“Hey!” said his friend. “You made it!”

  “Of course,” Wade said, feeling the pleasure of understatement.

  “This calls for a celebration,” said his friend. “I’m taking you out tonight and buying you the biggest steak you ever saw—hey, what’s the matter?”

  Professor Wade was blushing.

  X—

  DEAR DIARY

  JUNE 10, 1954 Dear Diary:

  Honest, sometimes I get so sick of this damn furnished room I could absolutely vomit!

  The window is so dirty—half the time on Saturday and Sunday mornings I think it’s going to rain even if the sun is shining.

  And such a view! Underwear yet, dripping on wash lines. Girdles, overalls. If it isn’t enough to make a girl wish she was dead. It all stinks.

  And that journey across the hall. He makes life worse than it is. Where he gets his money for booze, who knows? Probably he robs old ladies. Drunk—sings all the time, makes lunges at me in that hallway that looks like a dungeon hall in an Errol Flynn picture. For two cents— less—I’d send to the mail order factory for a thirty-two caliber pistol. Then I’d shoot the crumb. They’d put me away, no more worries. Aaah, it ain’t worth it.

  And what jolly joy is tomorrow night. Harry Hartley takes me to the Paramount and for one lousy show and a cheap chow mein feed he wants I should play wife to him all night. Honest, men!

  Honest, it’s so stinking hot.

  Now I have to wash out some stuff for tomorrow. I hate to think about it. Oh, shut up! Those dumb dopes across the way—jabber, jabber! New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers—they should all drop dead!

  And when I think of that lousy subway ride tomorrow— twice! Those bodies like sardines, the faces popping like roses. Some pleasure!

  God, what I wouldn’t do to get away from this. I’d even 103

  marry Harry Hartley and if I’d do that,-I know things are bad.

  Oh, to go to Hollywood and be a star like Ava Gardner or them. Having the men fall all over themselves to kiss your hand. Go away, Clark, you bother me. Yeah, he should bother me. I’d crawl all over him.

  Oooh, this lousy, stinking place! A girl hasn’t no future here. What can I look forward to? No guy who likes me except that fat dope. Chow Mein Harry I think I’ll call him.

  Vacation in two weeks. Two weeks of nothing. Go to Coney with Gladys. Sit on the damn beach and look at the garbage float on the water and go crazy watching kids neck themselves blind. Then I get all sun-burned and maybe a fever even. And I go to a million movies. It’s some life.

  I wish it was a couple of thousand years from now, that’s what I wish. Then—no work. I live in a fancy spot and they have rocket ships and you can eat pills for a meal and free love. Would I go for that! The pills, of course. Like fun!

  This isn’t no time to be living. Wars, people yelling at each other and what can a girl expect out of life?

  Oh, I’ve got to wash my lousy underwear.

  June 10, 3954

  Dear Factum:

  Sometimes—yes!—I become so ill of this cursed plastoid dwelling that I could be inclined toward regurgitation.

  What a dismal view!

  The spaceport across the highway. All night—buzz, buzz—and those red shooting exhausts from the vents. Even taking the pills and rubbing narcotilotion on my eyes and ears doesn’t help. It is all quite sufficient to make me ill. It is all very foul.

  And that idiot neighbor with his ray machine. It infuriates me to know that he can see through the plastoid. Even when I put up my fibre screen I feel him staring. Where does he get the purchase tickets for his invention materials? His job at the spaceport doesn’t pay enough. I dare say he steals exchange tickets from the business office.

  For two minimatickets I’d get myself an atomizer gun from the spaceport armory and decompose the damned lecher! Then they’d put me away in the Venus pits and I’d be all set.

  No, it isn’t worth it. I can’t stand heat and I loathe sand storms.

  And tomorrow night—oh, foul joy—Hendrick Halley takes me to the Space Theatre and for one wretched performance and a dull meal of fricaseed lunar bat he expects me to undergo the risk of impregnation. Honestly, men.

  Oh, it’s so dreadfully warm. And my fool electro washer has to be mis-aligned just when I need it. I’ll have to fly down to the Spaceomat to wash my clothes and I do so weary of night flying.

