But instead of depositing it where everybody else was, I walked around the mountain of bags. Out of view on the riverside, I took the basket out and dumped the bones inside the bag over the railing into the river. I took one peek around my hiding place. Alice was nowhere to be seen.
Satisfied she would not be able to find me, and glad that I’d not disclosed my plans to her last night, I took the basket and crawled backward into the bag. Once there, I succumbed to the three things that had been fighting within me—grief, hunger, and thirst. Tears ran as 1 thought of Alice. At the same time, I greedily devoured, in rapid succession, an orange, a leg and breast of chicken, a half-loaf of fresh bread, and two great plums.
I crouched within the thick leather bag like—I couldn’t help thinking—an embryo within its sac. I was sweating so much that I felt as if I were floating in amniotic fluid. The outside noises came through dimly; every once in a while I’d hear a big shout.
When the workers quit the barge, I stuck my head out long enough to grab some air and look at the sun. It seemed to be about eleven o’clock, although the sun, like the moon, was so distorted that I couldn’t be sure. Our scientists had said the peculiar warmth of the valley and the elongation of the sun and moon were due to some “wave-focusing force field” hanging just below the stratosphere. This had no more meaning than calling it a sorcerer’s spell, but it had satisfied the general public and the military.
About noon, the ceremonies began. I ate the last two plums in the basket, but I didn’t dare open the bottle at its bottom. Though it felt like a wine-container, I didn’t want to chance the possibility that the Brew might be mixed in it.
From time to time, I heard, intermingled with band music, snatches of chants. Then, suddenly, the band quit playing and there was a mighty shout of, “Mahrud is Bull—Bull is all—and Sheed is the prophet!”
The band began playing the Semiramis overture. When it was almost through, the barge trembled with an unmistakable motion. I had not heard any tug, nor did I think there was one. After all I’d seen, the idea of a boat moving by itself was just another miracle.
The overture ended in a crash of chords. Somebody yelled, “Three cheers for Albert Allegory!” and the crowd responded.
The noises died I could hear, faintly, the slapping of the waves against the side of the barge. For a few minutes, that was all. Then heavy footsteps sounded close by. I ducked back within the bag and lay still. The steps came very near and stopped.
The rumbling unhuman voice of The Allegory said, “Looks as if somebody forgot to tie up this bag.”
Another voice said, “Oh, Al, leave it. What’s the difference?”
I would have blessed the unknown voice except for one thing—it sounded so much like Alices.
I’d thought that was a shock, but a big green four-fingered hand appeared in the opening of the bag’s mouth and seized the cords, intending to draw them close and tie them up. At the same time, the tag, which was strung on the cord, became fixed in my vision long enough for me to read the name.
Mrs. Daniel Temper.
I had thrown my mothers bones into the river!
For some reason, this affected me more than the fact that I was now tied into a close and suffocating sack, with no knife to cut my way out. The voice of The Allegory, strange in its saurian mouth-structure, boomed out. “Well, Peggy, was your sister quite happy when you left her?”
Temper,“ said the voice, which I now realized was Peggy Rourke’s.
“After we’d kissed, as sisters should who haven’t seen each other for three years, I explained everything that had happened to me. She
, started to tell me of her adventures, but I told her I knew most of
,! them. She just couldn’t believe that we’d been keeping tabs on her
‘ ’and her lover ever since they crossed the border.“
“Too bad we lost track of him after Polivinosel chased them down Adams Street,” said Allegory. “And if we’d been one minute earlier, we’d have caught him, too. Oh, well, we know he’ll try to destroy the Bottle—or steal it. He’ll be caught there.”
“If he does get to the Bottle,” said Peggy, “he’ll be the first man to do so. That F.B.I, agent only got as far as the foot of the hill, remember.”
“If anybody can do it,” chuckled Allegory, “Dan H. Temper can. Or so says Mahrud, who should know him well enough.” i “Won’t Temper be surprised when he finds out that his every move since he entered Mahrudland has been not only a reality, but a symbol of reality? And that we’ve been leading him by the nose through the allegorical maze?”
Allegory laughed with all the force of a bull-alligator’s roar.
“I wonder if Mahrud isn’t asking too much of him by demanding that he read into his adventures a meaning outside of themselves? For instance, could he see that he entered this valley as a baby enters the world, bald and toothless? Or that he met and conquered the ass that is in all of us? But that, in order to do so, he had to lose his outer strength and visible burden—the water-tank? And then operate upon his own strength with no source of external strength to fall back on? Or that, in the Scrambled Men, he met the living punishment of human self-importance in religion?”
