I turned my back on him and looked up at San Francisco and the little boats streaking the bay on the other side of the continent. Yes, we'd been friends once. Very good friends. We'd shared an apartment a long time ago, when he was only an assistant to an undersecretary and I was still haunting the Comus offices for a license to walk the boards. Even in those days the worm had been eating at Ted Nye. Maybe because he was so small. But he'd always been a man to grab tigers by the tail. He looked now like somebody hanging on to too big a tiger, afraid to let go. But that was his problem, not mine.

  I said with my back to him, "Why can't you leave me alone, Ted?" I shut my eyes and focused on the faint buzzing the scotch I'd drunk was setting up around me. "You've got what you want." I said. "Can't you let me have what I want too?"

  He said gently, "What's that, Howard?"

  "To be let alone, damn you." The words came out firmly, but they didn't quite ring true. Not quite. I made a frantic clutch at the walls of my buzzing room, in terror because they might stop buzzing. I could hear the sound grow thin, and it was Ted Nye's fault. He had breached my only bulwark, and I wanted suddenly to kill him.

  I thought, Maybe you don't know it, but the world is dead. Everything's dusty and still out there beyond the buzzing walls. The people aren't real. They're clockwork. You're clockwork too. There are clockwork birds in the trees and clockwork mice in the walls, but nothing has been breathing flesh since Miranda stopped abruptly, glared at me, and then turned to slap at the green, and ail voices terrify me because they sound that single monotone keynote of despair.

  Nye said, his voice shaking a little, "Don't try me too far, Howard." He was under a lot of tension, holding it down with an effort. "Maybe I know what you want better than you do." He slapped the red folder with my name on it. "I've got your psychograph here, every damned thing in it right up to date. Up to last night, when you spilled your guts under Pentothal. I know what makes you tick. I know more about you than you know yourself. If you don't——"

  The intercom on the desk burst into its musical hum. He stopped abruptly, glared at me, and then turned to slap at the button as if he were slapping my face. He was very near some kind of breaking point.

  The little greenish secretary said thinly, "Dr. Hallkils me to remind you about your rest period, Mr. Nye. And the senator from California says he can't wait much longer. What shall I——"

  "I don't care what the hell they say," Nye broke in sharply. "I'll be busy another ten minutes. If Morris can't wait, give him another appointment. I've got enough to worry about." He struck the button again and the green protesting face dwindled to a dot and vanished. Nye swung around to me.

  "Look," he said. "You used to be a good actor once. Maybe even a great one. Right now you're a drunken bum with nothing ahead of you but hard labor in Cropper camps until you get too beat to carry. Then they'll dump you. I'm offering a chance to pull out of it. I've bought up your contract. I've got a job you may be able to do. I need you. I'd like to help you if I can. But it's all up to you, Howard."

  I said desperately, "I'm washed up in the theater, Ted. Remember?"

  "You think you are. Suppose we give it another try. I need actors, Howard. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. There aren't enough qualified men in the country for the work I have in mind. Once we get the alcohol soaked out of you and the medication you need pumped in, you can do the job. I'm not asking you, Howard. I'm telling you."

  Something of his urgency vibrated a little through the thin drawn walls that protected me from the world. I knew I shouldn't listen. But somewhere in one of those back rooms of the mind a wild, irrational Rohan who could still believe the impossible began to stir. Maybe there still was a chance for me. To get free of the contract, to be my own man again, to try once more for the old, wonderful, glittering life ...

  For a moment the protective wall ceased vibrating. In that moment there came flooding back over me in one enormous wave the memory of the past. Miranda. The life we lived together. All the things we had known and shared in that vivid world there was so much to buy, so much to enjoy. I let the parties we went to swirl around in my mind like smoke. The wonderful parties. The music by the finest orchestras in the country. The magnificent gowns the women wore, the jewels like big drops of fire, the perfume, the glow. The dazzling talk, because the finest wits of the nation congregated right where we all did, around Andrew Raleigh. The old man himself, tall, ruddy-faced, in those wonderful, spotless, creaseless uniforms he wore once and then gave away. His air of majesty. That whole tremendous feel of being alive and functioning in the very center of the world while the universe revolved around us because we were ourselves, making it turn.

  "You can do the job. I'm not asking, I'm telling you." Nye's words echoed themselves in my mind. Tremulously, in hope and terror, I thought, Maybe he's right. Maybe I still have a chance.

  "What—what kind of a job is it?" I asked, my voice sounding thin and distant. "What kind of theater, Ted?"

  And I heard his answer remotely, too, filtered through swirls of doubt and hope. "I want you to handle a traveling theater troupe. I'm sending out several to—to one of the areas. Open-air, ring performances they'll be. I need somebody who can act, manage, direct, every damn thing they need."

  I said doubtfully. "I've never done theater-in-the-round, Ted. And—traveling? Like the old-time circuses? You know that won't pull. Nobody's interested in legit any more except in the biggest cities. I don't get it. I——"

  "Let me worry about that, Howard. Will you do it, or do you want to go back where I found you?"

