A matter of time

1975

Cash arrived early, but found John in ahead of him. Harald looked as though he hadn't gotten much sleep.

"What'd you get?" Cash asked.

"Christ. I fought it out with a whole battalion of clerks down there, for almost nothing." He opened his pocket notebook. "About the house. They started building it in 1868 or 1869, depending on who you ask, for two guys named Fian and Fial Groloch. Brothers? Anyway, these guys contracted the whole thing from New York. Never even came out to look at the land. Nobody knows for sure how they got Mrs. Tyler to let them build on her estate. Some people think that Henry Shaw arranged it, that he met them in Europe. If you want, I'll dig into that. Shaw's pretty well documented. Fian Groloch came out in sixty-nine to move in. He brought a man named Patrick O'Driscol with him. O'Driscol may have been wanted both in Ireland and New York. He seems to have been a Fenian, and a draft dodger during the Civil War, as well as hooked up with some shady people in New York. Fian also brought either a daughter or niece named Fiala…"

"Where the hell did you get all this?" That wasn't the sort of information kept in city records.

With a sarcastic stress on the O in official, he said, "From the official historian of the Shaw Neighborhood Association. Old dingbat named Mrs. Caldwell. 'Virginia, if you please.' You might know her. She lives on Flora too. Her old man, a doctor, died in fifty-nine, left her a bundle. Keeping track of this kind of stuff is all she does. She's got about three hundred diaries and a ton of papers and letters. Thrilled as hell when I showed up. The way she talks, she's got enough to tell us every time a Groloch farted. She's going to dig it up for us. They were great Groloch watchers in the old days. But don't go to her house unless you got a good excuse to get the hell out again quick. She'll drive you up the wall. Thinks she's still nineteen…"

"What else?"

'Taxes are current. Paid in cash every year. I had a hassle with the IRS, but they did break down and admit she's up to date with them. Pays quarterly estimates, by money order, on stock dividends that come to around twelve grand a quarter."

Cash whistled softly.

"Yeah. Sweet. That's about it, except they said she doesn't collect Social Security. I'll try to get a handle on her finances next. Banks and brokers. Utilities. Stuff like that."

He flipped his notebook shut, stared into space for a moment. "One other thing. O'Brien wasn't the first disappearing Irishman."

"Eh?"

"O'Driscol. He and Fiala had a thing going on for years, then he disappeared. I'm not sure this's the same Fiala, by the way. Maybe her mother. I hope. Mrs. Caldwell didn't say.

"And what about this Fian, you ask? Just dropped out of sight, apparently sometime in the eighteen eighties. And a guy named Fial apparently never made it out from New York."

Cash had the feeling he had ridden the carousel too many times around. "Railsback put a hold on the corpse."

"Yeah? So?"

"So I thought we'd take her down. Spring it on her. While she's off balance, we hit her with questions about the prints."

He hadn't heard. Someone had slipped up. Or maybe not. It was Railsback's style to play games. "The doll. They got a matching print."

"Oh, shit." The vinegar went out of Harald. He dropped into the chair Railsback had used the previous afternoon, gripping its arms like an old person flying for the first time. Like me, Cash thought, screaming inside all the way, It's going to crash, it's going to crash. His face grew pale. His lips trembled. "That old. And now prints."

He changed. "Norm, somebody's set this up. Somebody's gone to one hell of a lot of trouble to cover a trail." He had reached the limit of his credulity. His features became set. He wanted an alternate theory. Cash suspected that from now on he would edit all the facts to fit one he liked.

That had to be aborted. The attitude could leak over into more mundane cases.

"You were the guy who brought up the science-fiction angle to begin with."

"Yeah. Yeah. But I never thought we'd get backed into a corner where it was the only explanation left."

"It isn't. Not yet. That print just proves she knew the guy. Hell, it doesn't even prove that, really. It just proves that something he touched ended up in her wardrobe. He could've been a burglar. But it is circumstantial evidence that she hasn't told us everything. Hey! Here's an angle. Suppose he really is a descendant of the original Jack O'Brien? Say he came back to check on Grampa's old flame?" The possibility had occurred to him on the way to work. "Or, if you want it bizarre, he could be her son and she's kept him locked up since he was born."

"Come on, Norm. She's fruity, but that'd take a genuine National Enquirer basket case. Anyway, his age isn't right."

