'Buddy, after what I've seen that character do, I'll take his word on the rest.'

'But which contestant should we give it to?' Sampson poses the big question.

Local Dig 2 throws up his hands in munic.i.p.al despair.

'We are trapped!' he cries.

I think so too.

Well, we have to adjourn, because the contest must go on. I advise them to stall as long as possible, measure everything twice, ogle slow. They file back to their stand with the gaiety of n.o.bles climbing into tumbrils. They sit there, and I know they are worried when Miss Brooklyn writhes by and they don't bat an eyelash. When such a stack pa.s.sing before the eye causes no reaction, you are either powerful worried or you are dead.

Again I attempt to reason with cabbage head.

'Look,' I say, 'You're intelligent. Isn't it obvious that we can't give one prize to five contestants?'

Earthian math is lost on him.

'This contest must end soon,' is all he tells me. 'This superficial chatter is merely irritating us further. There is obviously no compet.i.tion between my lovely wards and those hideous creatures parading out there. No judge, be he of Earth or Heaven, could possibly award a prize to such manifest hideousness.'

Glimmers. A germ.

'Hideous?' I say. 'You think they're hideous?'

'You are all hideous.'

I turn away. Suddenly I have it. My brain is clicking at last. I rush to a phone and make my bid to save poor Earth.

Then I ease on stage and slide in beside Sampson. There, while eyeing morsels of perfect 36-22-36, I slip him the word from the corner of my mouth.

He breaks into the smile reserved for cash buyers of this year's Cadillac. Then he leans over and whispers the news to Gall Stone's civic pride. The mayor pa.s.ses it on to Mendelheimer's sh.e.l.l-like ears, Mendelheimer to Gloober, and Gloober to Loc Dig 2.

Now they are all grinning and looking with revitalized leers at pa.s.sing pulchritude, and I am feeling like a very clever publicity man.

This is probably the longest beauty contest known to man. It has to be. My plan needs time, and we have to buy it expensive. We have the contestants coming on frontways, sideways and backwards. Singly, in pairs, in groups, and in a long zoftic line. They do everything but walk on their hands. The babes start jawing about it. Even the audience gets a gutfull of willowy shapes. And when gla.s.sy-eyed males get tired of looking at babes, man, you've overdone it.

But by then it is all right, because my plan is ready to go.

I go to the mike.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' I say. 'Before we announce our winner, I want to add another surprise award to our list of prizes. We had formerly announced the loving cup, the car, the Hollywood contract, the year's free servicing and cha.s.sis work at Max Factor's, and other smaller items. Now we have another prize.'

I pause for my coup.

'A month's vacation in the Mediterranean with none other thana'

I wave my arm toward the wings.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' I am it, 'Mister Universe!'

The big blond giant comes padding out in his tights, and fed-up housewives do nip-ups in their seats.

While the cheers and groans ring out over my weary but joyous head, I gaze off stage.

As I figure, the broads from s.p.a.ce are crowding around their delegate. I nod to the m.c. and amble off the boards, my mind cool with victory.

So we're hideous, are we? Well, that's too bad. If they want the first prize, they have to take that vacation too.

A month in the Mediterranean with Mister Manifest Hideousness. Take it or leave it.

Cabbage head spies me now, and whizzes across the floor. I gulp as he approaches, the feeling of victory sort of dying. That eye looks mad.

'You attempt trickery!' he accuses me.

Trickery?' I make with the bland face.

'You intend to carry this ruse out?' he asks.

'Mister,' I say, 'this is our contest. We'll give you first prize, but we have the right to say what the prize will be.'

'Beside the actual point,' he says.

'What?' I feel something giving.

'How dare you proclaim that creature Mister Universe!' he gargles, 'Are you not aware that the Universe contains more galaxies than there are stars in your own galaxy?'

'Huh?'

'This calls for drastic action. I must call immediately on the alliance of galaxies. There will be a contest held in this building to decide who is really ent.i.tled to the name Mister Universe. Let me see, there are approximately seven million, five hundred and ninety-five thousand base representatives which, divided into their integral parts, makesa'

Harry, what do you say? Can you use a weak a.s.sistant to help you push beans? Harry, I'll work for nothing. Please!

JOE.

XII a" FULL CIRCLE.

The city editor called him in. 'Here,' he said. He tossed a ticket across his desk. 'For tonight.'

Walt picked up the ticket. 'Are you kidding?' he asked.

Barton rested his head on his hands. He looked mildly quizzical. He said, 'Thompson, do I strike you as the kidding sort?'

Walt grinned. 'Yeah,' he said, 'like Macbeth.'

He started out. At the door, he turned. 'How shall it be?' he asked. 'Straight? Humorous? Allegorical? Historical-pastoral? Scene undivided or poem unlimited?'

'You may get the h.e.l.l out of here,' Barton said.

As he moved through the press room, Walt looked at the ticket again. January 25, 2231. Terwilliger's Living Marionettes, it announced. Larg and Fellow Martians in 'Rip Van Winkle: 'Oh me, oh my,' cried his wife, 'we will starve to death. You are a lazy good-for-nothing, you Rip Van Winkle!'

