My skinny little nephew Robert Hopkins, as hairy as ever but more subdued than the year before, was a senior at the local college, where Avery Hopkins was Professor of Middle English.
"You know, Uncle Willy," said Robert at dinner, "all that stuff about burning banks and such was attacking the problem from the wrong end. I see that now. Like, if you really want to change the System, it does no good to use the same material means that the oppressing class does, because you end up just a materialistic as the oppressors. That's where the Communists went wrong. You've got to approach it on another plane, like you was making an end run in football."
"As if you were making an end run," said Avery Hopkins.
"Okay, okay, as if you were making an end run. Not that I'm any kind of jock."
"I never suspected that of you," I said. "How do you get to this other plane?"
"That takes special knowledge. There's a little study group working on it right now. We're figuring out a scientific way to use love as a weapon."
I glanced a question at Robert's parents. ~My sister Stella said: "It's some occult group that Robert has joined. We don't think much of their ideas; but they got Bob to give up marijuana, so they can't be all bad."
"So long as he keeps his marks up," said Avery Hopkins, "it's his business what ideological vagary he pursues. The young are always careening from one extreme belief to another. As Aristotle says, they despise money because they don't know what it is to be without it."
Remembering Robert's antics of the previous year, I expected a tantrum or at least an outburst. Instead, he smiled benignly.
"You'll learn," he said. "Uncle Willy, would you and Aunt Denise like to attend one of our ceremonies? I've tried to get Mom and Dad to go, but they won't touch it. The Master Daubeny's promised us a climax."
"I might," I said. "As for Denise, ask her."
"I might, also," said Denise. "My great big stubborn idiot of a husband needs me to keep him out of the trouble."
Next day, Stella took Denise on a round of the shops of San Romano. Avery Hopkins asked if I should like to see his campus. Nothing loath, I submitted to his guided tour. Since I am an engineer by training and a banker only by circumstance, the scientific laboratories interested me most. In the Worth Biology Building, Hopkins met a young instructor.
"This is Jerry Kleinfuss," said Hopkins. "My brother-in-law, Wilson Newbury. What's new, Jerry? Has anybody put piranhas in the swimming tank again?"
"Good God!" I said. "Has some poor devil been devoured while taking a swim?"
"No," replied Kleinfuss. "Some undergraduate did put a few of these fish in the tank and then spread the story during a meet. You should have seen the swimmers leap out of the water like seals! But these piranhas were of a harmless species. What puzzles us now is: who stole one of our Urechis worms?"
"Your what?" I said.
"Urechis, a large marine worm. We got several for experiments from the coast near Santa Barbara. Now somebody's pinched one, tank and all."
"Why should anybody do that?"
Kleinfuss shrugged. "We have no idea, unless the thief wanted to fry and eat it. I don't thing the result would be anything to write home about."
"Could I see one of these worms?"
"Sure. Right this way."
Kleinfuss led Hopkins and me into a room lined with small glass tanks, containing various marine organisms. Some had jointed legs, some tentacles, and some other appendages.
"Here they are," said Kleinfuss.
In each of the tanks, a large pink worm was moving slowly about in the water. Each worm was a cylinder, about eight or nine inches long and an inch in diameter. It was just the color of human flesh, which it amazingly resembled. It even had little blue veins visible through the skin. The effect was startling.
I burst out laughing. "I see the organs," I said, "but where are the organisms?"
Kleinfuss smiled. "You're not the first to notice the resemblance. Anyway, that vacant place in the row is where our missing worm was. We called him Priapus. The others are Casanova, Lothario, and Don Juan. To catch them, you stick a length of rubber tube down the burrow. The worm swallows the tube and swarms up it, forming a kind of fleshy sleeve on the outside of the tube. Then you have only to pull out the tube and scrape off the worm."
That evening, the Hopkinses had another couple to dinner. These were Associate Professor Marvin Held, from the Language Department, and his wife Ethel, an assistant professor of psychology. Held, a big, bushy-bearded chap who taught Romance languages, defended Latin and bewailed its disappearance from modern high-school curricla.
"I don't know," I said. "I've forgotten most of my high-school Latin. I'd rather have put the time on a widely-spoken modern language, like Spanish."
"Oh, you're both wrong," said young Robert in his squeaky voice. "I know people who've been all over the world, and they always found somebody who spoke English if they hollered long and loud enough."
Held snorted. "No wonder we're becoming a nation of illiterates! First the kids demand a say in college policies, and our spineless administration gives in. Then they find there's nothing duller than committee meetings to decide if full credit shall be given for French 1-A from Primeval Baptist College of Mud Creek, Mississippi. So they stop coming around. Next, they don't want to have to learn any history, or any foreign languages, and so on. Then they ask credit for what they call 'life experience.' What they really want is a diploma for merely existing, without any work at all."
"Instead of studying nine tenths of the irrelevant crap you guys give us," said Robert, "it would be more to the point, like, to spend the time learning to use the unseen forces of the universe."
"For my money," I said, "languages are the main unseen force around. Just get stuck in Iraq, as I once did, not knowing any Arabic beyond 'Yes,' 'No,' and 'Where's the toilet?' and you might change your mind."
Denise added: "No one can call himself a civilized, educated man without at least the French."
Ignoring her, Robert said: "That s not what I meant at all, Uncle Willy. Come to the big do of the Agapean Association day after tomorrow, and you'll see. We're gonna invoke the spirit of love."
Marvin Held said: "Bob, I've heard rumors about this outfit. Could Ethel and I come, too? It might be of professional interest."
"So you can look at us like bugs under a microscope?" said Robert. "Okay, come along. You might decide that the bugs have got the right idea and join us."
After the Helds had gone, Avery Hopkins said to me: "Willy, I think I ought to warn you. The rumor is that these people put on orgies."
"Really?" I said. "I've always wanted to attend an orgy. I don't know how Denise will take it; she was strictly brought up by a very proper French Protestant family. What sort of cult is it?"
"One of these sex-and-magic things that are springing up, now that the youth revolt has begun to run out of steam."
"Well, the state has always had a fine climate for nuts. I'm a little old for organized orgiastics myself, but I still want to see. I'm an old wild-life watcher, and such excesses make Homo sapiens a fascinating species to watch."
Early in this century, a man named Bannister made a mint in oil and built a mansion in San Romano. The Agapean Association had leased this mansion, which stood on an estate-sized lot, surrounded by palms, acacias, and pepper trees. The house was a huge, rambly place, pseudo-Spanish outside and medieval German baronial within. It had run down since the days of the Bannister family but was not yet decrepid enough to be really spooky.