"Just a hypothesis. He could be her son but O'Brien's grandson. How's that for off the wall?"

"There would've been rumors. You can't keep babies a secret. They yell all night." He said that bitterly. Cash now knew why he looked so haggard. His youngest had had a bad night.

"Just trying to make the point that there's still lots of possibilities. Probably a lot we haven't even thought of yet. When we find one that fits all the physical evidence, we'll have it whipped. Meanwhile, we just keep plugging."

That summed up Cash's philosophy of detective work. No grandstanding, no Sherlock Holmes ingenuity. Like the ram, just keep butting your head against that dam. Sooner or later, something would give.

"You dig some more this morning. I'll arrange a viewing for this afternoon. Say around two."

"Okay." Harald left in a hurry, as if glad to escape the speculations. Cash would have liked to have escaped himself. Miss Groloch and Jack O'Brien had driven his thoughts into some truly bizarre channels.

He did not understand why, for sure, that everyone, even he, assumed the old woman was guilty… of something. If she were really as old as she seemed, might there be an alienness which could be sensed only subconsciously? A natural resentment on the part of the ego?

"Heard you guys talking," said Railsback, replacing Harald in the chair. "I think you ought to follow up on your theory."

A glance told Cash the chance that incest and/or genuine murder were involved seemed, to Railsback, a piece of spider's silk thrown to a drowning man. He wanted logically neat, if morally outrageous, answers.

Even if the evidence at the scene hadn't suggested any direct connection with Fiala Groloch. Cash cautioned himself against grabbing for scapegoats, for easy outs.

He dithered a while, pushing papers, then checked out and went to the convent.

Sister Mary Joseph kept him waiting fifteen minutes, then appeared with a curt, "What is it this time?"

Cash was startled. But even nuns had to have their bad days, he supposed.

"A favor."

"And only I can help."

"We're going out on a limb. If you'll help, we're going to try jarring some information loose from Miss Groloch. Seems like it's the only way to get the whole story."

She crossed herself. "What would I have to do?"

"We figured we'd bring her in to view the body. And have you there to see what happens."

"You should take her into the room with the rubber hoses."

Cash shook his head. The sister seemed to have an overpowering, irrational hatred of the old lady.

"All right. But these interruptions are getting to be a habit."

"I'm sorry. I really am. If there were some other way… Well, my partner, the young officer, will pick you up about one-thirty. I'll try to have him call ahead so you'll know exactly when."

"Do that."

Cash beat a hasty retreat, involved himself in some unrelated legwork, a call home, and his daily Big Mac.

During the drive to Miss Groloch's he caught himself listening to the dispatcher with a grim intensity, as if subconsciously hoping something would interfere with his complicated, makeshift scheme.

Among other maneuvers, just this once, he had decided to bring Annie into the game.

Miss Groloch no longer appeared pleased to have company, though she remained a polite and fussy hostess. She even asked if he would like to see anything special on the television she had been watching.

The change was more marked in the behavior of her cat, who watched him warily, tail lashing, while he sipped tea, and sneaked amazed glances at the television. It had materialized overnight.

"It's my boss. Lieutenant Railsback. The woman claims the dead man's her brother. He says that, being's you're the only other one we can find who knew him, you'll have to come down and take a look too."

The woman was no fool. From her four-feet-ten she looked up and smiled a thin, I-don't-believe-a-word smile. Well, so much for poor Hank, he thought. For once the horns and tail couldn't be sloughed off on him. My turn in the barrel.

But she didn't call him on it. He suspected she had already decided that it would come to this and had elected for continued cooperation. Even if she were guilty of something, the net he was drawing closer had holes big enough for much larger fish to slip through.

"Just let me get my hat and coat," she said. "I'll only be a minute."

To his surprise, that was all it took. As she returned, she said, "I hope you will understand if I'm nervous. I have not been anywhere in so long."

Her stepping-out togs, which included a parasol, confirmed her claim. Coat and hat were ancient, and looked it, though they weren't threadbare. Cash thought his mother, at thirty, would have looked stylish in them. He hoped no one laughed. He was causing the woman enough distress as it was.

"I look how?"

His pause gave him away.

"Behind the times, yes? I can see out my windows, Sergeant." Her accent thickened. She smiled nervously. "Maybe, for my trouble, around the shops I should make you take me."