  Oh, there they go again—those fools across the way. Why don’t they turn off their speakers? This damned local board has to know every word we say. There they go again! Martian Eagles, Lunar Red Sox—may they all succumb to a vacuum.

  And when I think of that miserable spaceship ride tomorrow—twice! That lumbering monstrosity. Imagine— more than an hour to Mars for heaven’s sake!

  Oh, it’s too much. What I wouldn’t do to get away from it all. I’d even undergo a societal juncture with Hendrick Halley. Great galaxies, things can’t be that advanced!

  Oh, to go to the theatre capital and be a notable like Gell Fig or someone like her. To have all the men swooning and begging you to fly with them to their country planets. I do loathe this shiny spotless city.

  Oh, this vile spot! What future has a young woman here? None. I have no man who appeals—certainly not lunar-bat Halley with his nasty little ship that has rusty seams. I wouldn’t even trust that wreck on a hop to Europa.

  Vacationing in two weeks. Nothing to do. Dull trip to The Moon Resort. Sitting by that godawful pool and watching the young people pleasure themselves. And then I get that red dust in my nostrils and get a fever. And a million trips to the Space Theatre. Oh, how pitiful.

  I wish it were the olden days, many thousands of years ago. Then a person could know what was what. There was so much to do. Men were men and not bald, toothless idiots they are now.

  I could do much as I pleased without the government checking my every step.

  This is no time to be alive. What can a young woman like myself expect in these times?

  Oh, curses. I must fly down to the Spacomat and get my clothes done.

  XXXX

  Dear Slab:

  Sometimes I get so sick of this damn cave I could …

  XX—

  TO FIT THE CRIME

  “I’VE BEEN murdered!” cried ancient Iverson Lord, “brutally, foully murdered!”

  “There, there,” said his wife.

  “Now, now,” said his doctor.

  “Garbage,” murmured his son.

  “As soon expect sympathy from mushrooms!” snarled the decaying poet. “From cabbages!”

  “From kings,” said his son.

  The parchment face flinted momentarily, then sagged into meditative creases. “Aye, they will miss me,” he sighed. “The kings of language, the emperors of the tongue.” He closed his eyes. “The lords of splendrous symbol, they shall know when I have passed.”

  The moulding scholar lay propped on a cloudbank of pillows. A peak of silken dressing gown erupted his turkey throat and head. His head was large, an eroded football with lace holes for eyes and a snapping gash of a mouth.

  He looked over them all; his wife, his daughter, his son and his doctor. His beady suspicious eyes played about the room. He glared at the walls. “Assassins,” he grumbled. The doctor reached for his wrist.

  “Avaunt!” snapped the hunched-over semanticist, clawing out. “Take off your clumsy fingers!”

  He threw an ired glance at the physician. “White collar witch doctors,” he accused, “who take the Hypocratic Oath and mash it into common vaudeville.”

  “Iverson, your wrist,” said the doctor.

  “Who knuckle-tap our chests and sounds our hearts yet have no more conception of our ills than plumbers have of stars or pigs of paradise.”

  “Your wrist, Iverson,” the doctor said.

  Iverson Lord was near ninety. His limbs were glasslike and brittle. His blood ran slow. His heartbeat was a largo drum. Only his brain hung clear and unaffected, a last soldier defending the fort against senility.

  “I refuse to die,” he announced as if someone had suggested it. His face darkened. “I will not let bleak nature dim my light nor strip the jewel of being from my fingers!”

  “There, there,” said his wife.

  “There, there! There, there! rasped the poet, false teeth clicking in an outrage. “What betrayal is this! That I, who shape my words and breathe into their forms the breath of might, should be a-fettered to this cliche-ridden imbecile!”

  Mrs. Lord submitted her delicate presence to the abuse of her husband. She strained out a peace-making smile which played upon her features of faded rose. She plucked feebly at mouse-grey curls.

  “You’re upset, Ivie dear,” she said.

  “Upset!” he cried. “Who would not be upset when set upon by gloating jackals!”

  “Father,” his daughter implored.

  “Jackals, whose brains like sterile lumps beneath their skulls refuse to emanate the vaguest glow of insight into words.”

  He narrowed his eyes and gave his life-long lecture once again. “Who cannot deal with word cannot deal with thought,” he said. “Who cannot deal with thought should be dealt with—mercilessly!” He pounded a strengthless fist on the counterpane.

  “Words!” he cried. “Our tools, our glory and our welded chains!”

  “You’d better save your strength,” his son suggested.

  The jade eyes stabbed up, demolishing. Iverson Lord curled thin lips in revulsion.

  “Bug,” he said.

  His son looked down on him. “Compose your affairs, Father,” he said. “Accept. You’ll find death not half bad.”

  “I am not dying!” howled the old poet. “You’d murder me, wouldn’t you! Thug! I shall not listen further!”

  He jerked up the covers and buried his white-crowned head beneath them. Only his scrawny, dry fingers dribbled over the sheet edge.

  “Ivie, dear,” entreated his wife. “You’ll smother yourself.”

  “Better smothered than betrayed!” came the muffled rejoinder.

  The doctor drew back the blankets.

  “Murdered!” croaked Iverson Lord at all of them, “brutally, foully murdered!”

  “Ivie, dear, no one has murdered you,” said his wife. “We’ve tried to be good to you.”

  “Good!” He grew apoplectic. “Mute good. Groveling good. Insignificant good. Ah! That I should have created the barren flesh about this bed of pain.”

  “Father, don’t,” begged his daughter.

  Iverson Lord looked upon her. A look of stage indulgence flickered on his face.

  “So Eunice, my bespectacled owl,” he said, “I suppose you are as eager as the rest to view your sire in the act of perishing.”

  “Father, don’t talk that way,” said myopic Eunice.

  “What way, Eunice, my tooth-ridden gobbler—my erupted Venus? In illiterate English? Yes, perhaps that does put rather a strain on your embalmed faculties.”

  Eunice blinked. She accepted.

  “What will you do, child,” inquired Iverson Lord, “when I am taken from you? Who will speak to you? Indeed, who will even look?” The old eyes glittered a coup de grace. “Let there be no equivocation, my dear,” he said gently. “You are ugly in the extreme.”

  “Ivie, dear,” pleaded Mrs. Lord.

  “Leave her alone!” said Alfred Lord. “Must you destroy everything before you leave?”

  Iverson Lord raised a hackle.

  “You,” he intoned, darting a fanged glance. “Mental vandal. Desecrator of the mind. Defacing your birthright in the name of business. Pouring your honored blood into the sewers of commerciality.”

  His stale breath fluttered harshly. “Groveler before check books,” he sneered. “Scraper before bank accounts.”

  His voice strained into grating falsetto. “No, madame. Assuredly, madame. I kiss with reverent lips your fat, unwholesome mind, Madame1”

  Alfred Lord smiled now, content to let the barrages of his father fall upon himself.

  “Let me remind you,” he said, “of the importance of the profit system.”

  “Profit system!” exploded his sire. “Jungle system!” v “Supply and demand,” said Alfred Lord.

  “Alfred, don’t,” Eunice cautioned.

  Too late to prevent venous eyeballs from threatening to discharge from their sockets. “Judas of the brain!” screamed the poet. “Boy scout of intellect!”

  “I pain to mention it,” Alfred Lord still dropped coals, “but even a businessman may, tentatively, accept Christianity.”

  “Christianity!” snapped the jaded near-corpse, losing aim in his fury. “Outmoded bag of long-suffering beans! Better the lions had eaten all of them and saved the world from a bad bargain!”

  “That will do, Iverson,” said the doctor. “Calm yourself.”

  “You’re upset, Ivie,” said his wife. “Alfred, you mustn’t upset your father.”

  Iverson Lord’s dulling eyes flicked up final lashes of scorn at his fifty-year whipping post.

  “My wife’s capacity for intelligible discourse,” he said, “is about that of primordial gelatine.”

  He patted her bowed head with a smile. “My dear,” he said, “you are nothing. You are absolutely nothing.”

  Mrs. Lord pressed white fingers to her cheek. “You’re upset, Ivie,” her frail voice spoke. “You don’t mean it.”

  The old man sagged back, dejected.

