When he opened his eyes again, the tall man in black was standing over him. He had the whitest face Benson had ever seen—so white that he seemed practically transparent. “I’m awake,” Benson told him.

  “I know you are.”

  “What is it you want? Do you have to change the bed or something?”

  “You have been wronged.” The man in black spoke slowly, in a loud whisper. “You would say shortchanged. I have come to set things right.”

  Benson shut his eyes again. No doubt he was entitled to some hospital amenity that he was not receiving, a TV in his room or an evening snack.

  “You have never dreamed.”

  He had told someone about it not long ago; perhaps it had been this tall man in black. The darkness he saw with his eyes closed was the tall man’s black clothing. He had never known it, yet it did not seems strange.

  Far off, in a palace beyond the universe, the man in black said, “You will dream now, Timothy Otis Benson, for as long as may be.”

  · · · ·

  He sat up. He had lain down, apparently, on the front seat of his car. Drunk? He hadn’t been drunk since college.

  Something fell from the seat with a melodious clang, and he bent to pick it up.

  It looked like a guitar yet unlike one too, a tinny affair someone with more skill than sense had made from one of his mufflers and a section of tailpipe, guitar-like but given the S-shaped sound holes of a violin.

  Turning it over, he verified that it was in fact (as he had supposed from the first moment he saw it) made from a Magus muffler; Magus’s clouded moon was stamped boldly on what was now the back, although the trade name itself, which should have appeared there in capital letters, was missing.

  As were the sensuous curves of a real guitar, or for that matter a real violin. This—his questing thumb woke a chord from the five silver strings—was as plain and straight-sided as any prepubescent girl.

  How did the song go?

  “Little Missy Riddle,

  Haul ’em away.”

  He had meant only to mutter the words, but their old magic overcame him at once; his voice echoed from the windows and the windshield, in some fashion transmuted to mellow gold.

  “Little Missy Riddle,

  Haul ’em away.

  She broke her brand-new fiddle,

  Haul ’em away.

  Got a hole right up the middle!

  Haul ’em away,

  To me holly heigh ho!”

  Benson grinned as he ducked beneath the Magus-guitar’s thin strap. Could you really play this thing?

  “Little Missy Taylor,

  Haul ’em away.

  Said she’d never love a sailor,

  Haul ’em away.

  She’s been harpooned by a whaler!

  Haul ’em away,

  To me holly heigh ho!”

  He had never played, never sung, half so well; moved by innocent vanity, he looked around to see whether anyone had been listening.

  Cars, trucks, and buses surrounded him, motionless in the slanting rays of a brighter sun. No brake light glowed crimson now, no exhaust fouled the clear air.

  Here in his car that air was warm and musty, and growing warmer. He depressed a switch in the armrest to put down his window, but the glass remained where it was. Turning the key kindled no instrument lights, woke no sleeping tiger in the engine.

  He opened the door and got out. Morning was fresh and beautiful, and ghostly in its silence save for the barking of a small dog far off. A jet-black cat with eyes like emeralds blinked at him, spat, and retreated beneath a rusty minivan.

  Before and behind him, the sixteen lanes of Interstate 75 stretched as far as he could see, eight north, eight south. Every lane was filled, and every bumper touched another.

  He turned back, remembering that he had left his key in the ignition; but he had locked the door behind him, or it had locked itself. There were no keys in the pockets of the worn workpants he wore, no money, no driver’s license, no credit cards, and no handkerchief.

  “I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime,

  Everybody gets hard luck sometime.”

  He had not meant to play, but the low-down blues notes stole out of the Magus-guitar, possessed by a will of their own.

  “Mama don’t treat your daughter mean,

  That’s the meanest woman that ever I seen.”

  The door of a station wagon several cars up the lane swung open and a sleepy-eyed woman in a threadbare housedress got out. Thinking she might be offended, he switched songs.

  “Woke up this mornin’ with the blues ’round my bed.

  Yep, woke up this mornin’ with blues ’round my bed.

  Went to eat breakfast, got blues in my bread.”

  The woman called “You hungry?” and started toward him.

  “Good mornin’, Blues, how d’ye do?

  Good mornin’, Blues, how d’ye do?

  Feelin’ good, Partner. How ’bout you?”

  Nearer now, the woman repeated, “You hungry?”

  Benson shook his head.

  “We got a few little somethings left over from last night. The chowchopper come last night.”

  “I’m really not hungry,” Benson told her. “I just hope my singing didn’t disturb you.”

  The woman smiled, and at once the smile made her younger and almost attractive. “I was just layin’ there in our car awake, thinkin’. You sure can sing. I never heard nobody on the radio better’n what you are. Not near as good.”

  “Thank you,” Benson said.

  “They don’ play music much, and ain’t good when they do. Maybe you’d play me just one song?”

  “If it won’t wake people up.”

  Another car door opened; the man who got out said, “Go ahead. Nobody’s goin’ to complain.”

  “A love song,” the woman said, and Benson nodded.

