THE LATE UNICYCLIST Professor Damon Stern asked me one time if I thought there would be a market for religious figures of Christ riding a unicycle instead of spiked to a cross. It was just a joke. He didn't want an answer, and I didn't give him one. Some other subject must have come up right away.

But I would tell him now, if he hadn't been killed while trying to save the horses, that the most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

BUT LISTEN TO this: While idly winnowing through old local newspapers here, I think I have discovered whom that probably Caucasian, surely young and female skull belonged to. I want to rush out into the prison yard, formerly the Quadrangle, shouting "Eureka! Eureka!"

My educated guess is that the skull belonged to Let.i.tia Smiley, a reputedly beautiful, dyslexic Tarkington senior who disappeared from the campus in 1922, after winning the traditional Women's Barefoot Race from the bell tower to the President's House and back again. Let.i.tia Smiley was crowned Lilac Queen as her prize, and she burst into tears for reasons n.o.body could understand. Something obviously was bothering her. People were agreed, I learn from a newspaper of the time, that Let.i.tia Smiley's tears were not happy tears.

One suspicion had to be, although n.o.body said so for publication, that Miss Smiley was pregnant-possibly by a member of the student body or faculty. I am playing detective now, with nothing but a skull and old newspapers to go on. But at least I have what the police were unable to find back then: what might be proof positive in the hands of a forensic cranial expert that Let.i.tia Smiley was no longer among the living. The morning after she was crowned Lilac Queen, her bed was found to contain a dummy made of rolled-up bath towels. A souvenir football given to her by an admirer at Union College in Schenectady was the dummy's head. On it was painted: "Union 31, Hobart 3."

After that: thin air.

A DENTIST WOULD be no help in identifying the skull, since whoever owned it never had so much as a single cavity to be filled. Whoever it was had perfect teeth. Who is alive today who could tell us whether or not Let.i.tia Smiley, who herself would be 100 years old now, in the year 2001, had perfect teeth?

That was how a lot of the more mutilated bodies of soldiers in Vietnam were positively identified, by their imperfect teeth.

THERE IS NO statute of limitations on murder, the most terrible crime of all, they say. But how old would her killer be by now? If he was who I think he was, he would be 135. I think he was none other than Kensington Barber, the Provost of Tarkington College at the time. He would spend his last days in the State Hospital for the Insane up in Batavia. I think it was he, empowered to make bed checks in both the women's and the men's dormitories, who made the dummy whose head was a football.

I think Let.i.tia Smiley was dead by then.

And it was a matter of public record that it was the Provost who found the dummy.

THE MEDICAL EXAMINER from the State Police said it was odd that there was no hair still stuck to the skull. He thought it might have been scalped or boiled before it was buried, to make it that much harder to identify. And what have I discovered? That Let.i.tia was famous in her short life for her long golden hair. The newspaper description of the race she won goes on and on about her golden hair.

Yes, and the same story gives Kensington Barber as the sole source of the a.s.sertion that Let.i.tia had been deeply troubled by a stormy romance with a much older man down in Scipio. The Provost wished that he or somebody knew the name of the man, so that the police could question him.

In another story, Barber told a reporter that he had planned to take his family to Europe that summer but would stay in Scipio instead, in order to do all he could to clear up the mystery of what had become of Let.i.tia Smiley. Such dedication to duty!

He had a wife and 2 kids, and he sent them to Europe without him. Since the campus was virtually deserted in the summertime, except for the maintenance staff, which took orders from him, he could easily have ensured his own privacy by sending the workmen to another part of the campus while he buried small parts of Let.i.tia, possibly using a posthole digger.

I HAVE TO wonder, too, in light of my own experiences in public-relations hocus pocus and the recent history of my Government, if there weren't a lot of people back in 1922 who could put 2 and 2 together as easily as I have now. For the sake of the reputation of what had become Scipio's princ.i.p.al business, the college, there could have been a ma.s.sive cover-up.

