The New Formalist

Superficially, this great hub that is Washington appeared to be unchanged. Those gray avenues swarmed with a conspicuous traffic above and below, and those great massive mountains of steel and glass and stone appeared to be eternal verities, stronger than the humanity they were hewn from.

And yet the city was become insubstantial to the subtler eye. Beneath a warm cloudy spring sky the city was about to enter a new dimension, was about to dissolve into the smoky shadows of legend.

Something fatal had been insinuated among the great ponderous walls. Some feral thing nibbled invisibly, and an almost invisible element spoke in the breath upon the lips and upon the air, and clamored in the lungs, and wafted in the pores and among the individual cells of the metropolis.

Washington was conscious of oppressive skies weighing down. It waited for the terrors which had been promised, terrors which were due. In the mind’s ear were heard the whines of strange motors beyond the high fog, propelling missiles from across the broad Atlantic, and missiles from the warships parked at sea.

In a paneled cabinetroom three diplomats awaited a tardy visitor. Truncheons of America’s survival, these engaged faces displayed a bristling impatience. Beyond the common din of traffic could be heard a higher whine like the inevitable coursing of a diamond through glass.

The President watched icily a map of German Europe which lay open on the wall beyond his side-table, as he sat like a holographic image in his dreadnought of a chair, inscrutably. Beside him sat the Secretary of War, smoking with hooded eyes, watching the wall and watching the President.

The Secretary of Defense strode forth and back, up and down, his face apoplectically flushed. Often his glance landed on the map of German Europe and the Atlantic.

The President had been in a stone rage almost continually during his presidency, though few could detect it. He had fallen heir to a naked country, a defenseless country. His predecessor had been a smiling bungler who had invited war in the wrong circumstances, and peace in the wrong circumstances.

The fledgling president had to wrench America from deadly coils. By cunning he had to rouse the lazy and the docile, and to undermine the smug and the partisan, and to tease the greedy. His only slogan was a single word, and that word was Victory, whose implications appeared to everybody differently.

And he had mustered everybody into an alignment. He had commandeered the commanders, and he had appropriated the natural followers. He had explained that appeasement was impossible since appeasement had always been a liar and a failure. He had explained that capitulation was forbidden by everything that justified existence.

Everybody had yielded to his persuasion. Everybody was beguiled by him, and willingly. Everybody acceded, and bowed. Everybody, almost.

One indispensable man refused not to stand alone, and his name was Christmas. He was singular among biochemists, as he was singular among men. He was considered a reluctant pacifist, and the President considered his talents to be essential to the country’s survival and to its victory.

The President was acquainted with Christmas, and they were not friends. Genius has few friends.

Almost a whole generation had elapsed since first they had unsheathed swords. At that earlier day the continent had faced the same enemy, German Europe, who had been wreaking upon America a weapon which the old corsican, Napoleon, had declined because of the supposed inhumanity of its application.

After the liquid fumes of gas had rolled across the trenches and the schoolyards and throughout the hospitals, and through every little house and mighty castle, no organisms remained animated except for those who were dying miserably with their eyes running down their faces and their lungs vomited onto their chins and stomachs.

America had staggered, and begged for an anodyne. The President, who had been Secretary of Defense, called upon Christmas and was well answered.

Christmas invented a vaccination.

So elated was Christmas by his triumph that he decided to end human wars forever, and he invented item2. This too was a gas, mostly, and stopped that earlier war.

Christmas refused to surrender its recipe, and the government griped and threatened, but the war was over and the mirage of virtual morality was again displayed, and the government thought it best to be quiet.

And the years passed.

Never was the least mention heard of item2, and America had easily accepted German Europe back into the fold of respectable materialism, and the years passed.

Always looking for an opportunity to escape the confines of equality, the government in Bonn began to believe that the secret of item2 had been miraculously forgotten. It did not seem odd that materialists should believe in miracles.

And consequently they had availed themselves of their old tricks in the measured assurance that their traditional whipping-boys were asleep. From their European battlefronts and from their warships in the Atlantic missiles were lobbed to America.

America called out for an appropriate weaponry. The President had instituted a board and clinic of war, and Christmas had refused to be its director despite the promise of despotic powers.

Mr. President did not appreciate refusals.

Christmas would have none of him.

Finally a system of intermediaries prevailed upon Christmas’ assistant, and a meeting was arranged. Christmas was to appear.

Christmas was late. The President studied his wristwatch, observing, “The man is late,” uselessly.

The Secretary of Defense added, “The man would keep the whole continental government waiting on principle. Damn all radicals. Damn self-thinkers.”

The Secretary of War responded, “Perhaps you are mistaken. Perhaps his daughter might have done so, but a man cannot be held liable for his children’s actions even though he caused them. It is true that Christmas has a reputation as an ideologist, and perhaps he was an ideologist thirty years ago. But he did give us item2.”

“I suspect he regrets it,” commented the President.

Christmas’ bitter comments concerning the peace treaty had caused a media frenzy, and he had refused a continental knighthood, and he had refused the big peace prize.

“My service is not to a government,” Christmas had said.

A knock was at the door, and a pause, and a lesser secretary appeared and announced that Christmas’ assistant awaited in the anteroom. The assistant was ushered in and the President asked, “Where is he?”

