"Bombs," Foppl commented. "That's what woke us up." Someone had come up from below with wine and glasses, and cigars. The accordionist had brought his instrument, but after a few bars was silenced: no one on the roof wanted to miss any sound of death that should reach them. They leaned toward the battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons the sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets; lips blackened with yesterday's wine, nicotine, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the original hue only showed in cracks. Aging women shifted their legs frequently, makeup they'd not cleaned away clinging in blotches to pore-riddled cheeks.

Over the horizon from the direction of the Union came two biplanes, flying low and lazy, like birds wandered away from a flock. "That's where the bombs came from," announced Foppl to his company. So excited now that he slopped wine on the roof. Mondaugen watched it flow in twin streams all the way to the eaves. It reminded him somehow of his first morning at Foppl's, and the two streaks of blood (when had he began to call it blood?) in the courtyard. A kite lit lower down on the roof and began to peck at the wine. Soon it took wing again. When had he begun to call it blood?

The planes looked as if they would come no nearer, only hang forever in the sky. The sun was going down. The clouds had been blown terribly thin, and begun to glow red, and seemed to ribbon the sky its entire length, filmy and splendid, as if it were they that held it all together. One of the Bondels suddenly appeared to run amok: stood upright, waving a spear, and began to run toward the nearest part of the advancing cordon. The whites there bunched together and fired at him in a flurry of pops, echoed by the pop of corks on Foppl's roof. He had almost reached them before he fell.

Now the planes could be heard: a snarling, intermittent sound. They swooped clumsy in a dive toward the Bondelswaartz position: the sun caught suddenly the three canisters dropped from each, turned them to six drops of orange fire. They seemed to take a century to fall. But soon, two bracketing the rocks, two among the Bondels and two in the area where the corpses lay, there bloomed at last six explosions, sending earth, stone and flesh cascading toward the nearly black sky with its scarlet overlay of cloud. Seconds later the loud, coughing blasts, overlapping, reached the roof. How the watchers cheered. The cordon moved rapidly then, through what was now a pall of thin smoke, killing the still-active and wounded, sending bullets into corpses, into women and children, even into the one goat that had survived. Then abruptly the crescendo of cork-pops ceased and night fell. And after a few minutes someone lit a campfire out on the battlefield. The watchers on the roof retired inside for a night of more than usually riotous celebration.

Had a new phase of the siege party begun with that dusk's intrusion from the present year, 1922, or was the change internal and Mondaugen's: a shift in the configuration of sights and sounds he was now filtering out, choosing not to notice? No way to tell; no one to say. Whatever it arose from, health returning or simple impatience with the hermetic, he was starting to feel those first tentative glandular pressures that one day develop into moral outrage. At least he was to experience a for him rare Achphenomenon: the discovery that his voyeurism had been determined purely by events seen, and not by any deliberate choice, or preexisting set of personal psychic needs.

No one saw any more battles. From time to time a body of horse-soldiers might be noted in the distance, tearing desperate across the plateau, raising a little dust; there would be explosions, miles away in the direction of the Karas mountains. And they heard a Bondel one night, lost in the dark, scream the name of Abraham Morris as he stumbled and fell into a ravine. In the last weeks of Mondaugen's stay everyone remained in the house, getting only a few hours' sleep per twenty-four-hour period. Easily a third of their number were bedridden: several, besides Foppl's Bondels, had died. It had become an amusement to visit an invalid each night to feed him wine and arouse him sexually.

Mondaugen remained up in his turret, working diligently at his code, taking occasional breaks to stand out alone on the roof and wonder if he would ever escape a curse that seemed to have been put on him one Fasching: to become surrounded by decadence no matter what exotic region, north or south, he wandered into. It couldn't be only Munich, he decided at some point: nor even the fact of economic depression. This was a soul-depression which must surely infest Europe as it infested this house.

