_It was only a year and a half ago that Phil Farmer, till then a totally unknown (editorially speaking at any rate) young man of Peoria, wrote himself a novel that won him instantaneous acclaim as perhaps the hottest new science fiction writer currently astir. Its title was "The Lovers" and since then he has gone right on proving himself a top-hand craftsman. _ they twinkled like jewels _by . . . Philip José Farmer_ Crane didn't get the nice man's name--until it was far too late to do anything at all about it. Jack Crane lay all morning in the vacant lot. Now and then he moved alittle to quiet the protest of cramped muscles and stagnant blood, butmost of the time he was as motionless as the heap of rags he resembled. Not once did he hear or see a Bohas agent, or, for that matter, anyone. The predawn darkness had hidden his panting flight from the transiejungle, his dodging across backyards while whistles shrilled and voicesshouted, and his crawling on hands and knees down an alley into the highgrass and bushes which fringed a hidden garden. For a while his heart had knocked so loudly that he had been sure hewould not be able to hear his pursuers if they did get close. It seemedinevitable that they would track him down. A buddy had told him that anew camp had just been built at a place only three hours drive away fromthe town. This meant that Bohas would be thick as hornets in theneighborhood. But no black uniforms had so far appeared. And then, lyingthere while the passionate and untiring sun mounted the sky, thebang-bang of his heart was replaced by a noiseless but painful movementin his stomach. He munched a candy bar and two dried rolls which a housewife had givenhim the evening before. The tiger in his belly quit pacing back andforth; it crouched and licked its chops, but its tail was stuck up inhis throat. Jack could feel the dry fur swabbing his pharynx and mouth. He suffered, but he was used to that. Night would come as surely asanything did. He'd get a drink then to quench his thirst. Boredom began to sit on his eyelids. Just as he was about to accept somemuch needed sleep, he moved a leaf with an accidental jerk of his handand uncovered a caterpillar. It was dark except for a row of yellowspots along the central line of some of its segments. As soon as it wasexposed, it began slowly shimmying away. Before it had gone two feet, itwas crossed by a moving shadow. Guiding the shadow was a black wasp withan orange ring around the abdomen. It closed the gap between itself andthe worm with a swift, smooth movement and straddled the dark body. Before the wasp could grasp the thick neck with its mandibles, theintended victim began rapidly rolling and unrolling and flinging itselffrom side to side. For a minute the delicate dancer above it could notsucceed in clenching the neck. Its sharp jaws slid off the frenziedlyjerking skin until the tiring creature paused for the chip of a second. Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high onits legs and pulled the worm's front end from the ground, exposing theyellowed band of the underpart. The attacker's abdomen curved beneathits own body; the stinger jabbed between two segments of the prey'sjointed length. Instantly, the writhing stilled. A shudder, and thecaterpillar became as inert as if it were dead. Jack had watched with an eye not completely clinical, feeling thesympathy of the hunted and the hounded for a fellow. His own strugglesof the past few months had been as desperate, though not as hopeless, and . . . He stopped thinking. His heart again took up the rib-thudding. Out ofthe corner of his left eye he had seen a shadow that fell across thegarden. When he slowly turned his head to follow the stain upon thesun-splashed soil, he saw that it clung to a pair of shining blackboots. Jack did not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands againstthe weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a. 38 automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn't talkback to a mouth like that. II Jack was lucky. As one of the last to be herded into the truck, whichhad been once used for hauling cattle, he had more room to breathe thanmost of the others. He faced the rear bars. The vehicle was heading intothe sun. Its rays were not as hard on him as on some of those who wereso jam-packed they could not turn to get the hot yellow splotch out oftheir eyes. He looked through lowered lids at the youths on either side of him. Forthe last three days in the transie jungle, the one standing on his lefthad given signs of what was coming upon him, what