Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

PERLMUTTER AT THE EAST POLE

“It’s absurd,” Morty was saying to the chief, “three times around the world, attendance in eighty-two national capitals, fourteen days at one pole, eleven at the other — which reminds me: Did you know, you savage, there are four poles? Well, certainly. Read my write-up: ‘East Pole, West Pole.’ I got the idea from a popular song. That’s where the ideas are. I tell them and I tell them. Read my write-up. There’s a reprint in my knapsack. Anyway, it’s ridiculous, the basic paradox of my life: The places I’ve been. In the knapsack — you saw yourself: seventeen hand-drawn maps of unexplored territory. You know those white areas on globes — no, of course not; how would you — well, Morty Perlmutter’s been to most of them. Milonka? Check. Los Pappas, check. Frigtoony, check. Bishtumba, check. Bishtumba, check two times, once in summer, then in spring for the hatching of the slugs. It’s nothing, incidentally. Nature is nothing. Here it’s better. Wildnesses, wildnesses! Your Festival of Birth for example — those marvelous two weeks in Zum, our January, when all your women come to the clearing to have their babies in formation. Marvelous.”

“You must stay,” the chief said in Pragmatii, “for Lorp, your April.”

“I can’t. I can’t. It’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been to Gishlunt, to Kakos, to Schwatl, but never to New York City.”

“Fa na batoogie New York City?” the chief asked absently, stringing another eye on the live-forever-have-fine-sons-win-many-noses necklace.

“A great city in my homeland, Chief, and I’ve never been there. Well, it’s easily understood. California, where I’m from, has its own ports, and then even with my patrimony there’s my terrific expenses and I’m always looking for bargain bays — Texas City, Texas; Tampa — No, no, not the turtle foot next to the pig ear, man. There, the gland, that should go with the finger. Forgive me, but I understand these things. For three months I studied with the greatest jeweler in the Baktivian jungle.”

“We have our own ways,” the chief said shyly.

“There it is — that’s the curse—that’s it. Relativism. When are you people going to learn there’s only one truth?”

The next day Perlmutter pitched camp by the river and waited for the immunization boat. There was always an immunization boat. One of the ways he chose his jungles was by first learning of the prevalent diseases there and then finding out if there were serums to combat them. If there were, there would be an immunization boat somewhere in the woodpile and that solved his transportation problem.

He had to wait five weeks, and each night the chief came to his camp at the edge of the jungle to say good-by. Perlmutter was embarrassed one evening when the chief gave him the necklace he had seen him working on. Perlmutter gave the chief a reprint, but saw that the shy man was disappointed.

“Read it after I’m gone and make three wishes,” he told the chief.

On the afternoon the boat came Morty hailed it from the shore. “Take me to where I get the mule,” he shouted.

He wasted another day while the doctors immunized the natives.

As they were pulling away he heard a chorus of strange sighs from the direction of the clearing. Morty had never heard anything like it before.

“First of Lorp, must be,” the captain said to the doctor.

It took three weeks to get to where the mule was and two after that before the sandy beginnings of the highway. It was another six days from there in the jeep to the port. In ten days there was a boat that could take him to a place where the cook thought there might be a ship for Vancouver, British Columbia.

Morty worked on his book along the way. It was, he felt, his best effort in his lifelong struggle to synthesize the universe. Still, something was missing.

In the evenings he listened to the songs of the sailors. He took them down and translated them into English, but there was nothing new to be gleaned from them.

From Vancouver he made his way across Canada and entered the United States at International Falls, Minnesota. It was fitting, he thought, that he should approach New York from the West. He was, after all, a Westerner. New York he had saved for last. It was no use fooling himself. It would be last. He had a million diseases; a polyglot death worked in him — there’s your synthesis, he thought sadly — and as he made his way toward the East Pole he was troubled by his timing. He would be there in the final margins of his health and mind and resources, but it couldn’t be helped. He had come as one only could come: prepared, knowing a trillion things, having seen everything else. As though New York were the land and everything else the sea — so great was his hope — and he were some sea changeling swimming from western depths, out of all the old places, toward a drier fate. He did not know what to expect, but it would be tremendous.

“No standing,” the driver said.

“I have to see this.”

“No standing till the bus stops.”

Morty sat down in the front seat, over the wheel, and leaned far forward. He stared past the green-tinted glass, looking for light. Through the open window he heard the subaqueous roar. Under the water the bus hissed through the tiled tunnel. And then light. And then ramps. They spiraled toward a passageway. The bus went up and through and stopped.

“What is this place?” Morty asked.

“It’s the Port of New York Authority,” the driver said.

“Ah,” Morty said, “authority.”

In a phone booth, with a tool he took from his knapsack, he severed the chain that held the Yellow Pages to the narrow shelf. He buried the thick book in the depths of the knapsack.

He was exhausted from his journey.

“Where are rooms?” he asked the woman in the Travelers’ Aid booth. “I require a bed, a chair, a desk and light-housekeeping privileges. I can pay one hundred dollars a month for a good central location.”

“This isn’t that kind of agency,” the woman said.

“But you know a good deal about this city?”

“Yes,” the woman said, “we have to.”

Morty reached inside his shirt and slyly palmed the Haitian Sleep Stone he wore on a chain around his neck. He brought it out and hypnotized the woman. She said she’d call a friend who had a place on West 70th Street.

“I’m done with all that,” Morty said. “East 70th Street.”

“Not…for…a…hundred doll…ars,” the woman spoke soddenly from her trance.

Morty sat propped up in bed. Behind his head was the bulging knapsack he used for a pillow. He read the Yellow Pages until two in the morning and had just finished TAXIS when he had the inspiration. He went to Eighth Avenue and 164th Street, to the Manhattan garage of the largest cab company in the city. He chose one ramp and followed it down until he came to an enormous room where there were more cabs than he had ever seen. I could have used one of these in the jungle, he thought absently.

Despite the vastness of the room and the dim light, the yellow machinery lent a kind of brightness to the place. Everywhere there were drivers, alone or in groups, writing up log sheets or talking together. Men stood in line in front of the coffee machines along the wall. Inside some of the cabs, the doors open wide on their hinges, Morty could see drivers reading newspapers. He heard the steadily registering bells on the gas pumps. It was three-thirty in the morning.

Morty walked toward the center of the cavernous room and climbed up on top of a cab.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you? Get down from there,” a man yelled.

“New York cab drivers are world famous,” Morty shouted from the roof of the cab, “for their compassion and their oracular wisdom. I am Morty Perlmutter, fifty-seven years old, fifty-seven-time loser of the Nobel Prize for Everything, and I’m here to find out what you know.” They stared up at him, astonished. “I got the idea from the Yellow Pages,” he added sweetly.

