“You favor long words as much as I do,” the bottom half replied imperturbably, “but you also like to start arguments and employ a salty, clipped manner of speech which is really not your own—more like that of a deathwatch beetle.”
“I call a spade a spade,” the top half retorted. “And speaking of what spades delve into (a curt keening signifying the loamy integument of Mother Earth), I hope we’re not mashed into it by gunboats the next second or so. Or by beetle-crushers, to coin a felicitous expression.”
Bottom explained condescendingly, “The president and general secretary of the Coleopt Convention have a trusty corps of early-warning beetles stationed about to detect the approach of gunboats. A coleopterous Dewline.”
Top snorted, “Trusty! I bet they’re all goofing off and having lunch at Schrafft’s.”
“I have a feeling it’s going to be a great con,” bottom said.
“I have a feeling it’s going to be a lousy, fouled-up con,” top said. “Everybody will get conned. The Lousicon—how’s that for a name?”
“Lousy. Lice have their own cons. They belong to the orders Psocoptera, Anoplura, and Mallophaga, not the godlike, shining order Coleoptera.”
“Scholiast! Paranoid!”
The top and bottom halves of the blade of grass broke off their polemics, panting.
The beetles of all Terra, but especially the United States, were indeed having their every-two-years world convention, their Biannual Bug Thing, in the large, railed-off grass plot in Central Park, close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, improbable as that may seem and just as the grassblade with the split personality had said.
Now, you may think it quite impossible for a vast bunch of beetles, ranging in size from nearly microscopic ones to unicorn beetles two and one-half inches long, to hold a grand convention in a dense urban area without men becoming aware of it. If so, you have seriously underestimated the strength and sagacity of the coleopterous tribe and overestimated the sensitivity and eye for detail of Homo Sapiens—Sap for short.
These beetles had taken security measures to awe the CIA and NKVD, had those fumbling human organizations been aware of them. There was indeed a Beetle Dewline to warn against the approach of gunboats—which are, of course, the elephantine, leather-armored feet of those beetle-ignoring, city-befuddled giants, men. In case such veritable battleships loomed nigh, all accredited beetles had their directives to dive down to the grassroots and harbor there until the all-clear sounded on their ESP sets.
And should such a beetle-crusher chance to alight on a beetle or beetles, well, in case you didn’t know it, beetles are dymaxion-built ovoids such as even Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright never dreamed of, crush-resistant to a fabulous degree and able to endure such saturation shoe-bombings without getting the least crack in their resplendent carapaces.
So cast aside doubts and fears. The beetles were having their world convention exactly as and where I’ve told you. There were bright-green ground beetles, metallic wood-boring beetles, yellow soldier beetles, gorgeous ladybird beetles, and handsome and pleasing fungus beetles just as brilliantly red, charcoal—gray blister yellow hieroglyphs imprinted on their shining green backs, immigrant and affluent Japanese beetles, snout beetles, huge darksome stag and horn beetles, dogbane beetles like fire opals, and even that hyper-hieroglyphed rune-bearing yellow-on-blue beetle wonder of the family Chrysomelidae and subfamily Chrysomelinae Calligrapha serpentine. All of them milling about in happy camaraderie, passing drinks and bons mots, as beetles will. Scuttling, hopping, footing the light fantastic, and even in sheer exuberance lifting their armored carapaces to take short flights of joy on their retractable membranous silken wings like glowing lace on the lingerie of Viennese baronesses.
And not just U.S. beetles, but coleopts from all over the world—slant-eyed Asian beetles in golden robes, North African beetles in burnished burnooses, South African beetles wild as fire ants with great Afro hairdos, smug English beetles, suave Continental bugs, and brilliantly clad billionaire Brazilian beetles and fireflies constantly dancing the carioca and sniffing ether and generously spraying it at other beetles in intoxicant mists. Oh, a grandsome lot.
Not that there weren’t flies in the benign ointment of all this delightful coleopterous sociability. Already the New York City cockroaches were out in force, picketing the convention because they hadn’t been invited. Round and round the sacred grass plot they tramped, chanting labor-slogans in thick accents and hurling coarse working-class epithets.
“But of course we couldn’t have invited them even if we’d wanted to,” explained the Convention’s general secretary, a dapper click beetle, in fact an eyed elater of infinite subtlety and resource in debate and tactics. As the book says, “If the eyed elater falls on its back, if lies quietly for perhaps a minute. Then, with a loud click, it flips into the air. If it is lucky, it lands on its feet and runs away; otherwise it tries again.” And the general secretary had a million other dodges as good or better. He said now, “But we couldn’t have invited them even if we’d wanted to, because cockroaches aren’t true beetles at all, aren’t Coleoptera; they belong to the order Orthoptera, the family Blattidae—blat to them! Moreover, many of them are mere German (German-Jewish, maybe?) Croton bugs, dwarfish in stature compared to American cockroaches, who all once belonged to the Confederate Army.”
In seconds the plausible slander was known by insect grapevine to the cockroaches. Turning the accusation to their own Wobbly purposes, they began rudely to chant in unison as they marched, “Blat, blat, go the Blattidae!”
Also, several important delegations of beetles had not yet arrived, including those from Bangladesh, Switzerland, Iceland and Egypt.
But despite all these hold-ups and disturbances, the first session of the Great Coleopt Congress got off to a splendid start. The president, a portly Colorado potato beetle resembling Grover Cleveland, rapped for order. Whereupon row upon row of rainbow-hued beetles rose to their feet amidst the greenery and sonorously sang—drowning out even the guttural blats of the crude cockroaches—the chief beetle anthem:
They sang it to the melody of the Ode to Joy in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.
The session left many beetle wives, larval children, husbands and other nonvoting members at loose ends. But provision had been made for them. Guided by a well-informed though somewhat stuffy scribe beetle, they entered the Metropolitan Museum for a conducted tour designed for both entertainment and cultural enrichment.
While the scribe beetle pointed out notable items of interest and spoke his educational but somewhat longwinded pieces, they scuttled all over the place, feeling out the forms of great statues by crawling over them and revealing inside the many silvery suits of medieval armor.
Most gunboats didn’t notice them at all. Those who did were not in the least disturbed. Practically all gunboats—though they dread spiders and centipedes and loath cockroaches—like true beetles, as witness the good reputation of the ladybug, renowned in song and story for her admirable mother love and fire-fighting ability. These gunboats assumed that the beetles were merely some new educational feature of the famed museum, or else an artistry of living arabesques.