had come upon so manyof the transies. The muttering, the indifference to food, not hearingyou when you talked to him. And now the shock of being caught in theraid had speeded up what everybody had foreseen. He was hardened, like aconcrete statue, into a half-crouch. His arms were held in front of himlike a praying mantis', and his hands clutched a bar. Not even thepressure of the crowd could break his posture. The man on Jack's right murmured something, but the roaring of motor andclashing of gears shifting on a hill squashed his voice. He spokelouder: "_Cerea flexibilitas_. Extreme catatonic state. The fate of all of us. " "You're nuts, " said Jack. "Not me. I'm no schizo, and I'm not going tobecome one. " As there was no reply, Jack decided he had not moved his lips enough tobe heard clearly. Lately, even when it was quiet, people seemed to havetrouble making out what he was saying. It made him mildly angry. He shouted. It did not matter if he were overheard. That any of theprisoners were agents of the Bureau of Health and Sanity didn't seemlikely. Anyway, he didn't care. They wouldn't do anything to him theyhadn't planned before this. "Got any idea where we're going?" "Sure. F. M. R. C. 3. Federal Male Rehabilitation Camp No. 3. I spent twoweeks in the hills spying on it. " Jack looked the speaker over. Like all those in the truck, he wore afrayed shirt, a stained and torn coat, and greasy, dirty trousers. Theblack bristles on his face were long; the back of his neck was coveredby thick curls. The brim of his dusty hat was pulled down low. Beneathits shadow his eyes roamed from side to side with the same fear thatJack knew was in his own eyes. Hunger and sleepless nights had knobbed his cheekbones and honed hischin to a sharp point. An almost visible air clung to him, a hot aurathat seemed to result from veins full of lava and eyeballs spilling outa heat that could not be held within him. He had the face every transiehad, the face of a man who was either burning with fever or who had seena vision. Jack looked away to stare miserably at the dust boiling up behind thewheels, as if he could see projected against its yellow-brown screen hisretreating past. He spoke out of the side of his mouth. "What's happened to us? We shouldbe happy and working at good jobs and sure about the future. Weshouldn't be just bums, hobos, walkers of the streets, rod-hoppers, beggars, and thieves. " His friend shrugged and looked uneasily from the corners of his eyes. Hewas probably expecting the question they all asked sooner or later: _Whyare_ you _on the road?_ They asked, but none replied with words thatmeant anything. They lied, and they didn't seem to take any pleasure intheir lying. When they asked questions themselves, they knew theywouldn't get the truth. But something forced them to keep on tryinganyway. Jack's buddy evaded also. He said, "I read a magazine article by a Dr. Vespa, the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity. He'd written thearticle just after the President created the Bureau. He viewed, quote, with alarm and apprehension, unquote, the fact that six percent of thosebetween the ages of twelve and twenty-five were schizophrenics whoneeded institutionalizing. And he was, quote, appalled and horrified, unquote, that five percent of the nation were homeless unemployed andthat three point seven percent of those were between the ages offourteen and thirty. He said that if this schizophrenia kept onprogressing, half the world would be in rehabilitation camps. But ifthat occurred, the sane half would go to pot. Back to the stone age. Andthe schizos would die. " * * * * * He licked his lips as if he were tasting the figures and found thembitter. "I was very interested by Vespa's reply to a mother who had writtenhim, " he went on. "Her daughter ended up in a Bohas camp for schizos, and her son had left his wonderful home and brilliant future to become abum. She wanted to know why. Vespa took six long paragraphs to give sixexplanations, all equally valid and all advanced by equallydistinguished sociologists. He himself favored the mass hysteria theory. But if you looked at his gobbledegook closely, you could reduce it toone phrase, _We don't know_. "He did say this--though you won't like it--that the schizos and thetransies were just two sides of the same coin. Both were infected withthe same disease, whatever it was. And the transies usually ended up asschizos anyway. It just took them longer. " Gears shifted. The floor slanted. Jack was shoved hard against the rearboards by the weight of the other men. He didn't