textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv2n1.etx

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===============================================
InterText Vol. 2, No. 1 / January-February 1992
===============================================

  Contents

    FirstText ........................................Jason Snell

  Short Fiction

    Star Quality_..................................Melanie Miller_

    Half-Moons and Sunfish_.......................John Reoli, Jr._

    To Comprehend the Nectar_..........................Louie Crew_

    Multiplication and the Devil_............Daniel K. Appelquist_

    A Handful of Dust_.......................Daniel K. Appelquist_

    Gravity_..........................................Jason Snell_

  Serial

    The Unified Murder Theorem (1 of 4)_................Jeff Zias_

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@etext.org                       gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor          Send subscription requests, story
    Phil Nolte                  submissions, and correspondence
    nolte@idui1.BITNET                   to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 2, No. 1. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1992, 1994 Jason 
  Snell. Individual stories Copyright 1992 by their original 
  authors.
....................................................................


  FirstText  by Jason Snell
===========================

  Another year has dawned, and I'm back here again.

  Welcome to 1992, and to the first InterText of this year. I hope 
  I'll still be bringing you InterText into 1993 and beyond, but 
  that's now in the hands of various Journalism School admissions 
  officers around the country.

  At this time last year, in addition to covering protests against 
  the impending Gulf War for my school newspaper, I was involved 
  in designing my new net magazine, tentatively titled InterText 
  (I never did come up with a better title), and searching far and 
  wide for stories that I could put in issue number one.

  A year later, I think we've produced our best issue to date. The 
  stories in this issue are all first-rate. First up is The 
  Unified Murder Theorem by Jeff Zias -- a first for us, because 
  it's a four- part serial. Rest assured, the whole thing is 
  written and in my hot little hands right now. It's hard to 
  describe what Unified Murder Theorem is about, but I can say 
  that it's gripping stuff, and well worth reading.

  Another first in this issue is our first story (or so I think) 
  by a professionally published author. Louie Crew, who has 
  published hundreds of works, is a professor at Rutgers 
  University. His contribution this issue is the story To 
  Comprehend The Nectar.

  In addition, we've got a good cyberpunk-style SF story from new 
  writer Melanie Miller, and a somewhat pastoral piece by new 
  writer John Reoli, Jr.

  And to complete my ever-so-exciting synopsis of this issue's 
  stories, I'll mention what is not an example of nepotism --<2D>our 
  final two stories are by the editors of Quanta and InterText: 
  Daniel K. Appelquist's "Multiplication and the Devil" and "A 
  Handful of Dust" and my own "Gravity."

  Just a note to readers and writers -- the appearance of stories 
  by Dan and myself in these pages by no means proves any sort of 
  conspiracy (Oliver Stone take note) or old boy network. All 
  submissions we receive are judged solely on merit, not on the 
  identity of the writer. I'd never dump another story just 
  because I had a story by Dan or myself.

  So please continue to submit your stories. I've already got a 
  couple lined up for next time --<2D>which is the first time that's 
  happened in the year I've been doing this -- but we need as many 
  stories as we can get.

  Since I began this column by discussing one year ago, perhaps I 
  should continue the anniversary spirit by mentioning that our 
  next issue will be a special first anniversary issue. I'm hoping 
  to have a special cover for the PostScript version and more 
  goodies. Be sure to submit stories or articles soon if you'd 
  like to be in the anniversary issue.

  One other thing I'd like to mention is how amazed I've been at 
  the international flavor of my subscription list. InterText is 
  now sent to, among other places, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, 
  Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, China, 
  Australia, and New Zealand. Our circulation is slowly climbing, 
  as well -- at last count, exactly 1100 people were on some 
  distribution list. And that doesn't count the people who FTP 
  InterText from some site without asking to be put on the 
  distribution list.

  Be sure to let us know what you think of InterText. The great 
  thing about computer communication is that one can receive 
  almost instantaneous feedback. You rarely if ever get chances to 
  receive replies from the editors and writers of mainstream 
  magazines --<2D>but InterText lists the addresses and names of its 
  editors and writers. If you have questions or comments of any 
  kind, please feel free to mail us.

  Enjoy the issue. Take good care of yourselves. We'll see you 
  back here in two months.

--------------------------------------------------------------------


  Star Quality  by Melanie Miller
=================================

  I remember. . .

  Benjamin Grayson opened his eyes, struggling out of the dream. 
  He had been with Alicia Wilcox, his co-star, in a scene from 
  their latest movie -- smooth, blond Alicia, and the dreamscene 
  had moved beyond an acceptable rating into censored territory. 
  His fingers slipping underneath the velvet strap of her 
  monogown, exploring the feel of silky skin. And then, that 
  thought --

  I remember. . .

  An image, textbooks on an old wood desk. Grassy lawn, with blue 
  sky above it. It had a flavor to it, a texture of dread and 
  anticipation, pushing him away from Alicia, out of sleep. An 
  old, treasured fear.

  Of what?

  Slowly, he focused on the bedside clock. 7:30 p.m. projected in 
  ruby holograms, hanging in the darkness. Time to get up, get 
  ready for the party. It wouldn't do to keep the head of a major 
  Hollywood studio waiting.

  And he would never do something as rude as that, although he 
  could if he felt like it. Benjamin Grayson was one of the elite 
  of the '20s. Stars. And he was under contract with Maximillian 
  Hiller, the agent of the decade. Everyone wanted to belong to 
  the Hiller Group, and only the best, the hungriest, would be 
  admitted. Maximillian (never Max -- he hated diminutives) didn't 
  handle anything else.

  All of Maximillian's clients were stand-outs in some way. 
  Professional, other agents said with envy. Maximillian never had 
  to cover up embarrassing pasts, arrange special hospital stays, 
  pay off local law enforcement. The Hiller Group were actors 
  first and foremost, dedicated to their craft. Not to providing 
  filler for the tabloids.

  And part of their craft was to project an image. As Maximillian 
  suggested, Grayson arrived at the party just late enough to make 
  an entrance. The eyes of the crowd -- all people involved with 
  the Business -- crawled over his skin agreeably, feather-light 
  massage on the ego. Something clicked inside his head and he 
  went into automatic pilot: Benjamin Grayson, The Actor. Watch 
  him walk and talk, folks, like a real human being. Gossip about 
  him, wonder who he's sleeping with this week, what his next 3-D 
  will be. And, in a softer tone, how long can he last?

  To hell with it. I'm a star.

  Grayson kept the grin up, easing into the crowd. Nod here, kiss 
  a cheek there, get into the groove of things. Project.. He saw 
  Maximillian with Alicia, and waved. And when a director 
  intercepted him, launching into a not-so-subtle film offer, 
  Grayson managed to catch Maximillian's eye.

  "Benjamin, my boy, good to see you," the agent said, cutting 
  into the conversation. Maximillian looked like the ideal parent 
  -- six feet tall, a strong, kindly face, dark hair edged with 
  gray at the temples. The only thing that spoiled the image was 
  his eyes, a curious shade of light, oddly flat blue. "Enjoying 
  yourself?"

  "Naturally," Benjamin replied, giving the agent an wide smile. 
  He glanced at Alicia (I remember) and faltered. "Jorge and I 
  were discussing his next picture," he said, as if to explain the 
  break.

  "Which Benjamin would be perfect for," Jorge added, delighted to 
  have Maximillian's attention. "The part was practically written 
  for him, but he keeps dodging me -- "

  "Which he is supposed to do," Maximillian said smoothly. There 
  was a new undertone to his words, an ice that casting agents and 
  directors had come to recognize as a warning shot over the bow. 
  Keep Off, Private Property. "All business deals are done through 
  me, as I'm sure you know."

  Jorge immediately became apologetic. "I'm aware of that," he 
  said quickly. "I simply wanted to run the idea past Benjamin --"

  "Which you've done. Benjamin, why don't you escort Alicia 
  around, while Jorge and I discuss his idea." Maximillian handed 
  the actress to Grayson, then guided the director off to a 
  corner.

  Alicia glanced after them, the demure expression melting into a 
  smile. "This is the third time he's handed me off while he sets 
  up a deal," she said, half-laughing. "I'm starting to wonder if 
  I should ask for a cut."

  "I don't think you'll get it," Grayson said, grinning. "He's the 
  top hustler in town."

  "I like it that way. It makes me feel more secure." She had a 
  voice that had been described variously as soft, lilting, 
  honeyed. Tonight, Grayson thought, it was elegantly sweet; 
  champagne and strawberries. "By the way, he has some work for us 
  afterwards."

  Grayson nodded, understanding. The host, and probably the 
  hostess. It was part of the job when you worked with the Hiller 
  Group. The dream floated into consciousness again, overlaying 
  the party. I remember. . .

  "What's the matter?" Alicia asked. She looked up into his face, 
  smile turning down at the corners. "You faded out for a minute."

  "Nothing." He shrugged the dream off, back into his 
  subconscious. "You want that drink?"

  "Of course. Then we'll entertain the peons."

  Two hours later, he took a break from the mingling. Drift from 
  one group to another, be witty, amusing -- even if you were used 
  to it, it could get tiring after a while. Alicia was still 
  downstairs chatting with people in the vast ballroom, and 
  Benjamin wanted a chance to be alone with the night sky, 
  polluted as it was. He leaned out on a second-floor balcony, 
  tracking faint traces of starlight that made it through the 
  smog. Memories started bleeding through again, subconscious 
  fragments:


  I remember. . .

  Another time, another place. Further east, where people only 
  watched the stars on holovision, never thinking to become one of 
  them. Maximillian had come to the campus right after graduation, 
  where he met Tim McCarthy for the first time. Benjamin felt like 
  a ghost, watching Maximillian and the boy walking on the 
  campus's quadrangle. The sky had been blue, very clear, and the 
  sun had been warm on their shoulders as Maximillian explained 
  how the boy could make a great deal of money in the 
  entertainment industry.

  Tim insisted that he wasn't an actor -- the commercial had been 
  his girlfriend's idea. He wanted to be an agricultural 
  researcher. Maximillian demurred -- acting talent wasn't 
  necessary, not with the technological options at his command.


  "You look lonely."

  Not moving, Benjamin tried on a small grin that didn't seem to 
  fit. "Not really."

  He glanced sideways. Alicia's profile was framed, outlined by 
  the lights of downtown L.A. Classically beautiful. He tried to 
  come up with the right answer, something that would describe the 
  dreams he'd been having lately, but nothing seemed right set 
  against a background of the city's light. Especially I'm afraid 
  of my memories.

  They stood there in companionable silence, the cool night breeze 
  ruffling through their hair, before he said, "Do you ever 
  remember what it was like? Before?"

  Alicia sighed. "I don't think about it," she said. "You 
  shouldn't, either. It only confuses you."

  "I know. But sometimes I can't help it," Benjamin said, the 
  words moving sluggishly now. "It's like I'm being invaded by 
  memories. I don't know what to do."

  Alicia shook her head, moving away from him. She didn't want to 
  talk about it, he knew. Alicia was the ideal actress -- calm, 
  competent, perfectly adjusted to the change in her life. She had 
  a magic that critics kept comparing to the screen greats -- 
  Gish, Hepburn, Streep. Great implants. Alicia was never 
  confused. "Maybe you should go see Dr. Berringer," she 
  suggested, brusque. "Have him take a look at you. You might need 
  an adjustment."

  Unconsciously, Benjamin reached up and touched the skin 
  underneath his right ear, massaging it with two fingers. That 
  was where they'd gone in, with the surgical probes. "Maybe," he 
  agreed.


  A small surgical procedure, the newest form of wetware, and Tim 
  would have the skills of the greatest thespians at his 
  fingertips, Maximillian said. The silicarbon circuits would 
  interface directly with his brain, a biocompatible network 
  riding the limbic ring. All he would have to do is think about 
  the network, and it would generate controlled emotional states 
  in response to incoming stimuli.

  You mean it's an artificial persona, Tim said, quiet. He'd heard 
  about the procedure from friends, horrified at first, then 
  fascinated. It wouldn't be me, just some software riding around 
  in my head.

  You make it sound so nefarious, Maximillian answered, smiling. 
  Like it's a form of mind control.

  Well, isn't it?

  And this time, Maximillian did laugh, the father figure amused 
  by a fearful child. Of course not, he said. You would have 
  control over your every thought, your every mood. Your implant 
  would simply allow you access to a greater range of emotions, 
  the skills you would need to be a great actor. Think of it as a 
  built-in acting coach.


  "Anyway, I came out here to find you," she continued, her voice 
  growing warm again. "Maximillian's waiting for us upstairs."

  "All right." Benjamin turned, willing the vagueness to be gone. 
  He took control again, the smooth persona clicking into reality. 
  Turn up the charm, boy. It's showtime.


  Grayson dug his toes into the satin, thrusting harder. The woman 
  beneath him moaned, winding slippery legs around his hips, 
  whispering obscenities under her breath to urge him on. Across 
  the hall, he thought, Alicia was probably doing the same thing 
  with the studio head, unless the man got into something kinky. 
  Not impossible, but Alicia knew how to handle that.

  He jerked again, and again, until it was finished. Naturally, he 
  made sure the woman came first -- sometimes, he could even hold 
  back until she had two orgasms, once even three. After love 
  (because with him, it was love of a sort -- wasn't that 
  programmed into the implants?), he slid off to the side, holding 
  her. The after-sex comedown that women needed, he told himself. 
  If you were going to do a job, do it right.

  In the quiet of the room, he felt the other memories sliding up 
  to him, demanding notice. He tried to ignore it, to be the 
  perfect actor. Maximillian had said this would happen. Sensory 
  bleedover, he called it -- sometimes the implants didn't filter 
  correctly. But tonight, Benjamin was too tired to fight. He let 
  them come, shivering under their weight:


  Why me, Tim asked.

  Because you're the American ideal, Maximillian had said. They 
  want your type, your voice -- they'll love you. Maximillian 
  smiled, the cool charm turned up a notch. And because it would 
  make us both a great deal of money, he added gently. Tim 
  flushed, he mention of money tying a hard knot in his gut. There 
  weren't many scholarships for aggie scientists anymore, and he 
  had been living on loans and side jobs. And with graduation, the 
  loans would start coming due.

  Five years with the Hiller Group and you would have the money 
  for your bills, for a graduate degree, whatever you want, 
  Maximillian said. Five years with us, and you will have 
  financial freedom for the rest of your life.

  In exchange for five years of slavery, Tim said, horribly 
  surprised at a sudden, tiny desire to believe Maximillian. An 
  artificial persona was interesting when you were sitting around 
  with friends in a safe dorm room, your mind still your own. The 
  thought of actually carrying something like that in your head --

  I wouldn't call it slavery, Maximillian replied. It's simply 
  acting, taken to the ultimate degree.

  The woman eased into sleep. Only then did he slip out of bed, 
  gathering his clothes and looking for a bathroom where he could 
  shower. Luckily, the bedrooms were connected with a palatial 
  bath. Soundproof door, he noted, closing it behind him. Good.

  Alicia was already there, washing herself at the bidet. She 
  turned, looking over her shoulder, and gave him a cheerful 
  smile. "How was it?"

  "Not bad." Grayson went through his clothes, hanging them on a 
  towel rack. "Better than last time. At least she was in pretty 
  good shape. Yours?"

  Alicia shrugged. "About the same. He likes to be on bottom."

  Grayson grunted understanding, stepped into the shower to wash 
  off the woman's sweat. After a minute, Alicia slipped in. "You 
  mind?"

  "No." He handed her the soap, and received a sudsy washcloth as 
  a prize. Like cats on good terms, they washed each other. 
  Asexual, friendly.

  He was incapable of feeling any real attraction for Alicia, wet 
  and slick as she was. He was sure she felt the same way -- 
  Maximillian had suggested that a romance between them wouldn't 
  be in their best interest. He reached down to turn off the 
  water, when a showed appeared through the steam, watching them.

  "Lovely," the studio head whispered above the water's hiss. 
  "Lovely, children."

  Grayson felt Alicia freeze, next to him. Waiting for the next 
  suggestion, he thought disjointedly. Sure, we do requests, an 
  insane voice sang in his mind.

  "I'd like to see a love scene." The man leaned up against the 
  sink, his eyes slipping over them through the moisture. "Now."

  Compliantly, Grayson straightened up. His indifference melted, 
  changed to desire. His need was reflected in her eyes, blue and 
  eager, as she rubbed up against him, the water from the shower 
  no longer her only wet. He grabbed her roughly, the way the 
  studio head wanted him to hold her, the water beading on their 
  skin.


  It had been the money that finally convinced him. A guaranteed 
  $100,000 the first year; after that, the sky was the limit. 
  Whatever his talent could pull in -- a million and up wasn't 
  impossible, they had said.

  What if nobody wanted to hire me, he had asked. The 
  administrative section of the Hiller Group just laughed. 
  Maximillian hasn't picked a loser yet, they told him. Don't 
  worry. You'll be fine.

  And he had. After the surgery, renamed Benjamin Grayson, he had 
  co-starred in a fluff sitcom. Neilsens went through the roof -- 
  the public loved him. After that, it was a string of steadily 
  bigger movies, until he was signed as the star for his current 
  3-D, American Players. Women walked up to him everywhere, 
  offering him their bodies, anything he desired. Men wanted to be 
  like him. He was successful, a star, just as Maximillian 
  planned.

  And his memories of life as Tim McCarthy were dimming.


  The sun was a faint shimmer over the Hills when he finally got 
  home. Good party, he thought, throwing his jacket over the 
  couch. Another one for the record books.

  The events of the night, after the party -- well, they didn't 
  involve him, not directly. The sex had started after his first 
  movie, with the producer and his wife. Grayson remembered it in 
  a clinical way -- the quiet summons from Maximillian, being 
  delivered to the hotel by limo. Wrapped up like a birthday 
  present, he thought. It had been his first experience with a 
  threesome, the feel of male skin next to his own. Maybe that was 
  when the dreams began to bleed over into his conscious mind; the 
  ghost of Tim McCarthy screaming in agony, he thought morbidly.

  He had asked Maximillian about the sex once, and the agent had 
  explained it. These people were important in the Business, and 
  wanted intercourse with the godhead of entertainment. Contact 
  with beautiful bodies, nothing more. And it was part of their 
  job to supply that contact to the right people, he'd added. 
  Every member of the Hiller Group did it. Nothing new -- actors 
  and actresses had been doing it for years. The implants was an 
  improvement on the situation, a way to protect themselves 
  emotionally. Let the implants carry you through, Maximillian had 
  suggested before taking him up to that first hotel room. They'll 
  know what to do.

  Still musing, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. 
  Standard morning ritual -- orange juice, vitamin. More 
  suggestions from Maximillian. Thank God we're not shooting until 
  noon, he thought, shrugging off the rest of his clothes, 
  standing in his briefs in the middle of the living room. At 
  least I can get some sleep.


  He had wanted to talk to Alicia afterwards, but she had gone 
  straight home. Instead, Maximillian had been waiting downstairs 
  for him. Alicia told me you've been having some problems, he'd 
  said, slipping into the father confessor role. Like to talk 
  about it?

  And for the first time since Benjamin had started acting, he 
  didn't. He didn't want to talk to Maximillian Hiller, father 
  surrogate, chaperone, super agent. He wanted to work the 
  memories out on his own. But Maximillian wouldn't hear of it.

  I told you that might happen, he'd said easily, on the way home. 
  Your body's immunological system is reacting to the implant. 
  We'll have Dr. Berringer look at it tomorrow.

  I don't want him to, Benjamin had said. But Maximillian 
  insisted. It'll only confuse you if you allow this to continue, 
  Benjamin, he said.

  My name is Tim, he said irrationally.

  Maximillian was silent for a moment. He finally said, in this 
  place and time, your name is Benjamin. In two years, when your 
  contract is up, you may decide to go back to that name. The 
  agent smiled, and Benjamin felt chilled by that smile. Or you 
  may prefer the one you have now.

  No, I don't think so. But the words brought a strange, deep 
  confusion. His life seemed to be a series of facets, beads 
  strung on a chain. Somewhere, those facets had changed, become 
  something new that was called Benjamin Grayson. Did that make 
  him real? And what did that make Tim McCarthy? Unreal?

  He could imagine the resurrection. The chain would snap, oh yes.

  I can make the appointment for you this afternoon, Maximillian 
  said. Just a suggestion, of course.

  Dully, he nodded. Make the appointment.


  The implants were such a little thing, they had said, right 
  after the operation. Just to carry you along. And they'd led him 
  into a new life, something that Tim McCarthy had never imagined.

  And the strangers? Midnight blending of flesh. It was another 
  part of the life. Nothing personal, he could hear Maximillian 
  say -- it was only the body.

  Changing his mind, Grayson carried his orange juice out to the 
  terrace, cool morning air marbling his skin. He looked over the 
  sleeping city and imagined them out there -- the audience that 
  wanted him to be what he was now, not the repository of someone 
  they didn't know.

  And didn't care about.

  Suddenly, he felt lonely, wishing for the memory of blue sky 
  again. Wanting a past he knew was his own. Knowing that it would 
  never be there.


  Oh, I remember. . .

  Melanie Miller (kmrc@midway.uchicago.edu)
-------------------------------------------
  
  Melanie Miller was raised by wolves on the south side of Chicago 
  (you'd be surprised how well canines adapt to urban life), and 
  currently performs double duty as an English major at Purdue 
  University-Calumet and an administrative assistant at the 
  University of Chicago. She is now editing her first novel, "Deus 
  Ex."


  Half-Moons and Sunfish  by John Reoli, Jr.
============================================

  Mark smoothly whipped the pole backward. The tip bent, wiggled, 
  and jerked. He focused on the line out in the water. The 
  struggling creature played it, making small S-shapes and the 
  almost-circles of a stretched spring.

  "I bet it's a bluegill. Feels like it," he said.

  "It's a sunfish," said Deavon. "I can see it from up here. Guess 
  you're lucky today," he said, pulling in his line.

  Mark reeled the fish up to the clay bank and dragged it out of 
  the water. A long, thick strand of green moss had gathered where 
  the leader was attached to the line. He could see the orange 
  belly of the sunfish blazing through the moss.

  "Watch out for his spines," said Deavon. "It'll hurt like hell 
  if he sticks you with one of 'em."

  "I know."

  He raised the fish by the line, slowly pulled away the moss, and 
  tossed it aside. The sunfish arched its fan of spines and curled 
  its body in defense. Cautiously, he inspected it to see where it 
  had been hooked. The bright afternoon sun reflected off of the 
  sunfish and struck Mark in the eyes. He swung the fish away and 
  turned from the glare. The fish flopped hotly from the motion.

  "It's pretty big. Looks about seven or eight inches long." said 
  Deavon.

  Mark put the fish on the ground. Expertly, he slid his fingers 
  down the line to the fish's mouth and then gave the hook a quick 
  twist. There was a slight tearing sound as the barb came out of 
  the cold stiff flesh. He stood to kick the muddy sunfish back 
  into the water.

  "What are you doin'?" exclaimed Deavon.

  "I'm putting it back in. I just don't want to get one of those 
  spines in my hand," said Mark.

  "Are you crazy? Sunfish is good. I'll take it home if you don't 
  want to."

  "Ok. You can have it," said Mark.

  He put the fish on one of the metal clips of his chain stringer 
  and dropped it into the water beside his pole. It puffed and 
  flapped. He could see the red gills swell with each of its 
  breaths. Like a runner after a marathon, he thought; then baited 
  his hook and cast again.

  The line hummed like the high voltage wires overhead, and the 
  sinker made a muffled pluiff when it hit the water. Mark reeled 
  the loose ringlets of slack, rested the fiberglass pole into the 
  Y of a stick, and hung a small fluorescent bobbin between the 
  second and third eyes of the pole.

  Not far from shore, the late June heat rose in waves from a 
  rusted, metal plate laid across two parallel stone walls. 
  Standing on its edge, Deavon whipped a bamboo pole over his 
  head. A red and white plastic bobbin, round as a billiard ball, 
  jerked; then plopped onto the smooth green water. He put the 
  pole on the plate. The bamboo was sandy brown like the cattails 
  on the other side of the reservoir; its shadow curved across the 
  ripples of water. Small bluegills cautiously approached, then 
  nipped at Deavon's floating line.

