The waiter refilled my cup. “‘The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness … his and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’”
Barnes leaned forward to squint at the waiter, who did not move. Then Barnes busied himself blowing on his coffee: “As I see it, our plan is simple as one and one make two …”
The waiter said, “‘I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.’”
“Damn it!” Barnes slammed his cup down. “Peace! Get away while we eat, you, Keats, Plato, Holdridge, that’s your name. I remember now, Holdridge! What’s all this other junk?”
“Just fancy,” said I. “Conceit.”
“Damn fancy, and to hell with conceit, you can eat alone, I’m getting out of this madhouse.” And Barnes gulped his coffee as the waiter and proprietor watched and I watched him gulping and across the street the bright bonfire in the gut of the monster device burnt fiercely. Our silent watching caused Barnes to freeze at last with the cup in his hand and the coffee dripping off his chin. “Why? Why aren’t you yelling? Why aren’t you fighting me?”
“But I am fighting,” I said, taking the book from under my arm. I tore a page from DEMOSTHENES, let Barnes see the name, rolled it into a fine Havana cigar shape, lit it, puffed it, and said, “‘Though a man escape every other danger, he can never wholly escape those who do not want such a person as he is to exist.’”
Barnes was on his feet, yelling, the “cigar” was torn from my mouth, stomped on, and the Chief Censor was out of the door, almost in one motion.
I could only follow.
On the sidewalk, Barnes collided with an old man who was entering the café. The old man almost fell. I grabbed his arm.
“Professor Einstein,” I said.
“Mr. Shakespeare,” he said.
Barnes fled.
I found him on the lawn by the old and beautiful library where the dark men, who wafted kerosene perfume from their every motion, still dumped vast harvestings of gun-shot dead pigeon, dying pheasant books, all autumn gold and silver from the high windows. But … softly. And while this still, almost serene, pantomime continued, Barnes stood screaming silently, the scream clenched in his teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, gagged back so none could hear. But the scream flew out of his wild eyes in flashes and was held for discharge in his knotted fists, and shuttled in colors about his face, now pale, now red as he glared at me, at the café, at the damned proprietor, at the terrible waiter who now waved amiably back at him. The Baal incinerator rumbled its appetite, spark-burnt the lawn. Barnes stared full at the blind yellow-red sun in its raving stomach.
“You,” I called up easily at the men who paused. “City Ordinance. Closing time is nine sharp. Please be done by then. Wouldn’t want to break the law— Good evening, Mr. Lincoln.”
“‘Four score,’” said a man, passing, “‘and seven years—’”
“Lincoln?” The Chief Censor turned slowly. “That’s Bowman. Charlie Bowman. I know you, Charlie, come back here, Charlie, Chuck!”
But the man was gone, and cars drove by, and now and again as the burning progressed men called to me and I called back, and whether it was, “Mr. Poe!” or hello to some small bleak stranger with a name like Freud, each time I called in good humor and they replied, Mr. Barnes twitched as if another arrow had pierced, sunk deep in his quivering bulk and he were dying slowly of a hidden seepage of fire and raging life. And still no crowd gathered to watch the commotion.
Suddenly, for no discernible reason, Mr. Barnes shut his eyes, opened his mouth wide, gathered air, and shouted, “Stop!”
The men ceased shoveling the books out of the window above.
“But,” I said, “it’s not closing time …”
“Closing time! Everybody out!” Deep holes had eaten away the centre of Jonathan Barnes’ eyes. Within, there was no bottom. He seized the air. He pushed down. Obediently, all the windows crashed like guillotines, chiming their panes.
The dark men, bewildered, came out and down the steps.
“Chief Censor.” I handed him a key which he would not take, so I forced his fist shut on it. “Come back tomorrow, observe silence, finish up.”
The Chief Censor let his bullet-hole gaze, his emptiness, search without finding me.
“How … how long has this gone on … ?”
“This?”
“This … and … that … and them.”
He tried but could not nod at the café, the passing cars, the quiet readers descending from the warm library now, nodding as they passed into cold dark, friends, one and all. His blind man’s rictal gaze ate holes where my face was. His tongue, anaesthetized, stirred:
“Do you think you can all fool me, me, me?”
I did not answer.
“How can you be sure,” he said, “I won’t burn people, as well as books?”
I did not answer.
I left him standing in the complete night.
Inside, I checked out the last volumes of those leaving the library now with night come on and shadows everywhere and the great Baal machinery churning smoke, its fire dying in the spring grass where the Chief Censor stood like a poured cement statue, not seeing his men drive off. His fist suddenly flew high. Something swift and bright flew up to crack the front-door glass. Then Barnes turned and walked after the Incinerator as it trundled off, a fat black funeral urn unraveling long tissues and scarves of black bunting smoke and fasTVanishing crepe.
I sat listening.
In the far rooms, filled with soft jungle illumination, there was a lovely autumnal turning of leaves, faint sifts of breathing, infinitesimal quirks, the gesture of a hand, the glint of a ring, the intelligent squirrel blink of an eye. Some nocturnal voyager sailed between the half-empty stacks. In porcelain serenity, the rest-room waters flowed down to a still and distant sea. My people, my friends, one by one, passed from the cool marble, the green glades, out into a night better than we could ever have hoped for.
At nine, I went out to pick up the thrown front door key. I let the last reader, an old man, out with me, and as I was locking up, he took a deep breath of the cool air, looked at the town, the spark-burnt lawn, and said:
“Will they come back again, ever?”
“Let them. We’re ready for them, aren’t we?”
The old man took my hand. “‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie dawn with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together.’”
We moved down the steps.
“Good evening, Isaiah,” I said.
“Mr. Socrates,” he said. “Good night.”
And each walked his own way, in the dark.
The Mad Wizards of Mars
Their eyes were fire and the breath flamed from out the witches’ mouths as they bent to probe the cauldron with greasy stick and bony finger.
“When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
“When the hurly burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.”
They danced most drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their three tongues and burning it with their cat’s eyes all aglitter:
“Round about the cauldron go;
In the poisoned entrails throw!
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”
They paused and cast their glances round. “Where’s the crystal? Where the needles?” “Here!” “Good!” “Is the yellow wax thickened?” “Yes!” “Pour it in the iron mold!” “Is the wax figure done?” They shaped the stuff like molasses adrip on their green hands. “Shove the needle through the heart!” “The crystal, the crystal, fetch it from the tarot bag, dust it off, and have a look!”
They went to the crystal, their faces white.
“See, see, see—”
A ROCKET SHIP MOVED through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On the rocket ship, men were dying.
The captain raised his head, tiredly, “We’ll have to use the morphine.”
“But, Captain—”
“You see yourself this man’s condition.” The captain lifted the wool blanket and the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of sulphurous thunder.
“I saw it, I saw it!” The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far-removed, and the planet Mars rising large and red. “I saw it, a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man’s face, spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and fluttering!”
“Pulse?” asked the captain.
The orderly measured it. “130.”
“He can’t go on with that. Use the morphine: Come along, Smith.”
They moved away. Suddenly the floorplates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, “Is this where Perse is?” turning in at a hatch.
A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. “I just don’t understand it.”
“How did Perse die?”
“We don’t know, captain. It wasn’t his heart, his brain, or shock. He just—died.”
The captain felt the doctor’s wrist which changed to a hissing snake and bit him. The captain did not flinch. “Take care of yourself. You’ve a pulse, too.”
The doctor nodded. “Perse complained of pains, needles, he said, in his wrists and legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. Everything’s physically normal.”
“That’s impossible. He died of something.”
The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap
