THE ELLIPTICAL GRAVE
	by Lafferty, R A

	Chapter One

	The next great mutating of mankind is a little bit like the next
massive earthquaking along the San Andreas fault: it is overdue, and it nay
happen at any time.
 			Damocles Lectures. S.S.Eddington 


	The 'In The Beginning' lecture of Professor Pioneer J. Reventlo was
always given near the end of the first semester. It was one of those
floating lectures that students of a variety of sciences catch about once a
week. These were intended to give breadth and interchange and mutuality to
the views of the students of tie various disciplines. And most of the
floating lectures were quite interesting. it was true that breadth and
interchange and mutuality, were now oerhaps too much emphasized, to the
weakening of the intensity of specialization. It was true that the floating
lectures were now fossil forms and no longer innovations at all. But each of
them was attended by seventy or eighty of the more intelligent science
students of the community; and Reventlo's 'In The Beginning' lecture was
always attended by more than one hundred. That's a lot for a non-required
and no-credit lecture. 
	It was the Promethus Club ('Oh one more torch, and one still taller
fire!') that put on the floating lectures, and thev were social events also.
The richer of the professors and doctors, those who had in their homes
club-rooms that would accomodate eightv to one hundred and twenty persons in
uncrowded ease, gave their lectures in informal and gracious fashion in
their homes. Less rich instructors gave them in one of the regular lecture
rooms or in one of the lounaes. Pioneer J. Reventlo used floating sites for
his floating lectures, and this one was in the West Science Students'
Lounge. All of the Promethians were 'passionate learning people', but they
also practised graciousness and ease. 
	There was oden bar and open side-board, racks of ribs and wheels of
cheese, beer taps and wine decanters. There was instant pneumatic connection
to the twelve million books and tapes in the main library, which was not the
case with the East Science Students Lounge. The lounge was a continuation of
the botanical gardens outside, and the trees growing in the lounge were as
tall as the exterior trees. Up the circular stairways, one came to the
Astronomical Dome with its roll-back to the sky, and with its light
supression scooe. Inside dome and its scope there was no exterior light at
all; it was straight uninhabited sky-and-star view as good as that on the
far side of the moon. But outside of the building, a viewer could see the
ambient light washing over everything and piling up in layers ten thousand
meters thick. 
	It was the unusual number of repeaters and fellow instructors and
invited outsiders who ran up the numbers attending the 'In The Beginning'
lecture every year. A certain number of persons always walked out of the
lecture in planned disgust (this was the case with most of the floating
lectures). But this very great number of repeaters was not the case with
other lectures in the series. 
	And yet it wasn't that either the lectures or Professor Reventlo
came on very strong. Pioneer himself was a man who, though imposing, was
very easy to forget. To one who had not seen him for a while he seemed a
very large and strong man with powerful hands and a powerful voice. But the
impression of largeness and strength always faded away within -ninutes.
Pioneer became almost an invisible and forgotten man then. 
	This evening, Pioneer had a large and beautiful skull in his hands.
There are oeople who do not understand the orimordial beauty and consonance
of a good skull, who can hardly relate it to a living head. And then t,-Iere
are those who find an unfleshed skull as pertinent and expressive as an
undraped body, and equally awkward at times. All of those present, having
the holy vision of scientists, viewed the magnificent skull as pertinent and
expressive. But Pioneer Reventlo handled it very carelessly and once seemed
about to bounce it like a basketball. This skull had been presented to him
by a girl named Catherine January. 
	As is often the case with meetings of intellectually active poor,
there was the feeling of pacing panthers about the assembly even though many
of them weren't panther types. This strong man Pioneer Reventlo did not come
on very strong, and he did not speak well. Oh, he spoke too slowly for one
thing. Joseph Abramswell, a reoeater at Reventlo's lectures and a professor
of analytical projections, said that it was as if Pioneer was engraving all
his words on. stone as he went along with it. Pioneer's words did have the
style to be graven on stone, yes, but did they nave the content? There was
an amnestic quality about the old stone-dust that settled out when the man
talked. 
	Pioneer Reventlo never began to speak. He had in every case been
speaking for some time before people became aware of his words, before they
began to give him attention. And that was the case of his speaking now -- 
	"-- of our almost universally accepted idea concerning the early
state and the gradual development of mankind as going Lrom the basic and the
simple to the intricate and compounded. But this idea of mankind beginning
sparsely and with only a small number of gifts, and developing them into a
copious and interlocking culture-mass, this idea is backed up by a total
absense of facts. Or rather, the facts are presently held in almost totally
reversed fashion. 
	"If I were able to do deep and extensive time-excavations (and I am
on the verge of being able to do such right now) I would prove this without
any doubt at all, the fact of the stunning complexity in the beginning. Now,
it cannot quite be proved. I can throw fact after fact into the bog of
unreason and faulty presupposition, and they will all sink into that
quicksand without giving it a firm bottom. But I am convinced that man
really did make his appearance in high-styled and richly-gifted complexity,
and that he fell from there, not to simplicity (there isn't ann simplicity
in the picture anywhere), but to chaos, and to low-styled and bereft
confusion. We began in golden wealth, and we have come down to bare
poverty." 
	"What have these old things to do with the new kindling of the
Promethean Flame?" a young science student named Radigan Shrike called out
loudly. 
	"The Promethean Flame was a very old and sudden thing," Professor
Reventlo maintained. "It das dashed down and broken, and only a small part
of it has been recovered. The road to our bright birthright is along the
road to yesterday. Ah, let's see, what do I treat of next?" 
	"You begin with the case of language complexity, Pioneer," a learned
man iamed Jeffery Wind said with that smile that people use only when
talking to Pioneer Reventlo. (His name 'Wind' was pronounced as in 'the wind
that blows', not as in 'the helix that binds'.) "You always begin with the
subject of language, language that was complex from its absolute beginning,
so you say, and that now has been worn bare and has lost most of its
expression." 
	Jeffery Wind was a 'devices identifier'. He was a classifier of
artifacts, ancient and modern. He could tell, out of extensive knowledge and
sudden intuition, wheat anything at all was meant to be used for. He could
inform you that those little bone toruses were the fingering keys to
prehistoric bag-pipes whose deer-skin bags had long since rotted away. He
could tell you that what looked like a shoe-horn for an elf was really a
sort of easy-wrench (not made by Ford) for easier clipping of the isinglass
side-curtains onto Model T Ford touring cars when sudden rains came. He
could tell you that this other device was not an apple press at all, that it
was an elderberry press. Device identifying was a hobby of his, as was all
else. He did not have to have a straight vocation, he said. "The world
itself is just a sort of hobby of mine," he liked to say as he trailed his
tongue around on the inside of his mouth, furrowing his cheeks, "and I may
drop it at any time. I don't have to be here. I could be 'home, and I should
be. I could live in wealth there, as the prince that I am. But I'd rather
live in greater wealth here. Besides, I am only the second born and will not
inherit. I'm kidded alot in the family for slumming around on this world and
spending time here. Well, others in the family have silly hobbies also."
Jeffery Wind played second cornet in the faculty symphony,. He was long and
lean and freckled and pleasant. He looked like a young southpaw pitcher in
an old Class E league. They don't have such low rated leagues any more, and
they have few such pleasant southpaws. "Ah yes," Pioneer Reventlo had said.
"Let us begin with the Chinese language. Three years ago when I said that,
somebody asked me 'Do you know the Chinese language?', and I admitted that I
did not, so I had a bad beginning. At great labor I have remedied this
situation, but now nobody asks it when I am primed with the answer. Chinese
now is reduced to one-syllable words of unvarying form, and to a grammar
that is so basic and eroded that it no longer has the right to be called a
grammar. But once(more and more as we go backwards in time), Chinese had
long and segmented words that changed forms and endings like snap-tail
salamanders. It had cases by the dozens, tenses by the score, and numbers
almost without limit. And it had an extensive vocabulary. Now I would
suppose that it would be possible to say 'the daughter of the man'. But it
would not be possible to say, in a single and intricate root word,'the
seventh daughter of that man of medium stature and sparse hair'. But modern
Chinese retains, as whispers of something older, even though in
misunderstood and fossil form, remnants of the post alphabetical form that
was in the beginning. 
	 That flying couple, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, had made a
sudden appearance. Vivian and Curtis were acrobats, and thev also had
acrobatic minds. They usually went into tumbling skits whenever they
appeared, and their suddenly voiced ideas came in posed intervals of their
acts. 
	"You are right, Mr. Reventlo," Vivian chirided, "but we may he the
only ones here who see it. We see things faster than other people do. That's
why we understand you." And Vivian went off in a series of Arabian
Cartwheels. 
	 "We think in post-alphabetical forms ourselves, Vivian ad I,"
Curtis Bald barked as he popped a long ring-masters whip. "We understand
each other perfectly, but nobody else is fast enough to understand us. You
are right, you are right." And Curtis swung Vivian around and around by her
hair. 
	"It is hard to believe that they are flesh and blood," Creighton had
once said of Vivian and Curtis,"the tricks they do that defy momentum. I
rather doubt that they are flesh and blood." 
	"Several of the languages of the West have come out of complex pasts
bearing in their hands small and disjointed pieces. from the wrecked
complexity that had been in the beginning," Reventlo continued. Thus Russian
has 'aspects' of verbs, as well as voice and mood an.' tense. Portuguese has
conjugated personal infinitives. Icelandic has number, as well as singular
and plural, as had Old English and Old Greek. Greek had a middle voice as
well as the active and passive. It had the optative mood, and where is it
today? I'm rather in an optative mood myself this evening. Besides the
Present, Past, Future, Perfect, Imperfect, and Pluperfect, there were such
tenses as the First Aorist and Second Aorist, and the Historical Optative.
And there are detached fossils of twelve further tenses drifting down the
time stream. Certain Greek verbs had more than eight hundred different
endings, but I maintain that these were only the pinnacles of old massive
buildings that are now submerged. 
	"Well,'what do I mean to prove by this?' someone seems to wish to
ask. "I mean to prove everything by this. I am saying that the day that
talking man aopeared in the world, he was not talking in grunts or simple
sounds or with gesture-symbols. He was talking in a highly sophisticated
language, with more than a dozen pronoun and verb numbers. (with a root word
for 'the twelve of us', for instance), with twenty moods and twelve aspects
to his verbs, with two score of tenses, with six or seven voices, with more
than fifty parts of speech, with a common and pooular vocabulary of several
million words. He used these complex forms because he had complex thoughts
to express in them, fine ideas and distinctions that could not be expressed
in more simple form. It is the broken shards of that great primordial
language that we all speak today. 
	"There is every evidence of this, evidence found imbedded in more
than a hundred different language families all of it indicating an intricate
and universal high development as one comes nearer the earlier times. There
is no evidence at all that any people anywhere ever began with a simple and
basic soeech( much less than a series of grunts) and then developed that
speech in the direction of greater complexity and flexibility and
expressiveness. It is always stated (in the face of all evidence to the
contrary) that the trend was from povertv to riches in language. It wasn't.
All the real evidence tells us that the trend was from incredible richness
and development in the beginning to the present skimpiness and poor-boy
stereotyping that is on the road to final verbal poverty. Why am I the onlv
one who sees this?" 
	 "Oh, possibly because it isn't quite true," Lucille Creighton said.
After all, she was a full professor of historical Philology, and Pioneer
Reventlo wasn't. Lucille Creighton was stylish and French and
thirty-one-year-old pretty. She taught languages and chic, and she wrote
books on phonology-with-whimsy. She authored such statements as 'Americans
speak from the front of their mouths, for which reason they seldom can
manage the sounds of other languages. And they kiss from the front of their
mouths, for which reason they give the impression of shallowness. They must
learn to speak and kiss from the roofs of their mouths as the French do,
from the backs of their palates as the Germans do, from their glottis as the
Russians do. To kiss a poor linguist is seldom worth while. There will he no
strength or variety, or resonance in such a kiss.' Lucille also played the
piano with a lively, French-resonant, roof-of-the-mouth tone. 
	"It only seems that ,iay to you, Mr. Reventlo, because you are using
selected instances," Lucille said. "But I begin to swing around to view a
little bit ever so. I still insist that they are selected instances that you
use, but I must admit that they are the only instances to be found on this
subject. I must agree that all the real evidence points to your thesis, and
that there is not a scrimp of it that points to the correct and accepted
thesis. So I say that we must be practical about this and throw your ideas
clear out of the store lest we be convinced. At the same time I know that
'practical' does not have any meaning at all now. But we have to maintain
the belief that it was 'three grunts and a gesture' in the beginning,
because we live in the three grunts and a gesture tradition. Besides, reason
demands it." 
	 There was a distraction from the skull that Professor Reventlo
still held in his hands. A snake had appeared in the skull, quite a large
snake that poked its head out of the eye-sockets and out of an open trepann
cut in the top of the skull. 'Practical' here meant practical joker. This
was real 'fly-catching', upstaging the speaker with monkey-shines that
everybody sees except himself. There were several students of projection
psychology present, and snakes (being strong in the undermind) are among the
easiest of all things to project. But which of them was doing it? Pioneer
Reventlo, who was liked by almost everyone on the evening roster (except for
the few who had already made their planned walk-out) didn't seem a likely
target for such clownishness. 
	"The only sort of reason that demands 'three grunts and a gesture'
is the present skimpy and poor-boy stereotyped reason on the way to the
bankruptcy of all reason," Pioneer said,"the type of reason that is an
indication of how far we have fallen. We began our existence on this world,
I think, with an excellent sort of reason that shone like the sun, now we
are down to reason of only one-half-glow-worm power." 
	"Mr. Reventlo," said a female student named Adriana Thistle,"if it
is true of language, that it was immeasurably complex in the beginning, why
is it not true of other things? Why is it not true of artifacts, for
instance? And it isn't true of artifacts or of other things. A lance head is
not as intricate or as sophisticated as a hydrogen bomb. Really it isn't. A
cave, even a nicely appointed cave with its rocks hewn down to greater
convenience than their original form, is not as developed as this building
that we are in. Really it isn't. Swinging on vines or lianas was a form of
air transoortation, perhaps, but it wasn't as advanced a form as our present
jet transports. Really it wasn't. Smoke signals or rams-horn signals were
neither as instantaneous nor as informative as our present electronic
communications. Really they weren't. Rush-lights, or even wax candles or
tallow lamp, didn't illuminate as well as our present lighting. Reallv they
didn't. Mnemotic notched sticks could not store information as weil as can
our present libraries. Truly they couldn't. Sophisticated stone tools
designed for skull trepanning could not equal modern medical tools or modern
surgical techniques. Verily they could not" 
	It was suspected that this girl Adriana Thistle was a little bit
loose. "Come up to my place and have some Swedish pancakes," she used to say
to the fellows. "You haven't lived till vou have tried my Swedish pancakes."
She laughed a lot. She cheated at cards. She hada wind-blown look like a
tumble weed or her name-sake thistle. She didn't want to be a scientist. She
wanted to be a Science Feature Writer. "After all," she would say,"science
will be what we Science Feature Writers say it will be. Scientists are a
bunch of cartoon characters, but we are the cartoonists." 
	"I suspect that you are wrong on every point, Miss Thistle," Pioneer
Reventlo said now," but you are attacking points I haven't made yet." 
	"Never mind, you have made those points in other offerings or this
lecture in other years," said a male student named Stephen Jasper. Stephen
Jasper was an organized young man with a passion for acquiring knowledge. He
got by, he said, on four hours sleep a night. "And the other twenty hours
are strictly accounted for," he would say,"and most of them go into reading
and study. I always have one book clamped open at my shaving mirror and
another in my shower bath. I cut myself a lot shaving, and I wasli myself
ineptly, but the time gained makes it worth it. The ear-phones that I put on
while I'm eating have receotion from a different channel to each ear. I run
three miles every morning in fifteen minutes. Who can spare the time to jog
three miles? I catch Father Riordan's mass at the Newman Center every
morning. He's the fastest on campus, eighteen minutes, and by coming in two
minutes late and leaving one minute early I can do it in fifteen minutes
carrying four majors. And I take Mathematics in Russian, chernistry in
German, Physics in French, and Logic in Japanese. A person who sharpening up
on less than two things at a time is wasting time. I give eight minutes a
day to mv girl. She savs that tnis is enough and I say that it's probablv
too much. I mav have to get a different girl. once a week I absolutely waste
one hour just to keep my sense of proportion. This week I am wasting that
hour at the Pioneer lecture." 
	 Then, in the present sequence, Stephen Jasper was continuing: "For
tape-recorded memory of your past lectures, there is no equivalent in the
stone culture that you love to hark back to, Mr. Reventlo. But, yes, you
must open your other main front before you come to the that Adriana Thistle
was refuting. You haven't made them yet to but you are about to make them." 
	"Ah, what is my other main point?" Professor Reventlo asked. "At the
moment I forget what it is." 
	"Your other main point is 'Noble Cro-Magnon Man, standing in the
beginning, superior in brain and bodv to any man since," Jeffery Wind
prompted. 
	"Yes, yes, I have it now," Reventlo said as he raised his proud
head. "Cro-Magnon and his cousins were the beginning. And his effect on all
nature marked the beginning of the new era. It was as if this 'First and
Special Man' was an intrusion (and he was a benevolent intrusion,I believe).
I speak especially of his effect on the land and sea animals. It was at the
time of his appearance that many of them (particularly some of the land
mammals) became extinct. It was as though, when he named them, he said to
manv of them 'Your name is death.' 
	 Several of the listeners winced at what seemed to them the
phoniness of this touch of Reventlo. The snake in the skull reacted with
lowering anger at this suggestion. Whoever was projecting the snake was
doing so with considerable anger. 
	"Yes, proud Cro-Magnon was in the beginning, with the fullest mind
and the fullest soeech of anv man ever," Pioneer Reventio was continuing.
"He appeared with the most noble intelligence and ethics and vision, with
the intuition and the piercing transcendence that has now been lost to us.
He was the king of the golden age that we have fallen from. He was taller
than any man since, you know. He was of more noble configuration. he had a
bigger brain than have subseqent or modern men. He was created complete and
fully adult, and there are no full adults nowadays. Now there are only gawks
and gooks of various chronological ages, but there are no full adults. How
we have fallen!" 
	"How we have risen since that no-happen time!" a male student named
F. Cyclone Boniface cried. "Mr. Reventlo, how long have you been giving this
'in the beginning' lecture?" 
	F. Cyclone Boniface had his own problem, even though it was only a
minor one. "Cyclone," a friendly professor had said to him one day, "do I
guess that you are a little bit unhappy with your name?" "Yes, I am,"
Cyclone said, "but I suppose that there's nothing that I can do about it."
"Why don't vou shift it around a bit?" the professor asked. "Instead of F.
Cyclone Boniface, why don't you call yourself Frank C. Boniface, or
Frederick C. Boniface, or Felix or Ferdinand or Floyd C. Boniface, or
whatever your first name is?" "It isn't any of those," F. Cyclone had said.
"If you knew what the F did stand for, you'd know why I'd rather have it F.
Cyclone Boniface even though I'm a little bit unhappy with that." But F.
Cyclone wasn't a bad name for him. He might in any case have been given a
nickname something like Cyclone from the way he blew through all his classes
and his lab assigliments. He was fast and he was competent. He made rapid
and clear sweeps of everything in his courses. 
	"I have no idea how long I have been givng this 'In the Beginning'
lecture," Pioneer Reveritlo said. "Possibly three years, possibly twenty." 
	"Mr. Reventlo, you say have been barely and technically correct on
part of your Cro-Magnon statements when you began to make them, but you are
not even technically correct in them now," Cyclone advised Pioneer. "It was
almost twenty years ago that modern man surpassed Cro-Magnon man in average
height and also in average cranial capacity. Today the superiority of modern
man in both of these things is beyond all dispute. You haven't really been
paving that much attention to the happenings of the last twenty years, have
you? There has been a spectacular leap forward in brain and body, size, and
in much else. Now we are all much larger than our fathers were, and we are
also larger than Cro-Magnon man was. Mr. Reventlo, was Cro-Maagnon man
really 'in the beginning'? Or was he only a sudden and temporary appearance
and instance of hybrid vigor and size? I believe that he was this latter,
the hybrid-freak of very short season. And hybrids are never 'in the
beginning', or at least I don't believe that are. They have to come late
enough for several streams to have diverged, for a capacitance to be built
up between the streams, or how else could they rejoin each other, and with
such sparkiness? I hope that our present surge is more than a short-lived
hvbrid manifestation, but in any case we have surged far beyond the
Cro-Magnons or any of comparatively modern freakishnesses." 
	 "Where is it coming from?" the girl Catherine January asked her
companion. 
	"Where is what coming from, Cat?" asked a young man named Stephen
Tall who was with her. 
	 "The bright light of which Mr. Reventlo is seeing the reflection.
From what direction is it coming. Where is it?" 
	 "You don't have enough nails in your board, Mr. Reventlo," said a
female science student named Anabella Hilary. "You don't have enough nails
to keep it uo if a strong wind starts to blow. And I can count a lot of
gusts around here that would just as well start as not. But there are other
nails, Mr. Reventlo. There are other nails to nail it up solid. I know some
of them. I'm a partisan of yours now.. I'll find some of those nails and
bring them to you. 
	"Whether there are enough nails to nail your thesis up with or not,
what you are saying, Mr. Revernlo, is that a superior kind of mankind
arrived on this world in the historically recent past," a young man named
Radigan Shrike said. "You are saving that he appeared complete with high
technology and intricate thought patterns, and perhaps with literacy. Were
these appearing superior men 'ancient astronauts'? They would just about
have to be, wouldn't they?" 
	 "As to that, I say 'no, no' strongly, or else I say 'possiblyp
ossibly' very weakly," Pioneer came back with it. "How vey gross it is is,
how very unscientific it is to speculate at all before we have more facts.
We cannot prove anything about this unless we excavate. And I have not quite
worked out the technique for that kind of excavation yet." 
	"Excavate what?" Rosa Caprobianco asked. Rosa herself was an
excavator of very many old, people-bearing strata. "Of the excavating of the
earth there is no end. Or do you mean another sort of excavation than
digging in the earth itself?" 
	"Possibly an excavation of a little different sort, Rosa. And yet we
must ultimately excavate the earth and the other concentria spheres around
the earth. There is nothing else that we can excavate. We will have to
excavate out of the ground, out of the air, out of the aether, or the
noosphere. We have here at the University a man who has dabbled in 'haunted
air excavation' a little bit and perhaps he can help us. Ah yes, he's
present. I mean Joseph Abramswell. And you are a spade-woman, Rosa. Can you
dig in the 'haunted air medium'?" 
	"I think I can. I have done it before, mostly accidentally," Rosa
said. 
	"But to get back to Miss Thistle, I believe that she is wrong at
every point, and I would refute her at every point if I could remember what
they were," Pioneer came back to that sequence. the period which we must
call the 'Historical Yesterday', the recent period that I believe marks the
human beginning, there are artificial craters that are much larger than the
artificial craters of the present day. Artificial craters are made by
weapons run amok, but I do not believe that the weapons that blasted those
craters in that 'Historical Yesterday' were lance-heads. The'lance-head' is
a straw tool that you set up to demolish, Miss Thistle. And your 'cave' is a
straw building and your vines and your smoke-signals and your rush lights
and notched sticks and bone tools are straw devices also. And so are the
modern things you compare them to for their disadvantage. Personally I
believe that the jet aircraft is only a sudden and temporary instance of
hybid artifice and contrivance. And so is the whole electromagnetic complex
generally. It is a freakish hybrid of carried-over mind-power that had lost
part of its illumination, and of magnetic kick-coil toy, It isn't any more
amazing than any other double-jointed toy. 
	"Ah, but look at this wonderful skull!" Pioneer cried with a glow on
his face and his words as if he now saw the skull in his hand for the first
time. The snake had withdrawn from the eyes and excision of the skull, and
Pioneer did not see it dully coiled on the deep inside. "This skull is
nobility, this is beauty, this is man in the beginning when he still. had
the full light inside him. This is man when he possessed all his gifts,
before his deterioration began." 
	"Why was there a deterioration, Pioneer?" Rosa asked. 
	"I don't know, but look at him. This is Cro-Magnon, king of the
world, the magnificence that was in the beginning. What nobility, what
competence, what spirit, what mind, what benevolence! Who could argue
against that?" 
	"Who indeed, Pioneer?" Rosa asked. "You are your own best argument,
beloved man. But where did you get that wonderful skull?" "I don't know. It
seems that somebody handed it to me this evening to illustrate my lecture." 
	"I gave it to him," the girl named Catherine January said. "I am an
artist, and I make skulls of the people that I love and admire. I made this
one of Pioneer Reventlo and I gave it to him." 
	"Is it the skull of Pioneer Reventlo himself then?" Arthur Rasom
asked. 
	"Of course it is," Catherine said. 
	"Then it isn't meant to represent a Cro-Magnon skull at all?" 
	"Yes it is. Of course it is," Catherine January insisted. "I
maintain that it is the most perfect Cro-Magnon skull, and the most perfect
man I have ever seen."
	 "What nobility! What beauty!" Pioneer Reventlo cried, but he smiled
when he did it. "But I maintain again that the theory that man appeared out
of the hominid substratum, that he separated himself out of it gradually,
that he then gradually developed the use of tools and instruments and
processes and speech is a false theory. There could not be a man without
tools and devices: he would not be a man. The certainly could not be a man
without developed language. if he had a primitive language, he would he
animal and no man at all. This universally accepted theory of the gradual
emergence and developmen has nothing to support it and everything to
contradict it. Man appeared suddenly and joyfully and completely, and in his
full powers, and with every superior technique and gift that he might need.
Then, for reasons that I don't understand at all, he began to decline and
die. I want to go back and document just how it was 'in the beginning'. I
want to see what went wrong with it all. I want to reverse our decline and
death. It is very late now, I know, to discover and try to reverse things.
Likely it is too late. And I have very little to work with and no funds, and
no absolutely sound program." 
	 "Pioneer, there could be funds for whatever it is you want to do,"
Arthur Ransom of the bursary said. "Other sorts of travel and expeditions
and excavations are funded. We can fund yours also. We won't even have to
prove you have a rational point in all this. But what do you want to
excavate? And Where? in the stoney earth? In stoney minds or in stoney
books? Do you want to excavate the meteorological air, or in some other kind
of air, as you seem to hint? Do vou want to dig in the noosnhere? Or on a
galactic scale? Or on a sub-atomic? we can fund soades for almost any sort
of digging, Pioneer. People have actually run out of ideas for the
explorations of various sorts, and funds pile up. I myself would like to go
on an exoedition of a new sort, through time or concect, or on an uncharted
ocean. Give me something to go on. I've been asking you to do that for
several years." 
	"Perhaps Mr. Reventlo is trving to invent a time machine to go back
and find Cro-Magnon man in the -flesh and make him display his own marvels
and gifts," Barbara Redbrick, a female science student, mocked. 
	Barbara Redbrick wished to master the most difficult field of
science to be found. But she switched majors often in looking for it. "That
is too easy," she would say about a course that was not easy for everyone.
"Its turtle soup. Even some of the male students can learn this stuff. I
want something harder." So she would switch to something that was supposed
to be harder, and she would be disappointed to find that it was too easy
also. So she would switch again. 
	"Miss Redbrick," a counselor told her one day, "if you want the most
difficult field of science, create it. That's what all the genuine and
outstanding scientists have done. Thev have created their own fields." 
	"All right, I will," Barbara Redbrick had said. Looking for her own
difficult field, she began to examine the unclaimed areas between the
patches that were already plowed. It was in conjunction with this that she
happened to be at Pioneer J. Reveitlo's 'In The Beginning' Lecture. "I will
look at the bottom of every stone," she said. The people who came to such
things as this might not be overly impressive to her, but they did have
extensive unplowed elements about them. 
	"Of course I'm not trying to 'invent' the time machine," Pioneer
Reventlo answered Barbara. "It is not for inventing. It was one of the
things that was given in the beginning, and it has been in use for more than
twenty thousand years. Ah, plus or minus five thousand years, that is." 
	"What, do you believe that the time maciine is actually in
existence?" Dorothy Blue-Ice, a doctor of analytical biology, asked him.
"You are not talking in parables about something else. You believe that it
is literally in existence?" 
	"Oh, of course," Pioneer said. "it is still in working order, I
believe, but I have the feeling that it has not been used very much in
recent centuries. Oh yes, if the time machine were not in that recent
'beginning' there would be hardly anything since that time that makes sense.
No, no, how would I invent a thing that has been around as long as our
species?" 
	"Then if you're not trying to invent it, what are you trying to do
with the time machine?" Barbara Redbrick asked. 
	"I'm trying to get on it," Pioneer Reventlo said, and he spread his
hands out in a sort of frustration. "I'm trying to find out what corner it
stops at." 
	"We know where to get on it, Mr. Reventlo," Vivian Oldshoe the
acrobat called from a high beam. "We ride that time cart all the time. But
it isn't easy. You have to be an acrobat to do it." 
	 "How did you get up there, Vivian?"Pioneer asked in some wonder. 
	"I fell up here, of course," she said. 
	"We begin to learn a little bit too much about the time machine
Curtis Bald the other acrobat spoke. "There are people who say that we are
in forfeit of our lives for the things that we have already ridden on. knd
they say that they mean to collect." 
	They were all silent on the subject for several minutes while they
grazed the provender on the side-boards of the West Science Students'
Lounge, and while they tapped the foamy and the bubbly. There had always
been the feeling that Pioneer J. Reventlo really had something going, but
that it was obscured by enemies (either inside or. outside of him) who
prevented him from seeing it clearly and who force him to talk in symbols.
But what might be behind those symbols? Joseph Abramswell, the analytical
projectionist, tried to get a little bit more out of Reventio on the
subject. 
	"Have you any idea, Pioneer, what your time machine really looks
like?" Joseph asked. 
	 "Not like a machine," Reventlo said,"and I believe that it is not
properly a machine, that it is rather a natural growth or a natural
feature." 
	"Oh, what shape do you believe this natural feature or growth might
be, Pioneer?" 
	"I feel that it is an ellipse. Is that not the shape formed by
cutting a right circular cone obliquely? I am not a mathematician." 	"If
you are not a mathematician, then you have no business investigating
anything," said Stephen Tall who was a mathematical student. "Most of the
woes of the world are brought about by people who cannot think (who are not
mathematicians) trying to think. I wish they'd give it up." 
	"Oh be good, Steohen," Catherine January said. 
	Stephen Tall put his mathematical ability to use calculating odds
for wagering and gaming. He olayed in the 'Midnight Sun' and in 'Ace
Hudgeon's Odds-On Bar and Grill'. And he lost. He lost to the people who
have no mathematics at all. But hooe is the only thing that he never lost.
"The odds will have to pay me off in time," he said. "They have run against
me so long that they must reverse themselves doubly to justify themselves
Mathematically. I am mathematically certain of entering a very long winning
streak almost immediately. Things have to reverse." "My father used to sav
the same thing about the wind," Ace Hodgeons told Stephen. "'The wind has
been blowing out of the southwest; for forty years that I know of,' my
father told me, 'and maybe for a much longer time before I came around. Son,
all that wind has got to blow back the other way some day. I may not live to
see it, but you should see it. Be waiting for it when it reverses
directions. You can make a killing out of it.' Well, I am ready for it when
it blows back the other way, and I will make a killing out of it," Ace said.
I'll make part of the killing from you, Stephen." 
	"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of, and you're the dumbest gu
y I ever saw," Stephen Tall told Ace Hodgeons. 
	"If I'm so dumb how come I'm the one they call 'Ace' and not you,"
Ace asked. "If I'm so dumb, how come I always win and you always lose? 
	"You are extreme, Stephen Tall," Joseph Abramswell said back in the
current present. "I teach young mathematicians, including yourself I can
imagine nothing more dreary or crabbed than a society composed entirely of
mathematicians. I can imagine no society that would be dead wrong on so many
subjects so often. Let's go on with it, Pioneer. Have you any feeling of how
large this time-touring ellipse might be?" 
	"Oh, it would have to be measured in kilometers, Joseph, and
probably in tens of kilometers. You must know that small ellipses do not put
out any numenous phenomena. Size is a necessary dimension to this. And I
believe that the mechanism is always too large to be noticed or recognized."

	"You are not saying what you want to say, Pioneer. Let's go into
free association. What word do you match with those large and elliptical
time-rooted non-machines of numenous function that you have intuitions of?" 
	"'Valleys', Joseph. 'Valleys' is the word. I didn't know it till
this instant, but it is always 'valleys' that comes into the association." 
	"The time machines are in valleys, Pioneer?" 
	"The time machines are valleys, I believe, Joseph." 
	"Large and roughly elliptical valleys?" 
	"Yes. That will do for the moment." 
	"All right. Now there must be another word that attaches to these
large and elliptical valleys. Is there a buried pun here? Is this one of the
things that you have to excavate? Is there an ellipsis (a something
missing)? Free association, Pioneer! Quickly! The word, the word, the first
word that associates, however long it takes to come to you, however badly it
seems to fit." 
	"Games," Pioneer J. Reventlo said. "Yes, games. We are made game of,
and also something like -- like the old Olympic Games, but that instance is
of to the side of them. Games, ludi, fun-games or ridiculousnesses, as the
Latins called them. Games, agones, struggles or contests or agonies, as the
Greeks called them. games, meallscail, mirages, or mearbhlacht, illusions,
as the Irish called them." 
	"The games were held in the elliptical valleys,Pioneer?" 
	"I don't think so, not at first. The vallevs were somehow named
'games' or illusions or mirages, and then the contests and assemblies and
entertainments borrowed the names of the elliptical valleys, as they seemed
to fit the assemblies. But first there were such places as 'Fun Valley' and
'Ridiculous Valley' and 'Agony Valley' and 'Contest Valley' and 'Mirage
Valley' and 'Illusion Valley'. These were place names, and they were also
the names of time-processes. I will be able to identify some of them now. I
have been -- ah- colllecting these peculiarly manifesting elliptical valleys
for some time, but I considered their collecting to be an entirely different
interest from my attempted time excavations." 
	"The two of you have just set free association back twenty thousand
years, plus or minus five thousand years," Jeffrey Wind remarked. 
	"Ah, have you any particular one of these manifesting valleys that
you'd rather explore, Pioneer?" Joseph Abramswell continued with it. "I want
to go with you on your travel, mostly for the peculiar adventure of it all.
So does Arthur Ransom, I believe. And he can get funding kicked loose if you
make it even a little bit plausible. Any particular valley, Pioneer?" 
	"No -- not right now. Somebody is sending! Oh, how somebody is
sending! Give me a few minutes." 
	"The time-excavation must be in a place where the Cro-Magnon men
lived," Rosa Caprobianco said. "Such at least is the meaning that I seem to
lift from Pioneer Reventlo's mind. Where is the valley, Pioneer?" 
	"Where is it, Reventlo?" Joseph Abramswell asked. 
	"In a minute, in a minute," Pioneer stuttered. "Oh. how somebody is
sending! In Calabria, that's where." 
	"What, what? Calabria in Italy?" Rosa Caprobianco asked. "Is that
where your preferred elliptical valley might be? Is that possible?" 
	" I guess it's possible if I said it," Reventlo mumbled. "That's the
first free-association clue that came to me." 
	"I never saw such blatant insinuation of words into a mind and
mouth," Stehen Tall grumbled to Catherine January. 
	"I know, I know," she said. "Let us listen and learn." 
	"Free-associate some more, Pioneer," Joseph Abramswell said. "It
doesn't matter that someone is sending you words. That someone might be
either inside you or outside you, but it's valid in either case. Once more,
A Word!" 
	"White Goat," Pioneer Reventlo said. "And it's more than that. It's
White Goat Game', or it's 'White Goat Farce' , or it's 'White Goat
Illusion'." 
	"This is unfair," Rosa protested. "Pioneer has been raiding my own
unconscious. The white goat is in my own undermind; it isn't in that of
Pioneer. Throw that one out, Abramswell." 
	"Oh the duplicity of her, the duplicity," Catherine January
whispered to Stephen Tall. 
	"No, it is legitamate, Rosa," Abraniswell the analytical
projectionist said. "Very much free-association is dredged up from the
surroundings, but it will match the shape of the undermind that reaches out
and dredges it up. The underminds of others present always constitute a
legitimate raiding territory to capture matching symbols and names. Why do
you say that the White Goat is in your own unconscious, Rosa,?" 
	"'The White Goat Illusion' that is the name of the valley that my
family come from," Rosa said. "That is the origin of our family name, White
Goat. But there is no other connection with Pionieler's notions. When I
thought of an elliptical valley, I thought of the Calabrian Valley named the
'White Goat Illusion'. And them Pioneer lifted out of my mind. But time
doesn't travel notably in the White Goat. It moves much more slowly there
than it does in other places. This has been a pleasant few minutes, a 'White
Goat Illusion' or an entertainment, but it has no significance at all." 
	"Yes it has," Pioneer Reventlo argued. "There are echoes to it that
antedate my knowing you, Rosa." 
	"Yes, it surely has significances," Joseph Abramswell said. "But we
are treading on somebody's coat-tail, and that somebody will divert us from
our trail. It may be a murderous somebody that we are tailing a little close
now. No, I do not imagine these side-places. I sense them correctly. Did you
know that there was an enemy straddling the road to your excavations,
Pioreer? This is of significance, people. But, by tomorrow morning the
identified enemy have convinced all of us that it isn't." 
	And, true enough, all of them were convinced, the next morning that
there was no significance to any of, these things. But meanwhile before the
evening meeting broke up, there came a stroke of angry menace, if not of
significance. 
	"Are there any advantages to having a Cro-Magnon mind, Mr.
Reventlo?" Stephen Tall, the young mathematician asked. Stephen was a little
bit on the needle after Pioneer. "Every new development must have an
advantage or a self-preserving aspect to it, or it will not become a new
development. It will be blotted out instead. It will be an instant wash-out
if it doesn't have an advantage. Can you name an advantage to having a
Cro-Magnon mind?" 
	"The Cro-Magnon mind has a warning system," Pioneer said. "It has a
prenonitory sense of danger, and it has a trigger for lightning-fast evasive
action to go along with it." 
	"Can you give me an example?," Stepen asked. 
	"Yes, I'm afraid that I can," Pioneer said. "In just a minute, in
just a small fraction of a minute --" 
	Pioneer Reventio suddenly swung the artificial skull that he was
holding. He swung it up above his own head, hung it in the air the there as
it were, and all in the same moment he dived out of range 
	And that skull exploded in the air. it exploded, and it went into a
hundred large and small shards. And a large snake materialized in the middle
of the air where the skull had gone to pieces, fell to the floor in a
writhing tumble, and bumped and slithered quickly to some hiding place along
the walls of the room. 	It had been a very heavy weight, a solid lead
statuette weighing at least fifty kilograms, that had fallen from the
cat-walks at the top of the circular stairways that rose to the astronomical
dome above the lounge. This great weight had shattered the effigy of
Pioneer's skull, and it had been meant to shatter his skull itself. 
	"Where did that snake come from and where did it go?" was all that
Pioneer could say for a moment. Then he asked "Who has done this? Who tried
to kill me?" 
	"An enemy has done this," Joseph Abramswell said. 
	"I see wtat you mean, Mr. Reventlo," young Stephen Tall remarked.
"Such a mind, yours, does have a warning system of danger, and a trigger for
lightning-fast movement. It does have an advantage. Thank you for
demonstrating it." 
	Chapter Two 

	The World's great age begins anew, 
	The golden years return. 
				Hellas.	Shelley. 