“His health has been uncertain for some long time. And this morning as we were about to leave he suffered a collapse.”

The President continued sitting, and asked. “What exactly is his condition? Is he actually too ill to direct the Chemical War Board? I am told he is indefatigable in his lab, night and day. Perhaps we should hospitalize him here.”

Christmas’ assistant offered the diplomats his blandest expression, and he replied carefully, “He has been perfecting an experiment which possesses him completely. His nervous structure has been affected.”

“What sort of an experiment?”

The assistant hesitated. “Sir, that is a difficult question, and I cannot claim to interpret the theories of a master. I might say that his experiment concerns synthetic plasma and an artificial tissue culture.”

“Yes?” prompted the President.

“His objective might be to increase the self-regenerative capabilities of human tissue,” the assistant continued, “until an entire organism becomes self-sustaining and practically indestructible. At the same time, if you can understand my meaning, the organism becomes non-destructive.

“How he intends to coordinate these aims,” he continued, “is a mystery I cannot fathom. He has expressed to me that soon he expects his work to be done. 1 am frightened that he may have injured himself profoundly.”

The eyes of the President slid toward the map on the wall. The Secretary of Defense aimed his nose at Christmas’ assistant. The Secretary of War scowled at the assistant’s belt-buckle, coughing phlegm almost silently.

The President slid his eyes back to Christmas’ assistant, and his warm gracious smile leaped forth. “My dear sir, we are conscious of your scientific attainments, nor have we misplaced your war record. Accepting Dr Christmas’ incapacity we wish you to act as director pro tem of the Chemical War Board.”

The assistant blinked lashless eyes.

Rapidly the President laid it out. “The Cabinet convenes this afternoon at four. Present your program in the most detailed manner you might deem to be useful. We want every laboratory on the continent to become a vital productive part of our defense schedule.

“And one thing further: can you duplicate Dr Christmas’ experiment?”

“Unfortunately, I cannot,” admitted the assistant. “During his and my entire association my work consisted of exceedingly specialized chores. I could never discover a pattern which might unify my tasks, and often I suspected Dr Christmas of floundering beyond the limits of his genius. Only my loyalty and my gratitude kept me, and I am now responding to a higher loyalty and to a higher gratitude.

“He refused to confide in me.”

The President, who was an adept at gauging intricated motives, nodded thoughtfully, saying, almost mumbling “Well, perhaps we can re-capture the past, and re-discover item2.

“Please be kind enough to convey to Dr Christmas my warmest personal regards, and my hopes for his speedy recovery. Under the circumstances the Government has no desire to impose any additional burdens upon so illustrious a man. We are, however, intensely interested in any and in all of his discoveries which might prove such a boon to humankind.

“Today we are engaged in desperate war, and today we must decide if tomorrow will be closed to us, or will be open to us.

“Everywhere the future is being shaped by men of genius, and Christmas is the genius of our science. We are willing and we are anxious that he be among those who shape our country’s destiny, and we are certain that he will do his best.

“Please confer with the doctor. I want an accurate demonstration within half a month,” and the President’s eyes slid again to the map on the wall, studying the locations of the little pins with the little red flags attached to them.

Clearly dismissed, the assistant bowed with an old-world formality, and left.

The Secretary of War and the Secretary of Defense followed him after a silent moment. The Secretary of Defense was growling low, the off-yellows of his eyes fibred with blood-vessels. “It’s a bloody shame I must wait upon a dramaturge,” rang swiftly and cantankerously in his thoughts.

2.

Let us go now to the European landmass. While it is reasonably incontrovertible that the European landmass is merely a western peninsula of Asia, these times we dwell upon are yet a bit too early in human history for any political coherence to exist in the area.

It is enough for speaking purposes that Europe has been unified politically and its government is in Bonn. Most of the political maps call the area the European Community of Germany, but people call it German Europe.

Warships were in the Atlantic, and earthbound missile sites joined in the salvoes to America. Missiles did get through.

American warships were in the Atlantic, also, and they and earthbound cannons fired their American missiles in salvoes to German Europe. Missiles did get through, and many did not.

The Military High Command in German Europe, dressed in bankers’ robes in Bonn, was endlessly in a posture of waiting. Beneath the frittery robes of commerce they wore their proudly regulated uniforms. The stiff-backed Prussian generals waited with bitterly stiff lips on their former corporal, mad pied piper who played them on strings.

This potent Chancellor had withdrawn to his distant regions of the Capitol building, the cathedral become a castle, and he was pondering his evening’s speech. He was alone with gods, and his eyes flamed, and his mind was a thunderstorm, passionate, poetic.

In another part of the Capitol the Minister of Propaganda pontificated wildly to the assemblage of generals. He was small and wiry and dark, strutting like a prim monkey, and he was the Chancellor’s familiar. His voice was brittly tenor, fired through teeth opaque on the edges.

“Almost we are in readiness, and this will be the culmination of our centuries’ endeavor,” he said, waving a sheaf of papers as if it were a discus. “I do not think we shall fail.”

His technique was the mastery of the big lie, and he used it almost as cleverly as did his master, the Chancellor. And yet this Minister of Propaganda lacked the might of his master, lacked the vision: he was no ecstatic visionary.