  "That's an awfully big bobbin, Deavon. What do you think's gunna 
  pull it under, Shamu?"

  "Catfish. I saw a couple sittin' off of this plate when we was 
  up on the road," he said in mild defense.

  "Those fish looked about three feet long. There aren't any 
  catfish in here that big. You probably saw carp. Besides, you 
  know catfish eat off the bottom. Your bait's hangin' four feet 
  below that bobbin and probably fifteen feet off the bottom. No 
  catfish is gunna come up there. Some baby bluegill's gunna eat 
  your nightcrawler and you won't even know it because that 
  bobbin's too big for him to pull under," said Mark.

  "You just worry about your own line. I saw your hook baited with 
  velveeta cheese. What are you gunna use next, a ham sandwich?"

  "Deavon, I'm fishing for trout, not some sewage sucker."

  "Trout. There ain't no trout in here. Shiiiiit, you're lucky you 
  caught that sunfish. What do you know about fishin' anyways? All 
  you got up here in Star Junction is this reservoir and the one 
  above it. Both of em' full of bluegills. What you need is to 
  come down to Whittsett and fish in the river. You wanna catch 
  some fish, that's where they are," he boasted.

  Mark knew Deavon was right. There really wasn't any "good 
  fishin'" in the reservoirs like before. On days like today, when 
  the water was clear, carp could be seen sitting on the bottom 
  off the "tin plate," but mostly, the two reservoirs, one 
  overflowing into the other, were populated with bluegills and 
  sunfish. Occasionally, a catfish or perch would swim through to 
  break the monotony.

  Local fishermen spoke of a bass population returning; every year 
  around bass season, "They're comin' back." This kind of talk and 
  stubborn locals returned to the small, rain and spring fed 
  lakes; but outsiders wouldn't fish there. Not for bass. They 
  would go to the Yough river or up to Virgin Run lake: both 
  stocked by the state or a local fish and game club.

  "Why don't you come down to Whittsett and fish in the river? We 
  can go tomorrow," said Deavon.

  "You gotta be crazy. My dad would kill me if he knew I went all 
  the way to Whittsett," said Mark.

  "Shiiiiit, he don't have to know. You can leave in the morning, 
  fish all day, and be back by six o'clock. He'll think you was up 
  here all day."

  "How would I get there?" asked Mark.

  "Walk. How'd you think?"

  "I couldn't walk there," said Mark.

  "Why not?"

  "You know how this town is. If people see me walking towards 
  Whittsett they'll call my mom and tell her."

  "So what," said Deavon.

  "If my mom finds out I went fishing in the river she'll get 
  pissed at me and say I could fall in and drown. Then she'd tell 
  my dad and I'd have to hear it from him too," said Mark.

  "Man, your folks don't let you do nothin'," said Deavon.

  "Does your mom know you fish up here?"

  "Hell no, you gotta be crazy. I tell her I go way down the river 
  past the island to get catfish. The island's too far away for 
  her to check," said Deavon.

  "Doesn't anybody call your mom and tell her they saw you coming 
  up to Junction?" asked Mark.

  "They can try. We don't got a phone," he said, and turned to 
  Mark and smiled.

  The boys laughed out loud then Mark plainly said, "Look Deavon, 
  I just can't go."

  "Ok," said Deavon.

  Deavon sure is lucky to live in Whittsett, thought Mark. The 
  river's down there, and all those different kinds of fish. 
  Muskie, bass, pike, and trout. And things always wash up on its 
  banks. Rusty tricycles, cables, and plastic parts of things that 
  look like they come from appliances or factory machinery. And he 
  always has something from the river. Hunks of blue glass or 
  rusty railroad spikes. Sometimes his pockets are full of iron 
  ore pellets that fall out of railroad cars.

  Mrs. Adams almost went crazy the day he rolled a handful of them 
  to the front of the room while she was reading to the class.

  "Who's balls are these?" she shouted holding them in her hand. 
  "I want to know right now."

  Deavon puffed as he tried to restrain his laughter. Tears 
  streaked his face. Beside him, Mark buried his hysteria in a 
  social studies book. Under the desk, Deavon handed him some 
  pellets.

  "I know they're from the river. My son brought these home when 
  he was your age," she added.

  "Then maybe they're your son's balls," shouted Scott Stanko from 
  the other side of the room. The class roared. Tammy Smith 
  lowered her flushed face.

  With a crooked finger Mrs. Adams pointed toward Scott, but the 
  tip of the finger actually pointed right at Timmy Veletti.

  "Listen, young man. I'm warning you. You're already in trouble 
  with me for your outburst this morning. I was a WAC in World War 
  II, you know," she said to Scott, pronouncing WAC as "wack."

  "What are you pointing at me for? I didn't do anything this 
  morning," shouted Timmy. The class laughed even louder than 
  before.

  "No, but you did just now," she said and furiously rushed to him 
  in the middle of the room. The students moved their desks in big 
  jerky motions to exaggerate the width of her hips as she waddled 
  past. In the rush, she seemed to burst from her tight black 
  skirt.

  She grabbed the back of Timmy's shirt, put her face right up to 
  his and said, "I knew someone in the army like you."

  Just then three more of the rust red pellets bounced off the 
  blackboard. The class roared and she stormed out shouting for 
  the principal and her old commanding officer. Mark brushed the 
  rusty dust from his hands.

  Around the reservoirs, styrofoam bait cups are all you could 
  find, thought Mark. Fishermen from Virgin Run, who stop at the 
  reservoir to use up old bait, leave them lying around without 
  even a worm or two. Inside the cups, there's only perfect dirt; 
  the kind that comes with bought worms: no roots or coal or clay 
  or bits of coke ash, just perfect little moist chunks like black 
  cottage cheese.

  Mark looked at Deavon standing on the plate. He wore cut-off 
  shorts and his slight body bent backwards. His stomach stuck out 
  a little and appeared to have an inflated stretch, like a round 
  balloon pulled from both ends. His rich black skin seemed to 
  absorb the sun, soaking it into his body, never to release it.

  He stands just like those African bushmen, the ones on TV 
  specials about Kenya or Botswana, out there on the Serengeti or 
  Kalahari. They always look so curious, so concentrated, he 
  thought; still, but in motion with small pieces of hide around 
  their waists and a stick at their side. What are they looking 
  at? Maybe a lion or rhino. No. It had to be something else. 
  Something harder to discern. A small deer maybe. Dad always said 
  how hard it was to see deer when he went hunting. Maybe it 
  wasn't that different in the Serengeti than it was here.

  "So what are you gunna do?" asked Deavon.

  "Huh?"

  "What are you gunna do about tomorrow?"

  "I don't know."

  "Come on, Mark. You always think of something," said Deavon.

  "Yeah, I... Shit! Here it goes!" Mark leaned on his haunches 
  toward the pole. The bobbin wiggled back and forth, raised half 
  an inch, then stopped.

  "Gettin' a bite?" Deavon asked.

  "Yeah."

  "So what are you gunna do?"

  "Wait for him to hit again, he's just playin' with it now," said 
  Mark.

  "No. Not about that, about tomorrow. What are you gunna do?"

  Mark waited silently for the bobbin to move. It remained still. 
  Satisfied that the fish wasn't going to strike he turned to 
  Deavon.

  "I can't walk down to Whittsett," said Mark.

  "Why not? You got legs."

  Mark looked sternly at him and tried to explain.

  "Deavon, you know how these people are around here. Some of them 
  just like to make trouble. Maybe I'll ride my bike, I don't 
  know. I just can't walk down," he said with finality.

  KEIRHH!

  The bobbin smacked against the pole. Mark grabbed the pole and 
  pulled violently.

  "Shit! I missed him," he shouted and began to rapidly reel in 
  the line.

  Deavon walked to an edge of the plate and jumped. His leap was a 
  little short and his left foot landed in thick mud at the 
  shoreline.

  "Son-of-a-bitch!" he yelled, and pulled his foot from the mud.

  Mark laughed as Deavon turned his foot to examine the dripping 
  sneaker. When he pulled off the shoe, it made the same sucking 
  sound coming off his foot as it had coming out of the mud. 
  Deavon removed his other shoe and tossed it on the ground. 
  Barefoot, he stepped in the water near the stringer and crouched 
  to rinse the mud from his shoe. The yellow paleness of his feet 
  and palms was highlighted in the water. They're not white or 
  faded like people said, it's as if more of the blackness is 
  trying to come through, but can't, thought Mark.

  "You should put it on the plate to let it dry when you're done," 
  said Mark. "It's so hot it'll be dry by the time we go home."

  "Yeah, I know. Hey look! There's a mussel out there." said 
  Deavon, pointing to a submerged rock.

  "Yeah, I see it. Right by that rock. And there's another one 
  behind it." Mark finished reeling and laid the pole on the bank. 
  "Let's go out and get them."

  "We can use them for bait," Deavon added.

  At the rock, the water reached their chests. Deavon went under 
  for the first mussel then splashed to the surface with it. Stars 
  of water glistened on his tight jet hair. Mark went under and 
  retrieved the second. He pushed back his straight wet hair and 
  took Deavon's mussel. With one in each hand, he tapped them 
  together. Deavon watched closely, but the mussels remained 
  sealed from them.

  A loud engine rumbled on the other side of the reservoir. Wooden 
  planks bounced in tandem as a pick-up truck crossed the small, 
  flat bridge over by the swamp. The driver gunned the engine and 
  raced up the road along the reservoir. The boys turned and saw 
  patches of red streaking through the tree line. Past the trees 
  and out in the open the driver yelled, "Hey, you 
  motherfuckers!!!" The truck, patched with gray primer, continued 
  up the road. Its engine strained as it reached the top of the 
  hill. Mark put his head down.

  "Asshole," he muttered.

  Deavon laughed and said, "He don't mean nothin' by it. He's just 
  playin' around."

  "Maybe he is, but he doesn't have to play around with us. 
  Besides, who'd want to play around with anybody who has a piece 
  of shit truck like that?" said Mark walking to the shore.

  "Yeah, I know what you mean," said Deavon. "But, I'll tell ya' 
  something. His truck might be a piece of shit, but he got a good 
  lookin' sister."

  "You know that fuckhead?" asked Mark.

  "No, but I know his sister. I see his truck at her house when I 
  walk to school. Sometimes I see him working on it. He's too 
  young to be her dad, so I figure he must be her brother."

  "How do you know his sister?"

  "From school. You know her," said Deavon.

  "I do?" asked Mark.

  "Yeah, she's a year ahead of us, sixth grader, got black hair, 
  kinda' tall.

  "Whose class is she in?"

  "Mr. Deiter's." Mark searched his mind as he waited in the knee 
  deep water. Impatiently Deavon said, "You know who I'm talkin' 
  about. Black haired girl with those big titties that are always 
  bouncing up and down the hall."

  "That's Tricia Stueben's brother?" exclaimed Mark, pointing to 
  the road with one of the mussels.

  "Yeah. That was Boobin' Stueben's older brother, Steve," said 
  Deavon.

  "He looks kind of old to have a sister in sixth grade. Is he a 
  senior?"

  "No. He's out. Just works on his truck and drives around 
  bothering people," said Deavon. In the distance, the engine 
  rumbled and became louder as it approached. The two boys looked 
  at each other and faced the road. Rumbling down, right on top of 
  them, the truck appeared from around a turn. A long haired, 
  bearded man in the passenger side leaned out of the window and 
  shouted, "Fuckin' nigger!! Go back to Whittsett where you 
  fuckin' belong!"

  Mark threw one of the mussels. It missed the truck and spun 
  across the road.

  Stueben gunned the engine. The truck raced red and gray back 
  through the trees. The planks bounced in tandem. Loudly, Ba 
  Boom!

  Deavon got out of the water and found an old coffee can. He 
  filled it and spilled water on the plate two or three times. The 
  water dried quickly over the hot metal, but cooled it enough so 
  he could walk across. He stepped up onto the plate and sat in a 
  puddle where the water had collected near the edge. The metal 
  banged against the stone.

  The boys fished silently for the rest of the day. Using the 
  other mussel as bait, Deavon caught two or three bluegill and a 
  very small perch. Mark caught another sunfish, but lost a 
  catfish caught with one of Deavon's nightcrawlers. In the warm 
  water, their fish lay curled and stiff. Only the tiny perch, the 
  most recent catch, lived on the stringer. Snapping violently, it 
  made a gentle splash.

  Mark leaned back on his elbows and looked up. Deavon sat stiff 
  armed; tilted back on his hands. His legs hung flaccidly over 
  the edge of the plate. He's still looking out, ahead; thought 
  Mark.

  "So Deavon, you wanna get out of here?" he said through a loud 
  yawn.

  "Yeah. Let's go home." he said and silently stretched.

  They brought in their lines and gathered up their gear. Mark 
  surveyed the ground for any hooks and bobbins that might have 
  fallen from his vest; then, he put it on. Its rough canvas stung 
  his sunburned shoulders.

  Deavon wrapped his line around the base of the bamboo pole and 
  put the red and white bobbin in his pocket. The large ball 
  bulged tightly against the denim. Looks like old man Sweeney's 
  goiter, thought Mark. He jumped off the plate onto the cracked 
  clay bank and walked over to Mark.

  "How are you gunna take your fish home?" asked Mark, holding the 
  stringer.

  "With this." Deavon reached in his pocket and pulled out a 
  length of blue nylon cord.

  "I'll run this through their mouth, out their gills, and carry 
  em' like this." Holding the ends of the rope, he showed Mark how 
  they would hang.

  "That'll work; but you're not gunna keep that perch, are you?" 
  asked Mark.

  "Hell yeah, I'm gunna keep it."

  "Deavon, you can't be serious. It isn't more than three inches 
  long," exclaimed Mark.

  "So."

  "So, how are you gunna eat it? You'll cut most of it away when 
  you clean it."

  "No I won't. I'll give it to my grandmother. She grinds them up 
  and makes fried fish cakes."

  "All of it? Won't she cut off the head and the tail?"

  "I don't know. All I know is she tells me to bring home all the 
  fish I catch and them cakes is gooood," Deavon said smiling.

  Up on the road, like cut-outs of half-moons made in grade 
  school, one black, one white, they moved in a common sky. One 
  passed behind the other, grabbed at the sagging limbs of a 
  choke-cherry tree; the other crossed over and tormented a garden 
  spider webbed in a barbed wire fence. At the plank bridge by the 
  swamp Deavon turned to Mark and asked, "So, what are you gunna 
  do about tomorrow?"

  "Go down to Whittsett," answered Mark.

  "Are you gunna ride your bike?"

  "No. I'll walk down in the morning."

  As they crossed the bridge, the planks wobbled under their feet. 
  Softly, Ba Boom.


  John Reoli, Jr. (jr48+@andrew.cmu.edu)
----------------------------------------

  John Reoli, Jr. is a senior English major at Carnegie Mellon 
  University.


  To Comprehend the Nectar  by Louie Crew
=========================================

  One.
------

  I did not expect Robert Martin to die. I fled The Witherspoon 
  School soon thereafter. That's not the gamble I thought I took 
  when it began.

  Dr. Geoffrey Smitherman sat straight in a chair embossed "W & 
  N". I sank in leather. The cotton of my new suit brushed a panel 
  of the empire secretary which separated us. I had to tilt my 
  head slightly to look him in the eye. We did not yet have 
  air-conditioning. Early August. Not even a breeze.

  "Mr. Smith, can you also teach Senior Bible?" he asked.

  "Well, sir, I suppose I could, but I would prefer to teach only 
  literature. I have finished my thesis on Shakes..."

  "We will give you plenty of that, but we need someone to take 
  the Bible class. Mr. Foxworthy retired in May. I see that you 
  double- minored in religion and New Testament Greek at Evangel 
  University. Foxworthy lacked rapport. He talked about 
  missionaries and heathens. Quite candidly, our boys take the 
  course mainly to impress the colleges. Bible on their transcript 
  distinguishes us as a 'private' school. It also alerts 
  admissions people that our graduates understand allusions."

  "I could do it. It won't be a crip course though. I'll teach it 
  as literature, not as Sunday School fare."

  "Fine, Lee. I think you'll get along nicely here, especially 
  since you attended The O'Gorman School."

  "But O'Gorman is Witherspoon's biggest rival."

  "You know a fine Southern boarding school first-hand. New 
  faculty who went to public school often don't understand us. Our 
  reverence. Not the fanatic kind, but you know what I mean. I 
  believe Dr. O'Gorman wrote me that you won the Bonner Award 'For 
  Unselfish Service' at O'Gorman. Did you not?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good, can you attend faculty orientation the last week of 
  August?"

  "You mean I get the job?!"

  "The boys won't arrive until Tuesday after Labor Day, except for 
  the football team."

  My new trousers peeled from the chair as I tried to rise.

  "Thank you, sir. I am much obliged."

  "But you haven't asked what salary we will give you," he smiled.

  "Oh." I blushed. "That's not important. I'm sure you will treat 
  me justly. It's the teaching that interests me, not the money."

  "Excellent attitude!" he said. "Welcome to the Witherspoon 
  family."

  Two.
------

  Later I learned how much Dr. Geoffrey Smitherman valued the word 
  family. Because I had not pushed, he began me at the rate he 
  gave to those without a master's.

  But I had not exactly leveled with Dr. Smitherman either. I 
  doubted that he would hire me if he knew that I no longer 
  believed in God, or knew that at least I thought I didn't. Four 
  years at Evangel, the world's largest bigotry institution, 
  unconvinced me. I dropped my intention to preach and took up 
  literature as a better venue for "a living sacrifice."

  O'Gorman, had delivered me from a bad public school into a 
  community of others who enjoyed homework. But teaching as a 
  graduate student at a large state university taught me that too 
  few others value their brains. I had found such people at 
  O'Gorman; I might find others at Witherspoon.

  I tease fiercely, and teach best by what I call "creative 
  intimidation." Boys liked my classes. Since I began school 
  early, at age 5, I was only four years older than some of them. 
  Many got close, especially the brighter ones.

  But my best student, Robert Martin, rarely said a word, except 
  in class, where he shined. At O'Gorman, I had groveled too 
  often.

  Robert's football teammates teased him about his early lead in 
  my class, and would importune me to tell how soon I would post 
  the grades for the latest Bible test. Robert himself never 
  asked. Was it arrogance? Robert seemed to presume that he would 
  best his closest rival, Edgar Bell; and on every test he did, by 
  at least three points.

  Robert was prefect to second-formers in the Field House, but he 
  came to see his classmates on Senior Hall often and could have 
  dropped by with them to my apartment, had he chosen to. His 
  friend Philip Smethurst, heir to a textile fortune, visited 
  often enough, and even brought others, especially when I bought 
  one of the first stereo sets. Sometimes second-formers, not even 
  in my classes, came with him. But Robert never once did. Even at 
  the refectory, he seemed not to notice. He didn't avoid me, just 
  didn't notice and passed right by the faculty tables without a 
  nod.

  The perpetual shadow of his black beard made Robert seem older 
  than the others, but not sensual. Even now, over twenty-five 
  years later, and on much maturer terms with myself, I cannot 
  imagine myself in darkness peeking out blinds to look at him, as 
  night after night I waited to see either of his classmates, the 
  two prefects in the next building, shirtless, scratch balls.

  Robert triggered fantasies less sensual. They had something to 
  do with power, not his modest skills as a tackle, but his 
  ability to stay with a commitment until he won.

  At O'Gorman, I had escaped playing sports by becoming the 
  athletic trainer. At games I was a glorified water boy, but 
  after hours, with tongue depressors I swabbed many a hero's jock 
  itch with slabs of what looked like peanut butter and smelled 
  like axle grease. I aimed deep heat at others' sore buns; ground 
  analgesics into others' shoulders.

  Four years of bowl fanaticism at "Bigotry U." made me an 
  apostate to sports religion. I worried that The Witherspoon 
  School might revive that. Since new teachers often have to coach 
  j-v teams, I made a point during orientation to visit the 
  varsity workouts, hoping to influence my luck.

  It paid off. At a break in football practice, I asked a coach, 
  "What inning is it?" I got to advise the staff of the student 
  newspaper.

  But Rubbings no longer threatened me. By then I had learned to 
  live with my secrets, to channel most energy into books and 
  music as easily as tackles thrust it into another's gut. 
  Besides, The Sound and the Fury and enough other works I admired 
  had committed me to suicide before I would ever act on the 
  passions that surged in the dark as I peeked out the blinds.

  Instead, I feared the way that sports sucked me into their 
  definition of courage as essentially physical, an endurance of 
  pain and risk according to clear rules. That's why I never liked 
  Hemingway. But so pervasive is the point of view, I knew I could 
  easily fall back into thinking that only good athletes can win 
  courage, like a team trophy at the annual steak banquet. In that 
  world, waterboys like me live, if at all, off-sides, 
  out-of-bounds.

  I preferred to read "A Certain Slant of Light" and blast 
  Mahler's Ninth down Senior Hall.

  Three.
--------

  Robert Martin appeared to respect my terms. He never volunteered 
  to give a talk at chapel, though faculty often recommended such 
  speakers for the Ivy League. He never joined the glee club to 
  sip sherry in the director's bachelor apartment and sit in the 
  bachelor's chair monogrammed "V." Robert kept to himself his 
  athleticism and any other religion he might have had; studied 
  rigorously; and never made less than a 96 on any of my tests. He 
  worked less hard for other teachers.

  The more I learned about The Witherspoon School, the more I 
  admired Robert Martin. Witherspoon's trustees had given Geoffrey 
  Smitherman his "Dr." easily, since they also served as trustees 
  of a nearby Baptist women's college. Dr. Smitherman's 
  "publications" turned out to be several editions of a workbook 
  on sentence-diagramming, taught in no other school and only in 
  our own Form One. At his autumn tea, I examined a dozen of the 
  impressive leather classics in Dr. Smitherman's living room and 
  found not one with the pages cut.

  Claiborne was easier to like, if not respect. Dr. Smitherman 
  held the title "President," but Mr. Claiborne, as "Headmaster" 
  actually ran The Witherspoon School. Claiborne did not even try 
  to mask his pretensions.

  "What did you buy that buggy for, Smith? Do you drive it with a 
  rubber band?" he teased me publicly when he first spotted my new 
  Falcon, parked so all could see it, by the new Demster Dumpster.

  I had gone $2,100 into hock to buy it -- $2,800 after interest 
  -- and I earned only $3,600 for the 9 months, plus my room and 
  board.

  "Seriously, Lee," he added when he invited me to join him and 
  Mrs. Claiborne at their table in the refectory, "you will never 
  know that you have arrived until you sit behind the wheel of a 
  big car, smoking a cigar, knowing that it belongs to you."

  I added Babbitt to the reading list for Senior Bible. Students 
  could earn up to 10 extra points for their annual grade (at half 
  a point per book) for each work that they tested well on, in an 
  oral examination.

  "God makes 100. I make 99. The highest you can make, 98," I 
  explained.

  Robert put all 10 of his points into storage by the end of the 
  first semester, though he never needed them.

  Amazingly, no boy ever let out that I had put Dr. King's Strides 
  Toward Freedom on the list; some even read it, and those who did 
  not, still seemed pleased to have a teacher that had heard of 
  the outside world.

  On Saturdays when anyone went to town, he had to pass a 
  Hospitality Tent which the KKK had set up in a mill village. 
  Management had closed the mill and moved the work to Hong Kong 
  and Taiwan when local labor organized. News about sit-ins in the 
  Carolinas gave the white unemployed something different to get 
  worked up about.

  Dr. Smitherman addressed the new unrest the same way that he had 
  addressed the "Race Problem" every year for over thirty years. 
  He talked at chapel about "Old Joe," the barber to boys when a 
  young "Mr." Smitherman first came to The Witherspoon School.

  "Joe is one of the finest human beings I ever met." Dr. 
  Smitherman modulated a slight tremolo. "Mayors and governors 
  would do well to imitate his honesty and his good humor. He 
  loves Witherspoon boys. He helps us turn them into Witherspoon 
  men. You should respect good Negroes. Don't stir up a fuss like 
  unfortunate rednecks. If you treat the Negro kindly, the Negro 
  will serve you well.

  "Of course Old Joe would be the first to say that God does not 
  intend for the races to mix socially. Right, Joe?"