“That’s my cab that nut is up on,” a driver said. “Come on, nut, off and out.”

“I challenge you to a debate, sir,” Morty shouted. “I challenge all of you to a debate. Let’s go, every man on his taxicab.” He watched them carefully. Someone moved forward threateningly but stopped, still several feet away from the taxi on which Morty stood. It was the Perlmutter Dipsy Doodle, the dependable mock madness, one of his most useful techniques. He told them that frankly. He told them to their faces. He didn’t hold back a thing.

“It’s a known fact,” he said. “People have a lot of respect for insanity. Madmen are among the least persecuted members of any society. It’s because they’re not a part of society. They’re strangers. The Greco-Persian ethic of hospitality lies behind that. Listen, I didn’t read Hamlet until I was forty-two years old, but I learned the lesson. When does Hamlet die? During the single moment in the play he’s completely sane, that’s when! Figure it out.” He folded his arms and hugged himself and did a little dance on the roof. He was completely safe. “Come on, up on your cabs. Everybody.”

A man laughed and put a knee on his fender. “What the hell,” he said, “I’m a sport. A sport’s a sport.” He scrambled onto the hood and made his way over the windshield to the roof of the cab and stood up uncertainly. “Hey,” he said, “you guys look goofy down there.”

Morty applauded, and below him the drivers were grinning and pointing up at the two of them. Soon others were climbing over their cabs, and in a few minutes only the man whose roof Morty had taken was without a cab to stand on. He seemed disappointed. Morty shrugged.

Perlmutter waited until the others stopped giggling and became accustomed to their strange positions. “All right,” he said. “You men have lived in this city all your lives, most of you. What do you know? Tell me.” He pointed to a fat driver on a taxicab across from him, but the man looked back blankly and smiled helplessly. Morty waited for one of the others to speak. At last a tall driver in a green cap started to say something.

“Louder, sir,” Morty shouted. “It’s hard to hear pronouncements in this cave.”

“I was just saying that if you want I could talk about what’s wrong with the traffic in this town.”

The drivers groaned. Morty joined them. “Small-time,” he said, “but that’s an interesting demonstration of the limited world view. Thank you.”

“I’ll tell you how I give up smoking,” another driver said.

“Why did you?”

“I went out and bought a whole carton and dipped them in the old lady’s chicken soup and let them dry out on the radiator overnight. Then when I’d go for a smoke—”

“Why did you give it up?” Morty interrupted him.

“…you can imagine for yourself. They tasted—”

“I asked why. Why did you give it up?”

The driver stared at him. “Well, who needs the aggravation of a lung cancer?” he said. “I got a brother-in-law in Queens he’s got three dry-cleaning plants, a daughter away at school. Forty-eight years old he gets this cough he can’t get rid of it.”

“Self-preservation,” Morty said, bored. “Nothing. Nothing.” The man sat down on the roof of his cab. “Look,” Morty said, “I’m asking the meaning of life. This one says traffic congestion, that one lung congestion. I won’t be sidetracked.” Morty wiped his forehead. “New Yorkers, Cab Drivers, Big Mouths: I’m Morton Perlmutter from the world’s cities and jungles and seas and poles. I come, a genius, but humble, willing to learn, you understand, to the largest city in the world — that’s crap about London: they count everybody from Scotland to Surrey; Tokyo the same—the largest city in the world, a capstone of the planet, melting pot for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the not so huddled, the works. And if anyone should know, you should know. What’s the meaning of life?”

Morty watched a driver cup his hands against his mouth and he saw it coming.

“Life?” the driver shouted. “Life’s a fountain.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Morty said, getting down from the cab. “I know that one too.”

He had been disturbed by his experience with the cab drivers. He had meant, he supposed, to get the lay of the land, a maneuver familiar enough, but, finally, deflective. Science itself was deflective, he thought. What did he care, after all, about hypotheses, procedures, experiments? He needed answers. He was weary of his endless preparations. He reminded himself of someone forever adjusting his body in a bed, shifting, turning, raising, lifting, punching pillows, as though comfort was available only in some future displacement. He knew that his endless making ready would have to give way sometime to a final making do. But for all he seemed to the contrary, Morty was an essentially cautious man and he knew that before moving in on the truth he would have to make additional preparations. He would know where to look when he had to, but until then he needed to lay the groundwork.

He began his researches.

On successive weekends he attended representative churches and synagogues. He read the newspapers, including the Harlem papers and all forty-eight foreign-language weeklies and dailies. He read only the local news and the letters to the editor. In the New York Public Library he went through the newspaper files for the years 1947 through 1962, collating the subjects of these letters and classifying them according to their tones and literary styles. (By 1952 beautiful patterns began to emerge, though 1958 puzzled him until he saw how 1960 explained away the apparent discrepancy.) Once he spent a week in a branch library on Staten Island studying the loan rate of thirty-five key books on a list Morty had prepared himself. He walked through Central Park and studied the litter. (Also he went through the garbage dumps. What people threw away was frequently as significant as what they kept, he felt.) He haunted hospital corridors and waiting rooms, observing the attitudes of a sick man’s relatives and friends. He crashed weddings and bar mitzvahs and confirmations and baptisms and wakes. He watched the lines outside motion-picture houses and eavesdropped on the intermission conversations of theatergoers. He studied the menus in restaurants and spoke to salad men and short-order cooks to learn what New Yorkers were eating, and then used the information to work out interesting metabolic calculations. He observed the crowds at sporting events, deliberately inciting bets among the spectators. (You could tell a lot about human courage if you knew the odds men gave each other.) And he listened. Always he listened: to children, to hoodlums, to the old, the strong, to people in trouble and people who would never be in trouble.

In the second year something happened to interrupt Morty’s researches.

“I’m a scientist,” Morty explained suddenly to the woman next to him.