The generals, powerful animals, watched the Minister of Propaganda with cold tight smiles, and secretly each despised the man’s cleverness. Power was good and godly, and yet cleverness was only a sharp thin pricking blade, and great guns were required.

The simian buffoon and his master were availers to power, and therein was their usefulness. But time was against them all. Ancient beloved Germany, the true jewel of Europe, had become an explosive cauldron seething with the blood of the race, and its time must be soon.

If the time were not soon they might be unable to control it, and in the explosion everything might be lost, shards everywhere, the precious German blood immedicably spoiled.

The Minister of Propaganda detailed plans, and came to the point of the matter. “We remember item2 too clearly, although it has been formally unheard of these past few decades. Although we prefer to suspect that item2 is no more, we are informed that America has acquired or will soon acquire a weapon which may prove to be more leveling than was item2.”

The generals watched him skeptically, and one old general scoffed, “Stuff and nonsense. Rumors, arrogance, and propaganda. Why have I not heard of it, then?”

The Minister replied, “Perhaps the honored general chooses to believe that item2 was merely Propaganda? Does the name Christmas ring remembered bells?”

“It is a new gas,” suggested another general.

“We do not know what it is,” announced the Minister. “Only Christmas knows what it is, and what it is not. We have suborned his assistant but he is useless. Nobody can understand the impenetrable convolutions of Christmas’ brain. Nobody but he can understand where his arrows land.

“The fatherland has but one chemist who can match him,” the Minister declared and everybody understood his reference. Karl Kurtz had, they believed, almost solved the secrets of item2, and was the most respected German biochemist of his day.

“I have asked Captain Kurtz to appear,” said the Minister of Propaganda as he touched a button. Moments later Captain Kurtz walked through a door and saluted the German generals. He was studied coolly, and his salute was not reciprocated because their inelastic minds could not understand the dichotomy of being both a soldier and a scientist. Such a divergence of loyalties constituted a betrayal somehow, although they knew not how. It was improper, blasphemous.

Kurtz was a proper warrior, as they knew, and yet he possessed a corollary identity they could not fathom. He was keen at killing, keen as a sword, keen enough to untangle knots with a silenced stroke. Kurtz believed in the future and did not despair of the past. He believed in Wagner and in Strauss and he listened to them in his mind alone, and he listened to them in the halls, and he believed in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, mostly.

The Minister of Propaganda spoke. “You have been volunteered for a dangerous and a decisive assignment. You are to leave for Washington immediately. Germany depends on you, and you depend on Germany.”

“I am prepared, Herr Minister,” responded Kurtz.

The Minister of Propaganda and the company of generals watched Kurtz depart, distantly conscious of a nagging envy of his health, of the unparalleled beauty of youth. “Death and youth are good companions,” mused one general absently.

The Minister of Propaganda spoke into a telephone, “Arrest Captain Kurtz, and hold him until my further instructions.”

3

Near the Capitol, the cathedral become a castle, the focal cell of starship Earth, was a wide plain beside a river. And here perhaps a comet, once upon a prehuman time, had created a basin which had been partially filled by the millenial ages. Now it housed ancient rusted artillery scraps, vestigial barbed wire, and through the ages it had often played the role of diningtable for clumsy carrion-chomping birds. War is a feast for many species.

In emulation of his only hero, the Chancellor had selected this dramatic setting for his oft-rehearsed speech. Late evening was his favorite medium, when our human will begins to slough off the concerns of the day and our will has relaxed its vigilance, when the mind backs off and begins to reflect and becomes more vulnerable. In the late evening he was a kapellmeister and it was we who would sing.

Multitudes of fastidious troops assembled splendidly. Myriads of the common populace assembled in a mystical barbarism beyond the abilities of holiness. He was a quasi-spiritual umbilicus more intoxicating than was the Jesus of the ancient judeo-christian primitivists. And the divine fluid he circulated was immortal and awe-shattering.

Wagner strained over the assembled crowds, a benediction.

The Chancellor emerged from his recesses, and the storm of applause was thunderous, grew louder and louder, an avalanche of worship and of sound. He basked in the sound and he bathed in the sound and he raised his hand for silence and his command was obeyed instantly.

The Chancellor’s ringing cadences expressed unearthly urgencies and wailed about unendurable betrayals. Humanity’s most highly perfected evolution was being martyred because its natural inferiors recognized their inherent superiority and considered their existence an unconscionable reminder. Repeatedly his people had been denied a world which was incontrovertibly theirs. In ecstatic exultation the eye of the cosmos was held lovingly upon them and the whole created universe belonged to them forever if only they unleashed the courage to slam their fingers’ grasp around it and to raise the fist in victory.

“Now is the appointed time to beat our plowshares into swords. I have taught you the selfless joys of mercilessness, and I have made you strong and terrible. I ask only for your lives, that you may live.”

4.

Because of the frequency of missiles passing, and because of his international and his national reputation and because of his formidable previous services to the country, Christmas had been installed in a private laboratory of the nth quality deep below the throes of the quotidian world. Missiles and suicide-bombers and brachycephalic assassins were not unknown to the coddled world of scientists and he was well provided appreciatively though in Washington.