Peggy said, “He’ll die when he finds out that the real Pol-ivinosel was down South and that you were masquerading as him.”
“Well,” rumbled Allegory, “I hope Temper can see that Mah-rud kept Polivinosel in his asinine form as an object lesson to everybody that, if Polivinosel could become a god, then anybody could. If he can’t, he’s not very smart.”
I was thinking that I had, strangely enough, thought that very thing about the Ass. And then the cork in the bottle in the basket decided to pop, and the contents—Brew—gushed out over my side.
I froze, afraid that the two would hear it. But they went on talking as if they hadn’t noticed. It was no wonder—the Allegory’s voice thundered on.
“He met Love, Youth, and Beauty—which are nowhere to be found in abundance except in this valley—in the form of Alice Lewis. And she, like all three of those qualities, was not won easily, nor without a change in the wooer. She rejected him, lured him, teased him, almost drove him crazy. She wanted him, yet she didn’t. And he had to conquer some of his faults—such as shame of his baldness and toothlessness—before he could win her, only to find out his imagined faults were, in her eyes, virtues.”
“I don’t know. I wish I’d first taken the form of the Sphinx and asked him her questions, so he’d have had a clue to what was expected of him. He’d have known, of course, that the answer to the Sphinx is that man himself is the answer to all the old questions. Then he might have seen what I was driving at when I asked him where Man—Modern Man—was going.”
“And when he finds the answer to that, then he too will be a god.”
“If!” said Allegory. “If! Mahrud says that Dan Temper is quite a few cuts above the average man of this valley. He is the reformer, the idealist who won’t be happy unless he’s tilting his lance against some windmill. In his case, he’ll not only have to defeat the windmills within himself—his neuroses and traumas—he’ll have to reach deep within himself and pull up the drowned god in the abyss of himself by the hair. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.”
“Oh, no, not that!” gasped Peggy. “I didn’t know Mahrud meant that!*‘
“Yes,” thundered the Allegory, “he does! He says that Temper will have to find himself or die. Temper himself would want it that way. He’d not be satisfied with being one of the happy-go-lucky, let-the-gods-do-it Brew-bums who loaf beneath this uninhibited sun. He’ll either be first in this new Rome, or else he’ll die.”
The conversation was interesting, to say the least, but I lost track of the next few sentences because the bottle had not quit gushing. It was spurting a gentle but steady stream against my side. And, I suddenly realized that the bag would fill and the bottles contents would run out the mouth of the bag and reveal my presence.
Frantically, I stuck my finger in the bottle’s neck and succeeded in checking the flow.
“So,” said Allegory, “he fled to the cemetery, where he met Weepenwilly. Weepenwilly who mourns eternally yet would resent the dead being brought back. Who refuses to take his cold and numbed posterior from the gravestone of his so-called beloved. That man was the living symbol of himself, Daniel Temper, who grieved himself into baldness at an early age, though he blamed his mysterious sickness and fever for it. Yet who, deep down, didn’t want his mother back, because she’d been nothing but trouble to him.”
The pressure in the bottle suddenly increased and expelled my finger. The Brew in it burst over me despite my efforts to plug it up again, gushing out at such a rate that the bag would fill faster than its narrow mouth could let it out. I was facing two dangers—being discovered and being drowned.
As if my troubles weren’t enough, somebody’s heavy foot descended on me and went away. A voice succeeded it. I recognized it, even after all these years. It was that of Doctor Boswell Durham, the god now known as Mahrud. But it had a basso quality and richness it had not possessed in his predeity days.
“All right, Dan Temper, the masquerade is over!”
Frozen with terror, I kept silent and motionless.
“I’ve sloughed off the form of the Allegory and taken my own.” Durham went on. “That was really I talking all the time. I was the Allegory you refused to recognize. Myself—your old teacher. But then you always did refuse to see any of the allegories I pointed out to you.
“Well, Dan my boy, you’re right back where you started—in your mother’s womb where, I suspect you’ve always wanted to be. How do I know so much? Brace yourself for a real shock. I was Doctor Duerf, the psychologist who conditioned you. Run that name backward and remember how I love a pun or an anagram.”
