“You were saying…?” she prompted.
Prometheus sighed deeply. “It wasn’t important.”
But Pandora liked answers and didn’t want to let it go. “You said it has been in our nature ever since…?”
Prometheus looked up into her intelligent face, and his eyes glistened as a sad and distant memory surfaced in his consciousness.
“There was a woman once—Careful, Jack!” A second later there was a crash from the kitchen as Jack tripped over a stool. “I had put those parts of the human id that I thought undesirable into a large jar and sealed it tightly. I hoped to keep intolerance, sickness, insanity, vice and greed away from mankind. But”—he paused—“there was this woman who opened it against my wishes and let them out to taint the race I had created.”
“Pandora?” asked Pandora, who knew a bit about her erstwhile namesake.
Prometheus flinched at the sound of her name. “Yes, Pandora. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, the most rare and radiant maiden who ever walked upon this globe. Her skin was as soft as silk, and her eyes shone like emeralds. Her dark and flowing hair tossed joyfully in the wind as she ran, and her laughter was like cherubs singing in the morning breeze.”
“Hmm,” responded Pandora. “I heard she was a bit of a trollop.”
“Oh, she was,” replied Prometheus hurriedly. “She was as vain, foolish, mischievous and idle as she was beautiful.”
“And yet you fell in love with her?”
Prometheus nodded. “I loved her, and she betrayed me. I had no idea she was sent by Zeus to cause trouble to the human race. Alas, I was wrong. The ills were let out of my jar, and you can see the result.”
“But hope remained,” said Pandora, attempting to raise the spirits of Prometheus, who seemed to have lapsed into depression.
“Delusive hope,” corrected Prometheus quietly. “I had placed it there as a sort of insurance policy. Delusive hope, by its lies, dissuades mankind from mass suicide.”
“And where is she now?”
“I have no idea. After I was sentenced, my brother—fool that he was—married her to avoid a similar fate.”
“And you never saw them again?”
“They kept in contact for a bit, but you know how it is—just cards on my birthday for the first three hundred years and then nothing at all. The last I heard of them was in 1268, when Epimetheus was working as a cobbler and Pandora made a living as a translator. I have tried to find them since my release, but to no avail. I have difficulty traveling without a passport.”
“And the jar?” inquired Pandora, still curious.
He shrugged. “It’s invulnerable to any form of destructive power, so it must still be somewhere. But where that might be, I have no idea.”
“Coffee!” announced Jack, wondering whether sitting between Pandora and Prometheus wasn’t taking it too far. It was, so he sat with Madeleine. They all talked animatedly with Prometheus into the night. Pandora told him about studying for her degree in astrophysics; Prometheus mentioned that he thought Robert Oppenheimer had done the same as he—stolen fire from the gods and given it to mankind. The difference between him and Oppenheimer, he added dryly, was that Oppenheimer was never punished. Pandora told him about Big Bang theory, and he told her that Zeus had created the constellations; it was a lively argument and they had just got around to discussing human self-determination when Madeleine announced that she was going to bed and pulled on her husband’s hand to make him join her.
“I’ll stay for a little longer,” said Jack.
“It’s perfectly okay, Jack,” said Prometheus. “I’m not going to sleep with your daughter.”
His directness caught Jack on the hop, and he laughed at his own stupidity.
“Terrific!” he said at last. “I’m going to bed.”
Pandora and Prometheus continued talking as the fire gradually burnt itself down. Prometheus pointed out the flaws in evolutionary theory, such as how a bird could possibly have evolved wings without having useless appendages for thousands of years that would have hindered its survival. Pandora countered by saying that rule number one of the cosmos was that unlikely things do happen. Indeed, given the time scale involved and the size of the universe, unlikely things, paradoxically enough, become quite commonplace.
“What do you think?” asked Jack as he took off his shirt in the bedroom.
“About what?”
“Pandora and Prometheus.”
“Science meets mythology. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions they draw before the night is out. I’ll be fascinated to hear what Prometheus has to say about the fossil record.”
“Hmm,” said Jack as he climbed into his pajamas and pushed the inert form of Ripvan off his side of the bed. The cat fell to the floor with a thump—and without waking.
Jack slept well that night, curled up with Madeleine like two spoons in a drawer. Below them in the living room, Prometheus and Pandora talked into the small hours, while barely a mile away, in Granny Spratt’s garden, the beanstalk creaked and groaned to itself as it grew, like a bamboo plantation in the tropics.
32. Giorgio Porgia
CRIME BOSS TO RUN PRISON
History was made last week when Giorgio Porgia, Reading’s onetime crime boss and self-proclaimed “menace to society,” was unanimously elected governor of Reading Gaol. The surprise result followed an equal-opportunities advertisement for a replacement governor to which Mr. Porgia applied. Septuagenarian former blowtorch-wielding sadist Giorgio Porgia was found to be the most qualified to run the prison as he had himself spent much time within such institutions and has an almost unparalleled understanding of the irredeemable criminal mind—his own. The Home Secretary happily endorsed his appointment, and “Governor” Porgia will begin work in March.
—From The Owl, January 29, 1999
If the Sacred Gonga hadn’t been due for dedication by the Jellyman the following day, the papers would have had nothing else but the Humpty Dumpty case. As it was, they were half Humpty, half Jellyman. Even so, the Humpty part of it wasn’t good, and they all followed pretty much the same line: that Jack was an imbecile who was too proud to ask for help from one of the most eminent and upright pillars of the detecting community. Jack took the papers from the breakfast table and tossed them in the bin, then switched off the radio.
“The crowd is gathering,” said Madeleine as she looked out the window at the pressmen and TV news crews waiting to get a reaction. “I’m going to take the children to see the Jellyman,” she added. “Do you think you’ll be able to join us?”