One night he was awakened by a disheveled Weissmann, who could scarcely stand still for excitement. "Look, look," he cried, waving a sheet of paper under Mondaugen's s slowly blinking eyes. Mondaugen read: DIGEWOELDTIMSTEALALENSWTASNDEURFUALRLIKST.

"So," he yawned.

"It's your code. I've broken it. See: I remove every third letter and obtain: GODMEANTNUURK. This rearranged spells Kurt Mondaugen."

"Well, then," Mondaugen snarled. "And who the hell told you you could read my mail."

"The remainder of the message," Weissmann continued, "now reads: DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST."

"The world is all that the case is," Mondaugen said. "I've heard that somewhere before." A smile began to spread. "Weissmann, for shame. Resign your commission, you're in the wrong line of work. You'd make a fine engineer: you've been finagling."

"I swear," Weissmann protested, hurt.

Later on, finding the turret oppressive, Mondaugen exited through the window and wandered the gables, corridors and stairways of the villa till the moon was down. Early in the morning, with only the nacreous beginnings of a dawn visible out over the Kalahari, he came around a brick wall and entered a small hopyard. Hanging over the rows, each wrist attached to a different stringing-wire, feet dangling over young hops already sick with downy mildew, was another Bondel, perhaps Foppl's last. Below, dancing about the body and flicking its buttocks with a sjambok, was old Godolphin. Vera Meroving stood by his side and they appeared to have exchanged clothing. Godolphin, keeping time with the sjambok, launched quaveringly into a reprise of Down by the Summertime Sea.

Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at last neither to watch nor to listen. Instead he returned to the turret and gathered up his log books, oscillograms and a small knapsack of clothing and toilet articles. He sneaked downstairs and went out by a French window; located a long plank at the rear of the house and dragged it to the ravine. Foppl and guests had been somehow alerted to his departure. They crowded the windows; some sat out on the balconies and roof, some came to the veranda to watch. With a final grunt Mondaugen dropped the plank across a narrow part of the ravine. As he was working his way gingerly across, trying not to look down at the tiny stream two hundred feet below, the accordion began a slow sad tango, as if piping him ashore. This soon modulated into a rousing valediction, which they all sang in chorus: Why are you leaving the party so early, Just when it was getting good?

Were the crowds and the laughter just a little too tame, Did the girl you had your eye on go and forfeit the game?

O tell me Where is there music any gayer than ours, and tell me Where are wine and ladies in such ample supply?

If you know a better party in the Southwest Protectorate, Tell us and we'll drop on by (Right after this one) Tell us and we'll drop on by.

He reached the other side, adjusted the knapsack and began to trudge toward a distant clump of trees. After a few hundred yards he decided to look back after all. They still watched him and their hush now was a part of the same that hung over all the scrubland. The morning's sun bleached their faces a Fasching-white he remembered seeing in another place. They gazed across the ravine dehumanized and aloof, as if they were the last gods on earth.

Two miles further on at a fork in the road he met a Bondel riding on a donkey. The Bondel had lost his right arm. "All over," he said. "Many Bondels dead, baases dead, van Wijk dead. My woman, younkers dead." He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn't know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel's scarred back. They seemed the only three animate objects on the yellow road which led, he knew, sooner or later, to the Atlantic. The sunlight was immense, the plateau country wide, and Mondaugen felt little and lost in the dun-colored waste. Soon as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest Ganna bush. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't understand it.

chapter ten.

In which various sets of young people get together I.

McClintic Sphere, whose horn man was soloing, stood by the empty piano, looking off at nothing in particular. He was half listening to the music (touching the keys of his alto now and again, as if by sympathetic magic to make that natural horn develop the idea differently, some way Sphere thought could be better) and half watching the customers at the tables.

This was last set and it'd been a bad week for Sphere. Some of the colleges were let out and the place had been crowded with these types who liked to talk to each other a lot. Every now and again, they'd invite him over to a table between sets and ask him what he thought about other altos. Some of them would go through the old Northern liberal routine: look at me, I'll sit with anybody. Either that or they would say: "Hey fella, how about Night Train?" Yes, bwana. Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol' Uncle McClintic, he play you de finest Night Train you evah did hear. An' aftah de set he gwine take dis of alto an' shove it up yo' white Ivy League ass.

