SO IT WASN'T long before we had made the deadliest poisons in the Universe, and were stinking up the air and water and topsoil. In the words of the author, and I wish I knew his name, "Germs died by the trillions or failed to reproduce because they could no longer cut the mustard."

But a few survived and even flourished, even though almost all other life forms on Earth perished. And when all other life forms vanished, and this planet became as sterile as the Moon, they hibernated as virtually indestructible spores, capable of waiting as long as necessary for the next lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did s.p.a.ce travel become truly feasible.

IF YOU STOP to think about it, what the Elders did was based on a sort of trickle-down theory. Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

But the Elders' scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.

THERE WAS A lot more to the story than that. The author taught me a new term, which was "Finale Rack." This was apparently from the vocabulary of pyrotechnicians, specialists in loud and bright but otherwise harmless nighttime explosions for climaxes of patriotic holidays. A Finale Rack was a piece of milled lumber maybe 3 meters long and 20 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick, with all sorts of mortars and rocket launchers nailed to it, linked in series by a single fuse.

When it seemed that a fireworks show was over, that was when the Master Pyrotechnician lit the fuse of the Finale Rack.

That is how the author characterized World War II and the few years that followed it. He called it "the Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress."

IF THE AUTHOR was right that the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came, then even the greatest human being in history, Shakespeare or Mozart or Lincoln or Voltaire or whoever, was nothing more than a Petri dish in the truly Grand Scheme of Things.

In the story, the Elders of Tralfamadore were indifferent, to say the least, to all the suffering going on. When 6,000 rebellious slaves were crucified on either side of the Appian Way back in good old 71 B.C., the Elders would have been delighted if a crucified person had spit into the face of a Centurion, giving him pneumonia or TB.

IF I HAD to guess when "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" was written, I would have to say, "A long, long time ago, after World War II but before the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, when I was 10." There was no mention of Korea as part of the Finale Rack. There was a lot of talk about making the planet a paradise by killing all the bugs and germs, and generating electricity with atomic energy so cheaply that it wouldn't even be metered, and making it possible for everybody to have an automobile that would make him or her mightier than 200 horses and 3 times faster than a cheetah, and incinerating the other half of the planet in case the people there got the idea that it was their sort of intelligence that was supposed to be exported to the rest of the Universe.

The story was very likely pirated from some other publication, so the omission of the author's name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt? Black Garterbelt?

I DID NOT realize at the time how much that story affected me. Reading it was simply a way of putting off for just a little while my looking for another job and another place to live at the age of 51, with 2 lunatics in tow. But down deep the story was beginning to work like a buffered a.n.a.lgesic. What a relief it was, somehow, to have somebody else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

COUGH.

I'LL TELL YOU one germ that's ready to take off for the belt of Orion or the handle on the Big Dipper or whatever right now, somewhere on Earth, and that's the gonorrhea I brought home from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in 1967. For a while there, it looked like I was going to have it for the rest of my life. By now it probably can eat broken gla.s.s and razor blades.

The TB germs which make me cough so much now, though, are p.u.s.s.ycats. There are several drugs on the market which they have never learned to handle. The most potent of these was ordered for me weeks ago, and should be arriving from Rochester at any time. If any of my germs are thinking of themselves as s.p.a.ce cadets, they can forget it. They aren't going anywhere but down the toilet.

Bon voyage!

BUT LISTEN TO this: You know the 2 lists I've been working on, 1 of the women I've made love to, and 1 of the men, women, and children I've killed? It is becoming ever clearer that the lengths of the lists will be virtually identical! What a coincidence! When I started out with my list of lovers, I thought that however many of them there were might serve as my epitaph, a number and nothing more. But by golly if that same number couldn't stand for the people I've killed!

There's another miracle on the order of Tarkington's students being on vacation during the diphtheria epidemic, and then again during the prison break. How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?

"There are more things in heaven and earth ..."

27.

HERE IS HOW I got a job at the prison across the lake on the same day Tarkington College fired me: I came out of the garage, having read that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe. I got into my Mercedes, intending to go down to the Black Cat Cafe to pick up gossip, if I could, about anybody who was hiring anybody to do practically any kind of work anywhere in this valley. But all 4 tires went bloomp, bloomp, bloomp. bloomp, bloomp, bloomp.

All 4 tires had been cored by Townies the night before. I got out of the Mercedes and realized that I had to urinate. But I didn't want to do it in my own house. I didn't want to talk to the crazy people in there. How is that for excitement? What germ ever lived a life so rich in challenges and opportunities?

At least n.o.body was shooting at me, and I wasn't wanted by the police.

So I went into the tall weeds of a vacant lot across the street from and below my house, which was built on a slope. I whipped out my ding-dong and found it was aimed down at a beautiful white Italian racing bicycle lying on its side. The bicycle was so full of magic and innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn.

