The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and ideas:

Rabbi David S. Boros

George Zebrowski

Gardner Dozois

Joe W. Haldeman

Harry Altshuler

and, of course, Victoria Schochet.

When I was asked to do the introduction to this collection, that was the question I asked.

“Why me?”

One answer is that I am suspected of being Jewish. At least, my mother is Jewish and my father’s mother was Jewish, and that makes both my father and myself Jewish by definition.

I don’t do anything about it, you understand. I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never even undergone that curious puberty rite, the bar mitzvah. It doesn’t matter. I am Jewish.

How can that be? Oh, well, even without the kosher stamp of religion, I bear the cultural stigmata (you should excuse the expression). I was born in a Russian shtetl, and I was brought up in Brooklyn in the very last decade in which you could still find pushcarts lining the streets and candy stores on every corner. In fact, I worked for thirteen years in my father’s candy store. What’s more I can tell jokes in a Yiddish dialect like a master, and I can speak Yiddish itself quite fluently. I like music in the minor, and turn faint when my favorite person places butter on her corned-beef sandwich. “Mustard,” I whisper. “Mustard!”

“Why me?”

Well, I write science fiction and fantasy.

There was a time, you know, when you didn’t associate Jews with science fiction and fantasy. To write great novels—yes, that was permitted Jewish boys, along with playing violins (not saxophones or guitars), playing chess (not poker or pool) and becoming a doctor or a lawyer (or, in an emergency, a dentist or an optometrist—but not a ballplayer).

The result is that a great many novels written in America deal with Jewish themes. After all, what else are all those great Jewish novelists going to write about? Methodists?

But science fiction and fantasy (in cheap magazines yet—feh) was different. In the days when I was an avid groper for those cheap magazines, the stories dealt entirely with Americans of northwest-European extraction who fought Homeric battles with space pirates, outer-world monsters, and evil wizards (to say nothing of Martian princesses in brassieres). What kind of a place was that for Jewish boys?

I do not say, mind you, that there were no Jews among the scribblers who filled the pulp magazines. There must have been, for despite her best efforts, an occasional Jewish mother lost control. Think of all the Jewish boys who went on the burlesque stage (bums!) and became millionaires (geniuses!).

Many of the Jewish pulp writers, however, used pen names as a matter of sound business sense. A story entitled “War-Gods of the Oyster-Men of Deneb” didn’t carry conviction if it was written by someone named Chaim Itzkowitz.

To give an actual case, that excellent writer Horace L. Gold, whose marvelously funny story “Trouble with Water” is included in this collection, and who is as Jewish as stuffed kishke, wrote outstanding science fiction for years under the name of Clyde Crane Campbell, you should again pardon the expression.

Jewish names which sounded German were, of course, permitted, for after all they might really be German, and Germans were northwest Europeans, who (though they were not quite as superior as they thought they were) were pretty superior, for people who didn’t speak English.

As far as I know, though, I was the first science fiction writer of note who used his own name, where that name was a mixture of a Biblical Isaac and a Slavic Asimov.

Why? Because I didn’t know any better, that’s why. To me, the name Isaac Asimov had a swing to it. For some reason (possibly superior genes) I was happy with it. I never longed for anything more glamorous. Had someone offered me the name Leslie Fotheringay-Phipps and begged me with tears in his eyes to take it, I would have refused.

In fact, I adopted so proprietary an attitude toward my name that for a long time I felt annoyed at my brother for sharing my last name and at I. Bashevis Singer for sharing my first name. However, my brother is a nice guy, and I. B. S. is a good writer, as you can see from his story in this collection—so I’ll permit it for a while longer anyway.

Then, too, one of my major reasons for wanting to write was to see my name in print. My name, not some stranger’s.

Take William Tenn, who also has a story in this collection. His name isn’t William Tenn. Who, in his whole life, ever heard of a name like William Tenn? What William Tenn’s name really is, is Philip Klass. Now whenever Phil claims to be William Tenn, he is met with profound disbelief. Words like “hallucinatory megalomania” and in gantzen ah meshugener are heard.

This, at least, I was never troubled with. My pen name and my real name are identical and both are as Jewish as I am.

Only I didn’t write on Jewish themes. I didn’t think of Jews, particularly, in connection with robots, wrecked spaceships, strange worlds with six suns, and Galactic Empires. The subject didn’t come up in my mind.

And yet sometimes it popped up. My first science fiction novel, Pebble in the Sky, dealt with a stiff-necked group of Earth people facing a Galactic Empire that felt contempt for them. Some people thought they saw a resemblance to Judea and the Roman Empire of the first century there and, who knows, maybe they were right. And one of my chief characters was named Joseph Schwartz. I didn’t come right out and say he was Jewish, but I’ve never found anyone who thought he wasn’t.

Sometimes, too, it was necessary for me to have a character whom, for nefarious purposes of my own, I wanted the reader to underestimate. The easiest trick was to give him a substandard version of English, for then he would be dismissed as a comic character with at most a certain limited folk wisdom. Since the only substandard version of English I can handle faultlessly is the Yiddish dialect, some of the characters in The Foundation Trilogy speak it.

But times changed. After World War II, with the vanishing of the Nazi menace and the rise of the United Nations, racism became unrespectable. At once, all kinds of ethnic consciousnesses became popular and, to my own personal amazement, science fiction and fantasy, dealing with Jewish themes, turned out to be possible—so that a superb collection such as this one could be put together eventually.

Indeed, caught up in the new spirit, even I wrote a fantasy that was deliberately and entirely based on a Jewish theme. It was “Unto the Fourth Generation” and it is included in this collection.

That is still another answer to the question “Why me?”—because I have a story in this collection.

Anyway, what with one thing and another, even without the bar mitzvah and the ritual, I feel I’m doing my bit and I grow impatient with those who take up a Jewisher-than-thou attitude.

Which reminds me of a phone conversation I once had with a gentleman whose real name I won’t use (because I have forgotten it) but to whom I will give, at the proper time, a fictional name of equivalent aura.

It came about because the Boston Globe gave a bookfair at which I was asked to speak and at which I did speak. As it happened, the fair fell upon Rosh Hashanah, something I didn’t realize, because unless someone tells me, I never know when it comes. That is not an excuse, just a statement, because if I had known it was Rosh Hashanah, I would have delivered my speech anyway.

The next day, however, I received a phone call from a stranger, who said he was Jewish, and who demanded to know why I had consented to talk on Rosh Hashanah. I explained, politely, that I didn’t keep the holidays and that seemed to infuriate him. At once, he flung himself into a self-righteous lecture in which he descanted on my duties as a Jew, and ended by accusing me of trying to conceal my Jewishness.

Breathing a short prayer to the God of Aristotle, of Newton and of Einstein, I said, quite calmly, “You have the advantage of me, sir. You know my name. I don’t know yours. To whom am I speaking?”

And the Lord God of Science proved to be on the job, for the man on the phone answered, “My name is Jackson Davenport.”

I said, “Really? Well, my name, as you know, is Isaac Asimov, and if I were trying to conceal my Jewishness, the very first move I would make would be to change my name to Jackson Davenport.”

Somehow that ended the conversation.

But to Jackson Davenport (not his real name, remember), wherever he is, I have this further word: The reason I am writing this introduction is that, despite all my infidel ways and beliefs, I am Jewish enough.

SO YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME, Mr. Big-Shot Journalist, as if you’re surprised to see a little, gray-haired, gray-bearded man. He meets you at the spaceport and he’s driving a piece of machinery that on Earth you wouldn’t even give to a dog’s grandmother, she should take it with her to the cemetery and be buried in it. This is the man—you’re saying to yourself—this nobody, this piece of nothing, who’s supposed to tell you about the biggest, strangest development in Judaism since Johannan Ben Zakkai sat down with the Sanhedrin in Jabne and said, “The meeting will please come to order.”

Are you talking to the wrong man, you want to know? Did you come across space, fifty, sixty, I don’t know, maybe seventy million miles just to see a schlemiel in a cracked helmet with a second hand oxygen canister on his back? The answer is this: you are not talking to the wrong man. Poor as he is, shabby as he is, unlucky as he is, you are talking to the one man who can tell you all you want to know about those trouble-makers from the fourth planet of the star Rigel. You are talking to Milchik, the TV repairman. Himself. In person.

All we do is put your belongings in the back of the module and then we get in the front. You have to slam the door—a little harder, please—and then, if this is still working and that is still working, and the poor old module feels like making another trip, we’ll be off. Luxury it definitely is not, a spaceport limousine you certainly could not call it, but—module, shmodule—it gets you there.

You like dust storms? That’s a dust storm. If you don’t like dust storms, you shouldn’t come to Venus. It’s all we got in the way of scenery. The beach at Tel Aviv we don’t got. Grossinger’s, from ancient times in the Catskills, we don’t got. Dust storms we got.

But you’re saying to yourself, I didn’t come for dust storms, I didn’t come for conversation. I came to find out what happened to the Jews of the galaxy when they all gathered on Venus. Why should this schmendrik, this Milchik the TV man, have anything special to tell me about such a big event? Is he a special wise man, is he a scholar, is he a prophet among his people?

So I’ll tell you. No, I’m not a wise man, I’m not a scholar, I’m certainly not a prophet. A living I barely make, going from level to level in the Darjeeling Burrow with a tool box on my back, repairing the cheapest kind of closed-circuit sets. A scholar I’m not, but a human being I am. And that’s the first thing you ought to know. Listen, I say to Sylvia, my wife, don’t our Sages say that he who murders one man murders the entire human race? So doesn’t it follow then that he who listens to one man listens to the whole human race? And that he who listens to one Jew on Venus is listening to all the Jews on Venus, all the Jews in the universe, even, from one end to the other.

But Sylvia—go talk to a woman!—says, “Enough already with your Sages! We have three sons to marry. Who’s going to pay for their brides’ transportation to Venus? You think for nothing a nice Jewish girl will come here, from another planetary system maybe—she’ll come to this gehenna of a planet and go live in a hole in the ground, she’ll raise children, they won’t see the sun, they won’t see the stars, they’ll only see plastic walls and elevators and drunken cadmium miners coming in to spend their pay and have a goyische good time. You think just because a girl likes the stereo transcript of one of our sons and is willing to come here and marry him, we don’t have to pay her fare and maybe something a little extra she should enjoy herself on the way? Where do the Sages say the money comes from? Do they say maybe we should nail up a new collection box in the shul: ‘Help the Milchik boys find brides—their father is too busy with philosophy’?”

I don’t have to remind you—you’re a journalist, you’re an educated man—what Solomon says in Proverbs about women: a good one, he says, has got to cost you a lot more in the end than pearls. And still, someone in the family has to think about money and the boys getting brides. That’s the second point. The first point is that I’m a human being and a Jew, two different things maybe, and I’ve got the right to speak for all human beings and for all Jews.

On top of that, I’m a Jewish father with three full-grown sons here on Venus, and if you want to do an injury to your worst enemy, you say to him, “Listen. You’re Jewish? You got three sons? Go to Venus.”

And that’s the third point. Why I, Milchik the TV man, am telling you this, and why you come all the way from Earth just to listen to me. Because I’m not only a Jewish father, but I’m also—Listen. Could I ask you a question? You won’t be offended? You sure you won’t be offended?

You’re not Jewish, by any chance? I mean, do you have any Jewish ancestors, a grandfather, a great-grandmother maybe? Are you sure? Well, that’s what I mean. Maybe one of your ancestors changed his name back in 2533—2533 by your calendar, of course. It’s not exactly that you look Jewish or anything like that, it’s just that you’re such an intelligent man and you ask such intelligent questions. I couldn’t help wondering—

You like Jewish food? In twenty, twenty-five minutes my poor old tired module will pull us out of this orange dust and into the Darjeeling air lock. Then you’ll sit down to a Jewish meal, believe me, you’ll kiss every one of your fingers. We get almost all of our Jewish food shipped here from Earth, special packaging and special arrangement. And, naturally, special cost. My wife Sylvia makes a dish, they come from all over our level just to taste: chopped reconstituted herring. It’s an appetizer and we like appetizers in our family. So what I’ve been telling you, after all, is only an appetizer. I have to get you in exactly the right mood for the main dish, the big story you came for.

Sylvia makes all the food we eat in the shul—our synagogue. You know, the hamantashen, all that. She even prepares the formal Saturday morning breakfast, the bagels and lox and cream cheese that all the men must eat before they say their Sabbath prayers. We’re all orthodox here and we practice the Levittown rite. Our rabbi, Joseph Smallman, is superorthodox Levittown: he wears a yarmulka, and on top of the yarmulka a black homburg which has been passed down from father to son in his family for I don’t know how many centuries.

Oh, look how you’re smiling! You know I’ve moved from the appetizer to the main dish. Rabbi Joseph Smallman. It’s only Venus, and it’s maybe the seventh or eighth Darjeeling burrow listed on the map, but have we got ourselves a rabbi! To us he’s an Akiba, a Rambam.

More than that. You know what we call him when we’re alone, among ourselves? We call him the Great Rabbi of Venus.

Now you’re laughing out loud. No, don’t apologize: I heard a chuckle come out of you, like a belch, you should excuse the expression, after a big dinner.

This Milchik the TV man, you’re saying to yourself, he and his neighbors in the burrow they come to maybe seventy or eighty Jewish families, they’re making a living, with God’s help, out of the holes in each other’s pockets—and their rabbi is the Great Rabbi of Venus? The littlest hole in the ground claims the biggest fire?

It’s impossible, maybe? Is anything impossible to the Most High, blessed be His Name? After all, as the Sages tell us, “The last shall be first.” Just don’t ask me, please, which Sages.

Why is he the Great Rabbi? Well, first of all, why shouldn’t Rabbi Smallman be a Great Rabbi? He needs a certificate from the Great Rabbi Licensing Bureau? You have to graduate from the Great Rabbi Special Yeshiva to become a Great Rabbi? That’s first of all: you’re a Great Rabbi because you act like a Great Rabbi, you’re recognized like a Great Rabbi, you make decisions like a Great Rabbi. And you must have heard something of how he acted and how he decided when all the Jews in the universe held a congress right here on Venus. If you hadn’t heard, you wouldn’t have come all the way from Earth for this interview.

Other people had heard, too. They’d heard of his piety, learning, and wisdom—of his modesty, of course, I say nothing—long before the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference on Venus. People heard and people talked, and they came from as far away as the Gus Grissom Burrow to ask him for rabbinical decisions.

You’ve got the time to listen to just one example? Sure you’ve got the time: you’re driving through a heavy dust storm in a module that’s coughing its guts out, a module that knows Milchik the TV man gives it the best of everything—charged-up power cells, a brand-new fan belt—even if it means that he can’t afford to put food on his own table. For Milchik, the module will keep going no matter what, when by itself it would ask for nothing better than to lie down and die in comfort. And the module also likes to listen to Milchik expounding Halacha, the holy rules and laws.

About five years ago, something terrible happened on the eve of the Passover. There was an explosion aboard a cargo ship on its way to Venus. No one was hurt, but the cargo was damaged and the ship arrived very late, just a couple of hours before the first seder was to begin. Now on this ship was all the special Passover food that had been ordered from Earth by the twenty-four Jewish families of the Altoona Burrow, and the special food was in cans and airtight packages. When the delivery was made, the Altoona people noticed that the cans had been banged about and dented—but, worse than that, most of the cans had tiny holes all over them. Disaster! According to the Rabbinical Council of 2135 on Space Travel Kashruth, food which is in a punctured can is automatically unclean, unclean for daily use, unclean for Passover use. And here it is almost the seder and what can they do?

These are not rich people: they don’t have reserves, they don’t have alternatives, they don’t even have their own rabbi. If it’s a matter of life and death, all right, anything goes; but it isn’t life and death, all it means is that they’ll have to eat humetz, non-Passover food, they won’t be able to celebrate the seder. And a Jew who can’t celebrate the Deliverance from Egypt with matzo, with bitter herb, with charoseth, with Passover wine, such a Jew is like a bride without a wedding canopy, like a synagogue without a Torah scroll.

The Altoona Burrow is connected to the Darjeeling Burrow; it’s a suburb of ours. That’s what I said—a suburb. Listen, I know we’re a small place, but where is it written that small places, no matter how small, are not entitled to suburbs? If Grissom can have fourteen suburbs, we can have two. So naturally the Altoona people, white-faced, worried, their mouths opening and closing with aggravation, brought the problem to our Rabbi Joseph Smallman. Nothing was leaking from the cans, they said, but the result of the one test they had conducted was bad: as recommended by the Rabbinical Council of 2135, they had taken a hair from somebody’s head and poked it into a hole in a can—and the hair had not visibly curled back out. Did that mean that all the expensive food shipped across space had to be condemned, no seders in the Altoona Burrow?

Well, of course that’s what it meant—or would have meant to an ordinary rabbi. Rabbi Smallman looked at them and looked at them, and he scratched the pimple on the right side of his nose. He’s a pretty good-looking man, Rabbi Smallman, strong and chunky with a face like a young Ben-Gurion, but he does always seem to have a big red pimple on the side of his nose. Then he got up and went to his bookcase and took out half a dozen volumes of Talmud and the last three volumes of the Proceedings of the Rabbinical Council on Space Travel. And he looked in each book at least once, and he sat and thought for a long time after each passage. Finally he asked a question: “Which hair did you use and from whose head?”

They showed him the hair, a fine, white hair from the head of the oldest great-grandfather in the Altoona Burrow, a hair as thin and as delicate as a baby’s first sigh. “So this hair did not curl back,” he said, “from a hole in that particular can. So much for your test with a hair of your selection. Now for my test with a hair of my selection.” And he called over my oldest boy, Aaron David, and told him to pluck out a hair.

You’re not blind, you can see my hair, even at my age, how heavy and coarse it is. And believe me, it’s thinning out, it’s nothing to what it was. My boy, Aaron David, he has the traditional hair of our family, each one twice, three times as thick as a normal hair, his head always going up into a black explosion. When he comes with me, as helper on a job, the customer usually says something like, “With a head of hair like that, what for do you need to carry around coaxial cable?” I say to them: “Bite your tongue. Maybe Haman or Hitler would have used his hair for coaxial cable, or that unholy pair, Sebastian Pombal and Juan Crevea, they also liked to take our heads as raw material in their terrible factories, but don’t you talk like that in the year 2859 to a Jewish father about his Jewish son.” The Eternal, blessed be He, may demand my son of me, but to nobody else will I be an Abraham who doesn’t defend his Isaac. You know what I mean?

So when Rabbi Smallman picks up a dented can and pokes Aaron David’s hair at a hole, the hair comes back right away like a piece of bent wire. What else? And when he tries it with another can, again the hair won’t go in. So Rabbi Smallman points to the first can they brought him, the one they tested with the old man’s hair, and he says, “I declare the food in this can unfit and unclean. But these others,” and he waves his hand at the rest of the shipment, “are perfectly acceptable. Carry them home and enjoy your seder.”

They crowd around him with tears in their eyes and they thank him and they thank him. Then they gather the cans together and they hurry back to their burrow—it’s getting late and it’s time to begin the search for the last bits of humetz that you have to do before you can turn to the Pesadikeh food. The Altoona people rush out, in a few minutes, I tell you, it was as it says in the Second book of the Holocaust: “There was none left, not one.”

You understand, I hope, wherein lies the greatness of this decision? Jews from all over Venus discussed it and everyone, everywhere, marveled. No. I’m sorry, you’re wrong: the greatness did not lie merely in a decision that made it possible for some poor Jews to enjoy their own Passover seders in their own homes. That’s based on a simple precept—that it’s better to have a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew. Try again. No, that’s not right either: using a thick hair from my son’s head was not especially brilliant—under those particular circumstances, any really good rabbi would have done the same. For that you don’t have to be a Hillel already; you just have to avoid being a literal-minded Shammai. The point still eludes you, right? Goyische kop!

My apologies. I didn’t mean to speak in a language you don’t know. What did I say? It was just a simple comment about, well, how some people are intended to be students of Talmud, and other people are not intended to be students of Talmud. It’s kind of like an old saying amongst us.

Sure I’ll explain. Why great? In the first place. Almost any decent rabbi would have seen the importance of that food being found fit and clean. And in the second place. A good rabbi, a first-class rabbi, would have found a way to do it, a hair from my son, a this, a that, anything. But, in the third place, only a truly great rabbi would have examined that many books and thought that long and hard about the matter before he announced his decision. How could they really enjoy the seder unless they had perfect confidence in his decision? And how could they have perfect confidence unless they had seen him wrestle with it through nine separate volumes? Now do you see why we called him the Great Rabbi of Venus, even five years before the Neozionist Congress and the great Bulba scandal?

Now I didn’t go so far in Talmudic study myself—a man has a family to support, and closed-circuit TV repair on a planet like Venus doesn’t exactly help your mind in clearing up the problems of Gemara. But whenever I think of what our congregation here has in Rabbi Smallman, I think of how the Sages begin their argument: “A man finds a treasure…”

You shouldn’t get the impression, please, that a treasure is a treasure to everyone. Almost all the Jews on Venus are Ashkenazim—people whose ancestors emigrated from Eastern Europe to America before the Holocaust and who didn’t return to Israel after the Ingathering—but there are at least three kinds of Ashkenazim, and only our kind, the Levittown Ashkenazim, call Rabbi Smallman the Great Rabbi of Venus. The Williamsburg Ashkenazim, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us, the black-gabardined Ashkenazim who shake and pray and shake and pray, they call Rabbi Smallman the lox-and-bagels rabbi. And on the other hand, the Miami Ashkenazim, the rich all-rightniks who live in the big IBM Burrow, to them a rabbi is a girl who hasn’t yet gotten married and is trying to do something intellectual with herself. It’s said that the Williamsburg Ashkenazim believe in miracle-working, that the Levittown Ashkenazim believe it’s a miracle when they find work, and that the Miami Ashkenazim don’t believe in miracles and don’t believe in work, they only believe in the import-export business.

I can see you’re remembering I said before that I was through with the appetizer and ready to serve the main dish, the story you came for. And where, in all that I’ve just been telling you, is the main dish, you want to know? Listen, relax a little. Figure it this way: first I gave you an appetizer, then, after that, for the last few minutes, you’ve been having a soup course. You’re through with the soup? Fine. Now we bring out the main dish.

Only—just a second more. There’s something else you have to have first. Call it a salad. Look, it’s a very small piece of salad. You’ll be finished with it in no time. Now please. You’re not the cook; you’re only a customer. You want a story that’s like a sandwich? Go someplace else. Milchik serves only complete meals.

That night, after the seder, I’m sitting on a bench outside our apartment in the Darjeeling Burrow. To me, this is always the best time. It’s quiet, most people have gone to bed, and the corridor doesn’t smell from crowds. All through the corridors, the lights are being turned down to half their wattage. That’s to let us know it’s night on Earth. Exactly where it’s night on Earth, what part of Earth, I have no idea. Darjeeling, maybe.

As I sit thinking, Aaron David comes out of the apartment and sits down near me on the bench. “Papa,” he says after a while. “That was a great thing Rabbi Smallman did today.” I nod, sure, certainly it was a great thing. Aaron David puts his hand up to the part of his head where he pulled the single hair out. He holds his hand tight against the spot and looks across the corridor. “Before this,” he says, “I just wanted, but now I more than want. I’m going to be a rabbi.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “Me, I’m going to be the Viceroy of Venus.”

“I’m serious, Papa. I’m really serious.”

“I’m joking? I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll one day be appointed by the Council of Eleven Nations Terrestrial, and the Presidents of Titan and Ganymede? I’d do a worse job than that hooligan we got right now, his heart should only explode inside his chest? All right,” I say to him, “all right,” because now he turns and looks at me, with his eyes that are Sylvia’s eyes, and eyes like that, let me tell you, can look. “So you want to be a rabbi. What good is the wanting? Anything you want that I can give, I’ll give. You know I have that little insulated screwdriver, the blue one, that was made in Israel over five hundred years ago, when Israel was still a Jewish state. That precious little screwdriver, it’s like the bones of my right hand, that I’ll give you if you ask for it. But I can’t give you tuition money for a yeshiva, and more important, I can’t even find the transportation money for a bride. A tradition, now, it’s hundreds of years old, ever since the Jews began emigrating into space, and a Levittown bride must come from another planet—and it’s not only you, it’s also your two brothers. A rational creature, boychik, has to worry in an organized way. First the bride money, then we talk about yeshiva money.”

Aaron David is close to crying. “If only—if—” He bites his lip.

“If—,” I say. “If—You know what we say about if. If your grandmother would have had testicles, she’d have been your grandfather. Consider the problem: if you want to be a rabbi, especially a Levittown rabbi, you have to know three ancient languages even before you begin; you have to know Hebrew, you have to know Aramaic, you have to know Yiddish. So I’ll tell you what. If. If you can learn enough beforehand, maybe if the miracle ever happens and we can send you to a yeshiva, you can go through faster than usual, rapid-advance, before the whole family goes bankrupt. If Rabbi Smallman, for example, gives you lessons.”

“He’ll do that,” he says excitedly. “He’s doing it already!”

“No, I’m not talking about just lessons. I’m talking about lessons. The kind you have to pay for. He’ll teach you one day after supper, and I’ll review with you the next day after supper. That way I’ll learn too, I won’t be such an ignoramus. You know what the Sages say about studying Talmud: ‘Get thee a comrade…’ You’ll be my comrade, and I’ll be your comrade, and Rabbi Smallman will be both our comrade. And we’ll explain to your mother, when she screams at us, that we’re getting a bargain, two for one, a special.”

So that’s what we did. To make the extra money, I started hauling cargo from the spaceport in my module—you notice it drives now as if it’s got a hernia? And I got Aaron David a part-time job down on the eighteenth level, in the boiler room. I figured if Hillel could almost freeze to death on that roof in order to become a scholar, it’s no tragedy if my son cooks himself a little bit for the same reason.

It works. My son learns and learns, he begins to have more the walk and talk of a scholar and less the walk and talk of a TV repairman. I learn too, not so much of course, but enough so that I can sweeten my conversation with lines from Ibn Ezra and Mendele Mocher Sforim. I’m not any richer, I’m still a kasrilik, a schlemiel, but at least now I’m a bit of an educated schlemiel. And it works also for Rabbi Smallman: he’s able to send his family once a year on a vacation to Earth, where they can sit around a piece of lake and see what real water is like in the natural state. I’m happy for him, me and my herniated module. The only thing I’m not happy about is that I still can’t see any hope for yeshiva tuition money. But, listen, learning is still learning. As Freud says, just to see from Warsaw to Minsk, even if you don’t see right and you don’t understand what you see, it’s still a great thing.

But who, I ask you, can see from here to Rigel? And on the fourth planet, yet, they’ll come here and create such a commotion?

From the Neozionist movement, of course, we had already heard a long time ago. Jews always hear when other Jews are getting together to make trouble for them. We’d heard about Dr. Glickman’s book, we’d heard about his being killed by Vegan Dayanists, we’d heard about his followers organizing all over the galaxy—listen, we’d even had a collection box installed in our synagogue by some of his party people here on Venus: “In memory of the heroic Dr. Glickman, and to raise funds to buy back the Holy Land from the Vegan aliens.”

With that I have no particular quarrel; I’ve even dropped a couple of coins myself in the pushke from time to time. After all, why shouldn’t Milchik the TV man, out of his great wealth, help to buy back the Holy Land?

But the Neozionist movement is another matter. I’m not a coward, and show me a real emergency, I’m ready to die for my people. Outside of an emergency—well, we Jews on Venus have learned to keep the tips of our noses carefully under the surface of our burrows. It’s not that there’s anti-Semitism on Venus—who would ever dream of saying such a thing? When the Viceroy announces five times a week that the reason Venus has an unfavorable balance of trade with other planets is that the Jews are importing too much kosher food: that’s not anti-Semitism, that’s pure economic analysis. And when his Minister of the Interior sets up a quota for the number of Jews, in each burrow and says you can only move from one place to another if you have special permission: that also is not anti-Semitism, obviously, it’s efficient administration. What I say is, why upset a government so friendly to the Jews?

There’s another thing I don’t like about Neozionism; and it’s hard to say it out loud, especially to a stranger. This business about going back to Israel. Where else does a Jew belong but in that particular land? Right? Well, I don’t know, maybe. We started out there with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No good. So the first time we came back was with Moses, and that lasted for a while—until the Babylonians threw us out. Then we came back under Zerubbabel, and we stayed there for five hundred years—until Titus burned the Temple and the Romans made us leave again. Two thousand years of wandering around the world with nothing more to show for it than Maimonides and Spinoza, Marx and Einstein, Freud and Chagall, and we said, enough is enough, back to Israel. So back we went with Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and the rest of them. For a couple of centuries we did all right, we only had to worry about forty million Arabs who wanted to kill us, but that’s not enough excitement for what God Himself, Blessed be His Name, called on Mount Sinai a “stiff-necked people.” We have to get into an argument—in the middle of the Interplanetary Crisis—with Brazil and Argentina.

My feeling, I don’t know about the rest of the Jews, but I’m getting tired. If no, is no. If out, is out. If good-bye, is good-bye.

That’s not the way the Neozionists see it. They feel we’ve had our rest. Time for another round. “Let the Third Exile end in our lifetimes. Let the Knesset be rebuilt in our age. Israel for the Jews!”

Good enough. Don’t we still say, after all the wine, “Next year in Jerusalem”? Who can argue? Except for the one small thing they overlooked, as you know: Israel and Jerusalem these days isn’t even for human beings. The Council of Eleven Nations Terrestrial wants no trouble with the Vegans over a sliver of land like Israel, not in these times with what’s going on in the galaxy: if both sides in the Vegan Civil War are going to claim the place as holy territory because the men they call the founders of their religions once walked in it, let the bivalves have it, says the Council, let them fight it out between themselves.

And I, Milchik the TV man, I for one see nothing strange in a bunch of Vegan bivalves basing their religion on the life and legend of a particular Jew like Moshe Dayan and wanting to chop up any other Jews who try to return to the land of their ancestors. In the first place, it’s happened to us before: to a Jew such an attitude should by now begin to make sense. Where is it written that a Dayanist should like Dayan’s relatives? In the second place, how many Jews protested fifty years ago when the other side, the Vegan Omayyads, claimed all human Mohammedans were guilty of sacrilege and expelled them from Jerusalem? Not, I’ll admit, that such a protest would have been as noticeable as a ripple in a saucer of tea….

Well, the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference is organized, and it’s supposed to meet in Basel, Switzerland, so that, I suppose, history can have a chance to repeat itself. And right away the Dayanist Vegans hear about it and they protest to the Council. Are Vegans honored guests of Earth, or aren’t they? Their religion is being mocked, they claim, and they even kill a few Jews to show how aggravated they are. Of course the Jews are accused of inciting a pogrom, and it’s announced that in the interests of law and order, not to mention peace and security, no Jewish entrance visas will be honored in spaceports anywhere on Earth. Fair is fair.

Meanwhile delegates to the Conference are on their way from all over the galaxy. If they can’t land on Earth, where do they go? And to what site should the Conference be transferred by the authorities?

Where else but to Venus? It’s the perfect place for such a conference. The scenery is gorgeous—on the other side of the dust storms—and there’s a Viceroy whose administration loves the Jewish people most dearly. Besides, there’s a desperate housing shortage on Venus. That will create the kind of problem Jews love to solve: a game of musical burrows.

Listen, it could have been worse. As Esther said to Mordecai when he told her of Haman’s plans to massacre all the Jews of Persia—it could have been worse, but I don’t for the moment see exactly how.

So the delegates begin arriving in the Solar System, they’re shunted to Venus—and don’t ask. Life becomes full of love and bounce for us all. First, a decree comes down. The delegates can’t use hotel facilities on Venus, even if they’ve got the money: there are too many of them, they’ll put a strain on the hotel system or something. Next, the Jews of Venus are responsible for their coreligionists. In other words, not only is a Jew naturally a brother to every other Jew, he’s now also got to be either a boarder or a landlord.

Stop for a moment and reflect on how many are inflicted on us. Each and every planet in the galaxy which has a human population has at least a breath, a kiss, of Jewish population. So from this planet comes two delegates, from that one fifteen delegates, from that other one—where there are plenty of Jews, they should live and be healthy, but they disagree with each other; comes a total of sixty-three delegates, organized in eight separate caucuses. It may not be nice to number Jews, even if they’re delegates, but you can figure for yourself that by the time the last one has landed at a Venusian spaceport, we’ve got more than enough to go around.

We’ve got plenty. And on Venus, you don’t go up on the surface and throw together a couple of shacks for the visitors.

The Williamsburg Ashkenazim object. To them, some of these Jews aren’t even Jews; they won’t let them into their burrows, let alone their homes. After all, Shomrim in khaki pants whose idea of a religious service is to stand around singing Techezachna, Reconstructionists who pray from a siddur that is rewritten every Monday and Wednesday, Japanese Hasidim who put on tefillin once a year at sunset in memory of the Great Conversion of 2112—these are also Jews, say the Williamsburg Ashkenazim?

Exactly, these are also Jews, say the government officials of Venus. Brothers and boarders they are, and you will kindly make room for them. And they send in police, and they send in troops. Heads are cracked, beards are torn, life, as I said, is full of love and bounce.

And if you don’t object, you think it helps? Sure it helps—like a groan it helps. The Levittown Ashkenazim announce we’ll cooperate with the government, we’ll provide housing for the delegates to the limit—beyond the limit, even. So what happens? My brother and his family and all their neighbors get evicted from the Kwantung Burrow, it’s needed for delegate headquarters says the government.

An Interstellar Neozionist Congress we had to have?

I look around and I remember the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel—“I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven”—and I think to myself, “A promise is a promise, but even a promise can go too far. The stars by themselves are more than enough, but when each star has maybe ten, twenty planets…”

By this time, me and my whole family, we’re living in what used to be the kitchen of our apartment. My brother and his family, it’s a big family, they should live and be well, they’re living in the dining room. In what my wife, Sylvia, calls the parlor, there’s the wonder-working rabbi from Procyon XII and his entire court—plus, in one corner of the parlor, there’s the correspondent from the Jewish Sentinel of Melbourne, Australia, and his wife, and their dog, an Afghan. In the bedrooms—listen, why should I go on? In the bedrooms, there are crowds and arguments and cooking smells that I don’t even want to know about.

Enough already? No, I am sorry to tell you, not enough.

One day I go into the bathroom. A man is entitled once in a while to go into the bathroom of his own apartment? It’s nature, no? And there in the bathtub I see three creatures, each as long as my arm and as thick as my head. They look like three brown pillows, all wrinkled and twisted, with some big gray spots on this side and on that side, and out of each gray spot there is growing a short gray tentacle. I didn’t know what they were, giant cockroaches maybe, or some kind of plant that the delegates living with us brought along as food, but when they moved I let out a yell.

My son, Aaron David, came running into the bathroom. “What’s the matter, Papa?”

I pointed to the brown pillows. They had some sort of ladder arrangement set up in the bathtub with small shelves in different places, and they were climbing up and down, up and down. “What’s the matter, you want to know, when I see things like that in my bathroom?”

“Oh, them. They’re the Bulbas.”

“Bulbas?”

“Three of the delegates from the fourth planet of the star Rigel. The other three delegates are down the corridor in the Guttenplans’ bathroom.”

“Delegates? You mean they’re Jewish?” I stared at them. “They don’t look Jewish.”

Aaron David rolled his eyes up to the ceiling of the bathroom. “Papa you’re so old-fashioned! You yourself told me that the blue Jews from Aldebaran show how adaptable our people are.”

“You should pardon me,” I said. “You and your adaptable. A Jew can be blue—I don’t say I like it, but who am I to argue with somebody else’s color scheme?—and a Jew can be tall or short. He can even be deaf from birth like those Jews from Canopus, Sirius, wherever they come from. But a Jew has to have arms and legs. He has to have a face with eyes, a nose, a mouth. It seems to me that’s not too much to ask.”

“So their mouths are not exactly like our mouths,” Aaron David said excitedly. “Is that a crime? Is that any reason to show prejudice?”

I left him and I went to the bathroom in the synagogue. Call me old-fashioned, all right, but there are still boundaries, there are certain places where I have to stop. Here, I have to say, Milchik cannot force himself to be modern.

Well. You know what happened. It turns out I’m not the only one.

I took the day off and went to the first session of the Conference. “Rich man,” my Sylvia says to me. “My breadwinner. Family provider. From political conferences you’re going to get brides for your three sons?”

“Sylvia,” I say to her. “Once in a lifetime my customers can maybe not have clear reception of the news broadcasts and Captain Iliad. Once in a lifetime I can go see representatives from all of the Jews of the Galaxy holding a meeting and getting along with each other.”

So I went. Only I can’t say they got along so good. First there was the demonstration by the Association of Latter-Day Mea Shearim (“If the Messiah appears and starts going from star to star, only to find that all Jews are already on Earth and in Israel…”). When that was quieted down, there was the usual Bronsteinite Trotskyist resolution aimed at the Union of Soviet Uganda and Rhodesia, followed by the usual attempt to excommunicate retroactively the authors of the Simplified Babylonian Talmud that had been published in 2685. Then we had to sit through an hour of discussion about how the very existence of a six-story-high statue of Juan Crevea in Buenos Aires was an affront and an insult and an agony to every Jew, and how we should all boycott Argentinian products until the statue was pulled down. I agreed with what the chairman said when he managed to rule the discussion out of order: “We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by such ancient agonies, such stale affronts. If we do, where do we begin and where do we stop? Let Argentina have its statue of Crevea, let Düsseldorf have its Adolf Hitler University, let Egypt and Libya continue to maintain the Torquemada Observatory on Pluto. This is not our business here today.”

At last, finally, after all the traditional Jewish preliminaries, they got down to the real problems of the opening session: the accreditation of delegates. And there, in no time at all, they got stuck. They got stuck and all mixed up, like bits of lox in a lox omelette.

The Bulbas. The three from my bathroom, the three from Max Guttenplan’s bathroom—the total delegation from Rigel IV.

No question about their credentials, said the Committee on Accreditation. Their credentials are in order, and they’re certainly delegates. The only thing is, they can’t be Jews.

And why can’t we be Jews, the six Bulbas wanted to know? And here I had to stand up to get a good look, I could hardly believe my eyes. Because guess who their interpreter was? No one else but my son, my kaddish, my Aaron David. Mr. Show-No-Prejudice in person.

“Why can’t you be Jews? Because,” says the Committee Chairman, stuttering with wet lips and plucking at the air with his right hand, “because Jews can be this, can be that. They can be a lot of things. But, first of all, they have to be human.”

“You will kindly point out to us,” the Bulbas say through my son, the interpreter, “where it says and in which book that Jews have to be human. Name an authority, provide a quotation.”

At this point the Deputy Chairman comes up and apologizes to the Chairman of the Committee. The Deputy Chairman is the kind who wins scholarships and fellowships. “You’ll pardon me,” he says, “but you’re not making it clear. It’s a very simple matter, really.” He turns to the Bulbas. “No one can be a Jew,” he explains to the six of them, “who is not the child of a Jewish mother. That’s the most ancient, most fundamental definition of a Jew.”

“Aha,” say the Bulbas. “And from what do you get the impression that we are not the children of Jewish mothers? Will you settle for the copies of our birth certificates that we brought along with us?”

That’s when the meeting falls apart. A bunch of delegates in khakis starts cheering and stamping their feet. Another bunch with fur hats and long earlocks begins screaming that this whole colloquy is an abomination. All over the hall arguments break out, little clusters of argument between two and three people, big clusters of argument between twenty and thirty people, arguments on biology, on history, on the Baba M’tziya. The man sitting next to me, a fat, squinty-eyed man to whom I haven’t said a word, suddenly turns to me and pushes his forefinger into my chest and says: “But if you take that position, my dear fellow, how in the world can you make it compatible with the well-known decision, to mention just one example—’’And up on the platform, Bronsteinite Trotskyists have seized control of the public-address system and are trying to reintroduce their resolution on Uganda and Rhodesia.

By the time some kind of order is restored, two blue Jews have been carried away to the hospital and a lawyer from Ganymede has been arrested for using a hearing aid as a deadly weapon.

Someone calls for a vote, by the entire Congress, on the accreditation of the Bulbas. Accreditation as what—someone else wants to know—as delegates or as Jews? They’ve been accepted as delegates, and who are we to pass upon them as Jews? I’ll accept them as Jews in the religious sense, someone else stands up to point out, but not in the biological sense. What kind of biological sense, he’s asked by a delegate from across the hall; you don’t mean biology, you mean race, you racist. All right, all right, cries out a little man who’s sitting in front of him, but would you want your sister to marry one?

It’s obvious that there are as many opinions as there are delegates. And the chairman, up there on the platform, he’s standing there and he doesn’t know what to do.

Suddenly I notice one of the Bulbas is climbing up on the platform. These little tentacles, they use them for everything, for walking, for eating, for talking, for I don’t know what. And this Bulba, he gets to the public-address system, and he vibrates one short tentacle for a while, and finally we hear what he says, faint and very soft. We hear that funny voice, like a piece of paper rustling, all through the hall:

“Modeh ani l’fonecha.”

The line, just translated by itself, may not mean so much—“Here I am standing before you” or “I present myself before you”—but what Jew, even with only a fingernail’s worth of religious background, could not be moved by it, delivered in such a way and at such a time? Modeh ani l’fonecha, the Jew says in the prayer, when he is directly addressing God, blessed be His Name. And that’s what we all of us now hear in the hall.

Don’t talk to me about race, the Bulba is actually saying, don’t talk to me about religion, don’t talk to me about any legal or philosophical technicalities. I claim that I am a Jew, whatever a Jew is, essentially and spiritually. As Jews, do you accept me or reject me?

No one can answer.

Of course, all this is not getting the Congress any closer to Israel, to a return from the Third Exile. But it’s obvious on the one hand that the matter can’t be put on the table, and it’s obvious on the other hand that it can’t be taken off the table. This is not quite the kind of pilpul that our learned ancestors had to deal with. We have to find out: what is a Space Age Jew?

So, by general agreement it is decided that as Moses smote the rock to get water, we’re going to smite a High Rabbinical Court to get wisdom.

THE GRAY-FACED PERSON CAME ALONG THE STREET where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy, and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.

“You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”

“Walks like a golem,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

The old woman was nettled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”

The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipe stem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

“Man comes in without a hello, good-bye, or howareyou, sits himself down, and right away he’s at home…. The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”

She turned to her husband.

“Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”

The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

“Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous. “When you learn who—or rather what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.

“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”

“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

“All mankind—” the stranger began.

“Shah! I’m talking to my husband….. He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”

“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.

“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich. I suppose he came to California for his health.”

“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to…”

Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.

“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”

“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.

“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”

“I am not a human being!”

“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”

“On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired.”

“Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”

“You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

“In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?”

“Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”

“Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”

“If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.

“Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”

“Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—”

“Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder.”

“After thirty years spent in these studies,” the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years’ time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous: he made me. ”

“What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.

The old woman shrugged.

“What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”

“He made Me!”

“Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said, “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking…. Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”

The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink gums.

“In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov’s—”

“Frankenstein?” said the old man, with interest. “There used to be Frankenstein who had the soda-wasser place on Halstead Street: a Litvack, nebbich.”

“What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Frankenthal, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”

“—clearly showing that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy toward androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”

“Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”

“I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.

“Foolish old woman,” the stranger said, “why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”

“What!” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.

“When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”

Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back in his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside the flap of gray, skinlike material.

“Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs and wires inside!”

“I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.

“You said he walked like a golem.”

“How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”

“All right, all right…You broke him, so now fix him.”

“My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRaL—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”

Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”

“And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Löw, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem’s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow….This is not just a story,” he said.

“Avadda not!” said the old woman.

“I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.

“But I think this must be a different kind golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead: nothing written.”

“What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”

The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.

“Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.

“Well, after all, am I Rabbi Löw?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here… this wire comes with this one…” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”

“Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.

“Listen, Reb Golem,” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”

“Understand…..”

“If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”

“Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says….”

“That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see on the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”

“No-more-alive…..”

“That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”

“Go….” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.

“So what will you write to Tillie?” Old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.

“What should I write?” Old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”

The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.

AT TEN OF NOON, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, trying as usual to open the door with one hand, hold his briefcase in another and reach for his wallet with a third. Having only two hands, he found it a difficult job and, again as usual, he thudded his knee against the cab-door and found himself still groping uselessly for his wallet when his feet touched pavement.

The traffic of Madison Avenue inched past. A red truck slowed its crawl reluctantly, then moved on with a rasp as the light changed. White script on its side informed an unresponsive world that its ownership was that of F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.

Levkovich, thought Marten with brief inconsequence, and finally fished out his wallet. He cast an eye on the meter as he clamped his briefcase under his arm. Dollar sixty-five, make that twenty cents more as a tip, two singles gone would leave him only one for emergencies, better break a fiver.

“Okay,” he said, “take out one-eighty-five, bud.”

“Thanks,” said the cabbie with mechanical insincerity and made the change.

Marten crammed three singles into his wallet, put it away, lifted his briefcase and breasted the human currents on the sidewalk to reach the glass doors of the building.

Levkovich? he thought sharply, and stopped. A passerby glanced off his elbow.

“Sorry,” muttered Marten, and made for the door again.

Levkovich? That wasn’t what the sign on the truck had said. The name had read Lewkowitz, Loo-koh-itz. Why did he think Levkovich? Even with his college German in the near past changing the w’s to v’s, where did he get the “-ich” from?

Levkovich? He shrugged the whole matter away roughly. Give it a chance and it would haunt him like a Hit Parade tinkle.

Concentrate on business. He was here for a luncheon appointment with this man, Naylor. He was here to turn a contract into an account and begin, at twenty-three, the smooth business rise which, as he planned it, would marry him to Elizabeth in two years and make him a paterfamilias in the suburbs in ten.

He entered the lobby with grim firmness and headed for the banks of elevators, his eye catching at the white-lettered directory as he passed.

It was a silly habit of his to want to catch suite numbers as he passed, without slowing, or (heaven forbid) coming to a full halt. With no break in his progress, he told himself, he could maintain the impression of belonging, of knowing his way around, and that was important to a man whose job involved dealing with other human beings.

Kulin-etts was what he wanted, and the word amused him. A firm specializing in the production of minor kitchen gadgets, striving manfully for a name that was significant, feminine, and coy, all at once—

His eyes snagged at the M’s and moved upward as he walked. Mandel, Lusk, Lippert Publishing Company (two full floors), Lafkowitz, Kulin-etts. There it was—1024. Tenth floor. O.K.

And then, after all, he came to a dead halt, turned in reluctant fascination, returned to the directory, and stared at it as though he were an out-of-towner.

Lafkowitz?

What kind of spelling was that?

It was clear enough. Lafkowitz, Henry J., 701. With an A. That was no good. That was useless.

Useless? Why useless? He gave his head one violent shake as though to clear it of mist. Damn it, what did he care how it was spelled? He turned away, frowning and angry, and hastened to an elevator door, which closed just before he reached it, leaving him flustered.