  “This is my penitence,” he said, “to live with this woman who knows so little of words she cannot tell insult from praise.”

  The doctor beckoned to the poet’s family. They moved from the bed toward the fireplace.

  “That’s right,” moaned the rotting scholar, “desert me. Leave me to the rats.”

  “No rats,” said the doctor.

  As the three Lords moved across the thick rug they heard the old man’s voice.

  “You’ve been my doctor twenty years,” it said. “Your brain is varicosed.” “I am to perish,” it bemoaned, “sans pity, sans hope, sans all.” “Words,” it mused. “Build me a sepulchre of words and I shall rise again.”

  And domineered: “This is my legacy! To all semantic drudges—irreverence, intolerance and the generation of unbridled dismay!”

  The three survivors stood before the crackling flames.

  “He’s disappointed,” said the son. “He expected to live forever.”

  “He will live forever,” Eunice emoted. “He is a great man.”

  “He’s a little man,” said Alfred Lord, “who is trying to get even with nature for reducing his excellence to usual dust.”

  “Alfred,” said his mother. “Your father is old. And … he’s afraid.”

  “Afraid, perhaps. Great? No. Every spoken cruelty, every deception and selfishness has reduced his greatness. Right now he’s just an old, dying crank.”

  Then they heard Iverson Lord. “Sweep her away!” howled the sinking poet. “Whip her away with ninetails of eternal life!”

  The doctor was trying to capture the flailing wrist. They all moved hastily for the bed.

  “Arrest her!” yelled Iverson Lord. “Let her not embrace me as her lover! Avaunt—black, foul-faced strumpet!” He took a sock at her. “Avaunt, I say!”

  The old man collapsed back on his pillow. His breath escaped like faltering steam. His lips formed soundless, never-to-be known quatrains. His gaze fused to the ceiling. His hands twitched out a last palsied gesture of defiance. Then he stared at the ceiling until the doctor reached out adjusting fingers.

  “It’s done,” the doctor said.

  Mrs. Lord gasped. “No,” she said. She could not believe.

  Eunice did not weep. “He is with the angels now,” she said.

  “Let justice be done,” said the son of dead Iverson Lord.

  It was a grey place.

  No flames. No licking smoke. No pallor of doom obscured his sight. Only grey—mediocre grey—unrelieved grey.

  Iverson Lord strode through the grey place.

  “The absence of retributive heat and leak-eyed wailing souls is pre-eminently encouraging,” he said to himself.

  Striding on. Through a long grey hall.

  “After-life,” he mused. “So all is not symbolic applesauce as once I had suspected.”

  Another hallway angled in. A man came walking out briskly. He joined the scholar. He clapped him smartly on the shoulder.

  “Greetings gate!” said the man.

  Iverson Lord looked down his mobile, Grecian nose.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, distaste wrinkling his words.

  “What do you know?” said the man. “How’s life treating you? What do you know and what do you say?”

  The semanticist drew back askance. The man forged on, arms and legs pumping mightily.

  “What’s new?” he was saying. “Give me the lowdown. Give me the dirt.”

  Two side halls. The man buzzed into one grey length. Another man appeared. He walked beside Iverson Lord. The poet looked at him narrowly. The man smiled broadly.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What place is this?” asked Iverson Lord.

  “Nice weather we’ve been having,” said the man.

  “I ask, what place is this?”

  “Looks like it might turn out nice,” said the man.

  “Craven!” snapped Iverson Lord, stopping in his tracks. “Answer me!”

  The man said, “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody . .

  “Silence!”

  The semanticist watched the man turn into a side hallway. He shook his head. “Grotesque mummery,” he said.

  Another man appeared.

  “Hi, you!” cried Iverson Lord. He ran. He clutched the man’s grey sleeve. “What place is this?”

  “You don’t say?” said the man.

  “You will answer me, sirrah!”

  “Is that a fact?” said the man.

  The poet sprayed wrath upon the man. His eyes popped. He grabbed at die man’s grey lapels. “You shall give intelligence or I shall throttle you!” he cried.

  “Honest?” said the man.

  Iverson Lord gaped. “What density is this?” he spoke incredulously. “Is this man or vegetable in my hands?”