	And, sure enough, bv the next morning all of them were convinced
that the 'Pioneer Reventlo Illusion' was of no importance at all. But three
of them suddenly believed that, all fun aside, they could make a good thing
out of that Pioneer Reventlo Illusion. 	"It was easy," said Arthur Ransom, a
deputy bursar in charge ol expedition-and-dig money, and a man with green
fingers,"and there isn't much new furniture required for it at all. I don't
know how Pioneer gets such effects with so few props. He has masquerading
qualities. 'Soporific' is only a notch removed from 'hypnotic', you know.
And he doesn't have any ulterior motive. That man is clean. The mind of
Pioneer Reventlo is a mirror, and an echo wall, and a wishing well. We drop
small tokens or symbol-coins into it, and we draw out whatever we wish. You
tossed things at him, or into him, Rosa and Joseph, and they came back in
seconds, sea-changed and bright with wonder. Is there a valley named 'Whice
Goat Illusion' in Calabria, Rosa? And is it elliptical?" 
	"Yes, there is such a place. I was born there. And it is a 'haunted
air' place. But the sea-change vou believe we made Pioneer work on things,
it isn't quite as easy as you might think. Arid the things don't come back
within seconds. I dropped some of those coins into Pioneer's mind three
years ago. Illusions, like clouds, need time to grow." 
	"And my own manipulation of Pioneer is a long-time affair," Joseph
Abramswell the analytical projectionist said, "a pleasureable hobby that I
would never wish to terminate. It's tricky, though, and I don't know how I
get away with it. Pioneer Peventlo has a better mind than I have. That being
the case, the question constantly rises 'Who is dredging whose mind
anyhow?'. But, yes, his mind is a wishing well, if we're talking about the
same thing." 
	"Oh yes, we're talking about the same thing, a pleasant and well
funded summer in Calabria in this new-turned year, are we not?" Arthur
Ransom said. "I will love it. I have never been on a 'haunted air'
excavation before, and I have never been in Calabria." 
	"And I have never really left Calabria," Rosa said. "I cannot leave
it, I carry it with me. I'm made out of Calabrian marble. The Calabrian
marble is buff-colored or flesh-colored, as you may not know. The color is
the result of impurities in it. That also is the case with my own
coloration." 
	"What variety of Calabrian marble are you made out of, Rosa" Ransom
asked. "I'm sort of a buff of buff-colored marbles myself." 
	"Nicastro," Rosa said,"of the Nicastro marble." 
	Well no, Rosa wasn't exactly buff-colored. There was something in
her both lighter and darker than the buff. There was elephant ivory in her
coloring, and fire-rose and carmine, and a tinge of deep olive-blue. When
one speaks of olive-olored one usually means a yellow-greenish touch,
because Grecian olives are yellow-green. But Calabrian olives are
bluish-hued, while still maintaining the olive saturation. 
	"Are there legends of statues-come-to-life in the White Goat
Legendary, Rosa?" Arthur Ransom asked her. 
	"I don't know but there are facts of statues-come-to-life in the
White Goat Illusion Valley," Rosa said. "I am one of those facts." 
	"Have you ever dug in the valley of the White Goat Illusion?" Joseph
Abramswell asked. "I suppose it's foolish to inquire, since you've dug
everywhere, and you've dug several times in Calabria, as I remember it." 
	"No, I have not dug in the White Goat," Rosa said, "nor has anyone
else. It has been waiting. Many times I have dug in Calabria, but never in
the Goat. That isn't allowed before now. There is a note that is sometimes
sounded in the White Goat, and I don't know how to explain about it. It is
linked in my mind with a back-stage legend around the San Carlo opera house
in Naples. There is, as you may not believe it, at least one note (some
people say there are possibly seven notes) that, under exotic conditions may
be preceded in time by its own resonances. This time gap is too small to be
recognized by an untrained ear, but a really good ear will hear the
phenomenon several dozen times in its life. This is in defiance of all the
laws of physics and cosmology and philosophy, that an effect should happen,
by however slight an interval, before its cause. 
	"There was a flautist in the San Carlo opera who was able to blow
such notes.Then he wondered what would happen if, after the preceeding
resonance had sounded, he should refuse to blow the note itself. He had
talked about this over the wine with friends, and they said that he would be
compelled to blow it. So he tried it one evening the opening evening of the
winter season when there was royalty present. He had the note already in his
mouth. The preceeding resonance of it sounded. But the flautist did not
allow the note itself to sound that hundredth of a second later. He withdrew
the flute from his mouth, and he broke it in his hands. 
	"There are three endings to this legend. I will tell only the one
that is the most easily believed. That is that great hand reached down, put
the pieces of the flute together, removed the break from the flute and held
it abeyance for a moment, and put the note in the mouth of the flautist and
forced him to blow it. Then, since the break that had prperly been on the
flute had to go somewhere, the great hand deposited it on the neck of the
flautist. The neci of the flautist was broken and he fell down dead. 
	"The Valley that is named the 'White Goat Illusion' has such notes
of preceeding resonance. There is a compulsion to sound primordial now in
accord with an inhibiting resonance, and a person can get killed by it all."

	"Ah, I'd like to have Lucille Creighton on the expedition," Joseph
Abramswell said softly. "I like to hear her play the piano in the evenings."

	"How odd of you to say that!" Rosa exclaimed. "I have three times
heard Lucille strike notes that had a ghostly preceeding resonance. We may
be assembling critical elements for our expedition accidentally. Do you have
a talent for digging in the haunted air, Joseph?" 
	Joseph Abramswell was olive-colored himself, but his was a tinge of
the Jerusalem olive, more of the gold-brown than of either green or blue.
His eyes were of the same gold-flecked luminous brown, and his hair and
whiskers were curled. He was clean shaven, but his whiskers curled before
they came through his skin and so added to the complexity of his texture.
His hands were very large. Sometimes he cupped in his hands the heads of
people when he talked to them. A lady who used to go to him for analysis has
stated that, at the beginning of a session, this Doctor Joseph Abramswell
used to cup her head in his hands, then remove her head deftly and easily
from her body (it was as if a latch that held it were released, she said);
and then Abramswell would set her head on the table across from her, she
being conscious of her bilocation when he did it. And then Joseph the
analvst would talk sometimes to her headlessness and sometimes to her head,
and most often to the both of them all through the session. So it was always
like a conversation of three persons, the analyst, the lady, and the ladies
head. The lady said that her head spoke in a higher tone than she herself
usually used, and that her headlessness spoke in a more throaty voice. It
was illusion or projection of course, but Joseph Abramswell must have been a
good therapeutic projectionist to get the effect. 
	For the rest, Abramswell was a verv large man, but of a remarkable
lightness. He moved around rooms at a sort of a trot. He surrounded himself
with fragile objects, fine Faenza and Romagna pottery, blown glass montages,
soun crystal statuary, but there was no way he could have broken any of
these things by his trotting around. Something else would have happened.
There could not have been a collision. Either Joseph would have moved
through the delicate objects, or they would have moved through him. Such at
least was the impression that this analytical man gave. He was in control of
all things around him, as has not been the case since the Cro-Magnons
maintained such control. 
	When Abramswell spoke of Pioneer Reventlo as having a better mind
than himself, he must have been joking. Oh, perhaps Pioneer had a stronger
more rooted mind in some ways. But for mental balance, for kindness (always
an aspect of high mentality), for passionate penetration of a situation, for
all the things that make a mind good, Abrai,,iswell had a superior mind. 
	And he was either a handsome person or he was a genius-done
caricature of a very handsome person. He was twenty-nine years old He had
been twenty-nine for seven years. 
	"There won't be any problem," Arthur Ransom said. "My
recommendations are never refused, never. I will put in for funding in the
White Goat Valley of Calabria, and we will get that funding. The wording of
the application will have to be done flamboyantly. That's what catches them.
But what is more flamboyant than digging 'time' out of the ground with spade
and shovel, and spreading it out to study in its aeons and intervals? And
what is more flamboyant than the idea of literally excavating the air? I
like the bit about your being an expert on 'haunted air' excavation, Joseph.
There are whole vistas of possibilities here. It cries out for
'super-sophisticated electronic equipment', and there is almost no price
ceiling on t nat. Ah, there is no way that 'haunted air' or 'stratified
time' could be excavated without expensive equipment." 
	"Not only have you green fingers when you talk of that, Arthur, but
green eyes and green breath and an entire green complexion," Joseph said
with his analytical smile. "Aye, and even the tip of your tongue is green
when it flicks out." 
	"I know, Joseph, I know," Arthur Ransom agreed with this appraisal
of himself. "I love the money that all these projects must be wrapped in for
safe and convenient handling. I love that money even in isolation, but I
especially love it when it is accompanied by pleasant travel with pleasant
people (yourselves), and by a project that is piquant and curious, and which
may even have a dram of validity in a big tun of it. I could bet by with
another Rosa Caprobianco expeiditon, but I had better not try it. Rosa will
be on this monomania for our front."
	Arthur Ransom had a scotch nose and a Dutch mouth. He had the 
larger-than-life blue eyes of a North Sea Monster. His hair was like sand
colored rushes flopping about on his head. His eyes, to define them further,
were the blue of the sky on June twenty-first at eleven on the morning on a
cool cloudless day in the latitude of forty-two degrees. This detailed
analysis of their color was Arthur's own. He was an oil painter by
hobby-avocation, and his own face was his most common subject. He had
studied his own eyes relentlessly and he had painted them many times, his
eyes only, and nothing else in the picture. He knew colors and he knew his
own eyes.
	Arthur was dishonest with money but with very few other things. He
gave himself socially and personally without asking return. It was not his
fault, he said, that he was born with green fingers. He tried to make
himself the most honest person in the world. He failed at it. He tried again
and failed again. But he still worked at it. And he still worked at being
charming. He was over-active and over-endowed in many ways. Almost everybody
liked him. 
	"I believe that you two are using Pioneer as an echo chamber for
your own predilections," Arthur said. "And just what is this substance that
you are trying to bring out? Is there really a new fire somewhere in this? I
walk around and around it, and I cannot tell what it is. If we must come at
it thorugh parables, then let us have the parable of the big picture of it,
of its totality. What are some of the legends of the White Goat Illusion
Valley, Rosa? Digging out legends is one sort of excavation that has always
paid well in side benefits. But I am the one who will have to make the
presentation to obtain the funding. So give me a little bit more to go on."
	"Oh, there are trickster legends," Rosa said. "The White Goat 
is the Trickster, so much so that people don't always see him as the white
goat. Sometimes they see him as a man who tricks them. And evn as a goat, he
has a way of penning the goat-herds into the goat pen and not letting them
out until they answer all the ultimate riddles. No one has answered all of
them, and every goat-herd ever penned by him has died in his pen. Then there
are the 'Ghost-City' or 'Ghost-Tribe' legends. There are Rip Van Winkle or
Time Paradox legends, very many of these. There are 'Subterranean Creature'
legends and 'Preturnatura Enemy' legends. And there are the 'Living Statue'
legends. As I told you, I am one of them."
	Rosa Caprobianco was not literally made out of Nicastro marble. She
was made of intercoastal (from between the ribs) flesh, as was her mother.
She had strawberry hair, and that is rare for one coming from the Toe of
Italy. She had an earth-strength. She had once cracked the ribs of of a
gentleman friend with a too hearty hug, which required medical repair on
them. She was too stocky, too heavy. But how could she be less so without
losign her strangth and her vigor? Yes, she was a subterranean person and a
cave person. she was an excavating woman, a spade woman. She had a rich and
multi-dimensioned memory that seemed to take in everything. She was a
muutation, or she would be one short. If not a natural one she would be an
artificial one. She would have memory still more rich after she had taken a
certain step with herself. 
	"I am of the one thousandth generation of humanidy in the world,"
she said. "I should get a door-prize, a janus-palma at least, for being out
of the one thousandth. There aren't too many who have reached the one
thousand mark yet. I have come from the eldest sons and the eldest daughters
for a long time in an early-generating line; for the line began only
eighteen thousand years ago. Other calculations show it longer, but those
other calculations are wrong. I know how long it is for I remember it. I am
of an advantaged line. Every ancestor of mine on the direct line has been an
illiterate. 
	"Oh, they were not illiterates when they were children or youths.
They read and wrote as young people have done for as long as there have been
young people. The legend of peole who did not have reading and writing,
people who preceeded reading and writing, is as foolish a legend as I can
imagine. Reading and writing are natural things that young people do, like
walking and talking. They are forms of chatter, usually of brainless
chatter. But, for greater benefits these gifts are returned by some people
when they come to a certain period of life. Many strong and intelligent
people become naturally when they become full adults. otners make so, in
order that their minds and personalities may develop Literacy is a crutch,
and this renunciation will be like bread cast upon the waters. It will be
returned one-hundred fold." 
	"You are wrong in your emphasis, Rosa," Arbamswell said. "Humans are
making an adjustment to that now. Literacy continued beyond childhood and
youth may no longer be such a trauma and drag. There are even things to
recommend it. Though late literacy has always an enemy and inhibitor of the
prophetic function, an accord is now becoming possible. One person who has
been strong in the business is the name-leader of our proposed expedition,
Pioneer Reventlo. He has been shedding literacy for the last several years.
He would have been dead last night if it weren't for that. His premonitory
system was working, and it works for few actively literate persons. But in
other areas there is something wrong with Pioneer. He used the literacy
crutch too long." 
	"That girl, Adriaria Thistle, spoke last night (with a touch of
contempt) of 'sophisticated stone tools designed for skull trepanning',"
Rosa said. "But she didn't even understand the purpose or trepanning. Why
have we found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of primitively trepanned
skulls? It is not odd that supposedly backward people (backward in time, at
least) should have performed this rather intricate skull-and-brain operation
hundreds and hundreds of times (successfully, for the persons have lived
long times after being trepanned), and not have performed other more simple
operations. The number of set broken arms is far rarer. 	"The purpose
of trepanning, of course, was to remove the literacy nodule from the brain
in cases where it had failed to whither away with the coming of adulthood.
The literacy nodule and the whole literacy complex get in the way of
lighning intuition and of real mental growth. The nodule should have been
left behind in the cocoon. But of the true people have it after they are
grown, and I have it myself. Oh, I have somehow become alienated from the
true tradition, here in a strange land among stuffv people. But I will have
my nodule removed from my brain this summer, in my own land, and with
sophisticated stone tools of the ritual sort. And then I can enter the full
adult state. I have been a pupa long enough." 
	"Prophets of some remote peoples do have their brains circumsized as
it is said, before they enter on their full prophetic mission," Abramswell
remarked. "Possibly this is the meaning of it." 
	"Are you serious about this, Rosa," Arthur Ransom asked. "Do you
really mean what you are saying?" 
	"Partly serious, friends. Almost half serious about it," Rosa said. 
	"No you are not," Joseph Abramswell contradicted. "You have never
been as much as half serious about anything. I think you are about
one-eighth serious about it. To be more than one-eighth serious is
one-eighth serious about it. it's in contemptible as bad as to be more than
one-eighth Italian -- it's in contemptable taste."
	"Are you not more than one-eighth Italian, Rosa?" Arthur asked. 
	"Nah, I don't think so. A Calabrian is never more than an eighth
Italian. I am also a Troglodite and a Tyrrhenian and a Troll and a Grimali
and a Greek and a touch of one of Pioneer's Cro-Magnon originals. And other
things besides. But I can tell you that literacy carried over into adulthood
has been a plague and danger to us all. That is what destroyed the
Neanderthals, if you will remember. Always writing on the rocks. And I've
let it go on uncorrected in myself too long. Ah, Lucille has sounded her
preceding note. She is coming now."
	"We are all in favor of it then, are we not?" Arthur Ransom tried to
nail it down. "We will make the pleasant and enriching expedition to the
White Goat Valley in Calabria this summer." 
	"Of course we will," Joseph Abramswell said. "Take care of it,
Arthur. Get us the funding for it. With that, everything else will take care
of itself. Enough of that for this morning."
	There had been an anticipatory resonance of a musical note yet to be
sounded. Then the somewhat stylized, somewhat prototypical note itself
walked into the room. It was Lucille Creighton. 
	"Will we go to Calabria?" she asked. "Will we find it there?" 
	"We will go, and we will find some sort of success in the
expedition-excavation," Abramswell said. 
	"The hypostasis that might come after that" Do you think we will
find it?" she asked. 
	Anabella Hilary, along with Radigan Shrike and Dean Hayfield and
Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface, had gone into special session day
a the 'In The Beginning' lecture of Pioneer Reventlo. These five young
science students had become strong partisans of Pioneer Reventlo, and they
set about gathering up more spikes for nailing up his precarious theory.
There was also a sixth person present, but the name of that one doesn't seem
to be recorded. 
	"I am always the sour one," Radigan Shrike said,"the one who says
that a thing can't be done. But we have come to a thing that has to be done,
and we are the ones to do it. We are the Prometheans, and we arecommitted to
make a fire-jump, the next great mutation of humanity. There has to be a
mutating group that is at least partly conscious of its mission. Well, at
the moment, I seem to be the only one of us who is conscious of it. 
	"There was once a person who aspired to jump over a wall. It was no
ordinary wall. It was the wall that surrounded, and heretofore concealed, a
birth-right estate of great importance and salvation. This person jumped and
jumped. He could not jump over that wall. 'I will have to find somebody to
jump with me,' he said. 'Together we may be able to make the jump.'"
	"Oh, I'll jump with you, Radigan," Anabella Hilary said. "If I
usually seem cool to your ideas, it's only because I don't like you. But I
will jump over that wall with you." 
	"The person obtained a companion," Radigan said. "And, side by side,
they jumped. They still could not jump high enough. 'If we had a few more
persons to jump with us we could do it. we could make the jump then,' the
companion said." 
	"We will jump with you," Catherine January told him. "cyclone and I
will do it, though it's a very dubious adventure." 
	"And I'll join you," Dean Hatfield said. 
	"I won't," the sixth person refused them. 
	"So five of them stood side by side and jumped," Radigan continued
his parable, "and they still fell short. 'We're coming closer though,' one
of them said. 'If we had the magic number of persons we could do it.' So
they gathered a larger group, each member of which had new Promethean flame
in his heart. There were twenty or so of them assembled there. They stood
side by side. They jumped. And every one of them jumped over that wall. All
it required was the magic number of persons. Twenty or so was the magic
number." 
	"And that is how the next great mutation jump of humanity is
achieved?" Cathcrine asked. "Oh dubiety, dubiety, dubiety! Is that the way
it works? We will consider it." 
	But they didn't consider it for very long at that time. They had
grasshopper minds that day. 
	"Consider the complete clarity of the lines of most mummies' hands,"
F. Cyclone Boriiface said. 
	"I always admire a thumping conversation opener," Catherine January
remarked as she fingered the bones of F. Cyclones skull. "'Consider the
complete clarity of the lines of mummies' hands!' Cyclone, that's good. And
it brings up the vision of the everlastingness of those hand lines. It is
like the grin of the Chesire Cat. Those lines in the mummies hands will
still remain after the hands themselves and the mummies themselves are total
dust. But really, how many mummies do you know? We have six Domremy mummies
here at the University, and a dozen of Southwestern Indians. But What
others? Oh, I love your occipital bone!" 
	Catherine January, who made skulls of persons she cherished and
admired, loved to fondle the bones of her friends' heads. She said that all
bones were slightly fluid, and that the bones of a living skull change in
accord with the moods of their owner. Some days the bones droop and sag. But
the mood of F. Cyclone Boniface was always good when Catherine was caressing
the bones of his head. 	"I know quite a few mummies," F. Cyclone said, "in
Mexico, in Guatemala, the ice-mummies of Sweden, the rift mummies of
Nairobi, the mummies of many universities and museums. All of them have this
startling clarity in the lines of their hands, and the older they are the
greater is the clarity of the lines." 
	"Isn't it true though," Anabella Hilary said,"that most mummies have
their hands clasped tightly shut? How could anyone see the lines of them?" 
	"Most but not all of the mummies have their hands shut tight," F.
Cyclone continued with his lecture. "But there is a favorable selection
process here. The best of the mummies have their hands loosely open or half
open. They are the ones who went to their deaths easy and untensed and
unafraid. Those with tightly clasped hands were those with tightly clasped
minds. They do not represent the best of them. And yet we should examine all
of them for statistical nurposes. It is troublesome. The hands can be
opened, but they are brittle and it sometimes means having to break off a
finger or two. They also may mean discipline or expulsion or even legal
process against one. Indeed I myself have been expelled from one university
for tampering with mummies. But I do have a small cubical camera with
illumination. This can be forced into even a tightly-clasped hand, and with
luck it can take six good pictures with the six sides of its cube. Many of
these turn out well and can be put together for a panorama of the inside of
the hand. I work with what I have to work with, and I have accumulated a
mass of very compelling data." 
	"Let us launch a 'Project Unclasp Mummies' Hands'," Anabella said. 
	"The reason that cheirognomy, hand reading, has fallen from the
ranks of the respected sciences is that its material is blurred and faded,"
Cyclone said. "I am convinced that the first men (the first men of that
'historical recent' of which Pioneer Reventlo speaks) have their lives and
their personalities written clearly and plainly in their hands. Today these
things are written in a confused manner; but the further back we go the
clearer they are. The clearest hand-lines I have found in living men are
those of Pioneer Reventlo and Joseph Abramswell and Jeffery Wind. But
they're not in at all with the hand-lines of the Gila Bend Mummies who are
quite old. The finger prints,  the only part of the hand lines that are
accepted today as having significance, are actually no more than skimpy
tables-of-content of the books that are the palms of the hands.But the only
attention paid to them is that each one is different. Of course each one is
different. How would any two different books have identical tables of
contents?
	"The hand lines of a person were a complete mnemotic of the person's
life. The events were all there, before they happened, while they were
happening, and after they hapened. And there was a small node that moved
down each line of each hand, and it represented  the then-present time point
of that hand, which was usually the person's time of death, when it had
stopped moving. Even the personal name was  written in the palm of each
person's hand, in the old, original, post-alphabetical language. And it
could be pronounced by any person of that early illuminated period. it can
still be read and pronounced by an adept of the subject, and I am working
hard to make myself such an adept. 
	"Even the moons at the bases of the fingernails of the original men
of that bright mornng, they were calendars, they were almanacs, they were
ephemerides of the planets and stars, they were annals, they were navigation
charts, they were clocks. One might read the bearing of latitude and
longitude from them. I really believe that as a person travelled on a
journey, the moons of his fingernails would change at the same time that the
stars in the sky changed. A man could look upward and see what time it was
and could see dhere in the world he was. or he could look at the moons and
suns and planets and stars or his fingernails and see when and where he was.
There are even notatin on some of the fingernails, in Chaldean or in the
Original Language if it was different. I am learning to read them now. They
have projections and legends that are older and more valid than Mercator's.
You will sometimes see even today, a person, one person in a hundred, who
looks at the palms of his hands, and the back and nails of them when he
ponders something, and he reads the answers there even though he does not
know that he is doing it." 
	"I like the Evidence of Mummie's Hands," Anabella said. "The hands
are one of the signature zones, surely, and by them early man can still give
evidence of himself. What is that noise? It sounds like somebody using a
hack-saw, a micro-hack-saw, up in the chandelier." And that was exactly what
it sounded like, 
	They were in the Agassiz Alcove of the West Science Students 
Lounge. They were all sitting at a table under the beautiful and 
heavy Agassiz Memorial Chandelier.
	"How are you going to get people to take cheirognomy seriously?"
Dean Hatfield asked. "I question whether it is a science at all, since it is
not taught as a science, and since there is not any consensus agreement
about its results." 
	"It is deeper than a science," Cyclone said. "It is an insignia. It
is an intuition. It is a reading and unriddlig of flesh documents. Even in
those muddy days of the world, even with muddy lines to read from, some
pretty good interpretations be made. From the heart line of a person, we can
tell whether he has a good heart or a bad, whether he is a saint or a
scoundrel. From the hearing we can not only read I.Q. better than by any of
the tests, but we can get a good idea of the style of the intelligence that
is involved. From the life-line, we can tell within a month when a person
will die, and we can also read the history of health, both past and future.
There is a lot to be found from hands, from their lines, from their
contours, from their texture, from their color and mottling. But we know
that the further back we go (and we cannot reallv go back very far because
there are no real people or mummies of them back very far), the further back
we go, the longer and healthier are their lives, the better and more holy
are their hearts, the finer and more intelligent are their minds."
"Hogwash!" Raddigan Shrike and the sixth person cried together in angry
exasperation. And then Radigan went on by himself, "Cheirognomy is ninety
percent imagination. Say, that does sound like someone with a very small
hack-saw up in that chandelier, but we can plainly see that there's nobody
there." 
	"Did you know that finger-prints have been lifted from the lead
statuette that was dropped from the astronomical dome last night and that
almost killed Pioneer Reventlo?" Dean Hayfield asked. "Did you know that
they are non-human finger-prints? They are Stoicheio finger-prints." 
	"Talk sense, Dean," Raddigan spoke angrilv. "You know that the
Stoicheio are imaginary. They are only a story told by children to children.
Who lifted the Stoicheio finger-prints off of the lead statuette?" 
	"I did," Cyclone said. "As to the Stoicheio, they may well be
imaginary, but that doesn't say that thev aren't real. We should have
Pioneer Reventlo's 'In The Beginning' language available, for we don't have
the words that we're in need of in the modern languages. The Stoicheio are
invisible, yes, and they have some qualities of the immaterial and some of
the material. We cannot see them, but we cannot think of them very well
without having an image to think on. So we construct make-shift images of
them in our minds (each of us likely makes a different sort of image of
them). And 'to make an image of' is the meaning of the word 'imagine'. But
they are real because they have effect. They enter into our thoughts and our
actions, and they affect us. And, under favorable conditions, they leave
finger-prints." 
	"Why, then, read the finger-prints, Cyclone," Dean Hayfield said.
"Read them as tables-of-contents of what things are in the Stoicheio. They
should be invaluable for that." 
	"I cannot agree that each of us has a different image of the
Stoicheio," Anabella said. "I believe that there is a common consensus of
them. I believe that this consensus image is held by as many as ten percent
of us, by as many as thirty percent of the people who have thought about the
Stoicheio seriously. I have been doing considerable work on this myself, and
I believe that I soon have a composite image of the Stoicheio worked out. I
will present it to the world, perhaps by next Autumn. The Stoicheio
finger-prints tat you have lifted, they are only the fifth set known in
world, arern't they?" 
	Anabella Hilary was into ghosts strongly. "You may  say that the
Stoicheio are only ghosts," she said sometimes,"but they are active ghosts
and we will have to deal with them. They are revealing their organization
more and more." 
	And there was, in Anabella's own adolescence-area, a ghost infued
complex that she refused to release. She still had a poltergeist associated
with her. Most infested children will be rid of their infestation by the
time they are sixteen. She kept her poltergeist secretly, as a young man
will sometimes keep the teddy bear that was the companion of his childhood.
Indeed, Anabella believed that the whole appearance and idea of the teddy
bear was only an attempt (a surprisingly accurate attempt, she said) to make
a poltergeist visible. Catherine January also said that poltergeist skulls
were definitely bear-shaped. She had made several skulls of poltergeists she
had known when she was younger.
	"No, the set of alien finger-prints that I lifted from the statuette
is the eleventh known set," Cyclone said. "There had already been ten sets
or partial sets authenticated. Mine is the eleventh." 
	"It's elfin, that hack-saw cutting away up there," Catherine said.
"I bet it isn't ten millimeters long, from the pitch of the blade sound. How
is anyone going to cut through metal with so small a saw? I almost wish that
I could help it." 
	"The finger-prints are good evidence for the existence of the
Stoicheio as have been random bones for the existence or several animals and
several sorts of men," Cyclone said. "Osseologists used to reconstruct
complete animals and men from no more than a dug up bone or two. And those
bone experts subsequently had to give up very little of what they had
claimed in the name of the bones. Even near man, even man of that
'historical recent' period were generated by no more than a bone or two
found in authenticated undisturbed strata. However, there are no bones of
modern man in authenticated undisturbed strata, none that can be verified as
untampered with or as not artifically placed where they were found, none
that can be classified absolutely as 'modern man' rather than for
'historically recent' man or near-man. Therefore there is less reason to
believe in the existence of present-day modern man than there is to believe
in the existence of the Stoicheio." 
	"What rot, what rot," said the sixth person present. 
	"Our question as Prometeans must be: How can we make a climatic
Promethean advance? Where is the new spark? Where is the new fire? Dean
Hayfield asked. "Strangely, Pioneer Reventlo has his hands full of new fire,
but he believes that it is very old." 
	"We haven't very much to go on yet," Anabella said. "We haven't
anything at all that can be really authenticated. We have an idea of the
noble and primordial original language, and yet nobody has ever seen it or
heard it. We have the noble bones and perhaps some of the noble paintings,
of the Cro-Magnon men. But we do not have any objective proof that there is
really anything noble about them. We have evidence from hand-lines of
mummies that men were more clear in their thinking as we go further back,
but (with all deference to dear Cyclone) there isn't any proof of any of it.
The only thing proved is that old mummies tend to have clear hand-lines. We
have a little bit of evidence on the invisible Stoicheio who are said to
have been enemies of the Cro-Magnons, and to be enemies of ourselves as
well, but this is empty talk. We have some things that might possibly point
to a greatness and completeness 'in the beginning'. But we need three
thousand pieces of real evidence, not three pieces of purported evidence.
what say you all?" 
	"We're working on it," F. Cyclone Boniface Said. "Let's take this
one: The Stewardship of the World bit, we call it. The Stewardship of the
world is clearly evident for several millennia after the sudden, recent
'beginning'. It was a time when the swamps and moors obeyed man, as they
should. The weeds and the trash held to their modest places. The rivers ran
rich but unchoked. Paleobotany tells us this strongly. So does recent
geology. There are clear eras and funny eras all through geology, but
several millenia after the beginning were exceptionally clear. It was a
state of order that Prevailed for several thousand years, and we still live
on the remnant and pattern of it. Should the dinosaurs return to earth
today, they could not find the swamps and fens to accomodate them. Out of
the variant geologies we can get only a half adequate idea of how rugged the
disposition of the world was before this, or how ordered it became in its
age, and how comparatively ordered it still is. Disordered nature is a
horror." 	"That state of order, that draining and currying of the
world that prevailed for several thousand years and still prevails in
weakened form, it is not to be found at all in the millions of years that
went before." 
	"That is all rhapsody, Cyclone," Raddigan Shrike said. "I do not
find that in Paleobotany or in the variant geologies." 
	"It is more than rhapsody," Catherine January defended it. "It
really happens, sometimes, somewhere. And, yes, we are either in the
afterlight or the forelight of it now. But is it somewhere that we will be
able to find, or is it only another reflection thrown on the hills behind
us?" 
	"There may be another way of looking at magnificent Cro-Magnon man,"
Raddigan said. "I am reminded of the stanzas by Chesterton: 

	'The Northmen came about our land 
	A Christless chivalry: 
	Who knew not of the arch or pen, 
	Great, beautiful half-witted men 

	From the sunrise and the sea. Well, were the Cro-Magnons 'Great,
beautiful half-witted men'? Their physical counterparts today are so, or
that is the way it seems to me. And I am pretty certain that Pioneer
Reventlo fills that description, even though he is 'imposing'. Are they the
'Magnificent Morons' and are we giving them too large a place? I know that I
am small and dark and not at all of the Cro-Magnon type. But is the
Cro-Magnon myth identical with the Germanic, or at least with the Aryan
myth? And does anyone still take those myths seriously?" 
	"Someone has said that if the Cro-Magnon had been represented as
dirty and unshaven, and the Neanderthal as clean and shaven, the Neanderthal
would be the more noble of the two," Cyclone said. "But there is no evidence
that Cro-Magnon was a white man. And the Neanderthals and Grimaldis are not
really different from him at all. Man, in the sudden beginning, had a
variety of noble types, but race had not appeared yet. And yet all the races
were implicit in this 'beginning man'. Races do not take a long while to
develop. A single generation could do it. A different thought pattern would
produce a different race, and it may be that that is the only thing that
will do it. 'Race' is only the narrow face of divergent thinking which is
sometimes called heresy. Consider the Bogomills of the tenth to the
fifteenth century. Some of them were Bulgarians, some were Moravians, some
were of Turkish blood, some were Greeks, some were little Russians, some
were Scandinavians, some were Roumanians, some Albanians. But they all
looked alike. They did not look like their own blood-brothers any longer.
They came to look like their belief-brothers. A strangers could look at any
of them and say 'Thou also art one of them'. Consider the Secular Liberals
of today. I have a picture of a recent congress of their essential leaders.
Whether they are Chinese or Anglo or Latin or Negro or Polynesian, they all
look pretty, much alike. They have become a seperate race, a new race that
has appeared within the last two hundred years." 
	"Hogwash!" said Raddigan Shrike and the sixth person together.
"There is another fragment that may turn into a piece of real evidence some
day," Catherine January said. "Our interpretation of the Aalborg Skeletons,
and they are about as Cro-Magnon as you can get, is that these men lived to
be near a thousand years old, an the evidence of certain accumulations in
their bones and certain traits in their bone-structure. But another
interpretation of the same evidence is that there was then much more
carborundum than there is now." 
	"I don't believe that we're helping the Pioneer Reventlo thesis very
much," Anabella said. "And yet I believe in it. I do believe in a golden
age, possibly just of a canonical thousand years long, that was in the
beginning. And I believe that somebody is preventing our examining it. But
we must examine it and pile up evidence for it. If we discover what it
really was, maybe we can bring it back."
	That flying couple, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald ('Are they really
flesh and blood?' it used to ask on the playbills for their act) came
suddenly, into the Agassiz Alcove. There was no way they could ever arrive
anywhere except suddenly. 
	"Oh, we have all the evidence!" Vivian cried,"and it proves that
Pioneer Reventlo is absolutely correct. It came to us like a series of
explosions, intuitively and dynamically. It is out in the open for all the
world to see, and it is almost the most important thing in the world." 
	"The reason that you haven't seen the interlocking mass of evidence
is that vou have been looking for static evidence, aid this is kinetic,"
Curtis Bald rattled his words out almost like rifle fire. "It can only be
caught by high-speed eyes and high-speed ears. We can't stop to communicate
it to you right now though. There are enemies pursuing us to kill us." 
	"Why don't you change your patter, people," Raddigan suggested.
"Your acrobatics is tops, but your patter is bottom." 
	"There always are people pursuing you to kill you," Anabella Hilary
said with feigned boredom (actually, the prescence ol the two acrobats
always brought a sort of excitement). "You always believe someone is chasing
you, but they never seem to catch you. Vivian, what is that spreading --?" 
	"Oh, it's only blood," Vivian said. "Mine. I'll just take this bar
towel to sop some of it up. My dress is already ruined, but I hate to
dribble too much of it on these classy carpets. We will try to contact vou
within a week if we're not pursued too relentlessly. Toot, toot, ta, ta!"
And the flying youngsters were gone. 
	And everybody laughed. Vivian and Curtis liked to put on acts. Both
of them were super acrobats and super adagios. They gave their skits in
everv variety show that happened at the University. They made explosive
entrances and exits always. And they always talked, no, not talked, they
always shouted in passing, of great secrets that they possessed and how they
were being hunted down to their deaths for knowing too much. 
	"Are they flesh and blood, or are they Spirits of Adagio?" Raddigan
declaimed in the manner of the acrobats' own playbills. But Cyclone had
caught some of the scarlet fluid that had apparently been spurting from
Vivian. He had caught it in a labratory retort ("Cyclone isn't very fast
with the answers, but he's never without a retort," Catherine January had
said of him once). 
	"I will just analyze this," Cyclone said. "Naturally I am not
witnout a mini-testing kit. I bet they got it at the magic shop. Maybe I can
make it and sell it cheaper." 
	There was metal dust drifting down on them as sat there in the
alcove. It had been drifting down on them for a long while and they had
tried to ignore it. "The sound of that little saw would almost out one to
sleep," Dean Hayfield said. It was such metalic dust as might be produced by
a hack-saw blade of vert small size with almost immeasurably small teeth.
And the Agassiz Memorial Chandelier had begun to sway. 
	"Let's sing," said the sixth person present. "Let's have rousing
sea-chanteys and hoe-downs. Lets sing very loudly and get as deeply involved
in it as we can." 
	"What in the world for?" Catherine January asked. 
	"For the love of noise, that's what for, " the sixth person said.
"Let us create a roaring around the table. Let us make the loudest and most
arousing din that we are capable of. Let's sing. let's roar, let's sound
off." 
	"I kind of think that we should make a big noise too," Raddigan
Shrike said. "I don't know why but I have the sudden impulse to agree with
him."
	"With whom?" Dean Hayfield cried in amazement. "What is the matter
with you, Dean? What are you trying to distract us from? First something was
trying to drone us to sleep, but that didn't work for them. Now they are
trying to distract us with singing. And you, un-person, what is the matter
with you?" 
	"For that matter, what are you?" Anabella Hilary asked the sixth
person. "And who are you?" 
	"It's blood," Cyclone announced the results of his analysis. "Vivian
was bleeding blood." 
	"How logical of her," Anabella said. 
	"No use waiting for the last possible moment," Dean Hayfield warned
them all. "Out from under it, people! We are almost hypnotized by it. Out,
out!" 
	"No, no, sit, sit," the sixth person, or the non-person cried. "Sit
still." 
	But the five persons of them were out from under it in the last
instant of time. Then the big Agassiz Memorial Chandelier crashed down and
smashed the table flat. 
	"Oh, what is the matter with those invisible enemies," Catherine
groused. "Have they only a single method of assassination?" 
	"Oh, clumsy, clumsy," said the non-person who had for a while been
mistaken for a sixth person. "Oh, clumsy, clumsy." Then it dimmed out. 
	"I'm not sure I want to go on the expedition that is forming
itself," Raddigan Shrike said a little while later. "I want to stay here and
assemble a party to -- well, to jump over that wall. Really, I think that
all Prometheans should be committed to the mutational jump. Whatever
essential is to be found anywhere is to be fourid here also. Let us assemble
here and make the leap together that we cannot make singly. Yes, I am scared
by these attempts to kill the people who want to go on the expedition to
Italy. But I believe we should stay here anyhow." 
	"There will be walls to leap wherever we are, Raddigan," Anabella
said. "But maybe our company cannot be completed here. if we have an
authentic call to go, then we should go. There is Appointment for us
somewhere. We can jump at the place of our appointment. Lucille Creighton
calls it the 'Hypostatic Jump'." 