  Venerable Joe Thompson, now in his eighties, hauled out of 
  retirement for this paid annual production, smiled generously 
  and said, "Yes, sir. You are a good man, Dr. Smitherman!" He 
  would smile to the audience and say, "Dr. Smitherman is a good 
  man, boys, a good, good man."

  "Boys," Dr. Smitherman would close, "Joe confirms what you learn 
  when you study 'Mending Wall,' the great poem by Robert Frost: 
  'Good fences make good neighbors.' "


  Four.
-------

  "He can't go behind his father's saying? What's 'behind' it?" I 
  would ask my fifth-formers in the next period, given Dr. 
  Smitherman's own prompt to teach the poem.

  As far as I know, they never reported to Dr. Smitherman how I 
  used Frost's own words to mince his interpretation. Claiborne 
  probably would have enjoyed it if he could have understood it. I 
  felt that he didn't like Dr. Smitherman and impatiently waited 
  for Dr. Smitherman to retire so that he could replace him in the 
  President's Mansion. Perhaps I misjudged him.

  I learned later that few boys or faculty approached Claiborne 
  for anything, except to listen. Isolated in my books and music, 
  I did not notice their reticence and had to learn the collective 
  wisdom on my own.

  I had no discipline problems in class. Students respected my 
  work ethic. If a boy ever did sass, I would squelch him with 
  invincible sarcasm: "John, you are very perceptive and therefore 
  will understand how important it is that you meet me here for 
  two hours after class to analyze your perception."

  But in the dark, after lights-out, I could not defend myself 
  with words. As the newest faculty member of three on Senior 
  Hall, I had a hard time when the boys tested me.

  They usually started off playful enough. Birdcalls. Frog croaks. 
  But I too soon took bait and shouted, "Who made that noise!?" or 
  guessed wildly, "Poindexter, the next time you do that you'll 
  sit in study hall for a week!"

  This licensed the circus as clearly as if I had walked to the 
  center ring. By three o'clock in the morning I might have nabbed 
  three culprits, but the hall would remain littered with water 
  bombs and other trash. Everyone, highly entertained, would wait 
  for my next turn on duty.

  Next I decided to ignore them, not to take even the first bait. 
  Let the menagerie built to whatever crescendo their ears could 
  bear, I would wait fortressed in my room. They gave up after 
  about an hour, but resented me. My ploy might have worked if I 
  used it when they first played, but now I was a spoil-sport. 
  They turned mean, to jew- baiting.

  Rabinowitz played right into their trap. The moment someone made 
  the wailing sounds used in the movie version of "The Diary of 
  Anne Frank," Rabinowitz would run out of his room and bang on my 
  door. They loved it better than water bombs.

  I would stand in the dark hall for hours, but no one ever made 
  the noises from a range close enough for me to catch him.

  During Thanksgiving, I searched for evidence. With a master key, 
  I crept through all 45 rooms on the hall. Lawrence's Lady 
  Chatterly and Miller's Tropics had only recently broken the 
  censors' backs, but the porn these rich boys sported would not 
  be marketed publicly for another decade.

  I stared for a long time, especially when I discovered in the 
  drawer of a weightlifter the pictures of men having sex with 
  men. If I had known such pictures existed outside my mind, I 
  might have predicted Poindexter would have a stash. He often 
  jerked off at the late bed-check; sometimes he waved! Yet he 
  hoarded only dirty letters from his girl friend, no pictures at 
  all.

  Partly on instinct, partly because a box of my books had pushed 
  the back out of my own laundry bin, I decided to check the backs 
  of bins in several boys' rooms. I hit the jackpot on my first 
  try. It opened to a casino.

  Yes, as in mine, the back of the laundry bin opened into a low, 
  narrow place under the roof, large enough to squeeze maybe two 
  people. But behind the boys' bin, unlike mine, the narrow space 
  opened into a much larger one that ran the full length of the 
  shower room midway down the hall. In this secret space boys had 
  placed a rug, several cases of whiskey, three slot machines, and 
  enough other paraphernalia to keep up to fifteen gambling at any 
  one time.

  Even though I routinely eavesdropped, I had not expected 
  anything like this. Once I had overheard a prefect on the hall 
  say that the governor's son, a Form Two boy who lived in the 
  Field House, had lost $1,000 in one card game, but I presumed 
  that the prefect exaggerated, or referred to something that had 
  happened during the previous summer.

  Knowing that this evidence could blow the top off Witherspoon's 
  reputation as one of the finest prep schools in the South, I 
  went cautiously to Claiborne's Office. Closed for the holiday. I 
  spotted his Ninety-Eight parked in front of the gym and trekked 
  through the rain to his apartment at the back. Mrs. Claiborne, 
  sensing my urgency, asked about my family, pointed to some 
  fruitcake, and quickly left me alone with her husband.

  Claiborne did not interrupt once during the whole time I told 
  him what I had discovered. I omitted the parts about water bombs 
  and jew- baiting, even the part about my plot to check the boys' 
  rooms. I fibbed a bit; I said that a stranger had telephoned to 
  tell me to look under the eaves.

  Claiborne didn't question me. He didn't take notes. He just 
  listened. For half an hour he listened.

  After I had stopped, Claiborne said, "Now, Lee, have you told 
  anyone else?"

  "No, sir."

  "Don't."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You've done a good job. Now let me take care of it completely. 
  Do you understand?"

  He already stood at the door.

  "Well, yes, sir," I lied.

  "Good."

  He never mentioned it again.


  Five.
-------

  I've told this story out loud at least a dozen times over the 
  past quarter of a century, usually to close friends, but 
  sometimes even to my classes. Since I don't know you, I'm 
  pleased and a little surprised you've gotten this far. I never 
  thought that in print I would risk sounding like Edith Bunker 
  when she loses her main point to give you ten interesting minor 
  ones instead.

  But I never have come to terms myself with the main point. I 
  know the minor ones add up to something big. Maybe you can tell.

  I can easily conclude the part about the jew-baiting. By the 
  time the boys returned from Thanksgiving, for the two weeks of 
  term examinations, they had too much work even to think of 
  late-night play. Then after Christmas, that seemed like another 
  dispensation.

  Until April. Mistakenly I left my copy of Emily Dickinson in my 
  apartment. Only honor students could study in their rooms during 
  the day, and no one expected a teacher about. Philip Smethurst 
  ambled past the showers, his back to me, and as he passed 
  Rabinowitz's room, he let out the moan from "The Diary of Anne 
  Frank." As much to my surprise as his, I pounced on Smethurst 
  before he ever saw me, lifted him off the floor by his jacket, 
  and held him against the wall, my fist pressed into his stomach.

  I don't remember any words. I just raged. I saw him only once 
  after that, when he gave the Valedictory.

  I learned by the grapevine that after the summer break began, 
  The Witherspoon School notified the parents of several of 
  underclassmen that their sons could not return. Claiborne placed 
  in The O'Gorman School the one senior who flunked, and the 
  governor's son.

  Viewed from a quarter of a century, Claiborne's seems a much 
  cleverer way to handle the gambling than to panic as I had done 
  with the water bombs, even though I still do not respect him.

  When Claiborne succeeded Dr. Smitherman, he too metamorphosed 
  into "Dr." and built a garage beside the President's Mansion for 
  his new Lincoln. I heard he inherited even the leather, uncut 
  books.

  I understand that it took a few more complete turnovers to rid 
  the place of all hints of scandal when marijuana hit in the 
  early seventies; but The Witherspoon School survives, its good 
  reputation intact. It has initiated even a few black students 
  into reverence, not just football.

  "Old Joe" Thompson and Dr. Geoffrey Smitherman eventually died, 
  confirming my theologian friend's emendation, "So long as 
  there's death, there's hope."

  When I fled, I taught first at an Episcopal school outside the 
  South. From there to London to teach poorer boys, in the slums. 
  From there to my Ph.D. and teaching adults in college.

  Each year at its Commencement, The Witherspoon School bestows 
  several coveted awards, including the Bible Prize, given in 
  perpetuity by the family of an early alumnus who died of a cold 
  his first month as a missionary to Nigeria, to "that boy who in 
  the view of the Senior Bible Teacher best demonstrates a 
  rigorous understanding of Holy Scripture." I surprised no one 
  when I posted the grades for the final examination outside the 
  classroom: everyone had guessed that Robert Martin would win it.

  Then Claiborne called me to the President's tiny office for my 
  second and final visit. Dr. Smitherman sat high in the "W & N" 
  chair. Claiborne leaned against the wall, stoking a cigar. I 
  sank in leather.

  "Mr. Smith, you have taught well for your first year," Dr. 
  Smitherman said.

  "Thank you. Next year I expect to revise..."

  "We hope that you will cooperate with us so that you can teach 
  here next year," Dr. Smitherman said.

  "Cooperate?"

  "It's about the Bible Prize, Lee," Claiborne blurted, ever 
  impatient with Dr. Smitherman's delicacy.

  "That's easy," I said. "Everyone knows that Robert Martin has 
  won it. He has led all year, and I posted his final grade, a 99, 
  which normally I reserve...."

  "Not easy," Dr. Smitherman said, softly.

  "Sir?"

  "We cannot tell you any details. You must trust us. But Robert 
  Martin has done something we prefer not to mention, ever. He 
  cannot win the Bible Prize or any other."

  "But he already has. I have posted the grades...."

  "Lee," Mr. Claiborne said as paternally as when he advised me 
  what kind of automobile to aspire to, "no one has ever said that 
  the Bible Prize has to go to the boy with the highest score. You 
  may freely consider other factors, like character. I believe 
  that Edgar Bell scored second highest. He plans to preach. 
  Robert Martin will study business at Shackville State."

  "Mr. Smith, you have taught a good course. We hope that you will 
  cooperate." Dr. Smitherman urged, not looking me in the eye.


  Six.
------

  Every other time that I have told this story, I have used it as 
  a model for endurance not orchestrated, for risk without clear 
  rules.

  I have explained to all earlier audiences, as I told you at the 
  beginning, that I left The Witherspoon School soon thereafter. 
  Everyone charitably assumes that I walked away from Witherspoon 
  with this courage of a different kind.

  But I didn't. Actually I stayed on for two more short years. 
  Edgar Bell won the prize and went to Evangel. Robert Martin 
  never got to Shackville. He drowned in a sailing accident two 
  months later.

  I remember driving my black Falcon to the muddy lot behind the 
  Field House. Boys and their families sloshed everywhere. I saw 
  him several cars away, loading his gear.

  My face said: "They pressured me; they made me; I'm sorry."

  Robert seemed to see. I can't be sure. He waved from the gate of 
  his family's station wagon, shrugged his shoulders, and winked.


  Louie Crew (lcrew@adromeda.rutgers.edu)
-----------------------------------------

  Louie Crew is an associate professor in the Academic Foundations 
  Department of Rutgers University. He is the author of 
  Lutibelle's Pew (Dragon Disks, 1990), Sunspots (Lotus Press, 
  1976), Midnight Lessons (Samisdat, 1987) and more than 865 other 
  publications. His work appears in several recent anthologies, 
  including Gay Nineties: Contemporary Gay Fiction (Crossing 
  Press, 1991) and New Men, New Minds: Free Parking (The Spirit 
  That Moves Us, 1990).


  Multiplication and the Devil  by Daniel K. Appelquist
=======================================================

  The rain poured steadily down on top of the one-room 
  schoolhouse. To David, it sounded like the world was crashing 
  down around him, and the normal routine of morning 
  multiplication tables proved to be little comfort. David was 
  smallish for his age, with sandy hair that didn't quite cover 
  his gray eyes, eyes that were now closed tightly shut.

  "David?"

  The eyes sprang suddenly open in an expression that was a 
  mixture of fear and surprise. "Yes, Mrs. Wadlemire?" The words 
  came almost unconsciously, as his head swiveled to survey his 
  surroundings. He saw only faces, turned towards him in 
  amusement. There were only fifteen other children in the morning 
  session, but to David it seemed like the entire population of 
  some child-inhabited planet was staring him down, taunting him, 
  making fun of his stupidity, his ignorance.

  "I asked you: Would you care to recite the second row from the 
  table?" She pointed a stiff, bony finger to the chart which hung 
  on the wall. Conical hat and flowing black robes only 
  materialized afterward in a brief flash.

  "Uh..." Hat and robes were suddenly gone, as were the millions 
  upon millions of rapt watchers. All was replaced with the 
  suddenly confining space of the small classroom, rain still 
  descending in a cacophony above his head. Mrs. Wadlemire, now 
  clothed in her traditional blue dress, stared at him 
  expectantly.

  "Two times one is two," he began.

  One by one, his classmates started to look back towards the 
  front of the room.

  "Two times two is four," he continued in his well-practiced 
  monotone. The beating of the rain on the roof seemed to 
  intensify. Mrs. Wadlemire may have said something. Something to 
  do with fish, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was droned out by the 
  incessant downpour.

  "Two times three is six." At this point, the lights went out, 
  shrouding the room in a sort of gray darkness, the color of 
  rainy skies. Through the skylight, David could see a dark shape 
  moving above. David squinted to see what it might be through the 
  continually renewed layer of water, but its form remained 
  indefinable.

  "Two times four is eight." A face! For an instant, he could 
  definitely make out a face, staring down at him from the 
  otherwise featureless gray rectangle of the skylight. The face 
  was full of strange, mixed-up features, and yet had been 
  strangely familiar to him, as if it was one he was supposed to 
  recognize.

  "Two times five is ten." He looked around to see if anyone else 
  had seen it, but the other children were all gone, replaced with 
  cardboard cutouts, decorated with crayons. Only Mrs. Wadlemire 
  seemed untouched by this strange transformation, as if whoever 
  had affected it had let her be, out of disgust. Her face, now 
  framed in harsh shadows, seemed like an amalgamation of the 
  worst traits of mankind. In it he could see hatred, cruelty, as 
  well as a host of other, equally undesirable traits.

  "Two times six is twelve," still he recited on, as if any 
  deviation from the norm might alert them to his presence; the 
  monsters that stole children and replaced them with cutouts. A 
  chill started to work its way up his spine. He could feel the 
  presence of something behind him. A dank, musty odor assaulted 
  his nose, almost eliciting a sneeze. He did not turn, for he 
  knew that to do so would mean certain death. The whatever-it-was 
  that he had seen on the roof had definitely made its way down 
  here, somehow switching the other children in the class while he 
  wasn't looking.

  "Two times seven is..." he faltered. The answer was on the tip 
  of his tongue. He had recited the same phrase over fifty times, 
  but today it stuck in his throat like chunky peanut butter. He 
  felt the presence behind him closing, closing on its target like 
  some great snake, now ready for the kill. If only he could 
  remember!

  "David..." The voice of Mrs. Wadlemire cut through his 
  concentration. Why didn't she do something? Was she blind? 
  Didn't she realize that her class now consisted of a host of 
  badly drawn replicas, one child and an unmentionable beast? 
  Perhaps she had been in on it from the beginning!

  "Fourteen," the momentary distraction of these thoughts was 
  enough to dislodge the word from his throat and cough it up. In 
  the presence of the word, the creature behind him seemed to 
  shrink back, as if it couldn't bear to hear it. Mrs. Wadlemire, 
  now blindfolded, holding a calculator in one hand and a 
  chalkboard eraser in the other, smiled a faint smile and shifted 
  inside the folds of her white robe.

  "Two times eight is sixteen," he went on, causing the thing to 
  shrink back even further (had it emitted a gasp of terror, just 
  then?) One by one, the cardboard children were replaced with 
  their flesh-and- blood equivalents.

  "Two times nine is eighteen." He definitely heard a stifled cry 
  from the creature (he dared not look back yet, lest he be turned 
  into cardboard and become unable to recite the last verse of the 
  deadly spell). Under the fluorescent lights, even Mrs. Wadlemire 
  seemed to radiate a goodness, a quality which David found to be 
  quite at odds with her Nazi armband and smart officer's cap.

  "Two times ten is twenty."

  With this last incantation, the beast shrieked in agony. In its 
  death-throes, it managed to overturn a table, and set a globe 
  careening down the aisle towards the blackboard with its immense 
  claws, now waving randomly in the air. When David finally looked 
  back at it, it had almost shrunk out of site, seeking to hide, 
  in its disgrace, behind the plastic jack o'lantern.

  David sat back down behind his desk, his job completed, the 
  monster vanquished. Even Mrs. Wadlemire, now clothed in her 
  traditional blue dress, would have to thank him. He had, after 
  all, saved her class from a fate most probably worse than death. 
  But she only looked at him, with her not-disgusted expression 
  and said, "Very good, David."

  Hmm. Some thanks that was.


  A Handful of Dust  by Daniel K. Appelquist
============================================

  Rembrandt looked out of his tenth floor window and crooned 
  softly to the parrot perched on his wrist. The city lay outside, 
  a strange mix of traditional, postmodern and futurist styles, 
  now bathed in the light of the noonday suns, but Rembrandt's 
  thoughts were elsewhere. His thoughts, specifically, were of 
  Picasso. It had been ten days now since Picasso had ventured out 
  into that cityscape and they had heard nothing. Not a peep.

  Monet looked up from the table and spoke. "Anything?"

  It took a few seconds for Rembrandt to respond, but his answer 
  was quick enough not to provoke a second asking. "No. Just the 
  same." He turned, and the parrot left his arm, flying off 
  towards some unknown perch. "Do you really care?"

  Monet sat back in his sparkling chair and gave Rembrandt an icy 
  stare, but remained silent.

  "What if he never comes back?" Rembrandt continued.

  "He will."

  "But what if he doesn't. You certainly wouldn't shed a tear."

  Monet rolled his eyes. "Picasso and I have had our differences, 
  but that's no reason for me to want him out of the picture."

  Rembrandt sat down, and as he did so, a chair came into 
  existence under him. His eyes were still locked on Monet's. 
  Increasingly of late, he was beginning to believe that Monet was 
  a bit off-color. At first, he had seemed simply withdrawn, but 
  his arrogant attitude now betrayed something Rembrandt detested, 
  something that was only now becoming apparent. "If he doesn't 
  come back, what are you going to do?"

  Monet's collar, normally green, suddenly glowed bright red, 
  betraying his emotions to Rembrandt even if he would not openly 
  display them. "I will remain here. I'm perfectly content to stay 
  here."

  "You're not curious about what lies outside the door?"

  "I've seen it. You've seen it. You were just looking at it!"

  "And that doesn't interest you?"

  "Frankly, no."

  Rembrandt looked away, disgusted. After a second or two, he 
  looked back, his eyes gleaming with purpose. "Well it interests 
  me. If Picasso doesn't come back by tomorrow, I'm going out 
  after him."

  "Very well."

  "I'm tired of being cooped up in here like some sort of animal," 
  Rembrandt continued, ignoring the other's response, still 
  feeling the need to justify his decision.

  "Fine."

  "Has it occurred to you that that's all we are: Animals, 
  performing for someone else's pleasure?"

  Monet's tone grew brusque. "As a matter of fact, it has. I've 
  spent a great deal of time thinking about who we are and how we 
  got in this unlikely situation and, as I told Picasso, my 
  conclusion is that it is best not to think about it." With this 
  he looked back at Rembrandt, challenging him for some sort of 
  rebuttal. Rembrandt snorted defiantly, got up, and left.

  The sparkling remains of the chair slowly disintegrated as Monet 
  looked back towards the table and his book.

  A person reading a story might expect certain elements. For one, 
  they might expect a setting which they could relate to. 
  Certainly they would not want to be thrust into a cold, surreal 
  universe where the characters are named after famous painters 
  and chairs appear and disappear, seemingly at will. Any reader 
  expecting this sort of textual trickery would be brutally 
  disappointed by most modern fiction. In fact, it was just such 
  disappointment which caused Monet to look away from his book 
  after a short while and seek some other form of entertainment. 
  He stood and walked slowly over to the window. As he turned his 
  back, table, chair and book melted into nothingness.

  The window presented him with the same shifting scene. Much of 
  the cityscape lay below him now but a few of the buildings 
  jutted up towards the sky. Many of the buildings lumbered along 
  at a slow to moderate pace, some stopping momentarily in their 
  journey to allow others to pass. As he watched, a massive stone 
  cathedral slowly ground to a halt to make way for a squat, round 
  building which looked like it might also serve some religious 
  purpose. There were never any people to be seen in the city.

  Monet leaned out towards the window and looked down. Below, the 
  river was reasonably quiet. On some days, massive amounts of 
  debris could be seen floating down it. Today, it merely streamed 
  past, brown and silty, making oval patches of bubbly froth 
  around the streetlights. For the first time, Monet thought it 
  bizarre that there should be streetlights on a river, but this 
  thought was dismissed from his mind by a sharp noise.

  "Let me in!"

  It was Picasso. It was definitely the muffled voice of Picasso.

  Rembrandt sat up in bed, his eyes springing open.

  "Let me in!"

  There was no mistaking the voice. He sprang up and walked to the 
  edge of the room, the wall parting as he passed through it. A 
  story which switches back and forth between two or more 
  characters' points of view can be very confusing indeed. The 
  Parrot, being deaf, heard nothing.

  The main door was the only object in the building which actually 
  required some effort to affect. When Rembrandt arrived, Monet 
  was already there, eying the circular stone carefully.

  "Why haven't you started?" Rembrandt asked accusingly.

  "You know very well that I couldn't even make a start by myself. 
  It takes two."

  Rembrandt knew this, but he needed some excuse to abuse Monet 
  nonetheless. He hated himself for this need but he made no 
  outward apologies. He moved towards the massive stone that 
  covered the main entry way and began to push. "Come on!"

  Monet followed suit, muttering something under his breath. Soon 
  the slab of stone was rolling under their combined pressure. A 
  small crack of the doorway was uncovered. This crack slowly grew 
  in size until a small man stepped through, a canvas bag slung 
  over one shoulder. Outside, they could see his makeshift canoe 
  tethered to the railing of the stair. None talked until the 
  stone was set securely back into place. When the task was 
  accomplished, Monet and Rembrandt looked their colleague over in 
  frank interest.

  "Well, don't you have any questions?" Picasso's zealous voice 
  broke the silence.

  "You're quite a sight," Monet commented with more than a hint of 
  cynicism in his voice.

  "You two are quite a sight yourselves! A sight for sore eyes."

  "Didn't you find anyone else?" Rembrandt asked cautiously.

  "No one."

  "No one?"

  "Not a soul."

  Rembrandt paled. "Then we are truly alone."

  Picasso walked over to him, trailing mud and silt from his feet. 
  "Don't lose hope yet! I didn't cover even a fraction of the 
  city. The city is even more immense than it looks from the 
  window. It will take years to explore it all," but as soon as 
  the words escaped Picasso's lips he knew that they had been a 
  mistake. Rembrandt was like a small child. His urge for instant 
  gratification overpowered his reason and his logic. The thought 
  that exploring the city might take years or even weeks filled 
  him only with grief.

  "That long?" he sighed and hung his head.

  "But now we are armed with a weapon." Picasso reached into his 
  back and pulled forth a paper scroll. Spreading it out on the 
  floor of the entryway, he declared "this, as far as I can tell, 
  is a map. A map of the city."

  Monet scoffed. "But that's plainly ridiculous, Picasso. As we 
  have observed, the city is a moving landscape, it never remains 
  constant. How can one make a map of such a place?"

  Picasso waved his hands in the air as Monet spoke, obviously 
  quite excited. "That's what I first thought, but I found this 
  map infinitely more useful than I first expected it to be."

  "Do you mean that it changes with the city?" Rembrandt queried, 
  wide eyes turning to stare at the unfurled scroll.

  "I've never actually seen it change, but it always seems to show 
  basically the correct configuration. While travelling back from 
  here," he indicated a position on the map "I made it a point to 
  stare at the map continuously for a good while. I never caught 
  it changing, but somehow, the positions of the buildings, even 
  though they were moving, were always correct."

  Rembrandt looked to Picasso in wonder and then stared back at 
  the map. Monet simply started on the long trek up the winding 
  stairs to their tenth floor apartment. Picasso rolled up the 
  map, much to the dismay of Rembrandt, and also started up.


  # # #
-------

  "So what are we to do?"

  "It's clear that if more than one of us leaves this place, they 
  won't be able to get back in. There's no way to move the door 
  from the outside."

