IV

Jack stood inside the wire and bent his neck back to watch a huge black

and silver oyster feel the dusk for a landing-field with its single

white foot and its orange toes. Blindingly, lights sprang to attention

over the camp.

When Jack had blinked his eyes back to normal, he could see over the

flat half-mile between the fence and the ship. It lay quiet and

glittering and smoking in the flood-beams. He could see the round door

in its side swing open. Men began filing out. A truck rumbled across the

plain and pulled up beside the metal bulk. A very tall man stepped out

of the cab and halted upon the running board, from which he seemed to be

greeting the newcomers or giving them instructions. Whatever he was

saying took so long that Jack lost interest.

Lately, he had not been able to focus his mind for any length of time

upon anything except that one event in the past. He wandered around and

whipped glances at his comrades' faces, noting listlessly that their

uniforms and shaved heads had improved their appearance. But nothing

would be able to chill the feverishness of their eyes.

Whistles shrilled. Jack jumped. His heart beat faster. He felt as if the

end of the quest were suddenly close. Somebody would be around the

corner. In a minute that person would be facing him, and then ...

Then, he reflected, and sagged with a wave of disappointment at the

thought, then there was nobody around the corner. It always happened

that way. Besides, there weren't any corners in this camp. He had

reached the wall at the end of the alley. Why didn't he stop looking?

Sergeants lined the prisoners up four abreast preparatory to marching

them into the barracks. Jack supposed it was time to turn in for the

night. He submitted to their barked orders and hard hands without

resentment. They seemed a long way off. For the ten thousandth time he

was thinking that this need not have happened.

If he had been man enough to grapple with himself, to wrestle as Jacob

did with the angel and not let loose until he had felled the problem, he

could be teaching philosophy in a quiet little college, as his father

did. He had graduated from high school with only average marks, and

then, instead of going to college, as his father had so much wanted him

to, he had decided he would work a year. With his earnings, he would see

the world.

He had seen it, but when his money ran out he had not returned home. He

had drifted, taking jobs here and there, sleeping in flop-houses,

jungles, park benches, and freight cars.

When the newly created Bureau of Health and Sanity had frozen jobs in an

effort to solve the transiency problem, Jack had refused to work. He

knew that he would not be able to quit a job without being arrested at

once. Like hundreds of thousands of other youths, he had begged and

stolen and hidden from the local police and the Bohas.

Even through all those years of misery and wandering, he had not once

admitted to himself the true nature of this fog-cottoned grail. He knew

it, and he did not know it. It was patrolling the edge of his mind,

circling a far-off periphery, recognizable by a crude silhouette but

nameless. Any time he wanted to, he could have summoned it closer and

said, _You are it, and I know you, and I know what I am looking for. It

is...? Is what? Worthless? Foolish? Insane? A dream?_

Jack had never had the courage to take that action. When it seemed the

thing was galloping closer, charging down upon him, he ran away. It must

stay on the horizon, moving on, always moving, staying out of his grasp.

"All you guys, for'ard 'arch!"

Jack did not move. The truck from the rocket had come through a gate and

stopped by the transies, and about fifty men were getting off the back.

The man behind Jack bumped into him. Jack paid him no attention. He did

not move. He squinted at the group who had come from the rocket. They

were very tall, hump-shouldered, and dressed in light grey-green Palm

Beach suits and tan Panama hats. Each held a brown leather briefcase at

the end of a long, thin arm. Each wore on the bridge of his long nose a

pair of rose-colored glasses.

A cry broke hoarsely from the transies. Some of those in front of Jack

fell to their knees as if a sudden poison had paralyzed their legs. They

called names and stretched out open hands. A boy by Jack's side sprawled

face-down on the sand while he uttered over and over again, "Mr.

Pelopoeus! Mr. Pelopoeus!"

The name meant nothing to Jack. He did feel repulsed at seeing the

fellow turn on his side, bend his neck forward, bring his clenched fists

up against his chest, and jackknife his legs against his arms. He had

seen it many times before in the transie jungles, but he had never

gotten over the sickness it had first caused him.

He turned away and came almost nose to nose with one of the men from the

rocket. He had put down his briefcase so it rested against his leg and

taken a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe the dust

from his lenses. His lids were squeezed shut as if he found the lights

unbearable.

Jack stared and could not move while a name that the boy behind him had

been crying out slowly worked its way through his consciousness.

Suddenly, like the roar of a flashflood that is just rounding the bend

of a dry gulch, the syllables struck him. He lunged forward and clutched

at the spectacles in the man's hand. At the same time he yelled over and

over the words that had filled out the blank in his memory.

"Mr. Eumenes! Mr. Eumenes!"

A sergeant cursed and slammed his fist into Jack's face. Jack fell down,

flat on his back. Though his jaw felt as if it were torn loose from its

hinge, he rolled over on his side, raised himself on his hands and

knees, and began to get up to his feet.

"Stand still!" bellowed the sergeant. "Stay in formation or you'll get

more of the same!"

Jack shook his head until it cleared. He crouched and held out his hands

toward the man, but he did not move his feet. Over and over,

half-chanting, half-crooning, he said, "Mr. Eumenes! The glasses!