After urinating elsewhere, I set that perfect artificial animal upright. It was brand-new. It had a seat like a banana. Why had somebody thrown it away? To this day I do not know. Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything. My guess is that some kid from a poor family in the town below came across it while skulking around the campus. He a.s.sumed, as would I, that it belonged to some Tarkington student who was superrich, who probably had an expensive car and more beautiful clothes than he could ever wear. So he took it, as would I when my turn came. But he lost his nerve, as I would not, and hid it in the weeds rather than face arrest for grand larceny.

As I would soon find out the hard way, the bike actually belonged to a poor person, a teenage boy who worked in the stable after school, who had scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy as splendid a bicycle as had ever been seen on the campus of Tarkington.

TO PLAY WITH my mistaken scenario of the bike's belonging to a rich kid: It seemed possible to me that some rich kid had so many expensive playthings that he couldn't be bothered with taking care of this one. Maybe it wouldn't fit into the trunk of his Ferrari Gran Turismo. You wouldn't believe all the treasures, diamond earrings, Rolex watches, and on and on, that wound up unclaimed in the college's Lost and Found.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. I would discover this to be the majority opinion in the prison across the lake as well, although n.o.body over there had ever heard of George Orwell. Many of the inmates themselves had been poor people with money before they were caught, with the most costly cars and jewelry and watches and clothes. Many, as teenage drug dealers, had no doubt owned bicycles as desirable as the one I found in the weeds in the highlands of Scipio.

When convicts found out that my car was nothing but a 4-door, 6-cylinder Mercedes, they often scorned or pitied me. It was the same with many of the students at Tarkington. I might as well have owned a battered pickup truck.

SO I WALKED that bicycle out of the weeds and onto the steep slope of Clinton Street. I wouldn't have to pedal or turn a corner in order to deliver myself to the front door of the Black Cat Cafe. I would have to use the brakes, however, and I tested those. If the brakes didn't work, I would go off the end of the dock of the old barge terminal and, alley-oop, straight into Lake Mohiga.

I straddled the banana-shaped saddle, which turned out to be surprisingly considerate of my sensitive crotch and hindquarters. Sailing down a hill on that bicycle in the sunshine wasn't anything like being crucified.

I PARKED THE bike in plain view in front of the Black Cat Cafe, noting several champagne corks on the sidewalk and in the gutter. In Vietnam they would have been cartridge cases. This was where Arthur K. Clarke had formed up his motorcycle gang for its unopposed a.s.sault on Tarkington. The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cuc.u.mber or watercress. I sc.r.a.ped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.

Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.

I ENTERED THE Black Cat Cafe for the first time in my life. This was my club now, since I had been busted down to Townie. Maybe, after a few drinks, I'd go back up the hill and let air out of the tires of some of Clarke's motorcycles and limousines.

I bellied up to the bar and said, "Give me a wop." That was what I had heard people down in the town called Budweiser beer, ever since Italians had bought Anheuser-Busch, the company that made Budweiser. The Italians got the St. Louis Cardinals, too, as part of the deal.

"Wop coming up," said the barmaid. She was just the kind of woman I would go for right now, if I didn't have TB. She was in her late 30s, and had had a lot of bad luck recently, and didn't know where to turn next. I knew her story. So did everybody else in town. She and her husband restored an old-time ice cream parlor 2 doors up Clinton Street from the Black Cat Cafe. But then her husband died because he had inhaled so much paint remover. The germs inside him couldn't have felt too great, either.

WHO KNOWS, THOUGH? The Elders of Tralfamadore may have had her husband restore the ice cream parlor just so we could have a new strain of germs capable of surviving a pa.s.sage through a cloud of paint remover in outer s.p.a.ce.

HER NAME WAS Muriel Peck, and her husband Jerry Peck was a direct descendant of the first President of Tarkington College. His father grew up in this valley, but Jerry was raised in San Diego, California, and then he went to work for an ice cream company out there. The ice cream company was bought by President Mobutu of Zaire, and Jerry was let go. So he came here with Muriel and their 2 kids to discover his roots.

Since he already knew ice cream, it made perfect sense for him to buy the old ice cream parlor. It would have been better for all concerned if he had known a little less about ice cream and a little more about paint remover.

MURIEL AND I would eventually become lovers, but not until I had been working at Athena Prison for 2 weeks. I finally got nerve enough to ask her, since she and Jerry had both majored in Literature at Swarthmore College, if either of them had ever taken the time to read a label on a can of paint remover.

"Not until it was much too late," she said.

OVER AT THE prison I would encounter a surprising number of convicts who had been damaged not by paint remover but by paint. When they were little they had eaten chips or breathed dust from old lead-based paint. Lead poisoning had made them very stupid. They were all in prison for the dumbest crimes imaginable, and I was never able to teach any of them to read and write.

Thanks to them, do we now have germs which eat lead?

I know we have germs which eat petroleum. What their story is, I do not know. Maybe they're that Honduran gonorrhea.

28.

JERRY PECK WAS in a wheelchair with a tank of oxygen in his lap at the grand opening of the Mohiga Ice Cream Emporium. But he and Muriel had a nice little hit on their hands. Tarkingtonians and Townies alike were pleased by the decor and the luscious ice cream.