	Three persons who in a sort of code are called 1-212-1212,
12-121-212, and 12-12-12-12 were met together at -- well they were not
necessarily met together at any one place. They didn't work that way.
Sometimes they were in places and sometimes they were not. They had a lot of
freedom in this. They were met to consider a problem. 
	"The Pioneer Reventlo Group, loose and unorganized and with it's
eyes still unopened as it is, has now become one of the 'Ten Most Dangerous
Groups to the Status of the World'," the person named 1-212-1212 said. Oh
certainly these people spoke in English, or at least they might be
understood as speaking in it. They could understand it and use it, as they
could all tongues. They were experts in tongues and all forms of
communications. 
	"Yes, they are coming too close to things," the person named
12-121-212 said. "That being so, and they being in our territory, we must
take steps to root out their dangerous proclivities. What if they are able
to see after their eyes are opened? What if they are able to feel, and to
put out their hands, and to take the world? We must put out their eyes and
cut off their ears and pull out their teeth and claws." 
	"I had already taken some slight steps against certain persons of
them who were due to become key persons in the movement," the one named
12-12-12-12 said. "Well, it didn't work in either case, but we're no worse
off then we were." 
	"Oh that was corn, pure corn, 12-12-12-12!" 1-212-1212 said. "The
weight, the great pendant dropped from a height, that went out three
thousand years ago except in B movies and B stories. You'll make us objects
of scorn and laughter with tricks like that." 
	"It is a trick that has worked again and again and again,"
12-12-12-12 insisted. "There is no trick that has made so many comebacks. I
even like it in cycles of threes, though you can call that triple corn. So I
failed to kill Reventlo! But he is the patsy of the bunch. He can serve us
as well alive. So I failed to kill five of his most intelligent young
followers, though I did have them grouped well and set up well, and I may
have found entry into the mind of one of them. Later today or tonight, I
will try the falling weight trick for the third time. I believe it will
work. I always believe it will work. But Pioneer Reventlo has been plugging
his backward notion for several years, and we have compelled him to put it
into ridiculous and inept form every time, and never more so than last
night. Why should it begin to have effect now when he has every part of it
all wrong? It does not matter. The odds against our failing are staggering.
we can as easily go on full phase defense, and lead them stubbornly to go
where we want them to go, and let them defiantly bully their way into the
trap and the grave." 
	"I will go to Calabria and wait for it there, if it gets that far,"
1-212-1212 said. "Well, for that matter, I am in Calabria now." And
1-212-1212 was in Calabria then at that instant. That is the way those
persons operate. 

	'As among snakes, so with ghosts, only about one of them in a
hundred is poisonous. Among the small number of poisonous species, the
Stoicheio are the most venomous. Humans, without admitting their belief in
Stoicheio, have always been convinced that the Stoicheio are unfriendly to
them. This is true. Max Morning, an outstanding authority, says that the
Stoicheio are the most politically active of all ghosts, if one might call
it that. And we do call it that. Their politics is 'Down With People!'. 
	'The Stoicheio and all Lemures are jealous of humans and
quasi-humans. The Stoicheio were first in time, and they feel that people
are superceding them. The Stoicheio do not have bodies of their own, and
they nut on borrowed bodies awkwardly. For aeons, they used, on a random
basis, the bodies of animals, in particular bears, big cats and panthers,
dogs, wolverines, apes and baboons, snakes and crocodiles. When people
appeared, the Stoicheio moved randomly into their bodies also; and they met
with opposition. But they muddled and confused the human people, and they
took the shine off them. This mental confusion of the people then took on a
life of its own, like an endemic disease. There is no person now who is
completely unconfused by the Stoicheio, for there is no person who has not
been possessed by them, for minutes or hours or days or months or years or
decades. 
	'The Stoicheio have also employed the bodies of humans 	who have
died and been buried. This has caused the old belief 	among humans that
the Stoicheio are shades of the dead. Not so.
	'Most humans do not even know the name 'Stoicheio' and 	indeed it is
only a contingent or speculative form. Most humans, even among those who
know a little bit about the subject, will not agree with my appraisals. I
have the name of being a crack-pot. Very well, I will bear that name and
shame if I am able to sound a warning that will be heard. 'Awake, awake, we
are being robbed of our property and souls! Awake and defend!"
	'There is a hidden treasure to which humans hold the deed -- if they
can find that treasure. That there is such a treasure waiting is one of the
facts that has always been known, consciously and unconsciously. The
Stoicheio (it was Anaxagores who called them 'an unsuccessful experiment on
the road to humanity' and so sent a tremor of rage through them), the
Stoicheio direct the humans away from the treasure by a variety of
deceptions. At times, they will direct them towards distant reflections of
the treasure. Or they will direct them towards their own destruction. They
have special traps and graves prepared for the treasure-seckers. But they
may not be able to direct the people away from it for always. 
	'There really is this treasure buried in a field, or in a cave or
pleasure place, or in a grave. We will it and it will make us all rich
forever. We have onlv to solve the geographical and temporal and categorical
location of it and it is ours. This is the joy that was bequeathed to us
from the beginning.' 
					The Back Door of History 
						Arpad Arutinov 
	Chapter Three 

	'The lines are drawn for the final battle, and only one question
remains: whose side are the goats on?'
					Armageddon is Immanent
						Karl Smelt 

	Prospectus of the 'Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation of
Earth, Air, and Mind Sphere, in the Region of the White Goat Valley of
Calabria in Italy, for the Purpose of Solving Problems of Human Origins and
Mutations in the Historical Recent Period', by Arthur Ransom, Coordinator: 
	'There has come a call for a scientific investigation of a series of
borderline questions and propositions; and we are not able to assemble
sufficient strictly scientific evidence to investigation. Nevertheless we
are requesting it, and that this is one of the times when strict
requirements be waived. Is it bad bursary business to waive the strict
requirements in this case? I don't believe that it is. 
	'We are far ahead of the game on our investigations. There is not
one of our projects of that has not achieved more than it promised. We have
grown scientifically rich on the accidental fall-out from our expedition. I
know that the bursary holds the firm conviction that every enterprise and
expedition must be regarded as in a seperate basket, not financially
dependent on any other one. But can a comprehensive theory of basketry be
developed if we keep all our baskets completely seperate? For all the good
case and good credit that we have built up, we ask that this new expedition
be approved. There is over-riding hunch and intuition that this will yield
the richest fall-out of any of the recent investigations. Do not be turned
off by some of the materials in this presentation. Much of it is more than
it seems, and the very words of it may be cloaks and symbols for streams
running too deep to be verbalized yet.
	'Go with us on this. We don't want justice; we want mercy. 
Approve this, and it shall return to you one hundred-fold. There is treasure
buried in this field. 

	Presentation of Pioneer J. Reventlo, Doctor and Lecturer. 

	'I suppose that what we are proposing here is a time excavation, or
at least a dimension excavation. We intend to dig in the ground more
thoroughly than anyone has every digged before, and in the richest of all
unexcavated valleys. We intend to dig in the 'haunted air' that is above
that ground. We are set on excavating in the noosphere or mind-zone that is
above the ordinary haunted air. We will dig in these concentric strata of
the sphere, and we will lay out for study all the things that have been
buried there. We will excavate time itself with spades and shovels and
trowels, but I am not sure if all of it will be past time. I believe that
present and future time are also buried in the deep earths, in the deep air,
and in the deep aether. I believe that we will dig out the bones of the
future as well as of past time, and that we will be able to assemble many of
them into meaningful articulations. We will make rational skeletons out of
things that have been, and still are, and are to be. And we will put flesh
on some of those skeletons. 
	'There is an excellent state of mankind that 'happens'. Wherever it
happens, that is the beginning of mankind. From that beginning, mankind goes
on in one, or in two, or in more than two directions. It is not at all
certain that time has only one or two directions. We do not have any direct
evidence for some of my statements, but that is like saving that we do not
have any direct evidence that this building has a foundation. For the
foundation (if indeed this building does have one) is underground and
invisible, and the facing stones of the building prevent us from coming into
it directly. And yet there is much good indirect evidence that this building
does have a foundation. The building has great weight that is borne by
something, and the clay ground around here will not bear great weight
without an underlying foundation reaching down to bed-rock. The plans of
this building show it to have a foundation. There are records of the
foundation being built, and there are records of stone and steel and and
mortar and labor being poured into it. There are people who remember the
foundation being built, and there are even people who remember building it.
And that is also the case with the glorious 'foundation days' of mankind. 
	'(There is a chase going on at this moment, and it has been going on
for several weeks. There art two persons, a young lady, named Vivian Oldshoe
and a young man named Curtis Bald, who are being pursued to their deaths.
Thev are being hunted and harried because they have guessed too close about
a treasure, and have come too close to it. And the wardens of this treasure
rise against them. They are acrobats. Is that something against them? They
are being hunted from city to city and country to country. I see them often
at night recentlv, in a variety of bioscopic dream. No, no, this isn't
scientific evidence for anything. But it is secondary, evidence that our
guess is right. No one would oopose our strongly if we were going on the
wrong trail.) 
	'The 'Glorious Foundation ol' Mankind' bears weight, and all the
things without foundations sink into the clay and marl of the earth. The
plans and schematics for mankind show this foundation and beginning of
mankind. There are records of the foundation built, though these coded
shorthand records of the builders are a little bit difficult to read after a
few millennia. But there are people (I cannot say whether or not they are
'presently bodied people') who remember the foundation being built, and
there are even people who remember building it. It is true that these
'recalls' are in the form sometimes called 'folk memories', and sometimes
called the 'folk unconscious' or the 'collective unconscious'. Well, the
strata are in these places, and they are formed by authentic deposits. They
are not formed out of nothing. I myself have never seen such rich and
meaningful outz:roppinas. 
	'This, you say, is not real evidence. what real evidence do we have
for any of this? There is the existence of languages growing more and more
intricate and more excessive and concise as thev go back in time. There is
the implication that more and rich languages were required to express more
intricate and varied thought. And there is the guess that this should be
followed back along the oath that might take us to the 'beginning in
completeness' of human intelligence born with all its tools fully developed.

	'I propose the original written language, which may actually have
preceeded slightly the first spoken language, that writing, with its grammar
(grammar is identical with thought, and it had only one inception) , that
writing did have, and still may have, magical effect. In that language there
were word-charms that worked, and it may have been made up entirely of such.
The word-charms of the old writing could transport and transmute physical
objects. This is stiil done sometimes with the crumbling remains of old
written Chaldee. 
	'There is evidence that the world, in short thousands of years,
became an orderly place to live in, when it had been a disorderly place for
the preceeding millions of years. (Man is more an anti-pollution device than
a pollution device.) There is strong evidence that we still live in an
orderly world, though that order may now be approaching the threshold of
serious erosion. 
	'And there is very much evidence for the sudden appearance of a
superior man, handsome inside and outside. There is evidence for his high
character and goodness, and his blazing intelligence, and for the
masterworks that came from his hands. There is implicit evidence that this
man is ourselves, but that we have been cast into semi-sleep. 
	'But there isn't yet of the direct evidence for this. There are
levels of validity separated by steel cliffs. We want to go on an expedition
for evidence of a higher validity.' 

	Presentation of Joseph Abramswell, Analyst and Haunted Air Excavator


	'There are absurdities of time and space in all my presentations.
There are absurdities about the nature of reality. there are far worse
absurdities about myself and some of my methods. I have managed thus far to
cover up most of my personal absurditiss pretty well, for the reason that
they work, that they give results. Sometimes, as after-thought, I am able to
rephrase my methods in light of their own successful results. 
	'But I work by hunchps and intuitions, and it is after I have done
things that I find rational exclamation for how thev are done. I hear
'voices', and these voices seldom mislead me. Mostly I do hear the voices
out of the 'haunted air'. other persons hear internal voices from their own
unconsciousnesses, and this is respectable. It is respected as a tapping of
a legitimate deposit of intellectual substance. But my own voices are
exterior to me, and I believe that they are real.
	'They are real persons talking to me, and I believe that I am an
accidental adept receiver of voices. I am in accord with the 'haunted air'.
The voices must know what they are about, for they are able to inform me
correctly on a variety of subjects. They are really of precursor effect, for
I have originated a startling number of things by means of them. And the
fact is I know that some  of the voices have been dead for thousands of
years, or at least they have been unfleshed for such lengthy period. (I no
longer believe in 'death'; mark that against me.) Well, I know that some of
them are removed from me by many thousands of years. They may be
conventionally dead, or they may be unborn. The two effects are very
similar. 
	'If and when we go to Calabria, I will hear more voices there,
because I already know that there is a concentration of voices there that
will be able to inform me. And yet, from my pleasant place, I hear voices in
Calabria now. (Et in Calabria ego.) 
	'There is an element of hypertension and hysteria in all good
receivers of voices. It is controlled tension and hysteria. I have these
elements in myself. We run into paradoxes in trying to analyse all of this.
Certain statements that are necessary to make turn out to be mathematical
fictions. Dammit, almost everything is a mathematical fiction. And the
voices, our unconsciousnesses and our exo-consciousnesses, are smarter than
we are. our basest interior organs are smarter. 
	'I plead for the approval of this expedition and excavation. I feel
that it will pay off in rich tangibles as well as intangibles. I feel this
so strongly that I don't even bother to put my plea into rational form. I
put it there in its strength, that it has intuitions and intimations of
every success, and that these intuitions have never deceived me. 
	'Like Pioneer J. Reventlo, I see vivid bioscopic dreams of the young
persons Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald being pursued to murder them to shut
their close guesses off. They have strong evidence of the truth of several
matters, and there are persons who will do anything to prevent tnese truths
being made manifest. If we were wrong in our new project, there would be no
need for enemies to hunt down these two young associates of ours. But now it
has gone beyond bioscopic dreams about them. They have just been here, for
the first time that anyone of the University has seen them since their
flight. They came into my room suddenly here. 'I have a document to write,'
Vivian said. 'Ah, this will do nicely.' She took a three litre jar of
priceless persimmon jam and smashed it. 'I will just write with this on the
blank white wall here,' she said. Blank white wall! It was Groben's famous
'White on White' which he did for me personally. It is one of the most
valuable paintings in the world. But Vivian was in a transport and did not
hear my objections. in rapid and sudden words, she wrote with the jam right
over the face of the painting. Visually, of course, the panting is the
equivalent of a blank white wall, but psychically it is much more. Well, the
damage is done now. Or is there any damage done to the psychic constituent
of the paiting? It may be improved. 	'Arthur Ransom, the coordinator of
the project, has copied these words from my wall. He says that he intends to
include them in his Prospectus for the Expedition and Excavation. 

	Presentation by Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, Acrobats and
Psychics, which presentation shall be known as 'The Handwriting oOn The
Wall'. 

	'It is because we are always so swift and acrobatic and intrepid
that we catch such crime facts on the wing. You don't catch such them by
waiting on your perch for them to come to you. Some of these soaring ideas
and insights are sky-birds that even sleep on the wing and never come to
roost. 
	'We know about the 'Golden Age' now, about the 'Treasure Buried In a
Field', and about the glorious 'Foundation Days' of mankind. What we know
about them absolutely is that they are. We will indicate the blessed
critical area of all of it by our own flight which will be seen by many of
our friends as bioscopic dreams. Our acrobatics are like bee-dances in the
air. They indicate where persons should go for best nectar or treasure. One
of the blessed coordinates of this time-space location (the handiest of the
treasure gates) has already been guessed correctly by all the propounders of
the excavation and expedition. Bear with us then, and we will trace out the
other coordinates for you if we have to trace them out in our own blood. 
	'As to that, the reason I am able to write so fluently and minutely
and clearly with my fingers in chromatic jam, is I have had several
occasions recently to write rapid and telling messages in secret places in
my own blood. I must write them in what I have or write them not at all. 
	'The reason that we are able to see things that other people miss is
that, because of our acrobatics, we have learned to take a rotational view
of things. This opens them up to us and gives us quick views of there
interiors. The reason that not all or us are able to go quickly and easily
to our inheritance in the golden promise is that there are enemies of
mankind who wish to block us from our rightful possessions. What they say to
themselves of mankind is 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and we
shall have his inheritance. There is one particularly fell species that
wants, out of jealousy of us, to turn or lead mankind away from all his
birthrights and rightful possesions. This revolting species gives false maps
of these promised place, and sets up false sign post to point away from it.
This is a murderous species, and several members of it were appointed to
murder Curtis Bald and myself, Vivian Oldshoe. But we will let them kill us.
And even if they do kill us, we will not let them stop us for a moment. 
	'Always throw your weight as far forward as possible, and always
move as rapidly and intrepidly as you are able to (the first part of that
was given to us by a tumbling coach before we outgrew the need for coaches,
and the second part of it was devised by ourselves.) If you throw your
weight far enough forward, then you will have to forward always. 
	'I flew this morning, just about an hour ago. I flew for the
distance of more than one hundred meters and to a height of about thirty
meters. This is much the furthest that I have flown. I fly by throwing my
body very far forward. It's fly then, or fall on your face. When you are you
are flying, you are sometimes able to look down and see your own body below
you, a phenomenon that I still do not understand. 
	'But I don't believe that the two bodies that will be discovered
today are really mine and Curtis's. They may look like ours, but that is
trickery. We die harder than that. They are a made by our enemies. They are
part of the false trail that our enemies strew. They cannot be ours, or at
least I do not believe that they are. We are hunted, and we are harried
closely, but we will come to the  blessed and fortunate place. And when we
get there, we will trumpet the location, so that everyone can come to it. 
	'Mr. Abramswell has just said to put in a plug for the 'Pioneer
Reventlo Expedition and Excavation'. Of course this must be approved,
gentlemen of the bursary. The expedition going to be one of the nodes of the
great diagram, and is going in a primary dimension of it. 
	'Let us go further than this. Only one part of the secret for which
we are being pursued can be given now: 'Come to the White Goat Valley. There
is appointment there.' It is important that the entire party should come
there together. Come there, we may transmit the rest of the secret to you.
Or we discover that 'Come to the White Goat Valley' was the entire secret. 
	'I believe that some of our chase sequences are pretty good,
considering that they are unrehearsed, considerirng that they are real,
considering that people are actively trying to kill us, considering that we
are not running at random but are always going toward the Treasure Itself.
All our friends and interested persons can be getting these sequences by
bioscopic dreams, and some persons are accidentally picking them up on
commercial TV. There have been four or five of our recent escapes that I
particularly love.' 

	Presentation of Jeffery Wind, 'Device Identifier' and Classifier of
Artifacts: 

	'Gentlemen, as an 'identifier of devices' I am good. I am the most
consulted identifier in the world. Without me the museums -- well, they
would now be in straits as sad as they were before I came along. Now I want
to identify a particular singular device and tell the purpose of it. This
singular device has the tentative name 'The Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and
Excavation of Earth, Air, and Mind-Zone, in the region of the White Goat
Valley of Calabria in Italy, For the Purpose of Solving Problems of Human
Origins and Mutations in the Historical Recent Period'. This device will
tell us what we ourselves are all about, what we can be, and what we so far
miss being. I am putting my reputation on the line with this. This is a
machine to be constructed to give us valid answers. Approve it, and let it
give them. I know that there are seven persons on the bursary board. That
includes our colleage Arthur Ransom who is committed to this project and who
is putting the prospectus together. I know also that one of you seven
persons is dead set against this project, dead against it with a cold fury.
He will be so strong against it that he may be taken to balance two or three
others who are weakly in favor of it. Do not let this happen. For this
member of the bursary board is not a true person. He is a device. And I know
about devices. I am a device identifier, and I will identify him by his
nature and his name as well as I am able to do it. 
	"I am not yet able to identify him by his human name. But his name
in Hell is 12-121-212. A wise person has said 'Whenever seven human beings
sit down together, statistically one of them is not human. For we are
heavily infiltrated by non-humans, by as much as one in seven. Some of the
non-humans who abide with us and pass for us are really friendly to us,
though always with certain reservations.' But this device person, known as
12-121-212 in his own place, is no friend of ours at all. His purpose is to
block us, to mislead us, to destroy us. And it is very important to him and
to his that the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition should not be approved. But this
device person has not opposed other expeditions and excavations that have
come before the bursary board. What is the difference? The difference is
that this proposed expedition knows where to dig. 
	'Is my own presentation here helping the prospectus? I doubt that it
is, but I write what I must write. I am now dealing with principalities and
powers and such things that are not commonly found under the scientific
umbrella. Gentlemen and ladies, I am telling you that the scientific
umbrella is too small by far, and that it is mostly midgets who are huddling
under it. 
	"I see these arrant principalities and powers are devices among
other devices and as living artifacts among other artifacts; and will oppose
them where they are identified and classified as to humans. They are
unfriendly to us on this, for we come to close to their den which is athwart
our patrimony. Permit me a symbolic levity that covers a true fact. For our
particular excavation it will be necessary that we move the Devills Tail,
for it is in the way where we intend to dig. Dante, I believe, describes how
the Devil's Tail curls around under the hilly land of Calabria before it
curls deeper.
	'People of the bursary, approve this request. It is important that
you do. Come out from under that little umbrella of seemly opinion before it
miniaturizes you completely. Make a spacious decisionn here. Approve.
	The seven members of the bursary board were met in ordinary session
to consider a prospectus sponsored by one of them. These were the seven
members: 
	Arthur Ransom who introduced and sponsored the Prosoectus and
Application for the 'Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation'. Arthur was
a multi-talented associate of the University scientists, an inspired
smatterer and joyful dabbler who had a sure sense of what would work and
what would not. He had oversized blue eves and hair like floppy sand. He was
honest about all things in the world except money. He had the green Dassion.
But he was an oil-painter and a gentleman. 
	"People, this one is a crackerjack," he said when he handed out the
Prospectus for the Reventlo Expedition. "There is even a surprise in the box
somewhere, the pearl beyond price. Do not look at it as narrowly as you look
at other applications. It is time that we enjoyed a sabbath from narrow
judgements. This has almost everything against it, and the only thing in its
favor is that it will work. It will work. I know it will. It is working in
me like wine now. As to such other applications as I have submitted, I have
always let them speak for themselves. But I speak for this one strongly.
Vote for it, vote for it, vote for it! And again I say, vote for it, vote
for it, vote!" 
	Bobby Birnbaum was the second member of the bursary board. (We are
counting counter-clockwise around the table.) Bobby was the manufacturer of
Unethical Bowling Balls. He was a large, fat, jolly man who usually talked
'no' and voted 'yes' on request before the bursary board. His bowling balls
were said to contain 'nonmetallic, gyroscopic-activated seekers' that would
give the bowler an average of twelve to fourteen points higher than anything
he would be able to get with another ball. Birnbaum had several times been
charged with making false claims for his ball, and he had always countered
with the stout statement that he had made no claims whatsoever. So he had
not made them, not on any slate that could be nailed down. It had all been
rumour and bowling alley talk, subsidized sometimes by minor bagmen. Even
this process of getting an idea planted had been called unethical by a lower
court. It was in a counter-move against this decision that Birnbaum had
called his ball the 'Unethical Bowling Ball'. And, after that, his fame and
wealth were assured. 
	"This is slush, Arthur," he said as he speed-read the prospectus.
"It does not mention the Promethean group, but I understand that they are
somehow pushing this expedition. Isn't it that they are for a next mutation
jump in humanity? What do you suppose this jump would consist of, Arthur?" 
	"I believe it will be 'direct apperception' as a short-circuiting of
more cumbersome and conventional thought. But this is only a feeling."
	"'Direct apperception computers' are becoming common, but the
Prometheans are not easier in Calabria than here? And are mutational jumps
easir there?" 
	"Somehow I believe that they are, yes, Bobby." 
	"The prospectus, it is badly done slush and nonsense. I don't
believe I have ever seen worse." 
	Clyde Zerubbabel was the third member of the bursary board. Clyde
dealt extensively in phantom companies and phantom currencies. His
transactions went on forever. "He can make an international deal out of
changing a dollar," Francis X. Brogan once said of Clyde, "and he can
confound banks in six countries. But he will end up with three thousand
dollars change for one dollar." That was true. Clyde collected transaction
fees on his own transactions, from persons who had nothing at all to do with
them. "The sun has to pay him a slight fee before it can rise in the
morning," Dorothea Nash said about him, "and it also has to pay him a
'no-show' fee on cloudy days." Clyde Zerubabbel was a punster of finance, a
caricaturist of the 'whole money process'. He kept his kited paper flying on
an international scale, very much like the farmer who drove a wagon 
loaded with live chickens to market evey morning. Whenever they went over
the weak board in the bridge, every blamed chicken of them had to get
airborne for an instant or they'd never have made it. If all of Clyde's
flying paper had come to rest at the same time, the weight of it would have
crushed whole empires. 
	"This is the worst you have ever done, Arthur," he said as he
scanned the application. "This is the most inept application I have ever
seen. And is it true, as I have heard from sormeone in your office, that the
presentations not selected to include here are even worse than those
included? I heard that the screed of Rosa Caprobianco (bless her scarlet
heart) was so silly that it set the very mice around the cheese,, Science
Buildings Compound to giggling. Is that true?" 
	"Yes, sadly that is true," Arthur Ransom said. "And hers was not the
worst." 
	Estrella Villarreal was the fourth member of the bursary board.
Estrella was into beauty strongly, especially Mens Beauty. Her line of men's
sachet was tops. She was very from rich her beauty industries, but was not
herself particularly beautiful nor even pretty. She looked,	as she
herself said, like an Andalusan farmer woman. "Oh, I make all that for the
vanity trade," she said, "but I haven't any vanity myself, only
practicality." 
	And now she said, "This is pretty awful, Arthur. It is
intellectually contemptable, grammatically insulting, and rhetorically
ridiculous. It is tainted through and through. Why do you do things like
this to us? Why do you not take more care in your presentations? There is no
scientific justification for a line of this, is there? Haven't you gone too
far this time, really now?" 	"I suppose so," Arthur said. "But I did take
care with it. No 
could have done a better job in presenting it, considering what it is. And
yet I ask you all again, vote for it, vote for it, vote for it. There is
something here that escapes the eye and wit. There is real worth to to be
found in this speculative expedition. It is just a little bit truculent
about letting itself be put into words." 
	Robert Qoth was the fifth member of the bursary board. Robert was an
Arabian from Minnesota. "We liked it that wav," Robert said. "We were the
only Arabian family within eighty miles, so we hadn't 
much competition in anything.	Naturally we became very rich. There There
is no way that we could have missed being so. Naturally we were all very
handsome there too. We hadn't much competition in that either." 
	And now he said: "Really, Arthur, this is one of the most
interesting things that I have seen this morning. For some reason, I missed
'Malaprop Comics' in the paper this morning, and this will take the place of
it. Even your acrobats aren't at their best in words. You know, I was
getting the bioscopic dreams of that acrobatic couple the night before last
and last night very strongly. I don't understand that part it all, and my
alienist doesn't understand it either. He is getting the bioscopic dreams
also. He said that most of the alienists were getting the dreams very
vividly. I can hardly wait till tonight to see how they get out of their
latest trap. And I agree with Reventlo that we live on a diminishing remnant
of order in this world, and I half accept that a more perfect order was in
the beginning. But I can't believe that this origlncal order is to be found
by excavating the Calabrian hills. And Abramswell, who usually makes such
masterful presentations, busts completely on this one. And so -- by the
principalities and powers! -- does Jeffery Wind. Ah, throw this one in the
trash barrel outside, Arthur. How could you all have done so badly at the
same time?" 
	Dorothea Nash was the sixth member of the bursary board. Dorothea
was a poverty person, deep in the machinations of 'World-Wide Poverty
Enterpises'. That's where the money was, that's where the diamonds were
mined, that's where the little mill that grinds out tile currency was
located. Dorothea was the author of such satirical masterpieces as 'The
Mystique of the Opulent Poor', 'The Fiduciary Policies of Prodigal Sonship',
and 'Face-Grinding For Fun and Profit, a Drama Pousee'. She was a
conspicuous person with a gleam on her. 
	And now she said "It's a bad joke, Arthur. And with acrobats yet!
What are these acrobats, Arthur?" 
	"Oh, I think that they are ghost poems. Yes, that's what they are.
They're also a form of ballet." 
	"Aren't they flesh and blood?" 
	"Their own playbills for their act always ask that question. I'm not
sure whether they are or not, Dorothea." 
	"I am almost tempted to vote against this, Arthur. And I am half
tempted to push to get it approved and then try to go on it to Calabria. In
some of the things here none of you know what you're doing or saying, but
you are babbling about something that may well be worth recovering. I won't
vote at all on this though unless there's a tie vote." 
	Francis X. Brogan was the seventh member of the bursary board.
Francis X. took a rather strict and scrutinizing view of many things. He
believed that heavy walls and firm foundations were a prime requisite for
serenity. "With your outlook on things, you should be a monk Francis,"
Dorothea Nash had said to him once. "I am a monk," Francis Brogan had
answered. "I am a residual and care-taker member of one of the oldest and
most obscure orders. Actually it was extinguished many centuries ago, but
now it flames up in me again." But Francis X. didn't like poor performance
in anything.
	"Where are the mathematical equations for all your propositions,
Arthur?" he asked now. "Can you have a supplement containing them ready for
us by two o'clock this afternonn? Where are the graphis and tabes and
citations? Where are the supporting papers? Where, I ask you, is the
Prospectus itself? This, as you must know, is only a heavy humored preamble
to a prospectus. Where is the main part of it?" 
	"That's all of it, Francis X.," Arthur said in a heavy voice and
with a heavy heart. "This is the main and only document of it. This is all
there is." 
	"You need a vacation, Arthur," Francis X. said. "You haven't been
working nearly hard enough, and you need a vacation from your debilitating
ease. Oh, I am voting against the proposition." 
	"And I," said another person. "I vote against it." 
	"And I," said still another person. "I vote to turn it down." 
	But the state of things was this: tie bursars were attempting to
raise their threshold, to move onto a higher financial plateau for the
institution. They wished to put the entire University Funding on a higher
basis. This would be done money-talk, bv intimidation and by arrogant
assumtion, by manipulation of foundations, by calling for payment of certain
claims to good will. But it would also be done by subscription and by vulgar
money-drive. The decision of the board was that this institution should
break into the magic circle of the top seven funded American Universities.
As an aid to this push, they had to show a crisis in funding. They had to
show an empty barrel. And so they were, for this month only, approving every
request that they could put their hands on to approve. There was a lot of
money that had to be gotten rid of quickly to be able to put the worst face
on things. 
	So it was a game. Four of the members now had to vote in favor of
the request, after three of them had humourously voted against it. It was
approved. It was taken care of. It was finalized. 
	And Arthur Ransom went away from there whistling 'On the Road to
Calabria' happily. But we still don't know which of the seven board members
had the name 12-121-212 among his own people. 

	Comment by H.H. Huges of the Pentagram Group:

	"The group headed by Pioneer Reventlo and Joseph Abramswell, Jeffrey
Wind, and Arthur Ransom is not working with real material and is not
applying valid evidence rules. After discounting the meager information they
give us (for all the information that is exchanged in such exchange groups
as their and ours is 'shot-gun' or 'brother-in-law' informationm and we
smile at some Oof the information we have given them), the residue is still
found to be tainted and empty. There is either arrant deception on the part
or University Group, or they have fallen into self deception. Pioneer
Reventlo and Arthur Ransom have always been prone to self-deception. Joseph
Abramswell and Jeffrey Wind have not been. 
	"This project began with Pioneer Reventlo's famous spotted horse
named 'Ursprache' or 'Original Language'. The fact that there are several
complex languages in the distant past and that there are many eroded
languages in the present betokens nothing. There also were eroded languages
in the distant past, and there are highly complex languages in the present.
Let me say that the system of highly developed inflections does not make for
a highly efficient languages, perhaps only for a cumbersome language. Some
of the classical examples are like old dromedary saddles, tall and ornate,
and not well fit for present day use. 
	"To use the fact of intricate past language as evidence of a Golden
Age in the past is stretching a non-existent rubber banana to breaking
point. And the other evidence -- that the lines in the palms of very old
mummies are clear and deep, that there was an ordered terraine in the most
recent distant past, and a disordered terraine in the less distant recent
past, that is all selected evidence, or it is blather. 
	"I believe I am justified in asking 'What is wrong over there?' It
is not my business how the University throws away its money; but it is my
business when any part of community, by fatuous utterance, reflects
unfavorably on the rest of the scientific community. But two of the persons
who head this program are intelligent, and all of them are honest. That
being the case, what is the cause? 
	"This is surely a Wild Goose Chase. Somewhere that group, in its
proposals, uses the term the 'White Goat Mirage' which is the same as goose
chase. Is this flammery? Who is doing it then? Is all the information they
are putting out merely code-talk for something very different and very
secret? But raw code-talk should not be used in even 'shot-gun' and
'brother-in-law' exchanges. And pseudo-science should not be slipped into
such exchanges either. 
	"Competant groups such as their do not suddenly become unhinged. Not
without a reason. Reasonable persons do not suddenly drop into idiot jargon.
This is apparently an empty expedition chasing an empty enterprise. Why? Who
is gulling these patsies? If there is something meaningful behind all this,
we must ignore it until it comes to the fore. At the present moment, this is
unworthy of report and evaluation. Maybe, ten years from now, they will tell
us over the gin what it was really all about."
	Chapter Four
 
	We are imprisoned by our enemies in a fortunate place.
	We are a body. We are a banquet.
	Now we open a transforming secret and feats upon it.
	After much feasting, we will be quiet for a day and a
night and a day.
	Then the Spirit will come and move over us.