Kensington Barber would have a nervous breakdown at the end of the summer, and be committed, as I've said, to Batavia. The President of Tarkington at that time, who was Herbert Van Arsdale, no relation to Whitey VanArsdale, the dishonest mechanic, ascribed the Provost's crackup to exhaustion brought on by his tireless efforts to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the golden-haired Lilac Queen.

25.

MY LAWYER FOUND only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.

The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.

THE CONVICTS DIDN'T create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they weren't against America. He said, "We are are America." America."

SO I TOOK my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.

It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadn't realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.

But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasn't talented, frightened the old novelist.

SLAZINGER WAS NO prize himself, of course.

AFTER THE PRISON break, I told the GRIOT here all I knew about Pamela, and asked it to guess what might become of her after her breakup with Paul Slazinger. GRIOT had her die of cirrhosis of the liver. I gave the machine the same set of facts a second time, and it had her freezing to death in a doorway in Chicago.

The prognosis was not good.

AFTER LEAVING PAMELA, whose basic problem wasn't me but alcohol, I started to climb Musket Mountain, intending to think things out under the water tower. But I was met by Zuzu Jack-son, who was coming down. She said she had been under the water tower for hours, trying to think up dreams to replace those we had had of running off to Venice.

She said that maybe she would run off to Venice alone, and take Polaroid pictures of tourists getting in and out of gondolas.

The prognosis for her was a lot better than for Pamela, short-term anyway. At least she wasn't an addict, and at least she wasn't all alone in the world, even if all she had was Tex. And at least she hadn't been held up as an object of public ridicule from coast to coast.

And she could see the humorous side of things. She said, I remember, that the loss of the Venice dream had left her a walking corpse, but that a zombie was an ideal mate for a College President.

She went on like that for a little while, but she didn't cry, and she ran out of steam pretty quick. The last thing she said was that she didn't blame me. "I take full responsibility," she said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked away, "for falling in love with such an obvious jerk."

Fair enough!

I DECIDED NOT to climb Musket Mountain after all. I went home instead. It would be wiser to think things out in my garage, where other loose cannons from my past were unlikely to interrupt me. But when I got there I found a man from United Parcel Service ringing the bell. I didn't know him. He was new to town, or he wouldn't have asked why all the blinds were drawn. Anybody who had been in Scipio any length of time knew why the blinds were drawn.

Crazy people lived in there.

I told him somebody was sick in there, and asked what I could do for him.

He said he had this big box for me from St. Louis, Missouri.

I SAID I didn't know anybody in St. Louis, Missouri, and wasn't expecting a big box from anywhere. But he proved to me that it was addressed to me all right, so I said, "OK, let's see it." It turned out to be my old footlocker from Vietnam, which I had left behind when the excrement hit the air-conditioning, when I was ordered to take charge of the evacuation from the roof of the emba.s.sy.

Its arrival was not a complete surprise. Several months earlier I had received a notice of its existence in a huge Army warehouse that was indeed on the edge of St. Louis, where all sorts of unclaimed personal property of soldiers was stored, stuff ditched on battlefields or whatever. Some idiot must have put my footlocker on one of the last American planes to flee Vietnam, thus depriving the enemy of my razor, my toothbrush, my socks and underwear, and, as it happened, the late Jack Patton's final birthday present to me, a copy of Black Garterbelt. Black Garterbelt. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, "Yes." A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, "Yes." A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that.

So I had the UPS man help me lug it into the garage. It wasn't very heavy. It was just unwieldy.

The Mercedes was parked out front. I hadn't noticed yet that kids from the town had cored it again. All 4 tires were flat again.

COUGH, COUGH.

THE UPS MAN was really only a boy still. He was so childlike and new to his job that he had to ask me what was inside the box.

"If the Vietnam War was still going on," I said, "it might have been you in there." I meant he might have wound up in a casket.

"I don't get it," he said.

