a two part post. You can go to the other post HERE. This post is rather long. I have exceeded the “industry norm” (Google SEO advisement) by a significant word count. As is my prerogative. You can visit the rest of this post HERE.

Conclusions, “Take Aways” and FAQ can be found on the second post.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 23AUG18.
  2. SEO review 23AUG18.
  3. Published 23AUG18.

What I miss from my original World-Line.

Here is a really short post.

Here are some things that I miss from my original world-line before I got all tangled up in MAJestic. It is in no particular order. It is all meaningless to the reader anyways. Here’s just some quick notes.

If you want to lecture me on the belief that the MWI is unproven, please don’t waste your time. If you only knew 10% of what I experienced, you would think differently. Anyways, with all that in mind, so here goes…

  • Sentences had two spaces after the period. Here on this world-line all the sentences look all bunched together and cluttered. I was taught that there was two spaces after every period and one space after a comma. It might seem like a little thing, but it drives me absolutely bonkers!
  • Songs are somewhat different. For instance, the song by Queen “We are the Champions” ended with “…of the world”. However on this world-line it doesn’t end that way. Which makes it really difficult to reconcile my memories when I was at a kegger in my Senior Year, and I was singing the song with my buddies. For us, the highlight of the song was “Of the World”, and we would always sing it loudly and beat our chests with our fists. Ha. I guess this world-line is “attitude lite”.
  • Breakfast egg and toast meal served with pork and beans. Here on this world line it is served with potatoes. Friggin’ potatoes!

Real breakfast.
I was raised with full egg breakfasts with toast and pork and beans. Today all through the states breakfasts are served with hash browns. Even in Howard Johnson’s of all places!

  • Howard Johnson Automats. On this world line, you have McDonald’s and other similar fast food restaurants. These are the popular places to go to get food fast. Now, my original world-line actually had restaurants too, maybe even had a McDonald’s as well. The closest thing that I remember to a McDonald’s was a “Big Boy”. However, by far, the most common way of getting “fast food” was by using an automat. It was faster. We ate better and had a better selection of food to choose from.

Automat
On my original world-line, automats were the preferred way of eating “fast” lunches. It was preferred over a fast food burger. There were restaurants that served fast food, but they were no where as popular as they are on this world-line.

  • Brands are slightly different. For instance, I ate Jiffy peanut butter and used White-Out. Not  “Jif peanut butter” and “Wite-out”. Many other brands have minor changes to their appearance. Such as the cheese that I used to eat with my father. It came in a flat circular box and had maybe eight triangular sections of cheese, each individually wrapped. Back then, the cow on the logo had a nose ring, but in this world-line the nose ring is missing. Not a biggie, but can make you question your sanity if you didn’t know better. I guess the biggest change is that on my parent world-line we drank Moxie more than Coke and Pepsi. Today, I don’t even know if Moxie exists on this world-line.
  • Dates are different. Here, if you want to say the 24th of June, 2018 you would write it as 6-24-2018. However, on my original world-line we wrote it as 24-6-2018. Military dates are the same.
  • Geopolitical Landscape is Different. In my original world-line the United States administered Panama as a US territory. After I joined MAJestic, not only was it was a separate nation, but we actually fought a war there and gave the Panama Canal to the Chinese to administer!
  • Traffic Lights are now backwards. Here, in this world-line, the colors of the traffic lights are red, yellow, and green (top to bottom). However, the traffic lights were different as being green, yellow, red (top to bottom). Again, it’s a curious difference, and in the big picture, quite meaningless.
  • There were more sidewalks. For some reason, one that I cannot reconcile, it just seems that the United States is designed for people in cars. It isn’t designed for people to walk. Sure there are older communities in Boston and Chicago that have sidewalks, but many of the newer construction projects view sidewalks as an expensive afterthought. New homes have lawns without sidewalks. On my world-line this situation would never exist. Even small towns had sidewalks.
  • Fondue was much more popular. While I will admit that fondue was never a staple of the American diet, we did eat it often enough. I would say that we had it maybe once a month. On this world-line, apparently it is a once in a decade occurrence.
  • Cats had wings. I know that this sounds really strange, but there was a high percentage of cats with wings. Maybe one in five cats had this feature. It really wasn’t feathered wings, but rather a big flap of skin behind the forearms covered in hair. The cats would climb up in a tree and glide down to get their prey. Here, on this world-line it is not at all common. You see an occasional sighting and Wikipedia states that this is “hogwash”, that it is “just” matted hair.

Winged Cat
WINGED PUSS GETS IN A FLAP. This mischievous cat has obviously spent too much time chasing birds . Ha! he’s grown a pair of furry wings! The one-year-old tom sprouted two flaps on his back after being hassled by females during a spell of hot weather in the village of Luzhou, in China’s Sichuan Province. Animal experts say the harmless growths are down to gene mutation. (ZN/WN) Credit: (Mandatory): WENN

  • Tuna Fish Sandwiches are different. We used to have tuna fish sandwiches made of tuna, mayonnaise, and pineapple. Today it is typically made the same way only the pineapple has been replaced with celery. In a like way, potato salad also had pineapple in it. On this world-line pineapple doesn’t seem to be added to that many dishes, though it actually is added to pizza of all things!

There is nothing really earth-shattering in any of this. World-line travel and / or personal migration is a natural occurrence. We migrate our individual realities though our thoughts. We share the template from which our realities are derived from. World-line travel enables us to alter that template.

The larger the deviance from your fated reality, the greater the divergence in your soul’s quantum organization. It’s all planned towards optimization. It’s planned so that our individual souls can advance and better themselves.

So we’ve got to be careful.

Now, for the sentience objectives to be realized, we have to have a dimensional anchoring effect that sets us in a reality where potatoes are served with breakfasts instead of baked beans. I know that it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Well, here you are. Though. It’s the “butterfly effect” for certain.

There is a saying in China. “There are many different ways to go to Beijing.” Perhaps living on a world-line with pineapple on pizza will have the same objectives as a different world-line with different (other) changes. Maybe this world-line is the closest anchored line to achieve our mutually defined objectives.

Anyways, world-line travel is not about entering and leaving other realities for purposes of wonderment and adventure. It is about stability and optimizing the configuration of our soul. Else, we risk discordant alignments and all kind of nightmarish problems. Good thing we have our extraterrestrial benefactors looking out for us. Eh?

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...

How to tell -2

Top Secrets

Sales Pitch

Feducial Training

Implantation

Probe Calibration - 1

Probe Calibration - 2

Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Gorilla Cage in the Basement

Sometimes we are exposed to dark secrets when we are little. It isn’t until we are much older when we realize what we were exposed to. Ah. When I was a young boy, perhaps five or six years old, I used to play around in our neighborhood. There is nothing strange about that. All the children did it…

As a Young Boy

Children play. That is how they learn. At that time, childhood was spent either outside alone in “free ranging” play or in front of the television set.

Television was big, but still had a lot of room to grow. We would watch “Diver Dan”, and “Hoody Doody”, “Soopy Sales” while our parents were busy. At night we would watch “Gilligan’s Island”, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The Rat Patrol” and “Lassie”. This was at a time during my early formative years. Naturally, our television was black and white.

At that time I lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. If there is one thing that I can say about it is this; it was quite different from what it is now. At that time, it looked a little like “Mayberry R.F.D”. Our neighborhood was all Caucasian. My school mates were mostly Catholic, and the immigrant children that I played with came from Germany, Poland and France. Today, well it looks quite different indeed.

Where we lived was a community of duplex apartments that catered to the rising middle class. Our parents, in the early Beatle years (early 1960’s), let us play outside and be children. There was none of that contemporaneous perpetual observation and structured play. We were free to roam and engage in unstructured play.

Which, of course, was something that we most certainly did.

The Abandoned Building Next Door

Adjacent to our housing complex was an abandoned flower garden. It was wedged between our housing complex and a (then new) school complex known as the Kennedy Center. There, we would play our childhood games, and explore the ruins. We would play “Army” and shoot at each other with plastic guns. We all had snap-cap pistols that resembled six-shooters. We would wear them in a holster that draped around our waist. We also had various larger toy arms. The Thompson tommy-gun was popular, as was a M1 carbine, and my favorite was the M14 with action sound. If we didn’t have our toy guns with us, we would cut down some branches with our cub scout knives and pretend that they were guns instead.

There, we would hunt each other in the brambles, bushes and ambush others from the tree tops. It was a time of running around on broken glass and exposed nails. In fact, I even ended up stepping on a protruding nail and had to get a tetanus shot as a result. Yeah, I ended up crying from the pain. It went right up through the sole of my shoe and was solidly lodged in my foot. Never the less, as a five or six year old, we loved all the debris and ruin. It was one huge playground to us.

The flower garden was more than just a small patch of overgrown weeds. It had, at one time, been a small working farm. On the property was a small craftsman-style bungalow, and behind it were rows and rows of straight cement paths that were used to plant roses and other flowers that were sold in the bungalow office. The flowers were still there. They were a colorful mess of tangled brambles, weeds, and odd flowers. It was obvious, even to us children, that the property was used to grow and sell flowers. In the decaying garage were stacks of clay earthenware flower pots (covered in green moss), bags of mulch (or something equivalent) and mechanical implements used in the tending of shrubs and flowers. We would climb in and out of the broken windows and even push ourselves up onto the roof. Occasionally we would jump down to the ground, and it hurt!

Pretty ballsy for a five year old, eh?

As a ruin, the structure was pretty typical. Thick rusty red water poured out of the faucets when you opened them up. The windows were all broken. The front door was open and the outer screen door was just a wooden frame with tattered collapsed rusty screening. The front lawn was overgrown and to us kids, the grass was as high as our waists. In and buried within the grass were bits of broken everything.

The second floor in the bungalow consisted of two rooms, and both were flooded with paper and unopened letters. That was it. It was a fully empty area filled with bags of unopened mail. As kids we would open the letters to see what was inside. They were just bills and boring letters. There just wasn’t anything exciting there.

The first floor consisted of a rear kitchen painted yellow with white trim, with windows over the sink that overlooked the rear gardens. The ancient white refrigerator was outside lying on its’ side. It was of the antique type with condenser coils on the top. It lay there like some kind of beached whale. The entry rooms were filled with piles of debris which seemed to be mostly display cabinets and a handful of chairs. The bathroom was outside. It was an outhouse with two toilet “holes” that were side by side. You know, for family or close friend use. On the floor were old ears of corn. Needless to say, we didn’t play in that.

The most interesting feature of this bungalow was its basement.

The Basement

Off from the kitchen was a nondescript door. It opened up to a staircase going down into darkness. Alongside the walls of the steps were old rusty cans of paint, dusty and cobweb covered mops, wires wrapped on nails, and boxes of rusty nails. The stairs plunged into pitch black darkness.

When we were able to brave the darkness and go downstairs, the stairs opened up to a landing in a large single room. It was a big open room made of cement cinderblocks. Light illuminated the dirty floor through low and dusty rectangular windows set at the sides of the cellar. There really wasn’t anything particularly interesting about the place, as it was filled with rubbish and rusty metal shelving containing empty wooden boxes, cans and empty glass bottles. There were piles of clutter. Even to us children, the clutter was dirty and uninteresting.

The clutter contained such things as cheap paintings of clowns (Why?), and oils of cats with enormous big sad eyes. There just wasn’t any toys of interest there. The closest thing was a speckled finish set of bongo drums, minus the drum covers. Even as a young boy, I didn’t want to touch the greasy filthy rubbish. It was a place where rats, mice and black widow spiders lived. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Looking around, we soon discovered that set into the wall was a hidden door. The door was made out of matching cinderblocks. It rested on a rusty frame that pivoted outwards, and was stuck and frozen in place. When closed, it was obvious that you wouldn’t be able to see that there was a concealed door at all. However, now, we could easily see the door as it was stuck in the open position and held in place with a dirt floor.  The door did not have an obvious handle. It looked like it could swing open and be bolted in place with a heavy rusted steel bar.

What was most interesting to us was what lay behind that hidden door.

The Gorilla Cage

For set in the exact middle of the room was a low cage. It too had a door that was frozen in the open position. The lower parts of the cage were all buried in the dirt of the floor. The bars were quite thick and were maybe ¾ inch thick. The top also had bars. It stood about five feet high, large animal size, and was maybe 5 feet by 5 feet square.

The door was set in the middle of one side. A rusty chain with a rusty padlock was affixed to the front door above an old keyhole lock.

We called it “the gorilla cage”.

It was empty. The floor of the basement had somehow flooded at some point in time and a layer of dirt covered everything.

We would play around this cage as children.  We would take turns standing inside of the cage, and play “tag” inside the building. Like the other room, this room also had windows, but they covered with slats. The light would shine through the broken slats and fall flat upon to the dusty floor. It would give the dirty and dingy basement a medieval feel.

I know nothing about the cage, or why it was there. As such, the cage is just a dusty mystery that has been forgotten over the years.

Analysis

It wasn’t until decades later that I began to ponder the cage. Was it where a gorilla was kept? No, most certainly not. That was just a name coined by our childhood friends. As I grew older I began to wonder about that cage. What was it doing within a secret room? Indeed, why was there a secret room under a flower garden in the first place? What was its history?

Could if have been used to illegally import banned animals? No, not very likely. In the United States in the 1950’s and 1960’s there really wasn’t much in terms on legal restrictions on the importation of animals of any kind.

Perhaps the owners of the house had a pet lion, or tiger. Perhaps that was where they kept it. They would keep it down there and play with it from time to time. Maybe they actually had a pet gorilla, or maybe a monkey that they would take out with an organ grinder music box and have the monkey collect change from passers’ by. Perhaps they used the cage as some kind of safe. The bars were strong and thick. They were the bars used to hold convicts, not casual animals in a pet store. They obviously kept it well locked. After all, it had both a locked chain and a keyhole lock on it.

It has remained a mystery to me.

Today it is a long forgotten history. In fact, if it wasn’t for this post, this history would have ended when the building was torn down in 1964. As such, it is a personal curiosity. It is something that I experienced and offers yet another mystery of the past that will never be solved.

I tend to believe that the world is filled with such mysteries and secrets. Many times curious and strange events and actions are kept secret from others. The secrets remain with the observers, and when the die the histories behind those secrets die with them. This is but one small example of one such secret.

What do you think?

Some people have suggested that this might have been used for nefarious purposes in the past. Others suggest that maybe it was used to hold the most valuable roses and flowers, or the secrets to their growth, within that locked cage. Still others think that it was nothing of consequence, just a set of bars that just looked like a cage.

I don’t know what to think. Anyone have any ideas?

Take Aways

  • Many children can play in abandoned buildings and not die.
  • Someone, at some time, played bongo drums under a flower garden.
  • People used to think that paintings of clowns were attractive decorations.
  • Discoveries made as a child can develop into mysteries as we age.
  • There are things that we will never know about, and can only speculate on.
  • It is mysteries like this that fuel our imaginations.

RFH

How about a Request For Help? I tire of busybodies and statists who poke fun at the ideas and theories of others. They offer no constructive dialog. Rather they just make fun, ridicule, and then scurry under a rock.

I use this forum as a way to disseminate some of the things that I learned and experienced. I use it to tell stories so that others can learn and grow from my experiences. So I have to ask, what are you (the reader’s) experiences? Are they similar to this? Have you also found paintings of clowns in long forgotten basements? Have you ever played the bongos? Maybe you have recited poems while playing the bongos? What stories do you have? Don’t let them die when you pass on. Share them, we all are listening.

FAQ

Q: Can children play in abandoned buildings?
A: Yes, they can, but caution is strenuously advised. A parent certainly needs to teach the child how to behave and what to watch out for prior to any excursion.

Q: What is a cage doing in the basement?
A: That is the big mystery.

Q: Can the cage hold people?
A: Yes. Anyone locked in the cage would have a very difficult time getting out.

Q: Can people have a gorilla as a pet?
A: Not in the United States today. Pets and animals are regulated for personal use.

Q: Can you have a pet monkey?
A: Sure. You will need to check with the local ordinances in your city or town.

  • Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

    Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

    Link
    Link
    Link
    Tomatos
    Link
    Mad scientist
    Gorilla Cage in the basement
    Link
    Pleasures
    Work in the 1960's
    School in the 1970s
    Cat Heaven
    Corporate life
    Corporate life - part 2
    Build up your life
    Grow and play - 1
    Grow and play - 2
    Asshole
    Baby's got back
    Link
    A womanly vanity
    The Warning Signs
    SJW
    Army and Navy Store
    Playground Comparisons
    Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

    More Posts about Life

    I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

    Being older
    Link
    Civil War
    Travel
    PT-141
    Bronco Billy
    r/K selection theory
    How they get away with it
    Line in the sand
    A second passport
    Paper Airplanes
    Snopes
    Taxiation without representation.
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Make America Great Again.
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    1960's and 1970's link
    Democracy Lessons

    Stories that Inspired Me

    Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link
    Link

    Articles & Links

    • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
    • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
    • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
    • You can find out more about the author HERE.
    • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
    • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Initially drafted on 8MAR18.
  2. Edited for publication 20APR18.
  3. SEO check 8MAY18.

Learning during my 1970s High School years

Do you remember what it was like going to High School in the 1970s? I do. I most certainly do. In fact, the older I get the more removed that I am from it. As time passes, it starts to look like some kind of a scene from “The Twilight Zone”. The truth is that the kind of life that I had growing up is really alien to the way kids grow up today. That is worrisome, and it really concerns me.

When an American intern comes in to work for me, I am stunned just how absolutely helpless they are. They do not realize that they must go to work before the start of the working hours, and cannot leave until the workday is over. They don’t realize some of the most fundamentals regarding self-initiative is totally missing from them. American kids today are robots, or maybe zombies. They need and expect constant supervision. They are afraid to do anything.

Now this only pertains to my American interns.

The interns that I get from Germany, France, Singapore, and England are just fine. What is wrong with America? What are they teaching in schools there? Ugh. I think that I will devote another post to cover that subject. As it is truly alarming.