The horn wanted to finish off: he'd been tired all week as Sphere. They took fours with the drummer, stated the main theme in unison and left the stand.

The bums stood outside like a receiving line. Spring had hit New York all warm and aphrodisiac. Sphere found his Triumph in the lot, got in and took off uptown. He needed to relax.

Half an hour later he was in Harlem, in a friendly rooming (and in a sense cat) house run by one Matilda Winthrop, who was little and wizened and looked like any elderly little lady you might see in the street going along with gentle steps in the waning afternoon to look for spleens and greens at the market.

"She's up there," Matilda said, with a smile for everybody, even musicians with a headful of righteous moss who were making money and drove sports cars. Sphere shadowboxed with her for a few minutes. She bad better reflexes than he did.

The girl was sitting on the bed, smoking and reading a western. Sphere tossed his coat on a chair. She moved over to make room for him, dogeared a page, put the book on the floor. Soon he was telling her about the week, about the kids with money who used him for background music and the musicians from other bigger groups, also with money, who were cautious and had mixed reactions and the few who couldn't really afford dollar beers at the V-Note but did or wanted to understand except that the space they might have occupied was already taken up by the rich kids and musicians. He told it all into the pillow and she rubbed his back with amazingly gentle hands. Her name, she said, was Ruby but he didn't believe that. Soon: "Do you ever dig what I'm trying to say," he wondered.

"On the horn I don't," she answered, honest enough, "a girl doesn't understand. All she does is feel. I feel what you play, like I feel what you need when you're inside me. Maybe they're the same thing. McClintic, I don't know. You're kind to me, what is it you want?"

"Sorry," he said. After a while, "This is a good way to relax."

"Stay tonight?"

"Sure."

Slab and Esther, uncomfortable with each other, stood in front of an easel in his place, looking at Cheese Danish # 35. The cheese Danish was a recent obsession of Slab's. He had taken, some time ago, to painting in a frenzy these morning-pastries in every conceivable style, light and setting. The room was already littered with Cubist Fauve and Surrealist cheese Danishes. "Monet spent his declining years at his home in Giverny, painting the water lilies in the garden pool," reasoned Slab. "He painted all kinds of water lilies. He liked water lilies. These are my declining years. I like cheese banishes, they have kept me alive now for longer than I can remember. Why Dot."

The subject of Cheese Danish # 35 occupied only a small area to the lower left of center, where it was pictured impaled on one of the metal steps of a telephone pole. The landscape was an empty street, drastically foreshortened, the only living things in it a tree in the middle distance, on which perched an ornate bird, busily textured with a great many swirls, flourishes and bright-colored patches.

"This," explained Slab in answer to her question, "is my revolt against Catatonic Expressionism: the universal symbol I have decided will replace the Cross in western civilization. It is the Partridge in the Pear Tree. You remember the old Christmas song, which is a linguistic joke. Perdrix, pear tree. The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. The partridge eats pears off the tree and his droppings in turn nourish the tree which groves higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at the same time assuring him of a continuous supply of good. It is perpetual motion, except for one thing." He pointed out a gargoyle with sharp fangs near the top of the picture. The point of the largest fang lay on an imaginary line projected parallel to the axis of the tree and drawn through the head of the bird. "It could as well have been a low-flying airplane or high-tension wire," Slab said. "But someday that bird will be impaled on the gargoyle's teeth, just like the poor cheese Danish is already on the phone pole."

"Why can't he fly away?" Esther said.

"He is too stupid. He used to know how to fly once, but he's forgotten."

"I detect allegory in all this," she said.

"No," said Slab. "That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of you."

She'd wandered to the bed. "No," he almost yelled.

"Slab, it's so bad. It's a physical pain, here." She drew her fingers across her abdomen.

"I'm not getting any either," said Slab. "I can't help it that Schoenmaker cut you off."