He groaned inwardly, dreading the chance. Annie was a window-shopping terror who drove him squirrely, and her wardrobe was up to date. Shopping with any of the women he knew sent him up the wall. His style was to decide what he wanted beforehand, get in, grab it, and get the hell out.

His dread showed. "Not to fret," she said. "Force you I won't. Well, let us be off." Her nervousness grew more intense.

Cash glanced at his watch. He was running early. He led the way to the car, making sure he held doors and gates. Neighborhood children stared. Some ran to inform their mothers. Miss Groloch pretended not to notice.

Cash was about to pull out when a truck stopped alongside him. A boy ran the afternoon paper to Miss Groloch's door. No big thing, Cash thought, but proof she wasn't completely out of touch.

Cash's home was just two blocks south and two east. He had to kill time. Miss Groloch had gotten ready far faster than expected.

"This's my home," he told her as he rolled to the curb. "I'm going to pick up my wife. I thought you'd be more comfortable if she went with us."

She did not respond positively or negatively. All during the drive her gaze had been aflutter as she devoured the changes time had wrought on the neighborhood.

"Is possible I can wait inside? Meaning no imposition."

"Of course." She would feel exposed, Cash thought. He hurried around to her door, saying hello to a neighbor's child on her way home from some special event at St. Margaret's School. Another dozen children were in sight. Miss Groloch paid them no heed.

He hoped Annie would be as slow as usual.

She was, the mindreader.

Miss Groloch prowled his living room like a cat in a strange environment, saying, when he offered her a chair and tea, "I'm too skittery. You don't mind?"

"No. Go ahead and look around."

She examined the television, apparently comparing it to her own, the telephone, a clock radio, and other impedimenta that had been developed or refined since she had gone into seclusion, and seemed especially intrigued by the concept of a paperback book. Several lay scattered about. Annie couldn't work on just one at a time.

"The kitchen? May I look?"

"Sure. Sure. I like to show it off. Did it over myself, about five years ago. It was a real antique. Same icebox and stove as when we moved in in forty-nine."

Miss Groloch seemed amazed by the smooth, coilless surface of the electric stove, and by the freezer compartment atop the refrigerator.

"So pretty. And convenient. And reliable? But wasteful, I suppose."

"Up here, someday, I'm going to put a microwave oven."

In moments he was doing all the talking, revealing plans of which even Annie was unaware. Time whipped past. He might have conducted the grand tour had Annie not decided it was time to go.

Miss Groloch had not, till that moment, seen Cash's wife. When she did, she peered at her queerly for a moment, then snapped her fingers. "The pears. Ripe pears from the tree beside the carriage house. I never did catch you, did I? "

Annie's eyes got big. One hand fluttered to her mouth. She grew more red than she had when Cash's Uncle Mort, drunk as usual, had gone further than usual with his off-color remarks at Michael's wedding reception. "Oh…" was all she could say, then and now.

Cash frowned at each in turn.

"Oh, she was a demon," said Miss Groloch. "Bolder than any of the boys. They thought I was a witch, you know. She would climb the fence and steal the pears. The boys would hide in the alley behind the carriage house."

Cash looked at his wife, trying to picture her as a tomboy child. He didn't doubt that she was guilty as charged. He decided not to tease her about it just yet, though. She looked frightened.

A memory that good did seem witchy.

Annie valiantly tried playing hostess all the way downtown, but couldn't get into the role. She kept lapsing into long silences. For Cash's part, he was thinking about carriage houses. Miss Groloch's, and any neighboring pear tree, was gone now, but its location was interesting.

He had seen Miss Groloch's backyard. There was room for a carriage house in just one place. Against the alley where the body had been discovered.

Had the carriage house been there still, there would have been little mystery in most of the physical evidence. The man could have stepped out and collapsed.

The bustle of downtown did nothing to settle anyone's nerves.

John met them in the hallway outside the morgue. He looked grim.

"Problems?" Cash asked.

"I feel like a Fed trying to make a tax case against Tony G. The trails are invisible. And none of them lead anywhere anyway." He then shut up. Miss Groloch was perturbed enough.

Sister Mary Joseph, in full habit, was with the body, which could not be seen from the doorway. The same nervous attendant hovered nearby. He was a young black man who, likely, had gotten his job on patronage. He was clearly uncomfortable with his work. If he remained a good party man, though, he would soon move to something better.