Whenever I berate an intern about something that they did wrong, I often use examples from my childhood. I use them to illustrate key points. Such as, [1] you need to eat breakfast at home before you come to work. [2] Showers are not optional. [3] Don’t check your Facebook when you are in a meeting with the boss. [4] Lunchtime is for one hour, and long lunches are not an option. As well, as a pet peeve of mine, [5] you must do the work assigned to you whether you want to do it or not.

Where in the Hell do they get this idea that they can argue or debate with the boss? A task is a task. You are assigned it and you must do it to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, many American interns think that they don’t have to do an assigned task, if they don’t want to. WTF?

When I was growing up, man we HAD to work. It wasn’t an option. Moreover, when I turned 18, I was on my own, or in college. And if I failed, I would be on the streets. This is literally. My family would be too ashamed to have me hide in their basement. A man needed to work.

Granted, I realize that not everyone had the same experiences that I had. My experiences were of a different time. I had the experience of fighting forest fires, working in coalmines, and laboring in steel. Today, they work as barristers in Starbucks, code games on laptops in “open work” environments, and drive uber taxis. Never the less, there is something very important about being able to earn your own money. There is something important about putting in a good, hard day’s labor. There is something very important about carving out your life by your own effort, alone.

To this end, let me talk a little bit what it was like for me growing up. I am sure that everyone has other experiences, and perhaps other ideas of what it was like. This is what it was like for me…

Growing up in Pittsburgh

I am a normal guy.

While I was born in the Connecticut Valley in Bridgeport, CT, I spent the bulk of my youth and High School years in the Pittsburgh area.  Pittsburgh was, at that time, the center of steel manufacturing.  Surrounding it were miles and miles of coalmines, and timber. America is a very big nation, and as such, it is culturally subdivided into regions. I was part of the Pittsburgh (or “Western Pennsylvania”) region. I was an “Iron Steel Baby” (So named because of the local “Iron City” beer and the steel mills up and down the major rivers in the region.).

America is comprised a different regions with different cultural norms and history.
America’s cultural enclaves. America is not a homogeneous society. It is a collection of social-economic regions.  America’s cultural enclaves. (Image Source)

Over the years I have lived in many other areas. Each area was very different. I have lived in the Central Florida, the Rio Grande, the Los Angles, the Fresno, the Memphis-Little Rock, the Louisville, the Cincinnati, the Indianapolis, the Upstate NY and the Boston New England regional areas. I wonder what cultural enclave that you, the reader, is from?

When I was little

When I was little, my father worked in a steel mill. To improve our life, he would go to night school. Eventually, he was able to get his diploma and degree. With that, he was able to get a better job, and we moved into a house that he was finally able to buy. My mother was a housewife, and she watched us kids.

I played “cops and robbers” and “cowboys and Indians” when I was little.  I played with fireworks, climbed cliffs and jumped off them into muddy water in the long hot summers. We would often put a penny on railroad tracks to watch the coal cars flatten it into a long oval copper plate. You can’t really do that with pennies today. That is because pennies are made out of plastic. Instead you can use a dime or a nickel. Both of these coins have a high percentage of copper in it.

Busybodies think that flattening a penny is not safe, and is dangerous to children. (Not everyone shares my point of view.  HERE is an article where it is considered the height of danger and folly to walk on train tracks. HERE is an article that says that it is terribly DANGEROUS and maybe evil to even suggest children participate in such a thing.) But you know what? I don’t care what they think. I personally like the Chinese solution when it comes to these busybodies.

Life in the Trees

I had a “tree house” that I would hang out in with my cat Sedgwick, and played “tug of war” under the willow tree with my pet husky and a big “bull rope” that hung down from one of the limbs. (This is an awesome tree that had flowing branches that fell to the ground.  You could go inside the tree and it was like you were inside a tent. Though in the spring, it was filled with bees and other insects attracted to the flowers.)

I had a “fifth finger toy gun”. It looked like a pointing finger, and it shot this little plastic pellet.  I also had this “joy buzzer” that you could “shock” your friends with (by giving them a handshake). Other toys included “Chinese handcuffs”, which was this woven contraption that you would stick on the ends of your fingers.

“let’s see, I slept outside in a tent almost every night during summer vacation, played lawn darts, shot arrows into the air and we would scatter like doves for the cover of a roof, sled riding down steep tree lined hills. 

Jumped ramps with our bikes (damn near lost one of my man marbles doing that though) climbed trees, built tree houses, floated down the swollen stream on a telephone pole after a 100 year rain storm. drove the flat bottom boat behind river barges to ride the wakes. 

Jumped off roofs with a homemade parachute (didn't work) played with matches, played with matches and gas, played with matches gas and fireworks, had a wrist rocket, bb gun, bow and arrow, went to a catholic grade school with hard ass nuns. I should be in kiddy Gitmo still.”

- booboo Feb 2, 2018 9:55 PM Permalink

Quicksand

We played “quicksand”, usually holding on to tree limbs and trying to avoid touching the sidewalk. (It, like many other things, turned out not to be as serious a threat that we thought it was when we “grew up”.) Talk about a disappointment!

Yeah. When we grew up we were in for some surprises…

The world that we envisioned was nothing like what we saw on television.  We never got to fight secret agents. The rocket ships to the stars never materialized. None of us ever got to tour the nation in a multicolored school bus and play musical numbers in different high schools . Our friends were never as organized as Spanky and his gang , and we never were able to harness a donkey with a carrot. That truly would have been awesome! The truth is, to this day, I have never come across a spot of quicksand.  What a shame.  What a true shame.

However, the reader need not give up hope on their childhood. There still is a Archie McPhee . Thank God for that!

Hats

I, like others of my generation, (in my pre-teens) usually wore a hat when we went outside. (The same was true for the ladies and the girls of that time.) There was even an entire set of rules and behaviors associated with these hats.  The church pews even had these little spring-loaded contraptions to hold the hats in place when in church. (This pretty much fell into disuse in the early 1970’s, along with eating fish on Fridays.) Coat racks in offices, dental offices, and insurance offices all had a shelf along the top of the rack to place your hats on.  For standing racks, there were also “pins” for holding one’s hat.

Take off your hat (civilian, that is) whenever you are indoors, except in a synagogue and except in places which are akin to public streets: lobbies, corridors, street conveyances, crowded elevators of non-residential public buildings (department stores, office buildings). Apartment house elevators and halls are classed as indoors, and so are eating places!

Take it off whenever you pray or witness a religious ceremony, as at a burial, outdoor wedding, dedication. Take it off whenever the flag goes by. And fergodsakes take it off when you have your photograph taken for the place of honor on her dressing table – and take it off before you kiss her!

Lift it momentarily as accompaniment to courtesies when hello, goodbye, how do you do, thank you, excuse me or you’re welcome are expressed or understood. The gesture is to grasp the front crown of a soft hat or the brim of a stiff one, thus to lift the hat slightly off and forward, and simultaneously to nod or bow your head as you say (or smile) your say.

Whenever you perform a service for a strange woman, or ask one—when, for example, you pick up something she has dropped on the sidewalk, or ask her (indirectly) to get her bundles the hell off that vacant bus-seat—you tip your hat to acknowledge her thanks or to give yours. Whenever you greet in passing or fall into step with a woman you know (your wife included), you tip your hat. In fact, the tip of the hat is a must for all brief exchanges with women, known or unknown.

A man rates your hat-lift, too, when he has performed some service for the woman you’re with—when he’s given his bus seat to your wife, for instance (in which case you should give him a card to your psychiatrist, as well). And also when he has been greeted by your woman companion, you tip your hat whether or not you know him. If she stops and if she introduces you, your hat comes off—but this is because you are standing and talking with a woman.

- From Esquire Etiquette: A Guide to Business, Sports, and Social Conduct, 1954

Boys and Girls liked to Play

When I was young, we all played together.  Boys and girls played together. Boys would tend to want to play “army” or “sports”.  Girls would tend to want to play “Barbie” or “house”. I really don’t think it was due to the way that we were raised. It was our interests at the time.

Anyways, we grew up normally. At that time, it was considered normal for boys to like girls, and girls to be interested in boys.  But, apparently today, that view is not shared.  Today there is a “zero tolerance” for anything deemed sexual harassment in young children. Which means that boys just cannot tell a girl he likes her. Today it is deemed “sexual harassment”. Sigh.

Please, why can’t you just let children be children?

We Played

If a boy wants to play with a toy gun, well then let him. If he wants to play with a Barbie doll instead, well then let him do that instead. If a girl wants to play football, I say go for it! If she wants to play house and dress up, good for her! Just let children be children. One of the things that has surprised me is the ever growing list of prohibitions that American children cannot do. Let’s see…

  • Can’t play with toy guns.
  • Can’t play with fireworks.
  • Can’t play knives.
  • Can’t play with slingshots.
  • Can’t play with tree-houses.
  • Can’t play with fire.
  • Can’t ride their bike alone through town.
  • Can’t stay out late after dark.
  • Can’t walk by themselves to school.
  • Can’t be in a playground without supervision.
  • Can’t go into a store without a parent.

This lack of play has had an absolutely devastating effect on the young millennials just now in college. Since they have never been on their own, and used their own self-guided imagination, they are retarded in certain significant cognitive abilities. It is truly worrisome.

Boys and girls would both play in the 1970s. Girls would play with dolls.
Girls of the 1970s would play dolls with their friends. Girls liked to play with their barbie dolls, and hang out with their girl friends. (Image Source.)

My Kid Sister

Consider my kid sister.

I have a niece who is a girly-girl. She loves clothes. One Easter Sunday my mother bought her this really nice Easter dress. My sister, totally hated it, and did not want the girls (I have numerous nieces) to have anything to do with it. However, my nieces, being strong willed, went out and got the dresses out from the closet anyways. The oldest niece, well she was a “Tomboy”, and refused to wear the dress that was bought for her. However, the girly-girl niece grabbed her dress and ran through the house with it.

As she ran, her socks went off. Her shoes went off. Her pants came off, then her top. She shinnied on the dress and went running outside in the yard in bare feet. The dress flying in bright white, and pink with ribbons floating. She ran, jumped, and leaped. She was the happiest girl in the entire world at that moment. She was totally absorbed in living that moment.

You just had to see it. The sky was blue and clear. The air was cool but sunny. The grass was a fresh lush green and the girl with her rosy happy smile on her fantastic sunny face was a picture of the Sun itself. Ah, such a very wonderful time, and a wonderful day…

As I said. Let the children play.

Elementary School

Things were different then compared to today.

I first went to parochial school, and then later, attended public school. In parochial school we were taught how to write in cursive, memorized poetry, studied basic Latin, learned how to perform mathematics using only a paper and pencil, and studied our collective history.  Indeed, when I attended school we learned history, and we were expected to understand it well enough to write a paper on it.  In fact, one of the seemingly yearly events all through middle school into my high school years was writing a paper on history. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Ah, history can tell us so much, and can be a real joy to read about if taught properly.

History has continued to be one of my favorite interests. I personally think that many people don’t know anything about history because it is really not being taught properly.

Coffee

My childhood is a tale of coffee. Coffee was the cheapest thing that you could buy in America. As such, everyone had a coffee pot, and we all drank it 24-7. We would cook it in percolators, and the smell of coffee and the sound of percolating coffee was the way most American woke up to in the mornings. There was even a television commercial that had a jingle that sounded like a percolating coffee pot.

As a child, I didn’t really drink coffee. It wasn’t until I was around 12 or so when I started to share a cup with my parents. That was two full years before I started to work.  It started to “put hair on my chest”.

The coffee was so cheap. In the movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” the main character is down on his luck in Mexico. To underline just how poor he was, he asks a passing stranger “Hey can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee”. That’s pretty down. Coffee was offered freely throughout the USA and Mexico. I’ll bet that the significance on that statement was pretty much lost on the reader when you watched the movie, eh?

via GIPHY

I well remember the time when the coffee suppliers began to jack up their prices. It was insane. I was working as a stock clerk in a grocery store at the time, and the prices just getting higher and higher. It kept going up…up… and up. First, it was 20%. Then another 20%. Then another 50%. Then 200%. Then 1000%. There was no stopping it.

The customers were angry. Then frustrated. Then crying. Nevertheless, still they bought the coffee. By then, the entire United States was addicted to it. The coffee plantations in Columbia, and Venezuela, and Mexico saw profits, and just took advantage of it. Wow!  With all the billions and billions of earnings that the companies (and owners) raked in, you would think that the nations would now be rich paradises. You would think…

I wonder why not…

Maybe it’s because they are all progressive socialist democracies, and only the rich get the money. Yup. We all know how that all works out. Look at all the wealthy and successful people in Cuba. Look at all the successful and wealthy people in Kenya. Look at all the wealthy and successful people in North Korea. Yuppur! Those progressive socialist paradises really know how to do things, now don’t they?

Potato chips were very popular as a child growing up in the 1970s.
Not every potato chip came in a bag. In Pennsylvania they came in a tin can. The potato chips we ate while we were in 1970s middle school. (Image Source.)

Grandparents

Every weekend we would visit our grandparents. There, we would often sit on the metal porch glider and have bottled soda and cold-cut sandwiches. Both of my grandparents would buy a case of soda in large glass bottles, and I would spend my entire visit drinking it. It would normally be placed in the cellar. That was a cool spot in the house, and it kept the soda cool, but not cold. As is typical for the Pittsburgh area, the basement had a commode located smack dab in the middle of the basement. It’s a Pittsburgh thing that I could never quite figure out. (Same with the idea of putting chairs in front of the house to reserve a parking space.)

A commode in the basement of Pittsburgh.
Many Pittsburgh homes have a commode in the basement. This seems to be native to Pittsburgh. While the story goes that the commodes were used by the workers to clean up and wash, when they came home from the steel mills, I do not buy into that. The reason is that a shower head is more important than a commode for cleaning up. The truth is that in Pittsburgh, typically the men had their own bathrooms. The women folk had their own bathrooms that they shared with the children. Thus, the basement was the domain of the men-folk. That is the real reason for the commodes in the basements of Pittsburgh.

Adults could drink their fill of beer. We always had beer in various old refrigerators, or boxes full of ice. When I started to work, at 14, my father figured that I was going to work like a man, then I could be treated as one as well. From that moment on, I was able to drink beer at all the family gatherings. Which was pretty cool. I was able to get tipsy, and then go to my room to sleep it off without making a scene.

My childhood was all about learning how to be a MAN.

The television was often on with a sports program or two in the background. They, of course, had a large picture of the “Last Supper” on the kitchen wall overlooking the table there. In fact, just about all of my friends had a similar picture. Today, I rarely see it, and absolutely NO television shows have this symbol of Americana displayed. We also had a painting of the “black Madonna” on the wall near the fireplace, and a statue of the Mother Mary in prayer inside a half buried cast iron bathtub in the back yard.

We ate well, and my mother insisted that we have fresh milk every day.

Fresh milk was delivered to our porch daily. It sat inside a small-galvanized metal box cooler specifically designed for that purpose.  It was delivered early in the morning and one of the routines was for my mother to fetch the milk and put it in the refrigerator promptly. The bill (for the milk) was left in an envelope inside the metal cooler box, and my parents would put money in the envelope inside the box to pay for the milk. It was a system that worked well then. I wonder how it would work today.

During the 1970s and 1960s milk was hand delivered to the houses by the local milkman.
In the 1970s, milk would be delivered to our house in a metal box that sat outside on our kitchen porch. Milk Box (Image Source)

Crime

We lived in a very safe neighborhood. I grew up in a small town. The town was big enough to have an elementary and a high school. Though, it was too small to have a middle school. It was a great place to grow up in.

Oh, we heard about the crime in the urban areas of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but that was a world that was way beyond our experience. We didn’t lock our house doors.  No one did. In fact, the front door lock was often stubborn from disuse. That went for the cars as well. We left the car keys in the ignition. Everyone knew everyone else. All the mothers knew each other.

Dinners in the 1960s.
In the 1960 and 1970s, most people had a traditional family. In a traditional family, the husband works, and gives all of his earnings to the wife. The wife in turn, budgets the money, provides fresh and healthy meals, makes sure that the house is clean, and that everyone is happy. She is in charge of the education of the children, and supervises it and runs off to the school if anything does not pass her muster.

All of the men knew each other. Maybe they did not work together, but they were all members of the various social clubs like the Rotary, the Elks, and the Moose. (As well as the Polish Falcons.) There would be a meeting or two at the lodge each month and my father would attend. Because everyone knew everyone else, no one was trying to take from each other.

For us kids growing up, the entire town was like one big playground. It was most certainly like a scene out of Mayberry RFD. If you want to know what it was really like then read “The Mad Scientist’s Club”.  It was exactly like that.

We would say “Hi” to our neighbors and play with their kids.  “Hi, Mr. Baley.”, or “Hi, Miss Cambell.”. We all played baseball in the neighborhood ballpark, and rode our bikes all over the town. If someone bought a new appliance, then we would make “forts” out of the cardboard boxes it came in, and play with that.

Boyhood Essentials

I always carried a pocket knife with me, and used it to cut small branches and to chew on twigs from a birch tree (it tastes like root beer). It was a blue Cub Scout knife with three blades. I carried it everywhere. My father bought it for me when I was six years old. Ah, it was a male rite of passage.

One of the things that has surprised me is that NONE of the male interns that have worked for me (from the United States) ever owned their own pocketknife. Most have heard about it, and knew what it was, but none had ever owned one. It really stuns me. My male interns from France, England, and Germany all have owned pocketknives. I just cannot get over the fact how retarded that American boys have become. It is almost like they have turned into girls.

Anyways…

Bicycles

I was very shy with girls, and not so great at sports.  However, I was a fantastic swimmer, an average golfer, and an active tennis player. I was a member of the cub scouts, and rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire. Every one of my friends owned a bicycle. My sister had one with a white plastic basket in the front. My bike had these long streamers of plastic that plugged into the handles. I eventually tore those things off. But I would put a card (from a deck of cards) and attach it to the bicycle with a wooden clothes pin. That way my bicycle would make some “cool” sounds when I rode fast. It had a huge red circular red reflector on the back, right under the white “banana seat”. Like the GTO I would later drive when I was in High School, the bicycle was an orange color.