  Rembrandt rolled his eyes at what he considered to be Monet's 
  defeatist attitude. "But there's every possibility that we can 
  find just as good if not better accommodations elsewhere within 
  the city."

  "There's no proof of that."

  Picasso, who had remained largely silent throughout the 
  conversation, saw fit to interrupt now. "I didn't find a way 
  into any of the buildings, you know. I did tell you that, didn't 
  I?"

  "There's no other way."

  "There is."

  "No."

  "I will stay," Monet stated in an infuriatingly final manner.

  "If we go, you have to go with us!" Rembrandt was furious. His 
  collar was bright green, and even seemed to grow brighter with 
  each pulse of aggression. Involuntarily, he reached out into the 
  air and a glass of ice-water appeared in his hand. He downed the 
  water and his collar began to grow dimmer.

  Picasso detested the way the other two always fought, but 
  somehow he felt connected to both of them, if only by the fact 
  that they had lived together for so long (how long, he could not 
  remember, but he knew, or sensed that it had been a great deal 
  of time.) He tentatively spoke out. "It may help if we arm 
  ourselves with a goal." He unfurled the map, and Rembrandt could 
  see that already there were some changes from when he had looked 
  on it last. The forms on the map remained static, though. 
  Picasso spread the map out on a table which came into existence 
  underneath it and indicated a position with an index finger. "We 
  are here." Rembrandt could see their building, marked by a red 
  #.

  "If we travel down the river this way," Picasso continued, 
  tracing a line with his finger, following the blue streak of the 
  river, until he reached a white +. Next to the + were the words 
  'the edge.' "This can be our goal."

  "The edge of what?" Monet spoke up.

  "I don't know. On my journey, I travelled this way." He 
  indicated the opposite direction from the +. "It was here I 
  found the map." He indicated a V sitting on the side of the 
  river. "It was lying on what looked like an altar, outside a 
  huge stone cathedral.

  "I think I've seen that building," Rembrandt piped up.

  "This," he again indicated the +, "is the only representation on 
  the map to be labeled. That must hold some significance."

  "But we have no idea what," Monet cut in. "Your addition of the 
  'goal' to our journey is as meaningless as the journey would 
  have been in the first place!"

  "Nonsense!" Rembrandt almost shouted. "Don't you see what this 
  means? 'The Edge' obviously indicates an escape route -- a 
  passage to somewhere else."

  "But it occurs nowhere near the physical edge of the city," 
  Monet argued, gesturing violently towards the map.

  Rembrandt's collar began to grow brighter again. "The city 
  moves! Picasso has confirmed this."

  Monet nearly pounced on Rembrandt. "You're just worried you 
  won't find anything and then you won't be able to come back. If 
  you go, it's final. You can't stand the thought of being trapped 
  out there with me in here. Look at yourself!"

  Rembrandt sighed as if the tension and energy of the day and of 
  the moment were released in that one moment. As his collar 
  cooled back to its normal azure shade, he plunked down into a 
  form-fitting couch which had not existed a moment before and 
  looked away, toward the now- darkened window. "Perhaps you're 
  right."

  Monet simply looked pleased with himself.

  "But did it occur to you that you too would be trapped within 
  this apartment?" Rembrandt started again, this time more with a 
  pleading tone than with anger.

  "He's got a point. I intend to go back out and to not return. 
  Rembrandt certainly intends to do the same."

  "Picasso, I always figured you for such a level-headed fellow," 
  Monet replied, more to himself than to any other speaker.

  "That I am, Monet."


  + + +
-------

  They left two mornings after.

  The huge portal rolled back into its frame with a chilling 
  finality. When it was done, and the three were left outside of 
  the door, looking back at their former abode, there was only 
  silence. Rembrandt felt a shudder down his spine and felt for a 
  second that he had left something very important in the house, 
  but he knew that there was nothing. The parrot could not be 
  coaxed out and that had disturbed him greatly, but other than 
  that he was content to start his new life. After the decision, 
  Monet's attitude had changed from sullen apathy to sullen 
  acceptance. He kept up with the others as they walked down 
  towards the rushing river, but his expression was colored with 
  jaded overtones.

  Picasso led the others down to the dock and pulled his makeshift 
  canoe by the tether he had so carefully fashioned. He, too was 
  scared, although he felt compelled to exude an air of detached 
  superiority. He was, after all, supposed to be the experienced 
  one. It had been his idea to brave the exterior city. But now he 
  was committed. He knew that he had let himself be prodded into 
  it by Rembrandt's urgings, but now there was no going back. One 
  leg at a time, he stepped into the canoe, and looked back at the 
  other two expectantly.

  After much fumbling, they were clear of the dock and paddling 
  swiftly down the river: Picasso steering with one oar, Monet 
  providing the grim motive power with the other and Rembrandt 
  sitting in the prow looking forward. As the city sped past them 
  on all sides, Rembrandt began to sing softly to himself.

  Looking back on the building they had come from, they now saw 
  how much it towered over this section of the city. It was a 
  giant, standing amongst midgets; a massive stone monolith which 
  tapered at its top to a sharp point. As Rembrandt looked back, 
  he counted up floors until he reached the tenth, in some vain 
  hope of finding a toehold of familiarity, but his effort was 
  fruitless. Every story was the same. They had never been able to 
  enter any of the other apartments.

  The terrain they were now passing through was fairly familiar to 
  Rembrandt already, but it took on a completely different aspect 
  when viewed from the ground. From ten stories up, all had seemed 
  orderly and neat but now the true nature of the city was 
  becoming apparent to him. Many of the buildings were only empty 
  shells where residences and markets may once have existed but 
  were no more. It seemed to Rembrandt that the material used in 
  these shells must have somehow outlived the interiors of the 
  structures. Pieces of what he took to be building material hung 
  tattered from gaping holes. Some of these were so close to the 
  ground that the river had spilled into them. They had become 
  part of the river, and the river had carried away their 
  contents, but the shells remained, indestructible.

  Once in a while, sitting among these rotting shells, there 
  appeared a larger, more grandiose structure. These were 
  typically haggard but seemed like they at least had some life 
  left in them. They varied in shape but all of them seemed like 
  meeting halls of some sort. Some, perhaps were large stores? 
  Some were simply strange. About half a mile from where they 
  started, there loomed across their path a huge sphere with no 
  visible entrance or window.

  "We're going to hit that," Rembrandt stated nervously.

  Picasso did not seemed distressed. "It doesn't look like it now, 
  but there's space underneath it."

  Still, it loomed up in front of them. Rembrandt strained to look 
  for Picasso's opening but he couldn't find it. What if the space 
  underneath had shrunk? What if the huge sphere were slowly 
  sinking into the river, eventually to cut it off and form a dam? 
  "You're sure."

  Monet spoke: "Shut up."

  "Well, I'd prefer not to be crushed to death today, ok?" 
  Rembrandt spat back, but by that time they were close enough 
  that he could see there was indeed a space underneath the huge 
  structure. Still, he was nervous until they had reached open 
  air. When they emerged from underneath, an entirely new scene 
  awaited them.

  For a moment, they all sat, mesmerized. There had been no 
  warning, no sign that such a violent change would take place. In 
  contrast to the drab, decimated landscape behind them, spires 
  made seemingly of cut glass or even diamond towered over the 
  them. Inexplicably, the river which was silty and muddy before 
  had turned crystal-clear. Rembrandt wasn't sure when the 
  transition had taken place but his mind didn't stay on this long 
  for he immediately noticed that the sky had changed color.

  "It's a dome," someone said. Rembrandt was so awe-struck that it 
  took a few seconds for Rembrandt to register that it had been 
  Monet speaking. He could see now that Monet was right. Running 
  across the sky, intersecting in a triangular pattern were white 
  lines which must have been support beams. It was impossible for 
  Rembrandt to judge how far away those beams were.

  Monet looked at Picasso accusingly. "You didn't tell us..."

  "I didn't know," Picasso cut him off sharply, unrolling his map 
  and studying it. "The city constantly moves and changes. From 
  studying the map, I've found that individual buildings move but 
  large sections of the city also can move." He indicated a 
  portion of his map, a circular region marked in the center by a 
  *. "This area must be what we've entered now. The river we're on 
  clearly intersects it now, where it didn't before." At this 
  point the reader might be getting slightly annoyed by the 
  ubiquitous presence of this map. The map is only vaguely 
  described, and seems to pop up only when convenient. Perhaps a 
  full description of the map would help to ground it a bit....

  Picasso put away his map and began to steer again.

  "This wasn't here when you...?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "It's beautiful," Rembrandt said dreamily.

  Monet looked up. "Yes."

  A change in the wind brought with it a strange howling sound 
  which sent a chill through the minds of the three travelers. If 
  there was any doubt now that they would never return then it was 
  the product of insanity, a derangement so grotesque as to be 
  unthinkable. The sound was like a voice and yet was discernibly 
  inhuman. Soon a second tone, higher and shriller than the first, 
  started up as the lower and more sombre one began to die down. 
  Rembrandt stopped rowing and stood transfixed as the tones 
  rolled over him. As the first tone died away completely, he 
  began to regain some composure and turned to stare back at the 
  other two. Their eyes were glazed over, the whole of their 
  brains devoted to their ears. Rembrandt had heard great 
  symphonies during his time in the flat. His ears had been 
  massaged by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart all in turn. No sound could 
  compare in beauty to the simple tones he heard now.

  "It's got to be some atmospheric phenomenon; a by-product of the 
  dome structure, perhaps..." Monet's words cut across Rembrandt's 
  dreamy mood like a hot knife. He looked back at the other to see 
  a face still transfixed. Monet's mind was more analytical, or at 
  least a portion of it was. Looking more closely, Rembrandt could 
  see that his expression was not that of a man overcome by beauty 
  but of a man in the throes of deep thought. Picasso, as always 
  maintained his composure. Even now, Rembrandt could see that the 
  sound was beginning to lose its effect on him. Picasso's eyes 
  fell by the degree until they again rested on the horizon. 
  Rembrandt looked back there as well, as another mesmerizing tone 
  began to dominate their surroundings.


  * * *
-------

  "Look!" The voice was Monet's. Their journey through the domed 
  country had lasted more than a day now. So far, the scenery had 
  been somewhat uniform, but as Picasso followed the line traced 
  by Monet's pointed finger he began to feel that their fortunes 
  were about to change. Just on the edge of the horizon in front 
  of them there stood an island. There, barely visible, there was 
  a huge building, itself the size of a small city, judging from 
  the distance. Picasso tried a quick mental calculation and 
  dismissed his figures as outrageous.

  It took an hour before he could begin to make out the details of 
  the structure, and even then, there seemed no sense to it. It 
  was a huge mass of twisted angles. It was in the rough shape of 
  a mushroom, but with no curves. It was entirely composed of 
  rectangular, triangular and rhomboid slabs, which jutted out 
  unevenly around its mass. Crowning the top was a spire which 
  reached fully twice as high as the building itself, and what 
  appeared to be a cross.

  In three more hours, it was looming up above them like a 
  surrealist's nightmare. Furthermore, what they had taken to be 
  an island had in fact been a peninsula. As they rounded the 
  right hand side of the base, they saw that the river ended 
  there. The rushing water fell into gratings some three miles 
  from where the river had forked.

  Confused by this, Picasso again pulled his map out and began to 
  scrutinize it. "That's odd," he intoned. "If we're where I think 
  we are, roughly in the center of the circular region, here, the 
  map shows the river continuing beyond this point."

  Rembrandt turned to him, just as they were coming up on the end 
  of the river. "Well either your map is wrong, or you're 
  interpreting it wrong. Here, let me have it." He reached past 
  Monet and snatched it out of Picasso's hands, just as their 
  canoe grounded itself in the shadow of the huge structure.

  The instant they hit ground, Rembrandt and map were gone. A 
  shadowy image replaced the space he had inhabited only a moment 
  before, then nothing. Picasso and Monet could only stare. Monet, 
  being within hand's reach of Rembrandt's former volume, reached 
  out cautiously, as if still expecting to find something there. 
  When he did not, he waved his hand around tentatively, then 
  furiously, anxious to find some indication that Rembrandt was 
  (or had ever been) there.

  Picasso simply stared, open-eyed, silent, their collars glowing 
  a deep azure.

  Rembrandt turned to Monet, who was not there. Frustrated at 
  Monet's absence, he turned inquisitively to Picasso to find him 
  also absent. It was only at this point that he began to 
  re-evaluate his situation. The surroundings had changed but 
  there had been no jump, no discontinuity. The grey walls that 
  now surrounded him seemed always to have been there. There was 
  no other explanation. And yet, he remembered the shoreline; the 
  canoe; the map! He looked about him, and found it also missing. 
  He shook his head in an attempt to rid himself of this 
  confusion, but the confusion remained, undaunted.

  He began to sit, but fell, instead. Suddenly annoyed at the non- 
  appearance of a chair, he scrambled to his feet, determined to 
  do something. But there was nothing to do. It was at this point 
  that he noticed the golden sphere. There was no way to know if 
  the sphere had been there when he had 'appeared,' for lack of a 
  better word. It was there now, however. It shimmered, suspended 
  halfway between floor and ceiling, awaiting instructions. Where 
  had that thought come from, Rembrandt wondered. Indeed, he had 
  the distinct feeling that the sphere was somehow awaiting 
  direction, or instruction.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he said "come here."

  Dutifully, it approached, bobbing slowly through the air until 
  it hovered not a foot away from him. Well, at least something 
  obeys me around here, he thought.

  Monet sat on the sandy bank of the river, staring out into the 
  darkness, while Picasso paced back and forth behind him, a gold 
  globe floating dutifully above his head.

  "These idiotic globes don't seem to be any use," Monet remarked 
  sourly, belting the one which hovered next to him in an offhand 
  manner. "I mean -- what's the point of a metal globe that 
  follows you around -- can it do anything? Can it produce food?" 
  He looked pointedly at it. "Produce food." It remained silent. 
  "Nothing." He looked away, disgusted.

  Picasso stopped and regarded his globe, which he had almost 
  forgotten about; he was contemplating the dimensions of the 
  structure towering over him. Even though the darkness hid its 
  form, it still seemed to loom over them, a tangible presence 
  bearing down, making the very air heavier with its unimaginable 
  countenance. "They could be monitors -- They could serve no 
  purpose at all, other than to report back to their masters what 
  our doings are."

  "Why, then, do they seem to obey our simple commands?"

  "A ruse? Trickery?"

  Monet's lips cracked into a wry smile. "You're beginning to 
  think like me, Picasso." His expression soured again as his 
  thoughts returned to Rembrandt. Monet was accustomed to thinking 
  of Rembrandt as a fool, and it did him no good at all to be 
  worried for him, even, perhaps, guilty that he did not.

  "You know," Picasso interrupted. "The globes may simply seem 
  unable to obey commands about food and such because they are 
  unable; assuming they themselves can't transport us."

  "A broad assumption, considering Rembrandt's case," Monet 
  retorted.

  "Nevertheless, assuming that: Perhaps there is no food to be 
  found here. And no way into the structure above?" He turned to 
  regard the globe coldly. "Perhaps these globes once served some 
  purpose, as rudimentary guiding machines, but there is no longer 
  anything to be guided to."

  "A cold thought, Picasso. A cold thought."

  "Come morning, we have to move on. There is no other choice."

  "Without your Map?" Monet raised his eyebrows.

  "Indeed. Our goal is still the same. We must reach the region 
  marked as 'the edge'."

  Monet cut in "Without a Map, how can we?"

  "Dead reckoning."

  Monet, silent to this, continued to stare out into the clear 
  water.

  Rembrandt, accompanied by the small gold ball, climbed a metal 
  staircase with metal walls.

  "Considering Rembrandt's case." Rembrandt spun around at the 
  sudden voice of Monet, but saw no-one.

  "Come morning, we must move on." Now Picasso's voice hung in the 
  air.

  "A cold thought, Picasso. A cold thought."

  Rembrandt's eyes widened as he ascertained the source of the 
  conversation -- the metal sphere. And, within the sphere, the 
  ghost of an image -- Monet and Picasso, sitting on the sandy 
  river-bed.

  "There is no other choice," the image Picasso said, a smile 
  flickering across his face.

  "You're beginning to think like me, Picasso," Monet replied, now 
  grinning. Then image, and sound abruptly faded.

  Rembrandt tried to grab hold of the railing, but it did not 
  steady him, and he fell down across the heavy, metal stairs. He 
  looked around wildly, for the walls now seemed to contain 
  menacing shapes. A coldness gripped him and he shivered. "No," 
  he mouthed.

  The globe sat impassively over him, silent.


  * * *
-------

  Dawn broke softly over the steeples of the fortress (Picasso had 
  begun to think of it as a fortress sometime during his fitful 
  sleep under its oppressive shadow.) Picasso's eyes sprang open 
  to behold Monet sitting dutifully on the bank, legs collapsed 
  between his arms, muttering to himself.

  "You hate me, don't you?" Picasso said.

  Monet looked up, surprised by the other's sudden utterance. "Why 
  do you say that? I don't, by the way."

  "You hate me because I forced this situation on you," Picasso 
  responded deliberately, his arms extending above him in an 
  expressive yawn. "I understand perfectly."

  "Don't be an idiot. It was the only way."

  Picasso sat up, then stood. "It wasn't though. Everything's gone 
  terribly wrong. We should have stayed in the apartment -- safe."

  "Perhaps..."

  Monet remained silent, morosely contemplating the shoreline and 
  the clear blue water of the river.

  "One thing is clear," Picasso stated. "We must either devise a 
  plan to find Rembrandt, or move on. One of the two. Sitting 
  here, morosely contemplating the shoreline isn't getting us 
  anywhere."

  Monet turned and stared pointedly at Picasso. "I don't think 
  you're seeing the big picture..."

  Picasso was taken aback. "How do you mean?"

  "I mean that we have to take careful stock of our situation, 
  Picasso. It is my opinion that we are being deliberately 
  manipulated."

  Rembrandt broke from his slumber fitfully, grasping out for a 
  lightswitch which did not exist, and steadfastly refused to 
  become existent. The thick black air coalesced around him, 
  encasing him in a veil of darkness.

  "Consider our situation," continued Monet. "We have been placed 
  here, by some unknown force. We don't remember how we got here, 
  don't really remember any of our backgrounds at all. And now we 
  find ourselves in this unlikely situation; run aground beneath a 
  huge tower, in the middle of some forgotten land."

  Picasso stared dumbly at him. "I don't see what you're getting 
  at, Monet."

  "If this were a piece of fiction, it would be grossly 
  unsatisfying. There's nothing for the reader to latch on to, no 
  hook, no familiarity..." He turned and stared again out across 
  the calm water. "...no meaning."

  Picasso frowned as he regarded his comrade. "You seem 
  depressed."

  "We must find him. We cannot continue, in tacit acceptance of 
  the events that enfold around us." So saying, Monet straightened 
  up and began to walk calmly toward the base of the fortress. The 
  metal globe hovering above his shoulder. After a moment, Picasso 
  followed, drawn by the other's strength of purpose.

  "Let us assume," Monet continued, "that we are pawns, playing 
  for some unknown being's (or beings') pleasure. The question 
  then becomes, 'Can we affect our own destinies?' "

  "But how could we know if we were pawns? What if every action we 
  took were pre-determined?" Picasso chimed in. He was beginning 
  to catch up to Monet's thought process.

  Monet continued, "Unfortunately, we can't know."

  "You seem to be painting yourself into a corner..." Picasso 
  remarked under his breath.

  By the time they reached the base of the fortress, they were 
  both panting from lack of breath. The base of the fortress was 
  smooth, a huge obsidian wall that rose up before them beyond all 
  reason. Monet moved his hand closest to the wall.

  Rembrandt continued to crawl through darkness, following brief 
  and faint flashes of color which played over his retinas. 
  Perhaps they were products of his imagination, but the 
  overwhelming darkness forced him to make a goal, any goal, and 
  follow that goal ruthlessly. As he crawled, too scared to walk, 
  lest he fall off some ledge or walk into a wall, he began to 
  mutter furtively to himself.

  "Damn Picasso for leading me out here. Damn Monet -- the smug 
  bastard. A plot, that's what this has been. 'Let's get rid of 
  that annoying Rembrandt fellow, Picasso.' 'Ok, Monet old boy, 
  how do you suggest we do it?' 'Well...' "

  There was a hollow knocking sound. Rembrandt strained his eyes 
  to look towards the source of the sound, but it deliberately 
  refused to come into view, hiding guiltily in the 
  pitch-blackness of this place. He was on the verge of beginning 
  his crawl again, when another loud, reverberating knock was 
  issued from above.

  "Who's there?" he yelled out, half in panic.

  Several smaller knocks followed, modulating into a creaking, as 
  of an ancient hinge, only now being opened after years of 
  neglect. And with the noise came light, blinding tempests of 
  light, pouring down from above. Rembrandt, temporarily blinded, 
  could only desperately cover his eyes, waiting for the pain to 
  subside.

  As Monet was about to touch the wall, a tremendous thunderclap 
  sounded, sending both Picasso and him to the ground, clasping 
  their hands over their ears in agony. Another thunderclap 
  sounded, followed by a series of smaller ones which seemed to 
  quicken until they were a shrill whine, eating up the air, 
  blotting out the natural, beautiful noises of this place, which 
  they had begun to take for granted.

  Picasso was the first to notice that the sky was falling. He 
  pointed wildly in the direction of the river, his eyes becoming 
  insanely dilated with fear. Monet turned to see the huge dome of 
  the sky apparently collapsing into the horizon. Looking up, they 
  beheld the entire sky moving, and looking away from the river, 
  they beheld an arc of darkness, opening slowly over their heads.

  When Rembrandt could finally see, he beheld a miniature 
  landscape in front of him, revealed by a slowly opening domed 
  lid. Above, two harsh globes hovered in the darkness, radiating 
  a fierce light down on the landscape. The landscape itself 
  consisted of a network of miniature glass spires, interconnected 
  by a series of streams. In the center of the landscape, stood an 
  enormous black tower, dwarfing the crystal spires. At the base 
  of that tower, two figures were clasping their hands over their 
  ears, trying to shut out the sound of the enormous dome, looking 
  off, away from Rembrandt, at their horizon, where even now the 
  final edge of the dome was disappearing into the ground.

  For a moment, Rembrandt stood in awe, amazed by the beauty of 
  what lay before him. Then he began to understand what he must 
  do. They had given him a chance for revenge now, and he intended 
  to make use of it. He reached a tentative hand out towards the 
  cowering duo.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Picasso caught movement. He 
  turned, his eyes registered the image, but his mind refused to 
  grasp its import. Slowly, he stood, watching the enormous hand, 
  fingers outstretched, come closer and closer to a similarly 
  transfixed Monet. As they touched, Rembrandt and Monet, a surge 
  of light, stronger than any he had ever seen, overpowered him, 
  followed by a surge of darkness.


  O
---

  When Picasso awoke, he was lying face down on a beach, the heat 
  of the suns beating down on his body. When he stood, he could 
  see the familiar landscape of the city surrounding him, although 
  he appeared to be on a small island, separated from the city on 
  all sides by a vast expanse of water.

  For hours, he walked up and down the beach, trying to find some 
  inkling of what had brought him here, what had happened after, 
  or before, or during. His memory of the event was spotty, but he 
  vaguely remembered the giant hand, the blinding light. He found 
  no trace, no indication that any of what he remembered had 
  actually happened. No tower, no domed sky, no metal globe 
  hanging dutifully above his shoulder.

  He sat on the sandy shoreline and watched the waves wash up and 
  down the beach. For a brief moment, they were one with the City, 
  endlessly rippling through variation after variation. He was 
  sitting at the window. He was hanging high from a tree-branch. 
  He was flying alongside the parrot, hearing what it could never 
  hear. A tremor came up through the desert island, shaking a few 
  of the rocks loose further up the beach where the sand turned 
  into a desolate moonscape. In the sky, the suns raged furiously. 
  Picasso often wondered what they talked about, the suns. He 
  imagined debates on philosophical issues and moral principles 
  which he, as a mere human, could not possibly comprehend. He was 
  one of them. Even as he was the earth, the stars and the sky.