answer until thepressure had eased and his ribs were free to work for more than meresurvival. He said, "You're way off, schizo. My hitting the road has nothing to dowith those split-heads. Nothing, you understand? There's nothing foggyor dreamy about me. I wouldn't be here with you guys if I hadn't been sointerested in a wasp catching a caterpillar that I never saw the Bohassneaking up on me. " While Jack described the little tragedy, the other allowed anunderstanding smile to bend his lips. He seemed engrossed, however, andwhen Jack had finished, he said: "That was probably an ammophila wasp. _Sphex urnaria_ Klug. Lovely, butvicious, little she-demon. Injects the poison from her sting into thecaterpillar's central nerve cord. That not only paralyzes but preservesit. The victim is always stowed away with another one in an undergroundburrow. The wasp attaches one of her eggs to the body of a worm. Whenthe egg hatches, the grub eats both of the worms. They're alive, butthey're completely helpless to resist while their guts are gnawed away. Beautiful idea, isn't it? "It's a habit common to many of those little devils: _Sceliphroncementarium_, _Eumenes coarcta_, _Eumenes fraterna_, _Bembix spinolae_, _Pelopoeus_ . . . " Jack's interest wandered. His informant was evidently one of thosetransies who spent long hours in the libraries. They were ready at theslightest chance to offer their encyclopaedic but often uselessknowledge. Jack himself had abandoned his childhood bookwormishness. Forthe last three years his days and evenings had worn themselves out onthe streets, passed in a parade of faces, flickered by in plate-glasswindows of restaurants and department stores and business offices, whilehe hoped, hoped. . . . "Did you say you spied on the camp?" Jack interrupted the sonorous, almost chanting flow of Greek and Latin. "Huh? Oh, yeah. For two weeks. I saw plenty of transies trucked in, butI never saw any taken out. Maybe they left in the rocket. " "Rocket?" The youth was looking straight before him. His face was hard as bone, but his voice trembled. "Yes. A big one. It landed and discharged about a dozen men. " "You nuts? There's been only one man-carrying rocket invented, and itlands by parachute. " "I saw it, I tell you. And I'm not so nutty I'm seeing things thataren't there. Not yet, anyway!" "Maybe the government's got rockets it's not telling anybody about. " "Then what connection could there be between rehabilitation camps androckets?" Jack shrugged and said, "Your rocket story is fantastic. " "If somebody had told you four years ago that you'd be a bum hauled offto a concentration camp, you'd have said that was fantastic too. " Jack did not have time to reply. The truck stopped outside a high, barbed wire fence. The gate swung open; the truck bounced down the bumpydirt road. Jack saw some black-uniformed Bohas seated by heavy machineguns. They halted at another entrance; more barbed wire was passed. HugeDobermann pinschers looked at the transies with cold, steady eyes. Thedust of another section of road swirled up before they squeaked to astandstill and the engine turned off. This time, agents began to let down the back of the truck. They had topry the pitiful schizo's fingers loose from the wood with a crow-bar andcarry him off, still in his half-crouch. A sergeant boomed orders. Stiff and stumbling, the transies jumped offthe truck. They were swiftly lined up into squads and marched into theenclosure and from there into a huge black barracks. Within an hour eachman was stripped, had his head shaven, was showered, given a greyuniform, and handed a tin plate and spoon and cup filled with beans andbread and hot coffee. Afterwards, Jack wandered around, free to look at the sandy soilunderfoot and barbed wire and the black uniforms of the sentries, andfree to ask himself where, where, wherewherewhere? Twelve years ago ithad been, but where, where, where, was. . . ? III How easy it would have been to miss all this, if only he had obeyed hisfather. But Mr. Crane was so ineffectual. . . . "Jackie, " he had said, "would you please go outside and play, or stay insome other room. It's very difficult to discuss business while you'rewhooping and screaming around, and I have a lot to discuss with Mr. --" "Yes, Daddy, " Jack said before his father mentioned his visitor's name. But he was not Jack Crane in his game; he was Uncas. The big chairs andthe divan were trees in his imaginative eyes. The huge easy chair inwhich Daddy's caller (Jack thought of him only as "Mister") sat was afallen log. He, Uncas, meant to hide behind