During the 1970s and 1960s all children rode bicycles. I had a banana seat bike that I rode.
We would all ride bicycles when we grew up. Which is different than kids today. Instead, today their parents drive them from event to event, instead of expecting them to get there on their own. A 1970s childhood. (Image Source)

My bike was a personal selection. When my father took me to a store to pick it out, I chose a really simple and rugged model. There were no front or rear brakes on the handlebars. To brake, you would just use the pedals. There also weren’t any gears. There was one gear only. It came with a rear view mirror, that soon broke off, and that was about it. My friends all had more complicated bicycles, and over the years, they were perpetually repairing their bikes and trying to fix them. For me, I never had that problem.

Chores

Every Spring I would help my father take down the “storm doors” and put up the “summer doors”. These doors had mosquito mesh instead of glass. It allowed fresh air to get inside the house, but kept the bugs out. To swap the doors was an easy chore. All you needed was a large screwdriver. Once I proved my mastery of that task, my father made sure that I did it every spring and fall. (Whoops! Roped in to another chore again!)

Life as a child in the 1960s.
In a traditionally run family, everyone had roles that they had to take on. For the boys, like myself, this meant chores. I was almost entirely responsible for all the outside chores, such as care and feeding of the animals, tending of the lawn and garden, and trash, and snow removal duties. My sisters were responsible for domestic matters, and learned how to cook and care from the clothing and the house from my mother.
The two family types and how they work.

Ice Cream

We ate “soft serve” ice cream from the local Dairy Queen stand, or had banana malt milk shakes.  My father would always take us out for a ride on Sundays after dinner. (Sunday dinner was the most important dinner of the week, and the most elaborate.) We all would hop into the car and ride over to the local Dairy Queen stand. There I would get a large vanilla (soft serve) ice-cream cone. Everyone got one. Even our dog Belle who was a husky. She would get hers’ in a little plastic dish.

Everyone had BBQ's in the 1960s and 1970s. We took the time to spend time with our friends and families.
During the 1960s and 1970s we attended BBQ cookouts exactly like this. We would eat pork and beans, or bacon wrapped hot dogs. Corn and watermelon would be served as well. I attended family barbeques exactly like this.(Image Source.)

We ate plump, real ground beef hamburgers and bacon-wrapped hotdogs.  We would eat a fine can of pork and beans, and let’s not forget the buttered corn on the cob, potato salad, and the macaroni salad as sides. Us kids would have an iced cooler full of all the soda we could drink and the parents drank all the beer they could muster. (Typically, Iron City, Bud, PBR, and Michelob.)

News

I would watch the news reluctantly. For me it was pretty boring.

However, I did follow the news about space. You couldn’t miss it. Everyone was talking about space, and the moon. That is all you heard aboout as a child of the 1960’s. The television shows also helped to maintain this theme.

As the news that played on the radio concerned our exploration of space and the Vietnam War.  Of course I didn’t know what was going on. It was a takeover of the United States government by dark forces embedded deep inside the United States government. When JFK was shot, my father insisted that I watch the television. He kept telling me that this was the most important thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. He was a lifelong Democrat and he had real concerns that there was more to the story than what the government was saying. Later, after he died and President Trump released the transcripts, it turned out that my father was right after all.

The “Deep State” murdered our President.

“This fucker, johnson should be dug up and pissed on, and torn apart. Every modern ill can be traced to him.” 

-sowhat1929

On Sunday we watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”, and “The FBI” (Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr) after the Walt Disney hour. If I wasn’t watching television, I was building plastic scale models, or experimenting on my Gilbert chemistry (and electrical) sets.

The A. C. Gilbert Company was an American toy company, once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It is best known for introducing the Erector Set to the marketplace. A chemistry set is an educational toy allowing the user (typically a teenager) to perform simple chemistry experiments.

During the Bill Clinton presidency (D) all sales of chemistry, electronics, and mechanical kits were put under investigation as possible routes for “home grown” terroristic activities, and were subsequently suppressed, if not outright banned. Over the Bush years (R), they resurfaced and eked out a small living.  However, by 2017 most hobby kit suppliers went out of business. Ramsey electronics, Heithkit electronics RIP.

Little Treasures

I, like my contemporaries, had my little treasures. Some of my friends collected baseball cards. Others, collected Indian arrowheads, and still others collected comic books. I had one friend with quite an impressive collection of comic books, and Doc Savage paperback books. I ended up buying his entire collection for $10 when he moved out of state.

I owned (but rarely wore) a “mood ring” that I found in an old “mason jar” filled with old “Indian head” pennies, marbles, and campaign pins (I picked it up at a yard sale for twenty five cents.).  I also wore a catholic ring of Saint Christopher that I picked up at a church sale on “Polish Hill” in Pittsburgh.

I was pretty stylish. I wore “Beatles style” hair with bangs that were always covering my forehead and falling in front of my eyes. My parents absolutely hated it.

Bottle Collecting

My favorite thing to do when I was around eight or nine would be to go “bottle collecting”. Here I would go into the local “woods” to dig for “old bottles” (in long disused trash dumps, often 100 years old) that I would then clean and collect. We had a couple of “dumps” that we frequented. One of the best, with the most impressive bottles, was near the river next to an old railroad spur. It was the home of many a “whittle marked” bottle, old time bitters, and about a hundred thousand Lydia Pinkham bottles. (I guess that the local woman folk must have had a lot of “womanly” problems.)

Our parents let us kids go out and play.

“I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life. 

My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. 

She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. 

I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Ah. My bedroom was a collection of old colorful bottles, scale models of tanks on shelves (and planes hanging from strings from the ceiling), as well as a quite a large collection of paperback books and comics. I had stacks and stacks of magazines. Magazines included “Lost Treasure magazine”, “Men’s Adventure”, “The Good Old Days”, “Mechanics Illustrated”,  “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics”, “Mad Magazine” and “Analog”. In fact, the upstairs bathroom had a closet, and the bottom two shelves were devoted to all sorts of magazines and comic books.

Money and Costs

Things were cheaper then.

In fact, most things could be paid for using coins.  If you ate at a restaurant, you would rarely need to use any bills.  Just a handful of coins (from a coin purse) was all you would need. Indeed, my father carried a coin purse and a money clip.  Wallets didn’t really become popular until the 1970’s. (When inflation had jacked up food prices to obscene levels.)

I would fill up the air in my bicycle tires with air from the local gas station.  (For free. Paying for air didn’t become vogue until the 1980’s.) It was a white building with two (gas) pumps outside, and an open garage bay where the owner would typically be fixing the cars of the local townspeople. Inside were dusty pin-up photos of sexy girls taken from magazines (like playboy, the “open spread” foldout format was well suited to wall-poster applications.) and industry calendars which always had a picture of a topless chick (or nearly topless) holding a wrench or hammer.

Advertising to men.
In a male dominated workplace, the most effective means of advertising tools is to utilize imagery that appeals to men. During the Bill Clinton (D) administration, there was a move to make everyone “equal”. In so doing, all efforts to appeal to a anything other than female or neutral gender was discouraged. Know your history.

I drank from a lawn hose in the summer when I was thirsty. It tasted like warm plastic.

If I was off away on a farm, or near a dirt road we would stop at a well and get a drink of spring water. At sometime in the 1960s all wells in Pennsylvania had to be covered up (so that no one would fall into them). Instead the placed these large iron hand-pumps (often painted red of green) that you could pump the water up and drink. The water was free to whomever needed it. Which is so unlike today where even common tap water is bottled by Walmart for a profit.

I was typical, and not a “bad boy” at all. When my friends started to smoke cigarettes, I refused. When I started to work, and was offered beer by the older boys, I drank and soon discovered that I was a “light weight” and numerous embarrassing events ensued. My friends chewed tobacco and often had a can of “chew” in the back pocket of their jeans (often creating a round circle of wear). I didn’t do this.  For the most part, my serious engagement of vices occurred much later… after my retirement.

Television

Television was rather primitive.

While we did have a color television, we still needed to walk across the room to change the channel. Imagine that! Remote controls were not available until the mid-1970’s. On top of it were “rabbit ears” until we were able to subscribe to cable in the late 1970’s. My grandmother had her “rabbit ears” with aluminum foil wrapped around it. She said that it improved her reception. Maybe it did. I don’t know, her reception really sucked, so it must have been really, really terrible.

My favorite after-school show was “The Flintstones”. All of my classmates watched it. There were many shows that I watched when I was growing up. It went from the black and white “Diver Dan” series, to the Fireball XL-5, Supercar, and included such staples as Gilligans Island, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E..

Toy Guns

I had full toy replica M-14 with “action sound” back in the day. We would go around the neighborhood playing war with the other kids with their (own) toy guns. Let’s see, I had a toy M1, a tommy gun, a grease gun, a Beretta that shot projectiles with a suction cup at the end, and a large collection of cap guns and water pistols. Not one parent had an issue.  Not one snowflake triggered.  Not one police call.  Even the girls loved it.

“I remember when toy trucks (Tonka) was made of metal. When automobiles were made of steel. When a carton of cigarettes cost $5, when there where phone booths, a gallon of gas was 45 cents, a postage stamp was 5 cents, a bottle of Coca-Cola was a dime, a nickel-bag of weed was $5, the Sun was yellow. 

I remember a time when you could find starfish and beautiful shells on the beaches of the Atlantic ocean. I remember when our skies where blue, not hazy white. I remember when slot machines paid out silver dollars. I remember a time when children could play safely outside.

I remember when kids could sell lemonade without being arrested. I remember when you could crack your child's ass in public for being a brat and not being arrested. A lot has indeed changed.”

-Hugh Mann Oct 21, 2017 1:34 PM

Lemonade Stands

Talking about selling lemonade, it was a method that introduced business techniques to children. The schools didn’t have any courses on how to start and run your own business. The boy scouts taught self-initiative and independence. If you wanted to know how to start your own business, and the basics on how it worked, your parents would teach you by allowing you to sell lemonade. It was a method by which a child could learn the basics of business management, and production.

Of course, during the Obama administration, this was forbidden.  Moreover, a war on young children, their lemonade stands, and the parents who would teach children about work began. The result was a decimation of the understanding of the basics of industry to an entire generation of children. Read about some of the thousands of instances here;

Today, americans can be arrested for the slightest cause. America is no longer free. Policemen and cops will arrest anyone, even children. In the 1960s and 1970s this would never happen.
Here is an American police officer frisking a child on the television show “Cops” showing how important it is for Americans to obey the law. American cop frisks child for breaking the law. (Image source.) You would never see this in the 1960s and 1970s.

Meals

We ate formal meals.

That is to say, that we ate in the “dining room” with a fully laid-out table with tablecloth (and undercloth), china dishes and silverware. My father sat at the “head” of the table, and my mother sat at the other end.  Us kids, sat in the middle. Household meals always had a meat or a fish with sides of mashed potatoes, a salad, cooked vegetables and bread. Meats would include pot roasts, pork chops, Salisbury steaks, roast chicken, and ham. We ate fish on Fridays. We only ate pizza or hamburgers when we ate outside or at a restaurant. (We rarely ever ate pizza, or “junk food” at home.  We ate “real” “sit down” formal meals.) With an intact family-centered life, we ate far better than Americans do today.

Link

Late Night Horror Movies

We acted like kids, and participated in the activities normal for that time. Most of our time was divided between school and play.  Of that, we enjoyed playing the most.  With our days filled with outdoor activities (such as hiking and bike riding) followed by evening television viewing. Whether it was “the Rat Patrol”, or “Chilly Billy Car dilly” on “Channel 11” showing low-grade “B” horror flicks, we watched them all.

In fact, I must say that I was a big “Ultraman” fan “in the day”.  But, overall, I was  Vincent Price fan.

Vincent Price made many movies during the 1960s and 1970s, and his Dr. Phibes series were amoung his best.
During the 1970s one of my favorite Vincent Price movies was the Dr. Phibes series. Here he is with one of his pretty assistants. Valli Kemp with Dr. Phibes. (Image Source.)

I really liked all of the Vincent Price movies.  These were often B-grade flicks made in the 1970’s which you would watch on a cold and snowy winter weekend afternoon. In fact, I would say that my all-time favorite movies are the Doctor Phibes series.  I don’t know why that is.  Maybe it’s because of the mechanical gadgets.  Maybe it’s because of the tales of creative revenge.  Or, maybe it’s because I always had a crush on his beautiful assistant(s).  LOL!

Dr. Phibes movies were very popular Vincent Price movies during the 1970's.
There were two Dr. Phibes movies. Each one used a different assistant. I was in love with both. Yikes! Image credit to Metro Goldwyn Mayer for their promotional photo. Virginia North with Dr. Phibes. (Image Source.) We all loved these movies int he 1960s and 1970s.

I was a good kid, though a bit “nerdy” compared to my classmates.

Nerd

I had other interests, which tended to be on the nerdy side. For instance…

In the 1970s, board games were very popular before the advent of computer games.
During the 1970s I used to play Avalon Hill’s board games such as Panzer Blitz and Squad Leader. Here are the counters from the Advanced Squad Leader game set. Advanced Squad Leader Counters (assorted). (Image Source.)

I played Panzer Blitz and Squad Leader board games.  (But only with the handful of friends who actually knew how to play the complex games and enjoyed strategy.) Board games were popular, and it took the entire computer industry to demolish the stranglehold that strategy games held. Games would last hours, even an entire day.

“I was just over at ebay scanning the wargames (because of threads in this forum such as the demise of boardgames) and seeing AH Panzer Leader there brought back fond memories. I am sure I had one box at one time, have to find it. I remember in high school, my friends and I had three Panzer Leader and two Panzer Blitz games plus some made up boardmaps, put them all together for a massive tactical wargame that lasted throughout the summer. Our german opponent, stuck in the middle in a replay of 1945, was able to keep the Sov and US units from meeting. Amazing.”

-AnimalAl

I also was very interested in the “computer revolution” that was just getting started. I had taken some basic programming classes, and excelled in them. However, my father thought that there would not be any kind of future in computers. So he STRONGLY recommended that I take something practical. He suggested that I go to university to study something that had potential. Engineering most certainly, but not anything related to computers. He felt that it was a passing fad that would soon go away.

We had a nice long “sit down” chat about my future, and he believed that I would be best served if I went to a military academy to reach my dream of being a spaceman. I believed in it. While it might sound crazy today, it was a reality during the 1960s. and 1970s. I tended to agree with him, and with that in mind I took High School classes that would be beneficial for me to attend the Air Force academy.

Telephones

There were no cell phones; indeed most phones hung on the wall, and fully 50% of them had dials instead of push buttons.  Our home had two phones. One was an old Bakelite black phone from the 1920’s hidden away in the basement. I loved the feeling of it. There was a weight to it that you just couldn’t get during the 1970’s. We also had a “main” phone in the kitchen. It had an extra-long cord. My sister was always “hogging it up”. So one year they bought her a phone for her room. She still spent most of her time on the phone, it’s just that she wasn’t talking in the kitchen all day.

Sunday mornings as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s was very much a time of newspapers, coffee and hot fresh buttered rolls.
Sunday mornings were very much the same during the 1960s and 1970s. This included the children in PJ’s, the coffee, and the pets. Sunday mornings were stereotypical.(Image Source.)

In the house we wore “house clothes” also known as PJ’s, with a robe. Mother would make sure that there was always a pot of coffee brewing, and us kids would always fight over who would get to read the comics section of the paper first.  Of course, our dogs and cats merrily participated in the morning ritual. Picture above is not the ideal, it was the actual.

Pleasures

Chores

From the time I was five years old I needed to pull my weight at the house. I had chores.

I would use a push lawn mower on the weekends to mow our grass (with no breaks until I was finished), and rake the leaves in the fall (with a break drinking apple cider).  No respite during the seasons, as I even had to shovel the snow in winter (with a break drinking egg nog on Christmas Day). (Such was the life of a typical boy in the 1970’s.) Us boys all had chores that we had to finish before we could go out and “play”. When we became old enough, typically 16 years old, we went and got our first job working for someone else.  It was what you did if you were a male boy. (Eh. I started at 14, as my father insisted that work would make me into a man.) So, I went to school until it ended, and then off to work from 4 to 9 every evening. Most of my life consisted of 12 to 14 hour shifts at work.

So, of course, I am going to take offense at the idea that I had “white male privilege”. And, I really get more than just a little hot under the collar when some female SWJ tries to make that point. There was no “white male privilege” in scrubbing out the filthy toilets in a coal mine, getting covered with dirty grease while you climb up a dragline, or being dressed down just because you are young and don’t know anything yet.

I was a typical boy. While many of my friends got to play football and other sports, I worked. I was bred to be a great work horse. That was the experience of boys of my generation. The experience of girls was quite different.

Girls were treated differently. My sisters all got weekly allowances.  This enabled them to go out with their other friends and buy the latest fashions. They were all members of the various cheerleader organizations, and participated in all the local events sponsored by the school.

Poetry

In my early school years (grades 1 through 3), I attended private parochial (Catholic) schools.  They offered and provided a superior education compared to the public schools that I attended afterwards.  I learned the Latin language as well as my English grammar. In fact, one of my most significant “loves” was introduced to me in first grade.

Here we were told (forced) to memorize poetry. (Oh, and boy did I hate it at the time. I would cry and cry. My father would record my complaints and play them back to me. Oh, I hated it. I HATED it.) Now, today, I really appreciate that memorization. I memorized Robert Frost, and Taylor Coleridge.

These are poems that I have NEVER forgotten.

The Road Not Taken - Poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There is a certain timelessness about this poem. I always loved the sound of it, but it wasn’t until I was much older did I appreciate the meaning. You know, when you are in elementary school, you haven’t lived long enough to experience decisions and consequences. However, when you are older, that is something else altogether. Today, the poem speaks to me like no book or movie can. And that is what poetry is all about.

The poem speaks to me personally. I can well guess that it might speak to you (the reader) as well. We have chosen paths that other people didn’t. They took us to interesting places. They have altered our lives in ways… special and significant ways.