This was his third day underground. “I’m trying to get the feel of the earth,” he said. “Last night I was on the Broadway-7th Avenue local and I got out at 14th Street and walked along the tracks through the tunnel to 8th Street. Exhilarating, marvelous.” The train had broken from its tunnel and begun to climb The Bronx. He glanced casually along the woman’s bosom and down at Jerome Avenue. He looked back at the woman. She was a blue-haired lady of about fifty-three, heavy, probably powerful. He had seen the type before, in London, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, in Chicago. He saw in her a sort of bahlabustuh-cumduchess who would survive her husband by twenty years. Perlmutter was attracted to such women; something atavistic in him responded while his heart said no. He imagined them around bridge tables, or playing poker in their dining rooms. He saw them giving daughters away in hotel ballrooms, and ordering meat from the butcher over the telephone, and in girdles in the fitting rooms of department stores. He had seen thousands of these women since coming to New York, recognizing in them from the days of some Ur-Morty (as if he had known them in the sea) old, vital aunts. She troubled him. He was responding, he supposed, to the science in her, to the solid certainty she gave off like a scent, to what he guessed might be in her an almost Newtonian suspicion, and to what he knew would be her fierce loyalty. Recognizing what he really wanted — it was to seduce one of these women — he had to laugh. The Morty Perlmutter who had known African Amazons and snuggled beneath arctic skins with Eskimo girls, who had loved queens of the circus and lady pearl divers — was this a Morty Perlmutter who could be stymied in The Bronx? (Because he understood that he would probably never make it with her. He sighed.) A scientist tries, he told himself, and tried.

“Excuse me, my dear,” he said. “I’m very clumsy at this sort of thing, but I find myself extraordinarily attracted to you. Will you have a drink with me?”

The woman would have changed her seat right then, but she was by the window and Morty had her penned in.

“I’ll call the guard,” she said.

“Now, now,” Morty said. “What’s in the bag?” he said. “Some little pretty for yourself?” he asked brightly. “Or is it for your husband?”

“None of your business. Let me out, you pervert, or I’ll yell.”

Morty stood up quickly. She seemed genuinely frightened and he leaned down to reassure her. “I am no punk molester of women,” he said. “I speak from respectable need. Of course, if you insist on making a scene I’ll have to leave you alone, but yours is a rare type with a rarer appeal. It is precisely my perversion, as you call it, which makes you attractive to me. Don’t knock success, lady. When was the last time someone not your husband wanted to have a drink with you? I do not count the one time in the Catskills ten years ago when the guests waited on the waiters and the band played on. This I write off. Or when you danced with the college bus boy and he kissed you for the tip. This I write off.”

She stared at him for a moment with an astonished respect, and Morty sat down again. He contemplated using the Haitian Sleep Stone but decided it would be immoral. “All right, I’m Morton Perlmutter and I’m here in the final phase of my search for synthesis. More later over cocktails.”

“I’m married,” she said, out of breath.

“Of course you are. Don’t I know that? You think your kind of character is possible otherwise? It’s sacrifice and single-mindedness that does that. It’s years of love love love. You’ll have to tell me all about yourself. I’m dying to kiss you. Where does your boy intern?”

“We have no children,” she said shyly.

He wanted to take her hand. It was unscientific, but there it was. He wondered, too, if he might not make a cozy confidante of this woman. He knew what it meant, of course. Why not? He knew everything. All that was nonsense about the vital aunts. Morty was King Oedipus. He shrugged. I am what I am. Nothing bothers me, he thought lightly. This is my finest hour. One of them. It’s all been swell.

“Let me have your number,” he told her.

She shook her head.

“Let me have your phone number.”

“No,” she said, frightened again.

He used the Sleep Stone.

“I…am…Rose…Gold. You…can…usually…reach…me…at Klondike 5…6…7…4…3. Tuesdays I…play…mahjongg. Wednesdays I at…tend matinees.”

He brought her out of it quickly. “Now about that drink…” Morty said.

“No. Leave me alone. You’re a strange man.”

“I am what I am,” he said.

“This is my stop,” she said, getting up. “Don’t try to follow me. You’ll be arrested. I’m warning you.”

When she had called him a strange man, she had meant something unpleasant. His shock value had worn off. That often happened to him now. He equated it with the dying sense of wonder in the world. TV has done that, he thought absently, mass communication has. It made him angry. He followed her to the platform.

She turned quickly and faced him. “I meant what I said.”

“I’ve got your number, Rose Gold,” he said passionately. She started to walk away and Morty ran after her. “Listen to Perlmutter’s curse,” he commanded darkly. “May your neighborhood change!” She was running along the platform now. “May the fares to Miami be trebled! May your chicken soup freeze over!” She was going down the stairs now and he rushed after her. “May your fur coats explode!” he roared.

Just for the hell of it he went to the Chase Manhattan and asked to see the director. (He had to use the Sleep Stone on two tellers, one vice-president and three secretaries. This made him uneasy. You could wear it out — like anything else.)

“Been overseas,” Morty explained to the director. “I’m thinking of moving my plant to New York City.”

“That’s wonderful, Mr. Perlmutter, but you’ll have to forgive me — I don’t think I’m familiar with your operation. If you could fill me in and then explain what it is you require of us—”

“Not so fast,” Morty said, “not so very fast there. There are some things I need to know.”

“I don’t understand why our Mr. Johnson—” he said speculatively. And then cheerfully to Morty: “Of course, if I can help you.”

“How’s the water supply?” Morty demanded.

“How’s that?”

“The water supply. Plants need water.”

The director blinked and Morty went on. “I don’t expect you to have all this stuff at the tip of your fingertips, you understand, but what is your labor situation in the area? Are the workers organized?” He thought of the natives back in the Pragmatii jungle. “Would there be women for my men?” he asked slyly. “These lads haven’t seen white girls in years.”

The director moved his chair back.

“Is there any culture?” Morty asked. “What about transportation facilities? How are the hospitals? In short, Mr. Director, what has New York City to offer me?”

The director had not heard the last few questions. He was mumbling into an emergency intercom in his water carafe. Morty offered the Sleep Stone but the man wouldn’t look.

He sat down in the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street and addressed the waiter in Russian. “We are a long way from Lubsk, hah, cousin?” he said.

The waiter didn’t answer and went immediately for the manager. The manager came over to Morty’s table.

“It is miles to Pinfh, is it not, little Russian brother?” Morty said.

The manager glared at him. “You’re one of those FBI guys, right?” he asked. “Sure, pal, I been expecting you.” He turned to the waiter. “I never seen it fail. Every four months one of these FBI guys comes around and tries to talk Russian to my waiters.” He looked back at Morty scornfully. “When are you boys going to wake up? You’re looking for spies, go learn Albanian and eat at one of their places.”

“Everybody is under arrest,” Morty said weakly, his heart not in it. “I hadn’t really meant to make my move just yet, but I was in the neighborhood.”

On the fifth ring a man answered.

“Let me speak to Rose Gold, please,” Morty said politely.

“Rose is next door,” the man said. “Who’s this calling?”

“My business is with Rose Gold,” he said firmly.