  While I hesitated the intercom sang musically again and Nye slipped it on to receiving so hard the image in the screen jiggled as it dawned. The greenish secretary was already talking, throwing all her biggest names in first to catch Nye's attention before he cut her off.

  "—Vice-President," she was saying, "and he's got to talk to President Raleigh before——"

  Nye shot me a quick glance and then punched the earphone button hard. The little voice went silent. Nye snatched up the earcup and pressed it to his ear, his eyes going unfocused as he listened. When he stopped looking at me and his face was unguarded, somehow the fullness and the color under his skin seemed to drain away, leaving him just a little withered, just a little like the way he might look the day after he died.

  "Trouble," I said to myself. "Bad trouble. At least, in the Croppers I'm safe. Do I want to stick my neck out this far?"

  A motion in the round cage where the canary hung caught my eye. Roused by the rival music of the intercom, the canary shook himself and then dived suddenly under one wing and began tousling his feathers fiercely in search of mites. The sight of him sent a ferocious wave of the old itching in surges over me. I could smell the sweat and disinfectant again, feel the weariness and the stupor and the itching like ghostly fire so strong that sweat broke out on my forehead with the violence of my effort not to scratch.

  I looked at Nye's face and his thin, tense shoulders under the striped shirt. I looked around me at the rich, hushed office. I felt the vibrations under my feet of the vast activities below us that cupped the whole nation in the hollow of one man's hand.

  And suddenly I hated Ted Nye, and envied him fiercely, and in a way felt love and pity for the driven little man I had once known so well. A sudden, furious storm of feeling swept through me like cold sleet. I knew I had to live again. Act again. Move and feel power and make the world turn. No matter how hard the work might be, no matter how much it cost me, no matter what the dangers—I had to do it. My safe little magic room built out of alcohol wasn't my room any more. Ted Nye had shattered it from the first moment he called me back to life.

  I hated him for that. I hated him for his success and power. I felt a deep, continuous tremor of sheer terror start to vibrate inside me high up under the rib cage, where the seat of emotion is. Scared, resentful, hating Ted and the world and myself, I drew a breath as deep as my chest would hold and said in a flat voice, without any emotion at all,

  "Okay, Ted. I'll take your job."

  -

  CHAPTER IV

  THEY HAD THIS marble slab in the steam room, with white clouds hissing out all around it. The nurse said to stretch out my back and relax for a while. I shrouded myself decently in the sheet and did as I was told. It felt good. You can feel the vertebrae relaxing and all the bones and muscles along the rib cage readjust when you lie out flat on a hard surface.

  A figure loomed up over me in the fog. Ted Nye's voice said, "Awake, Howard?" and I peered up to see him larger than life among the clouds and togaed like a Roman in his sheet.

  "Here comes poor Brutus, with himself at war," I said. I'd had twenty-four hours of treatment, and I was feeling much better now. "This is a surprise. I didn't expect to rate any more of your valuable time."

  "What do you mean, with myself at war?" he asked, looking down at me suspiciously.

  "Something's eating you," I said. "Anybody can see that. Maybe I should have started off with, 'Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?' It's obvious."

  He rubbed a hand over his face and looked at it vacantly, as if he hoped the expression would come off so he could inspect it on his palm, like dirt. "Yes, I've got plenty eating me. The whole country has. When Raleigh dies all hell is going to break loose, or try to. Don't tell me you haven't heard rumors."

  "In my social circles," I told him, "we haven't kept up with the news."

  He sighed, let himself down stiffly on the adjoining slab, and then grunted with satisfaction as his vertebrae went through the same procedure mine had. He rolled his head sidewise to look at me.

  "I don't need to see my face," he said. "I know I've got problems. I want to talk to you, Howard. I've briefed the other theater managers myself. I'll give you the same, and a little more." But he paused there, looking up into the steam. Abruptly he said, "Do you ever think about the old days, Howard?"

  "It was a long time ago," I said noncommittally. "Why?"

  "No reason, no reason." He paused again. "I'm glad you're going to work with us, Howard. We need all the good men we can get."

  Well, that wasn't the way I'd been hearing it, but I didn't say anything. He was right on one question, anyhow. After Raleigh died all hell would break loose unless a lot of changes got made. The yoke of Comus was getting pretty heavy. And Comus, according to the rumors I'd heard, was frightened by the prospect of change. New values, new concepts that might supersede the old ones. To hold the country safe, Raleigh had had to hold it rigid. The ferment of new ideas might so easily undermine our hard-won stability.

  So Comus maybe needed good men more than it really knew, but it wasn't trying very hard to find them. Comus was trying instead to stop all change, all time. The young men and women with new ideas had to be controlled. No matter how high they might test on the school creativity scale, if they could threaten even latently, the social order Raleigh and Comus were founded on, then they must never receive training or acquire skills. Sooner or later the psychographs would click through the big computers and directives would emerge.

  John Smith has failed his entrance exams at Cal Tech.

  Mary Jones is ineligible for training at John Hopkins.

  And even if John and Mary knew they hadn't failed, what could they do about it? Well, I thought, nobody ever claimed the system is perfect. On the other hand, let's not pretend we're trying very hard to get the men and women we need into the jobs they do best.