Here is another timeless poem by Robert Frost;

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost


Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Poems are wonderful. Now that I am older I really appreciate all the effort that the nuns made to force me to learn these poems.

Girls never seemed to care that I could recite poems. So it really wasn’t an issue about getting chicks. The girls of High School seemed only to care about the football players, and hot cars. The poems made a difference in my life when I got older. Then, the complexities of live began to take its toll, and it was poetry that became my refuge when the world spiraled out of control.

Whenever I am stressed at work, and there is some just outlandish and power crazed manager spouting nonsense (remember I worked in a corporate environment during the 1980’s and 1990’s), I would stand off to the side and recite a poem or two. It calmed me down. Because, no matter what role my boss would have, and no matter if he controlled my income, I could recite poetry, and he simply could not.

That fact always put a smile on my face and comforted me.

It also ended up being a great way to “break the ice” in China. I would offer a toast. Then, I would recite a poem. The Chinese, especially the English speaking ones, are always absolutely amazed. As are the beautiful Chinese ladies. Chinese poetry is different, but just as beautiful.

Kubla Khan - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.


So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.


But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !


And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.


Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !


The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !


A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !


And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,


For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Not one American intern, boys or girls, could recite a poem. Any poem. What in the heck do they teach at schools today? Many times, but not all, they do not even know a poem or could name one. What a sad, sad, state of affairs. It is almost like a part of their life is missing…

How far American Education has Degraded

Just for fun, let’s see if you (the reader) can take a simple 8th grade level test from 1912. Now this is from 1912. This is the kind of test that our grandparents, or in some cases, our great-grandparents took. My parents were constantly harping on how the educational system was dumbing down. Moreover, that was in 1960! One can only imagine what they would think of schools today.

Now, I have passed this test on to my (senior-year university) interns, and they constantly fail it. They justify their failure. Which is something that I teach them NOT to do, and thus the reason for having the interns take the test. Their excuses range from “the computer spell checks for me”, “I don’t need to know trivia”, to “that’s why Wikipedia exists.” Sigh.

Let’s see how you, the reader, can do…

The test begins with a spelling exam. The teacher would recite each of the following words. They would recite it three times. The student taking the test would then need to spell the words correctly. There are forty words in total.

Exam for eight grade students in 1912. This was the kind and type of exam that I used to take in the 1970s and 1960s.
Exam for eight grade students in 1912, but even I could pass it in the 1970s.
Math and Reading questions from the 1912 eighth grade test. I could have passed this test when I was in eighth grade int he 1970s.
Here is the reading and math sections of the 1912 eighth grade exam. Heck, even I could pass this in the 1970s.

Math and Reading questions from the 1912 eighth grade test.

This is a section of a test or exam for eight grade students in 1912. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took in the 1970s.
Grammar portion of the 1912 test for eight grade students. While I could pass it in the 1970s, it is highly unlikely that anyone could pass it today.
Here are some geography questions asked of students in eighth grade in 1912. We were also expected to answer similiar questions during the 1970s. It is unlikely that anyone would be able to answer these questions today.
Geography questions expected of eighth grade students in 1912. This was quite similiar to the kinds of tests that we were expected to pass in the 1970s.
This is a section of Physiology questions given to eighth grade students in 1912. This is similiar to testst that I took in the 1970s.
Physiology test section of a 1912 test given to eighth grade students. I was able to pass similiar tests in the 1970s.
Students today routinely fail test questions that we considered normal just a few decades ago. It is very similiar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.The dumbing down of the American population has been unabated.
Civil Government test questions given to eighth graders in 1912. It is very similiar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Questions on Civil Governance given in 1912 to eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Civil Government questions given to eighth graders in 1912. Note the questions given to 11 year olds. Today, numerous liberal and progressive sections of the United States wish to make voting possible for 16 year old’s, yet not one could be able to answer any of these questions. Heck, not even our Senators could answer these questions. Can you imagine Senator Maxine Walters (D) answering them? Hah! In fact, I wonder if she slept through class or skipped school. Indeed, this exam is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Students in America used to study and know history. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, not one college educated person can answer the questions in this test given to eighth graders in 1912.
History section of the 1912 exam for eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
This test was given to eighth grade students in 1912 to test their knowledge. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s. I am sorry to say that it is unlikely that any American college graduate would be able to answer these questions.
Conclusion of the 1912 exam given to eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.

You can find the answers to this test on this page HERE. Now, compare that with eighth grade students today.

Penmanship

We wrote in script, and printing out answers was discouraged (and frowned upon). A measure of one’s ability to communicate was penmanship. (Indeed, there is a scientific correlation between writing in script, poetry and improved thinking processes.  This was something, I believe, that gave me advantage over my public-school educated peers.)

We all wrote in script. We were taught script and penmanship early on in elementary school in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1960s elementary school we were taught to write in script. This continued through into the 1970s. All of our written tests were timed, and thus the ability to write in script clearly and quickly gave us advantage over those who could not. We wrote in script. (Image Source.)

When the New Year was upon us, we would go out and buy a “Farmer’s Almanac”. It was filled with all sorts of interesting things.  However, I believe that my mother would use it as a guide as to when we should till the earth, and plant our garden. It is still being printed. Thank God!

We wore bell-bottoms and nylon shirts with big-puffy sleeves, and wide collars.  I  also wore a tight collar around my neck made out of white beads. It was called a “choke collar”.

Hamper Migration

I was pretty much a typical boy, and got dirty a lot. When the clothes were dirty, we threw them into fashionable “hampers”, not the large super cheap polypropylene baskets that are sold in Wal-Mart today. In fact, we have seem many things go the same way as the “hamper migration” of the last few decades.

As the federal reserve decimated the United States dollar, Americans began to cope in numerous ways. One such way was to purchase cheaper and inexpensive furnishings. This started in the 1960s and 1970s and continued into the new century.
American hamper migration from high quality, long life articles to cheap and disposable furnishings. American Hamper Migration. Migration began in the 1960s and 1970s and persisted into the new century.

In regards to the function and design of the hampers.  I suggest that the reader pay attention that there was a migration in overall quality, utility, and appearance over time. Indeed, this also translated into longevity as well.  The older products were better made, lasted longer, and were designed for function AND appearance.  Somehow, and we all know why, American products became obsessed with cost savings at the expense of everything else.  Why? It was NEVER this way before.

The answer is simple.

It all is because of the passage of the Income tax and the Federal Reserve. Before the Federal Reserve was established, Americans ate quality food, bought quality clothes, furniture and housing. After the Federal Reserve was established there was a sudden drop in the value of the US dollar. This affected everything. Most notably the purchase power of American citizens.

With non-Americans controlling the American money supply, they could use it as they deemed fit.  They ran the value of the US dollar into the ground. As a consequence, both parents needed to work.  Families became dysfunctional.  People could only afford the cheapest food.  Butter became expensive, and so people bought margarine. As a result, people got fatter.  Greed ruined the core of what made America great.

Inflation ensued.

As the US dollar lost its worth, people could no longer afford what they once could.  Thus, stores that provided the cheapest products and solutions to home management dominated the industry.  (Such as Wal-Mart, and the Dollar Store.) The devastation of the value of the dollar can be traced back to one and only one sole cause. That is one of the many consequences of the imposition of the income tax and establishment of the Federal Reserve…

Ah, but I digress (yet again.)

Partylines

The interns that I employ act as if everyone has a smartphone and it is a requirement to own one. Heck, it wasn’t until the 1990’s that companies started requiring their employees to have a phone. When I was growing up in rural Pennsylvania, many people shared a phone line. This was known as a “party line”. When you picked up the phone, if someone was using it, you would have to wait until they got off before you could use the phone. Seriously, that is the way it was.

Things are so different now.

The problem, as I see it, is that Americans only know what they know. Since many have never experienced furniture made out of real hardwoods, and real solid metals, they don’t think anything of it. They think that just because Walmart is popular today, that it has always been popular. They think that because they need to buy water at a supermarket today they you always needed to buy water at a supermarket. And, finally, they think that just because coffee at Starbucks is expensive that it always was expensive.

No it wasn’t. In fact, until coffee was monetized, coffee was THE cheapest thing that you could buy in America.

This trend towards higher prices and cheaper products is not a random occurrence. It is systematic and has been going on for a long time now. It’s just that you don’t really see it unless you have lived for a while. Then you can see the differences. You can see things changing and then you can compare your experiences with the changes and come up with conclusions.

I blame the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve and the Decline of the USD

As the value of the dollar decreased, both parents needed to work to support the family. Children no longer had parental guidance, and problems came about as a result. The dollar’s value continued to plummet. So people could only afford the cheapest products. Still, that was not enough. The dollar still continued to plummet. Soon, people had to purchase things in credit to just get their basic needs met.

But don’t believe me. Look at the graph yourself. It is obvious whoever is running the American monetary supply is doing a FUCKING PISS POOR JOB at it. This is an obvious fact. It means that the entire system must be scrapped and replaced with one that maintains it’s value over time. If our elected officials were actually doing their job, they would have noticed a problem at the very start of this fiasco.

Decimation of the USD over time since the creation of the Federal Reserve. The 1960s and the 1970s showed the most evident collapse.
The decline of the USD since the Federal Reserve was established. Today the value of a dollar (2018) is less than one cent compared to what it used to be.

The Value of the US Dollar since the establishment of the Federal Reserve. The performance of the first ten years should have told everyone what a huge fucking mistake that they made. The truth is for the last 90 years, the value of the USD has had an unstoppable downward vector.

Door to Door

It was a time when door to door salesmen would sell young couples a huge multi-volume encyclopedia that would take months to pay off. (One can come across the huge collections in yard sales and estate sales.  Maybe on eBay.  Perhaps one of the greatest influences of my childhood was an illustrated encyclopedia for children that I would spend hours perusing.) My father saw what an interest the illustrated encyclopedia had on me that he considered it to be a great idea to get a full “adult” set. This was a great set, however it wasn’t for elementary children to read. As such, I really didn’t touch it or have any interest in it until I hit my teens.

Today is so different.

Back then we could play in parks.  We could climb trees there.  We could play games on the “monkey bars”, and slide down the slide.  We could ride on the “see-saw”, and splash in the pond. That was what their purpose was.  It was for fun. Yet, today it is something else entirely. Today “playgrounds” are no longer about play, they are about being safe. They should be called “safegrounds”, or even better “safe spaces”.

No freedom for Americans. Liberty is not for you. Celebrate the fourth of July without freedom. In the 1960s and 1970s we could celebrate freedom.
This is how Americans have come to celebrate freedom and liberty on the one day that represents freedom and liberty. It is so sad. America today.  Enjoy your holiday! (Image Source.) All of the things banned today were permitted in the 1960s and 1970s.

Porch Lights

It was a time of innocence. I wore a tee-shirt that had a big yellow smily icon, and the words “have a Nice Day” under it. My sister had a baton that she would practice twilling all day. (She also had a “Hula Hoop”. I could never get the hang of that thing. I guess that I just didn’t have the hips for it.

In the rural sections of the nation, porch lights were used to show “openness” to visitors. If you were lonely or just wanted to meet up with someone and talk, it would be pretty hard to do in the country. There just wasn’t any restaurants open, or places to gather around others. The roads were desolate and empty of cars at night. You could walk down them in total silence. It could be a little depressing.

So what people would do, if they wanted to be with someone else, is to turn on their porch light.

The porch light being on signified on of two things. Either [1] you were waiting for someone to arrive, or [2] you were open for visitors.  It was a way to keep everyone in a closed-knit community together with face-to-face communication rather than relying on telephones. Of course, the first thing you would do, when a person knocked on your door, was to lead them into the kitchen and put a fresh pot of coffee on. It was the neighborly thing to do.

Independence in the 1960s and 1970s meant that you had the ability to ride your own bicycle all over town. You had the freedom of time and play.
In the 1960s and the 1970s we rode our bicycles all over the town regardless of the rain or snow. Our parents did not cart us from event to event. Instead we were on our own. We all rode banana-seat bicycles even when it showed out. (Image Source.)

In a small community, everyone knew each other. It was a great way to meet up, make friends, and renew friendships and just chat. Other ways to do so included church, the various fraternities and clubs, and of course, the Scouts.

Cub Scouts

I was a cub scout up until I entered my teenage years.  Every week we would attend meetings in the homes of one of the scout mothers (called “Den Mothers”), and they would help us work on our “badges”, and get ready for the various events.  These events included picnics, hikes, plays and social get togethers.  We would proudly wear our uniform during parades, or on holidays like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or Labor Day.  We would salute the flag in school and lead the Pledge of Allegiance at school in the mornings. (Big change from today, when you have multi-millionaire NFL stars refusing to stand for the US Flag. I find it completely reprehensible and disgusting. But, then I am from the “old school”.)

One of the first things that I got when I joined the Cub Scouts was a blue uniform.  I well remember my mother teaching me how to put on my yellow scarf.  In addition, I got to have my very own hand axe.  It was a Rite of Passage for me.  Here at seven years old, I could carry a hand axe.  I was taught how to use it to cut trees, and how to throw it (just in case I might come across some desperate Indians…).

Boys all had hand axes when they were growing up. It was a part of being a boy in the 1960s and 1970s..
My first axe was given to me when I was a cub scout. I used it throughtout the 1960s and 1970s. I learned how to throw it, and how to use it. It was a rite of passage of all young boys. A boy’s first axe. (Image Source.)

While I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, it was my experiences during the 1970’s, which influenced my personality. Indeed, it is my feelings and experiences that reflect that period in time.

High School

Through most of my high school years, I wore “bell bottom” pants, and wide-collared polyester shirts. Our biggest source of entertainment was our television. We listened to the radio, and for me I would read or build plastic models in my bedroom while listening to FM radio on my “mult-band” radio receiver. At that time,  listened to WYDD, which was the “alternative radio” of the day. I also had a “Lava lamp” that was given to my father by a drunk friend who stole it out of a bar and didn’t know what to do with it.

We drank Orange Crush soda, along with Tab, Sprite and 7up. Our parents would drive to the “State Store” or “Beer Distributor” to buy the booze for the week.  In Pennsylvania, the government had a monopoly on the distribution of alcohol.  I guess that they reasoned that it would better” protect” the people of the commonwealth, or maybe they justified it by promising to fix the roads (snort!). Still promising (from what I gather from friends and family).  Yep.  One day the “potholes” all over the Pennsylvania roads will get fixed.  Yessur.

Until the democrats and progressive liberals took over state legislatures, boys and girls (of the 1960s and 1970s) were free to drink and smoke (with parential permission).
In the 1960s and 1970s, boys and girls were free to drink and smoke as they were growing up. This all changed when the Democrats took control of various state legislatures and enforced vice laws. Until Democrats took over the state legislatures,, children were able to drink and smoke with parenteral permission. (Image Source.)

Ashtrays and Chairs

Cars had cigarette lighters and ashtrays.  In fact, even airplanes had ashtrays built into the armrests of the seats.  (This all began to disappear during the Bill Clinton Presidency.) My grandparents both had standalone ashtrays that were their own piece of furniture.  They consisted of a large glass ashtray on a metal pedestal that sat next to the “Man’s chair” in the living room. In my family, as well as the families of all my friends, the father always had “his” chair that he sat in. While us kids might manage to use it, we would always get off of it and defer to our father once we walked into the room.

By the way, if you are dating a girl who says that she does not see the need for a man to have his own chair, run like the wind. I once dated a girl like this. Man, did she have father issues. She eventually dyed her hair a bright sickly pink-orange, shaved the left side of her head, put a nose ring that belonged in an ox’s nose, and went full-on militant feminazi.

Everyone in a household should have their own “space”.

It might be a bathroom that is “hers”. It might be a chair that is “his”. It might a dog that might have his own “special” toy. When you meet someone who believes that everything is equal, and that there are no differences, and no privacy, then you know that the person is mentally ill. Everyone needs and deserves some privacy. Everyone. If you are with someone who does not understand this most basic human needs, then you must avoid them. Avoid them.

The Partridge Family was a television show that was very popular int he 1960s and 1970s.
How can one talk about the 1960s and 1970s without mentioning the televisions show The Partridge Family? Everyone wanted to be a part of the Partridge Family.(Image Source.) Hey! Doesn’t the mother look a little like a younger version of Hillary Clinton? Maybe that’s part of her appeal? I will tell the reader that I did have quite a crush on Susan Dey. My Lord!

Work and Play

My sisters were cheerleaders in school.  All my friends played High School football.  I didn’t. I had to work. My parents were pretty unique in that regard. Most of my classmates got to have fun playing football, basketball, or baseball.  However, my father strongly felt that I needed to be a man, and that meant that instead of playing after school, I should learn how to work and to provide for a family.  Well, in a way he was right. But, in a way he was wrong too.

“The older I get, the more I realize how fortunate I was to grow up in the 70's (graduated HS in '78). It was just one simple, easy time. The stress of the 60's and all the racial/revolutionary crap that came with it was over. The greed of the 80's hadn't hit yet.

There wasn't crap on TV, and no computers or video games, so we spent our time just hanging out with friends, listening to 8-tracks and drinking beer (was actually legal to drink and drive in Texas in the 70's). If we were underage and were caught by the cops with beer, they just made us pour it out and go home.

Like an earlier post mentioned, "Dazed and Confused" really does capture those times well. I look at kids growing up today, with a federal government that's a a joke, police forces that nobody wants to trust, trillions of dollars wasted in "wars" we had no business fighting, college costs through the roof, and... well.. damn.. look at me.. I guess i turned into an old fart after all.”

-Reddit quote

Anyways, to my father, sports were just a game. You couldn’t really make any money off of it. Though, a decade later, my classmate Jim Kelly sure as heck was raking in some real money being a football quarterback. Ah, but that’s a story for another time…

Sports were more about social interaction than play. And, work, well… my history strongly indicates a disconnect from the traditional working models in favor of a debt-slave relationship to a powerful person or group.  But… more about that later…

Square Dancing and Weight Lifting

My favorite time during high school was during “study hall”. There, if we had finished our homework, we could participate in other activities. There wasn’t much at our school, but my two favorite activities were weight lifting (at the high school “Universal Gym”), and “square dancing”. There, believe it or not, the girls would come over and ask and invite me to join them dancing. It was great because there were only a precious few boys who would go dancing with the girls. LOL.