“Is this a tradesman? It’s almost midnight. Is this a tradesman?”

“I am Rose’s friend,” Morty said. “We used to travel together.”

“Oh. To Philadelphia. The man who used to take Rose in his car to visit her sister? Why didn’t you say so? Just a minute.”

“Hello,” a woman said in a little while. “What is it, Mr. Shintler?”

“It’s me,” Morty said, “it’s Morty Perlmutter. Last month. The subway. I wanted to buy you a drink.”

“How did you get this number?” Rose asked angrily. “Did you follow me?”

“No, no, listen to me. I’m very low tonight.”

“Why did you tell my husband you were Mr. Shintler?”

“Can I see you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I’m very low,” Morty said again. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Today’s my fifty-ninth birthday. I haven’t got any friends, any family. My money is almost gone. My health stinks. I’m restless. Also I’m worried about the synthesis.”

“The what? What are you talking about?”

“I’m fifty-nine years old.” He felt his heart turn over. He couldn’t talk.

“You…” Rose Gold said. “You. Are you still there? What is this?”

“Don’t hang up,” Morty said.

“Look, I don’t hang up on people,” she said. “So. You’ve been thinking about me, have you? Well, I’m very flattered. I’m very flattered a fifty-nine-year-old man with no friends and no family and who rides the subway and bothers women has been thinking about me.”

“I had to talk to somebody.”

“Say, wait a minute,” Rose Gold said. “You’re retired. Am I right? And you’re not fifty-nine, you’re past sixty-five. Is that right? And you’re out of business now and you’re a widower and your children have moved away and you don’t know what to do with yourself. Am I wrong or right?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Morty said.

“Of course it is,” Rose Gold said. “Listen, I remember you too. You’re basically a very decent-looking man, presentable, clean, I’ll give you some advice. Move to Florida.”

“Move to Florida?”

“Certainly.”

“That’s your advice?”

“Or California. Or Phoenix, Arizona. Wherever there’s sun. Old people need the sun. It cheers them up.”

Okay for you, Fatso, Morty thought. “Listen,” he said, “I haven’t any time. I think Shintler just came in. If he hears me my life isn’t worth a nickel. He’s coming after you when your husband goes to work tomorrow. He’s got this powerful new car, and he’s going to abduct you. He knows a place in Philadel — No, Shintler, I swear, I’m just sending out for pizza.”

Morty couldn’t sleep. It was hot in the room, and however he moved his head against his knapsack he could not get into a comfortable position. Also, as he had told Rose Gold a few nights before, he was very low.

He knew what the trouble was. For weeks now he had been statistically oriented — filled in, filled up. He was in a position now to move in on the truth. Then what? Where other men often experienced the vague emptiness of anticlimax, Morty was depressed by anteclimax. It was what he called his “Moses Syndrome.” (It was Morty’s hypothesis that Moses hadn’t died at the edge of the wilderness, and could have, had he chosen, entered the Promised Land with the other children of Israel, but that he had probably experienced, as Morty did now, an anteclimax and had turned back at the last minute. He had written it up. There was a reprint in his knapsack.) That’s what happens to you, Morty thought. He punched the knapsack a few more times and finally gave up.

He called Rose Gold and told her he thought he’d go over to Central Park and try to get some sleep there. He asked her if she’d meet him, and she said no and not to call her any more.

In the park Morty propped his knapsack against a tree and lighted his South American Rain Forest Lamp. He set it beside him and lay down in the grass. He decided to browse through the Yellow Pages until he became tired enough to sleep.

He was studying RESTAURANT EQUIPMENT REPAIRING when he saw the boys.

His hand closed around his blowpipe. “That’s close enough,” he said.

“Who you supposed to be, man,” the largest boy said, “Jungle Jim?”

Morty took careful aim and sank a poison dart directly into the center of the kid’s T-shirt. The boy sat down solemnly. A second boy kneeled beside him and looked at Morty in terror.

“You killed my brother,” he said.

“No, no,” Morty explained, “he’s not dying. I used Opiola. It just takes some of the fight out of them.”

“Jeez,” the oldest boy — probably the leader — said respectfully.

“You boys muggers?” Morty asked. “What do you generally clear on a night like this?”

“Hey, man,” the boy on the ground said suddenly, “I feel great. He turned me on, I think.”

“Yeah?” the leader asked, interested.

“Yeah. No crud, man, it’s very, very great. I see interesting things. Thanks, mister.”

Morty smiled.

“Mister?” the leader said.

“What is it?”

“Shoot me and my friend with the blowgun, hey.”

“You boys muggers?” Morty asked again.

“No, man,” the leader said, “we like to camp out.”

“What do you do,” Morty asked, “go after old ladies, old men, what?”

“Tell him, Ramon,” the boy on the ground said, “maybe he’ll shoot you.” He lay spread-eagled in Central Park and looked up at the stars. “I never been so high,” he whispered reverently.

Ramon looked down at his friend and then turned to Morty. “Sure,” Ramon said, “that’s right. We’re muggers. My friend here hits them low and my other buddy hits them high and I grab their purse and clip them a little.” He looked at Morty for approval. “We’re dropouts,” he added.

“I see,” Morty said.

“Poison me,” Ramon said hungrily.

The boy on the ground hummed The Star-Spangled Banner. “That’s a beautiful song,” he said. “I never realized what a beautiful song that is.”

“What do you make out of it?” Morty asked the leader.

“Depends,” he said. “Hot weather, a lot of people in the park, maybe a hundred, a hundred-fifty a week.”

“Wow,” the kid on the ground said. “Wow! Wow!”

“But you have to divide that between you,” Morty said.

“That’s right,” Ramon said impatiently, “between us. Go ahead, mister. Don’t miss.”

“Listen,” Morty said, “do yourselves a favor.” He took a memo pad from his breast pocket and tore off a notation and handed it to Ramon. “Here are the names and addresses of six organizations looking for boys. I took them out of tonight’s paper. You’ll make a lot more money and I understand there’s a real opportunity for advancement.”

“Okay,” Ramon said, “in the morning. I promise. Shoot us.”

“Why should I shoot you? You’re rehabilitated.”

“Don’t waste time talking, man,” the wounded boy’s brother told Ramon. “Let’s close in on him. He’ll have to shoot.”

“Yeah,” the leader said, “yeah, that’s right.”

They moved toward Morty.

“It actually gets better,” the boy on the ground said.

“No closer,” Morty said.

“Come on, Ramon, jump him.”

“No closer,” Morty warned.

Ramon moved to spring at Morty, and at close range Morty pumped a dart into his stomach. The boy fell writhing to the ground.