Another door opened and he stepped in briskly. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and tried to look bright alive—junior executive in its finest sense. He had to make an impression on Alex Naylor, with whom so far he had communicated only by telephone. If he was going to brood about Lewkowitzes and Lafkowitzes—

The elevator slid noiselessly to a halt at seven. A youth in shirtsleeves stepped off, balancing what looked like a desk-drawer in which were three containers of coffee and three sandwiches.

Then, just as the doors began closing, frosted glass with black lettering loomed before Martens eyes. It read: 701—HENRY J. LEFKOWITZ—IMPORTER and was pinched off by the inexorable coming together of the elevator doors.

Marten leaned forward in excitement. It was his impulse to say: Take me back down to 7.

But there were others in the car. And after all, he had no reason.

Yet there was a tingle of excitement within him. The Directory had been wrong. It wasn’t A, it was E. Some fool of a non-spelling menial with a packet of small letters to go on the board and only one hind foot to do it with.

Lefkowitz. Still not right, though.

Again, he shook his head. Twice. Not right for what?

The elevator stopped at ten and Marten got off.

Alex Naylor of Kulin-etts turned out to be a bluff, middle-aged man with a shock of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and a broad smile. His palms were dry and rough, and he shook hands with a considerable pressure, putting his left hand on Marten’s shoulder in an earnest display of friendliness.

He said, “Be with you in two minutes. How about eating right here in the building? Excellent restaurant, and they’ve got a boy who makes a good martini. That sound all right?”

“Fine. Fine.” Marten pumped up enthusiasm from a somehow-clogged reservoir.

It was nearer ten minutes than two, and Marten waited with the usual uneasiness of a man in a strange office. He stared at the upholstery on the chairs and at the little cubby-hole within which a young and bored switchboard operator sat. He gazed at the pictures on the wall and even made a half-hearted attempt to glance through a trade journal on the table next to him.

What he did not do was think of Lev—

He did not think of it.

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, in the old days we would have sat shivah for the whole week. My so-called daughter gets married, my own flesh and blood, and not only he doesn’t look Jewish, he’s not even human.

“Papa,” she says to me, two seconds after I refuse to speak to her again in my entire life, “if you know him you’ll love him, I promise.” So what can I answer—the truth, like I always tell her: “If I know him I’ll vomit, that’s how he affects me. I can help it? He makes me want to throw up on him.”

With silk gloves you have to handle the girl, just like her mother. I tell her what I feel, from the heart, and right away her face collapses into a hundred cracks and water from the Atlantic Ocean makes a soggy mess out of her paper sheath. And that’s how I remember her after six months—standing in front of me, sopping wet from the tears and making me feel like a monster—me—when all the time it’s her you-should-excuse-the-expression husband who’s the monster.

After she’s gone to live with him (New Horizon Village, Crag City, Mars), I try to tell myself it’s not me who has to—how can I put it?—deal with him intimately; if she can stand it, why should I complain? It’s not like I need somebody to carry on the business; my business is to enjoy myself in my retirement. But who can enjoy? Sadie doesn’t leave me alone for a minute. She calls me a criminal, a worthless no-good with gallstones for a heart.

“Hector, where’s your brains?” she says, having finally given up on my emotions. I can’t answer her. I just lost my daughter, I should worry about my brains too? I’m silent as the grave. I can’t eat a thing. I’m empty—drained. It’s as though I’m waiting for something to happen but I don’t know what. I sit in a chair that folds me up like a bee in a flower and rocks me to sleep with electronic rhythms when I feel like sleeping, but who can sleep? I look at my wife and I see Lady Macbeth. Once I caught her whistling as she pushed the button for her bath. I fixed her with a look like an icicle tipped with arsenic.

“What are you so happy about? Thinking of your grandchildren with the twelve toes?”

She doesn’t flinch. An iron woman.

When I close my eyes, which is rarely, I see our daughter when she was fourteen years old, with skin just beginning to go pimply and no expression yet on her face. I see her walking up to Sadie and asking her what she should do with her life now she’s filling out, and my darling Sadie, my life’s mate, telling her why not marry a freak; you got to be a beauty to find a man here, but on Mars you shouldn’t know from so many fish. “I knew I could count on you, Mama,” she says, and goes ahead and marries a plant with legs.

Things go on like this—impossible—for months. I lose twenty pounds, my nerves, three teeth and I’m on the verge of losing Sadie, when one day the mailchute goes ding-dong and it’s a letter from my late daughter. I take it by the tips of two fingers and bring it in to where my wife is punching ingredients for the gravy I won’t eat tonight.

“It’s a communication from one of your relatives.”

“Oh-oh-oh.” My wife makes a grab for it, meanwhile punching CREAM-TOMATO-SAUCE-BEEF DRIPPINGS. No wonder I have no appetite.

“I’ll give it to you on one condition only,” I tell her, holding it out of her trembling reach. “Take it into the bedroom and read it to yourself. Don’t even move your lips for once; I don’t want to know. If she’s God forbid dead, I’ll send him a sympathy card.”

Sadie has a variety of expressions but the one thing they have in common is they all wish me misfortune in my present and future life.

While she’s reading the letter I find suddenly I have nothing to do. The magazines I read already. Breakfast I ate (like a bird). I’m all dressed to go out if I felt like, but there’s nothing outside I don’t have inside. Frankly, I don’t feel like myself—I’m nervous. I say a lot of things I don’t really intend and now maybe this letter comes to tell me I’ve got to pay for my meanness. Maybe she got sick up there; God knows what they eat, the kind of water they drink, the creatures they run around with. Not wanting to think about it too much, I go over to my chair and turn it on to brisk massage. It doesn’t take long till I’m dreaming (fitfully).

I’m someplace surrounded by sand, sitting in a baby’s crib and bouncing a diapered kangaroo on my knee. It gurgles up at me and calls me grandpa and I don’t know what I should do. I don’t want to hurt its feelings, but if I’m a grandpa to a kangaroo, I want no part of it; I only want it should go away. I pull out a dime from my pocket and put it into its pouch. The pouch is full of tiny insects which bite my fingers. I wake up in a sweat.

“Sadie! Are you reading, or rearranging the sentences? Bring it in here and I’ll see what she wants. If it’s a divorce, I know a lawyer.”

Sadie comes into the room with her I-told-you-so waddle and gives me a small wet kiss on the cheek—a gold star for acting like a mensch. So I start to read it, in a loud monotone so she shouldn’t get the impression I give a damn:

“Dear Daddy, I’m sorry for not writing sooner. I suppose I wanted to give you a chance to simmer down first.” (Ingrate! Does the sun simmer down?) “I know it would have been inconvenient for you to come to the wedding, but Mor and I hoped you would maybe send us a letter just to let us know you’re okay and still love me, in spite of everything.”

Right at this point I feel a hot sigh followed by a short but wrenching moan.

“Sadie, get away from my neck. I’m warning you….”

Her eyes are going flick-a-fleck over my shoulder, from the piece of paper I’m holding to my face, back to the page, flick-a-fleck, flick-a-fleck.

“All right, already,” she shoo-shoos me. “I read it, I know what’s in it. Now it’s your turn to see what kind of a lousy father you turned out to be.” And she waddles back into the bedroom, shutting the door extra careful, like she’s handling a piece of snow-white velvet.

When I’m certain she’s gone, I sit myself down on the slab of woven dental floss my wife calls a couch and press a button on the arm that reads SEMI-CL.: FELDMAN TO FRIML. The music starts to slither out from the speaker under my left armpit. The right speaker is dead and buried and the long narrow one at the base years ago got drowned from the dog, who to this day hasn’t learned to control himself when he hears “Desert Song.”

This time I’m lucky; it’s a piece by Feldman that comes on. I continue to read, calmed by the music.

“I might as well get to the point, Papa, because for all I know you’re so mad you tore up this letter without even reading it. The point is that Mor and I are going to have a baby. Please, please don’t throw this into the disintegrator. It’s due in July, which gives you over three months to plan the trip up here. We have a lovely house, with a guest room that you and Mama can stay in for as long as you want.”

I have to stop here to interject a couple of questions, since my daughter never had a head for logic and it’s my strong point.

First of all, if she were in front of me in person right now I would ask right off what means “Mor and I are going to have a baby.” Which? Or both? The second thing is, when she refers to it as “it” is she being literal or just uncertain? And just one more thing and then I’m through for good: Just how lovely can a guest room be that has all the air piped in and you can’t even see the sky or take a walk on the grass because there is no grass, only simulated this and substituted that?

All the above notwithstanding, I continue to read:

“By the way, Papa, there’s something I’m not sure you understand. Mor, you may or may not know, is as human as you and me, in all the important ways—and frankly a bit more intelligent.”

I put down the letter for a minute just to give the goosebumps a chance to fly out of my stomach ulcers before I go on with her love and best and kisses and hopes for seeing us soon, Lorinda.

I don’t know how she manages it, but the second I’m finished, Sadie is out of the bedroom and breathing hard.

“Well, do I start packing or do I start packing? And when I start packing, do I pack for us or do I pack for me?”

“Never. I should die three thousand deaths, each one with a worse prognosis.”

IT WAS A GOSLIN day, no doubt about it; of course it can happen that goslin things can occur, say, once a day for many days. But this day was a goslin day. From the hour when, properly speaking, the ass brays in his stall, but here instead the kat kvells on the rooftop—to the hour when the cock crows on his roost, but here instead the garbageman bangs on his can—even that early, Faroly realized that it was going to be a goslin day (night? let be night: It was evening, and [after that] it was morning: one day. Yes or no?). In the warbled agony of the shriekscream Faroly had recognized an element present which was more than the usual ketzelkat expression of its painpleasure syndrome. In the agglutinative obscenities which interrupted the bang-crashes of the yuckels emptying eggshells orangerinds coffeegrounds there was (this morning, different from all other mornings) something unlike their mere usual brute pleasure in waking the dead. Faroly sighed. His wife and child were still asleep. He saw the dimlight already creeping in, sat up, reached for the glass and saucer and poured water over his nails, began to whisper his preliminary prayers, already concentrating on his Intention in the name Unity: but aware, aware, aware, the hotsticky feeling in the air, the swimmy looks in the dusty corners of windows, mirrors; something a tension, here a twitch and there a twitch. Notgood notgood.

In short: a goslin day.

Faroly decided to seek an expert opinion, went to Crown Heights to consult the kabbalist, Kaplánovics.

Rabbaness Kaplánovics was at the stove, schauming off the soup with an enormous spoon, gestured with a free elbow toward an inner room. There sat the sage, the sharp one, the teacher of our teachers, on his head his beaver hat neatly brushed, on his feet and legs his boots brightly polished, in between his garments well and clean without a fleck or stain as befits a disciple of the wise. He and Faroly shook hands, greeted, blessed the Name. Kaplánovics pushed across several sheets of paper covered with an exquisitely neat calligraphy.

“Already there,” the kabbalist said. “I have been through everything three times, twice. The NY Times, the Morgen Dzshornal, I. F. Stone, Dow-Jones, the Daph-Yomi, your name-Text, the weather report, Psalm of the Day. Everything is worked out, by numerology, analogy, gematria, noutricon, anagrams, allegory, procession and precession. So.

“Of course today as any everyday we must await the coming of the Messiah: ‘await’—expect? today? not today. Today he wouldn’t come. Considerations for atmospheric changes, or changes for atmospheric considerations, not—bad. Not—bad. Someone gives you an offer for a good air-conditioner, cheap, you could think about it. Read seven capitals of psalms between afternoon and evening prayers. One sequence is enough. The day is favorable for decisions on growth stocks, but avoid closed-end mutual funds. On the corner by the beygal store is an old woman with a pyshka, collecting dowries for orphan girls in Jerusalem: the money, she never sends, this is her sin, it’s no concern of yours: give her eighteen cents, a very auspicious number: merit, cheaply bought (she has sugar diabetes and the daughter last week gave birth to a weak-headed child by a schwartzer), what else?” They examined the columns of characters.

“Ahah. Ohoh. If you get a chance to buy your house, don’t buy it, the Regime will condemn it for a freeway, where are they all going so fast?—every man who has two legs thinks he needs three automobiles—besides—where did I write it? oh yes. There. The neighborhood is going to change very soon and if you stay you will be killed in three years and two months, or three months and two years, depending on which system of gematria is used in calculating. You have to warn your brother-in-law his sons should each commence bethinking a marriagematch. Otherwise they will be going to cinemas and watching televisions and putting arms around girls, won’t have the proper intentions for their nighttime prayers, won’t even read the protective psalms selected by the greatgrandson of the Baalshemtov: and with what results, my dear man? Nocturnal emissions and perhaps worse; is it for nothing that The Chapters of the Principles caution us, ‘At age eighteen to the marriage canopy and the performance of good deeds,’ hm?”

Faroly cleared his throat. “Something else is on your mind,” said the kabbalist. “Speak. Speak.” Faroly confessed his concern about goslins. Kaplánovics exclaimed, struck the table. “Goslins! You wanted to talk about goslins? It’s already gone past the hour to say the Shema, and I certainly didn’t have in mind when I said it to commence constructing a kamèa—” He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Am I omniscient?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Man walks in off the street, expects to find—”

But it did not take long to soothe and smooth him—Who is strong? He who can control his own passion.

And now to first things first, or, in this case, last things first, for it was the most recent manifestation of goslinness which Faroly wished to talk about. The kabbalist listened politely but did not seem in agreement with nor impressed by his guest’s recitation of the signs by which a goslin day might make itself known. “‘Show simônim,’” “he murmured, with a polite nod. “This one loses an object, that one finds it, let the claimant come and ‘show simônim,’ let him cite the signs by which his knowledge is demonstrated, and, hence, his ownership…” But this was mere polite fumfutting, and Faroly knew that the other knew that both knew it.

MY GRANDSON DAVID will have his bar mitzvah next spring. No one in our family has undergone that rite in at least three hundred years—certainly not since we Levins settled in Old Israel, the Israel on Earth, soon after the European Holocaust. My friend Eliahu asked me not long ago how I feel about David’s bar mitzvah, whether the idea of it angers me, whether I see it as a disturbing element. No, I replied: the boy is a Jew, after all, let him have a bar mitzvah if he wants one. These are times of transition and upheaval, as all times are. David is not bound by the attitudes of his ancestors.

“Since when is a Jew not bound by the attitudes of his ancestors?” Eliahu asked.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

Indeed he did. We are bound but yet free. If anything governs us out of the past it is the tribal bond itself, not the philosophies of our departed kinsmen. We accept what we choose to accept; nevertheless we remain Jews. I come from a family that has liked to say—especially to Gentiles—that we are Jews but not Jewish, that is, we acknowledge and cherish our ancient heritage but we do not care to entangle ourselves in outmoded rituals and folkways. This is what my forefathers declared, as far back as those secular-minded Levins who fought, three centuries ago, to win and guard the freedom of the land of Israel. (Old Israel, I mean.) I would say the same here, if there were any Gentiles on this world to whom such things had to be explained. But of course in this New Israel in the stars we have only ourselves, no Gentiles within a dozen light-years, unless you count our neighbors the Kunivaru as Gentiles. (Can creatures that are not human rightly be called Gentiles? I’m not sure the term applies. Besides, the Kunivaru now insist that they are Jews. My mind spins. It’s an issue of Talmudic complexity, and, God knows, I’m no Talmudist. Hillel, Akiva, Rashi, help me!) Anyway, come the fifth day of Sivan my son’s son will have his bar mitzvah, and I’ll play the proud grandpa as pious old Jews have done for six thousand years.

GREENBERG DID NOT DESERVE HIS SURROUNDINGS. He was the first fisherman of the season, which guaranteed him a fine catch; he sat in a dry boat—one without a single leak—far out on a lake that was ruffled only enough to agitate his artificial fly. The sun was warm, the air was cool; he sat comfortably on a cushion; he had brought a hearty lunch; and two bottles of beer hung over the stern in the cold water.

Any other man would have been soaked with joy to be fishing on such a splendid day. Normally, Greenberg himself would have been ecstatic, but instead of relaxing and waiting for a nibble, he was plagued by worries.

This short, slightly gross, definitely bald, eminently respectable businessman lived a gypsy life. During the summer, he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Rockaway; winters he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Florida; and in both places he operated concessions. For years now, rain had fallen on schedule every week end, and there had been storms and floods on Decoration Day, July 4th and Labor Day. He did not love his life, but it was a way of making a living.

He closed his eyes and groaned. If he had only had a son instead of his Rosie! Then things would have been mighty different—

For one thing, a son could run the hot dog and hamburger griddle, Esther could draw beer, and he would make soft drinks. There would be small difference in the profits, Greenberg admitted to himself; but at least those profits could be put aside for old age, instead of toward a dowry for his miserably ugly, dumpy, pitifully eager Rosie.

“All right—so what do I care if she don’t get married?” he had cried to his wife a thousand times. “I’ll support her. Other men can set up boys in candy stores with soda fountains that have only two spigots. Why should I have to give a boy a regular International Casino?”

“May your tongue rot in your head, you no-good piker!” she would scream. “It ain’t right for a girl to be an old maid. If we have to die in the poorhouse, I’ll get my poor Rosie a husband. Every penny we don’t need for living goes to her dowry!”

Greenberg did not hate his daughter, nor did he blame her for his misfortunes; yet, because of her, he was fishing with a broken rod that he had to tape together.

That morning, his wife opened her eyes and saw him packing his equipment. She instantly came awake. “Go ahead!” she shrilled—speaking in a conversational tone was not one of her accomplishments—“Go fishing, you loafer! Leave me here alone. I can connect the beer pipes and the gas for soda water. I can buy ice cream, frankfurters, rolls, syrup, and watch the gas and electric men at the same time. Go ahead—go fishing!”

“I ordered everything,” he mumbled soothingly. “The gas and electric won’t be turned on today. I only wanted to go fishing— it’s my last chance. Tomorrow we open the concession. Tell the truth, Esther, can I go fishing after we open?”

“I don’t care about that. Am I your wife or ain’t I, that you should go ordering everything without asking me—”

He defended his actions. It was a tactical mistake. While she was still in bed, he should have picked up his equipment and left. By the time the argument got around to Rosie’s dowry, she stood facing him.

“For myself I don’t care,” she yelled. “What kind of a monster are you that you can go fishing while your daughter eats her heart out? And on a day like this yet! You should only have to make supper and dress Rosie up. A lot you care that a nice boy is coming to supper tonight and maybe take Rosie out, you no-good father, you!”

From that point it was only one hot protest and a shrill curse to find himself clutching half a broken rod, with the other half being flung at his head.

Now he sat in his beautifully dry boat on an excellent game lake far out on Long Island, desperately aware that any average fish might collapse his taped rod.

What else could he expect? He had missed his train; he had had to wait for the boathouse proprietor; his favorite dry fly was missing; and, since morning, not a fish struck at the bait. Not a single fish!

And it was getting late. He had no more patience. He ripped the cap off a bottle of beer and drank it, in order to gain courage to change his fly for a less sporting bloodworm. It hurt him, but he wanted a fish.

The hook and the squirming worm sank. Before it came to rest, he felt a nibble. He sucked in his breath exultantly and snapped the hook deep into the fish’s mouth. Sometimes, he thought philosophically, they just won’t take artificial bait. He reeled in slowly.

“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “a dollar for charity—just don’t let the rod bend in half where I taped it!”

It was sagging dangerously. He looked at it unhappily and raised his ante to five dollars; even at that price it looked impossible. He dipped his rod into the water, parallel with the line, to remove the strain. He was glad no one could see him do it. The line reeled in without a fight.

“Have I—God forbid!—got an eel or something not kosher?” he mumbled. “A plague on you—why don’t you fight?”

He did not really care what it was—even an eel—anything at all.

He pulled in a long, pointed, brimless green hat.

For a moment he glared at it. His mouth hardened. Then, viciously, he yanked the hat off the hook, threw it on the floor and trampled on it. He rubbed his hands together in anguish.

“All day I fish,” he wailed, “two dollars for train fare, a dollar for a boat, a quarter for bait, a new rod I got to buy—and a five-dollar mortgage charity has got on me. For what? For you, you hat, you!”

Out in the water an extremely civil voice asked politely: “May I have my hat, please?”

Greenberg glowered up. He saw a little man come swimming vigorously through the water toward him: small arms crossed with enormous dignity, vast ears on a pointed face propelling him quite rapidly and efficiently. With serious determination he drove through the water, and, at the starboard rail, his amazing ears kept him stationary while he looked gravely at Greenberg.

“You are stamping on my hat,” he pointed out without anger.

To Greenberg this was highly unimportant. “With the ears you’re swimming,” he grinned in a superior way. “Do you look funny!”

“How else could I swim?” the little man asked politely.

“With the arms and legs, like a regular human being, of course.”

“But I am not a human being. I am a water gnome, a relative of the more common mining gnome. I cannot swim with my arms, because they must be crossed to give an appearance of dignity suitable to a water gnome; and my feet are used for writing and holding things. On the other hand, my ears are perfectly adapted for propulsion in water. Consequently, I employ them for that purpose. But please, my hat—there are several matters requiring my immediate attention, and I must not waste time.”

Greenberg’s unpleasant attitude toward the remarkably civil gnome is easily understandable. He had found someone he could feel superior to, and, by insulting him, his depressed ego could expand. The water gnome certainly looked inoffensive enough, being only two feet tall.

“What you got that’s so important to do, Big Ears?” he asked nastily.

Greenberg hoped the gnome would be offended. He was not, since his ears, to him, were perfectly normal, just as you would not be insulted if a member of a race of atrophied beings were to call you “Big Muscles.” You might even feel flattered.

“I really must hurry,” the gnome said, almost anxiously. “But if I have to answer your questions in order to get back my hat—we are engaged in restocking the Eastern waters with fish. Last year there was quite a drain. The bureau of fisheries is coöperating with us to some extent, but, of course, we cannot depend too much on them. Until the population rises to normal, every fish has instructions not to nibble.”

Greenberg allowed himself a smile, an annoyingly skeptical smile.

“My main work,” the gnome went on resignedly, “is control of the rainfall over the Eastern seaboard. Our fact-finding committee, which is scientifically situated in the meteorological center of the continent, coördinates the rainfall needs of the entire continent; and when they determine the amount of rain needed in particular spots of the East, I make it rain to that extent. Now may I have my hat, please?”

Greenberg laughed coarsely. “The first lie was big enough—about telling the fish not to bite. You make it rain like I’m President of the United States!” He bent toward the gnome slyly. “How’s about proof?”

“Certainly, if you insist.” The gnome raised his patient, triangular face toward a particularly clear blue spot in the sky, a trifle to one side of Greenberg. “Watch that bit of the sky.”

Greenberg looked up humorously. Even when a small dark cloud rapidly formed in the previously clear spot, his grin remained broad. It could have been coincidental. But then large drops of undeniable rain fell over a twenty-foot circle; and Greenberg’s mocking grin shrank and grew sour.

He glared hatred at the gnome, finally convinced. “So you’re the dirty crook who makes it rain on week ends!”

“Usually on week ends during the summer,” the gnome admitted. “Ninety-two percent of water consumption is on weekdays. Obviously we must replace that water. The week ends, of course, are the logical time.”

“But, you thief!” Greenberg cried hysterically, “you murderer! What do you care what you do to my concession with your rain? It ain’t bad enough business would be rotten even without rain, you got to make floods!”

“I’m sorry,” the gnome replied, untouched by Greenberg’s rhetoric. “We do not create rainfall for the benefit of men. We are here to protect the fish.

“Now please give me my hat. I have wasted enough time, when I should be preparing the extremely heavy rain needed for this coming week end.”