The Idols

I had a poster of Farah Faucett on my wall. She was smiling with this amazing smile, and her huge hair. We all had a crush on her. That, Loni Anderson and Rachael Welch as well.

Farah Faucett was an attractive actress that was very popular in the 1970s.
Farah Faucett was every 1970s boy’s dream. Just about everyone had a poster of her on our wall or doors in our bedrooms. Farah Faucett was every boys’ dream. (Image Source.)

I had numerous posters on my wall. One was the mandatory “black light” poster on velvet. (It glowed under UV light.) One was a picture of Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) performing a guitar solo. (I had super imposed a F-14 on it for combined imagery. After all, space and high-performance aircraft and rock n’ roll was my dream.) One was a Roger Dean poster (anyone remember the group “Yes”?).

Raquel Welch was a very popular 1960s and 1970s actress that made a big difference in the ideas of beauty and society during the 1960's and 1970's.
Raquel Welch was another popular actress that graced the bedrooms of many a boy during the 1960s and 1970s. (Image Source.)

Overall, I had a great childhood.  I grew up in the 1960s and attended high school in the 1970s. It was a great time, and not at all what is portrayed in conventional American media today  (as a time of “racism and bigotry”). It was a time of family values, productivity, and freedom. Black, white, yellow and red.  We were all Americans.

All of us lived, more or less, the same lifestyle. (Don’t believe me? Go to your grandmother’s house and go through her family albums of photographs.)  Our fathers worked.  Our mothers stayed home and tended to the house, the budget, and us kids.

What? Do I feel a bitching sesson coming on…

Bell bottom jeans were very popular during the 1970s.
During high school, bell bottom jeans were very popular in the 1970s. Elephant Bell-bottom style jeans. (Image Source.)

We were all Suffering through the Incompetence of Washington, D.C.

That was at a point in time before the Federal Reserve still hadn’t completely decimated the US Dollar. It was still worth around twenty cents. As the dollar kept on losing value, both parents needed to go to work. This fact, forced the breakup of the American family. The family had to break up, as the mother had to work as well as the father.

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

- Woodrow Wilson. Quoted in “National Economy and the Banking System," Senate Documents Co. 3, No. 23, 76th Congress, 1st session, 1939. The origional quote was published in "The New Freedom" in 1913.

There is a lot of debate on this particular quote. You can look at watch the sparks fly as the debate a rages on. Oh, my goodness! It is all so silly! One side says “here is the quote”, and the other side goes “Oh, No no no. He never said it! It’s all revisionist history. The Income Tax was wonderful!” It really is silly.

Here is my take.

The value of the USD (United States Dollar) was pretty stable. It had it’s ups and downs, but for the most part it was pretty consistent. It was stable. Then, after the passage of the 16th Amendment, the value of the USD dropped like a stone. It plummeted to 50% of its value within a ten-year span of time. It dropped 50% in a decade. That is horrifying!

Only a fucking idiot wouldn’t regret the decision to establish the Federal Reserve.

You have a fairly stable dollar. Some “friends” and “associates” convince you to change the system that is working just fine, and replace it with a different system. So, low and behold, you put a new banking system in place. Then suddenly, right before your eyes, the value of the dollar collapses. It goes completely to shit. Every year it gets worse and worse!

So…

[1] So, ok, maybe the former President didn’t say that quote. If so, then he was a fucking idiot. He was evil and selfish and couldn’t read a simple chart. That is the only conclusion that you can come to, if this quote did not belong to him. Because that is, what the statists are arguing. They are saying that the President was just fine and dandy and happy with what happened with the imposition of the Income tax and the Federal Reserve. He saw the result of the change, he saw the value of the dollar collapse, and agreed that it was all good and well.

[2] If the quote is indeed accurate, then he is a normal person who is able to read charts, and ended up with regrets. This is what a normal and sane person would be. They would see that what they put in place went to complete shit. This would be what a normal person would do. Personally, I can live both concepts. And you, the reader, should as well.

Anyways, with the collapse of the USD, now everything became more and more expensive. Both parents now had to go to work.

The Breakup of the Family

Both parents now had to go to work. As such, there were periods of no parental supervision after school.  That is how American society began to fracture. The parents were absent and replaced by the reality as portrayed by television, and narrated by the people in power.

As such, we LOST many of the important things that really mattered to families. We lost such things as “jobs for everyone”, the ability to save, and formal family meals.

At the end of the day we had formal “sit-down” meals where we would all gather around a multi-dish meal and discuss the events of the day. We kids would talk about the events in school, and our parents would talk about their day. My father would sit at the head of the table. Then, once the meal was complete, we would retire with some coffee and ice cream, and us kids would clean the table and do the dishes. Dinners were great. It was one of the things that I miss most from my childhood.

At that time, in both the 1960s and 1970s,  it was important to participate in your family. It was important to participate in your school.  It was important to participate in local events, and to become a meaningful participant in society.  My, how quaint and outdated that seems today.

"Elephant-leg, hip-hugger pants, halters and platform shoes were the biggest fads.”

-- Lori West, graduated in 1976 from West Forsyth High School in Winston Salem, NC

Fashions come and go. But I always had a fondness for tube-tops, bell bottoms, and those two zipper front jeans that the girls used to wear. The tube-tops showed off the soft curves , and the “painted on” jeans showed off why guys like to look at girls. For a while, platform shoes were very popular, and I ended up having a pair that made me feel like Richie Blackmore on the stage.

Guns

All my classmates owned guns, and many hunted. My father was a very liberal Democrat, and he forbade me from learning how to shoot. (Of course, today he would be considered a Right-Wing Conservative.) The attempts at disarming the American people dates way back, but it wasn’t until the very successful efforts in the 1990’s did Americans start to FEEL the repression of the Federal Government.

The second amendment gives Americans the ability to purchase just about any kind of firearm.
Back in the 1960s and into the 1970s, Americans used to be able to buy any kind of gun or rifle. The limits on weapons didn’t really start to take hold until the Democrats took control of the State Legislatures.  Americans used to be able to buy all kinds of weapons. (Image Source.)

The second amendment was considered important. Mass shootings using firearms DID NOT occur until government started campaigns to take away guns.  There are those who think that this is not really a coincidence. I, for one, KNOW that there is no such thing as coincidence.  “Coincidences” are simply pre-positioned “signs” by others who have constructed elements of our fated existence. But then again, that is just MAJestic speaking.

Anyways… Know your history. Americans are being dumbed down to become cattle. (And you do DO know what happens to cattle, don’t you?)

In the 1960s and 1970s gun safety was taught in school.
In the 1960s and 1970s, gun safety was an important part of growing up to become an adult. In the High Schools we all learned gun safety. My first class on gun safety was in elementary school in the 1960s. Then, just about every year afterwards we would have courses on safety and hunting safety. The first classes on how to use a gun occurred in Middle School.

Ah, television then was geared towards “most” Americans.  (When I refer to “most” Americans, I am actually referring to the MAJORITY of people.  It was not focused on capturing a minority.) That is to say that this was prior to the reorientation of television programing in the 1970’s. The reorientation changed what was presented on television, and marketed directly to the black urban communities. Before that, television shows were about straight white males and reflected the world at that time. (As America was, and still is, a Caucasian majority nation.)

Television Shows

Shows about black people were limited to “Stanford and Son”, and “The Jefferson’s”.

“The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural themed shows, the purge also eliminated several high rating variety shows that had been on CBS since their beginning of television broadcasting. One of the earliest efforts at channel drift, CBS in particular saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban audiences.”

-Wikipedia

The shows we watched were funnier than what you see on television today.  And, maybe, just maybe a little more innocent. “The Bob Newhart Show” was typical. The humor involved day to day situations and NEVER mentioned race (compare that to today), and had a real twisted surrealistic sense of humor. Consider “Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman”, or “Green Acres”. You can find out more here.

Hi my name is larry and this is my brother daryl and my other brother daryl.
Iconic characters from the Bob Newhart show that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Hi! I am Larry, and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl. (Image Source.)

Ah, you’ve got to hear about the three yokel brothers in the (very surrealistic) 80’s “The Bob Newhart show”. I loved these guys. They might have been the highlight of the show. Heck, they could have had their own show (hint. Hint.)

“…discovering that a witch is buried in the basement of their Vermont inn. They want to find out who she was, but they also want her 300-year-old grave dug up and removed. 

The silly-from-next-door tells him he knows some guys who`ll do anything for a buck.

Next thing, three goofy-looking, backwoods brothers from the genetically weak side of Vermont show up. “Oh, Lord!” says Bob, getting a whiff. Larry--the only brother who ever talks--hands Bob their card.

“We`ll do anything for a buck,” it says.”

- Larry, Darryl And Darryl Are `Newhart` Hits

Larry was the spokesman. Darryl and Darryl never spoke except in the classic final episode. No matter how many times Larry met you, he always started off by saying “Hello. I’m Larry. This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl.

They were quite good hearted, and obviously lived a strange, strange life. Afterall, clubbed weasel was their idea of good eatin’. Larry’s totally deadpan delivery of some very bizarre lines was always a highlight of any Newhart episode. “We went to the bakery ’cause they were advertising ‘bear claws’, but it turned out to just be a come-on.

Ah. Good times. Good times.

Movies and television portrayed westerns (with “white men” taming the wilderness), war adventures (mostly involving world war II fighting the evil Nazi army), space exploration (such as Lost in Space, Star Trek, Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds are Go and Land of the Giants), and Spy Adventures (against the Soviet Union or against fictional organizations such as T.H.R.U.S.H.).

Ah the 1970s

Kitchens had olive colored (baked porcelain steel sheet) appliances (at least in my family), not the brushed silver (aluminum) that is so fashionable today. Men wore polyester and nylon shirts with wide striped ties; carried briefcases not backpacks, drank soda instead of bottled water, and listened to the Air Supply and Firefall on the AM radio.  We wanted Peter Frampton to “show us the way” because we (most certainly) “felt like he did”.

Today, bottled water is everywhere.  You can go into a local 7-11 or similar store like circle-K and get a water.  It is cheap. However it is STILL more expensive than the water that I had when I was growing up. Water was free, and we drank from water fountains. Today you can easily buy a bottled water it is often less than a dollar. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up.

Water was free.

Quickie Marts and other fast stores…

In fact, we didn’t even have convenience stores.  When they first started to appear, everyone was making fun of them.  Why anyone would want to pay so much money for the snacks and sodas that they offered there, we asked. We soon found out that they would offer low prices for gasoline, and we could get our pictures developed by filling out special packages that were right there on the counter. It was most certainly a different life and a different time.

The local hardware store actually possessed a “cigar store Indian” statue. Which was pretty darn cool. I wonder where the Indian from “Cambells Hardware Store” is today. High schools taught firearms handling and safety. You could purchase these huge plump-tire motorcycle tricycles and everyone was driving them about (Until a Democrat had them banned.). We saved “Green Stamps”.  Schools taught FORTRAN. Calculators were just becoming available and our sliderules were starting to gather dust in our desk drawers. High school bands carried (fake) guns (painted white) when they marched.

Slide rules replaced hand held calculators in the late 1970s.
The slide rule was a device that was used before hand held calculators became available. It was used extensively in the 1960s and 1970s. The first calculators started to be available when I was in tenth grade. Slide rule. (Image Source)

Drugs in the late 1970s

Drugs hit mainstream America in the middle to late 1960s and was all the rage in the 1970s. Ecstasy (MDMA) and other so-called “designer drugs” did not make their appearance until the 1980’s.  During the 1970s the most popular drugs were weed (marijuana), LSD (blotter, and microdot), mescaline (or dried mushrooms), hash (processed marijuana), speed (tiny “white cross” pills) and Valium. (Cocaine did not hit the American culture until the 1980s.) All of this drug use (abuse) affected our culture.  All one would need do is view the television shows at that time to appreciate this fact.

Why is marijuana against the law?  It grows natural upon this planet.  Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit...unnatural?  

- Bill Hicks

Now there are all kinds of theories as to WHY a common enough weed was made illegal in the United States. I have my own theories. Here are my opinions.

Ah. What began in the 1920s and 1930s as a technique to imprison non-Americans and lower-society tier African-Americans (as most “typical” Americans did not enjoy these substances at that time) fully blew up into a nightmare. Moreover, thus began the downward slide of our culture, way of life, and everything that we believed in.

You take away the idea that the police are “on your side”, you will forever become an outlaw. Which was, if you think about it, the theme of the 1960’s and 1970s.

When I was growing up marijuana was highly illegal. It seemed crazy to me then. It was a “harmless” drug, surrounded by more dangerous, but legal drugs.  I, like the rest of my generation, chalked it up to a stodgy previous generation. At that time, we all smoked it.

High School in 1977 was just like as portrayed in the movie Dazed and Confused.
The movie “Dazed and Confused” very accurately portrayed what High School was like in 1976 and 1977. The vast majority of my 1970s generation used drugs. (Image Source.)

I would say that a full 80% of my High School class smoked the stuff.  Some were habitual.  Others were one-time users.  Indeed, the television show “That seventies show” routinely depicted the lifestyle of our generation.  There, they are shown sitting around a table and smoking marijuana. It was in every episode. However, for PC reasons, it was never shown where the smoke came from. I guess that there are some things that you cannot show on television…

This depiction is quite clear in the movie “Dazed and confused” as well.  Both video presentations accurately depicted what it was like growing up for my generation.

It took 40 years, but it seems that that ban on one of the most common plants in North America is beginning to crack.  I am not going to say whether or not the decision to do so is actually good or bad.  What people do in California or Colorado is none of my concern, as I live on the other side of the world.

What I will say is that people deserve FREEDOM.  That includes the freedom to stupefy yourself with drugs. My take is the decision to ban marijuana was a control method, put in place in the 1920s to make it easy to arrest and incarcerate blacks and Mexicans when other laws were not available.  Truth this.

Many people used drugs in the 1970s.
1970s childhood icon Pippy Longstockings smoking weed.  (Image Source)

The “War on Drugs” was in full swing in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, but you couldn’t tell it by participating in youth culture. A sizable percentage of teenagers participated in the culture. The older generations were oblivious to that fact.  In their minds, it was only a small minority of people who were smoking marijuana. They lived within their own bubble of reality. Much like many people do today about other things.

  • Our Grandparents believed that only Negros and (illegal) Mexican “wet-backs” (What “illegal aliens” were called before they became an important part of the Democrat strategy to win elections.) smoked the deadly demon “weed”. They believed that eventually the users would end up in the “crazy house”; locked up for life as the deadly poison worked its way through their brains. First in the mouth, and then in the brain. Before you knew it you became a crazed sex fiend always doing whatever it took to get your “fix” from the local “pusher”.
  • Our parents believed that only the rebels and the dregs of society smoked the illegal cigarettes. They felt that it was a given that the users would find themselves behind bars in jail. As this was characteristic of the behaviors of the misfits of society.

Well, what they failed to realize is that [1] you do NOT ban anything in a “free” society, and [2] times and people change.

What was just fine and dandy for the policing of Arizona in the 1920’s fell flat on its face during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  What only made things worse was that very powerful people, including those in government started to use the “drug issue” for everything. They capitalized on it, and used it as a resource.

“So some people want to smoke some pot once in a while in the land of the free.”

-knukles Karl Marxist Jan 5, 2018 5:21 PM 

Then, as now, older generations have problems understanding the youth that is slowing taking over their society. They just did not understand. (And, I must add, I can see why. Now that I am older, I too am having trouble with the youth of today. In short I find many terribly ignorant of history, devoid of basic work skills, interested in the most trivial of things, and basically very shallow.) Not everyone mind you. Just many of whom that I have come in contact with.

“The war on drugs to me is a war on liberty I concentrate on the issue of freedom of choice when doing things that are high risk. We permit high risk all the time. Generally we allow people to eat what they want. We do overly concentrate on what people put in their bodies,”

-Ron Paul

Indeed, how can we actually say the USA is “free” if we are told what we can and can’t do with our very own bodies?

Being told what you can and cannot do is NOT freedom. I don’t care what the excuse is.

This was a fundamental disconnect that our parent’s generation, and (most especially) our grandparent’s generation (Those idiots that thought up the 16th amendment.) had with those people who founded America.

The belief structures of both our parents and our grandparents were not the same as those of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison.  They were something else entirely.  They, instead, possess a more “modern” and “progressive” point of view.  One where “the smartest men” in the nations had the power to tell YOU how to live your life.

"People should have the right or responsibility of dealing with what is dangerous. Once you get into this thing about government is going to protect us against ourselves, there's no protection of liberty."

-Ron Paul

You tell them, Ron.

Black People were a Minority

When I show these images of my life to young millennials today, I usually get a harsh response. They claim that it is nonsense, and that I am being racist for not having images of non-white people. Yeah. Really. WTF?

"Most foreigners are amazed there are not more blacks in the U.S. They assume there are black and brown people everywhere from watching our TV and commercials and that they are systematically kept down."

-Zero Hedge

At which I must remind everyone, that up until the 1980s, black African-Americans were a small MINORITY.  That means, that they represented a very, very small segment of the population. When I grew up, the first time I saw a African-American was when I attended college. I did not meet a SA (Spanish-American) until after I left the US Navy and was in California. My first class with an Asian-American was in college.

There were no black people in my High School. This was in the 1970s, now it seems like they are everywhere. Thicker than flies in a barn.
In my 1970s High School we had no non-whites. We had one part Eskimo, and (of course) I was something like 1/10th Iroquois Indian. The vast majority of students were of white European lineage. My High School was all white, and there might have been less than 20 colored kids in the entire county. (Image Source)

While they weren’t common anywhere near where we all lived, we certainly were familiar with them. When I was growing up, I did see people from other races on television. In fact, one of my favorite shows was “Soul Train”, and I would really enjoy watching the American Negros dance and jive. They sure had “the moves”.  I would try to get up and dance as well (as long as no one else was watching).  It must have looked so silly.  This gangly ten-year-old boy trying his moves to soul and disco music!