His bankroll was an extensive one, and his apparatuses were many for conducting seemingly any desirable variety of biochemical investigation. His underground rooms resembled huge hallways of extraordinary widths, and shelves and cabinets were everywhere.

Racks and racks displayed an infinity of blood serums clutched in various vessels performing a variety of chemical acrobatics. Some of the walls were flanked with benches at various heights. Solutions were everywhere.

Beakers and tubes and globes and jars and dishes were as common as bric-a-brac in a widow’s attic apartment. Ensconced within intricacies of open glass tendrils globes bore vitally churning human hearts in plasmic solutions pumping, pumping, pumping.

Christmas worked.

He could not hear the city in the night or in the day, clearly, though sometimes vestiges of its meaningless bustle did interrupt his concentration before his magnificent will bore him back.

He was as hairy as a leprechaun though squat as a prehistoric human prototype, almost a dwarf, as wide and as thick as if he’d been born with two thumbs as book-ends or parentheses to each handful of fingers. “Say it slowly and you will understand it,” was the oft-spoken mantra he muttered slowly to himself.

Within the circumference of his head his face was huge as if his features and his expression were spiraling away from his proudly formed nose. His face and his expression were ugly with habitual concentration.

In youth a prodigy and in his middle-ages a master, he knew and he understood everything that was known and understood in the world concerning synthetic plasma. Life as he had found it was to him a miracle to be explored, and he did not seek for uncommon miracles.

In these years of his lessening he devoted his energies to his researches monomaniacally with a frenzy fueled by the signal tragedies of his life. His young wife had been killed in the explosion which had taken one of his eyes. His achievement of item2 he considered a spiritual capitulation, a damning blow.

These tragedies befell in his middle-ages, and he had recuperated not at all. He had pursued his unorthodox researches, disdaining methods which were socially justifiable, following his intuition which was his only master. He sought epiphanies, and they were permitted him.

As the salted seas are tossed by the dynamo formed of moon and sun and earth and stars, and atmosphere and self, so he believed that the bloody dynamo of the heart was the seas’ naturally conceived microcosm, its progeny. He believed that the salted seas had issued forth an abundance of living substances on this earth, had imbued and endowed those living substances with all of the specificities of sentience.

He believed that the living coursing heart was an attempt through the powers of the sea to channel existence toward a more exalted spiritual goal, a home.

He believed in the heart, three pounds of potential.

If only one might replicate its functions and perfect it, he believed, he might be justified.

Now he felt himself enabled to place within a human body an organically contrived improvement. Everything was pure, albeit modified. Everything was natural, albeit modified in a quest toward perfection. Perhaps a few difficulties remained...

His work was to be forgiven for those things which mandated his profound guilt, and he was selfless, as humble as a toad upon the altar of immensity. It was his fault his wife had died, and was dead. It was his fault that he had succeeded with item2 and the brutal war had ended so unrelievedly brutally.

What else remained to him?

With a sword upraised on its knees America was begging for his aid, once again, and was not wholly begging. This too was the war to end all wars, a war to establish forever the dignity of human existence.

Should he again bring forth item2, or might a better answer solve the hungry question? How best might he quell such an unbidden clamor?

Humanity cannot be purged of its desire for immolation, cannot be exorcised of those infernal imps who howl for its suicide, but, he thought, perhaps humanity can be divested of its ability to achieve such an end.

Politicians, secular and ecclesiastic, must lie and labor toward the worst humanly contrivable potential, for that is their unembarrassed incentive and their job, but, he thought, perhaps he might defeat them also.

And so he pursued his best.

He pursued the heart.

In these later stages of his research only his daughter, Ruth, was permitted his finer confidence. Her he had trained to be an excellent technician, to be his lesser self, and though she had no exquisite external intuitions she could craft cannily according to diagrams and according to precisely rendered systems of details.

He was the great event to her, and she was his pride.

He was her hidey-hole from the world, and he was too busy to acknowledge the error.

She was his finest instrument.

Sometimes she would watch his face as he worked, and he was not ugly to her. Sometimes, yet so seldom, he would watch her face as she worked, and sometimes, yet so very seldom, he would see the features of his bride, of his wife, and he would be in the mystery of wonder.

“Once again the fools have asked me to chair the Chemical War Board,” he commented during a pause while they fussed in the long deep halls, listening to the percolating globes where cruelly beautiful crimson knots flourished. “Obstinate savages. Persistent brutes.”

“They will have a go at it anyway, father, whether they are guided by a genius or by a dunce. And without your help they are surely to do it less well,” she responded. “It might be beastlier.”

“They will not soon find such a pretty toy as item2. Perhaps they can induce Herr Kurtz to play their little game, promising him an endless reward of lampshades decorated with the serial numbers of his choosing.”

It was not a joke to be laughed upon, and they did not laugh. It was only a bit of air idly tossed.

He hoped to complete his work, before the latest spell of brutality had brought his fellow countrymen onto his heels, and before the earth ran black with savagery. He knew he could not command the time.

Alertly sounded the bell of the telephone, and Ruth answered as the disused assistant entreated on behalf of the President, the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Defense. Politely she declined.

Work occurred.

5.