Greenberg jumped to his feet in the unsteady boat. “Rain this week end—when I can maybe make a profit for a change! A lot you care if you ruin business. May you and your fish die a horrible, lingering death.”

And he furiously ripped the green hat to pieces and hurled them at the gnome.

“I’m really sorry you did that,” the little fellow said calmly, his huge ears treading water without the slightest increase of pace to indicate his anger. “We Little Folk have no tempers to lose. Nevertheless, occasionally we find it necessary to discipline certain of your people, in order to retain our dignity. I am not malignant; but, since you hate water and those who live in it, water and those who live in it will keep away from you.”

With his arms still folded in great dignity, the tiny water gnome flipped his vast ears and disappeared in a neat surface dive.

Greenberg glowered at the spreading circles of waves. He did not grasp the gnome’s final restraining order; he did not even attempt to interpret it. Instead he glared angrily out of the corner of his eye at the phenomenal circle of rain that fell from a perfectly clear sky. The gnome must have remembered it at length, for a moment later the rain stopped. Like shutting off a faucet, Greenberg unwillingly thought.

“Good-by, week end business,” he growled. “If Esther finds out I got into an argument with the guy who makes it rain—”

He made an underhand cast, hoping for just one fish. The line flew out over the water; then the hook arched upward and came to rest several inches above the surface, hanging quite steadily and without support in the air.

“Well, go down in the water, damn you!” Greenberg said viciously, and he swished his rod back and forth to pull the hook down from its ridiculous levitation. It refused.

Muttering something incoherent about being hanged before he’d give in, Greenberg hurled his useless rod at the water. By this time he was not surprised when it hovered in the air above the lake. He merely glanced red-eyed at it, tossed out the remains of the gnome’s hat, and snatched up the oars.

When he pulled back on them to row to land, they did not touch the water—naturally. Instead they flashed unimpeded through the air, and Greenberg tumbled into the bow.

“A-ha!” he grated. “Here’s where the trouble begins.” He bent over the side. As he had suspected, the keel floated a remarkable distance above the lake.

By rowing against the air, he moved with maddening slowness toward shore, like a medieval conception of a flying machine. His main concern was that no one should see him in his humiliating position.

At the hotel, he tried to sneak past the kitchen to the bathroom. He knew that Esther waited to curse him for fishing the day before opening, but more especially on the very day that a nice boy was coming to see her Rosie. If he could dress in a hurry, she might have less to say—

“Oh, there you are, you good-for-nothing!”

He froze to a halt.

“Look at you!” she screamed shrilly. “Filthy—you stink from fish!”

“I didn’t catch anything, darling,” he protested timidly.

“You stink anyhow. Go take a bath, may you drown in it! Get dressed in two minutes or less, and entertain the boy when he gets here. Hurry!”

He locked himself in, happy to escape her voice, started the water in the tub, and stripped from the waist up. A hot bath, he hoped, would rid him of his depressed feeling.

First, no fish; now, rain on week ends! What would Esther say—if she knew, of course. And, of course, he would not tell her.

“Let myself in for a lifetime of curses!” he sneered. “Ha!”

He clamped a new blade into his razor, opened the tube of shaving cream, and stared objectively at the mirror. The dominant feature of the soft, chubby face that stared back was its ugly black stubble; but he set his stubborn chin and glowered. He really looked quite fierce and indomitable. Unfortunately, Esther never saw his face in that uncharacteristic pose, otherwise she would speak more softly.

“Herman Greenberg never gives in!” he whispered between savagely hardened lips. “Rain on week ends, no fish—anything he wants; a lot I care! Believe me, he’ll come crawling to me before I go to him.”

He gradually became aware that his shaving brush was not getting wet. When he looked down and saw the water dividing into streams that flowed around it, his determined face slipped and grew desperately anxious. He tried to trap the water—by catching it in his cupped hands, by creeping up on it from behind, as if it were some shy animal, and shoving his brush at it—but it broke and ran away from his touch. Then he jammed his palm against the faucet. Defeated, he heard it gurgle back down the pipe, probably as far as the main.

“What do I do now?” he groaned. “Will Esther give it to me if I don’t take a shave! But how?… I can’t shave without water.”

Glumly, he shut off the bath, undressed, and stepped into the tub. He lay down to soak. It took a moment of horrified stupor to realize that he was completely dry and that he lay in a waterless bathtub. The water, in one surge of revulsion, had swept out onto the floor.

“Herman, stop splashing!” his wife yelled. “I just washed that floor. If I find one little puddle I’ll murder you!”

Greenberg surveyed the instep-deep pool over the bathroom floor. “Yes, my love,” he croaked unhappily.

With an inadequate washrag he chased the elusive water, hoping to mop it all up before it could seep through to the apartment below. His washrag remained dry, however, and he knew that the ceiling underneath was dripping. The water was still on the floor.

In despair, he sat on the edge of the bathtub. For some time he sat in silence. Then his wife banged on the door, urging him to come out. He started and dressed moodily.

When he sneaked out and shut the bathroom door tightly on the flood inside, he was extremely dirty and his face was raw where he had experimentally attempted to shave with a dry razor.

“Rosie!” he called in a hoarse whisper. “Sh! Where’s mamma?”

His daughter sat on the studio couch and applied nail-polish to her stubby fingers. “You look terrible,” she said in a conversational tone. “Aren’t you going to shave?”

He recoiled at the sound of her voice, which, to him, roared out like a siren. “Quiet, Rosie! Sh!” And for further emphasis, he shoved his lips out against a warning finger. He heard his wife striding heavily around the kitchen. “Rosie,” he cooed, “I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll mop up the water I spilled in the bathroom.”

“I can’t papa,” she stated firmly. “I’m all dressed.”

“Two dollars, Rosie—all right, two and a half, you blackmailer.”

He flinched when he heard her gasp in the bathroom; but, when she came out with soaked shoes, he fled downstairs. He wandered aimlessly toward the village.

Now he was in for it, he thought; screams from Esther, tears from Rosie—plus a new pair of shoes for Rosie and two and a half dollars. It would be worse, though, if he could not get rid of his whiskers—

Rubbing the tender spots where his dry razor had raked his face, he mused blankly at a drugstore window. He saw nothing to help him, but he went inside anyhow and stood hopefully at the drug counter. A face peered at him through a space scratched in the wall case mirror, and the druggist came out. A nice-looking, intelligent fellow, Greenberg saw at a glance.

“What you got for shaving that I can use without water?” he asked.

“Skin irritation, eh?” the pharmacist replied. “I got something very good for that.”

“No. It’s just—Well, I don’t like to shave with water.”

The druggist seemed disappointed. “Well, I got brushless shaving cream.” Then he brightened. “But I got an electric razor—much better.”

“How much?” Greenberg asked cautiously.

“Only fifteen dollars, and it lasts a lifetime.”

“Give me the shaving cream,” Greenberg said coldly.

With the tactical science of a military expert, he walked around until some time after dark. Only then did he go back to the hotel, to wait outside. It was after seven, he was getting hungry, and the people who entered the hotel he knew as permanent summer guests. At last a stranger passed him and ran up the stairs.

Greenberg hesitated for a moment. The stranger was scarcely a boy, as Esther had definitely termed him, but Greenberg reasoned that her term was merely wish-fulfillment, and he jauntily ran up behind him.

He allowed a few minutes to pass, for the man to introduce himself and let Esther and Rosie don their company manners. Then, secure in the knowledge that there would be no scene until the guest left, he entered.

He waded through a hostile atmosphere, urbanely shook hands with Sammie Katz, who was a doctor—probably, Greenberg thought shrewdly, in search of an office—and excused himself.

In the bathroom, he carefully read the direction for using brushless shaving cream. He felt less confident when he realized that he had to wash his face thoroughly with soap and water, but without benefit of either, he spread the cream on, patted it, and waited for his beard to soften. It did not, as he discovered while shaving. He wiped his face dry. The towel was sticky and black, with whiskers suspended in paste, and, for that, he knew, there would be more hell to pay. He shrugged resignedly. He would have to spend fifteen dollars for an electric razor after all; this foolishness was costing him a fortune!

That they were waiting for him before beginning supper, was, he knew, only a gesture for the sake of company. Without changing her hard, brilliant smile, Esther whispered: “Wait! I’ll get you later—”

He smiled back, his tortured, slashed face creasing painfully. All that could be changed by his being enormously pleasant to Rosie’s young man. If he could slip Sammie a few dollars—more expense, he groaned—to take Rosie out, Esther would forgive everything.

He was too engaged in beaming and putting Sammie at ease to think of what would happen after he ate caviar canapes. Under other circumstances Greenberg would have been repulsed by Sammie’s ultra-professional waxed mustache—an offensively small, pointed thing—and his commercial attitude toward poor Rosie; but Greenberg regarded him as a potential savior.

“You open an office yet, Doctor Katz?”

“Not yet. You know how things are. Anyhow, call me Sammie.”

Greenberg recognized the gambit with satisfaction, since it seemed to please Esther so much. At one stroke Sammie had ingratiated himself and begun bargaining negotiations.

Without another word, Greenberg lifted his spoon to attack the soup. It would be easy to snare this eager doctor. A doctor! No wonder Esther and Rosie were so puffed with joy.

In the proper company way, he pushed his spoon away from him. The soup spilled onto the tablecloth.

“Not so hard, you dope,” Esther hissed.

He drew the spoon toward him. The soup leaped off it like a live thing and splashed over him—turning, just before contact, to fall on the floor. He gulped and pushed the bowl away. This time the soup poured over the side of the plate and lay in a huge puddle on the table.

“I didn’t want any soup anyhow,” he said in a horrible attempt at levity. Lucky for him, he thought wildly, that Sammie was there to pacify Esther with his smooth college talk—not a bad fellow, Sammie, in spite of his mustache; he’d come in handy at times.

Greenberg lapsed into a paralysis of fear. He was thirsty after having eaten the caviar, which beats herring any time as a thirst raiser. But the knowledge that he could not touch water without having it recoil and perhaps spill, made his thirst a monumental craving. He attacked the problem cunningly.

The others were talking rapidly and rather hysterically. He waited until his courage was equal to his thirst; then he leaned over the table with a glass in his hand. “Sammie, do you mind—a little water, huh?”

Sammie poured from a pitcher while Esther watched for more of his tricks. It was to be expected, but still he was shocked when the water exploded out of the glass directly at Sammie’s only suit.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Sammie said angrily, “I don’t like to eat with lunatics.”

And he left, though Esther cried and begged him to stay. Rosie was too stunned to move. But when the door closed, Greenberg raised his agonized eyes to watch his wife stalk murderously toward him.

I CANNOT REMEMBER EVER HAVING asked my mother outright about the tattooed numbers. We must have known very early that we should not ask; perhaps my brother Simon or I had said something inadvertently as very small children and had seen the look of sorrow on her face at the statement; perhaps my father had told us never to ask.

Of course, we were always aware of the numbers. There were those times when the weather was particularly warm, and my mother would not button her blouse at the top, and she would lean over us to hug us or pick us up, and we would see them written across her, an inch above her breasts.

(By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, “The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive.” And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)

By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college nearby, turning down his offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for mother. We had a lot of elms and oaks and a huge weeping willow that hovered sadly over the house. Our pond would be invaded in the early spring and late fall by a few geese, which would usually keep their distance before flying on. (“You can tell those birds are Jewish,” my father would say; “they go to Miami in the winter,” and Simon and I would imagine them lying on a beach, coating their feathers with Coppertone and ordering lemonades from the waitresses; we hadn’t heard of Collinses yet.)

Even out in the country, there were often those times when we would see my mother packing her clothes in a small suitcase, and she would tell us that she was going away for a while, just a week, just to get away, to find solitude. One time it was to an old camp in the Adirondacks that one of my aunts owned, another time to a cabin that a friend of my father’s loaned her, always alone, always to an isolated place. Father would say that it was “nerves,” although we wondered, since we were so isolated as it was. Simon and I thought she didn’t love us, that mother was somehow using this means to tell us that we were being rejected. I would try very hard to behave; when mother was resting, I would tiptoe and whisper. Simon reacted more violently. He could contain himself for a while; but then, in a desperate attempt at drawing attention to himself, would run through the house, screaming horribly, and hurl himself, headfirst, at one of the radiators. On one occasion, he threw himself through one of the large living room windows, smashing the glass. Fortunately, he was uninjured, except for cuts and bruises, but after that incident, my father put chicken wire over the windows on the inside of the house. Mother was very shaken by that incident, walking around for a couple of days, her body aching all over, then going away to my aunt’s place for three weeks this time. Simon’s head must have been strong; he never sustained any damage from the radiators worse than a few bumps and a headache, but the headaches would often keep mother in bed for days.

(I pick up my binoculars to check the forest again from my tower, seeing the small lakes like puddles below, using my glasses to focus on a couple in a small boat near one of the islands, and then turn away from them, not wanting to invade their privacy, envying the girl and boy who can so freely, without fear of consequences, exchange and share their feelings, and yet not share them, not at least in the way that would destroy a person such as myself. I do not think anyone will risk climbing my mountain today, as the sky is overcast, cirro-cumulus clouds slowly chasing each other, a large storm cloud in the west. I hope no one will come; the family who picnicked beneath my observation tower yesterday bothered me; one child had a headache and another indigestion, and I lay in my cabin taking aspirins all afternoon and nursing the heaviness in my stomach. I hope no one will come today.)

Mother and father did not send us to school until we were as old as the law would allow. We went to the small public school in town. An old yellow bus would pick us up in front of the house. I was scared the first day and was glad Simon and I were twins so that we could go together. The town had built a new school; it was a small, square brick building, and there were fifteen of us in the first grade. The high school students went to classes in the same building. I was afraid of them and was glad to discover that their classes were all on the second floor; so we rarely saw them during the day, except when they had gym classes outside. Sitting at my desk inside, I would watch them, wincing every time someone got hit with a ball, or got bruised. (Only three months in school, thank God, before my father got permission to tutor me at home, three months was too much of the constant pains, the turmoil of emotions; I am sweating now and my hands shake, when I remember it all.)

The first day was boring to me for the most part; Simon and I had been reading and doing arithmetic at home for as long as I could remember. I played dumb and did as I was told; Simon was aggressive, showing off, knowing it all. The other kids giggled, pointing at me, pointing at Simon, whispering. I felt some of it, but not enough to bother me too much; I was not then as I am now, not that first day.

Recess: kids yelling, running, climbing the jungle gym, swinging and chinning themselves on bars, chasing a basketball. I was with two girls and a piece of chalk on the blacktop; they taught me hopscotch, and I did my best to ignore the bruises and bumps of the other students.

It was at the end of the second week that the incident occurred during recess.

(I need the peace, the retreat from easily communicated pain. How strange, I think objectively, that our lives are such that discomfort, pain, sadness and hatred are so easily conveyed and so frequently felt. Love and contentment are only soft veils which do not protect me from bludgeons; and with the strongest loves, one can still sense the more violent undercurrents of fear, hate and jealousy.)

It was at the end of the second week that the incident occurred during recess. I was, again, playing hopscotch, and Simon had come over to look at what we were doing before joining some other boys. Five older kids came over, I guess they were in third or fourth grade, and they began their taunts.

“Greeeenbaum,” at Simon and me. We both turned toward them, I balancing on one foot on the hopscotch squares we had drawn, Simon clenching his fists.

“Greeeeenbaum, Esther Greeeeenbaum, Simon Greeeeenbaum,” whinnying the green, thundering the baum.

“My father says you’re Yids.”

“He says you’re the Yid’s kids.” One boy hooted and yelled, “Hey, they’re Yid kids.” Some giggled, and then they chanted, “Yid kid, Yid kid,” as one of them pushed me off my square.

“You leave my sister alone,” Simon yelled and went for the boy, fists flying, and knocked him over. The boy sat down suddenly, and I felt pain in my lower back. Another boy ran over and punched Simon. Simon whacked him back, and the boy hit him in the nose, hard. It hurt like hell and I started crying from the pain, holding my nose, pulled away my hand and saw blood. Simon’s nose was bleeding, and then the other kids started in, trying to pummel my brother, one guy holding him, another guy punching. “Stop it,” I screamed, “stop it,” as I curled on the ground, hurting, seeing the teachers run over to pull them apart. Then I fainted, mercifully, and came to in the nurse’s office. They kept me there until it was time to go home that day.

Simon was proud of himself, boasting, offering self-congratulations. “Don’t tell mother,” I said when we got off the bus, “don’t, Simon, she’ll get upset and go away again, please. Don’t make her sad.”

(When I was fourteen, during one of the times mother was away, my father got drunk downstairs in the kitchen with Mr. Arnstead, and I could hear them talking, as I hid in my room with my books and records, father speaking softly, Mr. Arnstead bellowing.

“No one, no one, should ever have to go through what Anna did. We’re beasts anyway, all of us, Germans, Americans, what’s the difference.”

Slamming of a glass on the table and a bellow: “God damn it, Sam, you Jews seem to think you have a monopoly on suffering. What about the guy in Harlem? What about some starving guy in Mexico? You think things are any better for them?”

“It was worse for Anna.”

“No, not worse, no worse than the guy in some street in Calcutta. Anna could at least hope she would be liberated, but who’s gonna free that guy?”

“No one,” softly, “no one is ever freed from Anna’s kind of suffering.”

I listened, hiding in my room, but Mr. Arnstead left after that; and when I came downstairs, father was just sitting there, staring at his glass; and I felt his sadness softly drape itself around me as I stood there, and then the soft veil of love over the sadness, making it bearable.)

I began to miss school at least twice a week, hurting, unable to speak to mother, wanting to say something to father but not having the words. Mother was away a lot then, and this made me more depressed (I’m doing it, I’m sending her away), the depression endurable only because of the blanket of comfort that I felt resting over the house.

They had been worried, of course, but did not have their worst fears confirmed until Thanksgiving was over and December arrived (snow drifting down from a grey sky, father bringing in wood for the fireplace, mother polishing the menorah, Simon and me counting up our saved allowances, plotting what to buy for them when father drove us to town). I had been absent from school for a week by then, vomiting every morning at the thought that I might have to return. Father was reading and Simon was outside, trying to climb one of our trees. I was in the kitchen, cutting cookies and decorating them while mother rolled the dough, humming, white flour on her apron, looking away and smiling when I sneaked small pieces of dough and put them in my mouth.

And then I fell off my chair onto the floor, holding my leg, moaning, “Mother, it hurts,” blood running from my nose. She picked me up, clutching me to her, and put me on the chair, blotted my nose with a tissue. Then we heard Simon yelling outside, and then his banging on the back door. Mother went and pulled him inside, his nose bleeding. “I fell outa the tree,” and, as she picked him up, she looked back at me; and I knew that she understood, and felt her fear and her sorrow as she realized that she and I were the same, that I would always feel the knife thrusts of other people’s pain, draw their agonies into myself, and, perhaps, be shattered by them.

(Remembering: Father and mother outside, after a summer storm, standing under the willow, father putting his arm around her, brushing her black hair back and kissing her gently on the forehead. Not for me, too much shared anguish with love for me. I am always alone, with my mountain, my forest, my lakes like puddles. The young couple’s boat is moored at the island.)

I hear them downstairs.

“Anna, the poor child, what can we do?”

“It is worse for her, Samuel,” sighing, the sadness reaching me and becoming a shroud, “it will be worse with her, I think, than it was for me.”

THE WINDOW WAS OPEN so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate. The bird wearily flapped through the open kitchen window of Harry Cohen’s top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River. On a rod on the wall hung an escaped canary cage, its door wide open, but this black-type long-beaked bird—its ruffled head and small dull eyes, crossed a little, making it look like a dissipated crow—landed if not smack on Cohen’s thick lamb chop, at least on the table close by. The frozen foods salesman was sitting at supper with his wife and young son on a hot August evening a year ago. Cohen, a heavy man with hairy chest and beefy shorts; Edie, in skinny yellow shorts and red halter; and their ten-year-old Morris (after her father)—Maurie, they called him, a nice kid though not overly bright—were all in the city after two weeks out, because Cohen’s mother was dying. They had been enjoying Kingston, New York, but drove back when Mama got sick in her flat in the Bronx.

“Right on the table,” said Cohen, putting down his beer glass and swatting at the bird. “Son of a bitch.”

“Harry, take care with your language,” Edie said, looking at Maurie, who watched every move.

The bird cawed hoarsely and with a flap of its bedraggled wings—feathers tufted this way and that—rose heavily to the top of the open kitchen door, where it perched staring down.

“Gevalt, a pogrom!”

“It’s a talking bird,” said Edie in astonishment.

“In Jewish,” said Maurie.

“Wise guy,” muttered Cohen. He gnawed on his chop, then put down the bone. “So if you can talk, say what’s your business. What do you want here?”

“If you can’t spare a lamb chop,” said the bird, “I’ll settle for a piece of herring with a crust of bread. You can’t live on your nerve forever.”

“This ain’t a restaurant,” Cohen replied. “All I’m asking is what brings you to this address?”

“The window was open,” the bird sighed; adding after a moment, “I’m running. I’m flying but I’m also running.”

“From whom?” asked Edie with interest.

“Anti-Semeets.”

“Anti-Semites?” they all said.

“That’s from who.”

“What kind of anti-Semites bother a bird?” Edie asked.

“Any kind,” said the bird, “also including eagles, vultures, and hawks. And once in a while some crows will take your eyes out.”

“But aren’t you a crow?”

“Me? I’m a Jewbird.”

Cohen laughed heartily. “What do you mean by that?”

The bird began dovening. He prayed without Book or tallith, but with passion. Edie bowed her head though not Cohen. And Maurie rocked back and forth with the prayer, looking up with one wide-open eye.

When the prayer was done Cohen remarked, “No hat, no phylacteries?”

“I’m an old radical.”

“You’re sure you’re not some kind of a ghost or dybbuk?”

“Not a dybbuk,” answered the .bird, “though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thanks God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful children.”

“Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.

“Why not?”

“What kind of birds?”

“Like me. Jewbirds.”

Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I’ve heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird.”

“We’re once removed.” The bird rested on one skinny leg, then on the other. “Please, could you spare maybe a piece of herring with a small crust of bread?”

Edie got up from the table.

“What are you doing?” Cohen asked her.

“I’ll clear the dishes.”

Cohen turned to the bird. “So what’s your name, if you don’t mind saying?”

“Call me Schwartz.”

“He might be an old Jew changed into a bird by somebody,” said Edie, removing a plate.

“Are you?” asked Harry, lighting a cigar.

“Who knows?” answered Schwartz. “Does God tell us everything?”

Maurie got up on his chair. “What kind of herring?” he asked the bird in excitement.

“Get down, Maurie, or you’ll fall,” ordered Cohen.

“If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz,” said Schwartz.

“All we have is marinated, with slices of onion—in a jar,” said Edie.

“If you’ll open for me the jar I’ll eat marinated. Do you have also, if you don’t mind, a piece of rye bread—the spitz?”

Edie thought she had.

“Feed him out on the balcony,” Cohen said. He spoke to the bird. “After that, take off.”

Schwartz closed both bird eyes. “I’m tired and it’s a long way.”

“Which direction are you headed, north or south?”

Schwartz, barely lifting his wings, shrugged.

“You don’t know where you’re going?”

“Where there’s charity I’ll go.”

“Let him stay, papa,” said Maurie. “He’s only a bird.”

“So stay the night,” Cohen said, “but no longer.”

In the morning Cohen ordered the bird out of the house but Maurie cried, so Schwartz stayed for a while. Maurie was still on vacation from school and his friends were away. He was lonely and Edie enjoyed the fun he had, playing with the bird.