					Transformation Poems 
					-- Catherine January 

	"The most dense ghost population in the world is in Calabria in
South Italy," Lord Byron said. "There are really more ghost than people
there."
	"Just as the Italians are three times as superstitious as other
people, so are the Calabrians thee times as superstitious as otherr
Italians," Browning said. 
	"All the Calabrians are half asleep in the daytime, and this also
the case with the beasts in their fields and the birds in their air. It is
said that all of them are involved in very much illicit night business which
is what makes them so sleepy in the daytime," Shelly said. 
	But the poets have been jealous of Calabria because every Calabrian
is a natural poet. And others have spoken in more friendly fashion of the
region. 
	"You are my delight," God said of it. 
	"It is a fair and pleasant place, but it is not good for anything,"
Napoleon said of it. 
	Calabria is the southern most part of continental Italy, the toe of
the Italian boot. 
	The Pioneer J. Reventlo Expedition-and-Excavation came to Calabria
on the last day of May. The year, not then in doubt, is in doubt now because
of a time anomaly that developed about the doings of the of the group. The
people of the expedition trans-jetted to Naples, loco-planed to Cosenza,
autobused to Nicastro, and took a hill-buqgy taxicab (owned bv Il Trol
Automobile Rentals Company) into the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. But
they had to walk and climb to G-oat Castle (Castello Capro) itself, and they
didn't know how they would get their heavy equipment up there. 
	The persons of the expedition were Pioneer Reventlo, Joseph
Abramswell, Rosa Caprobianco, Arthur Ransom, Lucille Creighton, Jeffrey
Wind, Dorothy Blue-Ice, Anabella Hilary, Raddigan Shrike, Dean Hayfield,
Catherine January, F. Cyclone Boniface, Adriana Thistle, Stephen Tall, and
1-212-1212. 1-212-1212 was now unaccountably going by the name of Leon Yuri.
There are several discrepancies about this last one, Leon. Arthur Ransom and
Raddigan Shrike said that of course Leon had been with them on the trans-jet
to Naples. They had played cards with him the whole journey. Others said
that Leon had not been on that flights that he had met them later, at
Naples, or at Cosenza, or at Nicastro, or in the Valley of the White Goat
itself. 
	Well there were fifteen of them in the party now, all of them
personable and talented and intelligent. And now as they came up to Castello
Capro they were all in the state of high-strung ease. What? What? There is
such a thing as high-strung ease? 
	Oh absolutely, there is nothing like it. It was a confident pleasure
for them to be there, but it was also a wide-awake and challening pleasure.
It was like the first day on a new continent, as it was for several of them.
It was like the first day at sea when the sea was still in general use. It
was the first day in love, or the first first day of the racing season. They
were together there, the last time when they would be absolutely together
until the time of their passion. And then they scattered again for trivial
things.
	Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface went to find out how the
heavy equipment might be brought up to the castle, for it had now arrived at
Castle Hill in nine more hill-buggy taxicabs.  This was a very steep hill
for bringing up heavy equipment. Stephen Tall and Dean Hayfield had gone to
see what they could do about much needed power supply, for there seemed to
be nothing except candles and oil lamps in Castello Capro. But Stephen had
suddenly beecome truculent towards the wiole White Goat Illusion Valley. 
	"This is all wrong, it is a trick, it is an illusion," he said.
	"Sure. Its suoposed to be an illusion," Dean Hayfield said. "One of
the reasons we came here was to excavate and study illusions. This is the
Valley of the White Goat Illusion, so naturally there is illusion here."
	"I balk right now," Stephen announced. "Things here just aren't as
they seem to be. Why can't the rest of you recogize that? The very air here
is crooked. We are into 'hallucination country.' This isn't really happening
as it seems to be. Henceforth we are in a trick. Why can't you all see
that?" 
	"Perhaps we do see that, Stephen," Joseph Abramswell had said.
"Would we have travelled this far without some hopes of advantage here? The
availability or an alternate framework to enter in and withdraw from can be
a very great advantage in solving certain sorts of problems. If the whole
White Goat Valley is indeed such an alternate framework,  then we will work
it for all it is worth. There should a mathematic symbol to indicate 'This
isn't really Happening, but proceed as if it were, for the duration of the
problem'. We should place such a mathematical symbol as soon as we invent
it, at each and every entrance and exit of the White Goat Valley." 
	Arthur Ransom had gone to find the persons from the castle had been
rented, to make payments and arragements with them, and to get some answers
to questions that were just beginning to shout their presence. But in the
meanwhile the view was pleasant in this the most fulfilling valley they had
ever seen.
	And the castle was perfect for serious and original work. There were
a score of very small monks' cells that would be perfect for sleeping and
study by the individual members. There were half a dozen large halls where
courts might be held or meals served. There were libraries with every sort
of book in them, even printed books. There was a wine cellar, a cheese
cellar, and a mushroom cellar. There was an armory and a bakery and a
butchery. There were leather tanning areas, and cloth-making facilities. But
mostly there were the great arcades or galleries with their stone tables and
benches where persons might talk almost forever and so resolve every sort of
problem. And the weather at the castle was perfect that last day of May.
This was a very strong castle, and it brought up questions about strong
castles in general.
	"Why are there such strong Castles?" Jeffery Wind wanted to know. "I
have heard stories and nonsense about them, but I haven't heard anything
that explained it. Castles are over-defenced, They don't have to be built
that strong for defence against people."
	"For defence against what are they built then?" Lucille Creightton
asked. "Yes, I know that oepole do have preternatural enemies, but most of
those uncouth enemies are unbodied or only occasionally bodied. Castle walls
and castle ramparts would not keep them out, no more than they would keep
thought out.
	"But castle walls and ramparts do keep thoughts out," Pioneer
Reventlo said. "They keep whole classes and sequences of thoughts out.
Castle walls are like semi-permeable membranes in that they are very
selective about what they pass through. This is the reason we selected this
castle. It's walls and battlements sein out all worthless and trashy
thoughts, and they bring in only such as we need. They also sein out
ambushes and treacheries." 
	"Come back to my question," Lucille said. "Against what enemies have
castle walls always been built so strong, since they do not need to be built
so staunchly against people?" 
	"Oh, they're built against Titans," Dorothy Blue-Ice told her, "and
against Troglodites and Tyrrhenians and Trolls, all of whose blood Rosa
carries in her canals, so she says. She's sell uo quite an opposition in the
castle already. And castles are built against giants generally. And against
Stoicheio." 
	"Many of those are legendary creatures," Lucille said, being
stubborn about it vet. They could see everything from here. And they could
see several pieces of their heavy equipment beginning to appear over the
edge of the west cliff. 
	"So perhaps are people legendary," Joseph Abramswell said. "There
have been studies made by the Stoicheio on this point. These studies have
been translated neither by humans or Stoicheio, but by another race
entirely. I have a long fragment of one of those studies. it arrives at the
belief that humans are entirely legendary. But this does not explain why the
Stoicheio so hate and fear humans, if they do not believe that they are
real. I have the opinion that many species are only real to themselves, and
that they are legendary or simply not noticed at all by most other species.
But we build strong castles against both real and legendary giants because
weak castles simply will not keep them out. And they're also built to keep
things and people in." 
	"The castle itself is a legendary building," Arthur Ransom said with
a green twinkle of a smile. "It isn't very functional. And there is not any
building of which we can say it is actually a castle. Not only are there no
two castles alike, but there is not one of them that conforms to even the
loosest definition of a cast-'Le. This building, according to what history
of it I have been able to di-g up, was a lodge headquarters for one of the
mili.tary-religious orders of knights. Most of its defences are ornamental.
It wasn't designed to keep anyone out." 
	"This one was designed to keep out goats," Perpetua said. 
	"My question still goes unanswered," Lucille Creighton complained,
"arid now I have another one. Why did you give that green twinkle smile,
Arthur, when you spoke of castles themselves being legendary buildings? You
only give that smile when you see wonderful profit in something." 
	"True," Arthur said. "I can see and smell a windfall profit coming.
It's always a joy to me. And here comes one of the wind-fall profits now.
She comes and goes, and her husband is ten meters behind her." But what was
coming and going was a serving maid, Perpetua, or maybe she was a gracious
hostess, or a retainer of the castle, or just a fine woman in the bloom of
second youth. This person brought them food now, pork and pears for the
mid-day meal, and small raw eggs of the Mountain Plover. Also white wine,
and flakey barley bread. And sea salt taken from the evaporative tidal flats
that very morning. There is a crystaline sparkle on such sea salt when it is
just taken. And this woman, though the only words she had spoken yet were
'this one was designed to keep out goats', had her own sparkle and saltiness
and old nobility. 
	"You are not paid for your work in the castle, are you," Arthur
asked her. 
	"Oh no. Why should I be paid?" the lady answered. "One does not take
pay for the easy amenities. And it is a privelage to be in so fortunate a
place. Besides that, it is not possible that I should be paid. I am not in
such a state as that." 
	"And your husband is not paid either?" Arthur asked, refering to the
second person ten meters behind her. 
	"Oh, he is not my husband," the lady said. "He is something else to
me. No, he is not paid. He is not in such a state either." 
	"You are not paid for the work that you do, or for the pleasure that
you give here," Arthur said. "But the majordomo of this castle, Signor
Vilicus, he will collect from us for your services." 
	"I bet he doesn't," the lady smiled, and she stroked Arthur's cheek.
And Arthur showed a negative sort of shock at her stroking. "He may collect
from some other visitors, but he will not collect from you, Green-Eyes."
Then the lady was gone. She came and left like that. 
	"What was that all about?" Lucille Creighton asked curiously. "Yes,
I did see her disappear. Was it her trick, or yours?" 
	"That was just a verification," Arthur smiled. "One does not pay for
every service supplied. One does not pay for the service of one who is not
in the state to be paid. And one who brokers in such services does wrong." 
	The lady was gone, and yet no one had seen her go. Or at least no
one had see; her 'go away'. Maybe in the primordial language that Pioneer
loved to hark back to there were words for the fine distinction. 
	"Oh!" Dorothy Blue-Ice said with a delayed note of surprise. "Was
that in line with Lord Byron's saying that there are more ghosts than people
in Calabria?" 
	"Just so," Arthur Ransom said, and he seemed to be pleased by his
own cleverness. No one would collect from his entrusted funds for the
service of a ghost. 
	"What? Is Perpetua a ghost?" Lucille asked. "But she carries and
serves material food and drink. Or is it? I'm not quite certain about the
Mountain Plover eggs, but the rest of it is material. Well, how did you
verify that? You do want me to ask that, don't you?" 
	"I as much as asked her if she was a ghost," Arthur said. "You just
heard me. And she as much as told me that she was. And here is Signor
Vilicus coming. I must be sure that he does not bill us for the services of
Perpetua and Marius, as I believe that their names are." 
	"By what signs did vou suspect that she was a ghost?" Lucille asked,
"if that is the word for them here? I'm sure there's a better word." 
	"In a day or two here, Lucille, you will be able to guess who is in
such a state and who is not," Rosa Caprobianco said, "and you will seldom be
wrong about it." 
	And the majordomo of the Castle, Signor Vilicus, came to them as
they sat on stone benches at a stone table in one of the arcades of the
castle. 
	"Are not Perpetua and her man ghosts, Signor Vilicus?" Arthur asked
of the majordomo whose eyes matched Arthur's own with there green glow. 
	"I don't know the word, good sir," the man said. 
	"Spettri," Rosa told them. 
	"There are many such in the area," the majordomo said. "It is their
business what they are, and I do not inquire about it too closely if they do
their work right. And those two do that. There are always more of the
creatures in the south than in the north of any country. 'Ghosts', as you
call them, don't like cold weather." 
	"But Percetua and Marius, are they not ghosts?" Arthur still
insisted. "Or do you not have the feeling, sir, that in this place, every
problem aid misunderstanding might be easily and quickly solved." 
	"It has always been that way with me," the majordomo said. "Problems
are not a bother here. Yes, that feeling goes over you like a breeze. does
it not? The knots all untie themselves. You can watch them unravel from
their standing lines sometime." 
	Then they all took note of the problem of lifting their heavy
equipment up the Castle level, and the easy wav it was solving itself.
Crates and bales were coming up over the edge of the west cliff, almost as
if they were coming by their own power, and being set in the middle of a
little cleared area. 
	"That should be investigated," Joseph Abramswell said. "There is
something improbable about whatever method is being used to lift our heavy
equipment up that cliff. There aren't any rational possibilities." 
	"Let's go see," Lucille Creighton suggested. "That's one way to
satisfy our curiousity." 
	"That may be the wrong way," Abramswell worried. "Whatever it is,
it's a wild thing, though Pioneer Reventlo might call it an ultra-ordered
thing. It could be spooked if we go to it ignorantly." 
	"Catherine January and Cyclone Boniface have just been lifted up
that cliff face themselves," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "They didn't spook it.
They used it. But Cyclone does look a little bit spooked bv something. They
are coming this way. We will have them explain how it is done. We can only
see the very top of the operation from here, but that is enough to show that
the thing is impossible. Catherine and Cyclone will have some tall
explaining to do." 
	"Oh surely it is only the ancient wav of lifting very heavy
objects," Pioneer Reventlo threw his bit in. "In all esoteric literature we
find lintel stones of twenty thousand tons or so set up on stone pillars
hundreds of feet high. It is always stated that they were raised by the
'Forgotten Secret of the Ancients'. The key word there is 'forgotten', for
moderns have several times learned the secret, and several times they have
forgotten it. Some of the very heavy stones have been raised up thousands of
feet on sheer cliff faces, or else they have been let down thousands of feet
from above or from the sky. I wish I didn't always forget how it was done.
I'm sure that I myself have known it and forgotten it." 
	"Catherine, how are the heavy crates being lifted up?" Dorothy
Blue-Ice called as Catherine and Cyclone approached the group at the stone
table in one of the arcades. "How were you and Cyclone lifted up
yourselves?" 
	"I forget," Catherine said. "I half understood it a moment ago when
it lifted us up, but I forget it now. It was pretty slick, but it had to be
prepared for previously." 
	"It was the 'Forgotten Secret of the Ancients'," Cyclone said. Well,
Cyclone was a kidder, but had he been close enough to hear Pioneer's use of
that phrase as he approached? "The secret is still in operation. By it,
objects of almost any weight can be raised to almost any height. Yes, it
works pretty slick. I forget just how, but it's mighty slick." 
	"But what is the motive force?" Joseph Abramswell asked. "I know
that this is ridiculous, that I can get up and walk no more that thirty
meters and find the answer to one of the most puzzling of questions. But
somehow I hesitate. I will know the answer soon, but there will be something
the matter with it. And I will not know it for very long. Catherine, give us
a hint. What is the motive power?" 
	"Oh, a man and a donkey, that's the motive power, I think it is. The
man and the donkey are both rented from 'Il Trol Automobile Rentals'. I have
big news. We're going to get married today. It's a very recent decision." 
	"Who is going to get married, Cat?" Pioneer asked. "You and the man
with the donkey?" 
	"No, no, myself and Cyclone. There is only one 'we' on this whole
expedition, and that is myself and Cyclone. There are no others who are that
close to each other. What finally got him was the way I rub the bumps on his
skull. And I love his occipital bring bone. We will be married right now if
we can find the priest, and there should always be a priest in an old castle
in Calabria. Where is Perpetua? She should know where there's a priest." 
	"And what if the priest that she finds is as much of a spettro as
she is herself?" Arthur Ransom asked. "Wouldn't it be only a ghost marriage
if it were performed bv a ghost priest? And how do the man and the donkey
lift the crates up a sheer cliff?" 
	"Not at all. It wouldn't be a ghost marriage. Why are all you big
professors always so ignorant? Two persons marry each other. That is the
direct and fundamental act. They marry each other by pledge and intent. But
their pledge must be witnessed and attested to whenever that is possible. A
ghost priest can witness it as well as any other one can. A marriage itself
will always have a ghostly or transcendent aspect to it, so a ghost priest
would be perfect. Oh, I think the man and the donkey use a rope part of the
time. And part of the time it isn't needed." 
	Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface went into the winding
interior of the castle to find a priest and be married. And Pioneer
Reventlo, Jeffery Wind, Lucille Creighton, Dorothy Blue-Ice, Joseph
Abramswell, Arthur Ransom, Rosa Caprobianco, and an eighth person (probably
Leon Yuri or 1-212-1212) walked the thirty meteres to the cliff edge to see
how the heavy equipment of the expedition was being hoisted up to the top of
the castle level cliff. 
	Well yes, there was a man and a donkey down below, and a large crate
was coming up, turning slowly in the air as it rose, seeming to be in the
control or grip of something. But that something was either hidden or
invisible. Neither the man or the donkey seemed to be doing much of
anything, but the donkey was wheezing with effort and was in a lather. 
	"Why doesn't the man help the donkey a little bit?" Dorothy Blue-Ice
asked. "The donkey is doing all the work and the man none at all." 
	"I can't see where either of them is doing any work," Lucille
Creighton protested. "They seem to be concentrating very hard, but neither
of them is doing any work. The donkey is apparently concentrating the
harder. Oh yes, I see a rope now, a very thin one going up the cliff and
fastened somehow to the crate. But how does it work? The rope can't be
pushing the crate up. It hardly seems as if the rope is strong enough to
lift the heavy crate in any case. And what is that pulley, if that's what it
is, fastened to it?" 
	"The rope is a concession to common decency," Joseph Abramswell
said, "so that we may not see the ancient secret completely uncovered. It
may be an illusion, but I don't believe the rope is bearing any weight at
all. What is it then? I can feel it, but there is no seeing it. There's a
force field set up, of course. It works by a sort of repulsion. It repels
the objects upwards, as soon as each of them is designated to be repelled." 
	"I can see the rope now," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "I couldn't see it
at first when the rest of you could. And I'm not sure that it's only a
concession to popular ideas. Still and so it would take six to ten such
rooes to lift some of our heavier crates. I do see the gin-poles or
tip-trees coming together now to support and swing the hoist, but they look
pretty flimsy for the job. And possibly I see a tread-mill down under the
leaves and bushes there, and that may be what powers it all. The donkey
doesn't move his feet much, but he does move them a little bit. Yes, that's
the way it's done. I see it all now. It's a simple donkey powered hoist to
lift weights." 
	"What is really at work is a combination of concessions to -- ah --
unpopular ideas," said Jeffery Wind the device identifier and classifier of
artifacts. "The mechanical contrivances are mostly concessions to common
decency. Yes, and concessions to the donkey also who probably lacks abstract
visualization. And it is also a concession to the telekinetic mentality that
is being forged by the man and the donkey. It is all symbolic of something
slightly different. But it's an old legend that a donkey will put tremendous
traction and thrust into such a telekinetic effort until he finally bursts a
brain and dies. And there are donkey bones, in crypts of honor, in almost
all the megalithic constructions. They are in seeming support of the view
that it is all done by massive telekinesis. There are sometimes several sets
of donkey bones about these massive works, and now I understand the
lithogliph often found that such a work is a six donkey, or a nine donkey,
or a twelve donkey job. The donkey hasn't much imagination, but he can pour
out his very brains on a traction-and-lift job when he is given a clear idea
of the direction that his effort should take. 
	"But this interpretation is also a concession to intellectual
decency. These are only a couple of small arcs of the effecting circle
itself. Look closer and you will see how the trick is really done." 
	"I listen closer, and I'm told by the humming air how it's really
done," Joseph Abramswell said. 
	"I remember closely, and I remember how it's really done," Pioneer
Reventlo said. 
	"We can talk all we want to, but we don't see how it's done,"
Dorothy argued. "Could we talk the boxes ur, there ourselves? We could. I
believe that the donkey is verbalizinq. That's what that low moaning is.
They are talking the crates up there, and thinking them up." 
	"Oh, I've always known how it was done," Rosa Caprobianco said, "but
when I'm away from it, I tend to forget how it works. After I have a little
trepanning brain surgery done to myself, and have had the bothersome nodule
removed, then I'll no longer have a tendency to forget such things." 
	"I see how it works now," Lucille Creighton said, "and it is slick.
But I'll forget in an hour, till I see it again. But after we have made the
jump, we will always remember all of such things." 	After a bit, as the
final heavy crates were hoisted up to the top of the cliff by the man and
the donkey, they all saw how it worked, that 'Forgotten Secret of the
Ancients'. But, once they were out of sight of it, most of them would not
remember how the wonderful trick was done. And, even in sight of it, several
of them expressed doubts. 
	"We're being had after all," Joseph Abramswell mumbled. "Oh, how we
are being had! Who is playing such tricks on us? Who is pouring such drool
into our brains? I myself thought that I understood for a minute how it
worked. Forgotten Secret of the Ancients! No, no, no, how can they get away
with such stuff in the sight of smart people like ourselves?" 
	"I think maybe we should have a talk the people at the Il Trol
Automobile Rentals," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "If this service is being rented
from them, we have the right to ask how it works."

	But something else intruded and they forgot for a while the lifting
of the heavy weights and equipment. They were all overswept by a daytime
spectacle which itself seemed more lighted by arc-lights than by the sun.
There came now to most of the people of the expedition a splendid bioscopic
vision of Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald. It as an episode of 'Death Chase'.
It was the two adagio acrobats at their best. 
	It was the old chase sequence, and these two persons, or 'ghost
poems', were being pursued to their deaths. ('Pursued to Their Death' was
the name of the orchestral piece that accompanied the act, and the words
also were chanted or spoken by a species of Greek Chorus.) The acrobats were
pursued through rushing landscapes and city-scapes in dizzy unrolling
panorama. 
	This was ballet, and it was also rinky-dink vaudeville combined with
old silent movie chase motif. There was absolute clarity of all the lines
and forms standing out from the rushing backgrounds. There was no fuzziness
at all. Vivian, of burnished copper skin and hair, was in creamy white and
velvet black. She was striking from the first in her incremental movement,
and even more so when the blood began to appear on her. 
	Curtis Bald, lighter toned than Vivian and lithely muscled, was clad
in black Danther-skin. The music was all ice-cream notes, pleasantly
shocking in their coldness and whiteness. They were white bright ana loud,
clear in outline, visual notes, with a touch of syrup on them. 
	"Gather in the pavilion, that's where it will happen. That's most of
the secret," Vivian called out of her tumbling motion. But what pavilion? 
	This was all the old pursuit movies together. This was 'The Mark of
Zorro' and'The Thief of Bagdad' acrobatics. The pursuers or adversaries,
dozens of them, all masked, all looking alike, were like a rushing river.
They were part of the foamy flow of the country-side and town-side. They
flashed knives, they flashed guns. They wielded garroting ropes and
bludgeons. It was a leaping, swinging, climbing go to escape them, up ropes
that were severed in mid-climb, over fences, through windows, into trees and
then upon roofs, up tall buildings by the ornate windows and cornices of
them, down fire escapes that swing apart in every way like Jacob's Ladders,
onto the tops of railroad cars or canal boats, through burning buildings, in
and out of maniac traffic; running along high-tension wires while the
coronas from them curl like flaming snakes, diving thirteen stories into
open man-holes, then into the crocodile pit at the zoological gardens,
assaulted by homing firebombs and by singing tracer bullets, swinging on
chandeliers or on bell-ropes or on grape-vines, climbing cliffs and having
those cliffs cleft like shaker shingles by dynamite in mid climb, escaping
ten killers or a thousand of them (for they all looked alike, and perhaps
the same ones were escaped again and again). Always trying to convey the
'message', which might be conveyed by the 'bee-dances' of the flight and
escape. Being pursued and entrapped, shouting the secret, and shooting it by
the bursting flare-flames from a very pistol, sky-writing the message in the
sky while scampering onto the wings of the rolling airplane to escape the
cockpit unaccountably filled with savage snakes. And coming down in
parachute while mad monkeys cut the parachute ropes one by one with their
flashing knives. More blood then, real blood. And the ice-cream notes of the
sharp and cool orchestra building to a climax. 
	Those bioscopic presentations were thrilling. 
	There was another wonderful thing in the Valley of the White Goat
Illusion. The people opened their eyes to it now, after Vivian calling out
about it in the bioscoplc dream. It was wonderful in the classic sense that
it did not always have the same appearance or shape. It was the Pavilion. 
	They all went down to the Pavilion now, though they had scarcely
noticed it before. Not down the cliff though, but down the north slope from
the castle height. If they had seen it earlier as they saw it now, they
would have gone to it sooner. 
	"The Red Pavilion of My Heart," Francis called it. "She did lie in
her Pavilion... cloth of gold," William spoke of it. "Pavilioned in splendor
and girdled in praise," Robert alluded to it. "A Pavilion in a garden of
cucumbers," Soloman refered to it. "Lord, who shall dwell in thy Pavilion?"
the Psalmist asked. "Pavilion -- the lower faceted part of a brilliant,
between the girdle and the culet," Noah (Webster, that is) gives as his
third meaning. 
	In the case of this pavilion they were approaching, the pavilion
itself soared up from the culet-based in a spreading building that seemed
ready to take wing. And the pinioned roof of the building, the bezel, had a
jeweled translucence, for it was a set of sky lights. The whole building was
a jewel, a brilliant. 
	Easy, people, easy! They don't really have buildings like that. 
	it had a temporary look about it, and yet it had stood at least
since Soloman was king. It was a pleasure building. Somewhat commercial
though, for the children were selling soft-drinks in the arched and fluted
doorways of it, and their parents were selling hard drinks and wine inside. 
	But the majordomo of the castle, Signor Vilicus, came down and
warned them that they should not go into the pavilion. 
	"It is a sordid trap,"he said,"and good people do not go there. And
such good people as do go there, they seldom come out alive. They are buried
in that grave-yard beyond it. So will you be, likely, if you go into the
deceptive place." But the people of the expedition paid no attention to
Signor Vilicus. They had to visit the pavilion. 
	The pavilion might have been considered a sort of hotel. It was
named 'The White Goat', and there were handsome British and Scandinavian
tourists there. There were several little bars and dining rooms, all fresh
and friendly as if they had been made only a moment before. There were dogs
wandering in and out as if they had prior claim to the place. There was a
boy playing a concertina, and there was a harp there that nobody was playing
right now. There were several beautiful map-globes on a walnut table: one of
them at least was of this world, and others of them were of other worlds.
There was a cinema screen possibly, or at least a hanging screen of fleece
or white-wool. A Danish woman was painting at an easel. There were scrolls
and stele and librettos that scholars had just left off reading. There were
sofas and couches, some of them draped with animal skins. There was a loom
on which someone had been weaving a pictured fabric. A face was just
emerging from that fabric: the upper brows were already done, and the
slitted tops of the eyes and the tips of the ears were well underway. It was
a very old, or very new, under-loom that wove from top to bottom instead of
from bottom to top. There was a colored schematic there showing how the
picture should go, with thread count and designated color and broken color
to use for each warp and woof thread. The instructions on the schematic were
printed in Swedish. There was a treddle operated wheel there and a heavy
cudgel-like tool such as is used in metal-spinning. Someone was into arts
and crafts. Well, almost all the tourists who came there were into them. 
	There were stratigraphic rocks there, and rock crystal, and
petrified wood. Someone had been taking samples from the country-side. And
there was a mummy case that contained a score of well-mummil@ied effigies.
There was also a scroll which a Danish lady said was called 'The White Goat
Document'. It was a roll of separate sheets, not all one long sheet as
scrolls sometimes are. 
	"Can they be read?" Catherine January asked. 
	"So they say," the Dansish lady told Catherine. "But there are
several different versions of what they say."
	"Oh yes, they can be read," said a person who seemed a sort of
curator for this museum corner of the pavilion hotel. "They have been read
often. They're not really old, a couple of millenia only. My father read the
document and published a translation of it. It isn't very interesting, not
yet anyhow. It's a covenant drawn up by these mummies here, when thev were
facing death. 'We join our hands and our hearts here and wait for the
lightening to speak to us,' the document says. If the lightening did speak
to them it must have spoken to them gently, even though killingly, for there
are no marks of violence on any of them. ,nd the document is also full of
stuffy philosophical comments."
	"Maybe it isn't stuffy at all," Joseph Abramswell interrupted.
	"It is, Joseph, it is," Rosa said, "I know about this all of my
life. There is a stuffiness placed around it all to turn intruders away. You
cannot raise very much interest in it yourself. You should be full of
questions about it. 'What writing is it written in?' you should ask. 'Let me
see it.' But you do not. All such finds and preservations as this are
guarded by a dragon. This group of things is guarded by a dragon named
'Stuffy'. He throws sleep-chaff and inattention-dust into our eyes." 
	"I didn't mean 'can the scrolls be read?'" Catherine January
Boniface said. "I meant 'can the mummies' hands be read?' I was teasing
Cyclone who is usually fascinated by mummies, but he isn't interested in
these at all." 
	The people weren't interested in the mummies or their things, only
because an impediment had been thrown to distract them away. But they were
interested in everytninq else there. There was a welling up in all of them,
a 'Joy of People' with themselves and these pleasure pavilion surroundings.
This 'Joy of People' is kindled in the middle of special groups only, and
cannot be experienced by a person alone or in an inferior group. 
	Central to the biggest of the rooms was a flaming fireplace. A dozen
people were around it, sitting on hobs or in barrel chairs or captain
rockers, or on guilded benches. What in the world for? Why should there be a
roaring fire at mid-day on the last day of May? For the crackling joy of it,
and for the kaleidoscopic pageant of it, that's why. And it was not at all
too hot with the mountainous fire leaping. And neither would it have been
too cool without that roaring fire. 
	A bear was being roasted whole on a turning spit in that roaring
fire. 
	Besides, it did not seem as if it were necessarily mid-day of the
last day of May in that master hall. It could have been any time of the day
or night, and any season. 
	"In the beginning, people lived in pavilions," Joseph Abramswell
said. 
	"Of course they did," Dorothy, Blue-Ice agreed. "They lived in
pavilions as families and as nuclear families, and as open-ended clans, and
as patriarchates. Really, for people who are in the fortunate case, there is
no other way to live. Hovels and houses came in later, but in the beginning
there were only the grand pavilions. The people of the plains, as you
recall, tried to build a towered pavilion to reach to Heaven. That was
really the last of the grand ones." 
	There were ripe grapes there, purole, white, and red. There were
ripe olives, as well as figs and dates. There were melons and pomegranates.
But this was only the last day of May. How could all these things be ripe so
early? 

	But it was out under the sky that the excavating took place. People
completely inexperienced in excavating can still get a falr idea of what it
is like to excavate in the earth. But they can hardly comprehend what it is
like to excavate in the 'haunted air', or in the noosphere or 'mind sphere'.
Well, Joseph Abramswell was already an admitted expert at excavating in the
'haunted air' but there were no admitted experts at digging in the
noosphere. 
	"Digging things out of the haunted air is always tricky," Abramswell
tried to explain as he checked out the heavy electronic equipment that had
been set up for the excavation of the teeming air. "The things are always
there, but it's necessary to startle them so they will reveal their places
by their movements. It's a little bit like beating on a hollow log to drive
its denizens out of it. The hollow log will seem to be empty when one looks
into it. But hammer on it and beat on it, and things are likely to come out.
Out of a hollow log may come a cotton-tail rabbit, or a ground squirrel, or
a boar coon, or a sleepy possum, even a cranky wildcat. They seem to
materialize there, and really some of them are too big to have been in the
log. Maybe a skunk will come out of it, or a wood chuck, or a badger, or
even a beaver. When we hammer on the resounding walls of the haunted air, we
are likely to rouse out stranger things even than those." 
	Some of the electronic equipment was for putting light-tracers into
the system, or setting outlining halos, or for auras. There are any number
of things in the haunted air at any time. The thing is to rouse them up and
make them visible and audible. And of course pictures and recordings will be
taken of anything that makes itself known. If a thing can only be 'seen' by
radio waves or heat waves, then it is by such that it is recorded.
Amplification and conversion will do wonders. Almost every sort of phantom
can be given visibility. But some of the things will make real and solid
appearance, and they may even converse with one. 
	After Joseph Abramswell himself, Dorothy Blue-Ice and Catherine
January were the most adept at excavating in the haunted air. It wasn't the
prize creatures that they most easily roused out of airy logs though. It
wasn't usually the fine badgers or beavers. It was the ordinary cotton-tail
rabbits, as it were. It was the smaller and more common animals, and it was
the smaller and most common peoole: it was the ordinary animal and human
ghosts of the comparatively recent centuries. 
	The most common of all the human ghosts were from the first half of
the twentieth century. Ghosts sleep for about fifty years after their deaths
and before they start to walk, or that is what Cecelia told them. And ghosts
from the whole nineteenth century were very common. There were lots of them
from the middle of the nineteenth century when King Ferdinand II ('King
Bomba' or 'King Bomb') ruled in Naples, which included Calabria. A lot of
people had died then in uncertain circumstances. But all of these recent and
easy ghosts appeared out of the air, powered by their own curiosity, to see
what was going on, and to offer to work or to help. But they were puzzled by
the electronic equipment. They said that it made the air feel stormy.
	"There is no reason to make a mystery about us," Cecelia said. "We
are only poor people in Purgatory. Purgatory, as you know, is not a place;
it is a condition. We wait in that condition until our time is over with.
But whenever someone opens the door, we come out of it and be in a place for
a little while. The big yellow orange-colored hissing and sparking machine,
it is a pretty good door opener that you have." 
	Even more comnon than the ghost people and the ghost animals were
the ghost plants; and perhaps they were even more informative. Joseph
Abramswell, who had a feeling for landscape-in-depth, understood the history
of waves and undulations of trees and boscage sweeping over a land. He
understood how the trees of one century will move along to higher ground in
the following times and will be replaced by savanna grass, which in turn
will be replaced by another wave of trees several hundred years later. So
there was always good ghost-tree hunting in the open lands where the living
trees would not interfere. 
	"This is the process," Abramswell explained to his friends and
co-workers. "We will make an old tree reappear, first in outline, then in
depth and solidity, then in complete cellular detail. And then we will make
selected recordings of the most likely of such trees. I wasn't sure that we
would be able to do this, but we are having some success already. We are
able to record the tree-rings of ghost-trees. I don't believe that anyone
else has ever done this. We are able to copy or transcribe them from ghost
records to permanent, contemporary, non-leaking records. And then, by the
data of the science of dendrinology, borrowing from the data and addinq to
it at the same time, we are able to date and collate those rings by their
sequence of dry and wet years. We are dating and identifying ghosts, that's
what we are doing. The same thing has been done before, of course, with
other sorts of ghost trees, boles and logs resurrected from Scandinavian
bogs after their long sleeps. But we resurrect our trees from air-bogs." 
	"But how are they preserved in the air when the wind blows through
and changes everything?" Cecelia Calca asked. "I understand how they might
be preserved in the covering earth or in the soupy water-bogs, but I don't
at all understand how they are preserved for centuries in the open air." 
	"I don't entirely understand it either, Cece," Abramswell said. "But
who are you to ask? Your case is more difficult than that of the sessile
trees. How are you preserved invisibly for a century and a half in the open
air? I don't understand it but I feel it, as I believe that you must feel it
also; and feeling a thing is often as close as we can come to understanding
it. The 'haunted air' is really the 'recording air'. No record is erased or
abolished comoletely, but the records do grow fainter and fainter. Their
clarity is halved and and halved again, as we go back from the newest to the
oldest of them. It takes fantastic amplification to bring them out and make
them speak when they have very much age on them. We have set ourselves
certain goals here which would be clearly impossible if it were not for
certain anomalies." 
	"What anomalies are these, Signor," Cecelia asked. 
	"They are anomalous clumps that we find in the air, inexplicable but
fortunate for us, cohesive in a very lucky way. You yourself are such an
anomalous clump, Cecelia." 
	"If my lover were were you would not call me a 'clump'," Cecelia
said in a lowering way with a flash of feigned anger. But then she laughed.
She was at a disadvantage here with those new people, and she really did not
seem to miss her long dead lover very much. She was swept up in new
interests now, and all her old life was behind her. She liked to take part
in the air excavation, and she liked Joseph Abramswell. And indeed she liked
all the persons of the expedition. 
	And Joseph Abrarswell liked to have her to talk to; it was really
talking to himself out loud. He could say the fundamental facts to her. But
if he said them to Dorothy Blue-Ice or Catherine January they would make him
feel small and inept. He had invented the science of air excavation, but
others had gone far beyond him in their glib phraseology of it. 
	"There are clumps in the air that are the people and animals and
plants, Cecelia," he said,"but there are also patterns and penned-off areas.
There are immaterial weir-dams that separate the air into smaller patches.
If it were not for the patterns and marked off areas, the ordered baffles
and fences, the pens in the air, you can have no clear idea of how hard the
wind would blow and how wildly the air would move and tumble. We have some
indication of it from our studies of the atmospheres of unordered worlds and
planets. We have some idea of it from studies of our own world during its
unordered millions of years. The power of the wind must have been
frightening. That is why we can mine the air only from the beginning of
ordered time. Do you understand me, Cecelia?" 
	"Not very well with your Roman Italian. Why don't you speak
Calabrian?" 
	This Cecelia Calca was a nineteenth century ghost, one of those who
died when King Bomba was king in Naples and there was violence in the land.
She said that some day she would tell all of them all the history of how she
and her lover met their deaths, and indeed she had already told many parts
of it. 
	But the anomalous clumps in the haunted air! That was the fortunate
puzzle, and at the same time it was the advantage that they needed.
Abramswell had discussed it with Pioneer Reventlo and Jeffery Wind, with
Cyclone Boniface and Stephen Tall, with Rosa and Lucille, and with all of
them who had time to listen to him. It was a happy sort of thing to come
onto an advantage like this. Problems in the field now solved themselves,
and all the supposed difficulties of one sort evaporated by themselves. 
	More and more, the others were finding these fortunate anomalous
clumps in their own excavations of earth and noosphere. They concluded that
such blind luck was the beating heart of anv successful excavation. 