  He wondered, only for a moment, where the others were. Not 
  Rembrandt and Monet, but the others. The background characters 
  that make any story complete. There were none. What was he 
  doing? What was he thinking of when he had signed up for this 
  meaningless existence? Had he even signed? How could one sign 
  away one's soul, one's future, to a fool world with multiple 
  suns that didn't even make sense most of the time. He slowly 
  bent forward until his head lay in front of him in the wet sand. 
  After a while, the tide came in and he ceased to breathe, but 
  death did not come for him.

  Like the buildings, shifting endlessly through their circular 
  journeys, washing up and down on the shoreline of the forgotten 
  island, his story was not, could never be, over.

  This one, however, is.

  Daniel K. Appelquist  (da1n+@andrew.cmu.edu)
----------------------------------------------
  
  Daniel K. Appelquist will, by the time you read this, have 
  graduated with a degree in Cognitive Science from Carnegie 
  Mellon University. In his spare time, he raises killer cats, 
  accumulates huge debts and enjoys crash-testing rental cars 
  without insurance. Currently he's either engaged in a desperate 
  search for employment or hitchhiking his way to Peru.

  (Editor's note: After the writing of this bio blurb, Dan -- who 
  also serves as editor of QUANTA -- managed to locate a job as a 
  computing consultant at Carnegie Mellon University. We assume 
  this means the Peru trip is on hold.)


  Gravity  by Jason Snell
=========================

  It started when Frank's CD player tried to kill me on my way to 
  work.

  I had just come down the stairs from my second-floor apartment, 
  and was already sweating. I could tell that the day would be hot 
  and humid. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

  There was, however, a large compact disc player eclipsing the 
  sun. For a second, my half-open eyes marveled at the sight of 
  its descent. Then I jumped.

  It landed about a foot behind me, and skidded across the 
  sidewalk. Plastic shards were scattered everywhere.

  "Frank!" I yelled up at the open third-floor window. "You 
  could've killed me with your goddamned CD player!"

  A shape slowly inched out his window.

  "Fucking digital clarity!" he screamed from inside.

  Frank's window was giving birth to a large stereo speaker.

  "Too clear! Too loud!" he shouted. The speaker picked up speed, 
  slid all the way out the window, and began to fall end-over-end 
  toward the CD player that had almost done me in.

  "Too fucking loud!" Frank shouted as it smashed into the 
  sidewalk.

  As I rounded the corner on my way to work, I heard another crash 
  come from behind me. Frank's second speaker had joined its 
  brethren in death, the third victim of some bizarre stereo 
  component suicide pact.

  My dear upstairs neighbor seems to be on some sort of quest. 
  He's searching for the ultimate home entertainment device, and 
  he's very temperamental.

  When I moved into the apartment in March, everything seemed 
  wonderful. Living on my own was great, especially after twenty 
  years with my parents -- <20>now I could have people over at all 
  hours of the night, could listen to my music any time I wanted 
  to, and I didn't have to worry about my parents walking in on me 
  while a female guest and I were buck-naked on the couch.

  Then I met Frank.

  About three weeks after I had moved in, there was a knock at the 
  door. It was Frank Cole, a 30-year-old<6C>man with an Electronics 
  Emporium name-tag pinned to his plaid shirt.

  "Hi," he said to me. "My name's Frank."

  "I noticed," I said. "It's nice to meet you, Frank. My name's 
  Jim."

  "Hi, Jim. I live upstairs." Frank gave me a wide smile.

  "I see."

  "I'm going to throw out my TV," he told me.

  "Really."

  "Would you like to come and see?"

  I was going to turn him down, but didn't really want to alienate 
  the person who was living above me. If I made him angry, he 
  could retaliate by jumping up and down on my ceiling any time he 
  felt like it.

  "Sure," I told him. "Why not?"

  Frank led me upstairs to his apartment, stopped outside the 
  door, and pointed into the dark room.

  "You first," he said.

  At first, I thought that I couldn't see any of Frank's furniture 
  because it was so dark. Then I realized that Frank didn't really 
  have much in the way of furniture. In the center of the room was 
  an overstuffed chair. The chair faced a home entertainment 
  system, including a wide-screen TV, that stood in the far 
  corner. There was nothing else in the room except for me. And 
  Frank.

  "Nice TV," I told him. "Where'd you get it?"

  "I got it at Electronics Emporium. And it's not a nice TV."

  "It sure looks nice. Mine's a ten-inch black-and-white. This has 
  got to be three times that size."

  "Four times. It's a 41-inch diagonal rear projection TV with 
  Digital Stereo Hi-Fi Surround Sound."

  "Nice TV."

  "It's not a nice TV. I'm going to throw it out."

  "What's wrong with it, Frank?"

  He pointed at the big chair. "Sit, and you'll see."

  I have no idea where Frank got the thing, but it even had feet, 
  like those old-fashioned claw-foot bathtubs. As I sank into it, 
  Frank ran over and turned on the TV.

  "You'll see. You'll see."

  The TV warmed up. One of those awful game shows that tries to 
  match up couples and send them on dream dates was on. I had 
  auditioned for two of them, but they said I wasn't their type. I 
  guess I wasn't dreamy enough.

  "Stupid show," I said.

  "Yes. Television is a waste of time -- <20>the shows are terrible, 
  the sound -- <20>even if you've got a Wide-Screen Rear Projection 
  TV with Digital Stereo Hi-Fi Surround Sound -- is 
  incomprehensible, and..."

  "And?"

  He raised his finger to his mouth. "Shh."

  "I'm telling you, Chuck, I didn't want to spill the salad 
  dressing all over Marcie's new dress..."

  "Listen to that," Frank said. "Terrible. The sound's terrible. 
  Even with Digital Stereo Hi-Fi Surround Sound. Even then."

  "Is that all?"

  "Of course not! You're in the chair. You can see. It's too 
  bright!"

  "Why not just use the brightness knob?"

  Frank looked angry, as if I was insulting his intelligence -- 
  <20>which I was.

  "Because then it would be too dark."

  Ah.

  "Well, if you'll excuse me, Frank... I've got to get back to 
  what I was doing before." I pulled myself out of the chair and 
  walked toward the door.

  The muscles at the corners of his mouth tightened. "Oh, sure," 
  he said. "See you again sometime. Nice meeting you."

  "Nice meeting you, too. Thanks for inviting me up."

  Frank began to close the door, paused, and stared at me. His 
  dark brown eyes were shining.

  "I'm going to throw it out," he said again.

  "Well, good luck," I said, and turned away.

  I went downstairs, turned my stereo back on, sat down on my 
  couch, and idly stared out the window. I was enjoying my freedom 
  -- even if I did have do deal with quirky neighbors.

  There was a scraping noise from upstairs. I could hear it over 
  the sound of my stereo. Then there were two loud thumps, and 
  silence for several minutes.

  I sat staring out the window, entranced by the music. The wind 
  blew. The trees moved. A Zenith dropped past my window.

  I blinked. It must've been a dream, a fantasy, perhaps even a 
  really big bat or bird or something.

  Then I heard a loud crash echo up from the sidewalk.

  During my dash to the window to see what had happened, two other 
  objects dropped past. Later I'd discover that they were Frank's 
  VCR and Hi-Fi Stereo Surround Sound Decoder.

  As I opened the window, I heard Frank laughing and screaming.

  "I threw it out!" he howled. "No more fucking static! No more 
  fucking test patterns!"

  I made a mental note to buy a deadbolt for my door and called it 
  a night.


  A week after Frank had tossed his CD player and speakers out his 
  window, he knocked on my door.

  "What is it, Frank?" I asked.

  "I've got a new Living Room Thing," he told me. "You've got to 
  see it!"

  "It's better than the TV?"

  "A lot better. No flicker, no reception problems."

  "Better than the stereo?"

  "Not as loud."

  I opened the door, stepped out quickly, and shut it behind me.

  "Okay, Frank," I told him. "Let's go see."

  The big chair was still there, but now it faced a large, 
  well-lit fish tank that sat in the corner. There were about 20 
  fish swimming in it, chasing each other and annoying the tiny 
  lobsters, or crayfish, or whatever they're called, that were 
  crawling along the bottom.

  "Is this it?" I asked, pointing toward the tank.

  "Yeah. No reception problems, no static. Quiet. Soothing. Fish."

  "Where'd you get them? They don't sell fish at Electronics 
  Emporium, do they?"

  "Nope. But there's a pet store next door."

  "What made you want to buy fish?"

  "I have dreams," he said. "Fish are in them."

  "What kind of dreams?"

  "Fish dreams," he said. "In my dreams, the fish are always 
  swimming. People are dying, but the fish keep swimming."

  "What's killing the people?"

  "It depends on the dream. Sometimes they're being tortured to 
  death, other times they just get shot in the head. But no matter 
  what the dream is, the fish keep swimming. That, and..."

  Something caught in his throat.

  "And?"

  "'Copacabana.'"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I can't hear any real sound in the dreams. People are dying, 
  but I can't hear their screams. All I can hear is the muzak 
  version of 'Copacabana'."

  "You mean Barry Manilow's 'Copacabana'?"

  "That's the one."

  I had to admit, Frank had stumped me on this one. I had 
  absolutely no idea what to say.

  "Could I take a look at the fish?"

  "Sure," he said, and led me to the side of his tank. Frank began 
  pointing at fish, though they moved so fast that I couldn't tell 
  which ones he actually meant to single out.

  "That one's Barry," he said. "And there's Rico, and Lola, and 
  that one in the back is Mandy -- "

  I stepped away from Frank and took a look around the room. It 
  was almost completely barren, except for a couple posters, the 
  chair, and the tank.

  "You know, this place would be nicer if you moved the tank out 
  of the corner," I told him.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Why not put it closer to the center of the room? Maybe by 
  the -- "

  He squinted at me when I stopped in the middle of my sentence.

  "What?"

  Maybe by the window.

  Frank's window looked exactly like mine. But I couldn't help but 
  think of everything he had tossed out that window. Putting the 
  fish near the window wouldn't help matters any -- especially if, 
  on the day that Frank gets tired of hearing "Copacabana," you're 
  one of the fish in the tank or you're taking a walk on the 
  sidewalk under his window.

  "Don't worry about it," I told him. "Look, Frank, thanks for the 
  tour. I've got to go."

  "Sure," he said. "Come back sometime, and say 'Hi' to the fish."

  "Sure."

  I turned and left as quickly as politeness would allow. I never 
  wanted to come back to Frank's apartment, especially not to make 
  friends with his fish. The poor devils would be meeting Mr. 
  Concrete pretty soon anyway.


  I was sitting on my window ledge, looking out at the sky and 
  peeling an orange -- my breakfast -- when I heard the argument. 
  It was a couple of days after I had met Frank's fish.

  At first, all I heard was thumping -- it seemed like Frank was 
  stomping through his apartment. Then I realized that I was 
  hearing two separate sets of footsteps. There were two people up 
  there, running around.

  Then, as I sat there stripping the skin from my orange, I 
  started to hear the voices.

  "What do you mean mrrm don't like mfff," was what I heard a deep 
  voice, presumably Frank's, shout at the top of his lungs. I tore 
  a round piece of peel from the orange and rubbed it between my 
  fingers.

  "I don't mrmff them there at all. They're weird. I ummmf mumm 
  move them, Frank." It was a woman's voice. Frank had a woman in 
  his apartment. And they were arguing.

  "It's my Living Room Thing!" he screamed. I held my hand out the 
  window and let go of the round piece of peel. It landed right on 
  the edge of the sidewalk.

  "I don't cmf. Either umffo um I go." Then I heard a door slam. I 
  could hear the woman stomping down the stairs. A few seconds 
  later, she stepped onto the sidewalk below and looked up at me. 
  Her hair looked like it had been cut with a bowl, and she 
  squinted behind what seemed to be extremely thick glasses.

  "You hear me, Frank?" she said. "Them or me!"

  "Don't do this to me, Emily!" Frank must've been standing at his 
  window, right above mine.

  "Do what to you?" I pulled off a strip of orange peel, and held 
  it against my nose. It smelled more like orange<67>than the actual 
  fruit tasted like it.

  "Make me get rid of my fish. My Copacabana."

  "Them or me," she said. "Barry Manilow or me. Think about it, 
  Frank."

  She started walking away, down the street. I threw my orange 
  peel at her, but it missed and landed in the gutter instead.

  Frank slammed his window shut. When I went to work an hour 
  later, I still hadn't heard anything else from upstairs.

  When I returned from work, Frank was screaming.

  "Fuck you, Barry Manilow!"

  Maybe I should've been more wary about approaching my apartment 
  building after the CD player tried to kill me. But I was 
  concentrating on licking the ice cream cone I had bought along 
  the way home, and so I didn't get to see the fish tank's 
  championship-caliber dive.

  But Frank's scream certainly got my attention. I looked up and 
  saw the tank impact with the concrete sidewalk as fish and water 
  rained down. Glass shattered and flew everywhere. I was lucky 
  not to be lacerated by a flying glass shard.

  "No more fucking air pumps! No more food flakes! No more Barry 
  Manilow!"

  The smell of fish mixed with the taste of Buttered Apple Pecan 
  ice cream in my mouth as I leaped over large chunks of glass and 
  two very annoyed mini-lobsters on my way to the safety of the 
  stairwell.


  Two weeks after he dropped the fish tank out the window, I went 
  upstairs to say goodbye to Frank. My summer job was over and it 
  was time to go off to college.

  Frank smiled when he saw me at the door. In fact, I had never 
  seen him seem so downright cheery.

  "Come in, Jim! Come in!"

  The big chair was gone from the center of his room. In its place 
  was a large mat with polka-dotted sheets and pillows on it.

  "Where's the chair?"

  "Emily didn't like it. So she took it away. Now we sleep on the 
  futon together."

  "I see. Congratulations, Frank."

  "Thanks."

  "But I don't see a Living Room Thing anywhere, Frank."

  His eyes twitched for a second, as if he were scanning the room 
  for a Living Room Thing that he couldn't find.

  "No more of those things. Emily didn't like me spending time 
  watching anything but her."

  "She didn't like the fish?"

  "No. She said I thought about them too much. And she said I 
  dreamed about Barry Manilow too much. She wants to be the only 
  person in my dreams."

  "Well, that's good, isn't it?"

  He hesitated for a second.

  "Yeah, I guess."

  Frank walked over to his open window, the one he had used to 
  send thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment -- not 
  to mention several fish -- to their deaths.

  "Emily's my Living Room Thing now," he said.

  I could deal with Frank's own special brand of insanity to a 
  point, idly watching the precipitation of electronic equipment 
  (and marine life) that fell from his third-floor window. But the 
  prospect that a human being might become the next object for 
  Frank to drop filled me with fear.


  "Emily? I need to talk to you about Frank."

  I had caught her in the stairwell, on her way up to Frank's 
  apartment.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Frank's not what you think he is," I told her.

  "Of course he's not. Frank scares me sometimes, you know?"

  "You know about him?"

  "Sure I do. I'm surprised you know how scary Frank is. I mean, 
  I'm his girlfriend. It scares me a lot more than you, I can tell 
  you."

  "I'm sure it does."

  "He's always so distant," she said. "He never came over when I 
  wanted him to. He said he was always too busy... you know."

  "Too busy?"

  "Too busy watching the new big-screen TV, too busy listening to 
  the stereo, too fucking busy with his little fish! God, I hated 
  those fish! He should've been spending time with me. I'm his 
  fucking girlfriend."

  "You were jealous of his fish?"

  "No, silly! But I was afraid that he'd lose himself in them, 
  like he did with the TV and the stereo. It isn't right for a man 
  to spend so much time away from his girlfriend, sitting alone in 
  that terrible chair. I should be his only diversion!"

  My voice grew louder as I tried to make her understand what 
  Frank undoubtedly had in store for her.

  "Now he doesn't have any of those things, Emily! You're the 
  center of his living room now."

  "Center of his life, that's what I should be. It's my rightful 
  place."

  "You don't understand, do you? Remember what Frank did to all 
  those other things when he got tired of them? He threw them out 
  the window! And you're next!"

  She paused for a second, as if she had finally understood what 
  I'd been trying to explain to her.

  Then she began to laugh.

  "Oh, don't worry," she told me, and began rummaging around in 
  her purse. "Frank would never think of doing anything to hurt 
  me. And even if he thought of it, I'd never let him try 
  anything."

  Her hand emerged from the purse holding a small handgun.

  "So don't be afraid for my sake. Frank and I will be fine, as 
  long as he makes sure I'm the only one he thinks about." She 
  slipped the gun back into her purse, and began walking up the 
  stairs.

  "Thanks for your help," she said.

  I swallowed hard and silently watched her ascend, until even her 
  ugly wooden clogs disappeared from sight.

  "Don't mention it," I whispered to myself.


  The next day was supposed to be my last day in the apartment. 
  But instead of packing, I spent most of the morning staring out 
  my window at the sidewalk, waiting for Emily and finishing my 
  supply of oranges. I wasn't sure if I'd be seeing her as she 
  walked down the street after leaving Frank's by way of the 
  stairs, or seeing her fall to her death after leaving by way of 
  the window.

  After a few hours -- and long after the last piece of orange 
  peel had fallen onto that sidewalk, Emily appeared down below. 
  Because I knew she had a gun, I was careful not to move until 
  she was around the corner, out of sight. Then I bolted for the 
  door and ran upstairs.

  "Frank!" I yelled as I pounded on his door. "Let me in, Frank!"

  Frank opened the door after a few seconds, and smiled at me in a 
  good-natured sort of way. Several clumps of his hair were 
  standing on end, and he was wearing a plain white T-shirt and 
  boxer shorts.

  "Hi, Jim," he said. "What's wrong?"

  "It's Emily."

  He opened his eyes all the way, as if he were finally waking up.

  "What? Did something happen to her?"

  "No, nothing like that. But Frank, I talked with her yesterday, 
  and I've got to tell you, something's really wrong."

  He turned around and began walking toward the window.

  "I knew it!" he said. "I knew this would happen. I've screwed up 
  again, haven't I?"

  "No, nothing like that, Frank. But I've got to tell you, she's 
  not the woman you think she is. She's no good for you, Frank. 
  She's crazy."

  "What do you mean? She's just as sane as I am."

  "Not quite. Look, Emily wants you to be her slave. She can't 
  stand to think that there's any point to your life except to 
  please her and think about her."

  "She's my girlfriend. I'm supposed to think about her all the 
  time."

  "Frank, being someone's boyfriend isn't supposed to mean that 
  you're her slave."

  "She took away my chair."

  I blinked.

  "I loved that chair," he said. "She wanted me to throw it out 
  the window, like I did with everything else. I told her that I 
  only throw things I didn't like out the window."

  "And you liked the chair."

  "It was a good chair. It wasn't too hard or too small or 
  anything. It was perfect."

  "What happened when you told her you liked the chair?"

  "She told me that I should only like her, and nothing else. And 
  then she took it away."

  His voice was raised. Here was more emotion in it than I'd ever 
  heard before. I idly noticed that only one of his eyes was 
  brown, and the other one was hazel.

  "Frank, she's got a gun."

  "A gun?"

  "A gun. I think she's afraid you're going to throw her out the 
  window."

  He opened his mouth, sputtered a few times, and shut his mouth 
  again. I'd never really seen anyone totally dumbfounded before. 
  Frank turned and stared out the window for a while, and finally 
  managed to say something.

  "Why would I throw her out the window?"

  Gosh, Frank, could it be because you've thrown every damned 
  thing you've ever owned out that fucking window? Might it be 
  possible that all the little fragments of glass that glitter 
  when I walk along the sidewalk are there because of your 
  penchant for demolishing CD players? At least Newton gave it up 
  after the apple -- if you had been there, Isaac would've 
  probably been killed by a rogue soup kettle.

  "Well, it's not like you've never tossed things out before," was 
  all I said.

  "But I wouldn't throw her out. I love her!" He hit the wall with 
  his open palm. "She doesn't trust me. I can't believe it. She 
  doesn't trust me. She doesn't trust me."

  He whirled around and glared at me. Both his eyes were open 
  wide, but the eyelid over the hazel eye was twitching a little.

  "Thanks, Jim," he told me. "I appreciate your help. I'd like to 
  be alone now."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes."


  I closed my apartment door for the final time and began to 
  descend the steps with my last box of stuff. I figured I wasn't 
  going to do any more about my upstairs neighbor's personal life 
  -- if I made him angry, he might toss me out a window, and if I 
  made his girlfriend angry, she could just shoot me on the spot. 
  Or they could act in tandem, with her shooting me and then him 
  disposing of my body out the window.

  But I wouldn't have to deal with them ever again. I was going to 
  be out of the building for good. Whatever happened, I would have 
  nothing to do with it.

  When I was halfway down the steps, Emily passed me, heading up. 
  She smiled as she went past. I managed to swallow and blink.

  I concentrated on keeping my feet moving as a slowly paced out 
  to my car. I opened the trunk and dropped the box in. As I 
  slammed the trunk door closed, I began to hear the shouting 
  coming from upstairs.

  I fingered my key, thinking that I should just get in the car 
  and drive away. It wasn't my problem. I didn't know these people 
  very well. If they ended up killing each other, it would have no 
  effect.

  But instead of driving away, I stood there and tried to make out 
  the yelling. My car was parked a few spaces down from the Frank 
  Cole target zone, so I figured I was safe from any falling 
  bodies that might be heading down.

  The yelling intensified for a second, and then cut off. I 
  swallowed again, and began moving toward my car as soon as I saw 
  a shadow in Frank's window. The window slowly slid open, as I 
  hid behind my car and watched. If Frank had managed to open the 
  window, I figured that Emily'd probably be taking part in 
  Frank's first human-powered flight experiment.

  But what came out of the window was far too small to be Emily. 
  It was smaller than anything else I'd seen come out of that 
  window.

  I dropped to the pavement when I realized that it was Emily's 
  gun.

  On impact, the gun fired off a shot. Great. I just knew I was 
  going to be hit by a random bullet, like in the movies.

  I realized I was fine when I heard the sound of shattering 
  glass. I peeked my head past the edge of my car in time to see 
  the last pieces of my old second-floor window raining onto the 
  pavement, where so many objects had landed before. Somebody 
  should paint a bull's eye there.

  "Frank! Emily!" I yelled. "You could have killed me with that 
  fucking gun! And you broke my goddamned window! Jesus, I just 
  moved out! I'm not paying for this!"

  "Sorry," came a soft reply from above.

  They paid for the window.

  Jason Snell (intertxt@network.ucsd.edu)
-----------------------------------------

  Jason Snell is a senior at the University of California, San 
  Diego, where he serves as the Editor in Chief of the UCSD 
  Guardian newspaper, in addition to editing InterText. He will 
  graduate from UCSD in March of 1992 with a degree in 
  communication and a minor in Literature Writing, and hopes to 
  enter a graduate journalism program in the fall.



  The Unified Murder Theorem (part 1 of 4)  by Jeff Zias
========================================================

  Prologue
----------

  They killed him that night and somehow he felt it coming. In all 
  other respects it was a typical Thursday night gig. Getting 
  killed was something he was prepared for, so it was no big deal.

  The dark bar he was killed in was filled with noisy patrons 
  drinking beer, hard liquor, wine, or expensive mineral waters in 
  clear glass bottles. In the center of the smoky hovel was an 
  elevated stage. Merely four feet by six feet, the stage gave him 
  plenty of room for his Thursday night solo guitar gig, but 
  fitting a whole band up there was like putting a dolphin in your 
  goldfish bowl.

  The guitarist was medium height, brown haired, slightly 
  slovenly, and unremarkable in remarkably many ways. He could, 
  however, play the hell out of his instrument. The Thursday 
  regulars attentively listened to his cascades of chords and 
  flurries of arpeggios. Not only did his playing hold their 
  attention: the guitarist's instrument itself was a special 
  custom job, a focal point.

  Yes, all guitars have a fretboard, strings, and body; but this 
  guitar always projected a strangely luminous blue light which 
  emanated from its hollow body; it was simply a modified 
  instrument, some people in the audience thought. Most people 
  didn't pay much attention to the light, preferring to assume it 
  was nothing special, or assume that they really knew what the 
  light was, when they really did not. Like so many other 
  mysteries in life, the audiences usually chose to ignore the 
  phenomenon rather than explore it. Only a few people -- maybe 
  one out of every dozen -- would ask about the blue light. How 
  could he get that light to pour out of the hole -- in 
  synchronization with his notes? The guitarist would never fully 
  answer such questions. It is just a light, he would say, a very 
  ordinary light.