“He’s no trouble at all,” she told Cohen, “and besides his appetite is very small.”

“What’ll you do when he makes dirty?”

“He flies across the street in a tree when he makes dirty, and if nobody passes below, who notices?”

“So all right,” said Cohen, “but I’m dead set against it. I warn you he ain’t gonna stay here long.”

“What have you got against the poor bird?”

“Poor bird, my ass. He’s a foxy bastard. He thinks he’s a Jew.”

“What difference does it make what he thinks?”

“A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he’s out on his drumsticks.”

At Cohen’s insistence Schwartz lived out on the balcony in a new wooden birdhouse Edie had bought him.

“With many thanks,” said Schwartz, “though I would rather have a human roof over my head. You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God. But whatever you give me, you won’t hear complaints.”

However, when Cohen brought him a bird feeder full of dried corn, Schwartz said, “Impossible.”

Cohen was annoyed. “What’s the matter, crosseyes, is your life getting too good for you? Are you forgetting what it means to be migratory? I’ll bet a helluva lot of crows you happen to be acquainted with, Jews or otherwise, would give their eyeteeth to eat this corn.”

Schwartz did not answer. What can you say to a grubber yung?

“Not for my digestion,” he later explained to Edie. “Cramps. Herring is better even if it makes you thirsty. At least rainwater don’t cost anything.” He laughed sadly in breathy caws.

And herring, thanks to Edie, who knew where to shop, was what Schwartz got, with an occasional piece of potato pancake, and even a bit of soupmeat when Cohen wasn’t looking.

When school began in September, before Cohen would once again suggest giving the bird the boot, Edie prevailed on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusted.

“To deprive him right now might hurt his school work, and you know what trouble we had last year.”

“So okay, but sooner or later the bird goes. That I promise you.”

Schwartz, though nobody had asked him, took on full responsibility for Maurie’s performance in school. In return for favors granted, when he was let in for an hour or two at night, he spent most of his time overseeing the boy’s lessons. He sat on top of the dresser near Maurie’s desk as he laboriously wrote out his homework. Maurie was a restless type and Schwartz gently kept him to his studies. He also listened to him practice his screechy violin, taking a few minutes off now and then to rest his ears in the bathroom. And they afterwards played dominoes. The boy was an indifferent checker player and it was impossible to teach him chess. When he was sick, Schwartz read him comic books though he personally disliked them. But Maurie’s work improved in school and even his violin teacher admitted his playing was better. Edie gave Schwartz credit for these improvements though the bird pooh-poohed them.

Yet he was proud there was nothing lower than C minuses on Maurie’s report card, and on Edie’s insistence celebrated with a little schnapps.

“If he keeps up like this,” Cohen said, “I’ll get him in an Ivy League college for sure.”

“Oh I hope so,” sighed Edie.

But Schwartz shook his head. “He’s a good boy—you don’t have to worry. He won’t be a shicker or a wifebeater, God forbid, but a scholar he’ll never be, if you know what I mean, although maybe a good mechanic. It’s no disgrace in these times.”

“If I were you,” Cohen said, angered, “I’d keep my big snoot out of other people’s private business.”

“Harry, please,” said Edie.

“My goddamn patience is wearing out. That crosseyes butts into everything.”

Though he wasn’t exactly a welcome guest in the house, Schwartz gained a few ounces although he did not improve in appearance. He looked bedraggled as ever, his feathers unkempt, as though he had just flown out of a snowstorm. He spent, he admitted, little time taking care of himself. Too much to think about. “Also outside plumbing,” he told Edie. Still there was more glow to his eyes so that though Cohen went on calling him crosseyes he said it less emphatically.

Liking his situation, Schwartz tried tactfully to stay out of Cohen’s way, but one night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a hot shower, the frozen foods salesman began a quarrel with the bird.

“For Christ sake, why don’t you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?”

“Mr. Cohen, if you’ll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers.”

“Who’s obligated to feed you anything at all? You’re lucky to get herring.”

“Excuse me, I’m not complaining,” said the bird. “You’re complaining.”

“What’s more,” said Cohen, “even from out on the balcony I can hear you snoring away like a pig. It keeps me awake at night.”

“Snoring,” said Schwartz, “isn’t a crime, thanks God.”

“All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you’ll want to sleep in bed next to my wife.”

“Mr. Cohen,” said Schwartz, “on this rest assured. A bird is a bird.”

“So you say, but how do I know you’re a bird and not some kind of a goddamn devil?”

“If I was a devil you would know already. And I don’t mean because of your son’s good marks.”

“Shut up, you bastard bird,” shouted Cohen.

“Grubber yung,” cawed Schwartz, rising to the tips of his talons, his long wings outstretched.

Cohen was about to lunge for the bird’s scrawny neck but Maurie came out of the bathroom, and for the rest of the evening until Schwartz’s bedtime on the balcony, there was pretended peace.

But the quarrel had deeply disturbed Schwartz and he slept badly. His snoring woke him, and awake, he was fearful of what would become of him. Wanting to stay out of Cohen’s way, he kept to the birdhouse as much as possible. Cramped by it, he paced back and forth on the balcony ledge, or sat on the birdhouse roof, staring into space. In the evenings, while overseeing Maurie’s lessons, he often fell asleep. Awakening, he nervously hopped around exploring the four corners of the room. He spent much time in Maurie’s closet, and carefully examined his bureau drawers when they were left open. And once when he found a large paper bag on the floor, Schwartz poked his way into it to investigate what possibilities were. The boy was amused to see the bird in the paper bag.

“He wants to build a nest,” he said to his mother.

Edie, sensing Schwartz’s unhappiness, spoke to him quietly.

“Maybe if you did some of the things my husband wants you, you would get along better with him.”

“Give me a for instance,” Schwartz said.

“Like take a bath, for instance.”

“I’m too old for baths,” said the bird. “My feathers fall out without baths.”

“He says you have a bad smell.”

“Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?”

“I better not ask him or it might make him mad,” said Edie.

In late November Schwartz froze on the balcony in the fog and cold, and especially on rainy days he woke with stiff joints and could barely move his wings. Already he felt twinges of rheumatism. He would have liked to spend more time in the warm house, particularly when Maurie was in school and Cohen at work. But though Edie was goodhearted and might have sneaked him in, in the morning, just to thaw out, he was afraid to ask her. In the meantime Cohen, who had been reading articles about the migration of birds, came out on the balcony one night after work when Edie was in the kitchen preparing pot roast, and peeking into the birdhouse, warned Schwartz to be on his way soon if he knew what was good for him. “Time to hit the flyways.”

“Mr. Cohen, why do you hate me so much?” asked the bird. “What did I do to you?”

“Because you’re an A-number-one trouble maker, that’s why. What’s more, whoever heard of a Jewbird? Now scat or it’s open war.”

But Schwartz stubbornly refused to depart so Cohen embarked on a campaign of harassing him, meanwhile hiding it from Edie and Maurie. Maurie hated violence and Cohen didn’t want to leave a bad impression. He thought maybe if he played dirty tricks on the bird he would fly off without being physically kicked out. The vacation was over, let him make his easy living off the fat of somebody else’s land. Cohen worried about the effect of the bird’s departure on Maurie’s schooling but decided to take the chance, first, because the boy now seemed to have the knack of studying —give the black bird-bastard credit—and second, because Schwartz was driving him bats by being there always, even in his dreams.

The frozen foods salesman began his campaign against the bird by mixing watery cat food with the herring slices in Schwartz’s dish. He also blew up and popped numerous paper bags outside the birdhouse as the bird slept, and when he had got Schwartz good and nervous, though not enough to leave, he brought a full-grown cat into the house, supposedly a gift for little Maurie, who had always wanted a pussy. The cat never stopped springing up at Schwartz whenever he saw him, one day managing to claw out several of his tailfeathers. And even at lesson time, when the cat was usually excluded from Maurie’s room, though somehow or other he quickly found his way in at the end of the lesson, Schwartz was desperately fearful of his life and flew from pinnacle to pinnacle—light fixture to clothes-tree to door-top—in order to elude the beast’s wet jaws.

Once when the bird complained to Edie how hazardous his existence was, she said, “Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won’t try to catch you any more.”

“When he stops trying we will both be in Paradise,” Schwartz answered. “Do me a favor and get rid of him. He makes my whole life worry. I’m losing feathers like a tree loses leaves.”

“I’m awfully sorry but Maurie likes the pussy and sleeps with it.”

What could Schwartz do? He worried but came to no decision, being afraid to leave. So he ate the herring garnished with cat food, tried hard not to hear the paper bags bursting like fire crackers outside the birdhouse at night, and lived terror-stricken closer to the ceiling than the floor, as the cat, his tail flicking, endlessly watched him.

Weeks went by. Then on the day after Cohen’s mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmetic test, Cohen, enraged, waited until Edie had taken the boy to his violin lesson, then openly attacked the bird. He chased him with a broom on the balcony and Schwartz frantically flew back and forth, finally escaping into his birdhouse. Cohen triumphantly reached in, and grabbing both skinny legs, dragged the bird out, cawing loudly, his wings wildly beating. He whirled the bird around and around his, head. But Schwartz, as he moved in circles, managed to swoop down and catch Cohen’s nose in his beak, and hung on for dear life. Cohen cried out in great pain, punched the bird with his fist, and tugging at its legs with all his might, pulled his nose free. Again he swung the yawking Schwartz around until the bird grew dizzy, then with a furious heave, flung him into the night. Schwartz sank like stone into the street. Cohen then tossed the birdhouse and feeder after him, listening at the ledge until they crashed on the sidewalk below. For a full hour, broom in hand, his heart palpitating and nose throbbing with pain, Cohen waited for Schwartz to return but the brokenhearted bird didn’t.

That’s the end of that dirty bastard, the salesman thought and went in. Edie and Maurie had come home.

“Look,” said Cohen, pointing to his bloody nose swollen three times its normal size, “what that sonofabitchy bird did. It’s a permanent scar.”

“Where is he now?” Edie asked, frightened.

“I threw him out and he flew away. Good riddance.”

Nobody said no, though Edie touched a handkerchief to her eyes and Maurie rapidly tried the nine-times table and found he knew approximately half.

In the spring when the winter’s snow had melted, the boy, moved by a memory, wandered in the neighborhood, looking for Schwartz. He found a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean.

“Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?” Maurie wept.

“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later.

THERE WERE FIVE MEN who ran the world. They were called Representatives, though democratic elections had long ago been eliminated as “too inaccurate.” There was a Representative of North America, one of South America, one each from Europe, Asia, and Africa. They had all been in power for a long time, and they seemed to enjoy it. The citizens of their continental domains were glad of that. The last thing the overburdened people needed was a war.

Helping the Representatives in their duties was TECT. More comprehensive than just a calculating device, TECT was an immense machine buried far beneath the surface of the earth. It contained the sum total of everything mankind had yet learned about the universe; but, of course, so did several private and public computer installations throughout the world. TECT had special powers and abilities, though, which set it apart from other species of machine. It understood. Questions could be asked of it which were impossible to translate into basic computer binary input. TECT could interpret all human languages; if a built-in imprecision of common speech led to ambiguity, TECT would query the speaker. One might ask, “What is the difference between right and wrong?” and expect a quick reply. The machine’s answer would not be merely a philosophic abstract compiled from the vast recorded literature of the human race; that is what one would receive from the other, more accessible computers. No, from TECT there would be a slight pause, and then a closely reasoned, “personal” opinion made on the basis of TECT’s current measure of data. Such questions were rarely asked, of course; even from TECT, the answers were never conclusive, always impractical. And it was a very practical world.

What else was going on? Well, the population of the world was becoming joyfully homogeneous. Representatives had come and gone, but all their strategies were to one end; the idea was that the more people were alike, the better they’d all get along. And naturally the better everyone got along, the more power the Representatives would have. Of course, the great masses of people were aware that they were being exploited and manipulated. They understood it, at least on a subconscious level. But people do want to get along; it’s really so much pleasanter that way. And, too, the Representatives had so much power already, there wasn’t any other choice.

That didn’t mean that there weren’t still pockets of diversity. In the many generations of Representative rule, the distinctions among the races had not been entirely obliterated. The genetic laws of nature insisted at rare intervals on producing individuals with identifiably Negroid or Oriental features. These people often took government-sponsored jobs as “slum-dwellers,” living as their ancestors had done before the era of the Representatives. Small ghettos were organized on a strictly voluntary basis, in order to preserve museum-like tableaux of moribund cultures.

Less popular with the state and their fellow citizens were those who clung to cultural differences, as opposed to mere mistakes of breeding. Such groups as intellectuals, artists, homosexuals, and Communists, all of which had enjoyed greater freedom of expression before the Representative regime, were openly attacked. Perhaps the most extensive cultural enclave, and one of the most abused, were the Jews. Their ancient heritage of loyalty to family and to doctrinal ideals had preserved them from total assimilation; the other citizens worried that this would upset the Representatives and cause violent social repercussions. The citizens made their anxiety and their displeasure evident; but, far from being angered by the Jews’ persistence, the Representatives frequently made statements honoring the minority’s courageous and heart-warming tenacity. Still, the other citizens were not mollified.

Into this world, then, a boy named Murray Rose was born to Jewish parents. They weren’t very Jewish; they didn’t observe the Sabbath in any particular way, they were frequently startled by the arrival of Holy Days, and they were openly amused by their conservative friends’ attention to kashrut, the traditional dietary laws. The Rose family maintained a tenuous link to their heritage, more out of sentiment than anything else. But they were careful not to be identified as one of the “troublesome” Jews.

When Murray was ten years old, his grandfather came to visit. Murray was excited; he had never met Grandpa Zalman, but he had often heard the old man’s name mentioned. Murray’s parents were more anxious than excited. When the old man arrived, the three adults stood facing each other uncomfortably, while Murray hid behind his father. Grandpa Zalman looked different than the boy had imagined; the old man’s great gray eyebrows and long beard gave him a fierce look that confused Murray. He had always been told that Grandpa Zalman was odd, but very gentle.

“Hello, Julie,” said the old man. He kissed his daughter and shook hands with his son-in-law.

“It’s nice to see you again,” said Murray’s father. There was a long, tense silence.

“This must be Murray,” said Grandpa Zalman. Murray’s father took the boy’s wrist and presented him to his grandfather. Murray said hello and shook hands. He was dismayed by how huge and rough Grandpa Zalman’s hands were.

In the next few days Murray spent a lot of time with his grandfather. Murray’s father was gone all day at work, and his mother was much too busy with housework to entertain her father. The old man and the boy took walks around the neighborhood together and talked. At first Murray was a little timid, but after a while he realized that Grandpa Zalman was different than his parents in a way that was both foreign and strangely pleasant.

It was chilly and overcast one afternoon when Murray and Grandpa Zalman were sitting on a bench in the park. Murray had grown fond of his grandfather. He knew from their actions that his parents did not like Grandpa Zalman as well. The longer he stayed, the less he talked. Now they sat under a heavy sky, and Grandpa Zalman said nothing at all.

“What’s in the bag, Grandpa?” asked Murray.

Grandpa Zalman stared at the brick path. The boy’s question startled him from his thoughts. He shook the brown paper sack; its contents rustled. “Crumbs,” he said. “I brought crumbs for the birds.”

“Will they let you feed the pigeons?”

Grandpa Zalman sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “They used to. I used to feed the birds every day. It made me feel better. We used to get along very well, the pigeons and I. I gave them food; they pretended that they liked me. They were truly grateful for the crumbs. That’s more than people will admit.”

“Can I feed them?” asked Murray.

“Let me do it first,” said Grandpa Zalman. “Then if the CAS police come running with their clubs, it’ll just be me, an old man, who gets beaten.”

“Okay,” said Murray.

Grandpa Zalman opened the bag and tossed a handful of crumbs on the bricks. Several pigeons landed immediately and began pecking frantically at the offering. The old man gave the bag to Murray, who sprinkled more crumbs around his feet. “Are they bread crumbs?” he asked.

“No,” said Grandpa Zalman, “they’re matzo.”

“What’s that?”

The grandfather watched Murray sadly. “Matzo. Don’t you know what next week is? Passover?”

Murray looked up at Grandpa Zalman. “Passover?” he said.

“A Holy Day. A celebration.”

“Like Skirt Day?” asked Murray, puzzled.

“Come on, Murray,” said Grandpa Zalman. “I feel like walking.” Murray spilled the rest of the matzo crumbs in a heap for the pigeons and ran after the old man. They left the park and walked homeward. After a while the grandfather stopped to examine the display in the window of a small fichestore. He had said nothing to the boy since leaving the park; now he silently held the door open, and Murray preceded him into the dark shop.

“Can I help you?” asked the proprietor, looking skeptically at Grandpa Zalman’s beard and strange clothes.

“I want the afternoon tectape,” said the old man. “And I wonder if you have any fiches, maybe, on the history of the Jews. Their customs.”

The proprietor frowned. “We got a small section for religion,” he said. “The Representative’s office isn’t crazy about selling that kind of stuff. They’re cracking down now, you know. I don’t know what they’re worried about. It doesn’t move very good, anyway. If we got any Jewish stuff, it’ll be in there, but I think it’s mostly Moslem and Christian myths. A couple of artfiches.”

“Thank you,” said Grandpa Zalman. He went to the small bin that the store’s owner had indicated. There were a couple of dozen plastic microfiches, each one a microminiature book, designed to be read with the aid of a fichereader or projector. None interested the old man. He glanced at Murray, who had never been in a fichestore; the boy was wandering from bin to bin, picking up random fiches and holding them to the light, vainly trying to read them unenlarged. “Would you like one?” asked Grandpa Zalman.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Murray. “We don’t have a reader at home, anyway. Dad says we’ll buy one when I get to high school.” Grandpa Zalman shrugged and paid for the newstape, printed out by the store’s small tect console. As they left the store a CAS officer brushed by the old man. The. policeman scowled and shoved Grandpa Zalman out of the way.

“You guys ought to be more careful,” said the CAS man. “You ain’t got much time left, the way it is.”

Grandpa Zalman said nothing. He took Murray’s hand and walked off in the other direction. “The world is filling up with hoodlums,” he said at last.

“They don’t like you, do they, Grandpa Zalman?”

“No, they don’t like me. And they don’t like you, either. They don’t like anybody.”

“Is it because we’re Jewish?” asked Murray.

“No,” said Grandpa Zalman slowly. “No, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Maybe a little.” Then they went home. Grandpa Zalman read his tectape, and Murray went out to play knockerball with his friends. Two days later the boy’s father took Grandpa Zalman to the public teletrans tect. Murray never saw his grandfather again.

But the old man had had his effect on the boy. In the guest room Murray found three fiches, which Grandpa Zalman had forgotten or left intentionally. Murray took them to school, where he browsed through them on one of the library’s fichereaders. They were the first fiches that he had ever had all to his own; they weren’t textfiches, but they weren’t picturefiches, either. One was a long collection of Jewish lore that Murray found fascinating. He wondered what had happened to all the curious laws and customs. He asked his mother, and she said, “They’re still around. Not here, but around. There’s still plenty of people like your grandfather. But they’re learning, slow but sure. The Representatives are doing their best for us, and it’s people like Grandpa Zalman who make it harder. They’re learning, though.” Murray was doubtful. It seemed to him a sad thing that all the old Jewish ways were being neglected.

As Murray got older he took more interest in his education. After he read the three leftover fiches, he explored the school’s library and saved his money to buy more. When Murray was fourteen he learned that Grandpa Zalman had died; Murray was filled with grief for the first time in his life. He felt that he had never thanked his grandfather for all the old man had shown him. Murray was determined to repay Grandpa Zalman, and to make some sort of memorial to the old man, whom Murray’s parents were gratefully forgetting as quickly as possible.

Tenth-year Tests were scheduled for Murray’s class in the middle of February; Murray had just turned fifteen. Through the first six years of his schooling he had seemed to be just another unexceptional student, destined for the army or the CAS work legions. But then, after his grandfather’s visit, he showed a sudden and dramatic improvement. Murray entered the Test room anxiously, unaware of the envious glances he drew from his fellow students. The Test lasted six hours, and he was one of the first to complete his tapes. The next day he was ordered to the office of the school’s master.

“Come in, Mr. Rose,” said Master Jennings. “Get comfortable. I have some good news for you.”

Murray relaxed. He always felt terribly guilty when he was called into the office, even though he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. He sat in a chair opposite the master’s desk and waited.

“This afternoon TECT finished evaluating the Tenth-year Tests. You did very well yesterday, Mr. Rose. In fact, you finished first in our school. Congratulations.” Murray smiled; he was proud, and happy that in a small way he had repaid Grandpa Zalman. “More importantly,” said Master Jennings, “your score led everyone else in the district. This is the first time our school has had that distinction. Of course, you can understand how grateful we are for that honor. More to the point, though, is the reward you’ve won for yourself.”

Murray knew that the higher scores earned special privileges from the Representatives and TECT. “When you called me in,” he said, “I began to think that perhaps something special had happened. I’ve been hoping for a new fichereader.”

The master laughed. “You’ll be getting a lot better than that,” he said. “As a district winner, you’re entitled to a Mark VII tect unit, installed in your home. That comes with complete infotape, newstape, computape, and entertainment capabilities. Everything but the teletrans unit. Only the continental winners get the big one. And you’re still in the running for that; many of the other districts haven’t had their Tenth-year Tests as yet. The final winner will be announced next week.”

Murray was astonished. He would have his own tect, right in the house! That meant access to virtually every facet of TECT itself, except the data classified for security purposes. Of course, he’d still have to use the public teletrans tect facilities. But that was hardly a disappointment….

As promised, the continental winner was named several days later. It wasn’t Murray; he wasn’t at all let down, for on the same afternoon his own prize, the Mark VII tect, was installed in his house. His parents were proud and a little amazed. They weren’t imaginative enough to understand all that the tect represented. Murray stayed up well into the night asking the console questions, having it project pages of books on many esoteric subjects, playing games of go and chess against TECT’s Level Nine Opposition.

In the following years, of course, the unit helped Murray even further in his studies. He excelled in high school, and produced a brilliant score on his Twelfth-year Test. He was curious about what kind of prize he would win for that. Nothing was mentioned the next day. Murray was very disappointed. All through the final three weeks before graduation, Murray hoped that he would be called into Master Jennings’ office again. That did not happen, either. Murray graduated from school, receiving a huge ovation from the audience when he went to take his diploma. At home that afternoon, a message was waiting for him on the tect’s CRT readout. It said:

The tect’s Advise light was flashing, meaning that TECT had been asking for an immediate answer since quarter to one. It was now nearly four. He identified himself and the light went out. “Reply to 12:48:36 Query, 9 July, 467. Reply affirm.” Then, to be safe, he typed in yes after Accept?** on the tect’s screen. He had no idea what the real circumstances were, but it seemed to him that TECT was offering Murray a planet. The boy had never heard of such a thing. In a few seconds the promised list appeared:

And so on. The tectscreen filled with hundreds of entries in TECT’s master star catalogue. But none of the planets were described; Murray, still not fully appreciating that he was being given an entire world, had nothing useful on which to base his choice. The list went on, ending at last with:

“Query,” he said.

“According to contemporary standards,” said Murray, “rate the planets on the list, insofar as the following criteria are concerned: comfort of climate and terrain, probability of cultivating normal dietary constituents, minimum at least of aesthetic pleasures, lack of serious dangers consisting of animal, vegetable, mineral, geological, and meteorological threats, at least one potential homesite with optimum conditions implied by the above and entailing what we understand to be essential for normal life and human happiness. Narrow the list to three choices.”

