Rosen stood for a minute in thought. "You'll have to commit him, Mr. Nicholson," he said. "I don't know any way around it. I'll get the papers. There's a good place in Utica ..."
This happened before that court decision, that a loony must be allowed to run loose until he proves he is dangerous by killing somebody. After the troopers and the Nicholsons had gone, I asked Rosen:
"Doc, what was all that about birth dates?"
"Mr. Newbury, I've told you I don't believe for a second in supernatural stuff. But it is a strange coincidence that Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889; and that he killed himself in Berlin on the very day Marshall Nicholson was born. Moreover, I've read Hitler's speeches in the original."
"You have? That seems strange."
"Not at all. When you know somebody is out to kill you, it's only sensible to learn all you can about him, so you can protect yourself. The German that Nick was spouting seemed to be nothing but excerpts from Hitler's speeches. I'd have to check—I can't remember them word for word— but it certainly sounded familiar. Mr. Catfish, what was in that water Mr. Newbury got Nick to drink?"
"Just tap water," said Catfish, "but I prayed to Eitsinoha to give it the power to take away a man's memory." To me he added: "Donar gave her quite a tussle, but every spirit's strongest on its home ground."
"You mean," I said, "that Nick is a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler? I can see how that might work. If you wiped out his memory of this life, that would leave him the memory of his previous life. So he'd think he was still Hitler and be very much confused. One moment he's in the bunker, getting ready to shoot himself; the next, he's in a woodshed in upstate New York—"
"Please, please!" said Rosen. "I've told you, I don't believe in that nonsense. My business is curing folks of what ails them, and for that I need a strictly scientific outlook. But I thought it might interest you. Do you need a lift home, now that your cars are disabled?"
"No, thanks," I said. "Trooper Talbot offered to drive us back to the Farm. He should be waiting outside."
"Well, good-night, then. And Mrs. Wilder, you simply must learn to resist the sweets and starches!" -
The Purple Pterodactyls
I am as ordinary, commonplace a guy as you can find: middle-sized, middle-class, middle-aged; engineer by training, banker by circumstance; with a nice wife, nice kids, nice house, and nice car. But the damndest things happen to me.
When the children were grown enough so that they could take care of themselves in summer, Denise and I spent a vacation by ourselves at the shore. My cousin Linda, who has a house there, had been raving about Ocean Bay. So we rented an apartment in a rambly wooden-frame building, a block from the beach. This was before the waterfront sprouted a host of huge condominiums, like a plague of concrete mushrooms. You could walk on the sand without stepping on somebody or getting hit in the eye with a frisbee.
We swam, we sunned, and we walked the boardwalk. The second afternoon, Denise said: "Willy, my old, why do we walk not down to the park of amusement?"
She said it in French, since we speak it a lot enfamille. It is her native tongue, and I try to keep mine up by practice. We tried to bring the children up bilingually, but it took with only one of them.
We walked a mile to the piers and concessions. There were the usual fun house, roller coaster, and shooting gallery. There was a fortuneteller who called himself Swami Krishna. There were concessions where you threw darts at rubber balloons, or threw baseballs at plywood cats, or tossed baseballs into baskets. These baskets were so set that, when you did get your ball in, it bounced right out again and did not count. If you succeeded in such endeavors, you won teddy bears, rubber pythons, and similar junk.
I am normally immune to the lure of such games. One, however, showed more originality.
You bought three rubber rings, four or five inches in diameter, for half a dollar. You tossed these rings over three little posts, a couple of feet high and a mere yard from the thrower. There were three sets of these posts, forming three sides of a square.
The upper part of each post was conical, and it was no trick to get the ring over the point of the cone. To win, however, the ring had to fall down the rest of the post, which was square in cross-section and barely small enough for the ring to go over it. Nearly always, the ring hung up on the corners at the top of the square section. You had to ring all three posts at once to win a prize.
The prizes were even more originaclass="underline" a flock of plush-and-wire pterodactyls. They came in several models and sizes, some with long tails and some with short, some with teeth and some with long, toothless beaks. The biggest were over a yard across the wings. They were made so that you could hang one from your ceiling as a mobile. If the wind was strong, you could lock the wings in place and fly the thing as a kite. They were all dyed in shades of purple.
"Purple pterodactyls!" I said. "Darling, I've got to have one of those."
"Oh, mon Dieu.'" said Denise. "What on earth would you do with it?"
"Hang it in my study, I suppose."
"You had better not hang it where the people can see it. What do you like about these monsters?"
"I suppose it's the alliteration of the name. Only it's not a real alliteration, since you don't pronounce the p in 'pterodactyl' That makes it just an eye-rhyme—I mean an eye-alliteration."
"In English, maybe. But in French we do pronounce the p: p'tero-dac-TEEL. That is what is wrong with the English; you never know when some letter at the beginning of a word is silent."
"Like 'knife,' you mean? Well, in French you never know when a letter at the end of a word is silent. Let me have a try at this."
The concessionaire was a short, tubby, bald man of about my age, with a big black mustache. The ends of the' mustache were waxed and curled up, something like the Schnurrbart once worn by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The man sold me a set of rings, and I threw ... Ten dollars and sixty rings later, I was no nearer to getting my purple pterodactyl.
"Will you sell me one of those?" I asked the proprietor. "How much?"
The man ducked a little bow. "I am so sorry, sir," he said with a slight accent, "but they are not for sale. Either you win them with the rings, or you do not get any."
A look from Denise told me I had better not throw any more of the Newbury fortune, such as it was, after Mesozoic reptiles just then. As we walked off, I growled something like: 'Til get one of those things if it's my last ..."
"You say we can't afford a Mercedes," she said, "but you throw away money on those hideous ..."
"Well, anyway," said I to change the subject, "if we go right back to the house, we can get another swim before dinner."
"Willy!" she said. "You have had one swim today. The waves are big, and you will get the sunburn. Do not kill yourself, trying to prove your manhood! You forget we are middle-aged."
"I may be middle-aged," said I with a leer, "but I can still do some of the things young men do."
"Yes, I know. You did it just this morning. Some day you will try to prove your manhood once too often, and you will have the stroke in the middle of it."
"I can't think of a better way to go."
"But think of your poor wife! Aside from the fact that I don't want to be a widow, consider how embarrassing it would be to explain to the policemen!"
Next morning, we went out for our sun-and-swim. There on the beach was our friend of the purple pterodactyls, also soaking up ultra-violet. In bathing trunks, with his pod and his jungle of graying chest hair, he was a walking argument against nudism. He had been swimming, for the water had dissolved the pomade out of his mustache, so the ends hung down in Fu-Manchurian style. He was spooning sand upon himself with a child's toy shovel.