I have to admit the hair looked cool too.

Everyone was wearing “afros” which looked like a big ball on the top of their heads. Man, people had style back then. Some of the best dressed people were negro and they handled themselves with a way and manner that is rarely seen today.

In fact, one of my heroes of the Rat Pack; Sammy Davis Jr. was an absolutely AMAZING man. Let it be known that he would never allow his pants to fall down and show his butt-crack like some of the ethnic youth do today. He was cool, panache, and had real style.

When everyone else wants to be like Justin Bieber, be a Johnny Cash.
Men of real class; “The Rat Pack”. Men who made no excuses for their behaviors. The Rat Pack (Image Source.) These were “the men” of the 1960s and 1970s.

When Disco started to become popular all of my friends hated it. But I actually loved it. I would try to do some of the fantastic dance moves that I learned from Soul Train, but I don’t think I was good enough. In any event, the girls liked the fact that I was brave enough to shake some body, and that was a good thing.

via GIPHY

Oh, and about all this nonsense about race…

I lived in the rural hills outside of Pittsburgh. We never, and I do mean NEVER, talked about “niggers”, and race.  We just did not. The closest I ever came to it was being called a “Pollack”. (A lot.) The “issue” about race is (today) a politically motivated narrative. And, as such, it was constructed over the last eight years or so with defined objectives. It’s a pile of manure that we are all expected to believe.

Frankly, I am pretty tired about hearing about it all. It’s NEVER been part of my life. To me, it just sounds like a bunch of wining babies complaining. Wahhh! Wahhhh!  It really does. It’s irritating.

Here I am in China. I am always and forever an outsider. I am ALWAYS called by racist names (weiguren or laowei) and I don’t complain and use it as excuses, and you shouldn’t either. It’s below us. It’s stuff that little children do when they don’t want to eat their spinach.

“Our rulers don’t seem to understand just how tired their white subjects are with this experiment. They don’t understand that white people aren’t out to get black people; they are just exhausted with them. They are exhausted by the social pathologies, the violence, the endless complaints, the blind racial solidarity, the bottomless pit of grievances, the excuses, the reflexive animosity. The elites explain everything with “racism,” and refuse to believe that white frustration could soon reach the boiling point.”

-FR comment

Listen up. Real men do not complain about their hardships. They keep quiet about it, and they fucking TAKE IT. If there is one thing that is attractive to women it is that men are strong and quiet. Remember the Johnny Fontane scene from the movie ‘The Godfather” when the singer was begging for the part in the movie and crying about it. Do you remember what the Godfather had to say about it?

via GIPHY

Crying and whimpering about stuff that happened to others long before you are born, and using that as an excuse is…

…pathetic.

Just because the urban areas are NOW dominated by non-whites does not mean that it was ALWAYS that way. What you see today is a result of the decimation of the African-American household structure  in the 1960s and the population explosion that resulted. Read.  Learn.  Understand. For goodness sake, read your history books.

And that’s all that I need to say about that.

Cruising in our “Rides”

We loved our cars.

Cars and girls were a big part of growing up in the 1970s.
Cars were a big part of life when you were a teenager in the 1970s. For us, our cars were everything. (Image Source.)

My buddies cruised around in (decked out) “shag carpeted interior” Camaro’s, old Ford and Chevy pickup trucks (Usually with a cooler full of beer in the back and empty beer cans rolling about on the deck.), and a (periodically) roofless International Harvester Scout. We drove around in my decked out GTO known affectionately as “the goat” that we might race on “the flats”.

Cars were an important part of our lives growing up in the 1970s.
My first car was a 1970s Pontiac GTO. It was passed down from my parents to me. I fixed it up and customized it for parties with my friends. Of course, it had a “kick ass” stereo and shag carpeting. My first car. Pontiac GTO. (Image Source.)

If the reader wants to know what it was like going to High School in that beast, watch the opening credits to the movie “Dazed and Confused”. Same. You’ll see my old car cruising into the High School parking lot. Otherwise listen to Kid Rock’s “First Kiss”.

Yeah, this was me…

Growing up in High School in the 1970s was a time of custom cars, drugs, booze, working and fun.
Cruising in the “ride”, listening to music from Peter Frampton, Boston, Led Zeppelin, and Robin Trower. Smoking, drinking, and meeting up with friends. I owned a GTO that I would cruse in. Ah, life in the 1970s. (Image Source.)

My brother drove a Vega (the aluminum engine block nightmare) named the “solar boat” from a song of the same name by Ray Manzarek. He had the old engine removed and replaced it with a “sooped up” 360. I had friends who drove a Pinto (a plain but long lasting vehicle).  And when my GTO died of a car crash (an icy Pennsylvania bridge in March), I replaced it with a AMC Pacer (it was like riding around in a big epic glass greenhouse).  <smile>

It was a step sideways. Financially, I could only afford what I could buy with the insurance money. So, for a while I rode a Yamaha 250cc motorcycle (also orange!) and then got the pacer. (I needed money for college. It was a matter of priorities.)

The vega was a unique car that was semi-popular in the late 1970s.
My brother’s ride; “The Solar Boat”. He bought it off of my sister’s husband. He put a new engine in it, and customized it. My brother’s ride; a Vega with a retrofitted small block 360 engine. (Image Source.) He drove this car after I graduated in the 1970s.

Automobiles were a big part of our life back then.  In fact, unless you had your own car, it would be pretty difficult to get a date.  (It could happen, but it was much harder.)

We would typically work and use the money to buy a car and “fix it up”. Then, once the car was able to be driven, we would go “cruising”.  At that time, We would travel the back roads and highways of Western Pennsylvania and the mountains of West Virginia.

via GIPHY

Often we would do so with the music “cranked up” loud.

Perhaps the premium “cruising” music of the day was “Boston” (“More than a feeling”), Pink Floyd (“Another Brick in the Wall”, “Money“, and “Time”), Led Zeppelin (“Stairway to Heaven”) and Peter Frampton (“Do you feel like we do?”). The trunk was a mobile ice cooler. We would fill it with bags of ice, and put two or three cases of beer there. We drank anything that we could get our hands on. Most of my friends drank Miller (in eight-pack pony bottles), Budweiser, and Iron City Beer.

Cars had a large trunk that we could fill with ice and beer. Ah, the 1970s were a time of freedom and liberty.
We used to fill the trunk of the car with ice and beer. Then we would go out drinking, smoking, partying with our friends. (Image source.) Oh, this scene was so typical during the 1970s. Today you could get arrested for it, and spend time in prison.

At the time I was in my Senior Year in High School, vans were just getting really popular. Here, we would fully deck out the interiors into these mobile party machines. They would have shag carpeting inside, red mood lighting, comfortable seats, a kick-ass stereo and a big cooler of beer. Dodge and Chevy vans were the most popular.

While movies might give the impression that, the youth of my generation went to discos all the time, and acted like John Travolta, that was not really the case.  (That was the case for many urban youth, but it was not at all representative of the whole.) We pretty much worked part time jobs to support our on-going obsession with our cars.  Each paycheck was devoted to a new “cherry bomb” muffler, or a custom carburetor, or some nice rims for our cars.  Then, all fixed up, we would cruse the roads.  We lived the life of the movie “Dazed and Confused”, as that was a very accurate portrayal of my generation.

This love of cars was not limited to white kids in the country. Everyone loved their cars.  In the cities, such as Syracuse and Pittsburgh, urban blacks would spend all their hard earnings to buy the best and biggest Lincoln or Cadillac available.  Then they would deck them out (or “pimp” them out) into the most elaborate super-cool riding coaches. They sure had style back then. Those were the days for certain.

Not to mention REAL music.

It was a time of funk. Let me tell you all, modern music just doesn’t have that kind of free wheeling happiness, and muscle moving music as the funk of the 1970s did. Indeed, it was a really sad day when people started to talk about the death of funk. Though there are those who somehow think that modern music is just an advanced style of funk. I happen to disagree.

And that is my opinion on this matter.

Guys and Gals

Role models for men included John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery. Men who were MEN! Men were manly; they worked, fought when necessary, and provided for their families. (Yeah, we would ride around in these “sooped up beasts” and talk about our heroes on television. If we weren’t cruising around listening to “tunes”, we were in the weight room “pushing iron”.)

In the 1960s and 1970s everyone lived in houses like this.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans lived in suburbia houses much like this. We pretty much thrived in that environment and it was safe and a pleasant lifestyle. With solid families all run in traditional households with the wives all keeping an eye out for all the neighborhood kids.

For me, I would lift weights in the High School gym.  There was a “Universal Gym” that I could use.  I wasn’t a member of the school football team as I had to work after school. Some of my friends owned real sets of “free weights”.  They would have a weight bench outside in the back yard, and I might go out and lift with them. My parents had bought me a cheap set of “free weights”. These consisted of weights, not out of cast iron or steel, but rather of plastic disks filled with cement.  They did not last as long as their more expensive steel counterparts, but they did do their purpose.

I kept them in our basement.  They sat alongside the furnace.  Next to it was my father’s old childhood shoebox (he used to go out and shine shoes for a buck or two when he was a boy). It still had his shoe polish, brushes, cloth and other tools of the trade. It was painted light green, for some reason now lost in the mists of time. On the top of it was a platform, tilted at a 45 degree angle, where the customer could place their shoe so that he can shine it.

Both my weights, and my father’s shoebox, sat in front of my great grandfather’s toolbox. He was a carpenter who would make furniture.  Back in the “old days”, he would haul the toolbox out to the countryside.  His potential customers would judge his skill at furniture making by looking at his toolbox.  They would note the condition and craftsmanship of his tools.  As such, if the tools were well maintained and clean, and the workmanship was of high quality, he would obtain work to make commissioned furniture.  Back in his generation, at that time, most of his work was custom furniture to fit the needs of the local townspeople in Germany and Poland in and around the Bug river area.

There in the basement were three generations of male tools and brick-a-brack. Our female companions never cared too much for the emotional value and labor that these items represented to us men.  They only appreciated the money that was derived from efforts using them. (And, for me, NOPE I just never became a famous body builder.)

“Beginning in the 1980s, American childhood changed. For a variety of reasons—including shifts in parenting norms, new academic expectations, increased regulation, technological advances, and especially a heightened fear of abduction (missing kids on milk cartons made it feel as if this exceedingly rare crime was rampant)—children largely lost the experience of having large swaths of unsupervised time to play, explore, and resolve conflicts on their own. 

This has left them more fragile, more easily offended, and more reliant on others. They have been taught to seek authority figures to solve their problems and shield them from discomfort, a condition sociologists call “moral dependency.”

-The Fragile Generation

Roles for us men were different than roles for women. Because, after all, we are quite different.

(Quick recap for those of you who didn’t learn this in first grade. There are two genders. They are boys and girls. If there is a mixture of genitalia on a person, they have a rare condition known as a hermaphrodite. The construction of other genders beside these precious few is not biologically sound, and is used as a political construct for greedy people to get power. If you follow their narrative, you will eventually get hurt.)

Men and Women

Men and women are different. That is a good thing. Different is wonderful.

Hollywood portrayal of men during the 1960s and 1970s were of strong men of means.
1960s and 1970s male roles models were men who acted like men. They carried guns, spoke what they felt, and worked hard. Male role models. (Image Source.)

Television role models for women were different.

Women had a different series of standards and interests.  At that time, women were regarded and cherished as “different” from men.  Men and women were not, never were, and never will be, equal. 

Life in the 1970s as a woman.
In a traditional household, the woman of the house runs the financing, budgeting, and all aspects of the family life. She is totally and completely responsible for the family. She tells the man what to wear, and how to act. She will then budget out the money for him to carry in his wallet, and he will dutifully earn money for the family. She will be responsible for the health and education of the children. It is HER and her responsibly alone.

Heroines for women included Elly Mae, June Cleaver, Mary Anne, Anne Marie, Samantha, Lisa Douglas, and Jeannie. They were all women who acted like women and lived their lives on their own terms. From my discussions with women (Attribution below.), they all seem to agree that television promoted woman as strong leaders.

Consider Elly Mae from the television show The Beverly Hillbillies. She’s pretty but doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, can talk to animals and beat the living crap out of boys if she wants to.

Or, June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. From what I hear, June Cleaver was the perfect woman. “How fabulous were her clothes? Her little suburban life? Her shiny appliances? Her squeaky clean kids? Her “hunkahunka” husband? Her cocktail hour and her perfect little dinners?”

Mary Anne, from Gilligan’s Island was wholesome, nice, pretty, athletic, fab body, smart, and loyal.

Samantha from Bewitched was beautiful, magical, so in love with Derwood that she’d give up everything that makes her special, could get anything she wanted by wiggling her nose.

Fun and Games

One hobby that we loved to do was go “dirt biking” which involved a specialized motorcycle that was specifically designed for “off road” use. It would not have a head light or turn signals, and would be lighter.  We would ride these “beasts” up and down all through the woods and the “boney dumps” (strip mined regions devoid of trees). Good times. We just “kicked it up in the sticks”. Why is everything so kid-safe today?

I had many friends who had pickup trucks.  Typically they were older vehicles with many dents, dings and rusty panels. At that time, CB Radios were very popular.  It would be on and we would listen for “Smokey Alerts” (Police Traps). Another fun activity was to go “mud slingin’”.  Here, we would often take a “beater” truck and run through the local bogs and swamps with it.  As one could expect, the truck would “sling mud” everywhere. We would often keep a cooler of beer in the back (Typically in cans.  Our parents drank from bottles.), and drink and party to loud rock music, or (yes) country music.

Here’s a plug for Donald Ray Williams who died on September 8, 2017.

Gas was cheap. Food was cheaper. A dollar could buy you five McDonalds hamburgers, while a music album would cost you $20 (though, it might only have eight songs on it).

Music and Television

Television was a big part of our life.

It is difficult for someone in this day and age to appreciate the grand influence of television had on society during the 1960’s and the 1970’s.  Today we realize that everything is tied, one way or the other, to the Internet.  Well, at that time period, everything (while not “tied”) was most certainly revolving around the television set.  Oh, it was a much simpler time because the government controlled the media, there were only a handful of media companies, and no one knew about the ties between the two. It was an open secret.

Music and televisions were big.

During the 1970s and 1980s we had trucks with big tires, and mud was a perfect saturday afternoon. We would go out shooting our rifles, drinking beer, and chilling out.
In the 1970s and 1980s we used to go “Mud Slingin'” in the woods. Mud Slingin’. (Image Source.)

We watched Walter Cronkite on the evening news, enjoyed “Mary Hartman Mary Hartman”, “Three’s Company”, reruns of “It’s about time”, and weekly installments of “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” on television.  Also included such classics as “The Gong Show”, Reruns of “Adam-12”, and “The Brady Bunch” / “The Partridge Family”, and other retro-1960’s shows like ‘The Mod Squad”, “Julia”, and “Maude” were still getting air time.  So we watched them along with other 1960’s and 1970’s era shows. Of course, we all loved The Three Stooges.

Honorable mention to television shows that influenced me personally at this time included “The Time Tunnel”, “Star Trek” (Of course), “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Supercar”, and “Fireball XL-5”.  Finally, “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” defined our generation at that time.  The cold war influences were all blended together with the emerging post nuclear sciences that indeed really shaped our opinions and thoughts on life.

“I had a .22 Bolt Action Rifle and single shot .410 Shotgun when I was eight years old. I also rode my Schwinn Stingray without Wearing a Bike Helmet. I’m not even going to get into the many years my Parents drove me and my Brother around in a four wheeled death machine with no Seat Belts and a Dashboard made of steel. How I’ve lived to tell the tale is obviously a miracle.

Did I mention the Chemistry Set I got for Christmas when I was ten years old? Isn’t Mercury fun to play with?’

- 2/3/2018, 2:56:02 PM by Kickass Conservative

Television was a staple for my generation, but that was not the case for my parents’ generation. We absolutely lived off it.  They used it to augment their personal activities.  Whether it was knitting (my mother), or smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of red wine or cocktail (my father) my parents considered television to be a supplement to their lives.

Music was always playing and the televisions set was always on. My father would come home from work at the Steel Mill, and my mother would prepare him a cocktail while dinner was being made.  We would have the “late edition” of the Pittsburgh Press (newspaper) delivered, and he would read it in “his” chair (all men need to have “their” chair) as he drank his preferred beverage. We kids would watch the television.  When it was time to eat, we all would put what we were doing aside and go to the dining room. There we would have our daily meal together.

Yes, we collected albums, and listened to them on record players, or very expensive audio components known as “turntables”, “receivers”, “amplifiers”, and “tape decks”.  (We would even buy an album containing 10 lousy songs because we liked one track.)  Music, then as now, was a big part of our life.

Television was our primary source of entertainment. Everyone had one, and we all watched it.  Many households had the television  on most of the day. Though, for the most part, we only had access to from four to five channels of various quality. (This was before cable services.)

Before cassettes, and eight track players, we listened to albums on turntables, and FM music on recievers. Ah, the 1970s and the 1980s had their own way of doing things.
A well stocked 1970s album collection. In the time before CD’s we listened to albums on turntables. A well-stocked album collection. (Image Source.)

Is that a Chicago album I see? How many albums can you, the reader, identify? I see Alice Cooper’s Muscle of Love, Neil Young’s Harvest, and a Three Dog Night, a Boston with a BTO nearby.

Briefly, we had an “8 track” player installed in our family car.  Here we could switch between four (4) locations in the “album” so we could rapidly listen to a different song if we did not like the one that was playing.  We had a collection of these in the car.  As I recall, we had a “Jesus Christ Superstar”, and an “America”, and an “Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”.  The problem was that the inside of the car got hot, and the “8 track” tapes were made out of ABS plastic, so sometimes they would melt in the heat of the car If you left them on the dashboard.

Belief

At that time, we believed the media.  We believed what we saw.  We believed in the government, and we believed in the promises that were made to us.