He was having trouble waiting.

So was Sister Mary Joseph, in her way. She crossed herself when Miss Groloch entered.

Cash wasn't sure how he had expected the old woman to react. Certainly with more emotion than she showed. But she had been forewarned, hadn't she?

"I will say this," she said. "It certainly looks like Jack. Paler, thinner, and shorter than I remember him, but memory plays tricks. Uhm?"

John removed the sheet, exposing the entire body.

"Himmel! Is this a bad joke, Sergeant? He could pass as Jack's double."

Cash and Harald turned to Sister Mary Joseph, who had been staring fixedly at Miss Groloch since her entry. The nun could not bring herself to speak. John signaled the attendant. The man produced the plastic bag containing the clothing and effects that had come with the corpse.

Miss Groloch examined them carefully, but with distaste. Finally, "Sergeant, I think I am going to contact my solicitors."

Harald grinned, thinking they had her on the run.

"Either you men, or his baby sister there, or someone you know, are doing what, I think, you Americans call the frame-up. Sergeant, I think you better take me home now." She was cool and hard…

John's grin evaporated. Now she was an extra step ahead.

"Is this, or is this not, Jack O'Brien?" Cash asked, using his Official tone. "I'm afraid I have to insist on an unequivocal answer."

"If this were fifty years ago, I would say yes. But this is 1975, Sergeant."

"Miss Groloch, there're a lot of things here that look impossible. And I think you know what I mean. If this isn't Jack O'Brien, then who is it?"

"Sergeant, I don't know. If you have any more questions, wait until I talk to my solicitors."

"Miss Groloch, we aren't accusing anyone of anything. We don't have to wait on lawyers. Now, it doesn't seem possible to me that you can't identify the man. You yourself gave us a doll that had his fingerprints on it. That, you have to admit, gives us some justification for asking questions."

Her face registered shock. She turned to the corpse once more, hardly listening as Cash kept on.

"Now, we don't know that any crime has been committed. We're not saying one has. That's what we're trying to find out. You see? If we do find out, and you've been holding back, then you'll have been an accessory. Do you understand that?" He paused a moment for it to sink in, though he wasn't sure she was listening at all. "Look, I don't like this any more than you do, but the man died weird. We have to find out how and why. And who he was. And you're our only lead."

She remained stubbornly silent. She now posed defiantly, hands on hips.

"Don't be upset," said Annie, fussing round the older woman. "They're not trying to crucify you."

Her reassurances had no effect.

Harald didn't help. He played the bully. "The rest of you can be nice if you want. Me, I've got questions. And she has the answers."

"John…"

"Just can it for a minute, Norm. Let's get the shit cleared away. Like, how old are you really, Miss Fiala Groloch? If that's really your name. Where were you born? Are you really human? Whatever happened to Fian and Fial Groloch? What about Patrick O'Driscol? And Jack O'Brien? Too many disappearing men, Miss Groloch. Too many arrows pointing to you, Miss Groloch. And I, for one, mean to find out what they're pointing at. Talk."

"John, you're being an ass…"

"Annie, I'm up to here with this old witch. One way or another, the truth's coming out. All of it."

Not one question elicited a response, nor did Miss Groloch seem much surprised by any of them.

"John, shut your mouth," Cash snapped. He sent a look of appeal to Sister Mary Joseph. She was the one who was supposed to apply the pressure.

But the nun had folded in the crunch. She seemed too terrified to do anything but alternate between signs against the evil eye and crossing herself. The few words that crossed her lips were incantatory Latin.

Miss Groloch spoke but once, to amplify Annie's point. "Young man, you are a boor."

Cash wondered, again, at the improvement in the woman's English.

"We're just getting mad at each other," he finally observed. "Let's cut it off here. Let it rest awhile. Miss Groloch, I'll take you home now. John, will you take Annie?"

As he pulled to the curb before the old woman's home, Cash apologized for the third or fourth time. "I'm truly sorry we upset you." She had ignored him all the way. He wondered if John and Annie were getting anything from the nun.

"Sergeant, stop the pretense. Although it is impossible, you think I murdered Jack O'Brien. Without leaving a mark. Then I transported him fifty-four years." Her accent was thick enough to slice, yet the improved sentence structure persisted. "You've made up your mind. Now you are looking for ways to prove your convictions. Let me assure you that, even if I had a way, and wanted to scare a man to death, I would not drop the body behind my own house."