“How is it, Ramon? Is it as great as George says?” the boy’s brother asked.

“It hurts,” Ramon said.

“It doesn’t hurt,” George said. “It’s great.”

“It hurts,” Ramon said. “I think I’m dying.”

“It doesn’t hurt, man. It’s very pleasant,” George said.

“No,” Ramon said, “it hurts.”

“Ramon is right,” Morty explained expertly. “I’m out of Opiola. I didn’t kill him, but he’ll have the pain for seven years.”

Morty called Rose Gold.

“I’m terrified of you,” she told him.

“No,” he said, saddened. “No, Rose.”

“I am. Terrified. You have our name, our number. Probably you have our address. I’m terrified.”

“No, Rose,” Morty said, “that’s awful. Why should you be afraid?”

“Listen,” Rose Gold said, “I’ve given the police a full description. You can’t get away with frightening people.”

“You’re being too soft with him,” a man’s voice suddenly broke in. “I’ve hired private detectives. They’ve got important clues. You’ll be brought to justice, don’t you worry about that.”

“Who is that?” Morty asked. “Who’s there?”

“This is Rose Gold’s husband,” the man said. “I hear everything you say to my wife.”

“Why are you talking to me like this?” Morty demanded. “What are you talking about clues? You want clues, I’ll give you clues. I never had a secret in my life. I live at 205 West 70th Street. Come get me. What do you think this is?”

“Did you hear that, Rose?” the man asked, excited. “Did you get the address? All right, you,” he said, “what do you want from Rose? Why do you keep calling her?”

“I don’t have to tell you a thing,” Morty said, “but as it happens, I have no secrets. In each society I visit I try to find somebody I can talk to. Then they pass on what I tell them. It’s the oral tradition. When we finally met for that drink, I was going to share everything with Rose.”

“Share everything? Share what?”

“Just the meaning of things, that’s all,” Morty said.

“Baloney the meaning of things,” Gold said.”

“Jerk,” Morty said, “you don’t think there is one? There is one, there is one. I have an astonished heart. Life is immense. Don’t you know that?”

The man laughed. “Okay, Mr. Philosopher,” he said, “you find out the meaning of things and you call us up at a decent hour and you let us know — but no drinks. No meetings and no drinks. We have your address. We can put our hands on you whenever we have to.”

“No threats, please,” Morty said quietly.

“This man is crazy, Rose,” Gold said.

“Let me talk to your wife now, if you don’t mind,” Morty said.

“Sure,” Gold said, laughing, “talk to her. Rose.”

“Rose?”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Is he still there?”

“He’s watching television. I guarantee you. What is it?”

“I’m very sorry, Rose. I didn’t know how awful it was for you.”

“He’s a good provider,” Rose Gold said.

“Don’t patronize me,” Morty said, raising his voice. “Don’t hang up. I’m sorry I yelled. Listen, I think I can help you. In my knapsack I have a special soap. Its lather brings understanding. It won’t give wisdom, but it opens the mind to the wisdom of others. Do you think you could get him to bathe?”

“Is that what you wanted to say to me?” Rose asked angrily.

“No. Listen. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow. I move up. I close in on the truth. Frankly, I’ve been putting it off. I’m a little nervous about it.”

“Well sure, a big thing like that.”

“I told you, Rose, I don’t permit people to patronize me,” Morty said, controlling himself. “Now,” he said, calm again, “this thing tomorrow will be tremendous. I’m qualified for it to be. Before no — now yes. I told them in 1934, when I refused the doctorate. That was a speech. That was. What was I in 1934? A small, marked man, thin as a warrior, passionate in the guts but unripe as next week. Still, I told them. ‘Doctors Lopus and Moore and Stitt and Frane,’ I said, ‘I decline to be examined. What of music, gentlemen? What of medicine and history and physics and literature? What of military strategy and folk dancing and astronomy and law? I know nothing, doctors. Good-by.’ ”

“Good-by,” Rose Gold said.

“Not you. It’s what I said. So now I’m prepared. Listen, it wasn’t easy. These aren’t the old-timey German-beer-garden days when all you had to do for knowledge was sell your soul. It’s a buyer’s market now. It probably always was. Anyway, it hasn’t been easy. Those damned jungles, that creepy food, those redundant world capitals — all that lousy note-taking and collating and waiting for boats and keeping your ears off their bloody necklaces. Phooey, Rose. But — you prepare and you’re prepared. Tomorrow.”

“Hah!” Rose Gold’s husband shouted. “Hah! You see? The man’s a fool. He’s crazy. Tomorrow is Sunday. Everything’s closed!”

“Tomorrow!”

He left his room and went downstairs and crossed Amsterdam Avenue and walked the two blocks to the park. He entered and turned right, walking south along the western margins of Central Park, crossing intricate foot and bridle paths, raising his stout stick to greet the few early morning riders, cutting through greensward where the wet grass swished against his cuffs. He was grateful it was cool, for his knapsack was heavy and he had a long way to go. From time to time, from a hilly rise, he could see the fine apartments across the avenue, and once, down a wide, plunging street, the hazy green of Jersey like something at the bottom of a moated hill. Then the road — there was barely any traffic — swung next to him and he moved along narrower and narrower grassy plots out into Columbus Circle. “Oh, brave new world,” he said, and caught his breath, and looked for a moment at the stunning marble brightness of the Coliseum. All around him were the city’s new museums, theaters, concert, and exhibition halls. “This is it,” they boasted to him. This ain’t it, he thought, and shoved the knapsack higher, lifting it as one would push up on the buttocks of a piggybacking child.

He crossed the wide street and walked past the expensive hotels toward the Grand Army Plaza, seeing his face, like something on fire, in the brassy medallion plates of the Essex and Hampshire Houses and the Barbizon-Plaza and the St. Moritz and Plaza hotels. And this ain’t it, he thought, catching a dim fragrance of open luggage, cuff links on the rug, melting ice.

He headed south on Fifth Avenue past the fine stores, their clean enormous windows reminding him of nativity scenes, glassed, moneyed crèches. He paused for a moment before a window, looking past his reflection into the cool, tweedy depths of the scene, and admired the horsey, intelligent dummies, a season ahead in a different time zone and climate, in some heaven off earth, standing, awkwardly graceful, self-conscious and chosen in front of the precious furniture and rare books. He caught a scent of the turning wheels inside Swiss watches. “This ain’t it,” he sniffed. “It’s only the way it ought to be.”

A policeman moved up behind him. Morty could feel the cop’s eyes on his back. “I’m no revolutionary, Officer,” he said without turning. “The thought of smashing this thick glass makes me shudder. I only wish I could afford some of this stuff.”

“You a peace marcher?” the cop asked.

“Too old,” Morty said. ‘“Truth walker.”

He crossed the street to look into the window of F.A.O. Schwarz and stared in amazement at the toys for the emperor’s children, the king’s kids, and then went down 56th Street toward Madison Avenue. In the distance, on both sides of the street, he could see the striped, fringed canopies and bright pennants of French and Italian restaurants. They looked like the gay tents of ancient, opposing armies. Knights could have appeared under the awnings, buckling armor.

He turned down Madison Avenue and smelled electric-typewriter ribbons. At Abercrombie & Fitch on 45th Street, Morty stopped, startled. There in the window was a manikin, burdened as Morty himself was by a knapsack, but pithhelmeted, superbly, masculinely bloused, with clever canvas loops for his shells running like intricate braid across his handsome shirt, his field marshal’s jodhpurs flowing like twin, wind-whipped flags into the rich leather boots. He marched proudly through his air-cooled, Platonized jungle, his eyes like jeweler’s crystal, toward the grand bull koodoo of creation somewhere behind Morty’s back. Morty was not put off. “No, this ain’t it either, is it, oh, wax brother?” he said and moved east along 45th Street past Park, where the banks were and the new office buildings like upended trays of ice cubes.

He went on to Lexington, walking abreast of the stocky, Greeky splendor of the Grand Central Terminal, still idle and almost cabless this early on a Sunday morning. He followed the big building, like a stone roadblock, around two corners and came out at 42nd Street.

He moved toward Broadway. Now he could smell dollar-nine-cent steaks. He could smell publishers’ remainders, paperback books, lenses, tripods, leatherette camera cases, record albums, little Statues of Liberty, transistorized tape recorders — plastic. Overwhelmingly he could smell plastic. “This ain’t it, and this ain’t even the way it ought to be,” he said.

At Times Square he looked north into the great valley of Broadway. Slogans, the names of movie stars, trademarks, colossal painted labels stuck flat to the buildings like ripped shards of poster on a kiosk. In the wilderness of unkempt, unlit tubing scribbled across signs, he could just make out glassy, ghost traces of airplanes, fountain pens, the complicated wing movements of birds.

“Pretty wonderful, ain’t it?” a man with a thick New York accent said to him.”

“Sure is, hick,” Morty said.

He turned around and walked down Broadway. Once he left Times Square and was into the Thirties he felt more comfortable, but he was very tired. He walked into the little square at 32nd Street and sat down on a bench to rest. An old woman in a dark cloth coat too warm for the day was across from him. She had on black, broken, high-heeled shoes and white bobbysocks, and sat feeding pigeons from a deep paper sack.

“Good morning there, mother,” Morty said.

“Good morning there, tramp,” the woman said.

Morty sat contentedly, looking from the great complex of department stores to the jerky thrusts of pigeon neck. “I am a traveler from the West who has come a long journey,” he said after a while. “Can you tell me the meaning of life?”

She looked up and squinted at him, her squeezed eyes enormous and burning behind her rimless, sun-reflecting glasses.

“I can but I won’t,” she said.

He stood up, wiping his forehead. “In that case I must be moving on, hi ho Silver.”

On his right as he went out was a statue of Horace Greeley. “You go West,” he told the statue. The nerve of that guy, he thought.

He walked down Broadway.

In the garment district he looked up at the huge windows, enjoying the familial, personal poetry of the names of the firms lettered there.

Broadway moved into the East Side at 23rd Street, and he began to walk faster. Now he no longer looked around him but moved quickly, excited and urgent and nervous.

At 17th Street he rushed to the picket railing around the square and closed his hands tightly about two iron-dark spears. His heart pumped violently. The muscles in his throat, contracting, gagged him. He entered Union Square Park.

It was an open-air forum, the last in New York, one of the last in the world.

Morty had known about Union Square but until now had stayed away from it, saying it, savoring the idea of it. It would not be like Hyde Park in London, where a man would take your picture on a soapbox for money. It would not be like the Bughouse Square in Chicago, where the high-school boys, smug, mock innocence like jam on their faces, came to bully the speaker, to grab at his pants from behind. This was different. This was serious.

There were no boxes. That made the difference. It kept the exhibitionists away. He remembered Kachoa, where the king had no throne. He met you at eye level. There the laws were wise, complex fiats issuing as naturally as rote morning salutations between friends. He knew where he would have to come to hear truth when he read about a New York City ordinance that permitted speech-making in the park so long as the speakers were level with their hearers.

It was not yet eleven, but already the men had begun to gather. They were men just past middle age, in blue work shirts, or tieless in white short-sleeved shirts, the collars spread neat and wide as bibs over the lapels of their jackets. They lounged on benches with newspapers in their laps or sticking out of wide, slack side pockets in their suit coats. It alarmed him to hear them question each other about absent speakers and to see their smiles as each name invoked some old-cronied recognition. If they knew the truth, why, he wondered, would they come back? Then he thought: Why, to relish it; they return to relish it, like old men warmed by any familiar, mutual memory.

Men continued to gather. They came into the park and waved at acquaintances or stopped to chat with friends with the odd, dignified courtesy of legislators in a cloakroom. There was about the place — in addition to expectancy, which was what Morty brought there — a sort of placidity: an air among them of having shared together something immense and final and incorruptible. Though he had never seen any of these men before, he could almost tell which of them had been labor agitators in the thirties, which had been hit by policemen, or been cellmates, or conspired together in basements.

An hour had passed and still no one had begun formally to address the crowds. Just after noon Morty leaned toward the man next to him on the bench.

“When does everything begin?” he asked.

The man didn’t look at him when he answered. “Too many regulars,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “Somebody who’s never heard it has to be around to listen. Otherwise it’d be like trees falling in the forest. Is a sound made?”

I’ve never heard it, Morty thought.

People continued to come into the square. Morty imagined them to be, like the men already there before he had asked his question, fellow connoisseurs.

Suddenly, and apparently at no signal, a man sprang up from a bench. He was already talking by the time he gained his feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man was saying, “in the City of New York last year two hundred forty-three people were burned to death in fires. Now, that does not take in Westchester County or Newark in New Jersey or the burned populations of Chicago or Montana or any other place on the face of this flammable globe. That’s the City of New York alone. Two hundred forty-three. How many of them husbands, fathers, kids, mothers, wives? And that’s death I’m talking about. How many singed children or limbs burned permanently useless?”

