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  Bermingham looked at her with angry disbelief. “You too! I smell it,” he said. “You going to tell me

  I don’t know what good old ethyl alcohol smells like?”

  “That’s the bin, Mr. Bermingham. It’s a terrible mess, I know.”

  “Funny place to keep the creature,” he muttered to himself, dropping to his knees. He dipped a finger into the drippings, smelled it, tasted it and nodded. “Alcohol, all right. Add a few congeners, couple drops of food coloring, and you’ve got the finest Chivas Regal a bellboy ever sold you out of a bottle with the tax stamp broken.” He stood up and glared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Dupoir? You not only don’t pay your honest debts, you don’t want to pay the bartenders either?”

  I said, “It’s more or less an accident.”

  “Accident?”

  Then illumination struck. “Accident you should find us like this,” I corrected. “You see, it’s a secret new process. We’re not ready to announce it yet. Making alcohol out of old plastic scraps.”.

  He questioned Shirl with his eyes. Getting her consent, he poured some of Butchie’s baby-food orange juice into a glass, scooped in some of the drippings from the bin, closed his eyes and tasted. “Mmm,” he said judiciously. “Sell it for vodka just the way it stands.”

  “Glad to have an expert opinion,” I said. “We think there’s millions in it.”

  He took another taste. “Plastic scraps, you say? Listen, Dupoir. Think we can clear all this up in no tune. That fool Klaw, I’ve told him over and over, ask politely, don’t make trouble for people. But no, he’s got that crazy lawyer’s drive for revenge. Apologize for him, old boy, I really do apologize for him. Now look,” he said, putting down the glass to rub his hands. “You’ll need help in putting this process on the market. Business acumen, you know? Wise counsel from man of experience. Like me. And capital. Can help you there. I’m loaded.”

  Shirl put in, “Then what do you want our house for?”

  “House? My dear Mrs. Dupoir,” cried Mr. Bermingham, laughing heartily, “I’m not going to take your house! Your husband and I will work out the details in no time. Let me have a little more of that delightful orange juice and we can talk some business.”

  Garigolli to Home Base

  Joy, joy

  Chief!

  Cancel all I said. WeVe met Directive Two, the Host is happy, and we’re on our way Home!

  Warm up the breeding slings, there’s going to be a hot time in the old hammocks tonight.

  Garigotti

  Straight as the flight of Ung-Glitch, the soaring vulture, that is the code of the jungle. I was straight with Mr. Bermingham. I didn’t cheat him. I made a handshake deal with him over the ruins of our Eco-Bin, and honored it when we got to his lawyers. I traded him 40 percent of the beverage rights to the stuff that came out of our bin, and he wrote off that little matter of $14,752.03.,

  Of course, the beverage rights turned out not to be worth all that much, because the stuff in the bin was organic and alive and capable of reproduction, and it did indeed reproduce itself enthusiastically. Six months later you could buy a starter drop of it for a quarter on any street corner, and what that has done to the vintners of the world you know as well as I do. But Bermingham came out ahead. He divided his 40 percent interest into forty parts and sold them for $500 each to the alumni of his drunk tank. And Mr. Horgan-Ah, Mr. Horgan.

  Mr. Horgan was perched on my doorframe like Ung-Glitch awaiting a delivery of cadavers for dinner when I arrived that morning, bearing my little glass jar before me like the waiting line in an obstetrician’s office. “You’re late, Dupoir,” he pointed out “Troubles me, that does. Do you remember Metcalf? Tall, blonde girl that used to work in Accounts Receivable? Never could get in on time, and-“

  “Mr. Morgan,” I said, “look.” And I unscrewed my baby-food jar and dumped the contents on an un-popped pop-up Eco-Bin. It took him a while to see what was happening, but once he saw he was so impressed he forgot to roar.

  And, yes, the Fourteenth Floor was very pleased.