Furniture during the 1960s was made out of real hardwood. The use of softwood, plywood, and particle board for furniture did not yet become popular.
This was the style of the dining room furnishings that my parents had. They bought them sometime around 1965. During my entire childhood and 1970s teenage years we would have family meals at this table. My household furnishings. (Image Source.)

We believed the Democrats when they told us that our social security money (taxes) went into a “lock box” (actual term as they used) and would never be “touched” (used for other purposes).  Then, right after they made those promises, they went around and started handing the money away to non-contributors like candy. Anyone could get it. Just like pensions. All gone. Bye bye.

WTF?

We believed that when we paid state taxes that they would go into fixing the terrible “pot holes” that littered Pennsylvania roads.

We believed that they would not go into the big unions of Philadelphia that operated like mob bosses of yore. But we were wrong.  We were really, really, wrong.

Instead, the fat mob bosses just got fatter.  The rich guys “on the Hill” (The Mayor and his toadies.) got richer, and our money seemed to get smaller and smaller. Every year the costs for things increased. Every year we were told that this was “normal” and we needed to accept things, but they “had a plan”.  Always, the plan turned out to take more money from our wallets, and put it into theirs.

My father, a staunch life-long Democrat strongly believed that once the entire state was controlled by Democrats that the world would be pure, easy and everything would be perfect. He really believed in what they promised. Even when it was found that they had stolen his pension. Even when it was found out that his 401(K) was looted. Even when he found out that they “lost” the monies that they promised to fix the roads with. He still believed.

Pennsylvania “pot holes” still never got fixed.

A Simpler Time

We might have been “simple”, but at least we possessed some “common sense”.  We at least knew what a boy was and what a girl was. That is unlike the confused children of today. (And, wow are they confused!)  We knew that if you possessed a penis you were a boy.  If you had a vagina, you were a girl.  If you couldn’t tell the difference you were confused.  Though at that time we would of simply called you a fucking idiot, and laughed at you until you ran home crying to your mother.

If you wore a mask to cover your face, you were a bad guy and doing something reprehensible.  (Something, I might add, that you are ashamed to associate with your face.)  This included Bank Robbers, Train Robbers, Stagecoach Robbers, the KKK, and the Black Panthers. They were not looked upon as righteous heroes such as what is being portrayed in the media today with the BLM, SWJ, and Antifa movements. They were considered criminals.

My First Job

I well remember the first time that I got a job.  I had just turned 14. It was in the local grocery store, and I was hired at minimum wage to stock shelves and bag groceries.  I used to wear a white short sleeved shirt and a red bow tie.  Over this, I wore an apron. My hair must be over my ears and not touch my collar. No face hair was permitted.

I was ready for my first job. However, before I could work, I needed to get a “social security” number.  Here is my experience about that event…

I asked my father, why do I need a social security number?  His response was, you need it because you need to save some money away for when you get old.  This will help you accomplish that.

We were riding in the car, and as we crossed over the East Brady bridge I looked at him, and asked him; “OK, I understand.  But, why does the United States government have to do this?  Can’t I just save the money on my own?”

He just shook his head.  “This is the way it is son.  You have to give part of your money away to the government.  They know better than you do, and they will take care of you when you get older…”

My trustworthy father told me the way things work in the United States. He said the United States government will take care of ME when I get older…

I AM older.  My government ain’t doin’ JACK SHIT.

It was my father’s generation, and his father’s generation that got us in the financial position that the United States is in today.  Reread his answer.  At the time… he really…REALLY believed what he told me. He was a life-long Democrat, and to the day he died he could not understand why, with all the taxes being collected, that the government could not (or would not) help the common citizen.

Back then, taxes were much lower than they are today. Yet, I well remember my surprise when I received my first paycheck.  I expected to be paid in full, and was surprised at the size of the amount deduced from my paycheck…

Americans have the most amount of money deducted from their paycheck for the most reasons, under the widest selection of names compared to the rest of the world.
Getting the first paycheck and seeing the deductions of taxes, fees, contributions, and services from the paycheck.  An American tradition: watching the expression on the face of someone getting their first paycheck and seeing all the taxes taken out. (Image Source.) I experienced this during the 1970s. I can only imagine what a shock it must be today.

It didn’t matter what job I was doing, the taxes always had to be set aside. No matter what the media said, I just never was able to get any of the “freebies” (reference law#40 on the 48 Laws of Power)  and deductions that was promised to me.

I was 11 when I had my first job. Summer job working at a restaurant. I’d be out by 12:30pm and would head to the beach with my friends.

My first pay check was $236 for 40 hours. I’d figured around $280 and was expecting it. I took my paycheck to the manager. I explained to him there were several deductions on it which I felt deprived me of my due compensation for the work I’d done. He explained how it was normal and everyone had it on their paychecks. He even showed my his pay stub with much larger deductions. I was shocked. It was theft. How could all these people put up with this?

I concluded -who steals from an 11 year old?

This is the point at which I became a conservative.


-Justa on Free Republic

Later, when I worked in the coal mines, there was talk about credits for solar panels. Even President Jimmy Carter put solar panels in the White House. But, that credit was not for me.

Then, when I was working in the steel mills, our union steward told us that if we voted Democrat that we could pretty much guarantee a lifetime pension and a great future for ourselves and our families. That never materialized either. My father was particularly upset with this change of events. Sigh.

When we were on the Forest Fire Crew, we would discuss the “rebates” that were promised to us by (then President) Jimmy Carter.  Nah. They NEVER materialized. Maybe some privileged group or major Democrat voting block got some, but we never saw anything. I guess that we weren’t important enough, or maybe it was because we just didn’t complain loud enough.

When I watch the news today, I can well see why those in power don’t want the youth of today to read and know their history. They want to keep them fat, dumb and stupid.

As I get older, I can plainly see the same old “bag of tricks” being recycled for use on an ignorant public. Yeah… yeah…. Vote Democrat and we will fix everything this time. You can trust us! Yah… yeah…

If you speak out of line, or don’t follow the official script, you are “off the reservation“, and will be attacked. Look at what is going on with Kayne when he does not follow the script.

Oh, and the Republicans are just as bad. Don’t think that they are going to get a free pass from me. In my mind they are every bit as bad as the Democrats. But at least they are pretending to try. The fact is that both Republicans and Democrats are working from the exact same playbook; Rule # 31 & 32 of the 48 laws of power.

Families & Vices

In those days, parents were responsible for their children, and if a child misbehaves the entire family would lose face. Parents made sure that children behaved. This was before the coddling movements of the 1980’s where everyone gets a participation prize at school, and those that excel are punished.

In the past, before government legislation, children could smoke and drink with parential permission.
In the 1960s and 1970s, children smoked with parental permission. This all ended when progressive democrats took over the state legislatures and began to re-engineer society to make it “better”. Childhood before social re-engineering efforts. (Image Source.)

The popular television shows reinforced this narrative. If you misbehave, your family would suffer.  Consider the television shows “The Brady Bunch”, “The Partridge Family”,  and Happy Days”.

Television commercials promoted both cigarettes and booze.  The hard liquor ban has been in effect since 1936 for radio and 1948 for television.  The ban on selling “soft liquor” (beer) has been a “darling child” of the progressive left since the days of Bill Clinton.  At the time of this writing the fight is still active.  Perhaps, by the time this gets read the liberal progressive Democrats will succeed in banning it.

The “vices” of the past were once considered unsavory habits. Today, they are considered to be serious crimes.  Indeed, it was just simply “fine” to smoke, drink and have a cocktail at lunch. Though there were limitations; for instance only Management and Sales could go for a “three martini lunch”, the rest of us had to limit it to one or two beers.

The phrases “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Or, “I’d rather fight than quit” were famous catch phrases for cigarette advertisements on television at that time.

Cartoon characters smoke, drank, fought and were very politically incorrect. Being homosexual was frowned upon, and there were absolutely NO portrayals of them in the media. No one knew what a LGBT person was, nor cared about it either. I ask the reader this; have you seen a gay person on “The Jetsons”, “The Flintstones”, “Deputy Dog”, “Captain Kangeroo”, “Lost in Space”, “Petticoat Junction”, “Hee Haw”, “F Troop”, or “Ba Ba Black Sheep”?

Now, today, you cannot find a single one without one. Even the science fiction staples such as “Star Trek” and “The Orville” all have multiple characters presented.

If you got pregnant before getting married, it was frowned upon, and while abortion was available, its use was discouraged. The social norms were reinforced by the media. They were not trying to redefine them.

The Three Martini Lunch

I suppose that some explanations are in order.

For there are many things that I grew up that were normal, that is considered outrageous today. One of them is the three martini lunch. The three-martini lunch is a term used in the United States to describe a “leisurely, indulgent lunch enjoyed by businesspeople”. Back in the day, this was a common enough practice. If you were in management, part of a sales team, or even a supervisor, these kinds of lunches were quite common. Indeed, many times, the boss would come back after 3:30pm from a long lunch and be quite “sauced”.

Now, according to Wikipedia, it is ONLY a perception.

“It refers to a common belief that many people in such professions have enough leisure time and wherewithal to consume more than one martini during the work day.”

Ah. Nope, my dear clueless millennial. It was not a perception. It was a reality. Drinking at work was commonplace. At least in the steel, coal, and appliance industries it was. I don’t know about the other industries.

Now, since business matters are usually discussed at them, three-martini lunches can be considered a business expense. Of course  (which includes travel, meals, etc.) and thus can qualify for a tax deduction. The people involved would remember to collect their receipts and turn them in at the end of the month for reimbursement. They would get money back, and the receipts were kept in a ledger to account for all the costs related to business expenses.

In those days, all managers, and of course sales staff, had an entertainment budget. The manager would have free latitude in determination of how to spend the money, and it was often considered a perk. The manager could spend it with employees to offer them incentives and to build up the working relationships, or use it for work related tasks with other companies and people.

Wikipedia does have it right in that the three-martini lunch is no longer common in the United States. However, it is, thankfully, quite common outside of it. Yeah! Baby!

“The three-martini lunch is no longer common practice for several reasons, including the implementation of "fitness for duty" programs by numerous companies, the decreased tolerance of alcohol use (Hum… speak for yourself), a general decrease in available leisure time for business executives, an increase in the size of the martini, and a decrease in the size of the tax deduction.”

America for the modern businessman certainly blows!

President John F. Kennedy (D) called for a crackdown on such tax breaks in 1961, but nothing was done at the time.

Then another democrat, Jimmy Carter (D)  condemned the practice during the 1976 presidential campaign. Carter portrayed it as part of the unfairness in the nation’s tax laws, claiming that the working class was subsidizing the “$50 martini lunch”. (Of course, use the “class struggle” to divide Americans. It’s a time-honored Democrat tactic. The theory is because a “rich businessman” could write off this type of lunch as a business expense.)

By the time Bill Clinton (D) came to office, there wasn’t much that still needed to be done.  So he concentrated in the elimination of all vices from the work environment (except for elected officials, of course) and the banning of cigarettes, and drinking proceeded apace.

Not to be outdone, Obama (D) started to tie health plans to tax breaks.

The only people who still had three-martini lunches were the “fat cats” in Washington, D.C.. They were “different” don’t ya know, and laws don’t apply to them. Most especially if they are Democrats.

Cigarettes

When I was a kid one of the most popular marketing brands was for Camel cigarettes. I can remember wanting to “walk a mile for a Camel” although I was too young to appreciate it’s meaning. This was a “dated” slogan, as it dated back to 1921.  Everyone smoked, except me. LOL!

There were cigarette vending machines everywhere including the high school. It sat right next to the Coke machine in the school cafeteria. The vending machine had a long lever that you pulled outwards to discharge a pack of cigarettes. Matches were common everywhere, and many stores and restaurants gave away free matches with their address on it.

1960s and 1970s cartoon figures smoked and drank on television.
1960s and 1970s childhood icon Fred Flintstone smoking. Of course, smoking and drinking was commonplace until the social re-engineering efforts by democrats. Our cartoon heroes all smoked. (Image Source.)

In the 1990’s during the Bill Clinton presidency, it changed to the “Joe Camel” advertising promotion that became wildly popular.  (Since the Democrat party had no way to skim off some of the huge profits that the advertising promotion generated, they went ”full on” to ban it.  After all, if they couldn’t get their cut in the profits, no one could get anything.  Oh, they promoted the ban to help “the children”.  But of course, what we now know about the Clinton pay-for-play schemes, we know this to be painfully true. But, like everything else, this is just my opinion.)

I guess that I am full of “nonsense” opinions.  Right?  Well, look at this from my point of view then…

  • In March 1992, the “Coalition on Smoking or Health” (a Democrat Progressive social-engineering platform) petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to ban Joe Camel.
  • However in June 1994, the commission decided not to take action against R.J. Reynolds, because the record did not show that Joe was attracting kids to cigarettes. After all, if you want to ban something you have to show a reason behind it.
  • This need; to find reasons to ban things, all ended during the presidency of Bill Clinton. (And look at the nonsense it hath wrought.) Bill Clinton implemented law #33 of the 48 Laws of Power.
  • In May 1997, after a change in personnel (the Bill Clinton administration changed the staff at the FTC precisely because they did not do as he wished) but no change in the relevant evidence, the FTC reversed itself, voting to seek an order that would keep Joe out of children’s sight.

Yup, you throw out the people who are “not on the same team”, and put your guys in. This is true for all politicians, not just Democrats.

Link

Though, President Trump is kind of slow in learning this political lesson…

Why did it get banned?  The evidence did not show a connection. The change in makeup of the FTC was changed by Bill Clinton, that is a fact.  Why?  To “save the children”, from what?  Where is the proof?  I am not, will not and cannot buy those excuses.  Especially related to a mega-rich uber-billionaire and his family who has no obvious sources of income except a presidential salary and well known for their famous “pay-me-money” for access and favors schemes.

Joe’s critics did not need evidence. Wasn’t it obvious that R.J. Reynolds was targeting children? Joe Camel was a cartoon, after all. To which R.J. Reynolds replied that Snoopy sells life insurance and the Pink Panther pitches fiberglass insulation, but no one assumes these products are aimed at kids. The company insisted that hip, irreverent Joe was designed to attract young adults who considered Camel an old man’s cigarette.

Find out on your own.  Take the time to find out why.

The demise of advertising for cigarettes on television, as well as banning cute advertisements aimed at youth (Joe Camel), was part of an anti-smoking initative initiated by the Democrat Party and specifically Bill Clinton (D) in the early 1990’s.  I suppose they wouldn’t have gone so aggressively against the “big” tobacco companies if they contributed more money to the Democrat party election coffers.  But that is a different subject for a different time.

The way this works is obvious to everyone. Especially today. If you want to keep the SJW, Antifa, BLM, and busybodies off your back, you pay them off.

In America you PAYOFF the busybodies.

Furniture

We had furniture that was made out of real hardwood.  The cheap softwood furniture started to replace the long-lasting and durable (and very beautiful) hardwoods in the 1970’s.  This lasted for a decade, and then the 1980’s hit. Everyone was trying to “make a buck”. As a result even cheaper furniture started to make it’s appearance.  This consisted of plywood furniture.  The plywood would have a laminated layer of nice attractive hardwood.

This lasted for about a decade, up until the decade of Bill Clinton. At that time, the uncontrolled spending by Congress reached new levels, and the resulting hit on the value of the worker’s dollar was substantial. Wal-Mart became very popular and powerful.  As it offered the cheapest products for families trying to maintain their standard of living while the value of the dollar collapsed.  This resulted in the cheap “sawdust and glue” furniture (Particleboard) that is so common today.

As inflation decimated the value of the USD dollar, Americans were forced to rely on cheaper and cheaper items of furniture. Today most Americans use paper and sawdust furnishings. This trend became quite noticable during the 1960s and 1970s.
Changes in the use of materials in American furniture since the advent of the Federal Reserve. As the USD depreciated in value, Americans were forced to buy progressively cheaper and cheaper furnishings. THis trend accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s.

Lawyers didn’t yet advertise for class action law suits. Not until the Clinton presidency.  That presidency implemented so many social revisions that are too numerous to mention.  Some may argue that it was certainly for the best.  But, I argue the oppose.  All you need to do is look at what constitutes a playground in America today to see the fallout from this folly.  All you need to do is take a bite out of a tomato that tastes like a cardboard box filled with bland water. All you need to do is try to speak your mind today and see the vitriol and hatred directed back at you.

Indeed, restrictions on one’s ability to do what they please is a restriction on FREEDOM, and is tyrannical in nature and substance. No matter what the (stated) intention was..

Anyways, while there were many things changing over the years, one of the most notable was the phone sex hot lines that were all the rage during late-night commercials. These things were just a passing fad that made some people enormously wealthy in a very… very short period of time.

The networks were dominated by the big three; NBC, CBS, and ABC and they controlled everything that we saw and many things that we read. There was no Internet, if we wanted to watch something out of the ordinary we would watch Public Broadcasting, or one of the small local startups that tended to appear and disappear after a few months. (Thanks to them, instead of the dominant American networks, I was introduced to Bennie Hill, Monty Python, and belly-dancing.)

“If you’re over 40, chances are good that you had scads of free time as a child—after school, on weekends, over the summer. And chances are also good that, if you were asked about it now, you’d go on and on about playing in the woods and riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Today many kids are raised like veal. Only 13 percent of them even walk to school. Many who take the bus wait at the stop with parents beside them like bodyguards. For a while, Rhode Island was considering a bill that would prohibit children from getting off the bus in the afternoon if there wasn’t an adult waiting to walk them home. This would have applied until seventh grade.”

-The Fragile Generation

Everything was different.

Politics

Politics have made America what it is today. Ugh!

All of the interns that I get from the United States are walking progressive robots. Which is fine, as long as they do their work. Just do you job, eh? The problem is that they have no idea what work is. They think it is talking about their feelings over coffee. What the fuck has happened to America?

Here is what work is;

  • I tell you what to do, and you do it.
  • You do it to the best of your ability.
  • You ask questions if you are not sure.
  • Once your assignment is completed, you have someone review your work.
  • Then you ask for more work.
  • Then you are paid or rewarded for your efforts.