it in ambush. Mister did not bother him. He had smiled and said in a shrill voice thathe thought Jack was a very nice boy. He wore a light grey-green PalmBeach suit and carried a big brown leather briefcase that looked tooheavy for his soda straw-thin legs and arms. He was queer-lookingbecause his waist was so narrow and his back so humped. And when he tookoff his tan Panama hat, a white fuzz exploded from his scalp. His facewas pale as the moon in daylight. His broad smile showed teeth that Jackknew were false. But the queerest thing about him was his thick spectacles, so heavilytinted with rose that Jack could not see the eyes behind them. Theafternoon light seemed to bounce off the lenses in such a manner that nomatter what angle you looked at them, you could not pierce them. Andthey curved to hide the sides of his eyes completely. Mister had explained that he was an albino, and he needed the glasses todim the glare on his eyes. Jack stopped being Uncas for a minute tolisten. He had never seen an albino before, and, indeed, he did not knowwhat one was. "I don't mind the youngster, " said Mister. "Let him play here if hewants to. He's developing his imagination, and he may be finding morestimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We shouldnever cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy--or whatever you call it--is the essence and mainspringof those scientists, musicians, painters, and poets who amount tosomething in later life. They are adults who have remained youths. " Mister addressed Jack, "You're the Last of the Mohicans, and you'reabout to sneak up on the French captain and tomahawk him, aren't you?" Jack blinked. He nodded his head. The opaque rose lenses set in Mister'sface seemed to open a door into his naked grey skull. The man said, "I want you to listen to me, Jack. You'll forget my name, which isn't important. But you will always remember me and my visit, won't you?" Jack stared at the impenetrable lenses and nodded dumbly. Mister turned to Jack's father. "Let his fancy grow. It is a necessarywish-fulfillment play. Like all human young who are good for anything atall, he is trying to find the lost door to the Garden of Eden. Thehistory of the great poets and men-of-action is the history of theattempt to return to the realm that Adam lost, the forgotten Hesperidesof the mind, the Avalon buried in our soul. " Mr. Crane put his fingertips together. "Yes?" "Personally, I think that some day man will realize just what he issearching for and will invent a machine that will enable the child toproject, just as a film throws an image on a screen, the visions in hispsyche. "I see you're interested, " he continued. "You would be, naturally, sinceyou're a professor of philosophy. Now, let's call the toy aspecterscope, because through it the subject sees the spectres thathaunt his unconscious. Ha! Ha! But how does it work? If you'll keep itto yourself, Mr. Crane, I'll tell you something: My native country'sscientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven'tpublished anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give youa brief explanation: Light strikes the retina of the eye; the rods andcones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to theoptic nerve, which goes to the brain . . . " "Elementary and full of gaps, " said Jack's father. "Pardon me, " said Mister. "A bare outline should be enough. You'll beable to fill in the details. Very well. This specterscope breaks up thelight going into the eye in such a manner that the rods and conesreceive only a certain wavelength. I can't tell you what it is, exceptthat it's in the visual red. The scope also concentrates like aburning-glass and magnifies the power of the light. "Result? A hitherto-undiscovered chemical in the visual purple of therods is activated and stimulates the optic nerve in a way we had notguessed possible. An electrochemical stimulus then irritates thesubconscious until it fully wakes up. "Let me put it this way. The subconscious is not a matter of locationbut of organization. There are billions of possible connections betweenthe neurons of the cortex. Look at those potentialities as so many cardsin the same pack. Shuffle the cards one way and you have the commonworkaday _cogito, ergo sum_ mind. Reshuffle them, and, bingo! you havethe combination of neurons, or cards, of the unconscious. Thespecterscope does the redealing. When the subject gazes through it, hesees for the first time the full impact and result of his undergroundmind's workings in other perspectives than dreams or symbolicalbehavior. The