"Never mind," I said. I knocked off the lock and hasp with a hammer. I lifted the lid of what was indeed a sort of casket to me. It contained the remains of the soldier I used to be. On top of everything else, lying flat and face up, was that copy of Black Garterbelt. Black Garterbelt.

"Wow," said the kid. He was awed by the woman on the magazine cover. He might have been an Astronaut on his first trip in s.p.a.ce.

"Have you ever considered being a soldier?" I asked him. "I think you'd make a good one."

I NEVER SAW him again. He could have been fired soon after that, and gone looking for work elsewhere. He certainly wasn't going to last long as a UPS man if he was going to hang around like a kid on Christmas morning until he found out what was inside all the different packages.

I STAYED IN the garage. I didn't want to go into the house. I didn't want to go outdoors again, either. So I sat down on my footlocker and read "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" in Black Garterbelt. Black Garterbelt. It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of lightyears long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the t.i.tle, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don't blame him. I can't think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot. It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of lightyears long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the t.i.tle, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don't blame him. I can't think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.

The Elders agreed at the meeting that the only practical way for life to travel great distances through s.p.a.ce was in the form of extremely small and durable plants and animals. .h.i.tching rides on meteors that ricocheted off their planets.

But no germs tough enough to survive a trip like that had yet evolved anywhere. Life was too easy for them. They were a bunch of creampuffs. Any creature they infected, chemically speaking, was as challenging as so much chicken soup.

THERE WERE PEOPLE on Earth at the time of the meeting, but they were just more hot slop for the germs to swim in. But they had extra-large brains, and some of them could talk. A few could even read and write! So the Elders focused in on them, and wondered if people's brains might not invent survival tests for germs which were truly horrible.

They saw in us a potential for chemical evils on a cosmic scale. Nor did we disappoint them.

WHAT A STORY!.

IT SO HAPPENED, according to this story, that the legend of Adam and Eve was being written down for the first time. A woman was doing it. Until then, that charming bunk.u.m had been pa.s.sed from generation to generation by word of mouth.

The Elders let her write down most of the origin myth just the way she had heard it, the way everybody told it, until she got very close to the end. Then they took control of her brain and had her write down something which had never been part of the myth before.

It was a speech by G.o.d to Adam and Eve, supposedly. This was it, and life would become pure h.e.l.l for microorganisms soon afterward: "Fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the Earth."

COUGH.

26.

SO THE PEOPLE on Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly to satisfy the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous idea, of course. In the words of the nameless author: "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer s.p.a.ce? It was a miracle that such ravenous and c.u.mbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."

The Elders, incidentally, had given up on influencing the humanoids of Tralfamadore, who were right below where they were meeting. The Tralfamadorians had senses of humor and so knew themselves for the severely limited lunkers, not to say crazy lunkers, they really were. They were immune to the kilovolts of pride the Elders jazzed their brains with. They laughed right away when the idea popped up in their heads that they were the glory of the Universe, and that they were supposed to colonize other planets with their incomparable magnificence. They knew exactly how clumsy and dumb they were, even though they could talk and some of them could read and write and do math. One author wrote a series of side-splitting satires about Tralfamadorians arriving on other planets with the intention of spreading enlightenment.

But the people here on Earth, being humorless, found the same idea quite acceptable.

IT APPEARED TO the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.

The people down here just ate that up!

ANOTHER THING THE Elders liked about Earthlings was that they feared and hated other Earthlings who did not look and talk exactly as they did. They made life a h.e.l.l for each other as well as for what they called "lower animals." They actually thought of strangers as lower animals. So all the Elders had to do to ensure that germs were going to experience really hard times was to tell us how to make more effective weapons by studying Physics and Chemistry. The Elders lost no time in doing this.

THEY CAUSED AN apple to fall on the head of Isaac Newton.

They made young James Watt p.r.i.c.k up his ears when his mother's teakettle sang.

THE ELDERS MADE us think that the Creator on the big throne hated strangers as much as we did, and that we would be doing Him a big favor if we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.

That went over big down here.