"What happened here, *hot?" '

"He is stopped, and I am picking roses," I tell them.

There are four *bots and an Over.

"It is time you left this place," I say. "Shortly it will be night and the werebot will walk. Leave, or he will end you."

"You stopped himi" says the Over. "You are the wereboti"

I bunch all the flowers against my chest with one arm and turn to face them. The Over, a large special-order *bot, moves toward me. Others are approaching from all directions. He had sent out a call.

"You are a strange and terrible thing," he is saying, and you must be junked, for the sake of the community."

He seizes me and I drop Kennington's flowers.

I cannot drain him. My coils are already loaded near their capacity, and he is specially insulated.

There are dozens around me now, fearing and hating.

They will junk me and I will lie beside Kennington.

**Rust in peace," they will say. ... I am sony that I cannot keep my promise to Fritz.

"Release himi"

No!

It is shrouded and moldering Fritz in the doorway of

the mausoleum, swaying, clutching at the stone. He al- ways knows....

"Release himi I, a human, order it"

He is ashen and gasping, and the sunlight is doing

awful things to him.

-The ancient circuits click and suddenly I am free.

"Yes, master," says the Over. "We did not know. ., .*'

"Seize that robotF

He points a shaking emaciated finger at him.

"He is the werebot," he gasps. "Destroy biro! The one gathering flowers was obeying my orders. Leave him

here with me."

He falls to his knees and the final darts of day pierce

his flesh.

"And got All the rest of you! QuicklyI It is my order

that no robot ever enter another graveyard againi"

He collapses within and I know that now there are only bones and bits of rotted shroud on the doorstep of

our home.

Pritz has had his final joke-a human masquerade.

I take the roses to Kennington, as the silent *bots file out through the gate forever, bearing the unprotesting Overbot with them. I place the roses at the foot of the monument-Kennington's and Fritz's-the monument of the last, strange, truly living ones.

Now only I remain unjunked.

In the final light of the sun I see them drive a stake through the Over's vite-box and bury him at the cross- roads.

Then they hurry back toward their towers of steel, of

plastic.

I gather up what remains of Fritz and carry him down

to his box. The bones are brittle and silent.

. . , It is a very proud and very lonely thing to be a

stainless steel leech.

A THING OF TERRIBLE BEAUTY.

I rather liked this one when I wrote it, but I don't re- member why or how I came to write it. Perhaps Ham- son Denmark had taken on a life of his own. Perhaps he's that gentleman I see walking along Bishop's Lodge Road every day, sometimes in both directions....

How like a god of the Epicureans is the audience, at a time like this! Powerless to alter the course of events, yet better informed than the characters, they might rise to their feet and cry out, "Do not!"-but the blinding of Oedipus would still ensue, and the inevitable knot in Jocasta*s scarlet would stop her breathing still.

But no one rises, of course. They know better. They, too, are inevitably secured by the strange bonds of the tragedy. The gods can only observe and know, they can- not alter circumstance, nor wrestle with ananke.

My host is already anticipating the thing he calls "ca- tharsis." My search has carried me far, and my choice was a good one. Phillip Devers lives in the theater like a worm lives in an apple, a paralytic in an iron lung.

It is his world.

And I live in Phillip Devers.

For ten years his ears and eyes have been my ears and eyes. For ten years I have tasted the sensitive preceptions of a great critic of the drama, and he has never known it

He has come close-his mind is agile, his imagination vivid-but his classically trained intellect is too strong, his familiarity with psychopathology too intimate to per- mit that final leap from logic to intuition, and an ad- mission of my existence. At times, before he drops off to sleep, he toys with the thought of attempting communica- tion, but the next morning he always rejects it-which is well. What could we possibly have to say to one an- other?

-Now that inchoate scream from the dawn of time, and Oedipus stalks the stage in murky terror!

17.

18.