subjective Garden of Eden is resurrected. It is mycontention that this specterscope will some day be available to allchildren. "When that happens, Mr. Crane, you will understand that the world willprofit from man's secret wishes. Earth will be a far better place. Paradise, sunken deep in every man, can be dredged out and set upagain. " "I don't know, " said Jack's father, stroking his chin thoughtfully witha finger. "Children like my son are too introverted as it is. Give themthis psychological toy you suggest, and you would watch them grow, notinto the outside world, but into themselves. They would fester. Man hasbeen expelled from the Garden. His history is a long, painful climbtoward something different. It is something that is probably better thanthe soft and flabby Golden Age. If man were to return, he would regress, become worse than static, become infantile or even embryonic. He wouldbe smothered in the folds of his own dreams. " "Perhaps, " said the salesman. "But I think you have a very unusual childhere. He will go much farther than you may think. Why? Because he issensitive and has an imagination that only needs the proper guidance. Too many children become mere bourgeois ciphers with paunches and round'O' minds full of tripe. They'll stay on earth. That is, I mean they'llbe stuck in the mud. " "You talk like no insurance salesman I've ever met. " "Like all those who really want to sell, I'm a born psychologist, "Mister shrilled. "Actually, I have an advantage. I have a Ph. D. Inpsychology. I would prefer staying at home for laboratory work, butsince I can help my starving children--I am not joking--so much more bycoming to a foreign land and working at something that will put food intheir mouths, I do it. I can't stand to see my little ones go hungry. Moreover, " he said with a wave of his long-fingered hand, "this wholeplanet is really a lab that beats anything within four walls. " "You spoke of famine. Your accent--your name. You're a Greek, aren'tyou?" "In a way, " said Mister. "My name, translated, means gracious or kindlyor well-meaning. " His voice became brisker. "The translation is apropos. I'm here to do you a service. Now, about these monthly premiums . . . " Jack shook himself and stepped out of the mold of fascination thatMister's glasses seemed to have poured around him. Uncas again, hecrawled on all fours from chair to divan to stool to the fallen logwhich the adults thought was an easy chair. He stuck his head frombehind it and sighted along the broomstick-musket at his father. He'dshoot that white man dead and then take his scalp. He giggled at that, because his father really didn't have any hairlock to take. At that moment Mister decided to take off his specs and polish them withhis breast-pocket handkerchief. While he answered one of Mr. Crane'squestions, he let them dangle from his fingers. Accidentally, the lenseswere level with Jack's gaze. One careless glance was enough to jerk hiseyes back to them. One glance stunned him so that he could not at onceunderstand that what he was seeing was not reality. There was his father across the room. But it wasn't a room. It was aspace outdoors under the low branch of a tree whose trunk was so big itwas as wide as the wall had been. Nor was the Persian rug there. It wasreplaced by a close-cropped bright green grass. Here and there foot-highflowers with bright yellow petals tipped in scarlet swayed beneath aninternal wind. Close to Mr. Crane's feet a white horse no larger than afox terrier bit off the flaming end of a plant. All those things were wonderful enough--but was that naked giant whosprawled upon a moss-covered boulder father? No! Yes! Though thefeatures were no longer pinched and scored and pale, though they wereglowing and tanned and smooth like a young athlete's they were hisfather's! Even the thick, curly hair that fell down over a wide foreheadand the panther-muscled body could not hide his identity. Though it tore at his nerves, and though he was afraid that once helooked away he would never again seize the vision, Jack ripped his gazeaway from the rosy view. The descent to the grey and rasping reality was so painful that tearsran down his cheeks, and he gasped as if struck in the pit of thestomach. How could beauty like that be all around him without hisknowing it? He felt that he had been blind all his life until this moment and wouldbe forever eyeless again, an unbearable forever, if he did not lookthrough the glass again. He stole another hurried glance, and the pain in his heart and stomachwent away, his insides became wrapped