  That Thursday night two guys who had been standing in the back, 
  against the wall, made their way up to the stage as the 
  guitarist was finishing his first set. He didn't get a good look 
  at them because as he lifted his head up from staring down at 
  the fretboard the taller of the two guys pulled out his 
  thirty-eight and fired two shots through the guitarists head 
  while mumbling, inaudibly, the words "goodbye from Nattasi."


  Chapter One
-------------

  The advancement of science is not comparable to the changes of a 
  city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place 
  to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which 
  develop ceaselessly...
                                      --  Jules Henri Poincare

  The sun was too hot, the shady grass too cool; the breeze was 
  too brisk and the baked sidewalks too dormant; but, taken as a 
  whole, the day was perfect.

  At three o'clock in the afternoon of a sunny, mid-November 
  California day, an accordion instructor named Jack Cruger looked 
  through the windows of his stuffy first-floor practice room into 
  the parking lot of Del's Music World. High School kids floated 
  through the parking lot like twigs down a river. Some moved 
  fast, some slow, and some clumped in a living, breathing circle 
  of conversation that resembled a whirlpool.

  Jack Cruger sat in the practice room waiting for his next 
  accordion student, a new kid. He hoped the kid had some ability; 
  any amount of ability would be greatly appreciated. Most of the 
  kids he got were forcibly sent by their parents in order to 
  satisfy some twisted ethnic family tradition. He could hear the 
  parents now: "we want Johnny to be able to play polkas at the 
  family reunion," or "teach him to play the Beer Barrel Polka for 
  Oktoberfest."

  That's why these miserable little students Cruger got were so 
  pathetic: almost none of them were acting of their own volition. 
  Forced to play the accordion, nature's most hated instrument. 
  What could be worse?

  Up in San Francisco, forty miles away, a law was on the San 
  Francisco ballet, proposition P for Polka, known as the "use an 
  accordion and go to jail" proposition. Times were tough for 
  accordionists.

  This accordion law (even though it was a joke) surprised Cruger 
  - - San Franciscans should know better, and some of them did. 
  Concurrently San Francisco, the city supervisors were ready to 
  appoint the piano accordion as the official instrument of the 
  city, since the piano accordion was invented in San Francisco, 
  in 1907 by Colombo Piatenesi and Pietro Dieiro.

  In fact one of San Francisco's leading literary icons, Mark 
  Twain, had been an accordionist. Not for long, though. Jack 
  Cruger -- being a fan of Mark Twain's -- recalled Twain's 
  acerbic notes on the subject of playing the accordion. Cruger's 
  nearly photographic memory (which he called his "pornographic 
  memory") for enjoyable quotes and images pulled in the choice 
  memorable quotes like a fisherman hauling in his nets. Twain had 
  said "After a long immunity from the dreadful insanity that 
  moves a man to become a musician in defiance of the will of God 
  that he should confine himself to sawing wood, I finally fell 
  victim to the instrument they call the accordion." Even Twain 
  maligned the instrument; the accordion, always good for a laugh. 
  And what else had Twain said: "At this day, I hate that 
  contrivance as fervently as any man can, but at the time I speak 
  of I suddenly acquired a disgusting and idolatrous affection for 
  it. I got one of powerful capacity and learned to play 'Auld 
  Lang Syne' on it."

  As the story went, after being thrown out of various residences, 
  Twain was eventually pressured to give up the instrument. He 
  even wrote a rude statement of defection. "When the fever was 
  upon me, I was a living, breathing calamity... desolation and 
  despair followed in my wake. I bred discord in families, I 
  crushed the spirit of the lighthearted, I drove the melancholy 
  to despair, I hurried the invalids to dissolution and I fear me 
  that I disturbed the very dead in their graves... with my 
  execrable music."

  Cruel was the capricious twist of public sentiment. Back when 
  Cruger was a teenager, playing the damn thing was almost hip. Of 
  course, these misguided people, much as Mark Twain obviously had 
  become, were forced into a reactionary hatred of the instrument 
  that only spoke of some underlying passion, some real human 
  emotion, that surrounded their feelings for the instrument. 
  Cruger could see this -- seen through the facade of ridicule, 
  hatred, and name-calling. Deep down, he knew they must actually 
  like the accordion.

  The real problem was half of Cruger's students didn't have any 
  talent. Little Billy Weymuts, the student that had just left, 
  was an exceedingly bad student who hated the accordion. Billy 
  either never practiced or had an almost disconcertingly powerful 
  lack of talent.

  This day, after three minutes, it had become clear that Billy 
  couldn't play his lesson assignment, a C major scale.

  "OK, try again Billy, starting on the low C."

  "The one here, this key?" Billy asked, as if he were searching 
  for the optimum spot to split a 80-carat diamond.

  "No, two keys to the left, there."

  "Oh yeah."

  Billy plodded through a few notes, then hit a clinker.

  "You know," Billy said, "This isn't so important. I want to get 
  into sports. Chicks dig a jock."

  Cruger scratched his head. There was something about an eleven- 
  year-old saying chicks dig a jock.

  "Who told you that?"

  "Told me what?"

  "About chicks digging a jock."

  "My brother, Ronnie. Told me I should just be a jock, or at 
  least play guitar, ya know, like Beejee King."

  "That's B.B. King. Do you even know what a jock is?"

  Billy Weymuts brought his shoulders to his little elfin ears and 
  dropped his eyes. "I guess not."

  They got back to the C major scale but didn't get far before 
  time was up; so much for Billy's lesson.

  But it was a living. With twenty-one, no, make that twenty-two 
  students, plus gigs, plus a workaholic nurse for a wife, his was 
  a workable career.

  That's what was holding him back, Cruger thought. This was all 
  too easy, much too easy. His students, clients, and wife were 
  all very willing to shell out enough money to make Cruger's life 
  very comfortable. No, he didn't drive a Porsche with 
  personalized plates saying "MONEYBAGS" -- these yuppie pursuits 
  were of no interest to Cruger. But still, he wanted more, just 
  because it was all too easy.

  Challenge, discord, friction. Friction; that's it. You couldn't 
  climb a mountain if it weren't for friction. In a world lacking 
  friction, you would slide back down into the saddle of your 
  equilibrium -- be it for better or for worse. Where is the 
  friction in my life? What are my battles, my defeats, my 
  failures? If it weren't for friction, no heroes would ever live.

  Cruger glanced at the practice room wall clock -- the new 
  student's time slot was about to start. Cruger began to recall 
  the initial phone conversation with the boy. The student had 
  said I would like to hear about playing the accordion. A strange 
  thing to say. Not a simple I want to learn how to play or I 
  would like lessons in . . . not the usual.

  Three minutes after the hour a young blond teenage boy knocked 
  softly on the studio door and then entered.

  "Hi, I'm Tony Steffen, I talked to you the other day." The 
  youth's voice was low, slow, and punctuated.

  Cruger reached over and shook Tony's hand. "Good to meet you, 
  Tony," he said, "have a seat."

  Cruger was impressed with Tony's maturity. What is it about this 
  kid, he thought? Tony stood about six foot one, more than a few 
  inches taller than Cruger, and had a wiry, muscular build. But, 
  Cruger thought, it is more than his height - the kid has 
  presence. The surfer blond hair, long arms and legs, erect 
  posture and resounding voice combined to create a seamless 
  package; the kid reeked of self- confidence. What the hell is he 
  doing here? Most of Cruger's students were from Nerd Squad. Tony 
  didn't fit the bill.

  Cruger looked at the dusty brown case that Tony held by the 
  handle. "I see you already have an instrument."

  "Yes," Tony said. "In fact, that's what I really wanted to talk 
  to you about most." Tony swung the case out in front of him. 
  Quickly popping the two aluminum latches on the front of case, 
  he reached in and pulled out a small and ornate accordion. 
  Polished cherry wood. Corrugated side panels and engraved trim 
  gave the old instrument a stately look.

  "It's beautiful," Cruger said.

  "Yeah. It's been, um, passed down to me. A really special 
  instrument, I've been told."

  "I'm not knowledgeable as a collector, Tony, but I can tell you 
  that they don't make them like that any more."

  Tony smiled a wide smile that radiated light and warmth. "I 
  wonder if you would play it a little for me?"

  Cruger had been anxious to do just that; now he needed no excuse 
  to grasp the accordion and give it a try.

  "I'll play it a little Tony, but, it's you who we need to get 
  playing it."

  Tony nodded unconvincingly and watched as Cruger gently moved 
  his arms and pressed his fingers across the keys of the fine 
  instrument. The "Too Fat Polka" reverberated throughout the 
  small practice room. The instrument had a smaller, darker tone 
  than Cruger was accustomed to. He was into the second eight bars 
  of the tune when he jolted slightly at the sight of a strange 
  luminescence rising from the belly of the instrument. Blue 
  streaks of light, entwined like yarn across a cat tree, 
  flickered their surprising veneer within the accordion's belly. 
  Cruger could see down into the cavity through a three-quarter 
  inch opening directly above the keyboard. Shock notwithstanding, 
  Cruger had continued to play down the solid Polka. When he 
  stopped, the strange light did likewise.

  "What's that light?" asked Cruger in a coarse voice ringing with 
  disbelief.

  "That light," Tony said, "is the reason that I had you play that 
  box." Tony seemed satisfied with that answer, but, Cruger 
  clearly was not.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The box will only do that, what we just saw, for you," Tony 
  said.

  "Are you trying to con me or something -- you calling this 
  magic?" Cruger didn't know whether to laugh or let out his true 
  feelings. He gave Tony a hard, defensive stare.

  "I know that this is all confusing for you, ah, Cruger. Is it 
  all right to call you Cruger?"

  "Yeah."

  "Anyway, I need to get this into your head, and I know it won't 
  be easy. All I want to do for now is tell you to please play 
  this instrument every night, for at least a little while."

  "I still want to know what this is all about."

  "Can you please just take it home and play it a little at night? 
  I will come back and explain everything to you in a day or two," 
  Tony said.

  Cruger looked up at the ceiling of the small practice room. 
  Small styrofoam polygons covered the ceiling; Del, of Del's 
  Music World, certainly wasn't using the high-quality foam 
  soundproofing material. With accordions being played, you'd 
  think he wouldn't skimp on it.

  But what should he do? Cruger was scared of his inaction. What 
  should he tell the kid? What the hell would friggin' Clint 
  Eastwood do in this situation? This is just plain bizarre. Is 
  the kid a nut case, on drugs? Thoughts sprayed through his mind 
  like machine gun fire.

  "Oh, by the way," Tony said, "Don't tell anyone about this, 
  please. "I know you won't," he said as if to assure himself.

  "But..."

  "Later," Tony said as he swung out of the cheap folding chair, 
  opened the door, and walked briskly down the musty, narrow hall.

  Cruger had no response. He slumped forward and stared at the 
  strange small instrument that rested on his forearms. Shaking 
  his head from side to side he smiled as he rehearsed, in his 
  head, telling his wife for the very first time, "had a tough day 
  at the office, dear."

  Chapter Two
-------------

  Cruger's wife, Corrina, was prone to the scientific approach. 
  Since Jack and she had decided to try to make a baby, their sex 
  lives had undergone a change.

  For one thing, they now made love three times a day. Three times 
  a day had previously loomed as a mythical figure to Cruger. Not 
  since their brief and carnal Honeymoon had the prospect of such 
  frequent intercourse seemed plausible. Yet, now, it was three 
  times a day whether or not Jack liked it, just like the 
  self-help fertility manual said on page twenty-four.

  They had been trying for four months. No periods had been missed 
  yet. Even so, Corrina continued to support the home pregnancy 
  test-kit industry with frequent testings. Rabbits dying were 
  yesteryear's method of test; vials of water needed to turn a 
  rich blue color or little tablets needed to spell plus or minus. 
  Four months of pale water and minuses -- the equivalent of live 
  rabbits -- was not considered a long time by most people.

  Cruger thought it was a long time. His lower back thought it was 
  a long time.

  When Cruger walked in his front door that evening, his own 
  accordion case in one hand and Tony Steffen's in the other, 
  Corrina was anxious to talk with him.

  "I'm going to start monitoring my ovulation cycle," she said. 
  She was excited, her bright eyes on fire, lighting the room.

  "Just as long as you don't make me count all my sperm every 
  day."

  "Listen silly. What I do is take my temperature every morning 
  and I can then chart when I start ovulating. Then we can make 
  sure to make love a lot just before and during my ovulation."

  "Sounds wonderfully romantic. Out of curiosity, along with 
  Bolero, did Ravel ever write any music entitled Symphony to 
  Ovulate to, in G minor?"

  "Did anyone ever not tell you that you're a smart ass?" she 
  said.

  "People who have never met me generally don't."

  Corrina sighed. "Ah, the lucky ones."

  "Listen, let me get this straight. When you're not ovulating I 
  take cold showers, keep to a low testosterone diet, and occupy 
  my mind with Baseball scores. Then for a week each month I eat 
  oysters, beat my chest like a gorilla, and jump your bones every 
  time the wind shifts?"

  "You've got it, partner -- but you don't always have to wait 
  till I'm ovulating," she said. "We can just practice the rest of 
  the month."

  "What, you think I'm a machine, a love-making machine; switch me 
  off, switch me on," Cruger said, "like clockwork?"

  "You've done well in the past. And, if your batteries need 
  recharging, I've got a few tricks up my garter belt."

  Cruger believed what she said. In her late twenties and 
  athletic, Corrina was still a head-turner, even a 'real fox' as 
  one of his buddies annoyingly called her. Trim, tan, with 
  mid-length auburn hair, she was extremely attractive. No tofu 
  thighs or belly rolls like Cruger saw on so many women at the 
  beach and around the neighborhood. Corrina didn't need help to 
  get his libido into high gear.

  "All I have to do is think of you in your string bikini. My 
  circulatory system does the rest," he said.

  Corrina walked over to Jack and gave him a soft kiss on the 
  lips.

  She said, "All I have to do is think of you getting into my 
  string bikini."

  Then they began to try to make a baby. No oysters necessary.


  Later that evening Cruger accepted the inevitable: he would have 
  to play Tony's accordion. From good sex to accordions, isn't 
  live full of dichotomies, he mused. And why play the thing? 
  First of all, the kid asked him to. Second, the thing was 
  exciting and strange and unexplained. Lastly, it had a nice 
  sound and a good feel. Why not?

  He closed the study door so Corrina would not easily walk in on 
  the strange sight. The warm, softly illuminated study was lined 
  on one wall with bookshelves full of Cruger's favorite reading 
  as well as a few shelves dedicated to Corrina's anatomy, 
  physiology, and nursing textbooks. Cruger allowed his eyes to 
  scan the shelves that were like friends to him, holding up parts 
  of his mind, parts of his past, books that had become a part of 
  his world view -- part of his most private self. On the top 
  shelf, a little Hemingway, some Fitzgerald, everything by Sir 
  Arthur Conan Doyle. The shelf below, invoking a more 
  philosophical mood, housed some Kafka: The Castle and The 
  Metamorphosis, Huxley, Plato, Koestler. The next shelf had the 
  high- speed fantasies of Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Sturgeon, 
  Clarke. Then Cruger's eyes stuck to the next lowest shelf, full 
  of the reading of the college years: Joyce, Proust, Mann, 
  Elliot, Beckett, Conrad; even some sixties classics jumped out 
  at him -- Mailer, Malamud, Pynchon, Barth. Catch 22 was there, 
  and others equally important.

  Cruger wanted to reach around and pat himself on the back for 
  his literary achievements, at the same time saying: Yes, ladies 
  and gentlemen, I read all of these and more. But, please hold 
  the applause, save the awards, because I've done nothing with 
  them but file them away in my mind, my selfish head; they are 
  now stashed deep into the brains of an accordion instructor who 
  is merely a consumer of knowledge, not a provider, a processor, 
  a manufacturer or a designer.

  Unlatching the old case, he pulled out Tony's exotic instrument. 
  Caressingly, carefully, and tentatively, he began to play a few 
  warm- up scales.

  Inexplicable blue light notwithstanding, the strangest thing was 
  this: Cruger began to play things he never played before. After 
  a few requisite Polkas, he launched into a snappy rendition of 
  Malaguena, a song he had heard but never played before. The 
  instrument's mysterious, resounding overtones echoed in Cruger's 
  mind as its blue sparks and beautiful notes rang out into the 
  energized, tranquil air.


  Chapter Three
---------------

  As promised, Tony called Cruger at home the next evening. Tony 
  thanked Cruger for practicing the instrument as he had 
  requested.

  "How do you know that I actually played it?" Cruger asked.

  "Oh, I know, it's obvious."

  Cruger was only slightly disturbed by the fact that Tony seemed 
  to know this for certain, somehow. Other more disturbing 
  questions were still unanswered. As if a witness to Cruger's 
  silent thoughts, Tony said "I'd like to come over to fill you in 
  on some facts."

  "I think I would enjoy that."

  "How about I come over after I'm out of school tomorrow, like 
  around four thirty?" Tony said.

  "That's fine, I'll be back here by quarter after four. And you 
  better have some good explanations; this whole thing is really 
  weird," Cruger said.

  "Oh yeah, must be totally weird for you. Don't worry, see you 
  then."

  Cruger hung up and thought about this High School "dude" who was 
  "totally" messing his mind. This kid was the strangest thing to 
  ever happened to Cruger. Being a true skeptic at heart, he still 
  felt that this was some kind of hoax, some strange setup. He 
  expected the hidden camera to pop out from behind the wall at 
  any minute: "Surprise, it was a joke, you're an idiot."

  Cruger realized that, according to the apparent behavior of most 
  people, he should have been jumping out of his skin with 
  curiosity. Most people would have been more affected, Cruger 
  thought. But he evidently had a high tolerance for ambiguity.

  He wondered if anyone really knew anything anyway, so why should 
  he worry about his silly predicament. He meant really knowing 
  what was going on, as in having positive, scientific proof of 
  existence. Besides, a little excitement was what he thought he 
  wanted. A small little challenge had presented itself, and he 
  now accepted the challenge, on its (or Tony's) terms.

  So like people, he thought, to accept challenges that find them 
  while never choosing a challenge on their own. Playing the game 
  is so much easier for people than inventing it.

  Cruger now waited for Tony to play his next move. What had 
  Kierkegaard said? Life can only be understood backwards; but it 
  must be lived forwards. Cruger now waited to live his 
  soon-to-be-explicable future.


  Chapter Four
--------------

  Cruger tried to put Tony out of his mind and found Corrina in 
  the living room doing aerobics. He asked his wife for a dinner 
  date and she kindly accepted. Corrina had the day off after 
  working a week of day shift, so she was rested and ready to go 
  out to dinner. The new Cajun place on El Camino Real, Louisiana 
  Pot, was their choice.

  The restaurant was located in a mini-mall that also had a dry 
  cleaner, record store, sandwich shop, crafts store, and Pizza 
  place. You could have your clothes cleaned, buy some overpriced 
  CDs, stock up on yarn, and eat anything from pizza to a tofu 
  burger all without reparking your car. Great.

  The Louisiana Pot was New Orleans moved 2,000 miles west. 
  Dixieland music played, people drank like fish, and the Gumbo 
  was excellent. Corrina waited for her blackened prime rib and 
  Cruger waited for his blackened catfish.

  Corrina told Jack about her patients, in particular a young girl 
  with MS who was a sweet kid with serious problems. In a way, the 
  toughest of patients.

  A tape of a Dixie band played "Here Come the Saints." Cruger 
  felt himself floating in and back out of the conversation with 
  his wife. He wondered if the whole function of entertainment, 
  evenings out for tasty dinners and movies, where nothing more 
  than a way of escaping from the harsh reality we all see when 
  we're alone. At the restaurant, Cruger could see his pretty wife 
  and well-dressed waiters and pretty waitresses and laughing 
  couples with nice clothes. He could hear Dixieland music and the 
  intoxicated laughs of young men and young ladies who had just 
  downed their "authentic" New Orleans Hurricanes.

  If this were more real than playing his instrument or reading or 
  sitting around the house, then it only seemed more real because 
  restaurant scenes are what you see in the movies and on TV and 
  what you read about in the newspaper. Everyone, without 
  exception, was at least moderately young and moderately 
  well-dressed. Bright colors and patterns that seemed to say: I'm 
  centered, I have money, do you too? These people are all sheep, 
  Cruger thought. They could be trained to accept nearly anything 
  as reality.

  The waiter arrived with the prime rib and the catfish. Both the 
  fish and beef were spiced and burnt black in an iron pan. For 
  all he knew, the meal was highly carcinogenic. Cruger looked 
  around as people eagerly awaited their burnt-to-a-crisp twenty 
  dollar entrees. Like sheep.

  "You think this blackened stuff causes cancer?" Corrina said.

  Cruger was surprised. Either his thoughts were printed on his 
  sleeve or she was as cynical as he. She's a worrier like me, he 
  thought, that's why we're married.

  "Un huh," he said. "But don't worry, what we did this afternoon 
  was an anti-carcinogen."

  "And good exercise too," she said.

  They ate their dangerous meal and Cruger tried to pay attention 
  to her discussion of patients and hospital politics.

  "You really help these people -- I'm proud of you. At least one 
  of us is making a contribution for the better," Cruger said.

  "Oh come on, you're making a contribution -- you're a teacher," 
  Corrina said. She had her nose screwed up that way it got 
  whenever she became mildly annoyed.

  Cruger realized that he was preoccupied and in a self-pitying 
  mood. At this rate, he would not be a very good date.

  What she just said was true. Yes, he was a teacher and that was 
  generally considered a noble profession. Unless you teach 
  accordion, in which case, he thought, people thought of you like 
  they thought of the neighborhood crack dealer: forcing horrible 
  habits on young, impressionable kids.

  Self-pity aside, honesty was sometimes the surprisingly best 
  policy: "It's just that I'm afraid I'm not doing enough with my 
  life," he said. " I've been worried about not making a 
  contribution, not giving enough."

  Corrina looking him straight in the eye, her pretty and open 
  face telling him as much as her words. "You're worrying too 
  much. Just face it, you're a good person, a great guy -- why 
  else would I have married you? Just accept that and quit 
  punishing yourself."

  And maybe he should let well enough alone. Did every action that 
  every person did on every day necessarily contribute to the 
  course of the future? Cruger thought that might be so; but, 
  playing that weird accordion with the blue light must be 
  something important, a substantial contribution, because there 
  was something about it that felt magical. He was somebody now, 
  playing that weird accordion.

  Whatever the flashy little thing really was.


  Chapter Five
--------------

               Our daughters and sons have burst
               from the marionette show
               leaving the tangle of strings
               and gone into the unlit audience
                               --  Maxine Kumin

  Tony showed up at Cruger's doorstep the next day, as planned. 
  Cruger was relieved and excited to see Tony, although he wanted 
  to appear nonchalant about the situation.

  "Can I get you anything to drink? Cruger asked.

  "A Coke or Pepsi, if you got it, thanks."

  Cruger popped a can and poured two glasses full, on the rocks. 
  He motioned for Tony to sit at the kitchen table.

  "So, you think the accordion I gave you is cool or what?"

  "You only lent it to me, and, yes it's cool." Cruger's use of 
  the word cool came out as a mockery of Tony, and Cruger 
  regretted it immediately.

  Tony said, "I have a lot of things that need to be said, and I'm 
  afraid you will need a really open mind to hear them."

  "My friends tell me I'm open-minded," said Cruger. "And my 
  enemies tell me that my mind is so open that everything has 
  leaked out."

  "Great, you'll need room in there for the stuff that I'm going 
  to lay on you." Tony flicked a wisp of his long blond hair out 
  of his eyes, as if the motion were a precursor to any serious 
  discussion.

  "Starting with an explanation of the blue light, I hope," Cruger 
  said.

  "Yep. Did you look down into the belly of that box when you were 
  playing?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "And you saw those blue strands of light sort-of moving around, 
  creating different patterns and stuff."

  Cruger nodded, wondering if they were going to play a guessing 
  game or if Tony would just tell him what was what.