  “As I was a-walking down Strawberry Lane,

  Where the roses grow pretty and fine,

  I happened to meet a merry, fair maid,

  That would be a lover of mine…”

  By the time the song was finished, there were ten or more ragged people around him, some awed, many smiling. Someone shouted, “Another song!,” seconded at once by the woman: “Play another one, won’t you?”

  Benson winked at the nearest man and began it.

  “I’m a lonely bushwhacker on the Reed County Line,

  I can lick any bastard, yokes one ox o’ mine.

  If ever I catch him, you bet that I’ll try,

  I’ll lick him with the oxbow,

  Root, hog, or die!

  “Git out upon that lonely road,

  Crack your whip ’n haul your load,

  Whip ’em, boys, and holler,

  Yell and cuss ’em ’til you’re dry,

  It’s whack them cattle on, boys.

  Root, hog, or die!”

  Benson glanced around him. He had fifty listeners now, perhaps a hundred. As he launched into the third verse, he told himself firmly that he should play no more than three songs for them. It was better—far better—to get offstage while you were still welcome, still being applauded with honest enthusiasm. He would count “Strawberry Lane” as the first, this as the second.

  “Sing another like that ’un!” a man in the crowd called when he had finished.

  Benson shook his head. “There are no more like that.”

  “Sing a good one,” the man he had winked at said. “You know what you got.”

  “Shenando’” seemed the only possible choice. He began to walk before he finished the first verse, afraid at first that they would follow him, and fearful that they would not.

  And when the last was sung, and the last of those who had had dropped behind him, the Magus-guitar sang still, murmuring the haunting melody of the wooded Eastern river and the cruel, hot, Western flood men had once called the Big Muddy, a mile wide and an inch deep, too thick to drink and too thin to plow, relentlessly rolling to the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Where are you goin’, mister?” a boy shouted.

  “Moving on,” Benson told him, and sang “The Wayfaring Stranger” for him, and then walked on as he had promised.

  Where was he going, and where had he been? Once he had sold franchises for a company that was to all intents and purposes a fraud. Bit by bit, he had made the thing real, providing the training that had been promised, upgrading the cheap and sleazy replacement parts, arranging—it had been his one stroke of genius—to sell stock to the franchisees, and welding them, his people, into the force with which he had seized control.

  It seemed a very long time ago, something he had worried about once but need worry about no longer. For a moment he paused to study his reflection in the window of a big, black, limo-like vehicle, a window cleaner than most.

  He looked as he had always supposed himself to look. A tickle from the back of his mind reminded him, for a moment only, that of late he had not looked like that—had been shocked, in fact, each time he saw his own face in a mirror. He turned away, and the tickle ceased.

  He was going to marry somebody again, marry a woman he loved, he felt sure, though he could not lay hand to her name at the moment. She would be pleased, whoever she was, to see him looking so young. Or anyway to see him no longer looking old.

  “Can you play that thing?” a man much younger than he asked.

  Benson nodded. “I’ll play you a song, and sing it too, if you’ll stroll along with me.”

  The young man hesitated, then grinned. “One song? That shouldn’t be very far. They can’t get too mad if you just walk for one song.”

  “Ah,” Benson said, wondering who “they” were.

  “’Sides, if you play like most others I’ve heard, one song ought to be enough. Maybe too much.”

  “This is the way I play,” Benson told him, and his fingers (almost carelessly, it seemed to him) called forth the melody of “Londonderry Air.”

  “Say,” the young man croaked when the last note had faded, “you’re good. You’re real good.” He sounded almost reverent.

  “Thank you,” Benson said. “It’s a good tune, though. So good that some have called it the most beautiful ever written. It’s hard to go wrong with a tune like that if you can play it at all.”

  “You said you’d sing, though. You didn’t sing.”

  “That was before you implied that the way I played one song would be more than enough,” Benson explained. “Since it was my playing you’d questioned, I let you hear that. Nothing compels me to sing for people who don’t like my music.”

  “Are you going to sing now?” the young man asked. “I’ll come along.”

  “No,” Benson told him, and walked on, a little upset with himself at first, but soon feeling oddly at peace.

  He had walked two miles if not more before he understood the feeling. He was at peace because he had been given what, in the depths of his soul, he had always wanted. It was an article of faith with many people that what one wants is never enough when one achieves it.

  But that was only because so many—himself included—enjoyed the chase, the struggle, the pursuit of some distant goal. Mountain climbers, when they had at length conquered the peak that had frustrated their efforts for months or years, went looking for more difficult heights. Not because they were insatiable, but because they enjoyed pitting their courage and their skills against Nature.

  He had liked pitting himself against Business, had liked being more duplicitous than the crooks, cheating them as they had cheated others, enjoyed beating the corporate politicians at corporate politics—then striking down those who tried to play politics with him.

  All that was true; but underneath it, he had longed for this, had longed to be a simple man living among simple people, seeing their faces glow when he sang the old songs. He had been in a hospital; he was quite sure that he remembered that. Someone must have given him this to cure him.

  As it had.