  There wasn’t any big money hi it. We couldn’t sell the stuff, because it was so happy to give itself away to everyone hi the world. But it meant a promotion and a raise. Not big. But not really little, either. And, as Mr. Horgan said, “I like the idea of helping to eliminate all the litter that devastates the landscape. It makes me feel, I don’t know, like part of something clean and natural.”

  And so we got along happily as anything-happily, anyway, until the tune Shirl bought the merry-go-round.

  A GENTLE DYING

  This was actually to have been the first story Cyril and I collaborated on; in fact, even before ‘that, it was to have been my own first novel. When I first began writing professionally I conceived the notion of a science-fiction novel to be entitled Sex Dream of a Precocious Twelve-Year-Old. I am no longer sure of what it was to be about, except that it had something to do with everyone’s dreams of flying, and something to do with the dying fantasies of a child. I told Cyril about it he volunteered to collaborate, he went home and produced a first chapter and we lost it When it turned up again, after his death, I had long since forgotten whatever it was I intended for the novel, but I saw a short story in it … and this is it.

  ELPHEN DeBeckett lay dying. It was time. He had lived in the world for one hundred and nine years, though he had seen little enough of it except for the children. The children, thank God, still came. He thought they were with him now: “Coppie,” he whispered hi a shriveled voice, “how nice to see you.” The nurse did not look around, although she was the only person in the room besides himself, and knew that he was not addressing her.

  The nurse was preparing the injections the doctor had ordered her to have ready. This little capsule for shock, this to rally his strength, these half-dozen others to shield him from his pain. Most of them would be

  used. DeBeckett was dying in a pain that once would have been unbearable and even now caused him to thresh about sometimes and moan.

  DeBeckett’s room was a great twelve-foot chamber with hanging drapes and murals that reflected scenes from his books. The man himself was tiny, gnomelike. He became even less material while death (prosey biology, the chemistry of colloids) drew inappropriately near his head. He had lived his life remote from everything a normal man surrounds himself with. He now seemed hardly alive enough to die.

  DeBeckett lay in a vast, pillared bed, all the vaster for the small burden he put on it, and the white linen was whiter for his merry brown face. “Darling Ved-die, please don’t cry,” he whispered restlessly, and the nurse took up a hypodermic syringe. He was not hi unusual pain, though, and she put it back and sat down beside him.

  The world had been gentle with the gentle old man. It had made him a present of this bed and this linen, this great house with its attendant horde of machines to feed and warm and comfort him, and the land on which stood the tiny, quaint houses he loved better. It had given him a park in the mountains, well stocked with lambs, deer and birds of blazing, spectacular color, a fenced park where no one ever went but DeBeckett and the beloved children, where earth-moving machines had scooped out a Very Own Pond (“My Very Own Pond/Which I sing for you in this song/Is eight Hippopotamuses Wide/And twenty Elephants long.”) He had not seen it for years, but he knew it was there. The world had given him, most of all, money, more money than he could ever want. He had tried to give it back (gently, hopefully, in a way pathetically), but there was always more. Even now the world showered him with gifts and doctors, though neither could prevail against the stomping pitchfire arsonist in the old man’s colon. The disease, a form of gastroenteritis, could have been cured; medicine had

  come that far long since. But not in a body that clung so lightly to life.

  He opened his eyes and said strongly, “Nurse, are the children there?”

  The nurse was a woman of nearly sixty. That was why she had been chosen. The new medicine was utterly beyond her in theory, but she co
uld follow directions; and she loved Elphen DeBeckett. Her love was the love of a child, for a thumbed edition of Cop-pie Brambles had brightened her infancy. She said, “Of course they are, Mr. DeBeckett.”

  He smiled. The old man loved children very much. They had been his whole life. The hardest part of his dying was that nothing of his own flesh would be left, no son, no grandchild, no one. He had never married. He would have given almost anything to have a child of his blood with him now-almost anything, except the lurid, grunting price nature exacts, for DeBeckett had never known a woman. His only children were the phantoms of his books … and those who came to visit him. He said faintly, “Let the little sweetlings in.”