"I'll grant you that much sense. I'll even confess that I haven't made up my mind. In fact, there's no evidence indicating murder. I'm trying to tell you. This isn't a murder case. Not yet. Like I said downtown, all we're trying to do is find out who the man was and what happened."

"I wish you luck. But you will gain nothing by hounding me."

"Maybe not. But I'll remind you that there's a connection, a provable connection that'll hold up in court, between a dead man and a porcelain doll found in your possession." It would not hold up, really. A good lawyer would get the whole thing laughed out before the prosecutor went before the Grand Jury. But the old woman didn't need to know that.

"That'll have to be explained," he continued. "Really, what makes your position difficult is your mysteriousness."

She started to let herself out. Cash reached over, gripped her left hand with his right. "Please. You read the paper. You should have an idea what would happen if the media got ahold of a story like this. We're trying to keep them off, but if we don't get it cleaned up pretty quick, they'll get their hooks in. They could make a circus out of you. We're trying to protect your privacy as much as anything."

She wasn't mollified. "Thank you. And good-day, Sergeant." She took care of the car door and gate herself, leaving Cash with one foot still inside the vehicle as she stamped up her walk, a diminutive Fury.

Glancing round, Cash saw several neighbors watching. A teenager with ragged hair and beard spat, mouthed a silent "Pig."

Halfway to her door Miss Groloch stopped, turned, said, "If you want to find out what happened to Jack, look into the Egan Gang. Carstairs would not."

"Egan's Rats? He was connected?" But she was on her way again.

Carstairs's report hadn't mentioned Egan's Rats at all. But the gang had been powerful at the time, with Torrio and Purple Gang alliances, and O'Brien's belonging would explain how he had supported himself. Cash made a mental note to look into it.

He frowned the long-haired youth into his flat, then dumped himself into the car.

X. On the Z Axis;

21June l967;

A Company Scale Action

Whang! Whang! Whang!

The bullets did more damage to nerves than to the Huey. The AK47 couldn't punch through the ship's armor.

Michael clutched his M-16. John's fingers were white on his M-79.

Twenty-two was too young.

Then Wallace, who was at the open hatch talking back with the M-60, said, "Huh?" and stiffened. The machine gun kept firing, muzzle climbing.

John staggered over to help Sergeant Cherry drag the dead giant away from the weapon that had been his closest friend. Through the black man's nap he saw the rotor wash whipping the up-rushing grass of the landing zone.

The chopper shuddered, shook, flipped. Its main rotor played power mower for a fractional second.

"Ahshitmyarm!" John screamed as men and equipment piled onto him.

"Not again!" Michael yelled.

"Get the fuck out before the fuel goes!" Cherry ordered. "Come on! Move it! Cash, take care of Harald."

Oblivious to the gunfire, the men hauled one another through the hatchway. Michael got an arm around John and, crouching, firing with his left hand, dragged his friend away from the wreck. "Medic!"

Gunships ripped across the sky, sending their best to the little brown brothers behind the treeline. Air cavalrymen poured from the uninjured craft.

Wham-whoosh!

The force of the explosion threw them forward.

"Damn!" Michael snarled. "We didn't get Wallace out."

"He don't care. He was dead already."

"Lyndon Johnson, I love you, mein Fыhrer. How's the arm?"

"Hurts like hell. I think it's broke."

"That was a good coon. A bad motherfucker."

"Yeah."

"I hope the lieutenant does it. If he don't, I will."

"Write the letter?"

"Yeah."

Wallace had said, if he got skragged, send the announcement to his next of kin, George Corley, care of the Governor's Mansion, Montgomery, Alabama.

"What the fuck are we doing here, Michael? We had wives. We had deferments." Incoming mortar bombs crumped like a beaten bass drum with a loose head.

"You was the one who wanted to quit school and join the army." Cash peered into a cloudless sky so bright it hurt. "Here come the navy birdboys."

"I wasn't the one who said let's volunteer for Nam. I wanted to go to Germany. Remember?"

Napalm sunflowers blossomed among the trees. They only perturbed the brown brothers more. The volume of fire doubled.

"Them bastards were laying for us again."

Cherry came snaking through the grass. "How's the arm, Harald?"