TECT ransacked its memories for nearly a minute. Finally the original list of worlds on the CRT vanished, replaced by Epsilon Eridani, Planet D; Tau Ceti, Planet C; and Pasogh 1874, Planet C.

“Print data on the three choices. Request hard copy.” Immediately, full profiles of the three planets appeared in the form of fiches, through a slot beneath the CRT screen. Murray studied the material for a couple of hours. Just before dinner he went to the tect. After Choice?** he typed, Pasogh 1874, Planet C. Then he went out and told his parents, who laughed skeptically. The next morning another message on the tect waited for him. It said:

“Rose, Gordon J.,” said Murray.

“He’s my father.”

And that was it. Murray stared at the console for several seconds, still futilely trying to understand what had happened. He had been given a planet. That in itself was unbelievable enough; but he was expected—no, he was compelled—to settle on the unknown place in a matter of hours. He thought about how he would break the news to his parents. He went back to the tect. He identified himself to the console and waited for the ?** to appear. When it did, he said, “Request.”

“I’d like a printout of all material relayed through this console since l0July 467 YR RepGreet.” In a few seconds a fiche appeared in the slot. Murray took the fiche into the living room and explained the situation to his parents. Their skepticism of the previous day turned first to wonder, then to pride, and at last to horror.

“Tomorrow?” cried Murray’s mother. “What kind of a thing is that? Tomorrow?”

“You’re going away? Where?” asked his father, who couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of the situation.

“I’m going to another planet,” said Murray wearily. “Somewhere out in space. By another star. They gave it to me.”

“But what about us?” asked his mother, sobbing. “What about you? What about college? Are you going all by yourself?”

“I guess so,” said Murray. He hadn’t thought about it that way, the only human being on an entire world. He felt cold suddenly, frightened and lonely.

“Who are these Representatives?” said his father. “How can they tear a family apart like this? How can they ruin a fine boy’s life?”

“You don’t understand,” said Murray. “It’s an honor. Not even the Representatives themselves have a whole planet to govern. It’s a special award, because of how well I did in school.”

“I want you here, Murray,” said his mother. Murray just sighed. He explained to his father about the job of acting as Murray’s agent; then Murray went back to his room to pack.

The next day he awoke early, dressed, made himself a small breakfast, and checked his suitcases again. His father came into Murray’s room and shook his son’s hand. “Your mother’s upset,” he said. “I gave her a pill last night, so she won’t wake up until after you’re gone.”

“Okay,” said Murray. “I’ll miss her. I’ll miss you.”

“It’s a hell of an opportunity, I suppose,” said Murray’s father. “I have to get down to the Substation. It’s getting late.” Murray loaded his luggage into his small car. His father stood on the driveway, looking worried and sad. Just before Murray began backing out of the drive, his father came to the car and shook hands again. Murray said nothing.

There were only a few people in the Substation. Teletrans was an expensive way to travel; people made long journeys by train, or they saved their money for the trip by tect. There didn’t seem to be anyone to meet Murray. He went up to a uniformed CAS guard and explained his predicament.

“Certainly, Mr. Rose,” said the guard. He spoke with more deference than Murray had ever experienced. “Just check in at the TECT desk over there.” Murray began to wrestle his suitcases across the broad, polished floor, but to his surprise the guard offered to carry one of the bags. Murray nodded, and carried the other suitcase to the TECT control station.

“Mr. Rose?” asked one of the uniformed women there. Murray nodded. “Just sign here, and step through. You’ll have to leave those bags behind.”

“But I’ll need—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rose,” said the woman. “The office of the Representative specified ‘No Luggage.’ It costs too much to ship it through, and they’ve taken care of all your needs on the other side.” Murray shrugged and signed the release form.

“Through here?” he asked, pointing to a small door in the building’s wall, apparently leading back out to the parking lot. The woman waved him away impatiently. Murray took a deep breath, opened the door, and walked through.

He was on another world.

Behind him there was the sound of the door sighing closed. He turned around quickly, but there was no hint of building or portal. Murray stood in the midst of a meadow of tall, waving grass. The field ran unbroken to the horizon, the light turquoise color of the grass making the scene more like a seascape than virgin prairie. To his left, on a small knoll, stood a house. Murray walked toward it, enjoying the odd smells of the plants and the moist red soil. The sun was low in the sky; whether it was rising or setting he could not immediately decide. The star around which Planet C traveled was of a more orange color than Earth’s sun. And the sky had a magenta tint to it that startled Murray several times on the way to the house.

A note was tacked to the front gate. It said:

Murray took the note and walked up the path to the house. It looked like a typical midwestern farmhouse, with picket fence, porch swing, curtained windows, and smoking chimney. The one error was the color. The house was painted a traditional farmhouse red, which looked terrible in the orange light, under a magenta sky. Murray made a mental note to do something about it. Inside, the house was lovely. It was furnished in an old-fashioned, comfortable style. The kitchen and the bathroom plumbing were efficient and attractive. Murray wandered through the rooms, climbed the stairs and explored more rooms, gazed through all the windows until he realized how silent it was. It was incredibly quiet.

He grew hungry. There was no food in the kitchen at all. There were the promised leaflets, though. One said, Welcome to Planet C! in huge Gothic script letters. It gave a short description of the various edible plants growing in Murray’s fields, with photographs of the fruits or vegetables in ripe and unripe stages. Murray wanted something quick to munch on, before he got on with the job of settling in.

He riffled through the pamphlets until he came to a description of a semi-aware creature housed in the barn. The thing was actually a colony of dozens of football-sized, amoebalike creatures. These jellyballs could be found oozing along the ground during the summer, and frozen into solid white stones in the wintertime. In the soft stage, two or more could be tossed into a container, where they would coalesce into a single entity. When this happened, the creature would begin producing tough gray objects, about once a week. If more single jellyballs were added and assimilated, the gray lumps formed more frequently. These gray things, according to the booklet, settled down through the unsolid body of the aggregate creature; the lumps were a great deal more dense, and in the wild eventually were left behind in the path of the jellyball. The creature in the barn was housed in a wooden tub with a trapdoor on the bottom. Just inside, between the trapdoor and the creature, was a layer of wire netting with holes large enough for the gray lumps to pass through. Murray had merely to open the trapdoor to let the gray lumps fall out, and close it before the jellyanimal itself began to drip down. If more young jellyballs were found, they could always be tossed in to improve the stock. The gray lumps had to be boiled thoroughly; otherwise they were intensely poisonous. Afterward they were softer and quite palatable. According to the pamphlet.

Obviously, the gray lumps were supposed to become a staple of his diet. Murray felt a queasy feeling grow in his stomach. The other beasts with which the planet and the thoughtfulness of the Representative provided him were equally as unsettling. But a living had to be made from them. Murray went outside to the barn, to inspect his cattle.

As the weeks passed, Murray adjusted quickly to the new environment. There was too much work to do to waste time in loneliness and petty regrets. Every day after dark, when he had made himself a strange-looking but nonetheless appetizing meal, Murray entertained himself with the tect. He had no lack of reading material, nor would he ever. The tect supplied him with movies, music, games, and almost everything else stored within TECT’s immense subterranean memory banks. Yet sometimes Murray wondered if this were the sort of goal toward which Grandpa Zalman had urged him with his eccentric scholarship.

After a while Murray learned the planet’s oddities. Days were twenty-six hours long. The year was nearly a month shorter than on Earth. Planet C had no moons. Seasonal weather patterns became familiar. The various instructions for the feeding of livestock and the care of the field crops were inaccurate or incomplete in places; practical experiments complemented the information supplied by TECT. Sometimes Murray was lonely, of course; after the arrival of winter, with the snow piled around the house so deeply that he despaired of getting into the barn to feed the animals, he had the first real opportunity to ponder and to experience an initial tinge of sorrow. He went for walks across the snow-deadened prairie, staring at the new constellations that glowed in the moonless sky like fiery eyes in a fading dream. He liked to stand and look back toward the house; the lights and the fireplace blazing through the front windows gave him a sense of belonging that he had never felt at home with his parents. This was his world. He could name those eerie constellations, and no one could dispute him. He could travel the face of the world and name continents, oceans, deserts, ranges of mountains. He could raise cities to rival the choking metropolises of Earth….

When he began to think like that, he always laughed. Out in the snow, his breath blowing out in quick clouds, Murray admitted his loneliness but was content nonetheless. He was building, and it gave him satisfaction. Even if Planet C never did have sprawling cities, it made no difference. Murray was happy. He felt an unshakeable unity with the world, a sort of faith in himself and in God’s eternal gifts; even here, circling Pasogh 1874, Grandpa Zalman’s simple ideals seemed to apply. Wherever he went in his immense realm, Murray felt the presence of Grandpa Zalman. And, eventually, Murray informed TECT that from then on Planet C would be known as Zalman.

The winter passed slowly but enjoyably. Murray had followed the advice of TECT and stored food for himself and the livestock; there was no problem at all about running out of provisions. Fuel for the fire was not essential, as the house seemed to be receiving natural gas from some local supply. Murray had learned that the dried stalks of one of the food crops made excellent, slow-burning firewood, but he hadn’t been able to store enough for frequent fires. Next year he’d know better, but now he had to ration the fuel. That was a shame, because there was nothing he enjoyed more than building a fire in the living room fireplace and listening to music.

Spring came, and with it an incredible amount of work. Alone, Murray had to prepare the fields for planting, seed the few acres, and maintain the young plants against the natural pests that lived in the high grass around the farm. Murray worked long days, glad of the extra hours of sunlight that Zalman’s slower rotation allowed him. Perhaps because he was laboring for himself alone, the work was never frustrating or tedious. At night, exhausted and aching, he was nevertheless satisfied. He knew that he could never have achieved that degree of fulfillment on Earth.

In the middle of the summer Murray realized that he had been on Zalman for almost a year, and had thought very little about his parents. He wondered if somehow he could contact them. He asked the tect, and it suggested that Murray dictate a letter, which would be relayed to a public tect near Murray’s old home, and from there by messenger to Murray’s parents. He was glad to have the chance, but he was nervous, too. He wondered if his parents could understand how happy he was, how what had seemed like a strange and cruel punishment was really the reward the Representative had promised. He wondered if he could try to explain that without hurting their feelings. Finally, he addressed a short, noncommittal note to them; he never received a reply to it.

The summer and then the autumn passed. It was time again to begin the harvest. Murray’s livestock had multiplied during the year, as well. He now had three large tubs of jellyanimals, each producing three or four gray lumps a day. He learned that the lumps could be stored unboiled for an indefinite length of time, and that after boiling they could be chopped and fed to the other animals; the livestock seemed to thrive with this addition to their diet. The draft animals, which Murray had named “stupes,” were large bearlike creatures with shaggy white coats. They had intelligent expressions, but three of them had almost starved before Murray realized that they were too stupid to look for their food beyond its normal place. He had rearranged the inside of the barn and moved the feeding troughs; the stupes had nearly died before they adjusted. Now there were six adult stupes and four helpless cubs. The TECT booklet said that they might be slaughtered for food, but Murray tended to doubt that. He preferred to delay that experiment, at least another year. The other animals were doing just as well; there were a dozen creatures that looked like squirrels the size of large dogs, which supplied Murray with a thin blue “milk”; there were scores of tiny things which Murray called “mice,” although they were more like lizards with fur, and which had an inscrutable but vital relationship with the stupes; there were several members of a trisexual species of flightless bird, which ate the unboiled gray lumps of the jellyanimals and regurgitated an ugly but nutritious porridge; and there were other animals, to all of which Murray had grown accustomed and even fond.

The second winter began, raged, and passed. A new spring woke the land, and with it came the first communication from Earth in many months. Murray was astonished to see the red Advise light flashing when he came in for the evening meal. He hurried to read the message:

“Yes,” said Murray, mystified and somewhat upset. “Query,” he said.

“Whom am I marrying?” he asked.

“Oh,” said Murray. Then he went into the kitchen to boil some gray lumps.

Like the periodic Tests in school, like the seemingly arbitrary way in which Murray had been settled on Zalman, the order to appear and be married reflected the total control possessed by the Representatives. Early in his life Murray had learned not to try to comprehend their sometimes baffling commands; now, he had the spring planting to worry about. He gave no further thought to the situation until the day of his return to Earth.

Murray knew that the subceiver would appear at eleven o’clock, RepNA time. He had to ask his tect what time that would be on Zalman; it was three o’clock in the morning. Murray sighed; he was glad the portal would be marked by flares. Still half asleep after the tect roused him according to his instructions, Murray hurried into his clothes and drank a quick cup of prairie grass tea. He wasn’t excited at all, not about returning to Earth or getting married. He checked his animals carefully, giving them a double ration of fodder in case he had to be away longer than he planned. Then he went out into the chilly darkness and walked toward the flares and the faintly glowing portal.

He stepped through, into a long hallway of gray cinderblocks. There was a large green arrow fastened to the wall, and Murray followed it toward a green metal door at the end of the hall. He paused outside for a moment, then knocked. A voice from the other side called to him to enter.

There were a couple of dozen chairs inside, most of them occupied by young men and women with anxious expressions. There was also a long line of couples leading up to a battered brown desk. The man behind the desk looked up from a form he was filling out and glanced at Murray. “Name?” he asked.

“Murray. Murray Rose.”

“Last name first, first name, middle initial,” said the exasperated clerk.

“Oh. Rose, Murray S.”

The clerk frowned. “All right. Let’s see, you’re with, uh, Stone, Sharon F. She’s not here yet. Take a seat. When she comes in, you can both get in this line.”

Murray sat down and waited, feeling at last some nervous symptoms. While he waited, he examined the other people in the room. They all seemed to be bright young men and women; who could tell what roles the Representative had chosen for them? Murray wondered if he looked any different than they, if his two years of hard work on Zalman showed in his face, his hands, his bearing. Soon he noticed his eyes burning; the air in the room was obnoxiously foul. The dense gray clouds of smog outside the Hall would excite no nostalgic thrills in Murray. Neither would the crowded streets and the filthy sidewalks. Murray was shocked by his own reaction. After all, here he was after a long absence, once more on the planet of his birth; all he felt was an impatience to get it all over with and go home—back to Zalman.

After about twenty minutes, the door opened and a young woman entered. The clerk shot his harried look at her and asked her name. “Stone,” she said. Murray watched her with more interest. This was the girl whom the Representative and TECT had picked to be his wife.

“You’re with Rose, over there,” said the clerk. “The two of you get at the back of the line.”

Murray stood and met her at the end of the line. He smiled hesitantly. “I’m Murray Rose,” he said.

She sighed. “Hello,” she said. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so they waited in silence. The marriage routine was very short, being merely a few questions concerning data updates, new addresses, future plans, and so on, and then the bride and groom’s presentation of positive identification.

When they had satisfied the clerk’s impersonal curiosity, he waved them away. “Next,” he said wearily.

“Is that all?” asked Murray later, as they searched for the way out of the building. “No official congratulations or anything?”

“What do you want?” asked Sharon. “A national yontif?”

“I don’t know,” said Murray. “I guess I’m more sentimental than I should be.”

“So,” said Sharon, “we’re eppes married. How many kids do we want?” She laughed, and Murray looked at her, bewildered; then he laughed.

“It is a little strange. What do we do now? You want to tell me all about yourself?”

“No. We have years for that. Where do you live?”

Murray paused briefly. “Well, see, it’s like this. I live on another planet.”

Sharon stopped short. “What?” she cried.

“I did pretty well in school. After the Twelfth-year Test they gave me this planet. I have a small farm. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very nice. I think you’ll like it.”

“Nu! You’re Jewish, right?”

Murray shrugged. “Sort of,” he said. “Nobody in my family really practiced at it.”

“Still,” said Sharon bitterly. “That’s the way the Representatives work it, you know. If they find a smart Jew, they figure some way of getting him out of circulation. They’ve bought you out. You won’t make any trouble for them wherever it is you live.”

“That’s politics,” said Murray. “I don’t believe in politics. At least, not on my wedding day.”

“Yes, but I do,” said Sharon. “Man, they really pulled a good one this time. They took care of the both of us in one shot.”

They walked some more, at last finding the door out of the Hall of Adjustments. “Where to?” asked Murray.

“My folks live in San Diego,” said Sharon. “I don’t know anybody in this town.”

“Maybe we could visit my parents. That would surprise them.”

Murray’s parents were surprised. “I thought you were off on some weird star or something,” said his father.

“I was brought back. The Representative ordered me. I got married this afternoon.”

“Married!” cried Murray’s mother. “Is this her? Your wife, I mean?”

“Yes; this is Sharon. Sharon, these are my parents.” The four of them talked for a while, and then Murray excused himself to go to sleep. As he left, his parents and Sharon were discussing plans for a wedding reception. Murray’s mother was already on the phone, calling relatives.

It was evening when Murray awoke. Sharon and his parents were eating dinner. They greeted him when he came into the kitchen. “Sit down, son,” said Murray’s father. “I want to hear all about this place you live on.”

“I sent you a letter a while ago,” said Murray. “Didn’t you ever get it?”

“No,” said his mother. “But that’s the post office for you.”

“I named the planet after Grandpa Zalman.”

There was a long pause. “Oh,” said Murray’s father. “What do you do for a living these days?”

Murray sighed. “I farm,” he said. “I have some fields and some livestock. It’s good, honest, hard work. I like it.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?” asked his mother. “You don’t go into town and fool around, do you? Sharon, you’ll have to watch him, I know. He’s at that age now. You’ll see.” The two women exchanged smiles, and Murray’s father slapped his son’s shoulder.

“There isn’t any town,” said Murray. “I’m the only one there.”

“How far away are your neighbors, then?” asked his father.

“No neighbors. I’m the only one on the whole world.”

Murray’s mother frowned. “That’s stupid, Murray,” she said. Sharon said nothing, but carried her plate to the sink. There was another silence.

“There’s going to be a party tomorrow, Murray,” said Sharon at last. “Your mother called all your old friends, too.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what happened to them all.”

The next afternoon Sharon, Murray, and his parents arrived at the Gutrune Kaemmer Jewish Community Center; the main hall was filling with Murray’s relatives and friends. It had been hastily decorated; a photographer from the local newstape took pictures, for Murray’s Test scores and his unique award had made him a celebrity in the neighborhood. Murray smiled and shook hands with everyone, and tried to introduce his new wife; he found to his dismay that he had trouble remembering the names of even some of the nearest relatives and closest friends. Finally, he was able to get away from the crowd with Billy Corman, his best friend from school, and Sharon.

“Things have really changed,” said Corman.

“I see already,” said Murray. “What happened to the big whatchamacallit—”

“Mogen David,” said Sharon quietly.

“Yeah,” said Murray. “They used to have it hanging on the wall there. A big, heavy old stainless steel thing.”

“I don’t know,” said Corman. “Some building inspector was checking on the wiring in the new wing, and decided they needed some kind of connections. I think they had to take down some of the paneling, right where the Star was. When the workmen left, they forgot to put it back. I guess the Center just never got around to it.”

“Very shrewd,” said Sharon. “They must send those inspectors to special school to learn that kind of thing.”

“Huh?” said Corman.

“I think my bride here is a radical,” said Murray. “A paranoid radical.”

Corman looked embarrassed. “Those are the worst kind,” he said, straining to make a joke. No one acknowledged it.

Murray and Sharon said goodbye to the friends and relatives soon thereafter; they had to be back at the TELETRANS Substation by five o’clock that evening. Murray’s parents wished them luck, and Murray’s mother kissed Sharon and cried. Everyone shouted their farewells, and Murray escorted his wife from the Center; they got a cab almost immediately, went straight to the Substation, and soon had signed in at the TECT desk. The yawning attendant indicated the portal, and Murray stepped through. A few seconds later Sharon joined him in the gently waving grasses of Zalman. It was only a few hours after dawn on his planet.

“For a sky, that’s a pretty strange color,” said Sharon. She was pushing the tall grass away from her, but the turquoise stalks swept back and brushed her face. She frowned in annoyance.

“I guess you’ll have to get used to it,” said Murray. “I have. Come on; you can see the house. I want to check the livestock.”

“What do you have?”

“They’re not earth animals. You’ll have to be prepared.”

“Look, Murray, this isn’t my idea. If I don’t feel up to playing the courageous chalutz, I won’t. Who knows? You may have gotten a real bad bargain. What if I go crazy?”

“It’s really a good farm,” said Murray. “And now there won’t be as much work.”

“There won’t be as much for you, let me remind you. I get the feeling there’s going to be a whole lot more for me.”

“It’s a good farm.”

“It’s how they bought your manhood, yekl,” said Sharon. Murray didn’t answer. “Wonderful, what a match that shadchen machine stuck me with,” she muttered.

“Look,” called Murray. “This is one of the animals that live around here.” He held up a small jellyball. “You get a couple of them and they sort of mush together. They make gray things that you can eat.”

“Feh!” said Sharon.

“You carry it,” said Murray. “You have to get over your fear.”

“It isn’t fear,” she said shrilly. “It’s disgust.”

The first few days were unpleasant. Sharon refused to have anything to do with the animals. Even the vegetables from the fields made her run from the table at mealtime. Soon her hunger grew to the point where she had to compromise. She ate a few vegetables, and some of the boiled gray lumps. She admitted that they were reasonably pleasant in taste; but her intellect betrayed her, and after she thought about the source of the food she hurried to the bathroom again. It wasn’t as bad the next day, and then it wasn’t long before she was eating well again. From then on she helped Murray in all the day’s chores, although forever after she had a particular distaste for the jellyanimals.

Murray had come back to the house for a quick lunch one day. It was now near the end of summer, and the day’s routines had none of the urgency of the spring planting or the fall harvest. Sharon had fixed a special meal for him, hamburgers made from ground stupe meat.

“You’re incredible,” said Murray.

“I figured you’d like it,” said Sharon. “How long has it been since you had a good old greasy hamburger?”

“Too long. One of the things I was hoping to do when I went back to get married was fill up on things like that. You know, pizzas and cheap French fries.”

“I know how you feel already. I’d give anything for some honest drive-in trayf. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that this isn’t our choice. If you never had the chance to decide, you never had the chance to make your own mistake. The Representatives have cheated you out of your own humanity. They’ve just forgotten about free will.”

Murray sighed. “Don’t start that again, Sharon, okay? This is my little Garden of Eden. You keep forgetting if you’re Eve or the serpent. You’re forever trying to make the Representatives sound like corruption personified. How many other people do you know who have a whole, clean, beautiful world all to themselves? You just can’t make a gift like that out of evil intentions.”

“For thousands of years we’ve swallowed that einredenish. They say, ‘Go on. Make money. Gather possessions. But just don’t get pushy.’ And the nuchshleppers go right along with them. Every time we seem to be pulling our people together, somebody throws cold water on our smoldering desire, scatters the flame of our spirit. Being driven out of our own land into exile wasn’t bad enough. But then for centuries, wherever small communities of Jews gathered, the machers in power devoted themselves to splitting up even those tiny groups.”

“That’s the racial paranoia my father yelled about all the time,” said Murray. “It’s stupid. What’s the matter, you need to be persecuted? You can’t have someone hand you a gift horse without looking it in the mouth?”

“Bubkes! I know some Trojans that would’ve been a lot better off if they had. Anyway, now the Representatives have found the real answer. This is a neat thing they’ve done. Nobody can accuse them of genocide. Even you can’t see what they’re doing.”

“What are they doing?”

“You know what the Diaspora means?”

“No,” said Murray.