  The nurse slipped out and the door closed silently behind her. Six children and three adults waited patiently outside, DeBeckett’s doctor among them. Quickly she gave him the dimensions of the old man’s illness, pulse and temperature, and the readings of the tiny gleaming dials by his pillow as well, though she did not know what they measured. It did not matter. She knew what the doctor was going to say before he said it: “He can’t last another hour. It is astonishing that he lasted this long,” he added, “but we will have lost something when he goes.”

  “He wants you to come in. Especially you-” She glanced around, embarrassed. “Especially you children.” She had almost said “little sweetlings” herself, but did not quite dare. Only Elphen DeBeckett could talk like that, even to children. Especially to children.

  Especially to these children, poised, calm, beautiful, strong and gay. Only the prettiest, sweetest children visited Elphen DeBeckett, half a dozen or a score every day, a year-in, year-out pilgrimage. He would not have noticed if they had been ugly and dull, of course. To DeBeekett all children were sweet, beautiful and

  bright.

  They entered and ranged themselves around the bed, and DeBeckett looked up. The eyes regarded them and a dying voice said, “Please read to me,” with such resolute sweetness that it frightened. “From my book,” it added, though they knew well enough what he

  meant.

  The children looked at each other. They ranged from four to eleven, Will, Mike, blonde Celine, brown-eyed Karen, fat Freddy and busy Pat. “You,” said Pat, who was seven.

  “No,” said five-year-old Freddy. “Will.”

  “Celine,” said Will. “Here.”

  The girl named Celine took the book from him and began obediently. ” ‘Coppie thought to herself-’”

  “No,” said Pat. “Open.”

  The girl opened the book, embarrassed, glancing at the dying old man. He was smiling at her without amusement, only love. She began to read:

  Coppie thought to herself that the geese might be hungry, for she herself ate Lotsandlots. Mumsie often said so, though Coppie had never found out what that mysterious food might be. She could not find any, so took some bread from Brigid Marie Ann-Erica Evangeline, the Cook Whose Name Was So Long That She Couldn’t Remember It All Herself. As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles’s Very Own Pond-Celine hesitated, looking at the old man with sharp worry, for he had moaned faintly, like a flower moaning. “No, love,” he said. “Go on.” The swelling

  soft bubble before his heart had turned on him, but he knew he still had time. The little girl read:

  -As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles’s Very Own Pond, she thought and thought, and what she thought finally came right out of her mouth. It was a Real Gay Think, to be Thought While Charitably Feeding Geese: They don’t make noise like little girls and boys, And all day long they’re aswimming. They never fret and sputter ‘cause they haven’t any butter,

  They go where the water’s wetly brimming. But say-Anyway- I

  Like Geese!

  There was more, but the child paused and, after a moment, closed the book. DeBeckett was no longer listening. He was whispering to himself.

  On the wall before Mm was painted a copy of one of the illustrations from the first edition of his book, a delightful picture of Coppie Brambles herself, feeding the geese, admirably showing her shyness and her trace of fear, contrasted with the loutish comedy of the geese. The old man’s eyes were fixed on the picture as he whispered. They guessed he was talking to Coppie, the child of eight dressed hi the fashions of eighty years ago. They could hardly hear him, but in the silence that fell on the room his voice grew stronger.

  He was saying, without joy but without regret. “No more meadows, no more of the laughter of little children. But I do love them.” He opened his eyes and sat up, waving the nurse away. “No, my dear,” he said cheerfully, “it does not matter if I sit up now, you know. Excuse me for my rudeness. Excuse an old and

  tired man who, for a moment, wished to live on. I have something to say to you all.”

  The nurse, catching a sign from the doctor, took up another hypodermic and made it ready. “Please, Mr. DeBeckett,” she said. Good humored, he permitted her to spray the surface of his wrist with a fine mist of droplets that touched the skin and penetrated it. “I suppose that is to give me strength,” he said. “Well, I am grateful for it. I know I must leave you, but there is something I would like to know. I have wondered … For years I have wondered, but I have not been able to understand the answers when I was told them. I think I have only this one more chance.”

  He felt stronger from the fluid that now coursed through his veins, and accepted without fear the price he would have to pay for it. “As you know,” he said, “or, I should say, as you children no doubt do not know, some years ago I endowed a research institution, the Coppie Brambles Foundation. I did it for the love of you, you and all of you. Last night I was reading the letter I wrote my attorneys-No. Let us see if you can understand the letter itself; I have it here. Will, can you read?”

  Will was nine, freckled darkly on pale skin, red haired and gangling. “Yes, Mr. DeBeckett.”

  “Even hard words,” smiled the dying man.

  “Yes, sir.”

  DeBeckett gestured at the table beside him, and the boy obediently took up a stiff sheet of paper. “Please,” said DeBeckett, and the boy began to read in a highpitched, rapid whine.

  ” ‘Children have been all my life and I have not regretted an instant of the years I devoted to their happiness. If I can tell them a little of the wonderful world in which we are, if I can open to them the miracles of life and living, then my joy is unbounded. This-I have tried, rather selfishly, to do. I cannot say it

  was for them! It was for me. For nothing could have given me more pleasure.’”

  The boy paused.

  DeBeckett said gravely, “I’m afraid this is a Very Big Think, lovelings. Please try to understand. This is the letter I wrote to my attorneys when I instructed them to set up the Foundation. Go on, Will.”

  ” ‘But my way of working has been unscientific, I know. I am told that children are not less than we adults, but more. I am told that the grownup maimers and cheats in the world are only children soiled, that the hagglers of commerce are the infant dreamers whose dreams were denied. I am told that youth is wilder, freer, better than age, which I believe with all my heart, not needing the stories of twenty-year-old mathematicians and infant Mozarts to lay a proof.

  ” ‘In the course of my work I have been given great material rewards. I wish that this money be spent for those I love. I have worked with the heart, but perhaps my money can help someone to work with the mind, in this great new science of psychology which I do not understand, in all of the other sciences which I understand even less. I must hire other eyes.

  ” ‘I direct, then, that all of my assets other than my books and my homes be converted into cash, and that this money be used to further the study of the child, with the aim of releasing him from the corrupt adult cloak that smothers him, of freeing him for wisdom, tenderness and love.’”

  “That,” said DeBeckett sadly, “was forty years ago.”

  He started at a sound. Overhead a rocket was clapping through the sky, and DeBeckett looked wildly
around. “It’s all right, Mr. DeBeckett,” comforted little Pat. “It’s only a plane.”

  He allowed her to soothe him. “Ah, leveling,” he said. “And can you answer my question?”

  “What it says in the ‘Cyclopedia, Mr. DeBeckett?”

  “Why-Yes, if you know it? my dear.”

  Surprisingly the child said, as if by rote: “The Institute was founded in 1976 and at once attracted most of the great workers in pediatric analysis, who were able to show Wiltshanes’s Effect hi the relationship between glandular and mental development. Within less than ten years a new projective analysis of the growth process permitted a reorientation of basic pedagogy from a null-positive locus. The effects were immediate. The first generation of-“

  She stopped, startled. The old man was up on his elbow, his eyes blazing at her in wonder and fright. ‘Tm-” She looked around at the other children for help and at once wailed, “I’m sorry, Mr. DeBeckett!” and began to cry.

  The old man fell back, staring at her with a sort of unbelieving panic. The tittle girl wept abundantly. Slowly DeBeckett’s expression relaxed and he managed a sketchy smile.

  He said, “There, sweetest. You startled me. But it was charming of you to memorize all that!”

  “I learned it for you,” she sobbed.

  “I didn’t understand. Don’t cry.” Obediently the little girl dried her eyes as DeBeckett stretched out a hand to her.

  But the hand dropped back on the quilt. Age, surprise and the drug had allied to overmaster the dwindling resources of Elphen DeBeckett. He wandered to the plantoms on the wall. “I never understood what they did with my money,” he told Coppie, who smiled at him with a shy, painted smile. “The children kept coming, but they never said.”