Having received exacting instructions from the Minister of Propaganda, an expendable servant of the Fatherland’s intelligence was escorted to a camp for the socially misaligned near Buchenwald, several tickings past midnight in a mild fog. The prisoncamp was of illumined poured stone, like a pyramid flattened for the arrival of nonterrestrial boats, thoroughly electrified, guarded zealously by automatons. Thousands of prisoners were held here, knowingly moribund.

Reminding himself by glancing at a photographic card in his hand, the expendable servant announced to the receptionist, “Bring me prisoner 95634.”

The proud capitulant was produced, and stood chained. He had once been a physician, but it had been revealed that his genetic heritage was repugnant to the state, proscribed by responsible nationalists. And he had spoken.

“He is mine. Load him,” replied the expendable servant.

The prisoner was removed to a cranny of the Capitol compound, and he was washed and barbered and placed into an appropriate military uniform. Shining round baubles were tacked to his chest, and brownish rectangular trinkets, and a sword was suspended from his hip. A needle was placed into his tongue, and it stung.

A crowd of willing and of unwilling shills, common people, the common provender of despotisms was assembled as the sun strolled above the horizon beyond the courtyard by the Capitol. The hapless prisoner was brought forth, and the band played patriotic tunes.

People in the audience wept to behold the joy of glory, and the prisoner was fastened to a peripheral post. An officer duckwalked to the prisoner and barked words. Cameras witnessed the cleansing act.

The medals were plucked and littered.

The sword was extracted and halved upon a knee, and littered.

The officer placed the needle of his gun below the prisoner’s chin, and the gun spoke. The prisoner sagged. Twice the gun repeated its command.

6.

In a workingclass compartment of a ziptrain on route to Brest, that hoary french pirate port, sat a whiskery bespectacled geezer intent upon a copy of Schiller’s poetic lugubrations. Being socially innocuous he was unnoticeable, almost, and was observed, estimated, and dismissed by his fellow passengers. He appeared to be as useless as a retired music teacher.

The war with America was old hat, and people were chatting about the cost of groceries, about Billy’s whooping cough, about the Japanese Rimlands, about the scheduled increase in taxes, about the sometimes debated policy of keeping the north cold. The bespectacled geezer was actually collating his memorized codes with whichever of Schiller’s poems they applied to.

Quietly Kurtz closed the pages upon themselves, and the poems became dark once again. Publicly his persona had been tried for treason against his beloved Fatherland, and had been bound to a post and reprimanded. And the reprimand permitted no recidivism, encouraged no appeals.

At the station in Brest, the old fellow left the train and shuffled along the pavement, his copy of Schiller pinched idly in his fingers. A nondescript porter approached and casually suggested, “Must be cool in Helsinki, I should think.”

Kurtz replied, “It is the least the bifold barbarians deserve, for being both north and east.”

“Indeed. Just so,” answered the porter, and Kurtz was shown to a taxi which had been hovering near. The taxi brought him outside the town, where a small airfield held a plane in readiness, one of the new ones which flew fast and wasted no fuel. He climbed in next the pilot and the plane rose and shot off.

Soon the computer explained that two planes were in pursuit, and Kurtz watched them on the screen, closing in. Then the screen displayed two similar blips, and these similar blips closed with the first two blips, removed them, and departed.

“Planning is everything,” he thought idly.

7.

Helsinki was considered an outpost of barbarism, a western extrusion of the memorially uneasy clodhopper alliance between the hairy cumbersome Russians and their automatically internecine neighbors, the Chinese. In neither region had the peoples opted for an acquisitive secularism, the substanceless pursuit of appearances which is business, and so they lagged vastly in technology compared to America, to German Europe, to Japanese Rimland. Technologically they were considered almost medieval, like Brazilgentina or Africa-Arabia.

It was the Helsinki postmark that caught Christmas’ eye. And within the envelope was only a terse comment in abstractly scientific jargon, a comment startlingly astute in reference to Christmas’ experiments in synthetic plasma. In curious lieu of a signature was a slightly inexact chemical equation explaining item2.

“Kurtz,” muttered Christmas. “Perhaps he could draw it to a period. I certainly seem stymied, as if my head had just rolled from a stumbling block and the blade put by.”

And yet he had read of Kurtz’s execution, so this note appeared almost a communication from the grave. “It is best not to ponder without adequate information,” he reflected for the thousandth time. He felt an empathy with Kurtz, and Ruth read the handed note with a similar excitement rising devilishly and tidied away.

Lightly, Ruth tattooed “shave & a haircut: 2 bits” on the lab door and Christmas answered with a regretful, “Come in,” knowing too well that Ruth seldom knocked unless somebody unpleasant had arrived. Christmas looked around and watched as his former assistant approached with an assembly-line of bureaucrats in his officious wake like a bridal train.

“Since you have resolutely declined to chair the Chemical War Board I have the honor now of that estimable position, Doctor. I am instructed to reiterate that the country needs your assistance urgently if we are to fend the Huns. Please, Doctor, I ask you and the President asks you.”