	In the earth, bodies and artifacts and old stone works were always
clumping together far beyond the randomness of blind strewing. They might
not even have been recognized as special things had thev been distributed
with real randomness. And in the noosphere there was this aggregation and
clumping also, of ideas, of notions and inklings, or speculations, of
inter-linked thought systems, of old and magnificent intellectual patterns,
of commitments and purposes, of directing and ordering. Jeffery Wind was the
leading practitioner among them at noosphere mining, but he was not expert
at it. And there were no experts anywhere. To some extent, though, the
noosphere provided leadership for its own excavating. There were rich ideas
and leaping out of it, all of them suggesting good ways of exploiting
itself. 
	"Are these mines salted?" Jeffery Wind had to ask himself very
early. And he had to conclude that all the mines in the valley, those of the
earth and the air and the mind-sphere, did seem to be salted, to be streaked
with bait-gold of every sort. Well, were they salted by enemy or by friend?
And what to do but analyse their gold in all its contrived streakiness? 
	And always there were some intrusions from one stratum into another.
And the fluid sea-medium, which they really hadn't intended to excavate at
all on this expedition, permeated all the other media. All night long there
in the Goat Valley, the sea could be heard breaking against the very feet
and foundations of the castle. But the sea was seven kilometers away. 
	And if the sea came to the very feet of the castle, then the
pavilion and the lower plain would have to be under the sea. The people at
the pavilion, including the British and Scandinavian tourists who lodged
there, and including Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface who were
spending their honeymoon there, gave the information that there was indeed
an under-seas feel to the pavilion, that under-seas dreams were dreamed
there; and that often sand and shells and sea-bracken and weeds could be
found on the upper sea-decks of the pavilion in the early mornings; and also
small gasping fish, drowning in the air. 
	Joseph Abramswell and Dorothy Blue-Ice excavated out of the haunted
air the shadowy outlines of big, puffy grumpus fish drifting in the air like
balloons. And when they are alive, the grumpus fish graze in the green
waters just under the shore -shelves. 
	The several working strata became real quarries from the material
digged out of them. Rooms in the castle became labratories and work studios
and appraisal rooms. But the pavilion had become the pleasure place for the
people of the party. And it was clear that current pleasure was as important
to the project as was excavation from the past. 
	Cecelia Calca was always snuffy about the cinema screen in the
pavilion. 
	"For such persons as you to have the cinema is unfair,"she said. "It
is an infringement. It is a theft. You have everything, and we have so
little. You should not rob us." 
	"Whatever do you mean, Cecelia?" Dorothy Blue-Ice asked. "When you
say 'you', do you mean us regular unghosted people? Why should we not have
the cinema? We invented it." 
	"No, no, it is the spettri, the ghosts who have always had it.
It is not a thing to be invented. It is ourselves cavorting, that is what
the original cinema is. Some of those old classics of our cinema, our
'Walpurgis Night' for an instance, are real ghost movies, but why can vou
not see it of the whole field? We had it first. we even used the screen
first. We used a fleece sometimes or any light animal skin for our
background. It is no secret that sometimes we are hard to see even by
ourselves, so we need a background. But it is you who make caricatures of us
now when create the artificial ghosts. And even these substitutes of us that
you use, they are animations of pictures only, not of real ghosts or real
people. You make false ghosts to take our places, and you thread them into
your machines. That's what you do with your cinema." 
	"Do you spettri really have something like cinema, Cecelia?" Pioneer
Reventlo asked. "Could you go onto that cinema screen now and enter into
that cinema scope? Could you iiingle with the cinema figures performing
there now, and a role in the drama?" 
	"Of course I could," Cecelia maintained. "I have done it often. It
was fun at first, before we realized just how much we were being insulted by
the whole thing. Several of us used to go into the old movie house in
Nicastro in the time when movie houses were just beginning. We would have
fun being unauthorized characters in the hammy little plays. But that was
long ago. I will never do it again now, not even to prove that I can do it.
It is all too insulting." 
	"How is it insulting, Catherine January asked. "Who insults whom?" 
	"The false ghosts on the screen insult us the real ghosts. They will
not acknowledge us at all. They will not answer us when we speak to them.
They will not even adnit that they see us, but they do. Sometimes they walk
right into us and knock us down and trample on us. And even when they are
doing that they will not admit that they see us or hear us. They look right
through us. These are affronts. They are a beastial bunch." 
	"Maybe they really don't see you, Cecelia," Lucille Creighton said.
"They are reproductions, and they are as unconscious as the pictures of
people in a paper. I believe that it is all an illusion that you and they
are on the same screen together. It only seems that you are there together.
You are a different sort of shadow from them. It is all an optical and aural
misunderstanding. But they and you are not on the same plane. You can pass
through each other like, well, like ghosts. You pass through each other as
ghosts pass through matter." 
	"No, no, they do not pass through us. They knock us down," Cecelia
insisted. "We are on the same plane or they would not be able to knock us
around like that. But there is another reason why I wouldn't be on the same
screen with them again. It is their immodesty. People on the screen dres
even more immodestly than do real people. See those women there. They are
under-dressed. You must admit that." 
	"And you perhaps are overdressed, Cecelia," Rosa Caprobianco said.
"I have noticee this overdressing in many ghosts, particularly those who
are, as you are, literally from the Victorian period. And I have wondered
about it. Why do ghosts wear clothes?" 
	"For modesty, you loose-tongued, underdraped woman," Cecelia said
angrily. 
	"I do not believe that anyone has ever seen a completely unclothed
ghost," Rosa said. "But how do you do it? Is it ghost clothing that you
wear? I can understand people themselves sometimes surviving as ghosts, for
the stubborn and unquenchable animation that is in some of them. But
clothing does not have any animation. How can it survive and make these
stubborn reappearances? is there such a thing as ghost clothinq, Cecelia?" 
	"It is our own clothing which we must be careful of," Cecelia said.
"I don't know whether it is ghost clothing or not. It does wear out, but
ghosts do wear out too. But when we wear out our clothing we can hardly
replace it. Sometimes we have to borrow clothing from each other. And if we
cannot find sufficient modest clothing to appear in, then we simply do not
appear anymore." 
	"Are all ghosts of one sort, Cecelia?" Jeffery Wind asked. 
	"No, no, they can be classified and developed in a number of ways.
One way they can be divided is into ghosts of the past and ghosts of the
future. I am a ghost of the past." 
	"How can you tell each other apart, Cecelia?" Anabella Hillary
asked. "I imagine that both sorts of you are continually committing every
sort of anachronism." 
	"Often we can't tell each other apart," Cecelia said, "not at first
meeting, not for a while. But very soon we know the difference. The future
ones are not as substantial as we are. They are conditional, and we are
absolute." 
	"But if there are ghosts from the future at all," Cyclone Boniface
hazarded, "that would mean that the future is already ordained and decided,
would it not, Cecelia?" 
	"Oh, I don't think so, Cyclone, no," she said. "The future is
probable at best, and no more than that. And so are the ghosts from the
future merely probable. But the future is not ordained and decided, and
neither are the ghosts from it. There is an area of horror in this.
Sometimes a detail will change in the present (I think that is what
happens), and then several details in the future will become impossible.
They will cease to be, and other details will rush in to take their places.
When this happens, a future ghost or several of them may be obliterated
comoletely. One of them will be extinguished. He will go away absolutely.
And then it will be the case that he was not, that he will not be, that he
is not, that he never was possible. I don't know whether I can make you
understand the agony of seeing a friend obliterated like that. There are
certain persons in the past who were made, for very grave offenses, never to
have existed. They were wiped out. But once thev were, however cute the
arguments that they were not. No matter how they are nullified and blotted
out of the book of tie world, they were once. But this is worse, for a
future ghost to be cancelled, to lose all possibility of ever being, when he
once had a ghost of a future at least. It is worse even than to be a soul
suffering in Hell. That one can say 'I was, and I am'. And the cancelled
past ghost can say 'I was'. But the cancelled future ghost cannot say
anything, because he is not, was not, and will not be. I do not believe that
God knows what a horror is involved in this paradox. if He realized it, He
would not permit it." 
	"That Cecelia is the phoniest baggage I've ever seen," Stephen Tall
said in a low voice to Adriana Thistle. "She is no more a ghost than I am.
She is a phoney." 
	"How does she appear and disappear then, Stephen?" Adriana asked
him. "How can she make herself either translucent or transparent or
invisible? Or, on the other end of it, how can she make herself shinningly
visible in total darkness?" 
	"Maybe she was a magicians helper once," Stephen suggested. "All her
tricks are absolutely second-class. And her patter is second class
magician's patter too. She is not a ghost. She may, however, be a pick-up
from one of Abramswell's scanners and reconstructors. Those electronic
machines of his are picking up a lot of strange phenomena now. But they're
not to be trusted. The scanners do good work, but the reconstructors aren't
to be depended on. Because his reconstructors show a thing to be one wya,
that is not to say that it ever really was that way. They are speculating
and guessing machines. I think that Cecelia is one of the things that his
electronic reconstructors have got wrong. She is a mechanical malfunction.
And, in addition to that, she is a personal phoney." 
	Who was the phoney? Stephen Tall knew that ghosts do not depend on
volume for hearing. They can hear anything spoken, and they can also hear
sub-vocalizations. Cecelia had heard all of Stephen's put-down, and he had
meant that she should. 
	Be careful. Bad feeling in a group can blow all its prosoects. 	But
sometimes Cecelia seemed to misclassify persons. She was of three or four
different minds about Vivian oldshoe and Curtis Bald, those intrepid
acrobats who sometimes appeared in their chase sequences in bioscopic dreams
and also on the cinema screen in the pavilion. 
	"I don't know what they are," Cecelia would moan. "There is so much
of the unreal in both of them. Sometimes they are people and sometimes they
are ghosts. Sometimes they are in the past and Sometimes they are in the
future. But they have learned a real and compelling secret, and they are
trying to write it out for you for both warning and directional guide. They
may be saying that they can write it out only in fire and blood with their
own limbs. They are trying to tell you where something must happen, and I
believe they have already told you that. And they are also trying to tell
you what shape it must be. 
	"They seem to be puppets sometimes, dangled down on strings by
persons who are giant-sized in comparison to them. But wait a minute. They
are the creative people, with their acrobatics and adagios, and not the
puppets. The real puppets (figures who are giant sized in comparison to
them) are huge balloon figures full of hot air and floating above the puppet
theatre, but restrained from floating clear away by the strings on them that
the acrobatic couple hold them down with. It is not easy, at first sight, to
be absolutely certain which are the puppets and which are the puppeteers. 
	"But all of you here, and you have known them longer than I have,
you have a tendency to regard them as cheerful clowns who are putting on
knock-down acts and Hogan's Alley chases. You regard them this way even when
thev come covered with their own blood. And the high point of it is when the
big, artificial snake begins to swallow them. The same two people are
insic:e the artificial snake making it work as are inside the artificial
horse in the next skit. 	"But the snakes aren't artificial. They are
real. An enemy had made them seem artificial. There is a horror that comes
over it all when we see that these two 'people of the secret' are really
being hunted to their deaths, and that the death may be being eaten alive by
the giant snake." 
	As a fact, all of the watchers at these bioscopic chase sequences
were feeling a growing horror about them. Sick humor will stretch only so
far, and then it breaks open to show the fundamental death sickness that is
behind it. These were eschatological chases, and "he most likely
eschatological alternative is always horrible death. Vivian Oldshoe and
Curtis Bald were sacrificial victims, however often they still escaqed the
knife. 
	Jeffery Wind had taken on the most difficult of the assignments. He
was trying to excavate the mind-sphere that was above the haunted air. He
had three or four particular excavation points, a turret on the pavilion, a
high tower of the castle, a haunted eagle aerie on a tall cliff, and a
balloon. Most of all it was the balloon he used to rise above the haunted
air. It rose on the end of a cable, and a boy let out the cable or cranked
it in with a windlass. Jeffery didn't know how high he had to go. Cecelia
Calca, the most communicating of the local ghosts, was of the opinion that
the ghosts of the haunted air cannot rise more than thirty meters high; for
she herself could not. But when a thing was encountered higher than that,
how could one tell whether it was an ordinary ghost or an unbodied idea or a
shared philosoohical construction? 
	Well, if it is all noosphere above this, why do high flyers in
jetostraters not have mind-encounters with the native fauna of the
brain-sphere? Very often they do. But they do not do it more often because
it is difficult to have a meaningful encounter with things when you swish by
them at speeds in excess of eighteen hundred kilometers an hour. 
	Jeffery Wind was attempting to excavate and mine the noosphere with
no tools and instruments at all except standard ghost-detection machinery,
and amplifiers and recorders and scanners. And 'Maxfield Thought Sensors'.
Possibly he was trying to mine immaterial things (thoughts) with material
equipment. But Jeffery Wind, as a device expert, couldn't admit that there
was any difference between the material and the immaterial. A good device
man can never admit that there is such a distinction. 
	Would there be minds here? Or only thoughts that may or may not have
been in minds? Oh the pure thoughts of the noosphere! Oh to be mining them
and gathering in whole cataracts of gems from their torrent! But, for
starters anyhow, those were not pure thoughts that Jeffery came upon there.
Early dipping in that ambient revealed that they were mostly impure thoughts
in the noosphere, mixed thoughts with unthoughtly material clinging to them.
There were analogous air-snakes and sky-snakes of thoughts writhing through
the zone. There was frog-and-toad philosophy abounding. There were stenches
and miasmas and insincerities. But all those things were rather pleasant and
bracing in the open, second-story air. (Some of the more pungent drifting
streams were not thoughts at all; they were smokes drifting all the way from
the industrial chimneys of Naples.) But many of the mind-fishes drifting in
that stream were genuinely trash fish. 
	And yet there was good mentality to be found. And there were persons
there, most of them shrugging off the intervention. They were solitary and
not-to-be-seen persons browsing there as in a special and gracious library,
with figurative or transcendent wine at their elbow and the spirit of music
playing in the background. But they trying to impose a condition of silence
or non-intervention on all interlopers? And some of the invisible persons
were just uD there for the view. There were countless fine, unbodied eyes
looking down on all the kingdoms of the earth and placing earth-operational
factors in the processes and minds below them. Every zone is rooted in all
the zones below it. This was the great panorama to graze the minds upon. 
	Almost all the towns of middle Calabria could be seen from the
balloon: Cosenza, Santo Giovanni, Amantea, Sambiase, Nicastro, Catazaro,
Vibo Valentia. Two seas could be seen from there, the Ionian Sea in its
guise of the Gulf of Squillace over the hills to the east, and the
Tyrrhenian Sea in its Gulf of San' Eufemia embodiment to the west. There
were the mantled hills, the very ends of the Apennines Mountains before they
disappeared into the sea. There was only one river to be seen, the Crati.
The whole of Calabria together owns only this one river. But there were very
many short streams and sudden torrents, for the route down from the steep
hills to the seas on either side was never more than fifteen kilometers. A
number of valleys of the elliptical shape were to be seen from the wavering
height, and the .nost elliptical of all of them was the Valley of the White
Goat Illusion. The balloon was anchored by windlass and line that was coming
right out of the throat of the White Goat. 
	Yes, the White Goat outline could be seen in the White Goat Valley.
But it could only be seen from above and at a certain height. It was picked
out by about two hundred white limestones stren about in patterns that
seemed random from the ground. The pattern of the White Goat couldn't be
seen anywhere at the ground level, and it couldn't be seen from a great
height, for the individual stones were small ones. It could only be seen by
one who was anchored in the wavering air, thirty to fifty meters high. 
	'The White Goat' was said to be the name of a secret society. Not,
however, a society of humans. It was a society of usually unbodied persons
who had one of their campgrounds thirty to fifty meters high over this
Calabrian valley. And the members of the society had not set the stones on
the ground themselves. They had coerced humans into setting them. Each of
the limestones had been set, independently of all the others and out of
sight of all the others, in a place that seemed a logical place for it, by
the human who set it. And yet there wasn't any human logic at all in the
setting. Jeffery Wind got this background bit by a valid drifting intuition.

	One could see in depth from the balloon. It takes no more than
penetrating vision and vertical perspective to see a few meters down into
the earth. In the immediate region, Pioneer Reventlo an Rosa Caprobianco and
others had already removed much of the outer skin of that earth. This seeing
in depth revealed some long forgotten places. 
	Under all of Calabria was the older country, Ager Bruttius, and the
difference between the old and the now was in more than the name. Not under
but above and still diffusing the S. Giovanni Hills were the old Sila
Mountains, for the older heights had been higher and sharper here, and now
they were eroded. Under Vibo Valentia was the old city of Hipponium. There
was an old city under almost every new town. Under Catanzaro was old
Scylietium. Under modern Crotone was the ancient Greek colony city of
Croton, greatly different in everything except name. Jeffery Wind resolved
to tell Pioneer and Rosa that several of these would be excellent digging
sites. But the expedition was to dig inside the White Goat Illusion Valley
only. 
	Under the Valley of the White Goat Illusion was the Valley of the
White Oreamnos Illusion. The Oreamnos was a shaggier and smellier ancestor
of the goat. All of that could be seen quite clearly from here by a device
man. The device that was the White Goat Valley had already been identified
by Pioneer Reventlo and others. It was a time machine. 
	From the balloon, Jeffery Wind saw on the ground a huge trap with
jaws. Jeffery did not comprehend what he saw; he did not understand how
there could be a trap there capable of gobbling up scores of people. 
	Then the light changed. It was the pleasure pavilion that had had
the appearance of a trap for a few moments. 
	"What a curious illusion!" Jeffery Wind said. 
	After he had given notice that he was hospitable to thoughtful
visitors, or to loose thoughts of any kind, Jeffery would sometimes spend
the time in the balloon by reading the great classics of balloon literature.
'Tom Sawyer Balloonist' was surely one of the greatest of these, though the
author mistakenly labeled it 'Tom Sawyer Abroad'. Oh, and 'Five Weeks in A
Balloon' by Verne was also the greatest. 'Ballooning Above the Land of the
Piff Baidits' was good. So was 'The Balloon Pirates of the Sulu Sea'.
Jeffery had not brought his complete set of 'Balloon Stories Weekly' with
him on the expedition. It was really too valuable to carry about. But he had
many other items. There is an old adventure literature about travel and life
on river rafts; and will make the river water in anyone's viens rise and
surge. But it is to the adventure literature of balloon travel. 'Balloon
Battalions Against The Kite-Dragons of Skokumchuck' was what Jeffery Wind
was enjoying right now. It had used to be the case, when Jeffery was
becoming famous as a growing and exciting brain, that he would read balloon
books inside the covers of erudite books. But here in the wind-buffeted 'The
Calabrian Queen' itself, he had no need for such deception. 
	Then the moment came for which he had baited his hooks and set his
scanning traps. The 'Thoughts of the Region' closed in on him like morning
thunders. He closed the balloon adventure book with half a sigh and half a
smile, for now there would be still more adventures in still more rarified
air. it came on rich, the thought complex. 
	There was a rhaosody both inside and outside of words. This was
crestomathy for acquiring all the Holy Ghoster tonques. This was flaming
transport, egregious ecstasy, multi-personal rapture with an almost blinding
glint to it; and at the same time it was cool to the touch, to the internal
touch. "I will bring Dorothy Blue-Ice up here tomorrow," Jeffery Wind said
inconsequently. "She always likes revel in thoughts. And there is really
more here than a single neophyte can enjoy." 
	These were clouds of cool-hlue rationality with flaming (All
metaphors are Jeffery Wind's own. There were coruscatring systems of logic
and speculation. The mind-sphere had been there all the time, not much more
than thirty meters high to the beginning of it, but it kept that distance
from all insrusions, from towers, from  spires, from most but not all trees
(not from the ailanthus, but this tree seldom grow so tall), from airships
and airplanes, but not always from balloons. Of course this wasn't a new
thing, going up there to experience it. 
	A Babylonian Calif used to have himself raised up in a balloon for
an hour every day to converse with the wise persons and the detached wise
thoughts to be found up there. Several of the wisest Chinese Mandarins used
to ride up there on kites. Both Paul and Aquinas had been swept up to this
low 'seventh heaven' (they didn't know any other	name for it) , and
had been drenched in mentality there. And both had come back mumbling 'I
have seen such things -- I have heard such things." 
	But perhaps the mentality sphere is a transcendent region and will
not have any effect on material instruments, so that the only instrument
Jeffery could employ up theere would be his mind? 
	Not so. Not have any effect on material instruments! Those
instruments were neighing like a string of spring colts. Those instruments
were recording as they had never recorded in their electro-magnetic lives
before. This stuff was of incredible richness ard abundance, and they were
getting very much of it down in permanent form. 
	The noosphere circles the whole earth with its intellectually. But
here it was a special case. The noosphere over Valley of the White Goat
Illusion is one of two dozen or so places in the world where it really
outdoes itself. 
	What has been accumulating in the noosphere since the appearance of
the privelaged species is the "integral achievement of man as intellectual,
aesthetic, and physical animal"; and also the integral achievement of
several other species as intellectual, aesthetic, ana physical and
paraphysical animals and animas. There are several other intellectual
species who are concentric with man on this world.
 
	"Is nobody alarmed that everything is going so easy?" Dorothy
Blue-Ice asked of several of them that day. "Does nobody of us known what an
outrageous ambush and trap smells like?" 
	"Oh, someone is greasing our way," Jeffery Wind said. "It is
thoughtful of them." 
	"Or, to use another carable," Dorothy went on, "we are like a
surgeon operating unaided, and he finds that all his instruments are handed
to him by invisible hands even before he quite needs them. He has never had
such excellent assistance bfore. Then he looks down at the patient, and he
sees that it is himself that he is operating on."


	Chapter Five 

	And I will go on holiday 
	And shovel air like sandy dunes 
	And mow the deepest earth like hay 
	And harvest skies from high balloons

				Penny Rimes, Penny Rowley 

	"Mr. Abramswell," Raddigan Shrike asked,"are we not trying to
rediscover the rationality that was in the beginning?" 
	"Let us say that we are trying to discover the rationality that is
in the beginning." 
	"And aren't we coming to it through some mighty irrational swamps
and mazes?" 
	"Oh, there are swampy riddles enough, Raddigan, but they might be
quite rational when finally we fit them into a comprehensive piece. It's
going to take quite a piece of an answer though to fulfill the several
thousand shaggy questions we've raised." 
	"Yes, it's shaggy. That's what bothers me. How will it ever come
clear?" 
	"Where will we fit in all the plain unrealities that we are finding
in our excavations?" Rosa Caprobianco asked. "We validate them, but they're
still unreal." 
	"Where will we fit in the swarms of unhuman enemies who are buzzing
around us?" Lucille Creighton asked. "Oh, it is a cheesy situation." 
	"For that matter where do we fit in Vivian and Curtis and their
chase sequences?" Dorothy Blue-Ice asked. "They have become mythological or
prototypal elements. They are not quite the adagio kids we used to know. Are
they dead and still giving us these entertainments?" 
	"Where are we going to fit in the White Goat Enigma and the
Elliptical Valley Enigma?" Joseph Abramswell asked. "There are too many
irrational unknowns for easy solving of this problem." 
	"And where do we fit in the new people who have joined our party?"
Pioneer Reventlo asked. "I don't remember that they were supposed to join
us." 
	"You don't remember the party and its program as spacious enough,"
Jeffery said. "We do want the new members. They are all elements who were
crying for inclusion." 
	Several noble, handsome, altogether charming, and highly intelligent
persons had now accrued to the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition. These
exceptional additions came in like wind-flocs and attached themselves to the
party. They were notable persons from all over the world. Or they were
private persons who had been cuietly motivating the world for a long while.
But how did it haopen that they all came at the same time, and where did
they come from? 
	"Me. I'm a Djinn. I've just escaped from a bottle. Your
instrumentation unwittingly helped me to escape from it," said the Count of
San Angelo. "The next thing that anvone knows, I'll be reclaiming my
estates. That will send those two-legged rats to scurrying. They occupy a
set of estates for a few hundred years, and they begin to feel that they own
them. 
	"Englanders Reventlo, Abramswell, and Wind, I believe that your
little project requires my participation. Really, you are like bare babies
standing in the gates of Hell, and you would be roasted alive without some
knowledgable person like myself to guide you. Do you not know that you have
the tip of a dragan's tail between the breads of your sandwich and you are
about to bite down on it with your corporate teeth? I tell you that the old
drgaon will tear up whole mountains with his writhing when he feels that
bite. The tip of his tail, which is the identical place where we are right
owl the Valley of the White Goat, it is one of my estates. But more than my
suzerainty here, more even than my wealth, it is my immeasurable erudition
that you need."
	"We figure that erudition is our own strong point," Josech
Abramswell said with the wink with which the timeless great ones of the
world recognize each other. "Do you play 'bezirk'? Our crying need here is
for one more superb 'bezirk' player. We need a seventh at 'berzirk'." 
	A person has to be extremely intelligent even to have heard of the
game of 'berzirk'. In all likelihood the best 'berzirk' player in the world
would also be the smartest person in the world. When the people of the party
played 'berzirk' they played to see which was the most intelligent of them,
and also which was the most smashingest gambler. 
	"I do play it," the Count of San Angelo said. "I played 'berzirk'
with the Fathers of Trent. I played there with two future popes, two future
Emperors, one future Queen of France, and one future King of Naples. It was
at the 'berzirk' tables at the Council of Trent that I won this particular
estate, The Principality of the White Goat Illusion. I didn't know then what
was buried here. But I did realize that one distraught noble person aas glad
to the bottom of his soul to lose it." 
	"We are not Englanders, my dear Count," Pioneer J. Reventlo said. 
	"To me, all persons who speak English are Englanders," the Coint
justified himself. "I do not differentiate." 
	"The Count of San Angelo is a phoney," Stephen Tall said in a low
voice to Adriana Thistle. "He is no more a Count then I am. I believe that
he is a shoddy confidence man. I expect him to break out at any time with a
new version of the Spanish Prisoner Con." 
	"He makes my flesh crawl," Leon Yuri said. "He gives me the hives."
And for a fact, Leon would break out in a hive-like rash whenever he found
himself in the same room with the Count. 
	"Anyone who gives Leon the hives can't be all bad," Anabella Hilary
said with her rare insight. 
	Another new person who came to them was Doctor Fritz Otto. It was as
a movie mogul that Doctor Fritz was best known to the world, but he was many
other things as well. This Doctor Fritz was himself a movie camera with
special features. He recorded camera-perfect everything that he had ever
seen or heard in his life. And he himself was a movie projector with a high
degree of movement and drama and contrivance. He was always on scene, and
the world was on scene to him. There were a few silent stretches and
unmoving stretches in the world for him, it's true. But they were put in for
effect. Never more than fifteen seconds without vivid movement or sound. He
had the constant feeling that the world was playing a scenario that he had
written, so he was seldom surprised by anything the world did. Not
surprised, but often displeased. "Bad drama, bad drama," he would often say.
Bad timing, bad emphasis. Oh world, world, can you not sharpen up your act a
little bit!" 
	And now he said on his joining the Reventlo party "I have come to
try to get something on the acrobatic couple. The lines of them lead
joseveral members of your expedition party. Though it has been validated
that they have been killed in the United States, and indeed heauthorities
have their validated bodies to prove it, yet I never believed that. It is
still they themselves playing the roles. They're the hottest and most
dram@tic property in the world at the moment, a property that is running
loose and uncontrolled and unmanaged. imoney salways second to art where I'm
concerned, but both the money and the highly kinetic art are going
unharvested in this puzzling case. This couple appears in bioscopic dreams
several times a day to a minority consisting of a few million people in the
world. There are several flash artists who have animations of each episode
on the market within an hour of their viewing them, but these flash artist
versions are accused of being subjective, of being not quite as other people
remember them. And the couple appears on TV sets and cinema screens, but we
can not even guess how they do it. All the appearances are random, however,
and not everybody is able to see them. 
	"Now these are highly developed instances of real life drama, and
they excite me as nothing has done for many years. They have effect that I
can not duplicate. I have tried to make other episodes of the Vivian Oldshoe
and Curtis Bald chase-to-death cycle, but the results are poor. I don't
know, though I can guess, who the enemy is who pursues them to death. I
don't know what the secret is that they are trving to communicate before
they are obliterated, but I know that it is to vou people here that they are
trying to communicate it. And meanwhile many persons in the world have died
while watching it There is talk of prosecuting because of reckless
performance causing people to die, bull how will they prosecute people who
are already officially dead for the dreams that other people dream about
them? Well, I want to learn the secret also. I want to be one of the special
persons. And I want to halt the deterioration until I am sure they have
communicated the secret. What time does the next show start?" 
	"We don't know that, Doctor Otto," Joseph Abramswell said. "There
are not any certain number of shows a day. Sometimes we sit together at noon
or in the evening and an episode is given on the cinema screen or on the TV
or in the form of group bioscopic appearance. Sometimes an episode is seen
by only one of us. somtimes two or three will be able to see it." 
	"Can you have an episode whenever you want to?" Doctor Fritz Otto
asked. 
	"Oh, I suppose so," Joseph said, "but two or three of them a day are
plenty. More than that are too much for our feelings, and they are surely
too much for the unfortunate couple." 
	"Could I sit down in front of that cinema screen now and see an
episode?" Doctor Otto asked. 
	"Probably," Joseph said. "Or vou could sit down in another place and
see it just as well. Or vou could stand or walk, or go look down at the sea
from one of the towers, and probably you would see episodes to fill your
heart." 
	Doctor Fritz Otto did all of these things, and he garnered more
chase episodes and sequences than anyone else had ever viewed. One not
knowing what he was doing might have regarded him as demented when he was
seeing the hyper-dramatic things that no one else was seeing. He breathed
hard, he cried out, he flung himself into the action with flailing fists, he
shouted warnings and encouragement. He wept, he groveled, he went into
transports. And yet this Doctor Fritz Otto was the most sophisticated movie
mogul in Europe. 
	After the Count of San Angelo and Doctor Fritz Otto, the most
noteworthy of the new people who came to them was an entity known as Il
Trol. Oh he came after the Count and Doctor Fritz in time only. He was equal
to both of them together in almost everything else. He had that monicker
because he looked like a troll, and he had now taken Il Trol as his legal
name. This was a successful advertising stroke on his part. Oh, there was no
doubt that he was a troll. He was about the height of an average man and was
about twice a man's breadth. And his head was quite large. 
	"There is no way that he could have been born," Lucille Creighton
said. "He is an extreme brachycephalic with a cephalic index of about
ninety-nine. The maximum radius of his skull had to be at least two fifths
of what it is now at birth. This is an inflexible rule. There is no way that
he could have been born. If, at birth, his head had been only one fifth the
radius that it is now, it would still be as large as the head of the average
adult man. There isn't any way, there isn't any way." 
	"Oh, I would bet that it was no problem at all," Dorothy Blue-Ice
said. "You have never seen a female troll, perhaps. I have. Tnere would be
no problem there." 
	Il Trol was everlastingly cheerful and everlastingly talking. He was
barefoot and was dressed in moleskin. "It must have taken hundreds and
hundreds of mole-skins to make your garment," Adriana Thistle said. "How did
you kill them all?" 
	"Oh, we don't kill them," II Trol said. "we wait for them to die. We
are never in a hurry." But Stephen Tall pulled Adriana aside by her arm and
whispered furiously to her. 
	"You know that is not mole-skin. It is ordinary rabbit-skin, dyed.
II Trol is a phoney. He is no more troll than I am." 
	"He is more of everything than you are," Adriana said. 
	Il Trol constantly passed out business cards. On them were
caricatures of himself. He was already a caricature, of course, but the
picture on the business cards was shocking in its power and humor, something
really aboriginal in caricature. There are old rock drawings like that.
There is nothing later that catches the spirit. 
	And the lettering on tie cards was "Il Trol Auto Rentals, Cosenza,
Calabria, Italy. Rent it from the barefoot Troll! He always has his feet on
the ground. Call 'Il Trol' or merely think Il Trol', and a rental car will
be at your door." 
	"Before I went into the auto rental business, I was a professional
wrestler, "Il Trol said. "I was one of the most colorful wrestlers in
southern Italy. I have never been pinned. If you will look at me osely, you
will understand one reason why it never happened. it cl would be
anatomically impossible to put both my shoulders to the mat at one time. And
then I am entirely too strong for the other wrestlers. It was a business I
enjoyed, but I also am in love with the auto rental and donkey rental
business. I can hardly think of a business in this whole world that I would
not enjoy." 
	These three persons, the Count, Doctor Fritz, and Il Trol were
welcome additions to the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition. It gave them the best
'berzirk' playing group in the world. They were all very intelligent, even
the troll. They could all lie like gentlemen, especially the troll. Things
need never be dull around the three-level dig now. 
	Il Trol said a curious thing the first day he was in the Pavilion
with most of the others. "We must be careful that we are not all in the
pavilion at the same time," he said. "One or more or the party must always
be outside of the pavilion. You do all understand that, don't you?"
	"I don't," Arthur Ransom said. "We have not had any guards at all in
the White Goat Valley thus far. Why should we begin to one or more guards
outside of the pavilion now when most of our aid lost of our dug up fruits
are at the castle?" 
	"Not guards to guard," Il Trol said. "Just a member of us to be on
the outside. Then, if an accident happens, the outside one can open the door
for us, and we will not be in any trouble." 
	"Open what door, Il Trol?" Jeffery Wind asked. "The pavilion is made
up almost entirely of open archways. The arches have no doors to them at
all. There are more than a hundred such. It is clear that is no way to shut
up such an open building as the pavilion." 
	"How topographically naive you are," Il Trol said. "It is an
illusion that there is no way to shut up such an open building as this. The
fact is that we could forget to leave one of us outside of the building, and
someone could close the door of the building, and we would never be able to
get out of it."
	"The fact that you have a big grin all over your outsized face, Il
Trol," Joseph Abramswell said, "tells us that this is troll humor, yes?" 
	"Not to me," young Stephen Tall said suddenly. "I will take it upon
myself to see that one of us is always on the outside of the pavilion. And
that one will usually be myself. I don't trust the place at all. The
pavilion also has a big grin all over its outsized face, and I believe that
its humor is more murderous than troll humor." 
	So Stephen Tall, along with Raddigan Shrike, undertook to guard the
people from the pavilion, not knowing quite what the danger was however. 
	The wife of Il Trol was not a troll. She was tall, thin, and
Italian-blonde. She did not take up residence with the people of the
expedition. After all, someone had to look after the automobile rental
business, and the donkey rentals also. But she came to the valley for a
visit for several hours every day. She was quietly beautiful. She was
probably younger than Il Trol, but she hadn't his childish elements. She was
stylish. She was cultured. She must have been expensive. was she at ease
with the pleasant monster she was married to? "Not quite," she said. 
	"Not at ease with him all the time, no," she said. "No, no, Lucille,
we are often a trial to each other for sure. But there is more than enough
pleasure in our relationship to make up for the awkwardness. Particularly in
Calabria, there have been thesemarriagesfor thousands of years. They are our
health and happiness. By that I mean that they are the health and happiness
of all the peoole. I wonder if you know just how wide is the gap between the
kindred, Lucille? You see, Il Trol isn't an extreme example of his people.
He's rather on the conservative side in appearance. And there is a sudden
resistance in some of the people against these matings. Do you know what the
legend of Romeo and Juliette is really about? Or the legend of Beauty and
the Beast? Do you have any idea what Romeo really looked like? My own people
have lived in this very land of Calabria for thirteen thousand years. And
his people -- oh, his people have lived under this very land of Calabria for
that same time. 
	Rosa Caprobianco is from here, and she understands what this is all
about. She herself is the result of such a mixture of bloods, within the
last two or three generations. That is why she loves to dig in the ground.
And yet she cannot move naturally through the earth. 
	"I myself began to love to enter the earth from the time that I met
Il Trol. We would go down into every sort of cave and crevice and passage
and worm-burrow, and we would work our way under the roots of the hills. I
am very thin, and am especially narrow in both skull and pelvis. When I am
stripped and greased, I can crawl through some remarkably straited passages.
Il Trol and myself are exactly the same height. But he weighs five times as
much as I do, and his bones are as thick as those of a rhinocerous. And yet
he can crawl through -- really, he can almost run through -- passages so
narrow that I could not even begin to work my way through them. 
	"He is a clown besides. He is so outlandish a clown that he not only
raises the hair on ones hackles; he makes one grow new hair from the
frightful rippling and shivering of the skin. Did you know that the legend
or fairy tale 'Beauty and the Beast' that I mentioned, is a troll legend and
not a surface people legend. It is about a troll girl and a surface lad. The
troll is the beauty, and the surface lad is the beast. Ah well, let Il Trol
be with you at the goat then, for many hours and days. I love to be with
him. But I love almost as much the wonderful memory of having been with him.
And the hours and days that I spend recuperating from him are equally
wonderful in their own way." 
	Well, they all felt that there would be hours and days when it would
be wonderful to recuperate from Il Trol. But that time was not yet. He was
still too new to them. 
	"I didn't understand what the troll's wife was talking about when
she spoke of the very wide gap between the kindred," Arthur Ransom said.
"Between what kindred?" 
	"Oh, between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals, to put it
simplistically," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "In non-essentials they are even
further apart than is remembered of them." 
	"Holy Troglodites!" Arthur gasoed. "That isn't possible. There
aren't either of them around any more. Not for thousands of years has that
been possible." 
	"No, of course not," Dorothy said. "It's impossible, as you can
plainly see. But she believes it. So do I. I very much hope that I'm able to
dig a troll of my own out of the reminiscent ground here." 
	The outlandish clownishness of Il Trol -- it sometimes took this
form -- Il Trol would excavate in the earth, as Pioneer Reventlo and Rosa
Caprobianco and the others would, with a short handled shovel and with
overflowing strength. But he would not start to dig where the others would.
He dould start lower down. He would go down a badger burrow or a fox hole,
and he would find one that opened down from the bottom of it. He would be
heard digging far underground sometimes, and then the sound of him might be
lost. But the diggers from the surface often got the feeling that Il Trol
was directly below there inside the earth, and sometimes they got grotesque
proof of this. Time and again, one of the diggers, excavating a promising
site, would break through to an underground space, and there would be the
ungainly head of Il Trol grinning up at them like light out of darkness. It
was always unnerving to excavate Il Trol in such a way. 
	"Some time I am going to cut your nose right off with my spade, Il
Trol!" Adriana Thistle said in exasperation once. "I will break through with
a great downthrust, and I will cut your grinning nose right off." 
	"Not done, not done," Il Trol grinned. "No way a little steel spade
like that could even scratch me. It will bounce off my nose just like off
hard rubber. I am one hard rubber man." 
	People, you don't realize what it does to vou to be digging one of
your own comoanions out of the ground like that. 
	"Let us stoo right here and take an over-view," Stephen Tall said to
Adriana. "This isn't quite happening like this. None of the things in the
White Goat Illusion, or for quite a while before we arrived here, is
happening quite as it seems. The framework has been distorted. An illusion
has been impressed on all our doings. The things that we have been ioing are
really very prosaic, but they are made to seem otherwise here. These things
aren't really happening, Adriana! other things which resemble them
superficially are happening, but these things are not. Let us be sure of
this." 
	"Let us be only partly sure of this," Adriana said. "I revel in the
illusion I will be sorry to give it up when we have to. Oh, here's another
of them. I'm sorry that I woke him up, but it's done now." 
	"It is not really happening that it's done now," Stephen argued.
"There is no digging this one out of the earth. We are deceived. I believe
that he is one of the young louts who is supposed to be working at putting
up hay in that next meadow there, and that he is hiding in wind-row there to
escape his work. You must be digging in a row of wind-row hay instead of in
the honest earth." 
	"It does dig too easy here," Adriana said,"but I can plainly see
that it is dirt and not hay, and I can see that I have dug this person out
from several feet of this dirt." 
	"This is not reallyhappening like this at all," Stephen still
insisted.
	Well, it seemed as if it wre happening like this, and when Il Trol
came up full of cheerful protest it seemed to confirm it as happening. 
	"No, no," Il Trol said. "You are digging up private persons, three
of them already today, who for their own reasons have buried themselves for
a little while in the White Goat sanctuary and asylum. You should not
disturb them. They have asylum right not to be disturbed here. Besides, if
they do not hide, they will have to work at the hay in the hot sun as they
are hired to do." 
	"They should hang out 'Do Not Disturb' signs over themselves then,"
Adriana proposed. 
	"No, chicken, no," Il Trol answered. "My chicken, they have done so.
In everything except an actual sign-board with words on it, they have hung
it out." 
	"This is not happening, this is not happening," Stephen Tall
repeated, as the youth who had been dug out of the ground hurried away in a
state of half-awake confusion. "This is not happening, and you are not
happening, Il Trol." 
	"But yes, I happen, Stephen, I happen. I am full of happenings."
	"You happen too glibly, Il Trol," Stephen challenged. "That's
exactly what's wrong with you." 
	"I happen glibly as if perhaps I had happened before?" Il Trol
asked, an eye cocked higher then any eye could cock. "Yes, you are right. I
have happened before many times." 

	Here was another bioscopic vision of the adventures of Vivian
Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, a mid-day presentation that came without asking. It
was a far-gone piece. It had passed the perfection of the several recent
adventures that had preceeded it. But it had become riper, more fulgent,
more dramatic in the contemporary European-Decadent meaning of dramatic. 
	There was the consciousness of strong direction in this sequence. It
was Doctor Fritz Otto, in the opinion of many persons the most powerful
director of kinetic drama in the world, who was imposing his own flairy
personality on this action. 
	"In the White Goat Pavilion, that's where it will happen," Vivian
was crying out of -te relentless action. "That's all that matters. That, and
the switness!" 
	This was not hay-seed ballet. This was not rinky-dink vaudeville.
This was end-of-the-world opera-made-flesh. The orchestra wasn't playing ice
cream notes now. They were sabre notes. There was the actual smell and reek
of fresh-hot blood accompanying the dozens of devil-masked, look-alike
adversaries. There were still the landscapes and city-scapes rushing past
them and through them. But those scapes were more surrealistic now. There
were erupting volcanos, there were exploding under water sequences, there
were burning desert interludes where all watchers felt their throats parched
with thirst. There was still the wall-scaling, the cliff-climbing, the
scampering up the sides of buildings. There were battles on the swaying
cables of bridges and on the dangling ladders of helicopters. There were
false deaths, and then splitting open a murdered artificial dody and the
real Vivian stepping out of it, still alive, but possibly looking ever
worse. There were horrible sequences in the garish Cavern oF the folk
unconscious where monsters clanged and roared. 
	There was still the attempt to convey the 'message', the 'secret' on
which depended the safety and survival of the expedition, and perhaps of the
world. Curtis Bald, his breast torn open and ligatures encircling his heart
to kill him, still bravely transmitted the the skip-beats of his heart, in
international code, on agreed-on frequency, which, however, the members of
the expedition had forgotten. And then Vivian had swooped to the rescue,
torn the killing ligatures from the wounded heart of Curtis, killed certain
animal-shaped guards, and then had gone up an iron ladder with the
not-quite-dead Curtis asling over one shoulder. The rungs of the ladder,
however, proved to be white hot.  Pain worse then that of Hell then! 
	Immediately after this, Vivian, transfixed by a lance, teetered on
the brin k of -- Ah, that was great action drama! But real death had already
eaten all the edges of the vignette and left only a diminished and oddly
shaped field of action for another time. 