  "Well, what was happening in there was significant. Each one of 
  those blue lights -- or strings, I would call them -- each 
  represents a path, a possible outcome. As you saw, there are 
  millions of those things wiggling around when you play.

  "I contacted you because you were chosen as someone who will do 
  a very good job of making, or, as I like to call it, spinning 
  these strings."

  "What is the point of spinning these strings, and why are you 
  involved?" Cruger said, the questioning leaping out 
  automatically before he fully comprehended what Tony had just 
  said.

  Tony began to explain everything, or, at least, quite a bit. 
  Cruger was being offered a job. Tony belonged to an organization 
  that looked for people who had special talents and abilities: 
  abilities that were a match for the special needs of the company 
  that Tony worked for.

  Cruger, mainly because of his musicianship, was one of the dozen 
  or so people in the world chosen for this job of "spinning" the 
  strange blue strings.

  "So your company is an international company then?" Cruger 
  asked.

  "Oh yeah. In fact the company is a lot broader based than that."

  Cruger frowned and Tony explained more.

  "The Company, as we like to call it, has a bunch of 
  responsibilities. The primary responsibility is to create and 
  support all worlds, galaxies, and universes."

  Cruger gave Tony a blank stare.

  "It's a service industry, really," said Tony.

  Tony laughed. Cruger pretended to laugh along with him. They 
  both continued to laugh -- Cruger felt like a cartoon character, 
  laughing, slapping his his knee; he would have even guffawed if 
  he knew what a guffaw was.

  "You're joking," Cruger said.

  "No, I'm totally serious. I can understand that you don't 
  believe me -- I didn't believe it at first either; but you'll 
  believe it soon."

  Tony explained more. The spinners completed a necessary function 
  of determining the probable outcomes of all events on earth. 
  Each string could be thought of as a possible plane of reality 
  across time. The many parallel strings that intersected each 
  other represented the large number of possible outcomes for any 
  given instant.

  "Couldn't God just toss some dice? I had always thought that's 
  how it might work anyway."

  "No," said Tony, "and we call him the Chairman, or the Big Guy, 
  by the way. Just Him rolling the dice would be a poor way of 
  spinning because it would be cold, mechanical, and lack the 
  variation and natural beauty that people like you provide."

  "Well, how could it be that I do a better job than, um, the Big 
  Guy?"

  "Originally everything was done by Him, like you say. But, then 
  it became clear that a more personal way would incorporate the 
  proper aspects of the human condition. I don't fully understand 
  it, but maybe you can think of it this way: it's like the 
  difference between computer-generated art and human-devised art 
  -- an expert can tell the difference."

  Cruger was either satisfied with that explanation or so immersed 
  in thought that he failed to respond.

  Tony continued to explain that the job of spinner would entitle 
  Cruger to a family health plan, enriched musical talent, and a 
  sense of accomplishment. Cruger just needed to play the special 
  accordion every evening for at least thirty minutes. Playing 
  more would do neither any good nor any harm. The job did not 
  come without risks, however. Not everyone was a friend of the 
  company. In fact, the company was in direct competition with 
  what they referred to as the "Other Company." Tony reminded 
  Cruger that he was most likely at least conceptually familiar 
  with the "Other Company."

  "If not for them, everything here would be perfect. Can you 
  imagine, no hunger, no disease, no murder or greed?"

  "So the 'Other Company' is responsible for everything bad?" 
  asked Cruger.

  "More or less. Death would always be with us along with the 
  natural occurrences that some people think are bad, but, the 
  Other Company pretty much has what we think of as the Devil's 
  work as their charter."

  "Somehow this translates to a risk for me?" Cruger moved the 
  conversation back to what stuck in his mind.

  "Yes. The Other Company has employees here just like we do. They 
  can get involved in messing us up -- they have in the past. But, 
  we keep a low profile. I am your only contact in the company. 
  Just like you, I have only one original contact, my boss, and 
  now I guess you, as an employee."

  "Hah," said Cruger. "You come in here and tell me I can have a 
  job with the rulers of the universe and my boss will be a high 
  school kid who looks like a surf bum?"

  "Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm telling you. I also know that 
  you are going to accept the job," Tony said.

  Cruger rose his eyebrows and felt his chin jerk involuntarily, 
  demonstrating a small surprise reflex that he never knew he had. 
  "How the hell do you know that?"

  "It came down to me in a memo. It's determined already by other 
  spinners. You're it."

  "Then why did you even ask me?" Cruger said.

  "Oh, we try to be polite in this business."

  "And what about that family health plan you mentioned," Cruger 
  smiled at the incongruous use of such prosaic corporate 
  terminology.

  Tony nodded and answered. "That means that you and your family 
  will experience no illness or harm, except for what is beyond 
  our control, like intervention from the Other Company."

  "Now that sounds like a pretty good benefit."

  "Yeah, well, we're a very competitive employer. We don't even 
  ask for your immortal soul in return."

  Chapter Six
-------------

  Cold, cold, cold. The frost was fall's thickest yet; the dried 
  old leaves of Maples and Eucalyptus lined the streets. Most of 
  all, it was cold.

  Leon Harris had just started his morning jog. His blood had yet 
  to flow to his extremities, which were as numbed from sleepiness 
  as they were aggravated by the chilling morning breeze.

  Harris glanced quickly at his black plastic, multi-function 
  jogging watch, $3.95 from Service Merchandise. He had only been 
  running for three minutes, two seconds, and fifty-seven 
  hundredths. Usually the endorphin rush didn't kick in until 
  fifteen minutes, at least. Harris imagined the feeling he would 
  have when the sweat poured off his brow and the blood pulsed 
  through his trunk and thighs. Running, it feels so good when you 
  stop, he told himself in a clenched-teeth mantra. Morning runs 
  are a lot nicer in the summer, but, think of the poor suckers 
  who live were it really gets cold, he thought. The radio weather 
  report that morning said currently forty- three degrees, warming 
  to a high of sixty. Not too bad.

  Harris usually got his run done by 7:05, into the shower, 
  breakfasted, dressed and out the door by 8:00. He could be to 
  work by 8:15, hit the weight room or Karate practice at lunch, 
  leave work by 6:00 and get home around 6:30. Not that he lived 
  by the clock.

  At home, Harris would throw together microwaved leftovers or 
  cook a quick stir-fry type dish: lean meat, vegetables, and rice 
  or potatoes. He only drank alcohol when out with friends, 
  keeping it to one or two drinks, which didn't have too much of 
  an effect on his lean 6-3, 210-pound body.

  Once at work, he would make out a list that described his goals 
  for the day. A typical list looked like this:

               8:30
               Glass of Water, write list

               8:45
               Investigate File System bug

               10:00
               Staff Meeting

               11:30
               Lunch workout

               12:30
               Debug, design next lib interface

               6:00
               Home
	
  Then he would break the list down into sublists. Often the 
  sublists generated sublists of their own, but Harris knew where 
  to draw the line.

  His performance reviews at work usually commended him on his 
  organizational, attention to detail, and ability to persevere on 
  a problem until closure.

  The man had no vices. Well, almost none. When given the 
  opportunity, Harris could be an extremely inquisitive person, 
  far past the point of simply being nosy.

  When Harris' next door neighbor, Jack Cruger, began playing his 
  accordion every single evening, Harris noticed.

  Harris, a black man who grew up in the sixties and seventies, 
  liked to listen to Stevie Wonder, James Brown, John Coltrane, 
  Miles Davis, Hendrix, Muddy Waters, and some Bach, Beethoven, 
  Brahms, but not accordion music.

  He would have been merely disgusted with Cruger and his 
  instrument, if not for the flickering pale blue light that shone 
  through the curtains when Cruger played every night.


  Chapter Seven
---------------

  Cruger was cooking dinner when he heard Corrina coming through 
  the garage door.

  "Back here," he said. "Your chef is at work creating another 
  masterpiece."

  He stirred the mushrooms sauteing in the butter sauce and 
  sprinkled the minced green onions from the cutting block.

  Corrina walked into the kitchen and put her purse down on the 
  counter. She sniffed the air. She smelled Tarragon.

  "Mmm, smells good."

  "But of course," he said, mocking the accents of the French 
  chefs that worked at restaurants more expensive than any he had 
  been to. He sounded exactly like one of those temperamental 
  little Cordon Bleu jocks.

  "Was that supposed to be a French accent?" she said. "Sounded 
  more like an Australian with lock jaw."

  "You've got no ear, no ear. My accent is magnifique," he said, 
  again sounding like an Aussie with lockjaw.

  "Whatever." And then she put her arms around him and pushed her 
  face into his neck. She whispered into his ear "we're pregnant."

  Cruger forgot about his culinary masterpiece and bad accent. 
  They kissed and hugged and she cried. He did too, a little, but 
  worked hard to keep her from seeing it and himself from 
  admitting it.

  Cruger believed that whatever would happen, they were strong 
  enough for it. The journey would begin again, a journey that, as 
  opposed to some others, was not in itself the reward.

  A baby, a baby, goddamn, I don't believe it. He hugged Corrina 
  tight and close, eyes shut hard, leaking only slightly.

  He and Corrina knew the fragility of life. Corrina had been 
  pregnant a year ago. The baby -- not yet known as a 'he' or 
  'she' but most certainly not an 'it' -- was of course destined 
  for greatness. Possibly a doctor, an astronaut, or maybe even 
  President of the United States, the baby would most certainly be 
  a special person.

  The winter months of December and January passed. Then, for 
  Corrina, she said it felt like a heavy period. Realization of 
  the dreaded fact was more horrid than anything they had ever 
  faced before. The robbery of a promised life was a malicious 
  obscenity.

  The Doctors gave Corrina a set of explanations. These thing can 
  happen for many reasons: failure of the fetus to attach properly 
  to the uterine wall, scar tissue, or hormonal imbalances. She 
  had still been in the danger period -- just barely. The first 
  trimester had nearly elapsed without incident. The integrity of 
  the umbilical cord had been questioned; the doctors thought that 
  the cord became twisted and then failed.

  He and Corrina vowed to be brave and try again. Only a success 
  could erase the miserable failure of their first attempt.

  Cruger wondered if he would ever believe that a real life had 
  not been lost. Sure, the first baby actually born to them would 
  be the first child, but, hadn't their been a different life, a 
  thoroughly different zygote based on different genetic material 
  that had existed and then suddenly not existed? In practical 
  terms, it didn't matter to him. In terms of the meaning of a 
  life that has been thoroughly erased, the meaning was very 
  special. The poor damned little umbilical cord.

  He kissed Corrina again. Yes, we are brave enough for another 
  shot at it.

  And what type of world would they be bringing their baby into. 
  Would they bring the baby into a world that he felt he had to 
  apologize for? No, his child, all the children deserved better.

  He vowed to try hard to make it better. For his baby.


  Later that night, Cruger retreated to the den to play Tony's 
  accordion. Cruger, admittedly, had never been an exceptionally 
  good accordionist. His repertoire consisted of a dozen Polkas, 
  some folk music, a few old swing standards, and "Lady of Spain." 
  Anything else and he had to read the music; and he was not one 
  of those expert sight-readers who could play anything perfectly 
  the first time. Since he had been spinning alone in this room 
  for a few nights, he noticed a change in his playing. The notes 
  seemed to flow out more smoothly. The instrument produced a 
  rounder, more musical tone. Cruger could play almost any tune he 
  had ever heard before, his ear and instincts accurately leading 
  him across the keyboard.

  This night was no exception. His paying felt strong and full of 
  life. He played Thad Jones's ballad, "A Child is Born." He had 
  only heard the song once before on one of Corrina's old Thad 
  Jones & Mel Lewis big band albums. But he knew the song now; he 
  deeply felt the song and every one of its nuances and alternate 
  chord changes. Life could be so good.


  Chapter Eight
---------------

  Leon Harris' beautifully landscaped front yard stood out as the 
  neighborhood's best. The lush green carpet of his front lawn was 
  thicker and greener than a billionaire's wallet. To the other 
  side of Harris' driveway was an elevated Japanese Rock garden. 
  The Scotch moss, red-tinged boulders, gravel, as well as the 
  spherically-shaped Pyrocantha and Juniper bushes formed a visual 
  retreat from the concrete and asphalt monotony of the maze of 
  streets, sidewalks, and driveways that entangled the 
  tightly-housed neighborhood.

  As Harris had improved his yard, his impression of the 
  neighbors' yards had diminished. At first his neighbors, both 
  the Crugers and the Youngs on the other side, had what appeared 
  to be perfectly adequate yards. By the time Harris had added the 
  final fieldstone to his rock garden, the neighbors' small 
  intermittent weeds seemed bigger, the rusted brownish grass more 
  horrid.

  The neighbor's yards had clearly become the landscapes from 
  hell.

  Harris didn't know any of his neighbors well. He said hello to 
  the ones he passed when he was out for a run, and had only 
  spoken briefly to the Crugers a couple of times. The Cruger guy 
  was a pretty lazy dude, Harris thought. A musician. Somehow he 
  had a babe of a wife. The guy must be twenty pounds overweight, 
  a scarcely employed accordionist (calling him a musician was 
  probably a stretch), and he's got a hot-looking wife who pretty 
  much supports him.

  He must not be as stupid as he looks, Harris realized.

  But who knows what the hell this Cruger guy is up to now? Harris 
  poured some boiling water over an herbal, caffeine-free tea bag. 
  Ginseng root, good for sustained energy as well as sparking the 
  immune system.

  Harris didn't have any plans for the evening. He sat at the 
  terminal in his home office and played with a few matrix 
  solutions he didn't get a chance to try at work.

  Later he went into the family room, were there was room to move, 
  and practiced a few dozen low and high kicks, on left and right 
  sides. He finished the quick workout with sixty-five knuckle and 
  fingertip push-ups. Even this quick workout gave him a good 
  healthy sheen of sweat. He peeled his shirt off as he entered 
  the bathroom and, grabbing his toothbrush, began his fourth 
  tooth brushing of the day. He concentrated on his gums -- the 
  plethora of television ads concerning gingivitis had him 
  worried.

  From the bathroom, through the obscured view of the semi-opaque 
  privacy glass, he could see the Crugers' house. A soft blue 
  light radiated a sense of peace and contentedness from one of 
  their bedroom windows. When Harris stopped brushing, he could 
  hear the sound of the accordion. It was a faint sound; Harris 
  thought it sounded like the old standard tune "Autumn Leaves," 
  but he couldn't tell for sure. It definitely wasn't a polka, and 
  Harris considered that much a great improvement.


  Chapter Nine
--------------

  The doorbell rang at 4:15, right on time. Cruger opened the 
  door. Tony was wearing day-glow pink beach shorts, a black 
  Megadeth tank top, and unlaced high-tops. He stood with one arm 
  holding his skateboard and the other around the shoulder of a 
  young lady friend who held her own skateboard. Her skin was 
  tanned to a smooth medium- brown. A perfect match for Tony, 
  Cruger thought. Her flaxen blond hair hung down to her shoulders 
  and across her eyebrows. Baby blue skin- tight lycra pants, 
  peach halter top and sandals completed the perfect 
  young-California ensemble. She was beautiful.

  "Cruger, this is my friend Sky," Tony said.

  "Sky? Nice to meet you."

  "Hi, shall I call you Cruger?" Sky asked between bubble gum 
  snaps.

  "Please. Are you and Tony in school together?" Cruger said.

  "Yeah, Tony and I have three classes together." Sky smiled wide 
  and lifted her big blue eyes towards her namesake as if having 
  three classes with Tony was better than winning the lottery.

  "I'll meet you later tonight, Sky. Cruger and I have some 
  business." At the word business, Tony's tone of voice dropped to 
  a deep growl.

  "OK, later." Sky waved and slapped her board on the ground in a 
  single fluid motion.

  Cruger watched her closely as she sailed, on the small plastic 
  board, down the driveway, swerving back and forth and then 
  cutting a turn onto the sidewalk. A second later he caught 
  himself staring and stopped.

  "Very attractive young friend you have, Tony."

  "I wouldn't have thought you of all people to be such a lech," 
  Tony said.

  "Lecher is too strong a word. Dirty old man will do just fine" 
  Cruger said. He rolled his eyes and smiled.

  "OK," Tony said. "Let's get to business here. Last thing I need 
  is you giving me a hard time about Sky."

  "Why is that? Is anyone else giving you a hard time about Sky?" 
  Cruger asked automatically, unable to imagine what conflicts 
  Tony would be having over a girl like Sky.

  At that moment Tony instantly looked like a teenager again. 
  Tony's shoulders slumped forward almost imperceptibly, yet, the 
  slight lapse in posture illustrated a vulnerability that Cruger 
  hadn't noticed before.

  Tony dropped his eyes to the floor and said "Sky is in what you 
  would have to call a 'sick' relationship. She's been going with 
  this guy for a year, and she's tired of him, but she can't get 
  out of it."

  "Why can't she get out of it? Has she tried to break up with 
  him?"

  "Oh yeah. In fact she's told him that she wants out and she 
  wants to date me. That just makes him grab on tighter and follow 
  her around -- I think he's obsessive."

  Cruger pondered Tony's situation, nearly breaking out into an 
  inappropriate grin, thinking of the fact that Tony was such an 
  extraordinary kid, plagued by ordinary problems.

  "The thing is," Tony said, "she and I have a lot in common, and 
  he -- his name is Rick -- doesn't have anything in common with 
  her. The guy is a delinquent. Really, I'm not exaggerating."

  Cruger wandered over to the family room couch and motioned Tony 
  to follow. The plush carpet and late afternoon sun blended to 
  create a calm atmosphere that clashed with Tony's mood.

  Cruger said, "there must be something about this guy that's not 
  allowing her to get away. Is she afraid of him?"

  "Well, she might be afraid of him. He's sort of wacko acting 
  sometimes, and that scares her."

  Tony was truly a teenager; Cruger could see that now. Not only 
  that, but, he was a sensitive young man who must feel like an 
  outsider among his peers. Tony lived a secret life that he 
  couldn't share with his friends. In the status-hungry phase of 
  late high school, that must be a serious social burden.

  "Well, enough of that," said Tony. "We need to get down to some 
  business.

  "OK. But if you want to talk about this or anything else like it 
  again, feel free."

  "Thanks, Cruger. I don't care what the Big Guy says, you're all 
  right."

  Cruger almost jumped off the couch: "Don't scare me like that -- 
  I went to Catholic School, you know."

  "Sorry," Tony said. "Now that we're being serious, I need to 
  continue your orientation lecture. How's the spinning going so 
  far?"

  "Great, considering I don't know what I'm doing."

  Tony paused for second, a look of concentration on his furrowed 
  brow. "If you've got time, I like to shoot over the hill to the 
  beach to think sometimes. We could talk there if you don't have 
  to be back," Tony said.

  "Actually, that would be fine. I don't have any plans this 
  afternoon -- my wife won't be home until seven-thirty." One of 
  the luxuries of being a musician who works few hours, Cruger 
  thought. Makes up for the magnitude of pay, or the lack thereof.

  "Cool. Let's go." Tony was heading for the door like a rocket, 
  his surfer's body being pulled toward the beach by a nearly 
  visible magnetic attraction.

  They got into Cruger's car. Tony rifled off instructions before 
  they had even left the driveway.

  "Seventeen shouldn't have any traffic going towards Santa Cruz 
  this time of day. Take Route One North when we hit it, and then 
  we can go to Natural Bridges -- I like that beach a lot."

  Cruger nodded and exhaled deeply, preparing himself for the 
  fifty minute drive. Shooting over to Santa Cruz was a young 
  man's move, but it felt good to be mobile, to live life to the 
  fullest and get the most out of every minute. His back was 
  starting to hurt from the drive already. He wondered where his 
  bottle of aspirin was and hoped Tony didn't want him to buy some 
  beers -- probably some wispy thin domestic beer that tasted like 
  slightly used water but left you with a thick headache the next 
  day.

  They started to ascend, having passed quaint Los Gatos nestled 
  in the foothills of the coastal mountains. The dense pine and 
  Douglas fir forests jutted skyward on each side of the two-lane 
  road, resting atop the smallish shoulders of the vertical 
  clay-rock walls that encased the highway.

  "I'm going to be a Physics major next year in College, man, I'm 
  really into it," Tony said.

  "I think I can understand your fascination with it," said 
  Cruger, "In fact, I guess you have access to, what would you 
  call it, inside information."

  "Yeah. I mean, the way things work, the scientific method, 
  that's everything. The only hope we have is to fully document 
  and describe the physics of our environment and our lives, only 
  then are we in charge -- you know, the masters of our destiny. 
  Hell, I can't talk to people about this at school. If they knew 
  that I skate home after school to review Schroedinger's 
  equations, they'd peg me a nerd."

  "So, is that where the 'Tony the GQ surfer dude' act comes 
  from?"

  "Totally dude; like totally," Tony said as he blew his hair out 
  of his face.

  "But what else is at stake here? How about this stuff with 
  humans being more in control because of the Unified Theorem?" 
  Cruger said.

  "That's the key. And when we get more control because of our 
  particular technological approach, I want to be one of those in 
  the know. The driver's seat will be for those of us who 
  understand the theory. The theory of operation."

  "And where does that leave a dumb old spinner, accordionist, 
  good for nothin' like me?" said Cruger. "I hope not as corporate 
  dead wood."

  "Oh no," Tony said. "Think job retraining, the wave of the 
  future."

  The twisted smile on Tony's face was the kind of smile that 
  reflects a sarcasm that is entirely too representative of the 
  truth. Cruger tried to take no offense.

  They arrived and Tony led them to the edge of the sand. Cruger 
  could only see one person, a quarter mile away, on the deserted 
  beach.

  Waves mercilessly pounded against the shore, slowly grinding the 
  fine sand particles into smaller and smoother pieces of sand. 
  Natural bridges was a limestone structure that formed a bridge 
  across a small ocean inlet. Through the center of the stone 
  structure was large circular hole that people would walk through 
  when traveling from one section of beach to another.

  Cruger took off his shoes and socks and stepped into the cooling 
  sand. The smooth particles massaged the bottoms of his feet, 
  rolling across the top of his feet when he took larger steps. 
  Cruger had always liked the beach, the winds, the sand, even the 
  fog that accompanied most mornings on the shoreline. Now the 
  cool afternoon breeze moved through his hair like an invisible 
  rake though grass, the salty air massaging health and the 
  robustness of the ocean into his scalp.

  Why don't I come here more often, he thought. The same thought 
  he had whenever he came, except for the times where he first had 
  to struggle through hours of traffic. If you knew when to leave 
  and when not to, that wouldn't happen.

  Tony sprinted down to the shoreline, dipped his feet in the 
  foamy water, and ran back to Cruger, covering the thirty yards 
  in what seems like a couple of seconds.

  "Need to get some exercise -- spent the whole day sitting on my 
  rear in class," he said.

  "Right," Cruger said, "a little exercise like that for me and 
  you can call 911."

  A gust of wind passed over them, kicking up sand, chips of 
  water- logged wood washed in by the tide, and scraps of leaves 
  and seaweed.

  "You need to know some more things about the Company," Tony 
  said. "The Company has a large, complex organization, but, I'll 
  tell you what you really need to know. As you probably already 
  guessed, a good percentage of the Company is composed of people 
  right here from earth.

  "Many of the executive positions are still held by Managers from 
  elsewhere. The vast majority of these -- well, I'll call them 
  foreigners, sounds better than 'aliens' -- most of them are from 
  the same planet: Tvonen. You won't find this planet on any of 
  your astronomy charts; I assure you, it's far away. Oh, by the 
  way, the Chairman himself is a Tvonen."

  Cruger raised his eyebrows. Now he knew the top dog was an 
  alien, did that matter?

  "These foreigners went through a process of evolution quite 
  similar to what the humans have endured. However, there are a 
  few major differences, and they're important differences."

  Cruger noticed that Tony's ability to talk so matter-of-factly 
  about these matters was surprising and frightening -- it even 
  grated on him a little. How could God and the secrets of life 
  that had previously seemed magical and immortal now be so 
  prosaic?

  "First of all, the Tvonens have creationist mythology that 
  rivals the book of Genesis for entertainment value. The only 
  irony is, their mythology is not allegorical like ours but 
  entirely factual.