“Many are my faults, sir, and yet I do not list reticence among them. Repeatedly I have stated that I am unable to spare myself from my present inquiries which are of immeasurably more significance than might possibly be the invention of some newfangled murdering machine unleashed from a tube. Why do you not go and bother the physicists once again, those damnedly politic luciferians?” Christmas glared with supercilious amusement at these creatures he despised.

Every other man stared unamusedly at Christmas. None of them was sufficiently inept to consider him a recalcitrant crank, and yet they did not easily understand his refusal to serve the time and their masters. They were vigilant not to understand things which might never be misunderstood again, regardless of convenience, and this was wisdom.

“We anticipated this demonstration of ill-will, and you are therefore informed that within a half-month you will have assisted us or your laboratory will be closed. In a half-month I will return for your binding answer,” replied the ex-assistant, and he and his fellows walked through the door.

Seconds later he peaked his head back in and said in a voice too soft to carry to unintended ears, “You will observe, Doctor, how exceedingly generous we are on your behalf. We really do want you to help us, and are willing, nay, we are eager to go much farther than half-way.

“We are begging you, begging you, and we are ineffably strong. Please do contemplate all extremities. We are serious, and we are begging you.”

And he left.

Christmas contemplated a rehash of item2 and the inevitable unholy Armageddon which must follow its proliferation into utterly unstable hands across the dirty globe. It was an emasculating thought, and he placed his hand on the back of a chair as his face paled and every one of his many years chased around him like so many hounds mindlessly barking and snapping.

He felt himself beginning to descend and he braced himself, touching the side of a forefinger to the tip of his nose, closing his eyes. His breathing steadied, and he muttered, “Crabbed animals,” and he resumed.

8.

Someplace miles off the Carolinas a parachute hit the waves and was immediately retrieved by the crew of a fishingboat which, as were numerous of the fishingboats that ply upon this liquid pearl we pass across so ceremoniously, was many things besides a simple fishingboat. It was crewed by intelligent people who had many interests other than exchanging fishes for moneys.

Soon Kurtz was aboard, dried and combed and warmed, fed and watered and clothed, and soon he was landed on a Carolinian island. He was escorted openly and pleasantly to a smallish house, feted, and he was escorted to the mainland and placed upon a train inbound to Washington. Few were the passengers inbound to Washington, with all of the broad countryside to roam.

In Washington he applied his precise instructions and readily located the fortress that was home and lab to Christmas and Ruth. Soldiers guarded the structure, and soldiers policed the city attentively.

From an automated kiosk he bought a tea, and he sat on a bench and watched the avenue with a demonstrable idleness. Occasionally an air-raid siren whined, and soon thereafter a missile or a covey of missiles banged into the city. Fire-engines sang to the scenes.

Kurtz approached Christmas’ door and was intercepted by a soldier, just a boy of a man, who asked for identification papers. “What is your business here?” asked the soldier.

“Dr Christmas and I are fellows. I come at his request, from Atlanta.”

The soldier spoke into a radio, and rang the doorbell. In a minute a servant answered the door. The soldier said, “This man says Dr Christmas invited him. Please ask the doctor.”

Christmas and Ruth appeared in the lit doorway, a long darker hallway stretching beyond their silhouetted forms.

Kurtz said, “Good evening, Dr Christmas. I do trust my equations reached you from Helsinki. Please forgive my tardiness. I was delayed in leaving the Atlanta laboratory. The hinterlands are always unreliable, as you have commented.”

Ruth was quicker on the draw than was her brooding father, and she leapt forth and grabbed Kurtz’s hands and said, “Thank Heaven you’re safe. Do come in.”

Christmas grasped Kurtz’s elbow and led him into the house, peremptorily asking the soldier, “Is anything wrong, officer?”

“No, sir. Just an identification. Thank you, sir.”

The door closed.

9.

The missiles were a boon to Christmas, in one sense, in that there was no dearth of cadavers and he could purchase human hearts almost as cheaply as he could purchase chicken hearts or Brussels sprouts. Christmas used his time well and seldom left his lab except for a catnap at the insistence of his daughter, Ruth. She was no foot-stamping pretty little thing, but a resourceful woman who understood that a man is useless unless he is healthy.

Each of his glass globes contained a human heart in solution, and Christmas could feel a relentless vibration as the liquids deliberately shimmered. He found the vibrancy personally energizing. He was not so pixillated that he considered the fuming tissues in the role of his children, but somehow he felt they were his personal colonies into a nonpersonal existence, much like a scribbler feels, or a sculptor.

He imagined, vaguely, those alternative environments in which these hearts might be placed while he was someplace far elsewhere, or far nowhere. He was too busy to pursue such speculations, and he was almost unaware they stirred.

Christmas admired his new assistant, Kurtz, and he was a man seldom given to admiration. Kurtz appeared to be less fanciful, less imaginative, perhaps, and to be more reasonably shaped, mentally. His mind was almost a Euclidean line, level as a gunshot, open-ended for its inspiration, clear as a Bach concerto.

Ruth studied Kurtz, surreptitiously, and could not solve the riddle he presented. It was not with jealousy and it was not with envy that she surrendered her piece of Christmas, for she surrendered nothing. She was as useful as she ever had been, if not more useful yet. Now she was a portion with three, and three were stronger than two. Because each person understood mostly what was occurring, each person considered itself to be tied vitally with its fellows.