People moved up to him. Some were smiling.

“What’s the earth? How did it get here? The earth is the sun. The earth is a spinning fragment of the exploded sun. And I tell you that it is the natural function of the sun to burn. And I tell you that just as the acorn does not fall far from the tree, so too will the earth ever combust from here to eternity.

“Do not be deceived, my friends, by the notion of a ‘cooling earth.’ That’s nothing but the cant phrase of sophist scientists—”

“You tell ’em, Smoky Joe,” a man called good-naturedly from the crowd.

The speaker ignored him.

“…the cant phrase of sophist scientists. Don’t be lulled by it. As the one million people destroyed on the slopes of Etna were lulled. As the thousands charred beneath Vesuvius were lulled.”

“Smoky Joe thinks the Empire State Building will erupt one day,” a man shouted.

“Or as the natives of Chicago were lulled. Or Hiroshima. Or any of a hundred other places I could name.” He turned to the heckler. “Wise guy. It will. One day it will. What do you think? Do you know what the combined total of fire-insurance premiums is on the Empire State Building each year? One million…”

“…six hundred and ninety thousand,” the crowd joined him, familiar with the figure, “four hundred seventy-two dollars…”

“…fourteen cents,” the speaker said, finishing just behind the crowd.

“Let him speak,” Morty shouted.

“Thank you, sir,” the speaker said, “but they don’t bother me. Those bums don’t bother me. All right. What do you think? Those guys know what they’re doing they shell out like that. Everything burns. Where are your houses of yesteryear? Where are they? Gone. Burned down. What are your majestic ruins of Rome and Athens? Burned buildings! I’ve inspected them. I’ve been there and inspected them and they make me sick.

“The kindling point of human flesh is fifty-five degrees lower than the kindling point of a varnished hardwood floor, did you know that?”

“We know it, Smoky Joe,” said a man through cupped hands. “You told us last week.” Others near him grinned and clapped him on the back.

“What are we thinking about, friends? What are we thinking about to let this holocaust continue? And it will continue. Mark my words. It will continue. What’s the answer?” Smoky Joe made himself taller as he challenged them. He grinned.

“It’s not a case of fighting fire with fire, let me tell you,” he said, and Morty, sick, knew it was a joke he had made a hundred times before. The speaker stooped for a moment and drew something out of a large cardboard file near his feet. Standing, he held out a mat on which had been mounted half a dozen box-camera photographs. They appeared to be views of a rather strange-looking house. He thumped the photographs with a thick finger. “The Fire Commissioner knows the answer. The Real Estate Board knows the answer. The construction interests know the answer,” he said, building to a climax. “And Smoky Joe has lived in the answer…”

“…twenty-four years,” the crowd yelled, anticipating him.

“… — four years,” Smoky Joe echoed. “And what is the answer? It’s processed tin. Processed-tin walls. Processed-tin floors. Processed-tin doors and ceilings. Simple? Yes. Fallible? Yes. I’m very frank. It’ll burn. Everything will. But — after you’ve all been charred, marred and scarred in those Japanesey parchment-and-paper-dolls’ houses you call homes, the chances are a million to one that old Smoky Joe will be sitting back, high, dry and cool in his processed-tin strongbox!” He pounded his photographs again.

“Cool you’ll be,” a man said,“—in winter.”

“I already said it’s not infallible. But suppose there is a fire. Now, it can’t start in those processed-tin floors, walls, ceilings or doors, but let’s suppose for the sake of argument that you’ve gone to bed and your wife is still up reading in the living room and she’s smoking a cigarette, and she gets sleepy and her burning cigarette falls on her housecoat and starts a fire. Well, you’re sound asleep, but you smell the smoke and you get up to see what’s what, and you see all the furniture in the living room is burning. That could happen. Well, what do you do? All you do is go back into your bedroom and slam the processed-tin door and forget about it!”

“What about your wife, Smoky?”

“My wife is dead in a fire. Don’t make jokes about my wife.”

“Oh no,” Morty said softly. “Oh no.”

“He always uses the same example,” a man explained. “He always uses the same example, and that guy always asks the same question.”

Morty shouldered his way out of the crowd, seeing, suddenly projected on the grass, his shadow, the knapsack making a kind of hump on his back.

While he had been listening to the man who believed in fire, other groups had formed.

A dozen voices competed against each other, and Morty moved along the curving cement walks behind the backs of the crowds. It was like a holiday. Small children climbed over benches or darted in and out of groups, like dwarfs with messages.

In the crowds, constricted, clumsy under his knapsack, he brushed against the shoulders of other men and felt a queer, muffled shock, as though someone had stepped on an artificial leg he used, or struck him in a glass eye. He shoved against people — collecting randomly now, drawn to the speakers by some curious abeyance of the will, as men pause before one booth rather than another at a fair. He stepped over a low iron railing onto a soft noman’s-land of grass. A policeman waved him away. He moved back into the voices.

He stopped to listen to a man with a beard, and it struck him that the man appeared not so much to address those men already listening to him as the others — those passing by in low-geared, imposed shuffle, or already settled in small, thickish bands around other speakers. He did not speak or persuade so much as call his oration, the ideas strangely shouted in an unthinking excitement, like someone with another’s umbrella rushing to a doorway to call after the guest who has left it behind.

“People waste time,” the man shouted. “They’re fools. It’s simple. I never ask questions. Notice that. No one’s ever heard me ask a question. The most perfidious instrument in all human language is the question.

“Look at your great teachers. ‘Verily I say unto you,’ Christ says. The Ten Commandments are not questions. Not one sentence in the Declaration of Independence is a question. No valuable literature or great human or divine instrument is ever interrogative. Sermons! Declarations! Commandments! Marvelous!

“There is no room or time in life for questions. Questions are the breeding ground of dissension, atheistic pestilence and war. I tell you that when I hear men talking together and one man asks another a question, I want to go up and shake that man!

“Look at your tragic secular literature: Faust is punished for asking questions. Oedipus is. Hell is a questioner’s answer. Nature’s sinuous and hideous serpent forms a question mark as he writhes along the ground. So did he in Paradise! So does he in Hades!

“Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies, the poet says. No one has ever heard me ask questions.”

“What do you do when you’re lost?” a man asked.

“Who gets lost?” the bearded man roared.

Morty pulled away, turning carefully, conscious again of the heavy pack, feeling clumsy.

“When do you speak?” a boy said, coming up to him. He was young, vaguely tough. “I been here a hundred times. I never heard you speak.”

He pushed past the boy.