	The people of the expedition dug interesting things out of all of
the zones of the earth, air, and mind sphere. They procured associates out
of each of the three zones. Cecelia Calca had already joined them out of the
haunted air. ("It isn't really happening li.ke this," Stephen Tall had said
of Cecelia,"she's a phoney and no more a ghost then I am.") Then they got
one out of the delved earth (Il Trol), and one out of the mind sphere. It
took onlv slight cheating to complete this symmetry. Il Trol could pass for
the one out of the delved earth easily enough, but really he had come to
them from the world of commerce and diurnality instead. So, to fulfill the
case more exactly perhaps, they got a youth who had realiv been buried in a
field. If he had been buried in a wind-row of hay, it was in a wind-row that
was two meters deep in the earth. 
	This young man said, or he seemed to say, that his name was Nerone
Estensi. He was due up by Adriana Thistle, and he seemed to adopt himself to
her. 
	"In his confused state of waking up, he is like a little duck just
come out of the egg," Lucille Creighton told Adriana. "You are the first
moving thing he saw, Adria.,ia, and lie has taken your impress. In some
respects you will be like a mother to him. " 
	"She had better not be like a mother to him," Stephen Tall said
sourly, for he had a proprietory interest in Ariana, and a hot-blooded sort
of interest also. "Be gone, Nerone, or I'II bust thy skull in -- Iao te
smasherai -- ah -- romperai tuo skullo -- ah -- cranio." 
	"I don't believe he understands you, Stephen," Lucille said. 
	"Why don't you say 'This isn't happening, this isn't really
happening', Stephen?" Adriana mocked. " Why don't you say 'He is a phoney.
He's no more dug out of the gr und then I am.'"
	"Because I don't want you to over to the 'this isn't happening, side
of the barrier, Adriana," Stephen said. "I want you to continue to happen." 
	But this dug up Nerone Estensi was a complication. He continued to
be mixed in his wits, as are many persons who have been buried in the ground
for too long. He showed the mental dimness that many ghosts show (he was
hard of hearing, and sometimes estopped of tongue), and his dug-up body also
showed many of the qualities of ghost flesh. But he would see things with
penetrating intuition at times also. So have many ghosts this untrammeled
intuition. 
	"Oh sure, he's a ghost," Cecelia Calca the ghost said. "There are
all kinds of them. There are house-ghosts like Perpetua and her husband
Marius here. They are always in faithful service and will not leave it even
for releasing death. Then there are the period-ghosts like mvself, nailed by
their own blood to a spot, for most of us were murdered in our blood. And
there are ghosts like this one, buried in the earth but not having the
decency to die there. For some reason they lack the ability to decompose and
disintegrate. They can be dug up again air again and set to do simple tasks.
They are the zombies of the zombie countries. But they cannot learn harder
tasks, for their brains were somehow damaged when they were buried. The
Invisible Man though, that new friend of Jeffrey wind, he is a ghost of a
still more tenuous type, a type that I do not understand well."
	The friend of Jeffery Wind though, what was he anyhow? He was the
addition who came to them out of the mind sphere. Was Cecelia Calca right in
her guess that he was some sort of ghost? Well, Jeffery had met this friend
when he was up in the balloon. The handwriting of this friend had first
appeared in the ships log, which was really a sort of note book (or notion
book) that Jeffery kept aloft with him. 
	The handwriting first appeared when Jeffery wasn't looking. This
went on for a while. There would be a friendly and penetrating note here, a
witticism there, an observation yonder. And then Jeffery was able to watch
it appearing several times, rapid handwriting done without pen and without
hand. 
	"That's the damnest thing I've ever seen," Jeffery said in some
wonder. 
	"Oh yes, it's a pretty good little trick," the voice told him, "but
it doesn't get much better with practice. I never could write a really
crashingly good hand." 
	"Who are you?" Jeffery asked the person. "You've made a pretty good
first appearance, without appearing." 
	"I'm Cedric Sinclair de Orsatti," the voice said,"but it would
simplify things if you'd just call me the 'Invisible Man'. I'm British and
Italian, of a very elite line of both." 
	"Oh yes, that goes without saying," Jeffery nodded. "Will you come
down with me now when the boy winds the balloon down with the windlass?" 
	"Yes, I'd like to," the Invisible Man said. "I'm like a kitten. I
can get up prettv high, but then I forget how to get down again. I get
frightened, and I don't know whether to back down or go down head first. I
would appreciate the ride down in the balloon, yes." 
	"I'd like you to meet the rest of the party," Jeffery Wind said. "We
will offer you the best hospitality possible, if I can figure out how to do
it. Do you eat?" 
	"That depends entirely on what is on the bill of fare," the
Invisible Man said. 
	But Stephen Tall was quite angry when Jeffery came into the castle
with the invisible man. "That breaks it," hebawled. "That is no more an
invisible man than I an. He is a phoney through and through. You are not
really like that, man. I confront you here." 
	"You're confronting him in the wrong place, Stephen," Jeffery Wind
said. "He is oi this side of me, not on that side. How did you know that an
invisible man was was with me? Nobody mentioned the fact to you." 
	"This isn't really happening, not as it seems to be," Stephen was
chanting."You are not really here, man. Some other thing that resembles you
superficially may be here, but you are not. W will e have to break this
illusion and get rid of trash like this." 
	"Be quiet, pup!" the Invisible Man siid to Stephen with surprising
sharpness. 
	"Stephen can see right through the Invisible Man," Raddigan Shrike
mocked. 
	But all of them in the party got on pretty well together. These
little disagreements would always be out. They were experiencing either the
deficiencies or the advantages of the White Goat Illusion. They were inside
one of the alternate frameworks, and they had to come up with improvised
behavior to cope with it. 
	"He may be invisible but he isn't untouchable," said Catherine
January who had been feeling the invisible skull of the new-comer. "I say
that a man with such head-bones as his can't be all bad. I will make a model
of his skull immediately. Then I and all the rest of us can see what he is
like, and it may help him to regain his identity." 
	There were golden threads of good nature running through all of them
always. But on this afternoon now, they were gnawed by a 
growing doom-fear for two lost companions of theirs. "The devils have killed
their bodies," Raddigan Shrike said bitterly, "and now they make their
spirits jump on jack-strings." That daredevil duo, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis
Bald, were appearing to many of the party in bioscopic dreams this day, and
the cloying sense of murder was all through the chase scenes. 
	"They are tired, and the bouyancy has gone out of them," the
cinemogracher Doctor Fritz Otto said. "The climax of their chase sequence
will not be at the end of it. The climax was somewhere back along the way,
and I will have to dip back and try to pick it up. There is a sordidness, a
trashiness in tired endings. Even a killer sometimes averts his eyes when he
makes a finish to it. But that is not good drama. 
	"When a deer is run down to his death (and single American Indians
have run deer to their deaths, and groups of men have often done it), the
deer takes on a ghastly appearance near the end. I have film clips of such
cases, and thev were cut out of sequences of 'The End of Summer', which took
the All-Europe Prize three years ago. At the end of the chase, the hair of
the deer is no longer deer hair; it is like short, dead grass The eyes of
the deer are no longer deer eyes; they are like large, featureless, grey
pebbles. The tongue of the deer is no longer red when he lolls it out. It is
as grey-white as alkali dust. And the gait of the deer -- ah, he no longer
has a gait, only a stumble. There were many points where we could feel
compassion for the deer, but not when (having ceased to be essentially deer)
he staggers to an undeerlike end. It is bad drama, regrettably bad drama.
Oh, the heroism still pulses up in our two acrobatic friends today, but the
pulse is weaker and weaker." 
	"Will we see the two of them physically at the end?" Anabella asked.

	"I think so," Doctor Fritz said,"but some of you might not bother to
look." 
	"I will bother to look," said Leon Yuri (1-212-1212),"I will sure
bother to look." 
	"Where will it be?" Cyclone Boniface wanted to know. 
	"Here," Il Trol said. "Oh, you can look at me as if to say 'How does
he know?' I know." 
	"What does the deer look like when it looses its deer look?"
Catherine asked. 
	"I don't know," Doctor Fritz said. "I can't describe it." 
	"I can," Il Trol said. "It looks like the other side of the
medallion of the White Goat Illusion, but the peoole never show the reverse
side of the medallion. On the reverse side is the dead scape goat, dingy,
unwhite. " 
	Perpetua and Marius, those faithful servants, served the people of
the expedition a spacious supper that night in the main dining hall of	the
castle. There were twenty-one persons at the table, the fourteen members of
the original party, and Leon Yuri (1-212-1212) about whom there was some
doubt he was an original member. And Cecelia Calca, Doctor Fritz Otto, the
Invisible Man, Il Trol, and the troll's wife who stayed over for supper. And
the Count of San Angelo. The dug-up youth, Nerone Estensi, was not at table
with them. 
	There was a sort of belligerent gaiety on all the party. There were
five hundred indications that a time of trouble was enveloping them, and
were resolved to meet those troubles gallantly. 
	"I don't know should though," Rosa Caprobianco said. "All day long I
dig zombies, and they are gallant bones, every one of them. This can be told
by the fundamental texture of them, even when they are brittle and and
broken and disappearing. We never dig up cowards' bones at all, not of man,
not of beasts, not of anything. The cowards always escape with their lives,
and escape again and again and again. You never find any cowards' bones
because they are still in use, and all the cowards are still alive." 
	Rosa Caprobianco had had surgery that afternoon. She had had her
skull trepanned, a big section of her skull bone taken out, the brain
probed, and a nuisance-node cut out of it. And then she was all put together
again. As Rosa was already past first youth when this node or growth was
removed, she would probably remain literate to a certain extent. But she
would no longer be excessively literate as the rest of them were. And she
would harvest all the advantages of illiteracy or post-literacy. 
	Il Trol had performed the surgery on her, with ritual stone knives
and other instruments. The wife of the troll, and Dorothy Blue-Ice, and
Catherine January had all aided in the process, all of them understanding
the technique perfectly. And now Rosa was having pain and unease with the
flushed flesh of her head, and her eyes were burning and weary. Catherine
January had made for her a set of slitted bone blinkers that looked like
eye-glasses. Eskimos use these to guard against snow-blindness and glare,
ard Rosa wore them like sunglasses. But the light in the castle dining room
was not too bright -- candles and olive-oil lamps and yew-wood torches.
"Among the bones that I dug up this morning was an almost complete
Neanderthal skeleton," Rosa said. "It was in natural and undisturbed site,
but it was buried impossibly deep. This has happened again and again with
Neanderthal bones, and it throws my private time-niche for them off
completely. I don't understand it at all." 
	"Oh, the Neanderthals are very like the Trolls," the Invisible Man
said. He was no longer invisible; but he was translucent, and the
torch-light shone through him. Probably he had not changed since he had
'appeared' among them. It was simply that the people of the expedition had
learned better how to see him. "Being trollish, they could move through the
smallest passages in the earth and come up under old strata. Really, they
could move through the earth as if it were water. When they felt their span
ending, they crawled deep into the earth, disturbing it not at all, and died
there. So their bones are an intrusion to a lower level, but they do not
leave any of the signs of intrusions. And there is something else about
them. Their bones alwavs make seemly adjustments after the persons are dead.
Nobody would believe their bones otherwise. They would be entirely too
enormous for belief." And it seemed as though the Invisible Man was looking
at Il Trol as he said all this. 
	"Are there any pure Neanderthals left in the world?" Adriana asked. 
	"I think so," the Count of San Angelo said. "I think there is one."
And the Count of San Angelo seemed to be looking at Il Trol who was not
dead, and whose bones had not yet made the seemly adjustments from there
enormity. 
	"And are there any more Cro-Magnons left in the world?" Anabella
asked. 
	"I think so," the Invisible Man answered. "I believe that there are
two or more of them at table with us right now." Probably he meant Pioneer
Reventlo and Dorothy Blue-Ice and -- "They have been active in groups in
very late historical times, I know. They have surfaced within the last few
hundred years. It was a group of about a hundred of them who were at the
heart of the Italian Renaissance." 
	"What is the different frame-work in the White Goat Valley?" Cyclone
Boniface asked. "How can one place perform an illusion on people who come
from another place?" 
	"I think that there may be a different sort of geometry here," the
Count said. "I think there is a different sort of topography, and of
sequence, and of materiality. I think that there may be variants of all
these things in the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. This is part of my
estate, you know."
	"It is part of my own estate, distant cousin of mine," the 
Troll's wife said. "I believe that my own claim is as good as yours, Count.
In our house we say that I own all the White Goat Valley above ground, and
that my husband Il Trol owns all of it that is below ground." 
	"I have it for my family name," Rosa Caprobianco said, "and I have
as good a title to it as either of you. Later we might fight over it. Not
this evening." 
	"But the White Goat Illusion plays further tricks," Catherine
January said. "It plays tricks even with living bodies." 
	"I will give a desertation on bodies," the Invisible Man said.
"Bodies have been demeaned just because they have an inferior role. But they
fulfill their roles more adequately than do anv of the higher things that I
can think of. All bodies have always been perfect. They have been what is
called workably perfect, that is to say complete. From the most primitive
sea-wheel or sea-worm, they have been what they should be. It is the
practice to place these bodies (or the reconstructed ideas of these bodies)
into a sort of sequence, and then to say that each of the bodies has turned
into the following one. The same can be proposed, with about equal
justification, for the numbers of the sequence. We can say that the number
two has turned into the number three, and the number three has turned into
the nunber four, and that all persons who do not subscribe to this
proposition are ignorant and superstitious and priest-ridden. 
	"And all minds have likewise alwavs been workably perfect, that is
to say that they have been complete for practical purooses. The mind of the
cockroach is perfect in its way, as the mind of a greyhound or a whale or a
man is perfect in its way. There have never been, as belonging to a general
class, moronic cockroaches, or moronic Greyhounds, or moronic men. 
	"But there are some persons who, while accepting the tolerable
perfection of bodies wheresoever they are, and of minds wheresoever they
are, still do not accept them as perfect together. I myself am usually of
this divided acceptance. There are only two ways we can have it, as to man
(we don't possess the duality that many non-men have). We can perhaps accept
a new mind being infused into an old body; that is the easiest but perhaps
the less correct view. Or we can accept a new body becoming associated with
an old mind that had heretofore been existing without a body. There are very
many of these unbodied minds, and it isn't always easy to persuade one to
become associated with a body." 
	"I think, with all this high flying talk that is going on here, that
we are not touching on our problem at all," Stephen Tall said, "we have
forgotten the aim of this expedition and excavation."
	"The aim," said Pioneer Reventlo stiffly,"is the solving of problems
of human origins or of human mutations in the historically recent period.
Our chatter uses approximately those words, and I believe that they cover
everything." 
	"Maybe they cover it too widely," Stephen said. "is the 'present' a
part of the historical recent period?" 
	"Oh, the present impinges on it , surely," Pioneer said. "Yes, for
lack of a better place to put the elusive present, I would say that it was
part of the historical recent period. 
	"Then we are trying also (and mainly, I hope) to find answers to
that elusive present, as you call it. Somehow it doesn't seem as if we are."
	 "I suppose that we are, Stephen," Pioneer Reventlo said, "though it
all seems very trivial. Just what are you really asking?"
	"The Problems of the Contemporary Workd," we don't seem to be
considering them at all. And I believe that they are central."
	"The Contemporary World has problems?" Reventlo questioned. "Oh, I
don't believe so, not really it is my impression that the Contemporary world
has run out of problems, just as it has run out of zest." 
	"It is my impression that it still has a lot of both!" Stephen Tall
spoke in near anger. "Oh, it isn't really like this! This isn't happening.
It's an illusion. We must find a way to seperate the phenomena from the real
people here." 

	After supper, they went to the pavilion. There they saw, in
bioscopic vision and on the cinema screen and on every channel of the TV,
the current and presently-happening chase sequence of those adagio
fugitives, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald. 
	There was an overpowering feel of weary hvsteria in this chase
sequence which all the watchers believed to be pretty near the last of them.
Vivian Oldshoe, who had always been so kinetically pretty, was hideous now,
her face contorted into a mask of torture. That doe deer had become very
undeerlike at the stench of approaching death. (or at the stench of
something worse, if she was already dead.) That bubbling girl had become
very unhumanlike. 
	The scene was in a landscape that was almost familiar. It was
Italian on the verge of being Calabrian. This was no more than an episode
away from being in the White Goat Valley itself. 
	It looked somewhat as the White Goat Valley might look if it were
covered by a new and growing layer of ash and hot pumice. Perhaps it should
be said that it was as the White Goat Valley appeared when it had been, or
when it would be, covered by such a layer. 
	There was the smell of scorched flesh, that of Vivian and Curtis.
There was throat rotting thirst, and the feeling of having drunk molten
sulphur instead of water. The landscape and wilderness-scape did not rush by
like a river, as the scapes in the other sequences had done. The landscapes
walked, with a scuffing gait. They stalked slowly after prey who moved even
more slowlv. 
	There were the blood snakes now (they had started as annoyances and
had grown to be horrors) that entered every new wound on the acrobats and
drank and gobbled their life-blood, The land was all mire now, all hot
quicksand, and yet the scene had clainly become that of the beautiful White
Goat Valley. 
	Vivian lept for a swinging vine. She had very few leaps left in her.
And she caught it and swung with new animation. On a swinging vine there was
no way that an enemy could get the best of Vivian. But then the vine came
loose from the confused trees overhead. it swung down and coiled tightly
around Vivian, and they crashed to the hot ground together. It was a giant
anaconda snake and no vine at all. 
	There was a rattle of machine guns then for a touch of
contemporareity. AAnd one could only crawl deeper into the hot ashes to
escape the volleys. But this was the place for the meeting, or almost the
place. The goal was nearly at hand, but the goal was not quite ready for
them. 
	"Shout the message! Shout the secret!" Pioneer Reventlo called
loudly. But that was not the Pioneer J. Reventlo who was sitting stupidly
and watching the death drama. It was another one of the same name and
appearance, the one who was inside the drama as an effigy. 
	"The secret isn't in words yet," Vivian cried through the ashes in
her mouth. "There is no way we can shout it. Open your head and I'll pour it
in." But the Reventlo in the drama made a mistake. Instead of opening his
own head he opened the artificial skull that Catherine January had made for
him. Vivian, not knowing the difference, poured the message into the open
skull. But the snake who inhabited the skull ate it.
	Then everything broke into flame which, as it happened, was the
habitate of the enemies who hunted the couple. They came with burning spears
and ran Vivian and Curtis through and through and set them on fire. The
couple contended as well as they could, but they hadn't their old agility.
Then a choking and stupifying smoke blotted out everything.  
	That wasn't quite the last episode of the chase sequence, but it
was coming very near to the last one. 
	Chapter Six 

	'Let's talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs.'
					King Richard II
						-- Shakespeare

	They woke to bells every morning then. And bells in the morning make
the whole day worthwhile. It was Il Trol who now rang matins on the castle
bells every morning right at sun-glint. The matin bell was very heavy and it
had not been rung in many years. 
	The old lord of the castle had ordered that the matin bell should
hang silent until one man heavy enough and strong enough to ring it should
come. Previously it had taken three large men or five ordinary men to set in
motion the matin bell. A single man on that bell rope was not of much more
effect than a flea on it. 
	This old lord of the castle had given the order to silence the matin
bell because he had been told that he would die while matins was ringing.
The provision about a single man ringing the bell had been added only
because the only man who had ever rung the bell by himself was a giant, an
ancestor of the castle lord, who had done this a thousand years before. The
castle lord believed that the world would be set right again if his giant
ancestor should return; and death would then be a short thine -- since the
following morning would be Ressurection Morning. Now, Il Trol, a creature
strong enough and heavy enough to ring the bell by himself had come along.
And he rang it. Then what had happened to the oid castle lord? 
	"Oh, he died, just as he believed he would," that sunshiny and
ghostly servant Perpetua said. "I'm really glad that he died. I seldom saw
him, but he cast a gloom over the whole castle. Now I will find him and
throw him out in what bones and dried meat is left of him. Then I'll bring
the sunshine in." 
	"But when did he die, Perpetua?" Joseph Abramswell asked. "I was
sure that he was only a castle legend." 
	"He will become one now, old olive, he will become one now,"
Perpetua told Joseph. "Oh, he died when the bell rang the other morning when
Il Trol first rang it. He was right that he would die then. Now it is the
third day that he is dead and it is getting pretty stenchy in that old wing
of the castle. The mass this morning is for his soul. But he hadn't been in
very good state for his whole last century. " 
	It was the morning mass that Il Trol always rang the morning bell
for,	but there was some question about the validity of that mass. The old
castle Driest was regarded as being as much a ghost as the old castle lord,
as much a ghost as Perpetua herself. well, the castle lord had been
unghosted just long enough to become a ghost again, but the old priest
remained one. Tenuous and transparent, he remained a ghost. It was by this
ghost priest that Cyclone Boniface and Catherine January had been married.
And it was this ghost who still ministered to the souls in the scarsely
populated White Goat Valley. 
	"Is a mass said by a dead man a valid mass?" Arthur Ransom
questioned.
	"Yes, it should be, if all the rites and words are fulfilled,"
Joseph Abramswell gave the opinion. "it is nowhere said that death is an
impediment. 'Thou art a priest forever according to the order of
Melchisedech' is the promise, and that promise isn't restricted by such
accidents of the flesh or by such changes of state as are represented by
death." 
	Half a dozen of the inhabitants of White Goat Valley had begun to
join the expedition people from the morning they first heard the matin
bells. And a British couple, the last of the tourists who had been lodging
at the pavilion, joined them also this morning. 
	"We are leaving at mid-day," the British lady said. "All the other
tourists have gone already. This is odd, for they all intended to stay
longer, and it on when still more tourists should be coming. But something
impels us to leave." 
	So a certain brightness had come into everything after the morning
bells began to announce a new awakening. This counteracted the gloom that
had accompanied the winding down of the death-drama of Vivian Oldshoe, and
Curtis Bald. The affairs of the expedition and excavation greened and
brightened, especially on this last day (though they did not know that it
would be the last day) of the normal routine of the party. In both senses,
the spade work of the expedition had mostly been done and the harvest was
ready. 

	"As Prometheans, we must be both open and fastidious," Lucille
Creighton said. "We believe in excellence as a condition, so we must be
fastidious lest anything secondary might be introduced. But at the same time
we do not understand the use of everything, and it may be that some very
awkward things are to be a part of our real requirements. We have to be open
to the most outlandish persons and ideas and things. We don't know what is
involved in a mutating jump, so we don't know that it isn't surrounded by
irregular prodigies. The death drama of Vivian and Curtis is such an
irregular prodigy, and it is part of our process no matter how awkward it
is. The ghosts of Calabria are irregular prodigies, the appearance of
prototypal persons in the midst of us (Oh Fritz, oh Trol!) are irregular
prodigies. So are the anomalies of time and space and matter that are part
of the White Goat Illusion. There are prodigies all over the place. We need
a guide." 
	"We have a guide," the immeasurably kind Annabella Hilary said. "We
all love each other so much, in spite of the brittle things we sometimes say
to cover up. This is the big thing, I believe, and this is the guide. it Is
the awakening that comes now, you know." 
	"What, even before the sleep?" Lucille quizzed. 
	Evidence, good evidence, absolutely 'golden' evidence and artifacts
were being dug out of the ground in profusion and quality beyond every
promise. This was an explosion of evidence and discovery. And there seemed
to be preturnatural conspiracies in favor of the party of them, so that all
the links of the evidence should come to hand timely, and the persons would
be able to appreciate the scope and sweep of what they were discovering. 
	They discovered consumate and prototypal machines here that were so
simple that they would not even have been recognized as machines by
excavators who did not have their eyes strongly opened. In these machines
(how old were they anyhow? how new?) all future machines of any worth were
implicit. The idea of the nature of a machine would have to be changed.
Change it then. There was a whole spread of 'highest-ever' culture. There
were amenities, their were arrangements, there were [rovisions and
techniques. All this was dug out of the ground and the inhabited air and the
hyperactive mind sphere. Here was the plan and providence of everything that
anyone would ever need.
	And, even beyond that, here was the fortunate mixture of superb
stuff that no one would ever need and that everyone should have as a special
bonus. Here was the seed-bed (Oh, and the harvest rows at the same time!) of
all the arts and enjoyments and praises, all the virtues and miracles, all
the divinity of life, all the excellence. It had really become a 'musical
earth' that they dug in, with all the singing things that they excavated,
with all the remnants of the muses themselves. It had become a speaking
earth.
	"Mint," said Jeffery Wind, and he raised his head at the aroma of
it. "It is the euphoric mint affecting us. Mentha euphorica! It is the
simple secret of Paradise, that one sould always be witnin smelling of the
euphoric mint."
	"It is more than that," Joseph Abramswell said. "it is 
solum euphoricum, the well-being soil of the earth itself. Enjoy it!"
	"We must take time out to enjoy all of this," Pioneer Reventlo said.
"We have to feast our eyes and our senses on it. It's the 
magnitude that we hoped for. It proves all our points, of course, that the
magnificence was complete in the beginning. but it dwarfs
our point also. Can man ever catch up with his starting point? He 
can if he continues to receive bonus after bonus as we have been 
receiving here lately." 
	"Lift up your eyes, Pioneer," Joseph Abramswell laughed. ('He 
laughs like an olive tree,' the sunny ghost Perpetua had said of 
Joseph.) "You are seeing only one third of it, the one third that was buried
in the earth and is seen from the outside. Look now at the 'haunted air',
which should be called the 'inhabited air'. You must see this as great
things should be seen, see it as being inside it. We are not alone here, and
we have never been alone. We tend to form companionships and corporations of
the living and the dead and the not-yet-born all together. The air is loaded
with mentors, and we will be mentors to others. We can even enjoy the
multiplicity of ourselves, in our younger and in our older forms. We meet
with elder mortal coils and with our own immortal adult forms. But why
should I have to tell you what the ha un ted air, the inhabited air, is
telling you loudly? It is our extradimensional ambient, and we are inside
it. Enjoy it. Explicate it. Be blessed in it. Oh certainly, Pioneer, this is
the ordered rationality and para-rationality that was in the beginning, this
is the ruled beauty. Like the cosmos itself, we are exploding with a big
bang, and it is still graciously ringing in our ears."
	(In truth, persons had reported a bale of genuine euphoric mint from
Arcadia and had opened it for its aroma to mix with that of the native mint.
This was a trap and a trick, and it was catching the people.) 
	"Lift up your eyes still a little bit further, people," Jeffery Wind
said. "The mind-sphere opens into dimensions of a world of which this is
only a token. We have still other eyes to open, after we have opened our
first and second and third sets of eyes. And when these are all dazzled, we
will open still other sets. 
	"How ironic is the trashy idea that any living thing should ever be
alone and unidentified. T&ere is one mind, and we are on the inside of it.
It is human, and at the same time it is animal and angelic also. We can
travel in the spacious and unconscious depths and extents of all its persons
and groups. Have you wondered what it is like in the unconscious mind of
angels? Maybe you have forgotten it, but you have been there. We are in
these regions, and we walk through them. And all the people of every kind
move through our corridors. Heretofore we have been characters in each
others' dreams. Now, as we rediscover our own sphereicity, we will be
characters in each others' and in the ultimate realities. But analogies and
rhapsodies break down after a while, until we have learned to talk in the
proto-tongue again." 
	Oh, this couldn't have been the effect of just the euphoric mint
that was in the air. There were half a dozer euphorias around there. 
	"This really is happenigg," the young Stephen Tall said. "It is
euphoria, but of the valid sort. The illusion has fallen away, and tile
reality is much more powerful. Everything that was phoney has been melted
out of it or skimmed off." 
	"This is like seeing everything at once," Adriana Thistle said, "and
yet all the implications opened up by it would take a thousand years to
follow to their sources. Very well then, we will  follow them in total joy
and grace. We have that thousand years to use as we wish. It is given to us
now for the joyous work. And after we have drunk that thousand years, we are
given ten thousand more. And then we are given forever. We have found the
pearl that was hidden in the field, and we discover that it much bigger than
the world. Yes, yes we have been sipping euphoria wine and breathing
euphoria air. it's good, isn't it. There are no limits now." 
	"Easy, little chicken, easy," Il Trol said. "Yes, it is wonderful.
All mv fat days I have been trying to tell people how wonderful the worid
is. But it is not all euphoria. There are more serious things in it, and
thev also will prove to make it worth while. Oh, it is a fat and wonderful
world!" 
	"I wonder if something or somebody isn't taking us just a little bit
fast this morning though," the youth Raddigan Shrike asked. 
	They all began to drift down towards the pavilionn from what had
been a spontaneous meeting and enjoyment in the open air. They were all
caught on the aroma of something impossibly rich. The wife of Il Trol had
joined them and she brought a sort of well bred joy with her. This balanced
the big and ill bred joy that Il Trol himself always showed. Or which was
which? Which of them was the beauty and which the beast? 
	The fact is that Il Trol had alwavs talked and acted in perfect
sanity and reasonableness, and his was all in intricate and flowery and
archaic words. But the speech came out of the resonating clay that his belly
and body (his soul was in his belly, not vulgarily, but because it was a
very large soul and there was no other chamber even in that huge body that
was able to hold it): and the eyes of Il Trol (each of then bigger and more
golden t-a,,i a Calabrian grapefruit) rolled around in his head in a
low-comic manner that might he taken by some as ill-bred ('His is he the
only horizon to horizon ogle,' Anabelia Hilary had said of Il Trol.) 
	"We can throw away our crutches now," Rosa Caprobianco said. "We can
forget most of the token scratching in which we have kept records. Now we
come to the things that all previous things were tokens of."
	"Are we perhaps seeing more than is here? " Raddigan Shrike asked.
He was a young man who had a strong skeptical streak in him. And yet even
was beaming all over his face and form at the unfolding realization of the
day. Och, the mentality and aesthetics of it! The grace of it! The
remembered joy! Yes, the joy that was remembered, as an old-new thing,
across many millennia. 
	"Of course we are seeing more than is there," Lucille Creighton
burst out like a new bloom "We are the golden inchworms, and this is the way
we inch along. And when we do see a thing, then it comes to be there. We
effect new things by our act of seeing them. We're magic togay."
	"Easy, little chicken, easy," Il Trol said. "I also feel the
expansive mood. We have uncovered the treasure. But have we counted all the
guards who were set to guard us away from it? Have they played their last
trick?" 
	"We have aces in suits that have just been invented," Arthur Ransom
gloated. "All the principalities -- we will heat them at every trick. And we
have accounted for every guard, even that dragon guard named 'Stuffy'.
Nothing could be stuffy today." 
	"Perhaps this thing needs a devil's advocate," Dean Hayfield
ventured. "Yes, we see the light. We fracture it and analyze it. And the
spectrograph tells us that the light is the bursting of new dawn. we know
that this is true. We know intuitively that no light shatters into such
spectacular colors as does the dawn-burst. But are we seeing it directly, or
are we seeing it only by reflection? I have my own intuition that we are
seeing it off of evening cliffs."
	"From the East even unto the West," said Jeffery Wind. "That is the
sign by which,we may know the parousia, the appearance that was in the
beginning."
	"Yes, yes, I know," Hayfield said with still a touch of wariness.
"But I still wonder which evening cliffs they are. Are they yesterday's
cliffs or tomorrows And is it yesterday's dawn or tomorrow's that it
reflects? I think we're still at 'yesterday evening station'." 
	"Are our faces too much alike? Lucille Creighton asked suddenly.
"Are we becoming a single vine with all of our calyx-faces identical?"
	"We are becoming a single vine, yes," the Count of San Angelo said.
"But our faces will be our own, however much in accord with the others they
may be. The Scandinavian lady tourist in the pavilion had nearly finished
her 'Shouting Faces Tapestry' before she left. They are our own faces that
she has done passably well, and they do shout. We are forming the 'Shouting
Face Vine" a powerful plant." The Shouting Faces of the people of the
expedition were these: Pioneer J. Reventlo. He had looked like Cro-Magnon
man once. Now he had decayed, but he still made a haunting ruin. Though the
light had been dimmed in him, and those his eyes were as blank as those on
an old Greek statue, he was still imposing.
	Joseph Abrarnswell, the analytical projectionist. He had gold-brown
color of the Jerusalem olive, curly hair, and curly whiskers under his skin.
Gold-flecked eyes, and the cupping hands. He was a large and light man who
travelled at a lope. 
	Rosa Caprobianco. Ivory, fire-rose, carmine, olive-blue, she was
made out of buff and living Nicastro marble. Strawberry hair. She was too
stocky, too heavy, too sensual. Hers was a Grimaldi face with many of the
colors gone wrong. 
	Arthur Ransom. He had oversized blue eyes which he himself painted
in oils often. He had green fingers, and the reflection from them showed in
his face. He had a Scotish nose and a Dutch mouth, and his hair was like
floppy sand. 
	Lucille Creighton. "Stylish and French and thirty-one-year-old
pretty." She was a hazel-eyed brunette. Her piano-playing fingers were long
and knobby, and she was holding them to her cheeks as she often did, framing
her face. 
	Jeffery Wind, the long, lean freckled, pleasant south-paw, with the
curiously pudgy lips that coronet players always have. He was casually
stunning in his intellect, and it showed in his face. He fulfilled the
George Borrow verse 'A lad who twenty tongues can talk/And sixty miles a day
can walk', and this and other talends showed in his face.
	Dorothy Blue-Ice, the doctor of analyticalbiology. She was blue-eyed
and yellow-haird. "Your skull, it can't be that big," Catherine January had
said to Dorothy once when she fingered the head bones with her affectionate
and arty fingers. "There cannot be a skull that big. There cannot be a
person that big. But you don't look big at all. I won't tell anyone if you
won't." 
"All right," Dorothy had said. Her face was bigger than any of their's,
except Il Trol, but it didn't look so. 
	These seven form the middle leaf of the triptych. There were not
such faces to be found anywhere, but how could one exolain their excellence?
They were simply a superb series of living portraits. 
	Anabella Hilary, sandy, freckled, drawly, and immeasurably kind. 
	Raddigan Shrike, small and black. "I am always the sour one," he had
said, but his wasn't a sour face. It was a true 'shouting face'. His eyes
always looked as if he were watching an ooponent in the kid's game 'Fast
Hands', a sort of 'Fast Draw' game with@ut guns. Raddigan had fast eves. All
the persons of the expedition were larger than life. Rad@igan Shrike was a
larger-than-life runt. 	Dean Hayfield. He was very young, and really his
face hadn't formed much yet. But it was a big full-moon of a face, and there
was plenty of room for features to form. 
	Catherine January, the skull-maker with the former's hands. They
were more distinguished than her face. Her face was doll-blank. Pretty, but
nothing. The animation was in her voice and in her hands, and a little bit
in her smile. Nobody could look at her face without wanting to try a hand at
illuminating it. 
	F. Cyclone Boniface. He was fast and he was competent. He looked as
'smart as a hickory thistle' in the old country expression. He was a very
tall bov with a very tall face. 
	Adriana Thistle. She had the wind-blown look like a tumble-weed or
her name sake-thistle, and the rummy eyes of oeoole who lust alot. She also
had the slightly crooked nose of a rogue. And something else. And something
else. You would take more third and fourth and fifth looks at her face than
at any of them. 
	Stephen Tall, the mathematical student and gambler. He was very
mobile of mouth and eyebrows. Adriana used to say that by looking at his
mobilities one could tell of his nine jokes he was going to tell. 
	These seven formed the right-hand leaf of the triptych. They
obviously weren't finished, but they just as obviously were very good and
could well become stunning. 
	Leon Yuri (1-212-1212). He looked very much like a man-sized rat who
was trying to pass as a man, like one who did pass much of the time. 
	Cecilia Calca, the period ghost. She was dated. She was pretty,
Qretty enough for murder and legend. Nobody would fail to notice that she
was nineteenth centery. They made skulls just a little bit different, and
they finished them with slightly different hair and features. 
	Doctor Fritz Otto. This was a man who did so many things that his
features were always in a noble jumble. He didn't really have a Face of his
own. He had a thousand faces to mirror the thousand plots that he was always
narrating in some form, and th@ thousand persons he had chosen to play the
lead roles in those plots. 'He is as handsome as it is permitted Germans to
be,' Dorothy Blue-Ice had said of him. 'There are limits put on us, you
know, to punish our pride.' All of Fritz Otto's thousand faces were quite
handsome, for he created them all himself. 
	The Invisible Man. He looked better as he was. The translucence and
sometimes transparence was kind to him. He had rough places on his visage
that reflected rough deeds that he had done long ago, but the screen of
half-invisibility hid the defects most of all and gave him a shimmering
mystery.
	Il Trol. He was the 'beauty' of the fairy tale. 'His face is like
the State of Texas," Adriana said once. 'When he came into the Union, he had
permission to have it divided into five faces whenever he wished, and each
of them to have full representation.' Oh no no, there is no way to describe
Il Trol's fat and beautiful face.
	The Troll's Wife. She is the 'beast' of the fairyt tale, but it has
always been a troll-viewpoint tale. "Ther is no way for a woman coming from
less than a hundred generations of beauties to be that beautiful," Lucille
Creightton had said of her with pointed envy. The Troll's Wife had easy
style, and had had it for much more than a hundred generations. Her face was
nex to the Troll's, and she was the one yopu would look at first and last.
	The Count of San Angelo. Oh, he was from the old nobility, and was a
distant cousin of the Troll's wife herself. The background of his face was
darkened with age, and his own features had somehow suffered from it. One
always wanted to put a little more light on that face to have a better look.
But it was still dark.
	These seven ormed the left-hand leaf of the triptych. There was
hardly to be found in this world the twenty-one faces as excellent as these,
for good or for bad. And if something was going to happen of great moment,
it was to these people of the 'shouting faces' that it was going to happen.