Somehow, the young folk out of the United States never learned this. Their ideas about what work is looks more a scene from the television show “Friends”, or the inside of a coffee shop. Maybe they feel at ease parroting Ellen Degeneres. Many are totally useless at work. It’s their education.

You know, the entire reason for this post was due to a young intern. She had the gall to suggest that I (her supervisors boss’s boss) was in my role because I was “privileged” growing up. She had the fucking gall to tell me that I didn’t know about their “struggles”. Her “struggles”…. Give me a fucking break will you!

Well, I didn’t hold back in my response. I’ll tell you what. She probably has nightmares about me now. (Sigh). Look, life is full of good things and bad things. But life is what YOU experience. It is not what you hear about, read about, or watch in a movie. It is what you personally experience. Unless you have gone through what I had to endure to be where I am today, then SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Politics are both silly and dangerous. I wouldn’t be so fearful except that politics is used to change governments. Here is the basic recipe;

  • They take a stable government and turn it into a “democracy”.
  • Then, they obtain power by manipulation of the people. (This has many facets.)
  • Finally, they devolve into tyrannical governments.
  • Once in power, these governments then turn on their own people. They turn against them.
  • The most important step towards tyranny; you disarm the people.
  • Then you separate the people into groups; favored and unfavored.
  • Then finally, you kill them in batches. Know your history.

Which is why, those of us who actually READ, support the second amendment.

Those that want to change the government are often well-meaning, but easily manipulated by tricksters. Those “tricksters” often manipulate their followers to obtain their ultimate goals of power, control, wealth and fame. Then, once they have obtained power, they kill their top leadership and their top followers. This happens each and every time. It happened in Germany, in China, in North Korea, and in Cuba. The techniques are well known and well documented. If the reader is interested in this, maybe you too want to control your own nation someday, you can read about it in the book the 28 laws of Power.

Politics never reflect reality.

American politics is just a way for those in power to control the people who live within America.
American politics is a very complex subject. Here is a simplified explanation. American politics explained. (Image Source.)

Politics were black and white. Democrats supported the governments of Communist Russia, and Communist China.  (That is one of the reasons why all of the old symbols of the Democrats were red.)  Even the Democrat / Confederate “battle flag” was red with the crossed bars. The KKK was, and for the most part still is, a Democrat organization. Let’s not forget that the Grand Kleagle (LOL!) was Senator Robert Byrd Democrat from West Virginia! I’ll wager a bet that you all didn’t know that.

It’s one of top secrets of the DNC.

Secrets

There are many such secrets. Secrets abound, and it’s not just politically motivated secrets only. Consider the Clinton body count (terribly underestimated in size and scope). The secret about when President Trump exploded all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons under the mountains. Oh, and the Obama funding for the anti-White race war in South Africa. Oh, you haven’t heard about that one yet… well, you will…

You will…

My father, a life-long Democrat, constantly talked about how “one day” the Democrats will get in power and change things.  Yessur!  The people will rise up and the “little guy” (himself and all his white middle-class friends) would get a chance to “sit at the table”. Hah! Was he ever so disappointed in President Obama. I think it broke his heart. 

Now, even though he is long dead and buried, he still, to this day continues to vote Democrat

Democrats were for free speech EVERYWHERE by EVERYONE.  (Speech was more than just talk, but included behavior.  Indeed, Democrats wanted to “let it all hang out”.) Yikes…! At that time, it helped further their agenda.

Which was, and still is, a phased plan to rewrite the Constitution.

  • First step…claim that the Constitution is a “living document” subject to change. Make it so that the rules are constantly and easily bent.
  • Second step… make changes to “improve” things. Put your own judicial interpeters in power. Have them implement rules to fit your narrative only.
  • Third step… repeat the narrative over and over and over. So that everyone calls it a Democracy. You know that you are “over the hump” when elected officials start to parrot this.
  • Then, fourth step… change a Democracy into a Social Democracy. Like the Nazi’s, or Communist China, or the Soviet Union.
  • Fifth Step. Make it nice and “Progressive”. Say you are doing it for just causes. Limit speech. Have a nice long list of things that you cannot say or talk about. Reference law #32 of the 48 laws of Power.
  • Sixth Step. Then the most important step… disarm the population. They can’t have their “pitchforks” and “torches” .  That’s right, get rid of all those guns (then see what happens).  Take every opportunity, get the children to march for it. Punish them if they don’t go along with the plan.
  • Seventh Step. Finally,… setup a rulership of the 1% presiding over a disarmed ignorant mass. Make sure the police have the latest in military technology. Call them something different, like “protectors”, “guardians”, or “peace officers”. Make the names fierce like the SS, or IRS. Use the military against your own people. Even if you are not permitted to, do it anyways.
  • Eighth and Final Step. Once you have control, you must RULE! Show everyone just who is Boss. Go full-on Negan!
Negan is a character ont he television show The Walking Dead.
Once, you obtain power, and you know that there is a large segment of the population that does not support you, you need to RULE. You need to show who is boss. You go full NEGAN. (Image source.)

Politics

Now politics is such a large part of American culture, that I just can’t leave it out.

Here’s the truth. It doesn’t matter if it is 1970 or 2010. Republicans were just sick and tired of all the political nonsense and wanted everyone to leave them alone and stop paying so much in taxes.  However, since the Democrats controlled the media they controlled popular culture.  No matter how one felt, the barrage of progressive indoctrination was incessant. Even the music that we enjoyed and listened to (at that time) was interspersed with progressive propaganda.

Democrats in the 1970’s followed time proved socialist techniques. They supported peaceful protests and “sit downs” for such things as labor unions (automotive, steel, government and education), and free access to the soft drink “Tab”. Republicans wanted to stop the apparently never-ending cycle of “walkouts”, “strikes” and “labor organization” (for substantial pay increases).

It was always attack, and Republicans defend.

Attack… defend.  Attack… defend.

Attack… defend.

By the mid-1980’s, a union steel worker (high school graduate, with no subsequent post-education) with ten years in the union, would be able to make almost two times the salary of a degreed engineer with ten years’ experience. It was really outrageous. (Yeah, but for my generation, it wasn’t so great. After they worked ten years or so and were laid off, they were fucked.)

Fucked over…big time.

Hey! You “I always vote Democrat because they will protect me and give me a pension”, how’s that working out for you? Now that non-Americans can get your jobs? It feel really good? It feels like your have been vindicated? Eh?

Anyways, all of this was pretty hard for industry at that time, where the production line could shut down at a moment’s notice on the most trivial of reasons, and the factory couldn’t do anything about it (that was until globalism…) The Democrats used the unions because they represented a huge voting block. They always manipulated huge blocks of people. Now, here today we know exactly just how far that utility lasts. So, the lesson here is that the Democrats turned their backs on the unions so that they could take more, in bigger bundles from foreign governments. It was all in the name of “Globalism”.

My father could NEVER get over that harsh reality.

Democrats wanted to burn bras (which was something even my mother did) and I never had a problem with it either, and have free love with everyone (and everything).  That also sounded good to me too. Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Who doesn’t like sex? Sex is fun.

Things were so different then. It was a different time indeed.

For today, if you are not from an urban ghetto, or a member of one of the (approved) “oppressed minorities” you are maligned. And, for the record, we all think it’s terrible inaccurate and very, very unfair. So when you are trying to label and box Trump supporters into such things as “uneducated, white males”, or “deplorables”, we all take particular offense at that.

We are not. So shut the fuck up.

 “The schools you send your kids to have been trying to inculcate your kids with all kinds of rotgut, perverted junk under the guise of enlightenment. And you’ve had to sit there and take it. 

You’ve had to sit there and listen to the never-ending, increasing profane rants and having all of this stuff pushed right in your face and down your throat. 

You’ve been forced to shut up. You’ve been forced to say nothing in reaction for fear of losing your job or being chastised, humiliated, or what have you, in social media.

You’ve been forced to accept the cultural rot that the American left has imposed on you and your kids. 

You have to sit around and listen to your religion be mocked. Your religion is laughed at, your religion is made fun of and criticized, openly and with malice, and it is done with impunity. People who mock and applaud and insult you and your religion are praised as brilliant artists. 

You are called hicks. You’re called white racists.

You’re called bigots. Sometimes they call you prudes. Sometimes they call you Bible thumpers. 

You’re an idiot. You’re small-minded. You’re a moral twit. 

And these are the people having a fit over Trump saying something? These people who have put themselves in charge of infiltrating crap throughout our culture and our society? These people who have been responsible for injecting drivel and bilge throughout our society claim to be upset and outraged and offended over the use of a word — slang for a toilet — by the president of the United States, in a private meeting?”

-Rush Limbaugh

Anyways, all the seeds of political unrest was planted during the 1970’s. The seeds are sprouting up today, and they aren’t pretty. It is sad.

It’s sad, but you know what, I no longer live in the USA so it’s not my problem.

You’ve got Democrats and you’ve got Republicans. They are both identical creatures with similar objectives. They pretend to be ideological, but they really aren’t. They just act that way. When it benefits them, they simply switch political parties. That way their objectives are maintained.

Yeah. It’s not my problem.

College

Then, college was where an intelligent and scholarly person would migrate to after high school. At that time, only a few people could afford to go to college, and they were very picky as to whom they would select.  At that time, the wealthiest, and the smartest went to college.  Then, after the implementation of the G.I. bill, room was made for those who earned their “place at the table” through merit (risking their lives in war). Thus, obtaining a college degree was significant and factored large in the overall standard of living that one could hope for.

That is totally the opposite of what college is today, where EVERYONE can get a college degree.  It is  where the content of the degree is so watered down as to become meaningless.  It is where those people whom graduate have to fight a flood of entry-level applicants for a scarce few positions. It hardly seems worth the time, and doesn’t seem to be worth the money, or the investment.

That is because, today, it just isn’t worth it. Looking at the big picture, it is almost like colleges and universities have become large institutions that turn young people into debt slaves – serfs. Unless they quickly obtain a high paying position, they might never leave that role.

Maybe that is the reason why President Obama made college so accessible… I wonder… Using it [1] as a propaganda machine, and [2] to turn the majority of the educated American masses into debt slaves.

For more links on this subject;

I went to college, as that was what young upwardly mobile families did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. For me, I had always wanted to be an astronaut. My only way to become one was through hard discipline, a strong technical background, and a clear vision.

Leaving the Mines to Better Myself

I applied and came in second place for the Air Force Academy. My grades were outstanding, and our scores were tied. Exactly tied. However, my family apparently didn’t have enough political pull, I guess. So my friend Brian got the open slot. (You know, if you two take the same battery of tests every weekend for six months, you do eventually get to become friends.)

It was a disappointment. But, I picked myself up off the floor. Dusted myself off and went to plan “B”.

Getting the best grade will not make you rich. Ability has no bearing on luck.
You can still do everything right, and still lose. It does not mean that you failed. It is just the way life is. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.
The reader should never take on the unrealistic belief that if they work hard, and be careful, and do everything right, and have everything go in their favor that things WILL work out to their advantage.  There are no guarantees. Truth is that there are always things and aspects of any particular given situation that is beyond one’s control. These aspects may or may not be in your favor.  Indeed it is quite possible to work hard, and make no mistakes and still lose.  That is life.

I had been saving all the money that I earned in the coalmines and at the steel mills so that I could be able to afford to go to college. I knew that I didn’t have enough for a full four years, but I did have enough for the first two. I had hoped that maybe I could supplement it by working part time while I attended university. My plan was to sell my car, buy a motorcycle and work part time to fund my education.

I applied to MIT and was accepted. I was going to enter their aeronautical engineering program, but at the last minute changed my mind and went to Syracuse University instead. They had an innovative aerospace engineering program that really appealed to me. They also offered to employ me part time as well (which was something that was not available to me at MIT). The program that I would eventually enter was a joint mechanical / aerospace engineering degree, which would specialize in the thermodynamic properties of rocket engines, and spacecraft design. So, I went to Syracuse. I went orange.

My dream was not dead. Just dormant.

My plan was to attend college, become a Rocket Scientist, and then enter another branch of service to obtain a flight slot. That way I could then eventually become an astronaut. It was a simple plan. All I needed to do was study hard classes, with a degree of persistence, all would work out. I would need to keep my focus clear and then with the skills, training and discipline, I would then enter one of the rare flight slots.

Conclusion

Well, I did attend university, and I actually did become a “Rocket Scientist”. I graduated on a sunny May day in 1981. My class was the first graduating class within the “big Syracuse marshmallow” (as opposed to the”big glowing green caterpillar”.)

The reader should know, that I also was accepted by, and joined the US Navy and trained as a Naval Aviator. (I passed the testing for a NFO, but my scores were so exceptional that they opened up a pilot slot for me. Woo Woo!) Indeed, shortly after I graduated, I found myself in the middle of training for a Naval Aviator down in NAS Pensacola, Florida.

All of my goals after years of hard work and labor started to finally pay off.

These are stories for another time. However, let it be known that opportunities to go into space DID present themselves to me. And I, well, I TOOK the opportunities presented to me. It was my dream, and I would never let anyone steal my dream away from me. So, yeah, I did get to explore the outer reaches, it’s just not at all what I expected…

And, as I have stated earlier, that will be a story for another day.

Take Aways

What can we learn from my experiences growing up?

  • I have strong opinions based on my experiences.
  • Growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s does not match the current narrative as promoted by the American media. Cherish the thought!
  • People had more freedom than they do today.
  • People ate better than they do today.
  • People played better than they do today.
  • Furniture was made out of higher quality materials than they are today.
  • Water used to be free.
  • Democrats and Republicans are identical. Don’t let their verbal “policy positions” distract you.
  • I had a knife when I was six years old.
  • I had long hair, had a white “choker collar”, wore bell-bottom jeans and drove a orange GTO in my Senior Year.
  • I like pizza.

All this should indicate that my experiences are totally different from what young people experience today.

Which means that when I talk to an intern, I need to explain to them some basics that they should have learned while they were growing up. The fact that they did not learn them, and that the families and the schools have both failed them is a troublesome worry. For they are not equipped to compete globally for any work at all. Let alone basic janitorial work.

Outrageous Then. Outrageous Now.
Being Gay, or LGBT. Drinking cocktails at lunch.
Not working until you are thirty. Working at 14 years old.
Getting ANY assistance from government. Having a free glass of water with your meal.
Free condoms to students. Cigarette vending machines in school.
Paid cable service. Free Torrents.
Not having a Christmas Tree during Christmas. Halloween costumes depicting black people.
Not punishing a child for screaming in a restaurant. Punishing a child in public.
Paying more than $0.10 for a cup of coffee. Paying less than $2.00 for a cup of coffee.
Not being a member of the local lodge. Having your wife make you a cocktail after work.
Going to school on the first day of hunting season. Smoking in a restaurant.
Having your parents watch you play. Unsupervised play.
Pumping your own gas. Full-service gas stations.
Manditory blood collections at work. Refusing to carry a cell-phone on you.

Comments on Free Republic

In July 2018, this article was presented on Free Republic for comments. You can read the comments HERE.

FAQ

Q: Why is Senior Year important in High School?
A: Senior Year is the last year that you can be a child. You are nearly an adult. You might have a girlfriend or boyfriend. You might have a car, a job, and some money. You have well established friends, and a future of some sort mapped out for you. You are in peak health, and are just ready to begin a new stage in your life.

Q: What was High School like in the 1970s?
A: It was a blast. I would imagine that it was like school in other generations and at other times. The 1970’s, were boring we thought. However, looking back, we can see just how absolutely great they were. Someday, you too will write about your experiences in school like I have here.

Q: What are the differences between High School in the 1970s and today?
A: Freedom. We could smoke outside the classrooms. We could drive our cars to and from the school. We could carry knives. Lunches were ok. We had a main dish, with two sides, a dessert and a drink. I see what constitutes a Michelle Obama school meal and I end up shitting my pants. What the hell was she thinking? Oh, and the music was awesome.

We often complained, back then, that the High School students in France got to drink wine during lunch time. Paid for, of course, by the school. We, us poor Americans, had to wait until we got home before we could drink. Looking back, the differences between then and now are astounding.

Q: What was segregation like in the 1970s?
A: I just don’t know. No one was segregated in the counties where I lived. I heard that there was still some “unofficial” or underground segregation going on in the deep south. But, in my neck of the woods, it was unheard of.

Q: Did everyone in high school drive cool cars?
A: Yes. I drove an orange 1970 Pontiac GTO. Many of my friends rode cool cars. My friend Clyde drove a Chevelle SS. Like the movie “Dazed and Confused”, where Wooderson drives a big-block Chevelle nicknamed “Melba Toast.” He had an Edelbrock intake on his 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS 454. Ohhh the 454, now that was an engine. Other cars included a Ford Mustang convertible, a Ford MACH 1, and a Plymouth Duster driven by the “Brackey Boys”. Heh heh.

Q: What was elementary school like in the 1960s and 1970s?
A: We would play outside before school started. We would play hopscotch on the sidewalk. We would mark out the numbered blocks with a stone and scratch it into the cement. Then we would file in. First thing after roll call was the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we would have a pretty much typical class.

Though there was often some education about the upcoming Global Cooling that would change the earth into a solid ice cube.

We would then go out on organized field trips to collect donations for the cause, and help clean up the local streams and countryside. I don’t know who got to pocket all the money we collected. All I remember is that we used to raise buckets of money for the cause. Literally, they were buckets and boxes of money. Afterwards, the teacher would sing on the guitar with some songs typical of that era, like “If I Had a Hammer”, and “Kumbaya”.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
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Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Drafted 21MAR18.
  2. Edited by request 24MAR18.
  3. Edited by request 25MAR18.
  4. Edited by request 4APR18.
  5. Edited by request 6APR18.
  6. Edited by request 12APR18.
  7. Edited by request 15APR18.
  8. Ready for internet 21APR18.
  9. SEO prep 2MAY18.
  10. Pre-launch checklist completed 3MAY18.