  The persistent whick-whick-whick of a helicopter sounded in the distance. It drew scores of people from cars to look at it, and point, and shout to one another. Benson stopped to look, too, shading his eyes with his hand. It was a big one, as large as the largest military helicopter he had ever seen, but slate blue or blue-gray, not the desert camouflage of the United States Army.

  It slowed as it passed overhead, then settled, almost but not quite landing. Men ran to it, queuing up to form a line that soon stretched twenty or thirty yards between the motionless lines of rusty cars and trucks. Benson joined them.

  Glancing behind him, he saw hundreds of women and children falling into line in back of the men. A barefoot young woman, a lanky blonde of perhaps seventeen, dashed past him and was admitted to the line by a young man who might profitably have pursued a career in professional football. There was a rumble of complaint, soon stilled.

  “Should be eggs today,” the man standing behind Benson said happily.

  Benson nodded his agreement. Far ahead, flat white boxes about eight inches by eight were being passed out by the crew of the helicopter, together with… He strained his eyes.

  Men who had been at the front of the line were drifting back now, some eating from the flat boxes they carried, more drinking from clear, squat bottles that were distorted by the pressure of their fingers.

  “Hope we get there ’fore the water runs out,” the man behind Benson said.

  “I’d like a nice drink of water myself,” Benson admitted.

  “They ought to take as many waters as crackerboxes,” the man continued bitterly. “They never do. Water’s cheaper, too, only they don’t like to bring it.”

  “It’s heavier, I imagine,” Benson said.

  The man ahead of him turned to stare back at him. “What’s that got to do with it? It’s just water.”

  “Weight limits the amount of cargo that a helicopter can carry,” Benson explained. “The size of the fuselage is just a matter of convenience, really. Capacity is determined by the power of the engines and the configurations of the rotors.”

  The man behind him asked, “You from hereabouts?”

  “From this city?” For a half a second, Benson considered. “Why, yes, I suppose I am. At least—”

  The fist of the man behind him caught him just below the ribs, sending him staggering forward. Something struck the side of his head, and something else, presumably a kick, the side of one knee. He fell, dropping the Magus-guitar. Shoed and booted feet attacked him like a flock of birds. He rolled, covering his head with his arms, his legs drawn up to protect his belly.

  Someone sprawled on top of him. He gasped and struggled before realizing that the body above his was not that of a new attacker. Overhead, in the lofty space occupied by those who still stood, a woman said, “Don’t get him,” and a man: “That’s enough! Hold on!”

  The protecting body vanished. Benson coughed and spat, wondering how badly he had been hurt. There was no blood in his spittle—or if there was, the dust in his eyes kept him from seeing it.

  They were still talking above his head. A new voice, a boy’s or a very young man’s, said, “I guess he didn’t know. I ought to have told him.” Was that the young man for whom he had played “Londonderry Air”? Benson tried to get to his feet, and succeeded in getting to his knees.

  Someone nudged his arm with a booted foot, saying, “You. Get up.”

  He did, finding that he could stand although his legs were shaky.

  “You get back there to the end.” It was the hulking young man who had allowed the lanky blonde to join him in line.

  Benson nodded, still too dazed to speak. Magically, it seemed, the Magus-guitar was in his hands as before.

  “Come on.” This was a new young man, short and slight. “You made that out of a muffler, didn’t you?”

  Benson cleared his throat and spat again.

  “I never seen one like that.”

  He managed to nod. “A replacement muffler.” He came very near to adding that it was one of his, one of his company’s. He really had made that muffler, in a sense, although not as an instrument.

  “You cut those fancy holes with a li’l file? There’s a man by us had a file.” The young man himself was grasping what seemed to be a hubcap with a dozen wires strung across it, a rude harp or lyre.

  Benson contrived to say something suitable.

  “It get busted? I’d like to hear it.”

  Dusting his hands, he spat again. “I owe you a lot more than that.” He offered to shake hands, conscious that his own was soiled, but conscious too that the one it would be shaking would be soiled at least as badly. “I’m Tim Benson.”

  The young man’s hand was small, but surprising hard and muscular. “Aldo Berry. We both of us play, an’ we both got names with a B.”

  They had come to the end of the line, the place marked by a bedraggled child who said, “You won’t neither get nothin’. Me neither.” Her small face was sad and resigned.

  “What’s your name?” Benson asked her. “You know ours, if you were listening. I’m Tim and he’s Aldo. Who are you?”

  “B’neice.”

  “How old are you, B’neice?”

  “Ber-nice!”

  Benson was so involved with his thoughts that he scarcely heard her. This young man, Aldo, was presumably a musician of some kind; that explained his rushing to the aid of a stranger—the age-old sympathy of one performer for another. And now his rescuer wanted him to play.

  Unbidden, his fingers caressed the strings, evoking for perhaps the millionth time since its composition the old Irish melody.

  “The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him…”

  Aldo opened his mouth to speak, gulped, stammered, and at last managed to say, “You got to learn me.”

  Benson sighed. Had he ever been this young? Yes. Yes, of course. He tried to say that he had very little of value to teach anyone—that what he really needed was courage like the boy’s own, adding, “You play and sing yourself, don’t you? You implied a moment ago that you did.”