Five men stood casually before a lamppost. One, jacketless, his bare arms slackly ribbed with long, stretched veins, addressed the others in a husky, conversational tone. Morty could not be sure whether he was a speaker or someone who had come there to chat with the others.

“Forty years I had a store in The Bronx,” he said, “and I tell you the important thing is the right mark-up.”

Another interrupted him. “That’s all very well. Of course, mark-up is important—”

“The right mark-up, I said.”

“All right, the right mark-up, but more important is knowing how much of an item to stock.”

“No, no,” a third said, “it’s the timing, knowing when to sell what. You got to understand the needs of the neighborhood.”

“Display. Display is everything,” a fourth joined in. “In the proper package you could sell a rat on a stick.”

“I don’t know,” the last man said. “I think good will. Good will is very important.”

Morty left them and went toward a tall, gray-haired woman a few yards away.

“The salvation of the world,” she said calmly, “can only lie in the successful efforts of our organization to bring to bear as a practical, major influence in all the underdeveloped nations, as well as in all the presently constituted world powers, free and iron curtain, the noble principles of the universal Republican party!”

When he turned away he saw the boy who had asked when he would speak. A friend was with him, and the two of them pointed to Perlmutter. The boy who had spoken nudged his friend expectantly.

Morty went toward the largest group he had yet seen, the people standing in a sort of deep, shapeless huddle. They shifted from foot to foot like people dancing in place and craned their necks back and forth nervously, endlessly, evidently trying to obtain some momentary view of the speaker hidden amongst them. They reminded Morty of the pigeons he had seen the old lady feeding in the park. Maybe this time, he thought, and moved closer. From where he stood, still at the perimeter of the crowd, he couldn’t hear the speaker. He would have moved away, but just then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the two boys were still following him. To get away from them he pushed harshly against the people straining to get a look at the speaker. When they saw he wore a knapsack they dropped back, intimidated and docile, and then closed around him again as though pouring in to fill up an imaginary wake.

Now he was surrounded, and apparently no closer to the speaker he still could not hear. He lunged forward, the canvas hump climbing unsmoothly on his back, and pushed through the final ring of people. There, in the center of the crowd, was a tiny man, shirtless, bald, explaining, in a thin, wavering voice pitched like a whisper, the tattoos that completely covered his torso and arms and hands and face and skull. It was as if he had been impossibly wrapped in a tight, shiny oriental rug. He raised his left arm and pointed with a tattooed finger to tattooed hair etched into his shaved armpit.

Morty stumbled past him without looking and, arms extended, reached into the crowd behind the man, jabbing at them stiffly to make them move.

When he emerged, the boys were waiting for him. Now there were four of them.

One came forward as if to speak to him, and another reached out to touch the pack on his back. Morty jerked violently away. Somewhere he had lost his stick. He only realized it now that he meant to strike them with it. They continued to trail him in a sort of sneering casualness, and he turned on them.

“I am not defenseless,” he said. “Stop following me.”

“It’s a free park, ain’t it?” one said. “When are you going to speak? Are you going to speak or ain’t you?”

“People must…” a voice said suddenly, clearly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” So abruptly had the voice broken into all their consciousnesses that even the boys looked away to see its source.

“It’s the Professor,” someone at the edge of one of the groups said, and Morty could see the sudden turning of a dozen heads, faces slamming alert.

“Where?” one asked.

“There. It’s the Professor. The Professor is going to speak.”

The groups dissolved, the speakers around whom they had been standing suddenly abandoned in mid-sentence, their mouths still open in stunned discouragement. Thirty feet away Morty saw the tattooed man appear as the crowd around him broke up. He had put on a hat and was buttoning his shirt.

Morty stumbled after the rushing crowds, but his knapsack was an almost unbearable weight now and he could not keep up. Already the crowds had re-formed into a single mass. Morty caught up and tried to push through but they shoved him back, his assertiveness, even his knapsack, no longer seeming to have any effect on them.

“People must serve…” the voice sang out, hopelessly hidden from Morty. He was struck by its precision and strength and clarity, by the wholesome sweetness of its range and timbre. He could not really tell if it was the voice of a man or a woman. It could even have been a child’s.

“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, trying to say,” it went on.

This would be it, Morty thought, alarmed and startled and pleased. This would be it and it would be worth it. That was the incredible thing. For a moment he regretted the ordinance that forbade platforms, but then he realized it made no difference that he couldn’t see the speaker.

“People must serve…” the voice said again, very slowly. “It’s what I’ve been trying to say, to make you understand, it’s what you must learn for the guilt…it’s the only thing that will help it, the guilt…help the guilt — People must serve…”

The splendid beauty of the voice thrilled him. Even the others were hushed. Far away, against a tree, the policeman leaned, his face as rapt as any there. The man who believed in fire and the man who never asked questions stood together, staring toward the voice, their faces, like Morty’s own, waiting, calm.

“People must serve—” the voice said, tired now, strained with the effort of mouthing the first premise of the universe “—must serve their necessity. People must serve their necessity — knuckle under to their necessity.”

Morty waited for the voice to go on. In the silence that followed the last pronouncement he and everyone else — there were hundreds now, it seemed, perhaps thousands — stood in thick, sedative patience.

They waited like that for five minutes, perhaps ten.

Then someone shrugged. And another did. And a man sighed. And a fourth coughed. And someone else was the first to turn around and walk away. And then, in a distant corner of the square, a rough voice began a new address. And then Morty could not see where the people had stood to listen to the voice. “Tch, tch,” Morty said sadly. “Tch tch tch.” It was the beginning of his compassion.

They had no preparation, no facts, no languages, no questions, no years behind them of jungle and pole and city and sex, no totems, no tokens, none of the trillion knowledges, none of the patience that Morty brought there. What would they have heard, what could they have made of it? To them it had been babble, less than nonsense. He had prepared, and everything had been made good. Redeemed, he thought. He was excited as he had never been excited. No. Yes. Once, he thought. When he had first conceived of what his life must be.

He had begun to tremble. A man, passing him, stared. “What’s eating that one?” he heard him say to his wife.

Morty slipped the straps of his knapsack off his shoulders and down over his arms and let it fall behind him. He turned and climbed on it, standing slowly, awkwardly, striving violently for balance on the soft, uncertain perch.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Morty Perlmutter began. He was glad the weather was warm. He would have weeks of it yet. In the fall the nights would be cool, but there were the big, folded Cajawohl heat leaves in his knapsack. If he was careful the Sambatlian total-food berries might last half a year. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he repeated. “Ladies and gentlemen and Rose Gold…”