  'Tell me the worst," I said. "You mentioned this theater work might be a little bit dangerous. How?"

  He cleared his throat, and something in my mind began to tighten. I thought. This is the old familiar Ted. He isn't going to tell the truth now, but a part of what he says will be true. I may be able to winnow out the truth from the falsehood if I listen close. Oddly, it didn't make me angry. This was Ted Nye, the bad mixed right in there with the good, as it is all of us.

  "This theater project is a big operation," he said. "Important. A lot may depend on it. We're having a—a little trouble in the place where you'll be going."

  "All right. Name the place."

  He hesitated. Then, almost wincingly, as if the word hurt him, he said, "California."

  I said, "All right, California it is." Then I did a quick mental double-take and said, "What? California!" For at the back of my mind a sudden door seemed to swing wide and then shut with a slam. Through it I had the briefest of glimpses of—something I couldn't remember. Something in a dream. A man named Comus stooping over my bed and telling me I was headed for California. How could I have known that, even in a dream? Or had it been a dream at all?

  "What do you know about California?" Nye demanded suspiciously. I wasn't listening. This looked like a paradox and it needed figuring. Had someone really stooped whispering over my bed while I slept? Part of it made sense. But only part. The rest of his message, involving the death of Comus and the mysterious use of something called an antic—no, that was ridiculous. Had it really been antic he'd said? I murmured it aloud to myself, testing the sound. "Antic," I said. "Antic."

  There was a furious swirl in the fog and Ted Nye was stooping over me, shaking me by both shoulders.

  "What did you say? Answer me, Howard! What do you know about the Anti-Com?" His little eyes, hot and anxious, blazed at me.

  I said, "Let go. Stop it, Ted. I didn't say anything."

  He shook me again. "I heard you. Tell me what you know!"

  "I don't know anything." I sat up and pushed him away. My heat was beginning to thud a little, because his excitement was infectious, but none of it made sense yet. "What in the name of God," I asked, "is an Anti-Com?"

  "You said it," he accused me. "You know."

  "I said antic. It doesn't mean anything. It's just part of a crazy dream I had. You reminded me of it. What are you talking about, Ted? What's wrong?"

  Still searching my face anxiously, he sat down again on his slab, muttering mostly to himself as he gazed at me, "You can't know. I remember now. You'd have spilled it under Pentothal if you knew anything." But he shook his head doubtfully.

  "Put me back under Pentothal if you doubt it," I urged him. "But you can't just drop this right here. What's the story?"

  "I guess you'd better know," Nye said heavily. "I hope it isn't common knowledge. As near as Comus samplings can tell, we've kept it quiet so far, but——"

  "Then you've kept it quiet. When a Comus sampling turns up false, they'll repeal the law of gravity. Even in my ivory tower I know that much."

  "Howard," Nye said, leaning forward on his slab, "in California the law of gravity has been repealed."

  I looked at him and waited. He licked his lips. "This isn't to be repeated outside California," he said. "But you'll soon know anyhow. We've withdrawn Comus from California."

  I said quietly, "My God."

  Then I got up on one elbow and stared at him. Then I sat clear up and put my bare feet on the floor, and we sat them knee to knee in our sheets, looking at each other across the steamy dimness like two ghosts on tombstones, trying to comprehend the end of the world.

  "You really mean it!" I said.

  If you were born, as I was, after 1960 you have, as I do, a strange sort of image in your mind. When you think of the United States you see it in the shape of Andrew Raleigh. You see the map and the nation standing up on two legs with the outlines of a man containing it, vast, diaphanous, towering, all the states in place, all the borders outlining the figure of Andrew Raleigh. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't have to. That's just the way you grow up thinking if you went to school with my generation.

  And Raleigh and Comus mean the same thing. You can't imagine life without Comus. Comus is everybody. It's the newspapers, the schools, the entertainment. It's the communications-theory boys who quantify language, the public-relations people, the psychologists, the artists in all media who take the prescriptions the computers feed them and build sugar-coated truths that will cure any social bellyache before society knows it had one.

  You can't get along without Comus. Life would be too unpredictable. Society would crumble like cheap cement. I looked at Ted Nye in the swirls of steam, and a sudden sense of awe came over me. Sure, he was a big shot, high up in the government, but then I used to be a big shot too. I took the man for granted in the old days.

  But now the awareness of his tremendous responsibility suddenly hit me in the face, and it came to me with a shock that I was talking to the man who ran Comus. The man, in fact, who had organized Comus for nearly half its lifetime, the latter and expanding half, and who was therefore responsible for a lot more than half of its complexity and power over the lives and minds and future of the United States.

  Nye was the man who bossed the god.

  And Nye was the man with the fox gnawing at his vitals. Maybe the fox was California. I had a sudden, idiotic cartoon vision of a long, narrow fox with a bend at one end, shaped like the state, ahead up near Eureka and a tail at San Diego, and little scuttling legs on the other side, gnawing away at a cartoon of Nye at the solar plexus of the nation, where all the nerve nets join. No wonder the man was jumpy.