in a soft wind. He was lifted. Hewas floating, a pale red, velvety air caressed him and buoyed him. He saw his mother run from around the tree. That should have seemedpeculiar, because he had thought she was dead. But there she was, nolonger flat-walking and coughing and thin and wax-skinned, butgolden-brown and curvy and bouncy. She jumped at Daddy and gave him along kiss. Daddy didn't seem to mind that she had no clothes on. Oh, itwas so wonderful. Jack was drifting on a yielding and wine-tinted airand warmed with a wind that seemed to swell him out like a happyballoon. . . . Suddenly he was falling, hurtling helplessly and sickeningly through avoid while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around andaround. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again hefelt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the grey tentacles of theliving reality reach for his heart. Jack looked up at the stranger, who was just about to put his spectacleson the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. Jack never didsee the pink eyes. That didn't bother him. He had other things to think about. He crouchedbeside the chair while his brain tried to move again, tried to engulf athought and failed because it could not become fluid enough to find theidea that would move his tongue to shriek, _No! No! No!_ And when the salesman rose and placed his papers in his case and pattedJack on the head and bent his opaque rose spectacles at him and saidgood-by and that he wouldn't be coming back because he was going out oftown to stay, Jack was not able to move or say a thing. Nor for a longtime after the door had closed could he break through the mass thatgripped him like hardened lava. By then, no amount of screams andweeping would bring Mister back. All his father could do was to call adoctor who took the boy's temperature and gave him some pills. IV Jack stood inside the wire and bent his neck back to watch a huge blackand silver oyster feel the dusk for a landing-field with its singlewhite foot and its orange toes. Blindingly, lights sprang to attentionover the camp. When Jack had blinked his eyes back to normal, he could see over theflat half-mile between the fence and the ship. It lay quiet andglittering and smoking in the flood-beams. He could see the round doorin its side swing open. Men began filing out. A truck rumbled across theplain and pulled up beside the metal bulk. A very tall man stepped outof the cab and halted upon the running board, from which he seemed to begreeting the newcomers or giving them instructions. Whatever he wassaying took so long that Jack lost interest. Lately, he had not been able to focus his mind for any length of timeupon anything except that one event in the past. He wandered around andwhipped glances at his comrades' faces, noting listlessly that theiruniforms and shaved heads had improved their appearance. But nothingwould be able to chill the feverishness of their eyes. Whistles shrilled. Jack jumped. His heart beat faster. He felt as if theend of the quest were suddenly close. Somebody would be around thecorner. In a minute that person would be facing him, and then . . . Then, he reflected, and sagged with a wave of disappointment at thethought, then there was nobody around the corner. It always happenedthat way. Besides, there weren't any corners in this camp. He hadreached the wall at the end of the alley. Why didn't he stop looking? Sergeants lined the prisoners up four abreast preparatory to marchingthem into the barracks. Jack supposed it was time to turn in for thenight. He submitted to their barked orders and hard hands withoutresentment. They seemed a long way off. For the ten thousandth time hewas thinking that this need not have happened. If he had been man enough to grapple with himself, to wrestle as Jacobdid with the angel and not let loose until he had felled the problem, hecould be teaching philosophy in a quiet little college, as his fatherdid. He had graduated from high school with only average marks, andthen, instead of going to college, as his father had so much wanted himto, he had decided he would work a year. With his earnings, he would seethe world. He had seen it, but when his money ran out he had not returned home. Hehad drifted, taking jobs here and there, sleeping in flop-houses, jungles, park benches, and freight cars. When the newly created Bureau of Health and Sanity had frozen jobs in aneffort to solve the transiency problem, Jack had refused to work. Heknew that he would not be able to quit a job without being arrested atonce. Like hundreds of thousands of other youths, he had begged andstolen and hidden from the local police and the Bohas. Even through all those years of misery and wandering, he had not onceadmitted to himself the true nature of this fog-cottoned grail. He knewit, and he did not know it. It was patrolling the edge of his mind, circling a far-off periphery, recognizable by a crude silhouette butnameless. Any time he wanted to, he could have summoned it closer andsaid, _You are it, and I know you, and I know what I am looking for. Itis. . . ? Is what? Worthless? Foolish? Insane? A dream?