And yet both Ruth and Kurtz understood that Christmas was the master in their common actuality. He always appeared to be just a bit beyond, and the exact nature of that bit was indecipherable. His mind was a giant chaos and yet they seemed seldom to catch a glimpse of that chaotic nature, because his words were selected so precisely.

His words had no waste, and Ruth and Kurtz both knew he was penalized for such behavior. Every effort brought them forward, strainingly, inexplicably, certainly. Almost they could smell the burden of the wrench, of the unrelenting rip.

And in the midst of such labor she studied Kurtz, wondering why. “Why was he here? Had they not such facilities in wealthy German Europe? Had he no family, no friends, no companionable colleagues? Integrity was a silent embarrassment at the throne of money, she thought, and a man of his gifts could not possibly have displeased the authorities sufficiently for them to have denied his usefulness.

Why was he here?

Their experiments were becoming increasingly explicit, and sometimes cadavers were refurnished with carefully prepared hearts, and yet the bodies would not be revived. Christmas had sometimes almost won, they thought, and yet he persisted in failing. Failure followed failure.

One corpse was reinvested with a heart and the process began once again. Color changed, and breathing enlivened, and the corpse slept. The heart thrilled.

Christmas beheld his Lazarus and he slumped.

10.

Ruth and Kurtz often found themselves working closely, and being closely allied in function and in body, instances happened when each became conscious of the other’s nearness, of the other’s aura, breath and aroma, a light touch of the flesh, emotional aim of the eyesight. Each could tell if the other skirted the periphery of inspiration, if the breath of truth were near. Her existence pushed against his, and his against hers, and secrets and intimacies were explored.

Distantly was heard the familiar ring of an air-raid siren, and in turning toward her his feet tangled as his hands held an unvaluable glass jar. She foresaw his distress and turned toward him and caught the jar as it was about to leave his fingertips. Eyes met in whole recognition and each stood in whole comprehension of the other.

The jar beside, each of them extended fingertips which pushed lightly the extended fingertips of the other. And they gracefully gawked.

11.

The busy half-month had expired, and the day of reckoning fell upon Christmas, Ruth, and Kurtz, like the slamming in of locusts. They were nervous, as might be expected when thoughtful folks must subjugate themselves to the judgment of duplicitous unthinkers. They were necessarily uncertain how best to arrange themselves to appease the speculations of schemers, and so they could only force themselves to appear as neutral and as efficient as was in their power to appear.

One hundred compartments resembling clear morgue drawers, one hundred compartments contained relatively uninjured cadavers, women and men who had been killed instantly and without gross mutilations, people who were medicably dead.

Chairs had been deployed for the committee that included most of the Chemical War Board, most of whose members were respectable scientists, actively or peripherally. These people were not certifiably fools, but were respectable citizens. None of them was dangerously imaginative, unsocially creative, or subject to politically inexpedient doubts or beliefs.

The chairs filled with little noise and no fanfare.

“Good morning, good people,” Christmas said conversationally. “I am honored in your attendance, and hope you will be pleased in our latest phases of these experiments. We cannot offer you quite what you hoped to receive, and yet we suspect you may leave here not disappointed.”

One drawer at his touch of a button trundled forth into fuller view, and Ruth brought him a series of scalpels and scissors and needles on a tray. He tugged back the sleeves on his white surgical smock, tugged his gloves into a better fit, and began his dissection of the corpse of a young soldier from Philadelphia. Like an Aztec priest, his only interest lay with the breast and its inhabited hollow, and Ruth had draped the remnant portion with a shroud of white linen, diaphanous though lightly blooded, reflecting no light.

Kurtz stood attentively beside the door. Ruth stood beside him. Both watched Christmas, the most interesting man in the world, fascinating beyond the reach of reason.

At touch of a button a clear globe lifted horizontally and was placed beside the laboring Christmas, who was explaining meticulously his every process, regardless that to such wholly earthdwellers, such wholly surface-dwellers, his words must seem abstract and thereby meaningless.

Listening to Christmas, his former assistant briefly compared the experience to his previous evening’s attendance of one of William Shakespeare’s later plays where his attention was dutifully fastened on a series of seemingly commonplace events and yet periodically a line would flash by and he would be shaken to his psychological foundations. His head would reel, and he would exclaim silently among his selves, “What on earth was that?”

Christmas continued his explanations calmly and yet never in a monotone, for this was all very important to him. He felt like an exceedingly humble and yet a worthy priest in supplication, and it was good not to be bewildered.

Christmas touched another button and the drawer closed, buttoning its inhabitant against the world. The audience could see a shifting as of mild vapors, and the inhabiting flesh pinked and flushed. Christmas’ spiel became deliberately academic and served as a white noise blocking nonspecific thoughts, while the audience watched the stirring of the corpse. Linen retracted.

Eyes opened and swam throughout the room, the head revolving as much as its constraints allowed. Mouth gaped, and an attempt was made to speak.

At the touch of a button the drawer slid out. Cautiously the patient climbed from the drawer and stood on the floor. His linens were clutched in the fingers of a hand, loosely.