“It used to mean the community of Jews living outside Israel. There used to be great numbers of Jews throughout the world. Now there isn’t. Mostly, there are a couple of million Jews in Israel, living in sort of an amusement park for the Representatives. And some more scattered neighborhoods in the rest of the world. Now they’re taking the best of our people and spreading them even further. A dispersion of the Dispersion. It’s much more effective than killing them would be. No one is angered, no one is vengeful. I mean, you certainly looked happy enough when you visited your parents, nu?”

“All right,” said Murray, rubbing his eyes with his rough fingers, “suppose you tell me why they bother?”

“Go to that damn machine of yours,” said Sharon. Murray frowned, not understanding, but he went to the tect. “Now ask it a question,” she said. “Ask it what a Jew is.”

Murray did so. The answer was immediate:

“That’s why they bother,” said Sharon. “It’s all the reason they need.”

Her ideas were as foreign to Murray as Grandpa Zalman’s had been; but, after he had thought about them, he discovered that he couldn’t find an easy reply. When he had made that admission, Murray decided that Sharon at least deserved the attention he had given to his grandfather’s odd ways. The summer ended. Several weeks later, he went to the tect and asked a few more questions. “How many other individuals have been given their own planet?” he said.

“What percentage of those people are Jewish or of Jewish extraction?”

“And what percentage of the population of the Earth is Jewish or of Jewish extraction?”

Those figures seemed to substantiate Sharon’s angry charges. But, still, Murray didn’t agree that giving virgin worlds away was a scheme to destroy the Jewish people. It may just be the result of a natural superiority among Jewish students, at least as far as what the Twelfth-year Test measured. But then Murray had a sudden thought. “How many known, habitable worlds are there in the universe, besides Earth?” he asked.

There! “How many other people are living on the world known as Zalman, other than Murray and Sharon Rose?”

Murray took the information to Sharon. “I have to apologize,” he said. “It looks like your view of things may be a little more accurate than mine. I’m either naïve or just stupid. If the Representatives will lie about meaningless things like this, who knows what else they’ve been lying about?”

Sharon smiled at him sadly. “Twenty-two other people, scattered around the face of a world. A regular little shtetl, if we could all get together. That’s what Jews have been saying since Genesis.”

“I guess it’s too late, now.”

“It may be too late for you and me,” said Sharon. “We’ve sold the birthright. We’ve betrayed our ancestors. And for what? Some gray lumps.”

Murray was still upset by his discoveries, and Sharon’s words only irritated him. He grew defensive. “So what should I be doing?” he said loudly. “Fighting them by myself?”

“We should be conserving what little remains of our heritage,” said Sharon softly. “You never cared much for that, did you?”

“You can’t blame me for my environment,” said Murray.

“I can, if you keep making its mistakes.”

Murray slammed his hand down on the table. “You want me to go back to Earth? Lead an uprising? Murray Maccabeus, for pity’s sake?”

“Murray, that light on the machine is flashing,” said Sharon. He turned around, startled. There was a message coming through.

“You think they’ve been listening?” asked Murray.

“Probably,” said Sharon with a scowl. “What difference does it make?”

Murray hurried to the tect. The CRT screen displayed the news:

“Congratulations,” said Murray. “The Representative strikes again.”

“Have you noticed how when that gonif strikes, he always seems to hit me?” said Sharon. Murray looked at her; she laughed, and he felt relieved. “Having a baby has taken more than one good revolutionary out of the action,” she said. “But at least I can train him to take care of those jellyanimals. That’s the trouble with this planet. No hired hands.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” said Murray. “Our baby—”

“I was only kidding.”

“I had this vision of you raising him to be an employee instead of a son. I can never tell when you’re serious.”

“Wait until you get to know me,” she said. “Then you can worry.”

“So tell me. How are you going to raise a kid without chicken soup?”

Sharon laughed. “I was waiting for that. No, really, I figure we can make a good enough broth out of stupe bones. Stupe soup. Feh!”

“And then this champion we’re raising can go back to Earth and bust heads for us,” said Murray.

Sharon suddenly got serious. “You know, Murray,” she said, “I don’t want to believe we’re the only ones who have discovered what the Representatives are doing. I mean, they’ve scattered our best minds, but those minds are still functioning. Our kid won’t be any Messiah. Not by himself. But maybe around these planets, we’re making a generation of Messiahs.”

“That’s a very heroic thought,” said Murray. “I guess you have to tell yourself things like that, to keep yourself going.” Now Sharon stared at her husband, until he laughed.

“I’m going to crown you one of these days, chachem, if you don’t stop mocking me. Look, the Hebrews were wandering around leaderless, oppressed by all sorts of people and ideas. Then came Moses. Now everybody’s oppressed and lost, not just our small tribe. So instead of one man, the world needs one strong family of men to stand up and fight back. What Moses is to the Jews, the Jews can be to all mankind.”

“And before the Messiah comes, isn’t the prophet Elijah supposed to return?” asked Murray with a smile. “I like that. It makes me Elijah. Mom would be proud.”

“No,” said Sharon, “it makes us Elijah. And the spirit of Elijah is with us. It’s Succoth.”

“What?”

“A feast. A harvest thanksgiving. There are traditions. We’ll build a booth in the fields, and we’ll eat our meals there. It will remind us of the temporary shelters of the Hebrews in their years of wandering. It can mean the temporary kind of dominance the Representatives have over us, if you want. We’re supposed to have willow and myrtle and other branches, but I suppose we can substitute. It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”

Murray kissed Sharon lightly on the cheek. “You’re very special,” he said. “You’re a little insane, but you’re special.”

“And you, luftmensh, you’re just dumb.”

“Let’s hurry up and have that baby, so we can all get out of here,” said Murray, sighing.

“Relax. We’ve waited this long, we can wait a little longer.”

“What do I do in the meantime?” asked Murray.

“You can help me get the rest of those bluebeans in,” she said. “And then we can start on the booth.” Murray nodded and started to go back outside. “Nu,” said Sharon. “I made this for you.”

Murray looked at the little thing she had pulled from her pocket. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a yarmulke. Take it.”

He hesitated for a second. Then he took it from her and put it on. It was time they got to work.

CARMODY HAD NEVER REALLY PLANNED to leave New York. Why he did so is inexplicable. A born urbanite, he had grown accustomed to the minor inconveniences of metropolitan life. His snug apartment on the 290th floor of Levitfrack Towers on West Ninety-ninth Street was nicely equipped in the current “Spaceship” motif. The windows were double-sealed in tinted lifetime plexiglass, and the air ducts worked through a blind baffle filtration system which sealed automatically when the Combined Atmosphere Pollution Index reached 999.8 on the Con Ed scale. True, his oxygen-nitrogen air recirculation system was old, but it was reliable. His water purification cells were obsolete and ineffective; but then, nobody drank water anyhow.

Noise was a continual annoyance, unstoppable and inescapable. But Carmody knew that there was no cure for this, since the ancient art of soundproofing had been lost. It was urban man’s lot to listen, a captive audience, to the arguments, music and watery gurglings of his adjacent neighbors. Even this torture could be alleviated, however, by producing similar sounds of one’s own.

Going to work each day entailed certain dangers; but these were more apparent than real. Disadvantaged snipers continued to make their ineffectual protests from rooftops and occasionally succeeded in potting an unwary out-of-towner. But as a rule, their aim was abominable. Additionally, the general acceptance of lightweight personal armor had taken away most of their sting, and the sternly administered state law forbidding the personal possession of surplus cannon had rendered them ineffectual.

Thus, no single factor can be adduced for Carmody’s sudden decision to leave what was generally considered the world’s most exciting megapolitan agglomeration. Blame it on a vagrant impulse, a pastoral fantasy, or on sheer perversity. The simple, irreducible fact is, one day Carmody opened his copy of the Daily Times-News and saw an advertisement for a model city in New Jersey.

“Come live in Bellwether, the city that cares,” the advertisement proclaimed. There followed a list of utopian claims which need not be reproduced here.

“Huh,” said Carmody, and read on.

Bellwether was within easy commuting distance. One simply drove through the Ulysses S. Grant Tunnel at 43rd Street, took the Hoboken Shunt Subroad to the Palisades Interstate Crossover, followed that for 3.2 miles on the Blue-Charlie Sorter Loop that led onto U.S. 5 (The Hague Memorial Tollway), proceeded along that a distance of 6.1 miles to the Garden State Supplementary Access Service Road (Provisional), upon which one tended west to Exit 1731A, which was King’s Highbridge Gate Road, and then continued along that for a distance of 1.6 miles. And there you were.

“By jingo,” said Carmody, “I’ll do it.”

And he did.

King’s Highbridge Gate Road ended on a neatly trimmed plain. Carmody got out of his car and looked around. Half a mile ahead of him he saw a small city. A single modest signpost identified it as Bellwether.

This city was not constructed in the traditional manner of American cities, with outliers of gas stations, tentacles of hot-dog stands, fringes of motels and a protective carapace of junkyards; but rather, as some Italian hill towns are fashioned, it rose abruptly, without physical preamble, the main body of the town presenting itself at once and without amelioration.

Carmody found this appealing. He advanced into the city itself.

Bellwether had a warm and open look. Its streets were laid out generously, and there was a frankness about the wide bay windows of its store-fronts. As he penetrated deeper, Carmody found other delights. Just within the city he entered a piazza, like a Roman piazza, only smaller; and in the center of the piazza there was a fountain, and standing in the fountain was a marble representation of a boy with a dolphin, and from the dolphin’s mouth a stream of clear water issued.

“I do hope you like it,” a voice said from behind Carmody’s left shoulder.

“It’s nice,” Carmody said.

“I constructed it and put it there myself,” the voice told him. “It seemed to me that a fountain, despite the antiquity of its concept, is aesthetically functional. And this piazza, with its benches and shady chestnut trees, is copied from a Bolognese model. Again, I did not inhibit myself with the fear of seeming old-fashioned. The true artist uses what is necessary, be it a thousand years old or one second new.”

“I applaud your sentiment,” Carmody said. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Edward Carmody.” He turned, smiling.

But there was no one behind his left shoulder, or behind his right shoulder, either. There was no one in the piazza, nobody at all in sight.

“Forgive me,” the voice said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” Carmody asked.

“Knew about me.”

“Well, I don’t,” Carmody said. “Who are you and where are you speaking from?”

“I am the voice of the city,” the voice said. “Or to put it another way, I am the city itself, Bellwether, the actual and veritable city, speaking to you.”

“Is that a fact?” Carmody said sardonically. “Yes,” he answered himself, “I suppose it is a fact. So all right, you’re a city. Big deal!”

He turned away from the fountain and strolled across the piazza like a man who conversed with cities every day of his life, and who was slightly bored with the whole thing. He walked down various streets and up certain avenues. He glanced into store windows and noted houses. He paused in front of statuary, but only briefly.

“Well?” the city of Bellwether asked after a while.

“Well what?” Carmody answered at once.

“What do you think of me?”

“You’re okay,” Carmody said.

“Only okay? Is that all?”

“Look,” Carmody said, “a city is a city. When you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.”

“That’s untrue!” the city said, with some show of pique. “I am distinctly different from other cities. I am unique.”

“Are you indeed?” Carmody said scornfully. “To me you look like a conglomeration of badly assembled parts. You’ve got an Italian piazza, a couple of Greek-type buildings, a row of Tudor houses, an old-style New York tenement, a California hot-dog stand shaped like a tugboat and God knows what else. What’s so unique about that?”

“The combination of those forms into a meaningful entity is unique,” the city said. “These older forms are not anachronisms, you understand. They are representative styles of living, and as such are appropriate in a well-wrought machine for living. Would you care for some coffee and perhaps a sandwich or some fresh fruit?”

“Coffee sounds good,” Carmody said. He allowed Bellwether to guide him around the corner to an open-air cafe. The cafe was called “O You Kid” and was a replica of a Gay Nineties’ saloon, right down to the Tiffany lamps and the cut-glass chandelier and the player piano. Like everything else that Carmody had seen in the city, it was spotlessly clean, but without people.

“Nice atmosphere, don’t you think?” Bellwether asked.

“Campy,” Carmody pronounced. “Okay if you like that sort of thing.”

A foaming mug of cappuccino was lowered to his table on a stainless steel tray. Carmody sipped.

“Good?” Bellwether asked.

“Yes, very good.”

“I rather pride myself on my coffee,” the city said quietly. “And on my cooking. Wouldn’t you care for a little something? An omelette, perhaps, or a soufflé?”

“Nothing,” Carmody said firmly. He leaned back in his chair and said, “So you’re a model city, huh?”

“Yes, that is what I have the honor to be,” Bellwether said. “I am the most recent of all model cities; and, I believe, the most satisfactory. I was conceived by a joint study group from Yale and the University of Chicago, who were working on a Rockefeller fellowship. Most of my practical details were devised by M.I.T., although some special sections of me came from Princeton and from the RAND Corporation. My actual construction was a General Electric project, and the money was procured by grants from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, as well as several other institutions I am not at liberty to mention.”

“Interesting sort of history,” Carmody said, with hateful nonchalance. “That’s a Gothic cathedral across the street, isn’t it?”

“Modified Romanesque,” the city said. “Also interdenominational and open to all faiths, with a designed seating capacity for three hundred people.”

“That doesn’t seem like many for a building of that size.”

“It’s not, of course. Designedly. My idea was to combine awesomeness with coziness.”

“Where are the inhabitants of this town, by the way?” Carmody asked.

“They have left,” Bellwether said mournfully. “They have all departed.”

“Why?”

The city was silent for a while, then said, “There was a breakdown in city-community relations. A misunderstanding, really. Or perhaps I should say, an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. I suspect that rabble-rousers played their part.”

“But what happened, precisely?”

“I don’t know,” the city said. “I really don’t know. One day they simply all left. Just like that! But I’m sure they’ll be back.”

“I wonder,” Carmody said.

“I am convinced of it,” the city said. “But putting that aside: why don’t you stay here, Mr. Carmody?”

“I haven’t really had time to consider it,” Carmody said.

“How could you help but like it?” Bellwether said. “Just think—you would have the most modern up-to-date city in the world at your beck and call.”

“That does sound interesting,” Carmody said.

“So give it a try, how could it hurt you?” the city asked.

“All right, I think I will,” Carmody said.

He was intrigued by the city of Bellwether. But he was also apprehensive. He wished he knew exactly why the city’s previous occupants had left.

IN A PRISON where souls bound for Sheol—Earth they call it there—await destruction, there hovered the female soul Jechidah. Souls forget their origin. Purah, the Angel of Forgetfulness, he who dissipates God’s light and conceals His face, holds dominion everywhere beyond the Godhead. Jechidah, unmindful of her descent from the Throne of Glory, had sinned. Her jealousy had caused much trouble in the world where she dwelled. She had suspected all female angels of having affairs with her lover Jachid, had not only blasphemed God but even denied him. Souls, she said, were not created but had evolved out of nothing: they had neither mission nor purpose. Although the authorities were extremely patient and forgiving, Jechidah was finally sentenced to death. The judge fixed the moment of her descent to that cemetery called Earth.

The attorney for Jechidah appealed to the Superior Court of Heaven, even presented a petition to Metatron, the Lord of the Face. But Jechidah was so filled with sin and so impenitent that no power could save her. The attendants seized her, tore her from Jachid, clipped her wings, cut her hair, and clothed her in a long white shroud. She was no longer allowed to hear the music of the spheres, to smell the perfumes of Paradise and to meditate on the secrets of the Torah, which sustain the soul. She could no longer bathe in the wells of balsam oil. In the prison cell, the darkness of the nether world already surrounded her. But her greatest torment was her longing for Jachid. She could no longer reach him telepathically. Nor could she send a message to him, all of her servants having been taken away. Only the fear of death was left to Jechidah.

Death was no rare occurrence where Jechidah lived but it befell only vulgar, exhausted spirits. Exactly what happened to the dead, Jechidah did not know. She was convinced that when a soul descended to Earth it was to extinction, even though the pious maintained that a spark of life remained. A dead soul immediately began to rot and was soon covered with a slimy stuff called semen. Then a grave digger put it into a womb where it turned into some sort of fungus and was henceforth known as a child. Later on, began the tortures of Gehenna: birth, growth, toil. For according to the morality books, death was not the final stage. Purified, the soul returned to its source. But what evidence was there for such beliefs? So far as Jechidah knew, no one had ever returned from Earth. The enlightened Jechidah believed that the soul rots for a short time and then disintegrates into a darkness of no return.

Now the moment had come when Jechidah must die, must sink to Earth. Soon, the Angel of Death would appear with his fiery sword and thousand eyes.

At first Jechidah had wept incessantly, but then her tears had ceased. Awake or asleep she never stopped thinking of Jachid. Where was he? What was he doing? Whom was he with? Jechidah was well aware he would not mourn for her for ever. He was surrounded by beautiful females, sacred beasts, angels, seraphim, cherubs, ayralim, each one with powers of seduction. How long could someone like Jachid curb his desires? He, like she, was an unbeliever. It was he who had taught her that spirits were not created, but were products of evolution. Jachid did not acknowledge free will, nor believe in ultimate good and evil. What would restrain him? Most certainly he already lay in the lap of some other divinity, telling those stories about himself he had already told Jechidah.

But what could she do? In this dungeon all contact with the mansions ceased. All doors were closed: neither mercy, nor beauty entered here. The one way from this prison led down to Earth, and to the horrors called flesh, blood, marrow, nerves, and breath. The God-fearing angels promised resurrection. They preached that the soul did not linger forever on Earth, but that after it had endured its punishment, it returned to the Higher Sphere. But Jechidah, being a modernist, regarded all of this as superstition. How would a soul free itself from the corruption of the body? It was scientifically impossible. Resurrection was a dream, a silly comfort of primitive and frightened souls.

YOU’LL PARDON ME but my name is Evsise and I’m standing here in the middle of sand, talking to a butterfly, and if I sound like I’m talking to myself, again you’ll pardon but what can I tell you? A grown person standing talking to a butterfly. In sand.

So nu? What else can you expect? There are times you got to make adjustments, you got to let be a little. Just to get along. I’m not all that happy about this, if you want the specific truth. I’ve learned, God knows I’ve learned. I’m a Jew, and if there is a thing Jews have learned in over six thousand years, it’s that you got to compromise if you want to make it to seven thousand. So, let be. I’ll talk to this butterfly, hey you butterfly, and I’ll pray for the best.

You don’t understand. You got that look.

Listen: I read once in a book that they found a tribe of Jewish Indians, somewhere deep in the heart of South America. That was on the Earth. The Earth, shtumie! It’s been in all the papers.

So. Jewish Indians. What a thing! And everyone wondered and yelled and made such a mishegoss that they had to send historians and sociologists and anthropologists and all manner of very learned types to establish if this was a true thing or maybe somebody was just lying.

And what they found was that maybe what had happened was that some galus from Spain, fleeing the Inquisition, got on board with Cortez and came to The New World, kayn-ahora, and when no one was looking, he ran away. So then he got farblondjet and wound up in some little place full of very suggestible native types, and being something of a tummeler he started teaching them about being Jewish—just to keep busy, you know what I mean? because Jews have never been missionaries, none of that “converting” crap; other, I shouldn’t name names, religions need to keep going, unlike Judaism which does very cute thank you on its own—and by the time all the smart-alecks found the tribe, they were keeping kosher, and having brises when the sons were born, and observing the High Holy Days, and not doing any fishing on the Shabbes, and it was a very nice thing altogether.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are Jews here on Zsouchmuhn. Zoochhhhhh-moooohn. With a chhhhh, not a kuh. You got a no-accent like a Litvak.

It shouldn’t even surprise that I’m a Jew and I’m blue and I have eleven arms thereby defying the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and I am squat and round and move very close to the ground by a series of caterpillar feet set around the rim of ball joints and sockets on either side of my tuchis which obeys the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and when I’ve wound the feet tight I have to jump off the ground so they can unwind and then I move forward again which makes my movement very peculiar I’m told by tourists without very much class.

In the Universal Ephemeris I am referred to as a native of Theta 996:VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici. The VI is Zsouchmuhn. A baedeker from some publisher in the Crab came here a few turns ago and wrote a travel pamphlet on Zsouchmuhn; he kept calling me a Zsouchmoid; he should grow in the ground, headfirst like a turnip. I am a Jew.

I don’t know what a turnip is.

Now I’m raving. What it’ll do to you, talking to a butterfly. I have a mission, and it’s making me crazy, giving me shpilkess, you could die from a mission like this. I’m looking for Kadak.

Hey you butterfly! A blink, a flutter, a movement it wouldn’t hurt, you should make an indication you can hear me, I shouldn’t stand like a schlemiel telling you all this.

Nothing. You wouldn’t give me a break.

Listen: if it wasn’t for that oysvorf that bum, Snodle, I wouldn’t be here. I would be with my family and my lust-nest concubines on Theta 996:III, what the Ephemeris calls Bromios, what we Jews call Kasrilevka. There is historical precedent for our naming Bromios another name, Kasrilevka. You’ll read Sholom Aleichem, you’ll understand. A planet for schlimazels. I don’t want to discuss it. That’s where they’re moving us. Everyone went. A few crazy ones stayed, there are always a few. But mostly, everyone went: who would want to stay? They’re moving Zsouchmuhn. God knows where. Every time you look around they’re dragging a place off and putting it somewhere else. I don’t want to go into that. Terrible people, they got no hearts in them.

So we were sitting in the yeshiva, the last ten of us, a proper minyan, getting ready to sit shivah for the whole planet, for the last days we would be here, when that oysvorf Snodle had a seizure and up and died. Oh, a look: a question, maybe? Why were we sitting shivah in the rabbinical college when everybody else was running like a thief to get off the planet before those gonifs from the Relocation Center came with their skyhooks, a glitch if ever I saw one, shady, disreputable, to give a yank and drag a place out of orbit and give a shove and jam in big meshiginah magnets to float around where a nice, cute world was, just to keep the Cluster running smooth, when they pull out a world everything shouldn’t go bump together… ? Why, you ask me. So, I’ll tell you why.

Because, Mr. I-Won’t-Talk-Or-Even-Flap-My-Wings Butterfly, shivah is the holiest of the holies. Because the Talmud says when you mourn the dead you get ten Jewish men who come to the home of the deceased, not eight or seven or four, but ten men, and you sit and you pray, and you hold services, and you light the yorzeit candles, and you recite the kaddish which as every intelligent life-form in the Cluster except maybe a nut butterfly knows is the prayer for the dead, in honor and praise of God and the deceased.

And why do we want to sit shivah for a world that was such a good home for us for so many turns? Because, and it strikes me foolishness to expect a farchachdah butterfly to grasp what I’m trying to say here, because God has been good to us here, and we’ve got property (which now is gone) and we’ve got families (which now are gone) and we’ve got our health (which, if I continue talking to you, I’ll be losing shortly) and God’s name can be hallowed by word of mouth only in the presence of others—the community of worshippers—the congregation—the minyan of ten, and that’s why.

You know, even for a butterfly, you don’t look Jewish.

So nu, now you understand a little maybe? Zsouchmuhn was the goldeneh medina for us, the golden country; it was good here, we were happy here, now we have to move to Kasrilevka, a world for schlimazels. Not even a Red Sea to be parted, it isn’t slavery, it’s just a world that’s not enough, you know what I mean? So we wanted to pay last respects. It’s not so crazy. And everyone went, and only the ten of us left to sit the seven turns till we went away and Zsouchmuhn was goniffed out of the sky to go God-knows-where. It would have been fine, except for that Snodle, that crazy. Who seized up and died on us.

So where would we get a tenth man for the minyan?

There were only nine Jews on the whole planet.

Then Snodle said, “There’s always Kadak.”

“Shut up, you’re dead,” Reb Jeshaia said, but it didn’t do any good. Snodle kept suggesting Kadak.