I found all this hard to believe. The Professor had always been kindly, gentle, and humorous. I would have thought he was pulling my leg if it hadn’t been for one thing! that was the Brew, which was about to drown me. I really thought he was carrying his joke too far.
I told him so, as best I could in my muffled voice.
He yelled back, ‘“Life is real—life is earnest!’ You’ve always said so, Dan. Let’s see now if you meant it. All right, you’re a baby due to be born. Are you going to stay in this sac, and die, or are you going to burst out from the primal waters into life?
“Let’s put it another way, Dan. I’m the midwife, but my hands are tied. I can’t assist in the accouchment directly. I have to coach you via long distance, symbolically, so to speak. I can tell you what to do to some extent, but you, being an unborn infant, may have to guess at the meaning of some of my words.”
I wanted to cry out a demand that he quit clowning around and let me out. But I didn’t. 1 had my pride.
Huskily, weakly, I said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Answer the questions I, as Allegory and Ass, asked you. Then you’ll be able to free yourself. And rest assured, Dan, that I’m not opening the bag for you.”
What was it he had said? My mind groped frantically; the rising tide of the Brew made thinking difficult. I wanted to scream and tear at the leather with my naked hands. But if I did that, I’d go under and never come up again.
I clenched my fists, forced my mind to slow down, to go back over what Allegory and Polivinosel had said.
What was it? What was it?
The Allegory had said, “Where do you want to go now?”
And Polivinosel, while chasing me down Adams Street— Adam’s Street?—had called out, “Little man, what now?”
The answer to the Sphinx’s question was:
Man.
Allegory and Ass had proposed their questions in the true scientific manner so that they contained their own answer.
In the next second, with that realization acting like a powerful motor within me, I snapped the conditioned reflex as if it were a wishbone. I drank deeply of the Brew, both to quench my thirst and to strip myself of the rest of my predeity inhibitions. I commanded the bottle to stop fountaining. And with an explosion that sent Brew and leather fragments flying over the barge, I rose from the bag.
Mahrud was standing there, smiling. I recognized him as my old prof, even though he was now six and a half feet tall, had a thatch of long black hair, and had pushed his features a little here and there to make himself handsome. Peggy stood beside him. She looked like her sister, Alice, except that she was red-haired. She was beautiful, but I’ve always preferred brunettes—specifically, Alice.
“Understand everything now?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “including the fact that much of this symbolism was thought up on the spur of the moment to make it sound impressive. Also, that it wouldn’t have mattered if I had drowned, for you’d have brought me back to life.”
“Yes, but you’d never have become a god. Nor would you have succeeded me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked blankly.
“Peggy and I deliberately led you and Alice toward this denouement so we could have somebody to carry on our work here. We’re a little bored with what we’ve done, but we realize that we can’t just leave. So I’ve picked you as a good successor. You’re conscientious, you’re an idealist, and you’ve discovered your potentialities. You’ll probably do better than I have at this suspension of ‘natural’ laws. You’ll make a better world than I could. After all, Danny, my godling, I’m the Old Bull, you know, the one for having fun.
“Peggy and I want to go on a sort of Grand Tour to visit the former gods of Earth, who are scattered all over the Galaxy. They’re all young gods, you know, by comparison with the age of the Universe. You might say they’ve just got out of school—this Earth—and are visiting the centers of genuine culture to acquire polish.”
“What about me?”
“You’re a god now, Danny. You make your own decisions. Meanwhile, Peggy and I have places to go.”
He smiled one of those long slow smiles he used to give us students when he was about to quote a favorite line of his.
“‘… listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go.’”
Peggy and he did go. Like thistles, swept away on the howling winds of space, they were gone.
And after they had vanished, I was left staring at the river and the hills and the sky and the city, where the assembled faithful watched, awestruck. It was mine, all mine.
Including one black-haired figure—and what a figure—that stood on the wharf and waved at me.
Do you think I stood poised in deep reverie and pondered on my duty to mankind or the shape of teleology now that I was personally turning it out on my metaphysical potters wheel? Not I. I leaped into the air and completed sixteen entrechats of pure joy before I landed. Then I walked across the water—on the water—to Alice.
I do think it was rather nice of me. After all, I wasn’t in too good a mood. That whole night and morning, my legs and my upper gums had been very sore. They were making me somewhat irritable, despite liberal potions of Brew.
But there was a good reason.
I had growing pains, and I was teething.