After the place had been open for only 6 months, though, a man came in and photographed everything. Then he pulled out a tape and made measurements which he wrote down in a book. The Pecks were flattered, and asked him if he was from an architectural magazine or what. He said that he worked for the architect who was designing the new student recreation center up on the hill, the Pahlavi Pavilion. The Pahlavis wanted it to have an ice cream parlor identical to theirs, right down to the last detail.

So maybe it wasn't paint remover that killed Jerry Peck after all.

THE PAVILION ALSO put the valley's only bowling alley out of business. It couldn't survive on the business of Townies alone. So anybody in this area who wanted to bowl and wasn't connected to Tarkington had to go 30 kilometers to the north, to the alleys next to the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory.

IT WAS A slow time of day at the Black Cat Cafe. There may have been a few prost.i.tutes in vans in the parking lot out back but none inside.

The owner, Lyle Hooper, who was also Chief of the Volunteer Fire Department and a Notary, was at the other end of the bar, doing some kind of bookkeeping. Until the very end of his life, he would never admit that the availability of prost.i.tutes in his parking lot accounted in large measure for the business he did in liquor and snacks, and for the condom machine in the men's room.

To the Elders of Tralfamadore, of course, that condom machine would represent a threat to their s.p.a.ce program.

LYLE HOOPER SURELY knew about my s.e.xual exploits, since he had notarized the affidavits in my portfolio. But he never mentioned them to me, or so far as I know to anyone. He was the soul of discretion.

Lyle was probably the best-liked man in this valley. Townies were so fond of him, men and women alike, that I never heard one call the Black Cat Cafe a wh.o.r.ehouse. Up on the hill, of course, it was called almost nothing else.

The Townies protected the image he had of himself, in spite of State Police raids and visits from the County Health Department, as a family man who ran a place of refreshment whose success depended entirely on the quality of the drinks and snacks he served. This kindly conspiracy protected Lyle's son Charlton, as well. Charlton grew to be 2 meters tall, and was a New York State High School All-Star basketball center in his senior year at Scipio High School, and all he ever had to say about his father was that he ran a restaurant.

Charlton was such a phenomenal basketball player that he was invited to try out for the New York Knickerbockers, which were still owned by Americans back then. He accepted a full scholarship to MIT instead, and became a top scientist running the huge subatomic particle accelerator called "the Supercollider" outside Waxahachie, Texas.

AS I UNDERSTAND it, the scientists down there forced invisible particles to reveal their secrets by making them go splat splat on photographic plates. That isn't all that different from the way we treated suspected enemy agents in Vietnam sometimes. on photographic plates. That isn't all that different from the way we treated suspected enemy agents in Vietnam sometimes.

Have I already said that I threw one out of a helicopter?

THE TOWNIES DIDN'T have to protect the sensibilities of Lyle's wife by never saying why the Black Cat Cafe was so prosperous. She had left him. She discovered in midlife that she was a lesbian, and ran off with the high school's girls' gym teacher to Bermuda, where they gave and probably still give sailing lessons.

I made a pa.s.s at her one time at an Annual Town-and-Gown Mixer up on the hill. I knew she was a lesbian before she she did. did.

AT THE VERY end of his life 2 years ago, though, when Lyle Hooper was a prisoner of the escaped convicts up in the bell tower, he was addressed by his captors as "Pimp." It was, "Hey, Pimp, how you like the view?" and "What you think we ought to do with you, Pimp?" and so on. It was cold and wet up there. Snow or rain blown into the belfry fell down through a myriad of bullet holes in the ceiling. Those had been made from below by escaped convicts when they realized that a sniper was up there among the bells.

There was no electricity. All electric and telephone service had been shut off. When I visited Lyle up there, he knew the story of those holes, knew the sniper had been crucified in the stable loft. He knew that the escaped convicts hadn't decided yet what to do with him. He knew that he had committed what was in their eyes murder pure and simple. He and Whitey VanArsdale had ambushed and killed 3 escaped convicts who were on their way up the old towpath to the head of the lake, to negotiate with the police and politicians and soldiers at the roadblock there. The would-be negotiators were carrying flags of truce, white pillowcases on broomsticks, when Lyle Hooper and Whitey VanArsdale shot them dead.

And then Whitey was himself shot dead almost immediately, but Lyle was taken prisoner.

But what bothered Hooper most when I talked to him up in the bell tower was that his captors called him nothing but "Pimp."

AT THIS POINT in my story, and in order to simplify the telling, and not to make any political point, let me from now on call the escaped convicts in Scipio what they called themselves, which was "Freedom Fighters."

SO LYLE HOOPER was without question responsible for the death of 3 Freedom Fighters carrying flags of truce. The Freedom Fighter who was guarding him in the tower when I came to see him, moreover, was the half brother and former partner in the crack business, along with their grandmother, of 1 of the Freedom Fighters he or Whitey had killed.

But all Lyle could talk about was the pain of being called a pimp. To many if not most of the Freedom Fighters, of course, it was no particular insult to call someone a pimp.

LYLE TOLD ME that he had been raised by his paternal grandmother, who made him promise to leave the world a better place than when he found it. He said, "Have I done that, Gene?"