"Okay, except a little broken." John groaned when the sergeant made sure the bone hadn't broken through the skin.

"Where's the grenade launcher? Lieutenant's got a machine gun that company says needs skragging."

"In the chopper."

"Shee-it. Great. Well, Cash, it's you and me hand-delivering it, then."

Michael unconsciously fingered a grenade. "What about John?"

"He'll be okay. All he's got to do is lay here and jack off. The dinks will be hauling ass out of here in fifteen minutes. They don't, the navy's going to splatter them from here to the Cambodian border. And the Arvans are coming up behind them."

The ADs began a second pass, this time firing rockets.

"So take it easy, John," said Michael, examining his weapon. It had a tendency to jam.

"You be careful. I need somebody to bring me flowers in the hospital."

"Hell of a way to get the Purple Heart." Cash's smile was a pale, nervous rictus. "What I'll bring is that little Le girl you liked so much. The one that works out of the Silver…"

"Never mind the pussy. Let's go." Cherry slithered toward the treeline. Cash scrambled along in his wake. Bullets whipped the grass, harvesting clippings by the pound.

The gunships took over from the ADs.

You got to hand it to the dinks, Cash thought. They've got balls.

Cherry waved him forward. "They're in some kind of bunker, else they'd have been skragged already. I want to come at them from the side, so they don't spot us."

All around the company's perimeter similar little stalks were underway, driving the Cong back. That he wasn't the only one crawling into hell did nothing to calm Michael's nerves, though. It was becoming a very small, very personal war.

"I'll put the grenade in. You cover."

"Don't be a hero…"

"Hey, man. Not me. This here's Chicken Charlie Cherry talking. If I was in the navy, they'd call me the Chicken of the Sea. But if we don't get that gun, a lot of guys are going to be dead when the Arvans get here." He resumed crawling, more cautiously now that they were near the trees.

Michael crept along behind, remembering his company commander in infantry school, Master Sergeant Heinz Krebs.

Michael had invariably grandstanded the exercises. And as inevitably, Krebs's softly spoken admonition had been, "You goddamned idiot. The idea's supposed to be to make the other jackass die for his country."

Krebs had always had an illustrative tale to show his pupils what they should have done. His father had managed to survive six years of the Second World War, most of them in the hell of the Eastern Front. He had been one of few enlisted men to win the Knight's Cross, Oak Leaves, and Swords to the Iron Cross.

His son had made an impression on Michael. Cash remembered his lessons once he found himself in a place where the bullets were flying.

Three dead men lay just behind the treeline, surrounding an American-made 57 mm recoilless rifle. They were so tiny and skinny that they resembled children. And in years, they were. The oldest might have been seventeen.

"No shells," Cherry observed.

"Shit. Think this's what got the Huey?" Several spent casings lay to one side.

"Could be. Let's go."

The snarl of the machine gun was loud now. It sounded like one of the Czech jobs, not the Russian. It was arguing with an American counterpart out in the grass. The American fire was all way high.

"Sixty meters," said Cherry. "Let me get about fifteen ahead before you follow me. They surprise me, you surprise them."

It went like an exercise. Everyone in the area, except the gun crew, seemed to be dead or gone. The ADs and gunships had done a good job.

Cherry made it to the flank of the low earth and log bunker, prepared a grenade, tossed it through the personnel opening in back.

Oblivious to the bursts from the American weapon, Cherry sprinted toward Michael.

A rifle cracked.

Whumpl

Several hundred secondary explosions followed as machine gun ammo went.

Michael put three rounds into the guerrilla who had shot Cherry in the back, then killed the two who, miraculously, staggered from the bunker.

His weapon jammed.

As someone tried for a homer with his head and helmet for a ball.

Feebly, he rolled onto his back, stared into the hate-filled eyes of the fifteen-year-old about to bayonet him.

An officer in North Viet uniform seized the boy's rifle.

Michael fumbled for his own bayonet.

The officer kicked it away. And allowed the boy to punt his ribs a half dozen times while he ended Cherry's misery with a pistol round through the brain.

By the time the ARVN battalion arrived and the body counting began, Michael Cash was three miles into an odyssey that would pause only briefly in a grim little camp in North Vietnam.

From one point of view, he could be considered lucky.

He was still alive.

XI. On the Y Axis;