_ Jack had never had the courage to take that action. When it seemed thething was galloping closer, charging down upon him, he ran away. It muststay on the horizon, moving on, always moving, staying out of his grasp. "All you guys, for'ard 'arch!" Jack did not move. The truck from the rocket had come through a gate andstopped by the transies, and about fifty men were getting off the back. The man behind Jack bumped into him. Jack paid him no attention. He didnot move. He squinted at the group who had come from the rocket. Theywere very tall, hump-shouldered, and dressed in light grey-green PalmBeach suits and tan Panama hats. Each held a brown leather briefcase atthe end of a long, thin arm. Each wore on the bridge of his long nose apair of rose-colored glasses. A cry broke hoarsely from the transies. Some of those in front of Jackfell to their knees as if a sudden poison had paralyzed their legs. Theycalled names and stretched out open hands. A boy by Jack's side sprawledface-down on the sand while he uttered over and over again, "Mr. Pelopoeus! Mr. Pelopoeus!" The name meant nothing to Jack. He did feel repulsed at seeing thefellow turn on his side, bend his neck forward, bring his clenched fistsup against his chest, and jackknife his legs against his arms. He hadseen it many times before in the transie jungles, but he had nevergotten over the sickness it had first caused him. He turned away and came almost nose to nose with one of the men from therocket. He had put down his briefcase so it rested against his leg andtaken a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe the dustfrom his lenses. His lids were squeezed shut as if he found the lightsunbearable. Jack stared and could not move while a name that the boy behind him hadbeen crying out slowly worked its way through his consciousness. Suddenly, like the roar of a flashflood that is just rounding the bendof a dry gulch, the syllables struck him. He lunged forward and clutchedat the spectacles in the man's hand. At the same time he yelled over andover the words that had filled out the blank in his memory. "Mr. Eumenes! Mr. Eumenes!" A sergeant cursed and slammed his fist into Jack's face. Jack fell down, flat on his back. Though his jaw felt as if it were torn loose from itshinge, he rolled over on his side, raised himself on his hands andknees, and began to get up to his feet. "Stand still!" bellowed the sergeant. "Stay in formation or you'll getmore of the same!" Jack shook his head until it cleared. He crouched and held out his handstoward the man, but he did not move his feet. Over and over, half-chanting, half-crooning, he said, "Mr. Eumenes! The glasses!Please, Mr. Eumenes, the glasses!" The forty-nine Mr. Eumenae-and-otherwise looked incuriously withimpenetrable rosy eyes. The fiftieth put the white handkerchief back inhis pocket. His mouth opened. False teeth gleamed. With his free hand hetook off his hat and waved it at the crowd and bowed. His tilted head showed a white fuzzlike hair that shot up over his palescalp. His gestures were both comic and terrifying. The hat and theinclination of his body said far more than words could. They said, _Good-by forever, and bon voyage!_ Then Mr. Eumenes straightened up and opened his lids. At first, the sockets looked as if they held no eyeballs, as if theywere empty of all but shadows. Jack saw them from a distance. Mr. Eumenes-or-his-twin was shooting awayfaster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller. No! He himself was. He was rocketing away within his own body. He was falling down a deepwell. He, Jack Crane, was a hollow shaft down which he slipped and screamed, away, away, from the world outside. It was like seeing from the wrongend of a pair of binoculars that lengthened and lengthened while the manwith the long-sought-for treasure in his hand flew in the oppositedirection as if he had been connected to the horizon by a rubber bandand somebody had released it and he was flying towards it, away fromJack. Even as