The audience was in harness, gaping. Spittle slid from the lips of some, and for awhile no pretense was made to appear dignified. In some faces the original child appeared and stared in shocked fascination. In some faces appeared the haggard ancient who was to give up the ghost in exchange for relief. Nowhere was contained the expression of the smiling liar.

And then the new day dawned, and reality slowly or abruptly automated these respectable faces. Poses returned, and the poseurs were gratified not to be themselves again.

At the touch of a button the silent doors opened to the terraced gardens, and the revivified corpse walked into the streams of sunlight among the flowers. He was grateful, and appeared to consider the other humans incidental to his purpose. He outspread his arms and his hands under the streaming sun, and he said in holy tones, “It is a blessing I am grateful for. Blood streams in the firmament.”

The scent of the flowers and the herbs, the look of the light, the reality of texture and of contrast, pleased him. He was pleased to be, and it was good.

He heard the songs of the birds, the announcement of a frog, the complaint of a cat, and he was pleased. He felt the breath of a wind upon his skin, and he was pleased.   

12.

Enthusiastic, imprecise information concerning the unlikely experiments reached the ears of the President, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of Defense, and much of the rest of the world, of course, and Christmas was given a reprieve while these considerable human powers decided just what to do with him, and decided just what to do with his.

During these extended days his factory was turning out a wee army of glad nonwarriors who were slowly and unmethodically infiltrating the countryside and the cities, braving the effects of their mostly unwelcome message of nonviolence.

These were soldiers who did not choose to kill, and who, which is demonstrably more to the point, chose deliberately not to kill. While they had been dandled in that jelly they were constantly washed with while in the laboratory, and while their hearts and bloods had partaken of whatever Christmas had sweetened them with, they had cast off our normal human aggressions.

They consumed miles of exceedingly leafy sprouts and therefore, sometimes, were called Baby Eaters by folks who hid a fear and loathing of the uncommonplace behind a mask of wit. They ate graingerms and leafy sprouts and beans, fenugreek and garlic, peppers and artichokes, and, after awhile, sometimes, just sometimes, a sardine or a wee piece of a chicken that somebody else had killed.

They drank tea, green and oolong. They drank strong tea.

To some folks they appeared to be perpetually stoned, astonished, stunned, or astounded, but it might be truer to say they were as if always afloat upon a lake of calm. Equilibrium was theirs, mostly.

They spoke with a minimum of artistry, using fewest words, speaking little that was nonsense. Their voices were calmly modulated, melodious, cheerful, unconstrained.

It was rumored that the Government wanted to halt any further such ineffectual experiments and to restore efforts to produce item2. It was rumored that these once-dead soldiers were to be parachuted into German Europe as intentional underminers of the German war machine, which was almost feasible since the language barriers had become negligible between those two mirroring countries.

It was difficult to dismiss these new wandering apostles as being merely zombies, because they could behave almost identically as could any other portion of the general population. They had individual personalities, and most of them attempted to blend in with whomsoever they associated with, except that they could not intend harm.

The Government warned the general populace that these newcomers must be housed, and fed, and therefore that they must be given jobs. But the economy was never intended to apply to people who un-died. A function of war was to organize those people who survived the depredations of those people who distributed the war.

And these balkers were inconvenient to the planners.

Underground organizations printed circulars announcing these myriad messiahs as being preludes to fulfillment of the biblical book of Revelations. People were afraid of dying and afraid of being dead, afraid of being undead, afraid of hauntings.

The President announced that Christmas’ experiments were to be terminated immediately. Profoundly he desired also that these traipsers from the grave should be rounded up and placed into a special camp where they could disturb nobody. They interfered with his war, with his powers, with his distributions of solid moneys created by the great war machine. They influenced morale, and interfered with the consensus of morals. The long-established and revered virtual morality of an entire people was being tweaked and pricked by a bunch of unanswerables.

It was unprecedented and it was disgusting.

Crowds gathered by day and watchers gathered by night about Christmas’ laboratory. Although the President had announced the closing of the lab he did nothing to implement this closure. He feared a democratic treachery. He feared a riot in the streets, if he appeared hard.

The people grumbled when these new pacifists took their jobs, and when they had to be fed and housed, and yet the people would not readily allow these new fellows an injury. It was odd, but a people who had been forced by reality into the abjectedness of pragmatism were now displaying a previously unsuspected idealism.

Childhood must have an end, and optimism must end, and the enforced wanderings of the resurrected exposed them to that subtle attrition which can brook no denial. These fledglings grew weary, weary of neglect, weary of contemplating beauties which were persistently denied them. These folks were truly ecstatic visionaries, and most ecstatic visionaries throughout our human history have drunk themselves to death, or hanged themselves without a note other than was constituted by that poetry they produced, or that bit of prose, or one especially curried friendship whose recipient was unaware.

Misery became the call of these the resurrected deathlings, and among themselves they prayed for an end to their miseries, but they were incapable of achieving suicide. They were incapable of ill-will. They were wholly kind always, in their intent.

Those normal folks who had once looked to these born-again folks for hope, for solace, for guidance, now looked upon them with loathing because their un-offered promises had not been kept. They had deceived without intending deceit, because they were the most innocent of victims, and they were hounded, persecuted, reviled, scourged.

And yet the attempt was made to ignore them, and sometimes it almost worked.