I sat lost in a heaving lava bed of children.

Their eyes were like abacus beads sliding. They couldn't sit still. They plucked at clothes and nose. They sucked and gobbled on candy bars. They whispered, they giggled, they threw paper rocket ships at each other.

Incidentally, they watched Terwilliger's Living Marionettes.

'You go and you find some work!' howled Mrs. Rip Van Winkle.

It drew an appreciative chuckle from oldsters at conditions before Position Bureau a.s.sured one hundred per cent employment. Mrs. R. Van W. tearing at his mop-hued wig a" Martians are bald as we know.

'You get out of this house and get a job!'

'Yah, yah!' replied Rip in a breathless squeak. 'Yah, yah, I go.'

He sticks a floppy hat on his large skull. His head swells outsize to his body. It makes him look like a caricature.

He is bent over and skinny. He is all angular joints and spaghetti extremities. He is dressed in old patched clothes hanging like robes on a skeleton. He is two feet tall.

'Yah, yah,' he says, repeating the line because kiddies guffaw when he says it. Guffaws drift to plucking, eating, shifting, picking, throwing, whispering, shouting.

Rip gets his gun. It falls apart. There are gales of appreciation. The auditorium is dark except for the stage.

The scene is an old Dutch kitchen, says the programme. Preindustrial period. Around 1750, to judge from the set. That's a long time ago. A pretty good story to last six centuries. But does it last so we may enjoy a" or perhaps so we may scoff?

She is chasing him out of the kitchen with a broom, an obsolete cleaning utensil. Straw, bound together for purpose of collecting dirt and trash in a contiguous pile. ' Kiddies don't know that. They think it's something for hitting.

'You get out of here, you lazy good-for-nothing!' she howls.

She hits him over the head. Once. Twice. Bang, bang! Kiddies roar, tug at their clothes, their neighbours' clothes, clap their pudgy pink hands, show their white teeth in savage pleasure.

Savage? Dear reader, do you raise eyebrows at that word applied to your children? Do you put down your paper, purse indignant lips? Do you ask yourself in silent outrage a" who is this jackanapes, this critic, this vile a.s.saulter on the high-blown walls of parenthood?

You do? But read on.

Out goes Rip! Flying through the double door. Flop! Into the dust of the road. Mrs. R. Van W. boots the dog, Wolf, after its master. The dog is only a doll made up as a dog. The Martians are too small. A real dog would fill the stage. A real dog might eat the actors.

'And don't come back without a job!' she cries out, fierce and indignant.

She plops in a chair. Her wig slips over her face. Pandemonium. The curtain dances out and meets itself. It shudders to a draping halt.

In the return to self I think of how almost shocking it was to see that wig come sliding off.

Like dignity fluttering down to fall beneath trampling feet.

Intermission.

The play forgotten, the kiddies crowded into the aisles. Time to stuff in more candy and soda and ice cream and cake and fighting. More rocket ships arched in graceful swoops through the theatre air.

I remained in my seat, listening to the raging storm of children together. Watching the maelstrom of activity that is the mark of youth. I picked the ticket stub from my coat pocket.

Terwilliger's Living Marionettes.

A minor note of prescience tugged at my mind. The words were contradictory I realized suddenly a" apparently for the first time.

Marionettes are not living.

And I sat thinking a" of the little man and his ragged clothes, of the shrill-voiced woman, hitting and shrieking.

And then I realized that the children were howling at liv.ing things. And something tightened in me.

And stayed tight.

Second act.

The ma.s.s of children was somehow shoehorned back in place. The auditorium was like an overstuffed trunk, its edges bulging. Bits of children popped up from the pressure of excitement.

The curtain opened. A flitting moment of hush. Then another scene.

Rip and his flat-faced dog trudged into a country glade. Dandruff-crowned mountains from the background, undulating slightly as breezes move the backdrop. The power to move mountains, the phrase occurs to me.

'Oh my, oh my, I'm so tired,' says Rip.

He flops down and his feet go in the air. No one notices the look of pain that flares up in his narrow face a" no one except me. I look at him carefully as he goes on mouthing childish words. This is Larg, the star. And are those lines in his face from makeup or from misery?

He leans against a fake tree trunk and looks around.

Brrooml Brrooml 'Oh my, what is that?' he asks his dog.

His dog says 'Woof!' Without its face changing an iota.' Woof!' again. Its voice drops down from the sky. It is noticeable because it is the only real marionette in this marionette show.

Brrooml Up jumps Rip. He says, 'I will look and see what it is!'

He starts off, pretending to walk while the backdrop creaks along on rollers and the tree is tugged offstage by dreadfully visible wires.

I watched him.

I forgot the show. The Martian was limping. There were lines of anguish in his face, obviously not etched with makeup pencils.

He was in pain. But no one noticed it. Not the parents, not the children. Who looks for pain in a piece of wood?

But perhaps I bestow a sensitivity on myself which was not present at that moment.

For it is later now, you see, and as I sit here writing of it, I have it all. Not just disconcerting fragments born in the midst of seething children.