this happened, as he knew vaguely that his muscles were lockinginto the posture of a beggar, hands out, pleading, face twisted into anagony of asking, lips repeating his croon-chant, he saw what hadoccurred. The realization was like the sudden, blinding, and at the same timeclarifying light that sometimes comes to epileptics just as they aregoing into a seizure. It was the thought that he had kept away on thehorizon of his mind, the thought that now charged in on him with longleaps and bounds and then stopped and sat on its haunches and grinned athim while its long tongue lolled. Of course, he should have known all these years what it was. He shouldhave known that Mr. Eumenes was the worst thing in the world for him. Hehad known it, but, like a drug addict, he had refused to admit it. Hehad searched for the man. Yet he had known it would be fatal to findhim. The rose-colored spectacles would swing gates that should never befully open. And he should have guessed _what_ and _who_ Mr. Eumenes waswhen that encyclopedic fellow in the truck had singsonged those names. How could he have been so stupid? Stupid? It was easy! He had _wanted_to be stupid! And how could the Mr. Eumenes-or-otherwise have used suchobvious giveaway names? It was a measure of their contempt for thehumans around them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the doubleentendres the salesman had given his father, and his father had neversuspected. Even the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity had beenterrifyingly blasé about it. Dr. Vespa. He had thrown his name like a gauntlet to humanity, andhumanity had stared idiotically at it and never guessed its meaning. Vespa was a good Italian name. Jack didn't know what it meant, but hesupposed that it had the same meaning as the Latin. He remembered itfrom his high school class. As for his not encountering the salesman until now, he had been lucky. If he had run across him during his search, he would have been deniedthe glasses, as now. And the shock would have made him unable to cry outand betray the man. He would have done what he was so helplessly doingat this moment, and he would have been carted off to an institution. How many other transies had seen that unforgettable face on the streets, the end of their search, and gone at once into that state that made themlegal prey of the Bohas? That was almost his last rational thought. He could no longer feel hisflesh. A thin red curtain was falling between him and his senses. Everywhere it billowed out beneath him and eased his fall. Everywhere itswirled and softened the outlines of things that were streaking by--alarge tree that he remembered seeing in his living room, a naked giant, his father, leaning against it and eating an apple, and a delicatelittle white creature cropping flowers. Yet all this while he lived in two worlds. One was the passage downwardstowards the Garden of Eden. The other was that hemisphere in which hehad dwelt so reluctantly, the one he now perceived through thethickening red veil of his sight and other senses. They were not yet gone. He could feel the hands of the black-cladofficers lifting him up and laying him upon some hard substance thatrocked and dumped. Every lurch and thud was only dimly felt. Then he wasplaced upon something softer and carried into what he vaguely sensed wasthe interior of one of the barracks. Some time later--he didn't know or care when, for he had lost allconception or even definition of time--he looked up the deepeverlengthening shaft of himself into the eyes of another Mr. Eumenes orMr. Sphex or Dr. Vespa or whatever he called himself. He was in whiteand wore a stethoscope around his neck. Beside him stood another of his own kind. This one wore lipstick and anurse's cap. She carried a tray on which were several containers. Onecontainer held a large and sharp scalpel. The other held an egg. It wasabout twice the size of a hen's egg. Jack saw all this just before the veil took on another shade of red andblurred completely his vision of the outside. But the final thickeningdid not keep him from seeing that Doctor Eumenes was staring down at himas if he were peering into a dusky burrow. And Jack could make out theeyes. They were large, much larger than they should have been at thespeed with which Jack was receding. They were not the pale pink of analbino's. They were black from corner to corner and built of a dozen orso hexagons whose edges caught the light. They twinkled. Like jewels. Or the eyes of an enormous and evolved wasp. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.