"Aren't I your friend?"

"No," said Slab.

"What can I do to show you -"

"Go," said Slab, "is what you can do. And let me sleep. In my chaste army cot. Alone." He crawled to the bed and lay face down. Soon Esther left, forgetting to close the door. Not being the type to slam doors on being rejected.

Roony and Rachel sat at the bar of a neighborhood tavern on Second Avenue. Over in the corner an Irishman and a Hungarian were yelling at each other over the bowling game.

"Where does she go at night," Roony wondered.

"Paola is a strange girl," said Rachel. "You learn after a while not to ask her questions she doesn't want to answer."

"Maybe seeing Pig."

"No. Pig Bodine lives at the V-Note and the Rusty Spoon. He has a letch for Paola a mile long but he reminds her too much, I think, of Pappy Hod. The Navy has a certain way of endearing itself. She stays away from him and it's killing him and I for one am glad to see it."

It's killing me, Winsome wanted to say. He didn't. Lately he'd been running for comfort to Rachel. He'd come in a way to depend on it. Her sanity and aloofness from the Crew, her own self-sufficiency drew him. But he was no nearer to arranging any assignation with Paola. Perhaps he was afraid of Rachel's reaction. He was beginning to suspect she was not the sort who approved of pimping for one's roommate. He ordered another boilermaker.

"Roony, you drink too much," she said. "I worry about you."

"Nag, nag, nag." He smiled.

Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended. Across one of the laboratory spaces, features lit Frankenstein's-monsterlike by a night light, facing Profane, sat SHROUD: synthetic human, radiation output determined.

Its skin was cellulose acetate butyrate, a plastic transparent not only to light but also to X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Its skeleton had once been that of a living human; now the bones were decontaminated and the long ones and spinal column hollowed inside to receive radiation dosimeters. SHROUD was five feet nine inches tall - the fiftieth percentile of Air Force standards. The lungs, sex organs, kidneys, thyroid, liver, spleen and other internal organs were hollow and made of the same clear plastic as the body shell. These could be filled with aqueous solutions which absorbed the same amount of radiation as the tissue they represented.

Anthroresearch Associates was a subsidiary of Yoyodyne. It did research for the government on the effects of high-altitude and space flight; for the National Safety Council on automobile accidents; and for Civil Defense on radiation absorption, which was where SHROUD came in. In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Such at least was Oley Bergomask's notion of progress. It was the subject of his welcome-aboard lecture on Profane's first day of employment, at five in the afternoon as Profane was going on and Bergomask off. There were two eight-hour night shifts, early and late (though Profane, whose time scale was skewed toward the past, preferred to call them late and early) and Profane to date had worked them both.

Three times a night he had to make the rounds of the lab areas, windows and heavy equipment. If an all-night routine experiment was in progress he'd have to take readings and if they were out of tolerance wake up the technician on duty, who'd usually be sleeping on a cot in one of the offices. At first there'd been a certain interest in visiting the accident research area, which was jokingly referred to as the chamber of horrors. Here weights were dropped on aged automobiles, inside which would be sitting a manikin. The study now under way had to do with first-aid training, and various versions of SHOCK - synthetic human object, casualty kinematics - got to sit in the driver's, death, or back seat of the test cars. Profane still felt a certain kinship with SHOCK, which was the first inanimate schlemihl he'd ever encountered. But in there too was a certain wariness because the manikin was still only a "human object"; plus a feeling of disdain as if SHOCK had decided to sell out to humans; so that now what had been its inanimate own were taking revenge.

SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes cosmetic-plastic, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 19 per cent of the American population, most of them respectable. Inside were a blood reservoir in the thorax, a blood pump in the midsection and a nickel-cadmium battery power supply in the abdomen. The control panel, at the side of the chest, had toggles and rheostat controls for venous and arterial bleeding, pulse rate, and even respiration rate, when a sucking chest wound was involved. In the latter case plastic lungs provided the necessary suction and bubbling. They were controlled by an air pump in the abdomen, with the motor's cooling vent located in the crotch. An injury of the sexual organs could still be simulated by an attachable moulage, but then this blocked the cooling vent. SHOCK could not therefore have a sucking chest wound and mutilated sexual organs simultaneously. A new retrofit, however, eliminated this difficulty, which was felt to be a basic design deficiency.

SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he'd got used to it. The only thing at Anthroresearch that still fazed him a little was SHROUD, whose face was a human skull that looked at you through a more-or-less abstracted butyrate head.

It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped in front of SHROUD.

"What's it like," he said.

Better than you have it.

"Wha."

Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.) "There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents."

But those are most likely. If somebody else doesn't do it to you, you'll do it to yourselves.

"You don't even have a soul. How can you talk."

Since when did you ever have one? What are you doing, getting religion? All I am is a dry run. They take readings off my dosimeters. Who is to say whether I'm here so the people can read the meters or whether the radiation in me is because they have to measure. Which way does it go?

"it's one way," said Profane. "All one way."

Mazel tov. (Maybe the hint of a smile?) Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the plot of Existentialist Sheriff. After a while he got up and went over to SHROUD. "What do you mean, we'll be like you and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?"

Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.

"If you aren't then what are you?"

Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.

"I don't understand."

So I see. But you're not alone. That's a comfort, isn't it? To hell with it. Profane went back to the guardroom and busied himself making coffee.

III.

The next weekend there was a party at Raoul, Slab and Melvin's. The Whole Sick Crew was there.

At one in the morning Roony and Pig started a fight.

"Son of a bitch," Roony yelled. "You keep your hands off her."

"His wife," Esther informed Slab. The Crew had withdrawn to the walls, leaving Pig and Roony most of the floor space. Both were drunk and sweating. They wrestled around, stumbling and inexpert, trying to fight like a western movie. It is incredible how many amateur brawlers believe the movie saloon fight is the only acceptable model to follow. At last Pig dropped Roony with a fist to the abdomen. Roony just lay there, eyes closed, trying to hold down his breathing because it hurt. Pig wandered out to the kitchen. The fight had been over a girl but both of them knew her name was Paola, not Mafia.

"I don't hate the Jewish people," Mafia was explaining, "only the things they do." She and Profane were alone in her apartment. Roony was out drinking. Perhaps seeing Eigenvalue. It was the day after the fight. She didn't seem to care where her husband was.

All at once Profane got a marvelous idea. She wanted to keep Jews out? Maybe half a Jew could get in.

She beat him to it: her hand reached for his belt buckle and started to unfasten it.

"No," he said, having changed his mind. Needing a zipper to undo, her hands slid away, around her hips to the back of her skirt. "Now look."

"I need a man," already half out of the skirt, "fashioned for Heroic Love. I've wanted you ever since we met."

"Heroic Love's ass," said Profane. "You're married."

Charisma was having nightmares in the next room. He started thumping around under the green blanket, flailing out at the elusive shadow of his own Persecutor.

"Here," she said, lower half denuded, "here on the rug."

Profane got up and rooted around in the icebox for beer. Mafia lay on the floor, screaming at him.

"Here yourself." He set a can of beer on her soft abdomen. She yelped, knocking it over. The beer made a soggy spot on the rug between them, like a bundling board or Tristan's blade. "Drink your beer and tell me about Heroic Love." She was making no move to get dressed.

"A woman wants to feel like a woman," breathing hard, "is all. She wants to be taken, penetrated, ravished. But more than that she wants to enclose the man."

With spiderwebs woven of yo-yo string: a net or trap. Profane could think of nothing but Rachel.

"Nothing heroic about a schlemihl," Profane told her. What was a hero? Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse's reins, lariat. Master of the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman.

"Why," he wondered, "does something like sex have to be so confused. Mafia, why do you have to have names for it." Here he was arguing again. Like with Fina in the bathtub.

"What are you," she snarled, "a latent homosexual? You afraid of women?"