	"What, what, have these unlicked cubs of devil's advocates any more
questions?" Stephen Tall asked. "I was always the one who objected before."
	"I have one more small question," Raddigan Shrike said. "Leon Yuri
here, Leon who may have another name, why does he have all his fingers
crossed? I didn't know that a limited set of fingers could be crossed in so
many different ways. ut I remember now that his people are even more
fetish-ridden than are humans. And why does he have his eyes closed in such
tight concentration? Why is he praying such gloopy fetish-prayers to his
fetish father? What words are you mumbling, Leon?"
	"Don't let them kick it away now," Leon mumbled half out loud.
"Don't let them kick it away when they're so close. Don't let them muff it
now."
	"Oh, we'll not muff it," Pioneer Reventlo proclaimed. "We aren't
about to kick it away. We have found the ordered glory that was in the
beginning, and we are going to return to it."
	"I don't think that's quite what Leon means," Adriana Thistle said.
"He's of the enemy, you know."
	"Don't let them kick it away when they're so close," Leon Yuri still
mumbled the fetish orissons as he stumbled away with hie eyes closed in the
intensity of his concentration.
	Then, one by one and three by three, they were all in the pavilion
to celebrate their discoveries, to rhapsodize over them, and then to make
hard valuation and assay and implementation of them.
	The majordomo fo the castle had told them that they should not go to
the pavilion for the clear reason that there wasn't any pavilion, that it
was an illusion from another time altogether and was not to be found in the
present.
	But they hooted at him, and they went with happy hooting to enjoy
the pavilion which was the plainest thing on the landscape.
	"We are absolutely correct that there was a grandness and
completeness and ordered intellectuality and implementation in the
beginning," Pioneer Reveltno was saying to the world. "Why do I feel so well
today? This is what they used to call having the bob-cat by the tail on a
down-hill drag. We have the confincing evidence of it all now, and it has
turned into living evidence under our hands. Now we must bring it to fuller
life after its long sleep. We must reconstruct it all as it was before it
eroded, and we must lead all creatures to it. This is our human birth-right
that we have rediscovered."
	Now?
	Yes, now.
	There was a slight click when they wree all inside the pleasure
pavilion, so faint a click that perhaps only one or two of them heard it.
	"Oh damn, they closed the door," Dorothy Blue-Ice yelped.
"Desolation, desolation! It's all over and finished with us now."

	It takes some persons several seconds or even minutes to apprehend a
new situation. Others do it immediately.
	"In my 'Sealed Room', when the first hint of what has happened hit
Erik Hoff, his eyes get as big as dinner plates," the cinema master Doctor
Fritz Otto said. "It is of very dramatic effect, the way he dilates his
eyes."
	"What has happened?" Arthur Ransom asked. "Why do you, one by one,
turn white in the face? Nothing has happened, has it?"
	"Someone shut the door," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "That is the end of
it. We are finished. There isn't any way out of this for us."
	"Il Trol, isn't this some of your under-the-rocks clownishness of
several days ago?" Arthur asked with some degree of irritation. "Weren't you
talking about somebody shutting the door of the pavilion, and we would be
cuaght in spite of a hundred doorless doorways?"
	"Some of my under-the-rocks clownishness, yes," Il Trol saod. "But I
forgot, for a moment, which rock the truth was under. ANd our guards forgot
to guard. I was swept up by some sort of mania a few minutes ago. I forget
just what it was. Some enthusiasm."
	"Satisfied? Leon Yuri, alias 1-212-1212, are you satisfied?" Adriana
Thistle asked bitterly.
	"Yes, satisfied," Leon said sleekly. "We have you all in the goat
pen, and the gate is closed. Not a one of you sad cattle bolted. I was
afraid that some of you would,a nd I dreaded that we might miss it after
having it so close. But now we have you tight."
	"In the 'Sealed Room', Erik Hoff pounded on all the walls and rolled
his eyes when he discovered that he was irrevocably trapped," the cinema
master Doctor Fritz Otto said. "That doesn't sound like much, but Gunter
Schnurr was playing in the role of Erik Hoff. Gunter was the greatest
eye-roller in cinema. We used to write scenes just around his eye-rolling.
That 'Oh-my-God-I'm-trapped!' scene in the 'Sealed Room' was one of the most
dramatic pieces that I've ever directed. I believe that it would be fitting
if Pioneer Reventlo carried on a little bit in that manner now."
	"Pioneer Reventlo woun't be carrying on very much from now on," Rosa
Caprobianco said. And in fact Pioneer had become quite listless and dull as
if someone had turned off the light in him.
	"Would it be quite useless to check all the doorless doorways for a
way out?" Stephen Tall asked. "There is no reason why there still isn't a
hundred ways out."
	"Oh yes, quite useless," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "This is the end of
it."
	"We'll do it anyhow," Adriana Thistle proposed iwth only a faint
pretense of hope, and she pulled Stephen along with her to search.
	Surprisingly it was the always sane Joseph Abramswell who pounded on
the walls and rolled his eyes. "Only in a thousand lifetimes does one touch
such a thing!" Joseph bawled. "We touched it, but we let it get away. How
have we failed?"
	"We'll have plenty of time to figure out how we failed," Lucille
Creighton said. "Have we food here for a while? Have we water? Never mind,
we will have several days, even if they are hungry and thirsty days, to
figure out how we failed. How did they do it to us anyhow? How did they
hypnotize us?"
	"Oh, they did that with mirrors," Jeffery Wind answered. "They did
it by flashing lights in our eyes with mirrors. Very hypnotic."
	"Then there really is a very bright light somewhere in this?"
Lucille asked.
	"Very bright, very very bright," Dorothy Blue-Ice agreed. "But we
wre mistaken aboput the location and time of that light. We thought that it
was behind us. We were looking for it in the wrong direction, so we were
patsies for the mirror trick."
	"There are hundreds of possibilities crowding into my mind,"
Anabella Hillary said. "How about going through the floors to some of our
recent digs? The 'Powers That Oppose' cannot be current with all of them. We
have deep excavations, one of them under one corner of the pavilion. How
about the towers? Even if we are buried, we cannot be buried as deeply over
teh tops of the towers as elsewhere. How about the water shafts and
conduits, and the electrical services entrance? How about the gabled roofs?
If they hold,t hey will fault and crack almost any dirt fill, and we could
dig right up a new fault. How about Il Trol who can go through earth almost
as if it were water?"
	"We have been trapped by persons who will have ticked off all the
possibilities," Jeffery WInd said. "I myself could have devised an
absolutely inescapable trap, and I am sure that our adversaries have done
that. But we will go over it al ljust to admire the ingeniuty with which we
were taken."
	"No, there is no possibility of getting out," Dorothy Blue-Ice said.
"There was a change in everything when that little click sounded. There was
an alteration in the light and temperature, in the pressure, and even in the
composition of the air. The air now is stale with the staleness of the ages.
There was a change in the year also, and probably in the century."
	"Maybe I am slow," Raddigan Shrike said. "Yes, I find a change in
almost everything, but just what has happened? Why are we scared? Why are we
despondent? There was the sound of a little click, and several of you went
into shock. And very soon, the rest of you followed into that shock and
trauma. What has happened?"
	"Oh, we're trapped," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "We can't get out of the
pavilion, not ever."
	"Why in white goat whiskers can't we?" Raddigan demanded.
	"Oh, we can't get out because there isn't any outside any longer,"
Dorothy gold him. "Oh that's what it amounts to. All the doors and windows
and other exists of the pavilion are closed and locked tight, and the
pavilion itself is in some sort of stasis. The majordomo of the castle was
right when he said the pavilion was not really here, that it was all an
illusion. Now the illusion has popped like a bubble."
	"I will find a way out of it," Raddigan vaunted.
	"Join the others who are searching then," Dorothy smiled. "I bid you
luck. I don't want to die here, myself, you know. Not of suffocation or
starvation or thirst of claustrophobia. I always dreaded being buried alive,
and now I am."
	But there were some pretty notional persons in the party, and for
several hours they explored every notion fo a way out of the pavilion. Then
they drifted back into the big hall, wenting to be together all in one
people, spooked by the unknown caul that contained them, unused to a world
with no outside.
	"The towers are gone," Adriana Thistle said, coming back from one of
her vventures. "They aren't collapsed, they aren't broken, they're just
gone, and with no sign that they ever were a part of the building, with no
sign of a place where they were ever joined on. I read the brochures that
are around here, the little booklets that they give to the guests here and
that relate a sort of history of the White Goat Hotel. The towers were only
added on a little over a hundred years ago. We're further back than that
then. And the building has had to be excavated and restored several times.
It sinks badly into the land here, and the land has to be peeled back from
it. In our peculiar present time, the pavilion is in an unexcavated state."
	"Why do you say 'We're back further than that," Adriana?" Raddigan
asked. "And wht did Dorothy or someone mean when she said 'The pavilion
itself is in some sort of stasis?' And, a while ago, 'There was a change in
the year also, and perhaps in the century'? What kind of talk is this?"
	"Did you have a deprived childhood, Raddigan," Dorothy asked, "that
you weren't acquainted with these things, the great machines? You must know
a little bit aobut the contrivances of fiction and of the future. The
pavilion, in every line and element of it, is a time machine. I'm sure that
most of us recognized that immediately. It's a real one too, so there is
nothing flashy about it. It does not move through millions of years with all
sirens shouting. It moves with a click and a whisper, and for only small
distances at a jump, fracturing the whole fabric of the universe, but doing
no real damage. It will move through its small span, dozens or hundreds of
thousands of years, if there is any reason that it should."
	"And what is this 'stasis' business?" Raddigan wanted to know. "I
know what the word means, but you're not using it that way."
	"Oh, the time stasis sets an object outside of time completely. It
puts it into neutral gear timewise. And spacewise also, since they are
interlocked. A thing in stasis isn't anywhere, nor is it at any time."
	Stephen Tall and Adriana Thistle were enthusiastic when they
returned from further exploration of the pavilion. They wre impressed and in
admiration.
	"It's masterly, simply masterly," Stephen cried. "It's a perfect
job. They haven't overlooked a single thing. Attention to every detail,
that's what. We can't get out. We can't even look out, not one centimeter.
Really we can't even imagine 'out' now, the way they've got it fixed. It's
as if there isn't --"
	"As if there isn't any outside," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. "Exactly.
It's in a condition of stasis, as I was telling the young fry. There really
isn't any outside. The whole cosmos disappears, and tehre is nothing
anywhere except the 'alpha object', in this case the pavilion. Oh, don't
look at me as if I made that up, Stephen. Josephy Abramswell here made it
up. He has the to prove it. And his equations are accepted."
	"Well, does the cosmos know that it has disappeared?" Anabella
asked.
	"No, the cosmos doesn't have an inkling of it," Abramswell said.
"Well, the cosmos isn't here, so how could it know what is going on? But the
cosmos doens't disappear from time of space. It's still tehre, if we were in
a position where we could rationally say 'still there'. The cosmos has only
disappeared from the time stasis that envelopes us. So we are isolated."
	"Forever?" Raddigan Shrike asked.
	"No. It can't be forever. A time stasis will decay, after a while,
or perhaps before a while. We don't know where the point of re-entry will
be, since we don't know exactly who is running the show."
	"But we will reenter somewhere back in time then?" Raddigan asked.
	"Or maybe somewhere forward in time," Josephy said. "I'm not sure
that our treacherous enemies have control of that. I'm not sure who does
have control. Our enemies, or those people not in accord with us, have set
us off in a sinking boat, and they are pretty sure that we will never reach
any land except the bottom. We don't know this much about the situation
because we don't know who put us into it."
	"Sure we know," Raddigan said. "Leon here is one of those who put us
into the situation. Let's pull a few fact out of him, by the roots."
	"Yes, it is time that we separated the phenomena from the people
around here," Stephen said. "All right, Leon, you ratty little phenomenon,
I'll just have a hold of you and --"
	But Stephen wasn't able to take a hold of Leon. Leon Yuri (they had
all expected it of the grubby little monstrosity) was not human, and he did
not obey the laws of humans. He did not seem to obey the laws of materiality
either. He looked at them all with a sort of ratty arrogance.
	"You are all in the pen now, and the gate is closed on you," he
said. "All of you sad cattle. We have you all." Leon sniggered. Then he was
gone.
	"One done," Stephen said. "How about you, Invisible Man?" he asked
that translucent person. "Are you a phenomenon or a man?"
	"I have always been a man," the person Cedric Sinclair de Orsatti
who preferred to be called 'The Invisible Man' said. "I suspect that I am an
imperfectly dead man, which is to say a ghost. But a human ghost."
	"Can you come and go, out of here and back?"
	"I think so. I don't understand this 'time stasis' talk, but it may
be the usual ambient of ghosts that you're talking about. Yes, I can leave
here, but I like the company of you all."
	"Can you go out from here and go get help for us?"
	"I can try. But I have trouble communicating with people. Unless I
meet someone as receptive as Jefferey Wind, I probably can't make my
presence known to anyone at all."
	The Invisible Man went out of the pavilion. It looked easy the way
he did it.
	"Where do you think we'll come out of the stasis, Jefferey?" Lucille
asked.
	"We likely will not come out at all, except in a mummified
condition. But the pavilion will come out, right about where it went in
spacewise, and possibly three hundred and seventy-five days later intime."
	"Why? Is there some special value to three hundred and seventy five
days?"
	"I think so. It's a special in-joke at least. Some special value to
three, and to three hundred and seventy-five, and to several other intervals
that are resonant to these. They fit the equation that I am putting together
now. They seem to be a group-constant. I'm calling it 'Wind's Floating
Constant'."
	"Is there plenty of food and water?" Arthur Ransom asked.
	"Oh, there's likely enough food for three hundred and seventy-five
days," Stephen Tall said with a crooked grin, "but a lot of might be
tiresome and bland and not fitting for such as us. Wwe would be down to
canned fare for at least part of it. There isn't any workable refrigeration
now; but all tempertures (both inside and outside of boxes) may well remain
where they are now if (which I take to be the case) there isn't any outside
world of space for temperatures to dissapate in. There is enough water to
drink, but not enough (somebody be praised!) for daily showers. This may
bring us down to our essentiality. We will wash a little less, and we will
have to get rid of our daily guilts in other ways. I am sure that the modern
hyper-washing wasn't practiced in Reventlo's 'Golden Age'. There is plenty
of wine to drink and --"
	"Remember that I will be drinking wine for two," Catherine January
said.
	"--and plenty of grain for bread. The hotel always prided itself on
making it's own bread from it's own flour ground on the premises from it's
own grain. The grain is here. We won't get cold if, as I suppose, the
pavilion is a temperature-closed unit now. In any case, there's a lot of cut
wood on hand. I believe that several loads of it were stowed in yesterday.
We can keep a roaring fire in the fireplace all three hundred and
seventy-five days of it. It shouldn't affect the temperature one way or the
other. That fireplace never did. It's a magic fireplace that we have here,
you know."
	"Is there enough to read?" Joseph Abramswell asked. "Ah, people, I
am sorry that I was the one who went to pices and pounded on the walls when
I found that we were trapped. I had my hopes set on something else."
	"About eight thousand books," Anabella Hilary said. "Some of them
look interesting. Some of them look quite learned. Not many of them are
trash. I shall learn Basque, and then Eskimo. There are manuals on each in
the tourists' rooms that haven't been cleaned out yet. One can learn a lot
in three hundred and seventy-five days, or a resonant part of that. Threat
of boredom is the greatest teacher in the world. And you brainy 'bezirk'
players can always play 'bezirk'."
	"How about you, Cecelia Calca?" Stehpen Tall asked. "Are you a
phenomenon or a person? We want to be sure of everyone."
	"I am a person, but I am what the Invisible Man called an
imperfectly dead person or a ghost. But I am not a phenomenon. I won't be
drawing full rations here. I don't eat, and I don't drink water. But I do
drink a little wine sometimes. Things would hardly be worthwhile without it.
And yes, I believe that I can come and go, inside and outside the walls of
the pavilion, but I would not be able to go beyond the precincts of the
White Goat Valley. I am nailed to the valley by my own blood. I still intend
to tell all of you the complete story of my life and death."
	"Yes, we will have three hundred and seventy-five days to hear your
story, Cecelia," Stephen said. "But could you somehow procure help for us
from outside?"
	"I don't know. All the people who come to the White Goat Valley stay
at the pavilion. And the pavilion isn't here any more.  We're in it but it
isn't here. And what few people actually live in the vallye, they shy away
from me because I'm a spettra, a ghost. They say, 'Now, now, Cecelia, we
respect your ways, we just don't want you to come too close to us..' And
when I do come closer and try to talk to them to some purpose, they run away
from me. Wel,, I'll go out and have a look around." And Cecelia went out of
the pavlion.
	"Pioneer J. Reventlo!" Stephen Tall barked out suddenly, "are you a
person or a phenomenon? We have to be certain of everybody."
	"Why do we have to be certain?" Dorothy asked. "I'm not sure that it
makes very much difference."
	"Pioneer? Pioneer?" several others of them questioned this. "But
Pionerr Reventlo is the head of our expedition-and-excavation, in name at
least. And he has been a leading light among us until -- well, until quite
lately. How could you question him?"
	"I question him because he has been dimming out ever since the door
snapped shut on us," Stephen said. "And he had already lost a part of his
brightness from the time that we first came to the White Goat Valley. I
question him because, as I now see it for the first time, there has always
been somehting lacking in him. Oh, he's been impressive. Everyone has always
said how impressive he was. but just what was it that was so impressive
about him? Why isn't he impressive now? What are you, Pioneer, a person or a
process?"
	"Oh, I'm sure that I'm a person, boy," Pioneer Reventlo said, but he
was smaller than he had been before and not nearly as impressive. "I seem to
be pretty nearly empty now. There was always something that kept me filled
up before."
	"Pioneer Reventlo was always sustained by projections that we didn't
question too closely," Joseph Abramswell said. "'Whoever is unsustained, let
him throw the first spear' we used to say. Now, apparently, the projections
that sustained him have been cut off, as everything else has been cut off
from the exterior world. He is a man now who is deprived of a peculiar
support suystem that he had depended on. Each of us has his own quirks, and
a change of conditions might leave any of us bankrupt in our persons, as
Reventlo seems to be now."
	"To be sustained principally by exterior projections is to be a
phenomenon rather than a person," Stephen said. "I don't believe that
Reventlo is a person at all. I must pursue this matter further, and other
matters also." Stephen had an odd and hurrying look on him. He had become
one of the older persons in the expedition in just an hour or two.
	"We are fixed alright on chess and checker sets, darts, backgammon
boards, dice playing, cards, poker chips?" Arthur Ransom asked.
	"I believe that tehre are plenty of all those things," Joseph
Abramswell mutterd. "But if we descend to any of them (except 'bezirk' with
the playing cards), then we have already become less than people, and
Stephen Tall might have to rephrase his questions a little bit."
	"Cigars?" Ransom asked. "Have we enough?"
	"We have or we haven't," Abramswell said. "All the cigar stores are
out of business to us. Oh, what are we to do now!"
	"Take a break for a few hours," Doctor Fritz Otto said. "An
afternoon nap will often clear a life-shock away. And then movies in the
evening."
	"We have no power. The projector won't work," Ransom said.
	"We will have movies this evening," Movie Master Fritz Otto said.
"Where are Cyclone and Catherine?"	
	"They're measuring the pavilion," Ransom said. "I don't understand
why."
	"Oh yes, the results should be interesting," Fritz Otto smiled.
"Could they measure the sword of Damocles also? It's hanging over us."
	Chapter Seven

Prometheans who taller flames would crave
Will harried by by stridency of throats,
And tricks of ghosts, and by the hoofs of goats,
And sorcery into elliptic grave.
				Down With the Dead Men
					-- Cruse Carlyle

	There were some indications that the pavlion was buried under
volcanic rock and soil. There were other indications that they were under
the sea. The pounding of the ocean could surely be heard around them and
above. But probably these were illusions, the pseudo-sounds and vibraitoins
that accompany stasis. The best guess was that there was no outside to the
pavilion.
	And no one took an afternoon nap to cure the life-shock they had
suffered.
	"If we are outside of time, how come time passes so slowly,"
Raddigan Shrike asked reasonably enough. "And I myself have no inclination
to grapple with the problem quite yet. The problem has meared himself with
bear grease, and it will be a messy wrestle when finally we join it. What
time -- if that word still holds here -- do the movies start?"
	So the movie-master started the movies a little earlier than he had
intended to, and he mined his own brain for selected short and long subjects
to project.
	The first of the movies which Doctor Fritz Otto presented that
evening was announced with flame fanfare. The fireplace rather than the
cinema screen was used. The name of the moivie, spelled out in garish flame,
was Der Phoenix. Smoke and ashes and resurrection! That colophon at the
beginning of the movie was rare and moving art. And all the credits were
given to Doctor Fritz Otto, author, adapter, director, choreographer,
photographer, narrator. Fritz would sit and chuckle as he projected it, and
then he would add still another credit.
	Doctor Fritz sat easy and smiling. He was a man who could projecdt
with great power but without strain. It was a comfortable intensity that he
had. Doctor Fritz was a dynamo, apparently at rest, his high speed rotation
indicated only by the low humming that came from him (the tune that he
hummed unconsciously may have been the old soldiers' song 'Wir Leiben De
Sturme"). And his quiet dynamic activity was also indicated by two green
pilot lights (his two green eyes) that indicated that the projection was
'all go'.
	And then the first scene opened. There was a giant and ancient bird
flying out of the Arabian Desert, a bird that was leaking ari badly and was
going to sink, a bird that had one broken pinion and hardly any feathers at
all; and it was pursued in flight by leprous ghost birds and flying snakes.
And yet the giant and ancient bird comign out of the desert was a
'Celebration Bird'.
	You do not know what a 'Celebration bird' is? That was the question
that was being asked by the 'Blooming Desert' musical sequence that now
became dominant. And the music was intending to answer it. And then ther
ewere old film-clip flash-backs from the corridors of Fritz Otto's mind,
spectacular 'living color' clips from the time when the bird was still
young. The clips showed the great eras of the Arabian Califs, and then the
Phoenix was a youthful bird, a gala bird, an entertainment bird, a talisman
bird. The desert was green then. The aprricots and olives and figs and dates
were all in bloom, and at the same time they were all loaded with ripe
fruit. They were celebrating the fertility of the world.
	The dromedaries were as rapid as race horses in that green world,
and the men were coursing them. And the horses were of a beauty and nobility
to be found nowhere else in the world. The whole earth was mentally and
physically jumping with life.
	The five highest arts, mathematics, belly dancing, astronomy,
Damascus-sword tempering, and the lyric poetry formed a five pointed star of
learnign that shone in teh sky even in the daytime and inspired the whole
land. (Doctor Fritz was projecting with elements of spoofing and
exaggeration and satire also.) And the virile sports had also become high
arts. At free-style wrestling, at free-style arrow shooting, at tilting with
the long spear on horseback, at feasting, and at dynamif domestic
transactions (sometimes called wifery), the men of the green flourising
desert showed that they had no equals.
	Nor had they equals in the strong music of their voices. At reciting
epic poetry, as reciting from the Book of the Way and the Life, at reciting
the 'Nine Hundred Entertainments of the Calif', at reciting the 'Voyages On
the Arabian Ocean', at reciting High and True History, there were never such
soundful and talented reciters.
	There was a little anecdote about the High and True History that
projectionist Fritz Otto introduced here. One brave man was told that his
rendition of High and True History was incomplete, that it lacked two lines
for its poetic balance and fullness. "I will have to go and make those two
lines then," the man said. He slung his sword, mounted his horse, and rode
away. One day later he returned on his blood-flecked horse, holding his
blood dripping sword, and he declaimed theadditional two lines that he had
just manufactured. This is the way that High and True History is made.
	This was when everything was burgeoning in the land, and when the
cob-webs were thick across the doorways of the lawyers' tents and the
judges' booths. This was when strangers might ask the people where their
flag was, and they would point to the Phoenix flying in the sky and say
'That is our flag, the highest flying flag in the world'. It was the Golden
Age when the Phoenix was the Celebration Bird, the Gala Bird, the
Entertainment Bird, and the Talisman bird.
	But now the Phoenix, crossing the Red Sea and coming to land in
Upper Egypt, plagued by ghost birds and scavenger birds and flying snakes,
had his bones bursting through his featherless skin, and he was dying of old
age.
	The cinema-master Fritz Otto projected this on the screen that was
the fire in the fireplace with only a few words, but with a rolling panorama
of sight and sound. You loved the ugly dying bird in his fallen majesty and
his maimed and flopping death. You loved him, but you didn't want to get
very near him.
	"Now that the 'Golden Age' is past, do you have any regrets?" a
person asked (It was a person partly covered in feathers and partly with
scales) asked the dying Phoenix.
	"You are confused," the parched, skin and bones bird conveyed. "The
'Golden Age' is not past. It begins tomorrow."
	And then there was the sheer spectacle as the fire was lighted and
the 'Death and Resurrection' cantata of Mozart lifted its voice. The real
name of this sequence was 'The Resurrection of the Phoenix'. Doctor Fritz
was very good at projecting this part. If he had not been a great
movie-mogul, he would have been a great director of symphony orchestras.
Symphony directing was his own second love, and he was especially good at it
now when he was both the orchestra and the director.
	This was looping, soaring, swelling, bonfire-into-dawnburst music.
But even by Doctor Fritz the 'Golden Age' could only be hinted at. And the
noon-time of it was far beyond even his genius. That blooming desert bit
that had preceded this, that had not been the real golden age. The age
itself was in the future always. THe realm name of the blooming desert bit
was 'Prelude and Intuition of the Golden Age'. And the orchestration ended
with the 'Fulfillment Fugue'.
	That had been a good little movie short subject, a superior
travelogue with whimsy and beauty. Fritz Otto was superb in his
color-and-sound creations, and in his surging 'narrations with-and-without
words'. He projected all of this from his ruddy and short haired head, the
'magic pumpkin' as Dorothy called it.
	Then there was a little intermission, and they talked.
	"The measurements, Cyclone and Catherine, how did they come out?"
Joseph Abramswell asked. "What are the dimensions of our craft -- ah -- of
our trap and tomb?"
	"Ah, the pavilion is a hundred and thirty-seven meters long,
twenty-three meters wide, and fourteen meters high," Cyclone said, half
defiant, half embarrassed.
	"Perfect," Joseph smiled. "Is is not perfect? It's the confirmation
of a lop-sided guess that has been running wild among some of you young
people here. It is so perfect that I suspect subjective influence, even
though that is impossible with all our approved measuring equipment. Is it
not impossible, Cyclone? I thought, when you first began, that I heard the
whistling protest from your measurer. That would indicate that you were
trying to influence it and had been caught at it. I believed, in fact, that
it was giving the response 'Absolute measurement is not possible on the
inside of a stasis; forget it.' But then you were gone for an hour longer,
and I heard no more of the whistled protest."
	"Oh, the measurer wouldn't cooperate at all," Catherine January
said. "It did respond 'All measurements must be figured out with out the use
of a unit of measurement. Measurements here are for entertainment only and
are not valid'. But then we found an old meter stick in the little museum
among the mummy cases, and we used that. That's what took us so long."
	"Yes, yes, there are not two more subjective persons on board this
ship -- ah -- in this pavilion, than you and Cyclone, Catherine," Joseph
said. "Did I not hear a protest note when someone tried to get evidence
aobut the outside of our hull -- ah -- about the outside of the pavilion?"
	"That was Raddigan and myself," Annabella Hilary said. "Yes, we did
try to find out just what sort of insulation material it takes to put a
complex object like this into stasis. But our own through-the-wall-pop-scope
carried on as if we were doing something dishonest. And then we found, in
the same little museum among the mummy cases, an old and unmonitored device
that was meant to be put on the outside of a cheese vat to give a reasing on
the cheese deposit on the inside of the vat, this without one having to life
the cover of the vat to disturb the 'patina of coagulation' of the working
cheese. That's what the explanaiton of the device that was printed on the
card said."
	"Wonderful, wonderful!" Abramswell beamed. "Our ancestors, in the
long interval between the Reventlo Golden Age and the present time, had some
wonderful devices. And they were highly subject to mind control."
	"I once owned stock in the 'Ancient Calabrian Goat-Cheese Company',"
Rosa Caprobianco said. "I know how very subjective is ancient Calabrian
goat-cheese, as well as all the instrumetns used in making it. Did you know
that the old cheese reade4r such as you are using, when placed against the
belly of a woman, could tell the sex of her unborn child? Well, what did the
old cheese reader tell us about the outside of our hull -- or shell -- or
whatever? How are we insulated to put us into time stasis?"
	"Oh, our hull is double-pitched," Raddigan Shrike said, "and
sheathed with wood and rosin (or possibly with rosin-wood), and interlarded
with fiber. 'Rosin-wood, tight with fibre, and covered with pitch inside and
out' -- that was the reading we got when I attached my own device 'The
Raddigan Redactor-Verbalizer' to the cheese reader."
	"Wonderful, wonderful," Abramswell said, "and absolutely
unverifiable. It really reminds me of a case of no other than Doctor Otto.
Doctor Fritz Otto, I know now where I heard of you before, for I am not
knowledgable about cinema matters. You are the movie expert who was called
in on the studies of cocoon life of the Papilio Karna, the Javanese
butterfly, the beautiful swallowtail. You were to join into the
investigations of cocoon dreams, and to aid in reconstructing them. But
there was some doubt about the authenticity of your reconstructions."
	"A completely authentic reconstruction of anything would starve to
death, Joseph," Doctor Fritz Otto said. "that's what we say in the trade.
Well, the Karna do some really kaleidoscopic dreaming when they're in the
cocoon. For a fact, there's nothing else for them to do there. And they were
even a bit organized about htie dreaming. For a fact, there's nothing else
for them to do there. And they were even a bit organized about their
dreaming. I myself learned a few things about projection from them. We
learned that a single Karna has rather dull-colored dreams. A half dozen of
them within the radius of a meter will have much more colorful dreams, and
they will tend to have the same dreams. A score or so of them within a small
radius (though there is no good way they can communicate with each other
except extra-mentally) will set up a regular theatre district. Joseph, they
were having moving picture shows in their cocoons! In a score of them there
will be three or four very good projectionists, and the shows they project
are amazing. The colros (all of our data were lifted from the minds of the
pupa by brain scan) were superb, as might be expected from incipient
butterflies. Of course they would dream of colors! But the music (and this
was totally unexpected) was also wonderful and moving. And then we come to
the controversial area, the organized representation. They were superb here
also, but they were not human. And in my translations I erred on the side of
enthusiasm. The plots, the story-lines of the short plays, the role-casting,
the mimicry, the sheer drama, these took control of me. Here was something
new in stage craft. It was my interpreting of the plots and eipsides into
human terms that was called unauthentic by some, but it was as authentic as
any inter-species translation can ever be. My own movie 'The Magic
Kaleidoscope' was partly based on the cinema lifted from the Karna pupae.
Like all of the dream-cinemas of them it was largely Cinderella motif, and
was explosive in its power. And yet I had unfairly been given the name of a
cheater."
	"Poor butterfly," Catherine January said, and caressed Doctor Fritz
Otto's skull. And people often called Doctor Fritz the 'Butterfly' after
this.
	"Folks in cocoons do enjoy good shows, do they Fritz?" Adriana
asked.
	"Indeed they do," the movie-master maintained.
	"I like that," Adriana said, "because we are people in cocoons now.
We are waiting our long cocoon waits and dreaming of resurrection. I am, at
least. We do all ralize that we are in cocoons, don't we? I hope all the
shows are good ones. And I know that they will be, Doctor Butterfly."
	Then Doctor Fritz Otto began to project another Selected Short
Subject onto the screen that formed itself in front of the fireplace.
	The short subject was 'Buried Alive', a documentary combiend with
pseudo-documentary, and with emotional overtones. Nobody has asked how
Doctor Fritz Otto had this power of projecting images and scenes. Such power
is not common. There were perhaps a dozen people in the world who could do
it, for very short spurts, and with great strain. No one else could do it
with such ease and scope, not for such intricate pieces of such length, not
with such warmth and intensity of sound and color and feeling. Nobody else
had been able to project with such validity. With Fritz Otto it was a new
breakthrough talent. But what he did now surpassed anyting he had even done
before.
	He projected sheer feeling without the help of sound or color.
	He projected total darkness. There was a variety of lights in the
main hall of the pavilion, and all fo the people were seated in front of the
big fireplace full of indubitable flame. The fireplace went dark. The
candles and olive-oil lamps and yew-wood torches went dark. Certain
ornamental phosophorus pieces went dark. Fritz Otto, by taking thought, had
projected total darkness throughout the pavilion.
	Then he projected the feeling of horrible aprehension. There is an
Indian pictogram for 'apprehension' that shows a five-headed snake on the
inside of a person, eating simultaneously of the liver, the greater
intestine, the heart, the trachea, and the brain. This was the same
apprehension Fritz Otto projected onto all of them, erputing terror,
horrible despondency, total degredation.
	Then Fritz Otto projected the ghosly and insane realization: "I am
buried alive!" And the noiseless gasp of horror raled through every one of
them. All tried to sit up. Most of them had already been sitting up, but now
it was a different case. And when they tried to sit up in the total
darkness, they encountered, from the insides, the lids and the sides of
their own coffins, the coffins that weren't there. But they were there.
Doctor Fritz Otto had projected them there.
	There was sobbing strangulation. There was nightmare-shouting and
tongue-swallowed groanings that could not find themselves into words. there
was ineffective pounding and clawing of the coffins' velvet interiors. It
was predominantly the moaning,t he moaning, the moaning though, and the low
sound of hair raising up, and teeth-chatter and whimpering. There was fear
like notghing else and abandonment. To die in the open was one thing. To
come alive ina death-sealed coffin was quite another. This was the ultimate
strangulation of horror, and tehre was no immunity to it.
	This went on for too long. It was traumatic. It was permanently
crippling to the spirit. At least one person of them decided to perform a,
to her, act of justified self-destruction, to rupture her own heart and to
haemmorhage her own brain. It was very close there.
	Then the lights came on again, soon enough to prohibit madness in
all of them, but not soon enough to avoid its shrivelling nearness. The glow
and flame of the fireplace was bright again. The candles, the lamps, the
torches, the ornamental phosphorescence were all illuminated once more. And
gone were the straighting interiors of the coffins and the terror of them.
	But Doctor Fritz Otto looked puzzled.
	"Who?" he asked. Then "Oh," he said.
	"Oh, I turned off the dark, Fritz," Dorothy Blue-Ice spoke calmly.
"A very few seconds of that were enough. There was damage. There would have
been death."
	"Flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, are you also the sharer of
my new powers?" Fritz asked. "Yes, you are. I don't realize how much I
overdo it. I suppose that we should have a short intermission after that
one."
	But how had Dorothy turned off the dark and broken the effects, when
those effects were all projections of Doctor Fritz's mind?
	"What is the name of the butterfly that has the poisonous sting on
its tail?" Dean Hayfield asked in rather bad humor.
	"There is no such butterfly," Joseph Abramswell told him. "It is
only a legend or a biological spoof."
	"Yes, there is such a butterfly," Dean insisted. "He does have a
legendary flair, but he exists and can be classified. I classify him a
little bit differently now."
	Oh, several of the people looked a little bit pale and distraught
but they recovered quickly. Each one showed a 'who, me?' look if it should
be implied that oneself had moaned or pounded on the sides of lid or
panicked. No, none of them seemed really upset for very long, except Pioneer
Revently, and he no longer had much balance or resiliency.
	But Raddigan Shrike did have his nails broken, and his finger ends
were red and black with surface and impacted blood. He had clawed in wild
spasms. And Anabella Hilary had material souvenirs of the adventure. She had
streamers and shreds of rich cream-gray velvet, streaked with bright blood.
She had held on to these pieces from her own projected coffin interior.
	"I wish I could have this velvet analyzed and traced," she said. "I
would like to have a little police detective work done on it to find the
manufacturer."
	"I wish it could be done also," Doctor Fritz said. "I would be very
curious to know who did manufacture it."
	"It was all good and dirty fun," Anabella said, "and nobody hurt
except somebody who was already hurt." She looked at Pioneer Reventlo when
she spoke that last phrase. Pioneer hadn't really known where he was for
some time. Now he was still making clawing motions with his hands. He
thought that  he was still in the coffin or ark, and he wanted out. But the
rest of them hid their shock.

	Cecelia Calca came in, as she did about once a day.
	"Oh, you people look more tense and serious every time I come," she
said. "I worry that you are not having enough fun, the way you're locked in
this cage here. I still want to tell my story to everyone. Aren't you now
what they call a captive audience? None of you could get very far from me. I
think that if I am able to tell my story to a group and have the sympathy
from them, that I might make a tranference and  be no longer nailed to the
White Goat Valley by my own blood. Now I have an idea. Doctor Fritz, why can
I not tell my story in the form of a movie show? The name of the show would
be 'The Thing In the Wall', a movie which you could product and project
here, and in which I could play myself."
	"We might possibly find a place for it, Cecelia, on the late, late
slot some night," the movie-master said. "What do the people on the outside
say of us and the pavilion? What does it look like to them?"
	"From the outside, there isn't any pavilion here now," Cecelia said.
"And nobody remembers any of you people, except Il Trol whom they remember,
and his short visits here, and his long disappearances between them. He is
on a long disappearance now, they say. And they remember Rosa when she was a
little girl, but they don't remember her being here recently. They shy off
from talking about th epavlion, and they say that they don't remember it at
all. And I don't believe that the people in the White Goat Valley do
remember it, not as being here regularly, not as being here in the daytime
anyhow. But there is a booger-tale of something a little bit like it, a
gzaebo or kiosk where spooks dance and carry on at certain nights of the
year.
	"If you have me on a late, late slot, maybe the people will not
attend on me properly, or appreciate my story as they should. They might be
sleepy and cranky and wandering. Then I would still be nailed to this
place."
	"Possibly we can move it up from a late, late slot to a late slot,"
Doctor Fritz said. "And now we will have another Selected Short Subject."
	There was a stentorian sound of trumpets, and then there was a
stentorian voice announcing the theme of the new presentation.
	"It does not matter how big the grave is," the voice boomed as if it
were coming from a very large grave or an echo-chamber. "If you are buried
alive in it, then you are buried alive. The grave may be as big as the
world. It may be a world, your world."
	There were panoramas (those things that Doctor Fritz did so well;
when, on the last day his head would be opened up, bushels and bushels of
panoramas would gush out of it), panorama of all the people in the world
tightening up in alarm and apprehension. They looked over their own hurrying
shoulders. What was it that was threatening them, and where was it? And
where did that giant voice come from?
	And then there came the voice even larger, double stentorian and
fraught with doom. Thre was no doubt where this voice came from. It came out
of the sky:
	"The World is Buried Alive!" the voice thundered and lightninged.
"The sky is the grave. Nobody can get out!"
	And then consternation ran like ten billion plague-carrying rats
through all the limits of the world. 
	"We're buried alive, we're buried alive!" the people howled and
driveled. Some of the people had the same faces as the people who were
watching this, or take-offs of those same faces. There were goofy versions
of@ the faces of@ Il Trol and Jeffery and the Count of San Angelo and
Catherine and Stephen. "We're buried alive! Nobody can get out!" these fun
faces bawled. 
	And then all the newspapers and TVs in the world were blaring it and
driveling it. This took flash-shots from all sorts of printing and
broadcasting areas, and hearing and seeing the rolling headlines. Hot-color,
luminescent head-lines screamed 'The World Is Buried Alive. Scientists seek
way out. World Leaders plead with People to remain Calm." 
	Ah well, it was burlesque really, the only thing that Doctor Fritz
did badly. He was ham. He milked and he bilked. And then he got very
extravagant in his projections. 
	There was a line of people, pushing and shoving in driven hurry, but
still maintaining a sort of line in the human way. Line-buckers were railed
against, scuffled with and sometimes ounched. The line was waiting for
elevators in the lobby of a large building. One elevator came, and people
pushed and shoved to get on it. And finally the loaded elevator shut its
doors on all who were not in, and ascended with its 'overload' lights
flashing. But it had made hardly a dint in the surging line that waited. 
	Cut to above then, and the elevator disgorges its too many
passengers onto the roof-garden. These fought to get to the iron fence
aroun@ the roof, but other persons were crowded ahead of them. People, in
swarm after swarm of them, were climbing the iron fence and leaping to their
deaths. Well, wouldn't you do the same thing if that voice was thundering
over your head 'The World Is Buried Alive. The sky is its grave. Nobody can
get out'? Welders were cutting out sections of the guard-fence to allow more
persons to jump to their deaths faster. That showed that someone was still
thinking. 
	Down in the street, a new extra was out with the headlines
'Scientists Say That The World Was Always Buried Alive. Nothing has
Changed.' Persons caught one newsboy who was trying to sell these papers to
them. They poured gasoline on him and set him afire. They would show people
that things had changed. 
	And the bodies continued to rain down from above. 'The World Is
Coming to An End.' Well then, cheat it, cheat it! 
	One enterprising man had set up a booth with the sign 'I Shoot ou
Between The Eyes For One Dollar. The world is buried alive! Neat shooting
done.' There was a line of people here too. Each person, as he came to the
head of the line, gave the man a dollar. The man shot the person between the
eyes and ended his worries. And then the next persor, would step up to the
head of the line, and in turn he would be shot between the eyes. 
	"The world is buried alive," came the big voice from the sky. 
	"Do you give credit?" a slight man asked the man with the gun. "I
have a check coming Tuesday. Could you shoot me on credit?" 
	"I just can't do it," the man with the gun said. "Step aside,
olease. e next person with a dollar." 
	"This skit is a turkey!" came a big voice half as high as the sky.
It was not the same sky voice that had been heard before. It was the voice
of Jeffery Wind, not one of Doctor Fritz's projected voices. "Cut it, Fritz,
cut it!" Jeffery said. 
	So Doctor Fritz Otto ended the skit 'The World is Buried Alive.' He
filled in the rest of the time slot with travel shots of the Julian Alps.
Fritz was very good on projecting travel shots. He was good at everything
except burlesque, and in Germany even his burlesque went well. 