Please, Mr. Eumenes, the glasses!"

The forty-nine Mr. Eumenae-and-otherwise looked incuriously with

impenetrable rosy eyes. The fiftieth put the white handkerchief back in

his pocket. His mouth opened. False teeth gleamed. With his free hand he

took off his hat and waved it at the crowd and bowed.

His tilted head showed a white fuzzlike hair that shot up over his pale

scalp. His gestures were both comic and terrifying. The hat and the

inclination of his body said far more than words could. They said,

_Good-by forever, and bon voyage!_

Then Mr. Eumenes straightened up and opened his lids.

At first, the sockets looked as if they held no eyeballs, as if they

were empty of all but shadows.

Jack saw them from a distance. Mr. Eumenes-or-his-twin was shooting away

faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller. No! He himself was.

He was rocketing away within his own body. He was falling down a deep

well.

He, Jack Crane, was a hollow shaft down which he slipped and screamed,

away, away, from the world outside. It was like seeing from the wrong

end of a pair of binoculars that lengthened and lengthened while the man

with the long-sought-for treasure in his hand flew in the opposite

direction as if he had been connected to the horizon by a rubber band

and somebody had released it and he was flying towards it, away from

Jack.

Even as this happened, as he knew vaguely that his muscles were locking

into the posture of a beggar, hands out, pleading, face twisted into an

agony of asking, lips repeating his croon-chant, he saw what had

occurred.

The realization was like the sudden, blinding, and at the same time

clarifying light that sometimes comes to epileptics just as they are

going into a seizure. It was the thought that he had kept away on the

horizon of his mind, the thought that now charged in on him with long

leaps and bounds and then stopped and sat on its haunches and grinned at

him while its long tongue lolled.

Of course, he should have known all these years what it was. He should

have known that Mr. Eumenes was the worst thing in the world for him. He

had known it, but, like a drug addict, he had refused to admit it. He

had searched for the man. Yet he had known it would be fatal to find

him. The rose-colored spectacles would swing gates that should never be

fully open. And he should have guessed _what_ and _who_ Mr. Eumenes was

when that encyclopedic fellow in the truck had singsonged those names.

How could he have been so stupid? Stupid? It was easy! He had _wanted_

to be stupid! And how could the Mr. Eumenes-or-otherwise have used such

obvious giveaway names? It was a measure of their contempt for the

humans around them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the double

entendres the salesman had given his father, and his father had never

suspected. Even the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity had been

terrifyingly blase about it.

Dr. Vespa. He had thrown his name like a gauntlet to humanity, and

humanity had stared idiotically at it and never guessed its meaning.

Vespa was a good Italian name. Jack didn't know what it meant, but he

supposed that it had the same meaning as the Latin. He remembered it

from his high school class.

As for his not encountering the salesman until now, he had been lucky.

If he had run across him during his search, he would have been denied

the glasses, as now. And the shock would have made him unable to cry out

and betray the man. He would have done what he was so helplessly doing

at this moment, and he would have been carted off to an institution.

How many other transies had seen that unforgettable face on the streets,

the end of their search, and gone at once into that state that made them

legal prey of the Bohas?

That was almost his last rational thought. He could no longer feel his

flesh. A thin red curtain was falling between him and his senses.

Everywhere it billowed out beneath him and eased his fall. Everywhere it

swirled and softened the outlines of things that were streaking by--a

large tree that he remembered seeing in his living room, a naked giant,

his father, leaning against it and eating an apple, and a delicate

little white creature cropping flowers.

Yet all this while he lived in two worlds. One was the passage downwards

towards the Garden of Eden. The other was that hemisphere in which he

had dwelt so reluctantly, the one he now perceived through the

thickening red veil of his sight and other senses.

They were not yet gone. He could feel the hands of the black-clad

officers lifting him up and laying him upon some hard substance that

rocked and dumped. Every lurch and thud was only dimly felt. Then he was

placed upon something softer and carried into what he vaguely sensed was

the interior of one of the barracks.

Some time later--he didn't know or care when, for he had lost all

conception or even definition of time--he looked up the deep

everlengthening shaft of himself into the eyes of another Mr. Eumenes or

Mr. Sphex or Dr. Vespa or whatever he called himself. He was in white

and wore a stethoscope around his neck.

Beside him stood another of his own kind. This one wore lipstick and a

nurse's cap. She carried a tray on which were several containers. One

container held a large and sharp scalpel. The other held an egg. It was

about twice the size of a hen's egg.

Jack saw all this just before the veil took on another shade of red and

blurred completely his vision of the outside. But the final thickening

did not keep him from seeing that Doctor Eumenes was staring down at him

as if he were peering into a dusky burrow. And Jack could make out the

eyes. They were large, much larger than they should have been at the

speed with which Jack was receding. They were not the pale pink of an

albino's. They were black from corner to corner and built of a dozen or

so hexagons whose edges caught the light.

They twinkled.

Like jewels.

Or the eyes of an enormous and evolved wasp.

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ January 1954.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.

copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and

typographical errors have been corrected without note.