  "It seems that the Tvonens were originally created as a tribe of 
  androgynous beings; there were exactly twelve of them and they 
  lived in a setting that we would have called Eden. It seems that 
  their creator, and exactly who that was is something I will get 
  to later, had quite a sense of humor. They were twelve Tvonens 
  living in a perfect environment; all the food they needed grew 
  in the ground and on trees, the atmosphere and temperature was 
  very mild, although too high on the nitrogen side for humans, 
  and there was no disease, poverty, pestilence, or taxes to pay.

  "Well what's the catch, you'd probably ask? Like I said, they 
  were androgynous; they had no way of reproducing. This did not 
  turn out to be such a disaster, though. The original twelve 
  didn't age. Their skins remained free of wrinkles and blemishes; 
  their bodies stayed young, flexible, and healthy. Before they 
  knew it, centuries of our equivalent time had passed and they 
  were all still young and healthy.

  "But, now I get to the part about the maker's sense of humor. It 
  turns out that one day, one of the twelve who was called Remad, 
  went a bit loony. He pulled limbs off tankas, or trees, and ran 
  around in a wild circle of self-flagellation. When the others, 
  who were entirely horrified, tried to stop Remad, he hit them 
  and then continued on himself. The next morning, when Remad 
  awoke, what do you think they found?

  Cruger just shrugged.

  "He had grown a sexual organ between his legs -- a penis." Tony 
  laughed and shook his head.

  Cruger scratched his head thinking that this, possibly the 
  strangest story he had ever heard, was maybe the most important 
  story he ever heard.

  "This is a documented fact, dude. To this day a Tvonen can be 
  observed to undergo 'the change.'

  "Maybe you can guess the rest. Two days later, another tribe 
  member misbehaved badly. The next day this Tvonen had become a 
  she. Only four days of groping and rubbing and kissing and 
  general boot- strapped sex education before she was pregnant by 
  Remad. Actually it wasn't that easy to figure out: the female 
  Tvonen has almost a half dozen sexual orifices. Only one is good 
  for reproduction, and it varies from individual to individual. 
  Trial and error.

  This conjured up some wild mental images for Cruger. Sounds like 
  a couple of sixteen-year-olds trying to do it in the back seat 
  of a Volkswagen have it easy compared to the Tvonens, he 
  thought.

  "For the longest time the rest of the original tribe remained as 
  they were -- looking younger and healthier every day, actually. 
  Remad and his wife, Tvena, had twelve children in as many years. 
  Strange thing is, Remad and Tvena were old, wrinkled and dead 
  within sixty years.

  "Three centuries later they knew that a special enzyme in their 
  blood stream control the secretion of the hormone for sexuality. 
  The sex enzyme was activated by exposure to environmental or 
  emotional impurities. Centuries later a Tvonen could either have 
  immortality, or a life of booze, drugs, sex, and procreation. 
  Isn't that cruel?

  "An interesting footnote to the story of the Tvonens is that 
  their early history was characterized as something that roughly 
  translates to: "The Fouled Fountain of Youth." Their culture 
  does provide the sort of Fountain of Youth that humans have 
  searched for in vain. When the Tvonens live in harmony with 
  their environment and avoid violence, destruction, and 
  pollutants, they live from that fountain. Once converted 
  sexually and environmentally, they can never go back. What you 
  see there currently, after millions of years of civilization, is 
  a healthy mix of reproductive and immortal Tvonens. Of course 
  they have preserved their environment, unlike earthlings, in 
  order to give their people a choice between immortality and 
  reproductivity."

  Cruger had trouble believing what he just heard. The idea of 
  androgynous and immortal sentient beings was hard to swallow. 
  But, then again, the idea of technological and "logical" humans 
  destroying their own planet was also a tough cookie to crunch.

  "What is their civilization like now?" Cruger asked.

  "Now they are what we would call a very advanced society. They 
  have technology that seems amazing. But, keep in mind, they are 
  a lot different than humans. For example, they never devised any 
  digital electronics. Their entire technology is based on analog 
  computing and mineral crystals. What they also have is terrific 
  projective holograms that they can transmit with pinpoint 
  accuracy. For clothing, they wear trained microorganisms that 
  are self-cleaning and form-fitting."

  Cruger sat there, the salt air blowing across his cool face, 
  thinking about the Tvonens. Whereas the sand was beginning to 
  stick to every square inch of Cruger's body, those small, coarse 
  annoyances seemed to slide off Tony's tanned surfer skin, as if 
  he were coated with teflon. Maybe the sand knew who its friends 
  were.

  "Normally science progress with one smallish advancement after 
  the other. Each scientist stands on the shoulders of all his 
  worthy predecessors. One thing that was never done before is to 
  stand on the shoulders of alien scientists -- that is how we've 
  skipped a few steps here and advanced so quickly," Tony said.

  "You mean the Tvonens, they've helped us?" Cruger asked.

  "Yes, the ones that are running the company. They've pitched in 
  a few key ideas that have allowed us to tie together string 
  theory with the singularities -- black holes and the Big Bang 
  phenomenon. Without the little tidbits they provided, we would 
  probably still be stuck for a decade or even a century or two."

  The wind blew Cruger's thin, curly hair down across his eyes. He 
  absently swept the hair away with his forearm.

  Tony explained that the theoretical physicists had made some 
  breakthroughs that even the company's R&D department didn't 
  immediately understand. Einstein had proposed a theorem that the 
  company engineers, the planet builders, had to check on to see 
  if it was actually the equivalent of their method. The 
  theoretical physicists of the '70s through now had come 
  incredibly close to defining the time/space continuum, at least 
  in human terms, in their "string theory" as it relates to the 
  formation of planets, galaxies, and the universe. The work of 
  Hawking and Penrose had brought the theory closer to full proof.

  "I don't know what happened to the original universe builders 
  because they are working on new projects. You know, the ones who 
  originally built the earth and all the galaxies. They're 
  entrepreneurial types. The maintenance engineers must check the 
  relativity and string theory to see if we really have done the 
  incredible: this planet itself has evolved a species to the 
  point that it has defined or even surpassed the knowledge of its 
  creator." Tony smiled proudly, his already bright eyes putting 
  out a higher amperage gleam. "An incredible notion. Think about 
  it, we're the student actually surpassing the teacher -- doesn't 
  happen often."

  "Yes, but if it's cliches you're looking for, 'those who can do, 
  and those who cannot teach'," Cruger said.

  "Mmm. That would be saying the creator can't create? I think, as 
  a species, humans are self-taught. In a nutshell, that's what 
  evolution of an intelligent species is: the slow education of a 
  species over time. We could call it Intellivolution."

  Tony grabbed a quick breath and then continued in a deep, 
  confident voice. "A better analogy is the notion that someone 
  like you could buy a fish tank, put in some fish, plants and 
  food. You then come back to check on the tank a 'while' later -- 
  remember the fragility of the notion of time -- and then the 
  tank is full of smooth skinned little "fish" with arms that are 
  telling you how the pump and filter work and what they want to 
  be fed. That's the human condition," Tony said.

  Cruger expected Tony to follow with the words 'Q.E.D' -- Tony 
  had sounded formal and overly confident in his statements. 
  Cruger grimaced during Tony's comparison of humans to fish but 
  vowed not to take it personally.

  Tony noticed Cruger's displeasure. "Hey, I am as human as you 
  are, bud. I know it hurts. But admit it, we humans aren't God's 
  gift, so to speak."

  Cruger chuckled. He thought about what Tony had said, wishing 
  that he had any kind of a background in science at all that 
  would help understand the concepts that Tony wrestled with.

  "Can there really be a complete Unified Theory?" Cruger asked. 
  "I mean, everything seems so infinite, how can it all be 
  explained or managed?"

  Tony nodded his head. "Right, it's all mind-boggling. Another 
  possibility that had been investigated was that there is 
  actually no theory of the universe that describes all of the 
  actions and behaviors in a scientific sense. It could be that an 
  infinite series of different explanations exist that apply to 
  each situation. Just like you wondered, it has been thought 
  possible that there is really no theory of life and the 
  universe. Events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent; 
  they occur in an random and arbitrary manner.

  "Even if we were able to fully quantize the Unified Theory, for 
  example in a series of algorithms on a computer, the theory 
  would still remain undeniably separate from implementation. As 
  an example, even if we completely understood every detail of the 
  functioning of the human body, it would still take a long time 
  to learn to actually create or 'build' that body.

  "In the same way, understanding the entire universe and creation 
  of universes would leave a lot of work to be done in 
  implementing tools that implement the theory."

  "But, they have the tools -- they've provided that step?" Cruger 
  asked.

  "Yes, I have converted their system into a human implementation 
  that actually uses computers. Digital electronics is our big 
  addition or contribution to this model," Tony said.

  "That's hard to believe. What they originally used must work, 
  right? Why would they want to convert to our technology?" Cruger 
  could not imagine a computer running the show. Images of '50s 
  science fiction films and the overused term 'computer error' 
  popped into his mind.

  "I can think of a few possible reasons. For one, in order for 
  earth to maintain itself, it may need to have a system developed 
  in its frame of reference, a human frame of reference. Another 
  possibility is that since we were getting so close ourselves to 
  cracking the code -- remember what I said about string theory -- 
  that they may have just expedited our own destiny."

  "Great. It also sounds like this 'promoting from within' was a 
  factor. If you want humans to do the job, give them endemic, 
  human- oriented tools," Cruger said.

  "Tools that are user-friendly," Tony said, following his 
  marketing jargon with a sardonic grin.

  As the orange sun started to hide itself behind the lighthouse, 
  beach cliffs, and twisted Monterey Cyprus trees on the horizon, 
  they packed up, brushed off sand, and began the drive home.

  "What about spinning?" Cruger asked while guiding the car over 
  the twisted road across the Santa Cruz mountains. "Is there 
  anything more that I should know or concentrate on when I do 
  it?"

  "No. I can't tell you exactly how to do your job, that would be 
  prejudicing the future's outcome. You must simply do it the way 
  you would naturally do it, without direction," Tony said.

  A while later Cruger pulled car into his driveway. He and Tony 
  said goodbye and Tony grabbed his skateboard. Hips swerving and 
  knees rolling, he sped down Cruger's driveway, all the while 
  whistling a small, nearly silent song that played hauntingly in 
  Cruger's mind as his tired legs walked the front steps of his 
  beckoning home.

  Crouched along the fence, watering can in hand, was Cruger's 
  neighbor, Leon Harris.

  Harris had been curious about the young visitor that Cruger had 
  entertained twice before. Explaining that he planned to work on 
  documentation at home that afternoon, Harris sat by his bay 
  window looking for anything out of the ordinary at Cruger's 
  house. Luckily, he found it. What's with the blond kid, Harris 
  wondered. And the accordion and the blue light at night?

  Harris was cursed with the curiosity of a cat. He would not rest 
  until he understood what was going on.


  Chapter Ten
-------------

  Cruger sat crouched over his accordion as he played. The notes 
  he struck had a special warmth that night, a deep dark sound 
  that reminded Cruger of the pounding Pacific ocean surf. The 
  room was fairly dark, brightened only by a single lamp covered 
  by its dark brown shade. Earth-tone light reflected off the 
  warm, egg-shell- painted walls. He looked at his trusted, dusty 
  old books in the large teak bookshelf as he carelessly flipped 
  his fingers across the piano accordion's keyboard.

  As he played, unbeknownst to him, babies were born, elderly and 
  sick people died, and innumerable twists of fate and fortune 
  ensued. Not all events were strings that were spun. Not all 
  events that were spun were done by Cruger. The complex interplay 
  of strings was ever changing, always evolving. Cruger would 
  never know the exact results of his actions.

  Within the next three weeks, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit the 
  San Francisco Bay Area. Part of the Oakland/San Francisco Bay 
  Bridge collapsed. The Highway 880 Cypress structure collapsed. 
  New lives began. Medical breakthroughs were made.

  A spinner in Iowa used his flour mill to do the special deed. 
  One evening, he got into a fight with his wife over the subject 
  of children. She wanted a large family of eight or ten children, 
  he wanted to stop with three boys. Enough children, enough 
  children, he thought.

  He went in to the barn and began spinning. Blue threads of light 
  ricocheted off the millstone and across the pale, straw covered 
  barn floor.

  That night, 700 miles away, a future President of the United 
  States was conceived. A big night, even for a spinner.


  A solitary spinner in Moscow sat in front of the his large 
  wooden chessboard. Each exquisitely crafted onyx piece was an 
  individual, telling a sordid tale of battle and emotions through 
  their small scars resembling nicks and scratches found across 
  their exteriors. The spinner, a Grandmaster -- only playing 
  against himself, with this chess set, in the warm, dark room -- 
  used the Karamoff defense; as he moved the Knight blue streaks 
  splattered the dull plaster walls. "Checkmate," he told himself.


  A man in California attached thirty-five large helium balloons 
  to his deck chair; he wanted to see what would happen. What 
  happened was: he floated into the sky. The air pistol that he 
  brought along to pop the balloons, one by one, in order to 
  smoothly descend, fell down between the chairs slats. He drifted 
  up to 17,000 feet, waving to passing birds and airplanes 
  indiscriminately.

  Spinners could not be held accountable for everything every 
  idiot did.


  Chapter Eleven
----------------

  "It's close to school actually, only take a minute to get there" 
  Tony said.

  Tony wanted to show Cruger where he hung out when he was doing 
  "company work." They got into Cruger's Honda Accord, started it 
  up. The small engine purred like an overfed kitten.

  The building was, as promised, a five minute drive from Cruger's 
  house. Tony's office was rented space in a small office building 
  shared by a Title Company, some Law offices, and Tony's facade 
  business. The placard outside his office entrance read 
  "Universal Properties, Inc."

  Tony's office had a small desk sitting in the middle of the 
  room. On the small desk was a thick blue cable weaving a 
  circuitous path to a two-inch hole in the wall.

  They sat at Tony's small, plain desk.

  "We need to continue your training," Tony said. "You only got a 
  small dose of it so far."

  Tony leaned back in his office chair and kicked his legs up on 
  the desk. "The other source of intelligent life that we know 
  about is the Chysa planet. They are actually a totally different 
  story than the Tvonens."

  Cruger felt like a child listening to his father tell bedtime 
  stories. But, he was no child; Tony was no parent; these were no 
  bedtime stories.

  Tony continued. "The Chysans are evidently really low-tech. If 
  it weren't for the Tvonens, they would not have any 
  representation on Earth or in the Company at all. No one has 
  seen them in their real form -- "

  "But you said they were on Earth," Cruger said. He had been 
  trying to form a mental image of these people and their ways. If 
  no one knew what they looked like, how could he imagine them?

  "Yes, but what I hadn't mentioned yet is that they evidently can 
  disguise themselves very well. I don't know for sure, but they 
  seem to easily take on new forms or at least wear very good 
  disguises."

  "Are we talking about adding something like makeup to their 
  faces, or are we talking about completely changing shape?"

  "I don't know," Tony said.

  Cruger wished he faced more absolutes, more certainties; all he 
  could get so far were maybes.

  "Then how do we know that they exist and are here?" said Cruger.

  "You just have to take it on faith, my man. We have intelligence 
  reports that say so."

  Cruger wondered if these "low-tech" intergalactic hitchhikers 
  were really so low-tech. Seemed like they had kept a pretty low 
  profile so far. That takes a little intelligence, at least.

  "Is there any sure-fire way to know which ones they are?"

  "No," said Tony. "I consider that an important area for future 
  research. Especially since many of them may be involved with the 
  Other Company."

  The words fell on Cruger like a sack of rocks. He had begun to 
  imagine these people, or whatevers, as playful, somewhat 
  backwards magicians. He had wanted to think of them like cute 
  sea otters at the zoo: swimming on their backs, doing flips, and 
  generally mimicking human behavior in a delightfully 
  anthropomorphic way. It now seemed that the Chysa were not so 
  innocent and playful.

  "Why the Other Company?"

  "That may be how they were recruited by delinquent Tvonens. The 
  Chysa have a tendency towards deceit and magic. This, in a way, 
  parallels the philosophy of the Other Company. You know, they 
  are totally into deceit and trickery. In the Chysa culture, this 
  is considered to be exemplary behavior."

  "The question is, do they really know what they are doing, or 
  are they pawns?" Cruger said.

  The luminance of the color computer monitor reflected a bright 
  and diffused image off Tony's face. "We don't really know, but, 
  it would probably be a mistake to think that they are mindless 
  and don't really know what they're up to. Just because they are 
  not more technologically advanced than us doesn't mean that they 
  are stupider than us," Tony said. "In some ways, we are really 
  stupid. We may be destroying our planet beyond help. We have, 
  throughout history, committed genocide. We may be the most 
  homicidal intelligent life form that ever lived. Maybe the Chysa 
  aren't so stupid."

  Cruger couldn't disagree. In one breath, humans were aspiring to 
  godliness. In the next, humans were possibly the stupidest of 
  the "intelligent" life forms. Contemplating the possibilities of 
  combining stupidity and power frightened Cruger. Absolute power 
  corrupts absolutely. How could he, of all people -- Jack Cruger, 
  the laid-back musician -- be involved in what was starting to 
  sound, disappointingly, a hell of a lot like politics.

  Tony gave him a computer overview; Tony had accomplished a great 
  deal on the computer so far. When Cruger's attention and energy 
  level began to fall off quickly, they agreed to get together 
  again Saturday.


  The next day Cruger gave his accordion lessons as usual, except 
  an extra sense of pride and meaning filled what must have been a 
  void in his life. He was proud of himself, proud of Corrina, 
  happy with what life had recently dealt him. Now he was giving 
  something important back, possibly making the world a better 
  place. Heck, maybe making the universe a better place.

  The quote, we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and 
  never to be undone popped into his head. How true -- who had 
  said that? James, or maybe Emerson. Little did they know just 
  how right they were.


  Chapter Twelve
----------------

  The engaging back-beat of the legato bass-line anchored the 
  solid, driving blues that Cruger coaxed from his accordion. He 
  had developed yet another new technique: he played the bass line 
  with his left hand while reaching over and playing the melody, 
  higher on the keyboard, with his right hand. The bellows were 
  pumped with his elbows while both hands worked out the dirty 
  blues in synchronicity.

  Next, he picked up the tempo and banged out a respectable 
  arrangement of Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee." Corrina would like 
  this - - too bad she isn't home yet. The other night she heard 
  him playing "Dolphin Dance" and "On Green Dolphin Street." Was 
  he in a dolphin mood that night, whatever the hell a dolphin 
  mood may be? She was as surprised as she had yet been in their 
  three-year marriage -- wasn't she the one with the stack of 
  Miles, Bird, and Coltrane albums, while he had the most unhip of 
  old records ("The Schmucker brothers play the Catskills") piled 
  in their wall unit?

  "Hey, you're playing some good stuff, I can't believe it," she 
  had said.

  "Well, I'm just getting into some more jazz and classical to 
  broaden myself. Your bebop albums are pretty good after all, now 
  that I actually listen to them. I have to admit."

  She continued listening from the kitchen, not yet seeing and 
  questioning his instrument's secret blue sparks. Next he played 
  Bach's Toccata in D minor. Very dramatic. He finished up with a 
  rousing version of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Cruger clacked 
  the keys for percussive effect and even nursed a hypnotic 
  distortion from the box, blue streaks flying. Hendrix on 
  accordion? Maybe this is pushing it a little, he thought.


  Chapter Thirteen
------------------

  Bright and blue beyond belief, the Saturday morning sky hung 
  like a warm protective blanket across the wide sky. Tony walked 
  to the front door of Jack Cruger's house. Just as he heard the 
  slightest rustle of a sound, he turned to see something large, 
  colorful, and horrible. It was on him in an instant. Tony was 
  thrown hard to the concrete steps. As his clothes were ripped 
  and torn, he felt immobile, suffocated, entirely constrained and 
  helpless.

  He was punched, kicked, crushed, pinched and groped. Every 
  square inch of his body was touched, attacked, in some way. His 
  clothes were torn away from his body, leaving him naked, 
  exposed, humiliated.

  Tony's sense of time bogged-down to the slow-motion rate of 
  tragedy and disaster; the entire encounter really lasted only 
  seconds.

  He lay near death, only shock and the hallucinogenic aftertaste 
  of violence spared him from terrible pain.

  He swallowed the salty and fast-flowing blood that filled his 
  mouth. A slow calm kept him from panic. He knew to conserve 
  energy, to hug himself tight and construct a spiritual cocoon 
  around his destroyed body.

  Faint in the distance he heard the doorbell ring inside Cruger's 
  home. He felt himself slipping closer to that dark, cold cave 
  that filled his mind with images of pure fear. As if a brutal 
  joke were being played, Tony heard the thin beep-beep-beep of 
  his digital watch alarm -- telling him his time was up? Then, as 
  if hitting an ice slick, he slid quickly into the cold and 
  gloomy abyss of his nightmares. He was gone.


  Chapter Fourteen
------------------

  Friday had been a lousy looking day. The foggy and smoggy sky 
  pasted a dull gray tint across everything below it. Clouds, 
  trees, houses, birds, and cars absorbed the depressing dull 
  radiation and emitted a picture of impassive apathy.

  A rotten day.

  Saturday was different. In a climactic zone that rarely had 
  quickly-changing weather -- Cruger's friends on the East coast 
  saw wild weather swings like this all the time -- Saturday was a 
  big switch. The wind blew just strong enough to clear the skies 
  to a bright blue. The smog count was low, the conifer pollen 
  count high. Bright sunlight tunneled through Cruger's silky 
  curtains, illuminating small dust particles, the kind usually 
  never seen unless the light shines through them at a certain 
  angle.

  Cruger was home washing the dishes, Corrina just having left to 
  work. Cruger never taught lessons Saturday. Some Saturdays he 
  would play a birthday party, Bar Mitzvah, or wedding reception. 
  Not today. He wanted to sit and think. Pulling himself away from 
  the regular monotonous list of duties he usually attended to, he 
  would figure out what was happening in his life. Too much -- he 
  knew that at least.

  The doorbell rang. Cruger dried his hands and walked to the 
  front door.

  Cruger's stomach compressed into a tight knot. The horrid wake 
  of catastrophe flooded Cruger from his toes to his fingertips. 
  Tony lay face down on the doorstep, a puddle of crimson liquid 
  forming around his limp blond hair.

  Tony's innocent exuberance for life was gone, wasted, spilt like 
  a child's first glass of wine; spilled like Tony's blood across 
  Cruger's doorstep.

  Cruger reached down to feel for a pulse, but, he knew the answer 
  before he even began to bend over. The realization of Tony's 
  death hit him; the emotional collision with an overly harsh 
  reality demanded some necessarily inadequate dissipation of 
  unwanted energy. Cruger exhaled loudly "No . . .my God," and 
  then sunk to his knees, not knowing what to do.

  And that sound, what was that sound? Cruger then saw the black 
  digital sports watch on Tony's wrist, chirping its annoying 
  repetitious chirp over and over.

  Leon Harris stuck his head out of his front door. He saw Cruger 
  doubled over in front of his young friend, who lay in an 
  entirely unnatural position, limp armed and limp legged. Harris 
  ran across his lawn to Cruger's front step.

  "What happened?" Harris said.

  Cruger's heart fluttered like a bird's; his skin was flushed 
  from the neck up.

  "I don't know," Cruger said, "I think he's dead."

  Harris bent down and checked both Tony's carotid and radials 
  arteries for a pulse.

  "Yeah ... I'm afraid you're right."

  Cruger reached down and unstrapped the noisy watch from Tony's 
  lifeless wrist. Using the heel of his shoe, Cruger stomped down 
  on the fancy blue plastic watch a few times before it was 
  silenced. He wanted to see a spray of springs and clamps and 
  smoke pouting out like in the cartoons, but the watch only lay 
  there, in the stark sunlight, like Tony: beaten, broken, and 
  wasted.

  To be continued...

  Jeff Zias  (ZIAS1@AppleLink.Apple.com)
----------------------------------------
  
  Jeff Zias has written and managed software at Apple Computer for 
  ten years, and will soon begin a stint with a new software 
  company. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two small 
  children, playing jazz with Bay Area groups, writing software 
  and prose, and building toys for his children to trash. The 
  Unified Murder Theorem will continue next issue.


  FYI
=====

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  Thanks for swingin' past the farm. Ma loves it when you bring 
  the young folk to see us.
  
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