	If you're buried alive, you might as well have a little fun out of
it. Well, they had all become smilingly thoughtful, and they were having a
measure of good fun as their deaths closed in on them. The cocoons had begun
to form around them already, a thread of silk here, a thread there. They
were still invisible cocoons, and they didn't restrict yet. But they had
begun to form. 
	Jeffery Wind had been experimenting with an artificial air, for
their old air might give out before anything else did. The pavilion was
getting stale already. Oh, there was lots of things to make air out of. They
could pull the carbon out of the air and use it all again, they could get
oxygen out of almost everything in the pavilion, but they could not recycle
these things forever. What time there was, it was against them. 
	"The mummies in the pavilion here, is there a history on them?"
Raddigan Shrike asked one day. 
	"Oh yes, sure," Anabella said. "A sort of one printed up for the
guest who stay here. It says that the mummies were found right here in the
pavilion which was a cave then. I don't understand that part of it. The
mummies were found on couches, dead apparently of starvation, but they were
not harmed in any way. And this had never been a starvation country around
here." 
	"Then there has been other game taken in this same trap," Stephen
Tall cried. "We are not the first. So they failed, our mummies there. They
probably weren't as expert as we are. That is nothing to worry about that
they failed, and that incident should not influence the odds on ourselves. I
believe that the betting now should be no less than a hundred to one against
us. Cecelia, can you go out and get bets with someone at a hundred to one?
Where is that ghost? She's gone again." 
	The final episode of the Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald 'Flight Into
Death' serial was almost missed. Persons like Doctor Fritz had even said
that there would be no more episodes of the drama, that it was finished. The
neglected end of it came on about the third night of the movies, after most
of the persons had come to realize the problems they were in and were not so
much distracted by the Fritz Otto projections as they had been before. Nlost
of the people wore asleep. 
	Only Anabella Hilary was awake. And Raddigan Shrike was half awake. 
	Vivian Oldshoe burst into the pavilion, flying through the air,
landing, rolling, and tumbling onto her feet again. She had surely swung in
somehow on her favorite vehicle, the swinging vine. 	"Oh, thank Heaven
you are all safe inside this blessed trap!" Vivian cried out. "We enticed
you here every way that we could think of. I was afraid all the time that
some of you would slip out of it. This is where it all happens, you know.
There isn't any way you can get out, is there? Caught, caught, caught! We're
happy about that. Now we can die happy." 
	"No, wait, Vivian, wait!" Anabella cried out. "Don't die, Vivian.
Wake up everybody! Vivian's here!" 
	But no one would wake up except Raddigan, and he was only half
awake. 
	"That isn't Vivian," he said. "It's only a cardboard poster that
they used to put up for their acts. It belongs to Dean Hayfield. He was
stuck on Vivian." 
	"No, no, she's real. Wake up everybody!" Anabella cried. "It's
Vivian and she's dying."
	"She died last winter, back in the States," Raddigan said. "They
found her body there, and that of Curtis. They were murdered. Go back to
sleep, Anabella. That's part of a cardboard poster that you have in your
hand. And you're hallucinating." 
	"Yeah, it's the end of me," Vivian said. "You're the only one I
wanted to say goodbye to anyhow, Anabella." 
	"Don't go Vivian, I love you," Anabella said. 
	"I'll show you a trick, Anabella," Vivian said. "The last one." 
	This would be good. Though she had suffered, Vivian now showed a
flash of her rogueish humor. With her cardboard hands, Vivian tore pieces
off of her irregular poster and put them in her cardboard mouth and ate
them. She did that until there was nothing left but her cardboard hands and
her cardboard mouth. 
	"You can't make a mutation jump without breaking a few categories,
Anabella," Vivian said. She ate her hand with what mouth she had left, and
she was gone. 

	'Fountains of The Deep' was possibly the greatest movie that Fritz
Otto ever made. He borrowed extensively from it for one particularly strong
presentation that he made one fateful night in the pavilion. And he also
borrowed extensively from his movie 'The Magic Kaleidoscope' which
interpreted the pupa dreams and cinema of the incipient Papilio Karna
butterflies of Java. He himself had not realized that the two movies were
both fragments of a still unrealized master-work. 
	Creatures in cocoons have a sense that their cocoons are in motion.
This statement was projected in the fire of the fireplace that was now
functioning as a cinema screen in the pavilion. They have the feeling that
their cocoons are travelling strongly in space and time on a voyage of
immeasurable importance. 
	Of course being in a cocoon is the same as being buried alive, but
the cocoon-grave must have the feel of being alive and in motion. There
would be no joy at all in it otherwise. 
	The pavilion had become a master-cocoon, and -- (Doctor Fritz Otto
was no longer the solo projectionist of these mysterious movies: Jeffery
Wind, Dorothy Blue-Ice, and Raddigan Shrike had joined him in the composite
projection), and it was a cocoon in motion by an allegorical sort of
duality. It was the pavilion. And it was also a great ship of the identical
dimensions of the pavilion. 
	It is said that the paradox of motion requires that a thing must be
in two places at the same time if it is to move. 3ut there is an
alternative. It can also be two things at the same time. Then it can move.
The pavilion was two things at the sane time. 
	The sound of the crashing ocean! The pounding and roaring of the
ocean about them and dbove! The felt assurance that they were really in
space and not in the ocean; the knowledge that the crashing of the ocean is
only a weak memento of the crashing of space. 
	They were in, all at the same time, a coffin a grave, a cocoon
(which is a bomb), an ark, a pavilion, a world. Anaxagores was the first one
who knew that the shape of all of these was elliptical and that one may
voyage equally in any of them. 
	There was a great and close companionship here, but the quarters
were confining. They were all of the same kindred, of course, even the
animals. The rampant animality had been an irritant for a while, but now
that was all subsumed. They kept that fireplace a-goinq in the center of it.
It was a hearth and a galley-stove. It is the galley stove that is the heart
of any ship. 	"There were three arks when they started out," Anabella
said, "but one of them was sunk near St. Kitts, and one of them ran aground
in the Grenadines, and only the third of them finally arrived at fair land.
Their names were 'The Little Girl,' 'The Painted Woman,' and 'The Holy
Land.'
	"You were always weak on history," Raddigari said. "Those were the
ships of Columbus. Yet his also was a mutational jump akin to this one that
we have been backed into attemoting. He mutated the world, twinned it or
doubled it. But he lose all his juice in the jump, just as Reventlo has
done." 
	Yes, the persons in this oceanic cinema spoke in the voices and
thoughts of the people 'trapped-to-their-death' in the pavilion. Now the
fact is that the pavilion sailed directly into the cinema and absorbed it,
or was absorbed by it. And it became, for the duration of its voyage and
until its resolution and judgement, identical with all those other things,
with the coffin, with the grave, with the primordial cocoon which is also a
bomb in the special case, with the Ark, with the Argo, with five other ships
at least (Seven Holy ships in all), with valleys (do valleys make voyages?
yes, they do), with other pavilions. 
	"Are such as these the ambients in which mutational jumps have been
made?" 
	"To give a simplistic answer, yes, they are." 
	Checkers were first played on the Ark. The same is true of chess and
'berzirk' and 'ghosts and goats' and Kelly pool. They played a lot of games
on the old Ark. It was much like the Fimbul-winter they had gone through a
little while before that (the world itself was the Ark during the
Fimbul-Winter). They played Donkey's Uncle and Shadow-Play and Moving
Pictures, all very creative games. They first played the Writing Game on one
of the early arks. Ships' logs were the first things ever written down in
the primordial language. But the Writing Game was one of the games that
quickly became tiresome. 
	"There was one early voyage where a ship full of monkeys started
out, and when they reached the other shore they were a ship full of people."

	"Not quite. It was a matter of comparison and viewpoint. They passed
as people to the folks on the other shore, but those folks were
double-monkeys." 
	The Masterwork-Movie of Doctor Fritz Otto and many of the others,
that temporarily unnamed movie (they decided that they would put the name at
the end of it instead of at the beginning), it did not end as the other ones
ended. It merged with the Promethean Company itself, and it remained an open
question how it would end. The odds against it were steep. Well then, they
were steep. 
	"Why should such goofy people as ourselves being selected even
provisionally for such a shot?" 
	"Consider some of the other people. Consider all of the other
people. Talk about goofy!" 
	But this was not necessarily the end of the 'Selected Short Subjects
of Doctor Fritz Otto'. This was not the end of 'Every Night At The Movies'.
There could be innumerable little movies inside the big one. There might yet
be a slot for that unproduced Victorian Melodrama 'The Peculiar Revenge of
Cecelia Calca'. 
	Chapter Eight 

	Comst thou smiling from 
	The world's great snar uncaught? 

			Antony And Cleopatra 
					-- Shakespeare 

	Many days and nights had gone by. 
	Jeffery Wind was reading 'Life In the Grave' by von Hildebart,
'Essay On the Symbols On Ancient Tombstones' by Bachofen, and 'Death By
Drowning As An Experienced Mutation' by W.W. Yates. No, these were not
gloomy writings. All of them were sparkling with symbolism and bright magic.
In 'Life In the Grave' we find this passage (Jeffery was reading it out
loud): 
	"The first metro or subway railroad that I ever saw in my life was
in the Germanies when I was quite young. I was not at all predisposed
towards underground things, and I was in a panic about being taken down into
that sloping cavern, the motor entrance at the main terminal. We went down
into the ground there in a taxicab that was driven by a negro, the first
black man that I had ever seen. This was the land of the dead that we went
down to, and no one ever gets out of it alive. My father paid the black
Charon in coins, and he left us. And then we were alone, entombed below the
city and only a very little way from Hell itself towards which our steps
compelled us. 
	"But then I was utterly overcome by the fascination and sparkle of
the shods and booths that are on the Road To Hell. This was 'Vanity Fair' of
which para-scripture speaks, and this early encounter with it was one of the
passions of my life. There were electrical signs in an explosion of colors.
Some of them were moving and spelling signs, cascades and fountains of
colored light. It was daytime in the city when we had come down, and I had
never before been in a town that had anything more than simple electric
street lights. And, beyond the electric, there were the shouting words and
pictures on the posters that were everywhere, in the windows of the shops
and above the doors. My father took me into a penny arcade. There were
games, there were puzzles, there were even carousels. There were prizes.
There were bioscopic movies with whole worlds inside them that could be
watched for half a penny. 
	"My father took me to a pancake-and-sausage palace that was also a
coffee house. In all the world there had previously been no such place as
this. He took me to a fur shop and bought me a bear-skin hat. He took me to
a jewelry store and there he bought a red ruby for my mother. Then we got on
the metro train and travelled past a full one hundred blocks of arcades and
dazzling shops. 
	"Ever after this, I knew that there were (and still are) more
enchanting things below the ground than above it. And I looked forward and I
still do, to the sparkling splendorsthat appear in the grave. These spendors
light up only after the sexton has shovelled the last spadeful of dirt onto
your coffin, and the earth-toc people have gone away. But you have the
sparkle after these lesser neople are gone, and you will have it forever. To
me, things above the grouid are still only pale reflections of things
below." 
	"I rather enjoy being buried alive myself," Dorothy Blue-ice said in
kindly answer to von Hildebart, himself dead and in splendor by that time.
"Yes, it is a sparkling life here in the grave. It is intellectually and
aesthetically stimulating. And it will zoom to a climax soon, as do the
moving and spelling signs in the metro arcades. What will our own climax be?
Even poor people are buried in velvet lined boxes as indication of the
luxury to come. How completely will our life be changed by death?" 
	"Whence have you your name, Dotty?" Doctor Fritz Otto asked her. 
	"oh, my family was named Blau-gletscher, Blue-Glacier. I changed it
to Blue-Ice, a pun name that sounded like 'blue-eyes' in my still German
accent. I hoped that the fellows would say 'Oh, how big they are!' when I
told them my name. Some of them did." 
	"They ae big," Doctor Fritz said, "and I did know you back in the
days of the blue glaciers. It seems like only yesterday. That was when I was
working on the movie 'The Road To Yesterday', though I was only an assistant
director on that one (I was quite young). I wanted you for a part in that
movie and I couldn't find you. But I knew that you were real and that I
would find you again someday. That was the theme of the movie, recognizing a
loved one across many millenia. Then it came to me that the name of the
movie should be 'The Road To Tomorrow' rather than 'The Road To Yesterday',
and that I would find you in that tomorrow. And now I have. That is also the
theme of our presett case. we do all realize by now that what we were
excavating for in yesterday is really in tomorrow, don't we?" 
	"I realize it, yes," Dorothy Blue-Ice said. 
	Then Jeffery Wind was reading a passage from Yate's 'Death By
Drowning as an Experienced Mutation': 
	"In the previous chapter 'Three Days In The Belly Of A Fish', I
mentioned that, though many of us believe that we do recall that archetypal
experience, being three days in the belly of a fish in the depth of the sea,
yet very often we are confusing it with the memory of a resonance of it, the
simply pre-natal experience 'Nine Months In The Belly Of A Fish'. But now I
propose that there is another experience that many of us were confusing one
or both of these happenings with, and that is the 'Three Hundred And
Seventy-Five Days In The Cradle (cuptae or atca) of The Deep' . 
	"What is significant about this number, or about the cycles and
resonances of this number? What creature has a gestation period of three
hundred and seventy-five days? Only the sperm whale. If we are to believe
Cottonwood's translations of the only whale writing known, those deep-water,
iodine etchings on basalt stones that are off the Ile d'If, the sperm whales
are very much involved in all this and have taken pains to record it. But
who today believes in Cottonwood's translations? Or who even believes that
the 'whale writing' is writing?" 
	"What all the 'in-the-belly-of-a-fish' memories really symbolizes is
change," Joseph Abramswell said, interrupting the reading of the recently
dead Yates. "And change is always a sort of 'sea change' in the unconscious.
And the unconscious is always a sea. We will all be changed greatly,
people." 
	"These mutations or changes have happened before, have they?" Dean
Hayfield asked with half a doubt. "You older and slightly wiser ones are
saying that they have happened before?" 
	"All human change has been by sudden mutation," Joseph said. "And
all those mutations have the ear-marks of being elaborately arranged or
staged. They are ritualized, and ritual is probably a necessary part of
them. There is a sort of birth-ritual about them, the bent grass that is at
the birth site of all the prodigies. Of all nests, the most symbolism is to
be found in the grass around the mares'-nest, and perhaps our own changes
are birthed in such a place." 
	"Oh, what are you all talking about?" Dean Hayfield asked in
exasperation with himself for not keeping up. "How does all that grass get
into the middle of the sea? May we not have a poor-boy translation of all
this malarky?" 
	"We are talking about, and reaching for, the 'Eden Archetype',"
Abramswell said. "that fine pitcher that has been going to the well for all
these thousands of years. We have been to that well with that pitcher so
many times that I don't know why we remember it as being in the past instead
of in the future. We have an excuse for our memories being fogged now, but
they are not so fogged as they were when things were going well for us." 
	The excuse that they had now for foggy wits was that they were in a
dying state, and some of them were very nearly dead. There was a reluctance
to exam those people who had been quiet in their couches for the longest
times. Their sad case had come about by their being out of food (a red rot
or other plague out of Egypt had destroyed much of their grain and all of
their canned goods), out of water (and severely rationed on wine), and very
nearly out of good air (another plague of Egypt had made it that the air
should sting and wound the lungs like scorpions). All that was left were a
few bales of hay for the animals. Hay for the animals? What was this anyhow?
They really were fogged, and yet the hay was there. 
	But most of them were not really fogged in their wits. They slept
and woke, and they made prodigious scientific and mathematical discoveries,
which however they were not able to communicate to any potential or possible
outside world just now. They smiled and realized themselves and each other.
They no longer counted the days, but very many days had gone by. Many of the
people had long since formed transcendent arrangements with each other.
	The ghost priest from the castle had come and regularized some of
these transcendent arrangements, and the partners of others of them had
resisted him. Doctor Fritz Otto and Doctor Dorothy Blue-Ice (yes, Dorothv
was several kinds of doctor) had their union in attested words, and even had
it drawn up on attested paper. The certificate of their marriage was carried
back to the castle by the ghost priest, and likely it is still there. Nobody
ever goes away with attested papers in that castle. 
	The ghost oriest had a very easy attitude towards the troubles of
the people in the pavilion, but only Shrike and Hayfield resented this
easiness. 
	"After all, it is not you who are dying," Raddigan Shrike would tell
that ghost with an acia turn. "You have already died, and I suspect that you
have botched your own death. You would not be nailed down to your own area
otherwise." 
	"I did not botch my own death," the ghost priest said. "I died well.
It is for your own case, I believe, that I am to remain here and watch and
counsel you. If you would hurry it along ta little less complaining, young
friend, and a little more resolute dying), then I would be going on my own
delayed way." 
	"But does it not seem like a waste of time that we should die here
like this?" Dean Hayfield had asked. "We are really (though I have come to
realize it only since we have been entrapped here) the most variously
talented group in the world. But the Stoicheio, the Lemures, the
crooked-winged caricature of angels who are jealous of the people, they have
trapped the elite group of us in a trap here and left us to perish. Oh, they
swept us in shrewdly and got us out of their trashy way, but that is all to
the bad. This is loss, loss, loss, for the whole world. The Father of
Lights, if there is such, makes a mistake in allowing it. It is a loss to
the whole cosmos that we should perish here in a goat trao with an unclean
seal on the outside of it." 
	"No, no!" the ghost cried. "The Father of Lights, and there is such,
permits reasonable obstacles as a test to your readiness. The container will
not explode and scatter the new seed unless it is packed very tight, to the
point of explosion. Yes, young friend, I see that you are about at the point
of explosion now. And you here have not failed the readiness test yet, and
there is no reason that all of you should fail it. Several groups, in the
comparatively short history of mankind, have not failed it. some of them
succeeded gloriously, and perhaps none of them had more advantages than has
your own group. You are not in a goat men here. You are in a cenacle. And it
isn't @n unclean seal on the outside of this cunae. it is a holy seal." 
	"Are you sure of that?" Jeffery Wind asked with rising interest. 
	"Yes, I am sure of that," the ghost priest said. 
	"Then answer me this then --" Jeffery began, but the ghost priest
used a trick on them that he had used on them several times when he was
unable to answer questions. He went through the walls and was gone. 
	"A holy seal on the outside of our cubicle?" Jeffery still
questioned it. "Then what is the holy purpose of it all?" 
	"I begin to get a glimmer of it," Joseph Abranswell said. 
	"The glimmer had better turn into something much Brighter fast,"
Jeffery growled. "We will all be dead very soon. Everything else we may say
comes up against the same wall: 'We can't get out of this place.'"
	They talked about all their diminishing possibilities and negative
choices. 
	"We're starving to death, of course," Raddigan Shrike said. 
	"No we're not," Anabella contradicted. "We're getting fat inside.
We're being interlarded with nourishment. Oh, I don't know how it's done.
The tadpole in the cocoon doesn't know how he's being nourished. But he
doubles his weight after he goes on his hunger strike. And then he explodes
into the higher stage. He becomes the jumping himself, the fine frog. He
makes the quantum jump. He makes the mutation jump." 
	"You are more confused than usual, Anabelia," Adriana Thistle said.
"Tadpoles are never in cocoons." 
	"Oh, but they are! Tadpoles are one of my specialties. All cocoons
aren't made out of silk threads and leafy fiber such as caterpillars and
butterflies and worms use. i think that many cocoons are made out of water.
Right now, each of us is in a tight cocoon right here, and we don't know
what our own cocoons are made out of. They are probably made out of air, but
they have us pretty well constrained. The tadpole, before he makes his frog
jump is confined to a very small extent of water. He does not move at all.
He holds himself tightly and he generates his forces. There are walls and
lids of water in that water, and he cannot go out through them. Our own
case, a few nights back, was like this. We were confined in the coffins that
Doctor Fritz projected. Perhaps they were mental or immaterial coffins, but
we couldn't get out of them, not until Dorothy broke the projection. That
was a clever add instructive projection that Doctor Fritz devised, for it
was a premonition of the restraint that closes in on us now. We had the
terror for those moments when it lasted, but we may not have it again. By
fetish-transfer, it may be blocked out from any such feelings as we may have
for the real thing now. But we are in pitch-black coffins now, and we are
either dead or dying in them. Unless Dorothy can break this other projection
that is imposed by someone else, we are caught for sure. Can you break it,
Dorothy? Do you have a way out of it?" 
	"No, I don't have a way out right now," Dorothy smiled, "and yet I
can say that the answer is very possibly within me. It's fun to be cryptic
every now and then, and I'm the only cryptic person here who doesn't overdo
it." 
	"I believe that I will just dissect old (that's curious, why is he
old? -- chronologically he's younger than I am), old Pioneer Reventlo here
and see what has gone wrong with him or what is lackign in him," Jeffery
Wind said, and he began to lay out instruments. 
	"Is he dead?" Arthur Ransom asked. 
	"Dead enough for all purposes," Jeffery replied, and he spread
Reventlo out on a table, set torches at the four corners of that table, and
he began an exploration-and-excavation of the cadaver. 
	"Perhaps vou don't really overdo being cryptic, Dorothy," Lucille
Creighton said. "Well, don't overdo the pregnant pause after your statement
either." 
	"I made you use that word," Dorothy chortled. "I projected it into
you and out of you again. Oh, my son says that he knows the way out of this
place. He says that he remembers the way in, and he will be able to lead us
out of here the same way. Why should I doubt my own son?" 
	"Are you also wandering, Dorothy?" Anabella asked. "I never saw so
many wit-wanderers as we have here presently. You have no son." 
	"Yes, I have a son, my son in my belly. He knows the way out of the
pavilion. He will show us the way, he says, if we are able to wait a very
little while until he is more the master of his movements and signals." 
	"I never saw so many fruitful persons as we have here presently,"
Anabella said. 
	"Oh, Dorothy's is the old fireplace story, the old campfireplace
story. That is what my wife is telling you," Doctor Fritz said. "Among the
Shining Mountains (which are presently called the Rocky Mountains of North
America), there was one of them that reached clear uo to the sky, or so
close to it that one would have to walk bent over to go between the sky and
the mountain top. There was a hole in sky at this place where one might go
through and above the the sky; but it had a sky-colored blue flap over it so
that one might go right past it and miss it. Certain Red Indians would find
this hole by a stratagem, and they would go up through it and camp above it
for six weeks in the coldest part of winter. And they would be in the warm
sunshine there, with plenty of deer-meat and ripe corn and pumpkins all the
time. After six weeks they would go down through the hole again, and they'd
set a little pile of stones there on that part of the mountain top to mark
the place. But after they were gone, bears, jealous of the ability of the
people to go through the sky, would scatter the stones again, and so the way
through the sky would be lost to the people once more.
	"But the people had resources. That's what distinguished them from
the bears. Each year, a woman in fruit with a very active child would serve
as a guide to them. The child would guide his mother by pressing on the left
inside wall of her when he wanted her to go to the left, and on the right
inside wall when he wanted her to go to the right. And so they would come
under the sky-hole again. All the children who come into this world come
through that hole, and the more intelligent of them remember the way almost
until they're born." 
	"You should do a film on that, Doctor Fritz," Dean Hayfield said. 
	"I did," the movie-master answered. "It was called 'The World In The
Attic'. The 'attic' was the world above the sky. The picture wasn't a great
success. Like so many of mine, it was before its time. It was never shown
outside of Germany, and now it's nearly forgotten." 
	"How does it go with Pioneer?" Abramswell asked Jeffery Wind. "Have
you decided what is lacking in him?" The table with dead Reventlo on it,
with Jeffery Wind bending over it with his glittering instruments, and the
four torches burning at the four corners of it, was like an old Dutch
painting. 
	"It should be named 'Midnight Appendectomy of Count Ortiz'," Adriana
giggled. 
	"I think that he lacked a sense of time," Jeffery said, examining
molecule-thin sections of brain, and apparently reading them like sheets of
an old book. "Reventlo was a mighty jug, and if he had been properly filled
he would have been without equal. He was a resonating chamber, and the wind
blew past him and through him for a while. He was wrong about the direction
of it, though. He was wrong about everything, and he brought us to the right
place. And now there's not much here except a desicated body and brain that
the spirit withdrew from many days before his death. He's a dried-out Moses,
and he doesn't get to enter the Land himself. He's an unswept empty house
now. 
	"Cecelia Calca talked one day about the class of ghosts who are
resonances of future persons, and who are under-cut when the future varies
away from the probability of them, and their primary sources become
never-to-have-been's. I believe that Pioneer was such a resonance. Whatever
his primary will be, and it will be, it will not have much apparent
resemblance to him; he himself has changed that. Pioneer was a sort of ghost
in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was
inhabited a little by the 'Eden Archetype', a projection from the future. He
knew of course, but with his mind only and not with his feelings, that all
archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the
past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating. He
was (unknown to himself) one of the elements of the conspiracy that has
trapped us here in this stasis. He believed that the conspiracy was to good
purpose, and maybe it is. The scenario of our trapping operation was really
concocted by ourselves though we have no one to praise but ourselves if it
succeeds." 
	"Jeffery, that cadaver, it's mummified. It's that of a man who's
been dead for many years." 
	"I know." 
	"But he spoke a few words yesterday." 
	"I know, Joseph, I know. But a slight adjustment to
reality-framework has obsoleted most of the Reventlo element. And so ill is
indeed like one of the ghosts whose primary has disanpeared." 
	"Your free-handed brain sectioning there is impassibly fine,
Jeffery," Joseph Abramswell said in admiration. "And you are reading without
magnification. That's on the verge of impossible. So are some of your
interpretations almost impossible, and yet i believe they are valid. This is
break-through stuff that you are doing. You couldn't do any of this before,
could you, Jeffery?" 
	"Oh, I've received new powers unquestionably. So have you. So has Il
Trol and Dorothy Blue-Ice and Doctor Fritz. But we haven't time to analyze
ourselves now, have we? The younger students are showing changes even more
strongly, but there are coltish elements in all of them. And the four, or is
it five, or is it now, carried children, they should be born with
exceptional endowments. All is assuming the less than one percent
possibility that we will not all die here, as we seem to be doing." 
	"The Count of San Angelo is very quiet these last few day.',
Anabella said. "Is he dead?" 
	"No, he's a true nobleman," Abramswell answered "in situations
commoners and false noblemen usually die, but true noblemen hibernate. It's
the bear blood in them. And then, when the dire time has passed, they wake
again, after a year or two or a century or two. There are still a few of
those moth-eaten surviving in the world for a long, long, long time." 
	"Even Il Trol is very quiet, and that's not like him at all.' 
	"Oh, he's working, working away at every moment. He is too busy for
words." 
	"He doesn't look very busy, sleeping away there." 
	"Yes, he's quite busy. He is in an intensely creative sleep. He is
making up for some of us who don't have his degree of creativity." 
	They had all become quite mental in their last days of it, and quite
sleepy also. But there wasn't any conflict there. The sleepiness, and the
vital sleeping did not at all reduce their mentality. Asleep or awake, they
were mentally active, and new criteria might have to be established to
distinguish between their sleecing and waking. They held illuminating
conversations with each other, some of them in sounded words; but most of
them were silent conversations that they could hear equallv well and that
could be overheard by others of them. 
	They were eating a lot now and becoming well inter-larded. How does
that fit in with the fact that thev were starving to death? They ate
indifferently whether they were sleeping or waking. Most of what they ate
though was illusory or projected food. Or it may have been that 'other food'
that lesser oeople do not know about. 
	"Will you dissect anyone else, Jeffery Wind?" Anabella Hilary
conversed with him in her sleep. "Raddigan Shrike is dead." 
	"No, I won't cut anyone else after Reventlo here," Jeffery said.
"For Raddigan, and for others, it is more likely a case of catalepsy than
death." 
	"What will we do with all the loose ends?" Catherine January
Boniface conversed. (This was not the same day. It was the next day, or the
day after that.) 
	"We will weave a shroud out of them," the Troll's wife said.
"Weaving is a specialty of mine. Which loose ends?" 

	"The mathematically 'floating constant', the three hundred and
seventy-five days, or a resonance thereof. What does that represent?"
Catherine asked. 
	"Probably a cheerful hoax or misunderstanding," movie-mogul Fritz
dreamed an answer to her. "It was the period from the seventeenth day of the
first month till the twenty-seventh day of the first month of the following
year, the period when the ark was in stasis. But the figure arrived at is
most likely wrong. Those were probably lunar months that they were using
then, and they floated their way around the year. But the 'floating
constant' is still effective, simply because it floats. I researched all
this when I was making the film 'Over The Oceans To Ararat'. It is all a
little essay in analogies, to tie the ark and the grave and the whale and
the pavilion and other manifestations together." 
	"But nobody believes that the ark or the flood happened," Raddigan
Shrike conversed out of his catalepsy. (This,again, was on another day.) 
	"Not that it 'happened', possibly not," II Trol spoke out of his
belly. "They don't believe that it 'happened' but that it 'happens'. There
are many persons now, a whole cult of them, who believe that it 'will
happen'. Myself, I don't believe that it 'happened' or that it 'will happen'
either. But I firmly believe that it 'happens'."

	"What is the ellipse?" Deal Hayfield asked. He spoke out of a short
wakefulness but that isn't important. 
	"The ellipse, having two foci, is a circle in motion or change,"
Doctor Fritz answered from his mixed state. "The two foci are really one,
and this is a form of Zeno's 'paradox of motion', that a thing can move onlv
by being in two places at the same time. This is the reason that a time
machine must be in the shape of either a plane or a solid ellipse. It is
t'ie shape of the grave after it has settled, of an ark, of a whale, of
certain valleys where the demarcation between the several states of
creatures is the thinnest. And it is the shape of this pavilion. word also
means a deficiency, something left out. When a perfect circle or a perfect
sphere moves at all, or when it shows any life at all, it immediately
becomes an imperfect ellipse. It will never be perfect again until it comes
to rest. In our present project it has no particular meaning. It is just one
of the many keys that we tried, and we find that it fits several locks." 
	"To be in an elliptical grave, is that to be going somewhere?" Dean
Hayfield asked. 
	"Why, I don't know," Abramswell answered. "We hope that we 
are going somewhere." 

	Another day or two went past. Anabella broke open some of the bales
of hay that had been intended for the animals and strewed it- around on the
floorways. This was so that the para-scriptures be fulfilled. And then
somebody might ,iant to draw pentagrams in it. 
	It is said that there are no days in a time stasis, but there are.
The days are there, like hard, blue-white things, even in stasis. And
several more of them went by. 
	"What was the Cro-Magnon jag that Reventlo was on?" Stephen Tall
talked the question. 
	"The Cro-Magnon was a particularity only," Jeffery Wind blew the
answer off his lips like foam. "Il Trol is also a strong particularity. I
believe that several such strong ideas are necessary, in this. We are strong
and striking persons in the beginning, yes. In every beginning we are. in
the continuing beginning we are. Reventlo is one of the strong and imposing
fellows. We will meet him if we live long enough. Maybe it will be in the
verv next century."

	"We hint that we may have a rendezvous with mutation," Raddigan
Shrike framed a statement later that same day. "But how does a successful
mutation work? Has anybody ever watched one happen?"
	"No one in our time has watched a mutation happen," Dororthy
Blue-Ice said in a crystalline void. "Some of the ninety-nine that fail have
been observed. That hundredth one that succeeds has not been. We may see it
before and after, but we do not see it happen." 
	"What are the odds against us now, Cecelia?" Cyclone Boniface asked
that restricted ghost in one of her visits. 
	"Jimmy the Calabrian has the odds set at one hundred to one against
us," she said. "Do you want to bet money on us? If we win we will make a
killing." 
	"We don't know how to get money out of the pavilion," Cyclone and
Catherine said. 
	"I can get it out," Cecelia told them. "If you want me to bet on us,
give it to me. And I'll throw in for all I've got too." 
	Everybodv of the party gave Cecelia all the money they had.
	"Bet it on us," they said. 

	"What is the White Goat Illusion?" Lucille Creighton wrote on a wall
with whitewash and a broad brush. 
	"It is the illusion that you might survive this," came a metallic
and bitter voice. "But you won't. We'll intercept you. We'll keep watch
until all of you are dead." 
	"That is the voice of Leon Yuri, old 1-212-1212," Adriana jeered.
"We will whip this to spite you. We used you, to prepare the place for us,
the place where the thing will happen." 
	"No, no," 1-212-1212 shrilled like an angry rat. "Nothing will
happen here except your own extinction." 
	"The White Goat Illusion is really the pavilion trick," Jeffery
said. "Under the illusion, we walked into a hole that wasn't there, the
pavilion, and disappeared completely. Nor have we been heard from since."
	"The White Goat illusion is something still otherwise," Il Trol
spoke. "It means that you don't have a chance. And then it means that a
hundred to one against you will beat a thousand to one against someone else
every time. Nobody knows whose side the goat will finally be on. it is
really a fast dice throw known as 'The White Billygoat'. It is the ultimate
long shot throw. We can make 
this throw. We have got to make it. It has been made."

	After that, they went up and up. 
	"Could we back out now?" Raddigan Shrike asked. 
	"I don't think that any of us could now," Doctor Fritz projected. "I
believe that's reallv what Pioneer Reventlo tried to do, back out of it. We
don't want go back out, not any of us." 
	"Why are we chosen? Or why have we chosen ourselves for a shot at
this?" Stephen Tall threw out the words like a fowler throwing his net to
catch birds. "And what will we look like if it happens to us?" 
	"Ah, we are intelligent, we are adaptable, we are open, we are able
to see things that are invisible to many persons, and we are mutationable.
That is why we have formed ourselves into a group to mutate. But we will not
look greatly different if it does happen to us. We will not mutate in body
or appearance, except to grow more handsome. We will mutate in brains and
dispositions. We will keep our variety." That was either Joseph Abramswell
or Jeffery Wind who had winged that answer. The hay on the floor did look
very much like the grass around a mares'-nest now. 

	"Have there been other mutations? Were they great things?" a person
asked. 
	"There have been others, yes, three or four major ones," another
person answered. "Sometimes they are forgotten or they go unappreciated. But
they are what we are. We are the sum total of our previous mutations, and of
the slighter essence we were given to begin with. If they all don't seem to
add up to enough, then we are the only ones in the world with a chance to
correct that deficiency this time around." 

	They had moved into more intricate states, and yet they were held
immobile in the stasis that had now enveloped them personally. 	"Is it not
very likely that we will be wasted?" said one of the older ones. 
	"No, we will not be wasted, not either way it goes," answered one of
the more nimble-minded of the unborn. "Nothing is wasted except by choice. I
haven't chosen to be wasted. Nor have the rest of us."
	"Are such things not mere solaces that we tell each other? Arthur
Ransom asked with a last flicker of self-doubt. "Isn't the likelihood all
against us? isn't it that we have been made goats of by the goats? Haven't
we been ambushed by beings of an inferior soecies because our questionings
impinged a little bit on their pasture? Haven't we been trapped by animals
who are inferior even in their peltry? Haven't we been locked into a
goat-pen by goats?" 
	"As say, the odds are against us," another of them answered. 
	"Will there be a climax?" Rosa Caprobianco questioned. 
	"if do develop, if we do make it, we will live forever in a
perpetual and exciting climax," that was Dorothy Blue-Ice projecting. "I
seem to be living in an exciting climax right now." 

	"Will the ghosts ever ston being jealous of the people?" 
	"Not the hard ones among them. They hate us forever." 
	"Do they have any last trick to play this time?" 
	"They do. They have a dirty trick so tall and dread that the shadow
of its big toe brings a midnight darkness over everything. It's a trick so
murderous that -- here it comes now." 
	"Yes, I feel it coming. Oh, what bleak murder of a trick! What will
it do?" 
	"There is a clarification of the odds. They have swung to nearer a
thousand-to-one than a hundred-to-one against us now," one of them
calculated. 
	"Those aren't bad odds. We take the bet," several of them answered. 
	"Go, Prometheans, go!" Raddigan Shrike cheered out of a confident
catalepsy. 
	They were all quiet for a day and a night and a day. 
	Then the spirit came and moved over them.
	But which way did it move?