You should understand, one of the drawbacks of my species, which maybe a butterfly wouldn’t know, is that when we die, and pass on, there’s still talking. Nuhdzhing. Oh. You want to know how that can be. How a dead Jew can talk, through the veil, from the other side. What am I, a science authority, I should know how that works? I wouldn’t lie on you: I don’t know. Always it’s been the same. One of us seizes up and dies, and the body squats there and doesn’t decay the way the tourists’ do when they get shikker in a blind pig bar in downtown Houmitz and stagger out in the gutter and get knocked over by a tumbrel on the way to the casinos.

But the voice starts up. Nuhdzhing!

It probably has something to do with the soul, but I wouldn’t put a bet on that; all I can say is thank God we don’t worship ancestors here on Zsouchmuhn, because we’d have such a sky full of nuhdzhing old farts telling us how to run our lives, it wouldn’t be worth it to keep on this side of the veil. Bless the name of Abraham, after a while they shut up and go off somewhere.

Probably to nuhdz each other, they should rest in peace already and stop talking.

But Snodle wasn’t going away. He died, and now he was demanding we not only sit shivah out of courtesy for having lived here so prosperously, but we should also, you shouldn’t take it as an imposition, sit shivah for him! An oysvorf, that Snodle.

“There’s always Kadak,” he said. His voice came from a nowhere spot in the air about a foot above his body, which was dumped upside-down on a table in the yeshiva.

“Snodle, if you don’t mind,” said Shmuel with the one good antenna, “would you kindly shut your face and let us handle this?” Then seeing, I suppose for the first time, that Snodle was upside-down, he added, but softly he shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, “I always said he talked through his tuchis.”

“I’ll turn him over,” said Chaim with the defective unwind in his hop.

“Let be,” said Shmuel. “I like this end better than the other.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” said Yitzchak. “The gonifs come in a little while to take away the planet, we can’t stay, we can’t go, and I have lust-nest concubines lubricating and lactating on Bromios this very minute.”

“Kasrilevka,” said Avram.

“Kasrilevka,” Yitzchak agreed, his prop-arm, the one in the back, curling an ungrammatical apology.

“A planet of ten million Snodles,” said Yankel.

“There’s always Kadak,” said Snodle.

“Who is this Kadak the oysvorf’s babbling about?” asked Meyer Kahaha. The rest of us rolled our eyes at the remark. Ninety-six tsuris-filled eyes rolled. Meyer Kahaha was always the town schlemiel; if there was a bigger oysvorf than Snodle, it was Meyer Kahaha.

Yankel stuck the tip of his pointing arm in Meyer Kahaha’s ninth eye, the one with the cataract. “Quiet!”

We sat and stared at each other. Finally, Moishe said, “He’s right. It’s another tragedy we can mourn on Tisha Ba’b (if they have enough turns on Kasrilevka for Tisha Ba’b to fall in the right month), but the oysvorf and the schlemiel are right. Our only hope is Kadak, lightning shouldn’t strike me for saying it.”

“Someone will have to go find him,” said Avram.

“Not me,” said Yankel. “A mission for a fool.”

Then Reb Jeshaia, who was the wisest of all the blue Jews on Zsouchmuhn, even before the great exodus, one or two of them it wouldn’t have hurt if they’d stayed behind to give a little help so we shouldn’t find out too late we were in this miserable state of things because Snodle seized up and died, Reb Jeshaia nodded that it was a mission for a fool and he said, “We’ll send Evsise.”

“Thanks a lot for that,” I said.

He looked at me with the six eyes on the front, and he said, “Evsise. Should we send Shmuel with one good antenna? Should we send Chaim with a defective hop? Should we send Yitzchak who is so crippled with lust he gets cramps? Maybe we should send Yankel who is older than even Snodle and would die from the journey then we’d have to find two Jews? Moishe? Moishe argues with everyone. Some cooperation he’d get.”

“What about Avram?” I asked. Avram looked away.

“You want I should talk about Avram’s problem here in front of an open Talmud, here in front of the dead, right here in front of God and everyone?” Reb Jeshaia looked stern.

“Forget it. I’m sorry I mentioned,” I said.

“Maybe I should go myself, the Rabbi should go? Or maybe you’d prefer we sent Meyer Kahaha?”

“You made your point,” I said. “I’ll go. I’m far from a happy person about this, you should know it before I go. But I’ll do it. You’ll never see me again, I’ll die out there looking for that Kadak, but I’ll go.”

I started for the burrow exit of the yeshiva. I passed Yitzchak, who looked sheepish. “Cramps,” I muttered. “It should only wither up and fall off like a dead leaf.”

Then I rolled, hopped and unwound my way up the tunnel to the street, and went looking for Kadak.

The last time I saw Kadak was seventeen turns ago. He was squatting in the synagogue during Purim, and suddenly he rolled into the aisle, tore off his yarmulkah, his tallis and his t’fillin, all at once with his top three arms on each side, threw them into the aisle, yelled he had had it with Judaism, and was converting to the Church of the Apostates.

That was the last any of us saw of him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you ask me. Kadak, to begin with, was never my favorite person, if you want the truth. He snuffled.

Oh, that isn’t such an averah, I can see you think I’m making a big something out of a big nothing. Listen, Mr. Terrific-I-Flap-My-Wings-And-You-Should-Notice-Me, I’m a person who says what’s on his mind, I don’t make no moofky-foofky with anyone. You want someone who beats around the bushes you should talk to that Avram. Me, I’ll tell you I couldn’t stand that Kadak’s snuffling, all the time snuffling. You sit in the shoul and right in the middle of the Shema, right in the direct absolute center of “Hear O Israel, the Lord, Our God, the Lord is One,” comes a snuffle that sounds like a double-snouted peggalomer in a mud-wallow.

He had a snuffle made you want to go take a bath.

A terrible snuffle, if you’ll listen to me for a minute. He was the kind, that Kadak, he wouldn’t care when he’d snuffle. When you were sleeping, eating, shtupping, making a ka-ka, he didn’t care… would come a blast, a snort, a rotten snuffle could make you want to get rid of your last three or four meals. And forget talking to him: how can you talk to a person who punctuates with a snuffle?

So when he went off to convert to the Apostates, sure there was a scandal… there weren’t that many Jews on Zsouchmuhn… any thing was a scandal… but to be absolutely frank with you, I’ll speak my mind no matter what, we were very relieved. To be free of that snuffle was already a naches, like getting one free. Or seven for five.

So now I had to go all over there and back, looking for that terrible snuffle. It was an ugliness I could live without, you should pardon my frankness.

But I went through downtown Houmitz and went over to the Holy Cathedral of the Church of the Apostates. The city was in a very bad way. When everyone had gone to Kasrilevka, they took everything that wasn’t bolted down. They also took everything that was bolted down. They also took the bolts. Not to mention a lot of the soil it was all bolted down into. Big holes, everywhere. Zsouchmuhn was not, at this point in time I’m telling you about, such a cute little world anymore. It looked like an old man with a krenk. Like a pisher with acne. Very unpleasant, it wasn’t a trip I care to talk about.

But there was a little left of that crazy farchachdah Cathedral still standing. Why shouldn’t they let it stand: how much does it cost to make a new one? String. The dummies, they make a holy place from string and spit and bits of dried crap off the streets and their bodies, I don’t even want to think about what a sacrilege.

I rolled inside. The smell, you could die from the smell. On Zsouchmuhn here, we got a groundworm, this filthy little segmented thing everyone calls a pincercrusher. Lumbricus rubellus Venaticus my Uncle Beppo, the lunatic zoologist, calls it. It isn’t at all peculiar why I remember a foreign name like that—Latin is what it is, I’m a bissel scholar, too, you know, not such a dummy as you might think, and it’s no wonder Reb Jeshaia sent me on this it-could-kill-a-lesser-Jew mission to find Kadak. I remember because once I had one of them bite me in the tuchis when I went swimming, and you learn these things, believe you me, you learn them. This rotten little worm it’s got pinching things in the front and on the sides, and it lies in wait for a juicy tuchis and when you’re just ready to relax in a swim, or maybe to take a nap on a picnic, chomp!, it goes right for the tuchis. And it hangs on with those triple-damned the entire species should go straight to Gehenna pinch-things, and it makes me sick to remember, but it sucks the blood right out of you, right through your tuchis. And you couldn’t get one off, medical science as hootsy-tootsy as it is, you could varf from the size of a doctor’s bill, even the hootsy-tootsies can’t get one off you. The only thing that does it, is you get a musician and he bangs together a pair of cymbals, and it falls off. All bloated up with your blood, leaving a bunch of little pinch-marks on your tuchis you’re ashamed to let your lust-mates see it. And don’t ask why the doctors don’t carry cymbals with them for such occasions. You wouldn’t believe the union problems here on Zsouchmuhn, which includes musicians and doctors both, so you’d better be near a band and not a hospital when a pincercrusher bites you in the tuchis, otherwise forget it. And when the terrible thing falls off, it goes pop! and it bursts, and all the awful crap it had in it makes a stink you shouldn’t even think about it, the eyes, all twelve of them could roll up in your head, with the smell of all that feh! and blood and crap.

Inside the Cathedral of the Church of the Apostates, the smell. Like a million popped pincercrushers. I almost went over on my face from that smell.

It took three hands to hold all of my nose, a little whiff shouldn’t slip through.

I started reeling around, hitting the strings they called walls. Fortunately, I rolled around near the entrance, and I stretched my nose a couple of feet outside, and I took a very deep breath, and snapped my nose back, and held it, and looked around.

There were still half a dozen of them who hadn’t run off to Kasrilevka, all down on their stomachs, their feet winding up and unwinding, very fast, their faces down in the mud and crap in front of the altar, doing what I suppose they call praying. To that idol of theirs, Seymour, or Simon, or Shtumie, whatever they call it. I should know the name of a heathen idol, you bet your life never, better I should know the Latin name of a miserable worm that stinks first, let me tell you.

So there they were, and let me assure you it pained me in several more than a couple of ways to have to go over to them, but… I’m looking for Kadak.

“Hey,” I said to one of them. A terrific look at his tuchis I got. Such a perfect tuchis, if ever there was one, for a pincercrusher to come and chomp!

Nothing. “Hey!” I yelled it a second time. No attention. Crazy with their faces down in the crap. “Listen, hey!” I yelled at the top of my voice, which isn’t such a soft niceness when I’m suffocating holding my nose with three hands and I want to get out of that place already.

So I gave him a zetz in the tuchis. I wound up every foot on the left side, and I let it unwind right where a pincercrusher would have brunch.

Then the dummy looked up.

A sight you could become very ill with. A nose covered with crap from the floor, a bunch of eyes filled with blue jelly, a mouth from out of which could only come heathen hosannahs to a dummy idol called Shaygets or something.

“You kicked me,” he said.

“All by yourself you figured that out, eh?”

He looked at me with six, and blinked, and started to fall over on his punim again, and I started to wind up I’d give him such a zetz I’d kick him into a better life.

“We don’t accept violence,” he said.

“That’s a terrific saying,” I told him. “Meanwhile, I don’t accept an unobstructed view up your tuchis. So if you want I should go away and stop kicking you, so you can go root around in the dreck some more, what you’d better do is come up here a minute and talk to me.”

He kept looking. I wound up tighter. You could hear my sockets creaking. I’m not such a young one anymore. He got up.

“What do you want? I’m worshipping to Seymool.”

Seymool. That’s a name for a God. I wouldn’t even hire something called a Seymool.

“You’ll worship later. That buhbie isn’t going anywhere.”

“But Zsouchmuhn is.”

“Very correct. Which is the same reason I got to talk to you now. Time is a thing I got very little of, if you catch my meaning here.”

“Well, what is it you want, precisely?”

Oy, a Talmudic scholar, no less. Precisely. “Well, Mr. Precisely, I’ll tell you what it is precisely I want. You know where it is I can find a no-good snuffler called Kadak?”

He stared at me with six, then blinked rapidly, in sequence—two and four, three and five, one and six—then went back in reverse order. “You have a nauseating sense of humor. May Seymool forgive you.”

Then he fell back on his face, his legs up winding and unwinding, his nose deep in dreck. “I say Kadak, he says Seymool. I’ll give you a Seymool!”

I started to wind up for a kick would put that momzer in the next time-zone, when a voice stopped me. From over the side of that stinking Cathedral—and you can bet I was turning yellow from not breathing—a woman said, “Come outside. I’ll tell you about your friend Kadak.”

I turned to look, and there was this shikseh, all dolled up in such a pile of colored shmatehs and baubles and bangles and crap from the floor, I thought to myself, Gevalt! this turn I should never have crawled out of the burrow.

So anyhow I followed her outside, thank God, and let my nose extend to its full length and breathed such a deep one my cheek-sacs puffed up like I had a pair of bialies stuffed in. So now this bummerkeh, this floozie, this painted hussy says to me, “What do you want with Kadak?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ll get upwind from you, meaning no offense, lady, but you smell like your Church.” I rolled around her and got a little away, and when it was possible to breathe like a person, I said, “What I want is to go join my lust-mates on Kas—, on Bromios, but what I got to do, is I got to find Kadak. We need him for a very sacred religious service, you’ll excuse me for saying this, dear lady, but you being Gentile, you wouldn’t understand what it is.”

She batted four eyelids and flapped phony eyelashes on three of them. Oy, a nafkeh, a lady of easy virtue, a courtesan of the byways, a bummerkeh. “Would you contribute to a worthy charity to find this Kadak?”

I knew it. I knew somewhere on that damned looking for Kadak it would cost me a little something out of pocket. She was looking directly at my pouch. “You’ll take a couple of coins, is that right?”

“It isn’t exactly what I was thinking of,” she said, still looking at my pouch, and I suddenly realized with what I’ll tell you honestly was a chill, that she was cross-eyed in four of her front six. She was staring at my pupik. What? I’m trying to tell you, butterfly, that she wasn’t staring at my pouch which was hanging to the left side of my stomach. She was staring with that cockeye four at my cute little pupik. What? You’ll forgive me, Mr. Silent Butterfly With the Very Dumb Expression, I should know that butterflies don’t have pupiks? A navel. A belly-button. Now you understand what it is a pupik? What? Maybe I should get gross and explain to a butterfly that shtups flowers, that we have sex through our pupiks. The female puts her long middle finger of the bottom arm on the right side, straight into the pupik and goes moofky-foofky, and that’s how we shtup. You needed that, is that right? You needed to know how we do it. A filth you are, butterfly; a very dirty mind.

But not as dirty as that nafkeh, that saucy baggage, that whore of Babylon. “Listen,” I said, “meaning no offense, lady, but I’m not that kind of a person. I’m saving myself for my lust-mates. I’m sure you’ll understand. Besides, meaning no offense, I don’t shtup with strangers. It wouldn’t be such a good thing for you, either, believe me. Everybody says Evsise is a rotten shtup. I got very little feeling in my pupik, you wouldn’t like it, not even a little. Why don’t I give you a few nice coins, you could use them on Kasri—on Bromios. You could maybe set yourself up in business there, a pretty lady such as yourself.” God shouldn’t strike me down with a bolt of lightning in the tuchis for telling this filthy-mind cockeye heathen nafkeh what a cutie she is.

“You want to find this Kadak?” she asked, staring straight at two things at the same time.

“Please, lady,” I said. My nose started running.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Seymool is my God, I trust in Seymool.”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

“We are the last of the Faithful of the Church. We plan to stay on Zsouchmuhn when they Relocate it. Seymool has decreed it. I have no hope of living through it. I understand cataclysms are commonplace when they pull a planet out of orbit.”

“So run,” I said. “What kind of dummies are you?”

“We are the Faithful.”

It gave me pause. Even Gentiles, even nut cases like these worshippers of Shmoe-ool, whoever, even they got to believe. It was nice. In a very dumb way.

“So what has all that got to do in even the slightest way with me, lady?”

“I’m horny.”

“Well, why not go in your Cathedral there and shtup one of your playmates?”

“They’re worshipping.”

“To that statue that looks like a big bug picking its nose, with the dreck and crap and mud all over it?”

“Don’t speak disrespectfully of Seymool.”

“I’ll cut out my tongue.”

“That isn’t necessary, just stick out your navel.”

“Lady, you got a dirty mouth.”

“You want to know where Kadak is?”

I won’t tell what nasty indignities came next. It makes me very ashamed to even think about it. She had a dirty fingernail.

So I’ll tell you only that when she was done ravaging my pupik and left me lying there against a mud-wall of a building, the pink schmootz running down my stomach, I knew that Kadak had been as lousy an Apostate as he had been a Jew. One afternoon, just like in the synagogue years before, he ran amuck and started biting the statue of that bug-God they got. Before they could pry him off, he had bitten off the kneecap of Shmoogle. So they threw him out of the Church. This nafkeh knew what had happened to him, because he had used her services, you could brechh from such a thought, and he still owed her some coins. So she’d followed him around, trying to get him to pay, and she’d seen he’d bounced from religion to religion until they accepted him as a Slave of the Rock.

So I got up and went to a fountain and washed myself the best way I could, and said a couple of quick prayers that I wouldn’t get knocked up from that dirty finger, and I went looking for the Slaves of the Rock, still looking for that damned Kadak. I walked with an uneven roll, hop, unwind. You would, too, if you’d been ravished, butterfly.

Just a second you’d think on it, how would you feel if a flower grabbed you by the tuchis and stuck a pistil and stamen in your pupik? What? Oh, terrific. Butterflies don’t have pupiks.

Talking to you, standing here in sand, is not necessarily the most sensational thing I’ve ever done, you want to know.

The Slaves of the Rock were all gathered in a valley just outside the city limits of Houmitz. The Governors wouldn’t let them inside the city. Who can blame them. If you think those Apostates were pukers, you should only see the Rocks. Such cuties. It is to varf!

Big rocks they turned themselves into. With tongues like string, six or seven feet long, all rolled up inside. And when a krendl or a znigh or a buck-fly goes whizzing past, slurp! out comes that ugly tongue like a shot and snags it and wraps around and comes whipping back and smashes the bug all over the rock, and then the rock gets soft and spongy like a piece rotten fruit and absorbs all the dreck and crap and awfulness squished there. Oh, such terrifics, those Rocks. Just the kind of thing I would expect a Kadak to be when he couldn’t stand being himself no more. Thank you oh so very greatly, Reb Jeshaia for this looking mission.

So I found the head Rock and I stood there in that valley, all surrounded by Rocks going slurp! and squish! and sucking up bug food. This was not the best part of my life I’m telling you about.

“How do you do?”

I figured it was the most polite way to talk to a rock.

“How did you know I was the chief Slave?” the Rock said.

“You had the longest tongue.”

Slurp! A znigh on the wing, cruising by humming a tune, minding its own business, got it right in the punim, a tongue like a wet noodle, splat right in the punim, and a quick overhead twist and squish! all over the Rock. It splattered on me, gooey and altogether puke-making. Definitely not the kind of individual to have a terrific dinner out with. The guderim was all over me.

“Excuse the mess,” said the chief Slave. He really sounded sorry.

“Think nothing,” I said. “That was a very cute little overhand twist you gave it there at the last minute.”

He seemed flattered. “You noticed that, did you?”

“How could I help? Such a class move.”

“You know, you’re the first one who’s ever noticed that. There have been lots of studies made, by all kinds of foreigners, from other worlds, other galaxies, even, but never once did one of them notice that move. What did you say your name was?”

The bug ooze was dripping down my stomach. “My name is Evsise, and I’m looking for a person who used to be a person named Kadak. I was given to understand that he’d become a Rock a few years ago. I have a great need to find this Kadak rock, he should drop dead already such a rotten time he’s been making for me.”

“Listen,” said the chief Slave (as the remains of the znigh oozed down through the spongy surface), “I like you. Have you ever thought of converting?”

“Forget it.”

“No, really, I’m serious. To Worship the Rock is such an enriching experience, it really isn’t smart to dismiss it without giving it a try. What do you say?”

I figured I had to be a little smartsy then, just a little. “Say, I wish I could. You got no idea what a nice proposition that is you’re making to me. And in a quick second I’d take you up on it, but I got this one bissel tot of a problem.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

A psychiatrist rock, yet. I really needed this.

“I’m afraid from bugs,” I said.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “I see your point. Bugs are a very big part of our religion.”

“I can see that.”

“Ah, well. I’m sorry for you. But let’s see if I can help you. What did you say his name was?”

“Kadak.”

“Oh yeah, I remember now. What a creep.”

“That’s him.”

“Let me see now,” said the Rock. “If I recall correctly, we threw him out of the order for being a disruptive influence, oh, it must have been fifteen years ago. He used to make the ugliest noises I’ve ever heard out of a Rock.”

“Snuffling.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Snuffling is what he did. A terrible snort noise, all wet and cloggy, it could make you sick to be near it.”

“Yes, that was it.”

“So what happened to him, I’m afraid to ask.”

“He reconstituted his atoms and became just like you again.”

“Not like me, please.”

“Well, I mean the same species.”

“And he went off?”

“Yes. He said he was going to try the Fleshists.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“I’m sorry.”

I sat down. Settled my tuchis right down between my rims, drew up my legs, and dropped my head into a half dozen of my hands. I was very glum.

“Would you like to sit on me?” the Rock asked.

It was a nice offer. “Thanks,” I said politely, looking at the last slimy ooze of the znigh on the Rock, “but I’m too miserable to be comfortable.”

“What do you need him for?” he asked.

So I explained the best I could—this was, after all, to a rock, a piece of stone, even if it could talk—about the minyan of ten. The chief Slave asked me why ten.

So I said, “On the Earth, a long time ago… you know about the Earth, right? Right. Well, on the Earth, a long time ago, God was going to give a terrific zetz to a place called Sodom. What it was, this Sodom, was a whole city full of Fleshists. Not a nice place.”

“I can’t conceive of an entire city of Fleshists,” the rock Rock said. “That’s rather an ugly thought.”

“That’s the way God looked at it.”

We were both quiet for a while, thinking about that.

“So, anyhow,” I said, “Abraham, blessed be his name, who was this very holy Jew even if he wasn’t blue, you shouldn’t hold that against him—”

“—I won’t.”

“—uh. Yes. Right. Well, Abraham pleaded with God to save Sodom.”

“Why did he do that… a city full of Fleshists. Yechh.”

“How do I know? He was holy, that’s all. So God must have thought that was a little meshugge… a little crazy… also, you know God is no dummy… and he told Abraham he’d spare Sodom if Abraham could find fifty righteous men living there—”

“Just men? What about women?”

“There isn’t scripture on that one.”

“Sounds like your God is a sexist.”

“At least, you’ll pardon my frankness now, but at least he isn’t a thing that lies in a valley for birds to make ka-ka on.”

“That’s rather rude of you.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but it isn’t nice to call the one true God a rotten name.”

“I was only asking.”

“Well, it isn’t too classy for a rock to ask them kinds questions. Now do you want to hear this or don’t you?”

“Yes, sure. But—”

“But what!?”

“Why did this God haggle with this Abraham? Why didn’t he just tell him he was going to do it, and then do it?”

I was getting pretty upset, you know what I mean? “It was because Abraham was a mensch, a real terrific person, that’s why, okay?”

The rock didn’t answer. I guess he was sulking. So okay, let him sulk. “Then Abraham said, okay, what if I can only find forty righteous men? And God said, okay, let be forty. So Abraham said what if only thirty, and God said, nu, let be thirty already, and then Abraham said what if only twenty, and God started yelling all right stop nuhdzhing me, let be twenty…”

“Let me guess,” the rock said, “Abraham said ten, and your God got really mad and said ten was it, and no further, and that’s how you came up with ten men for the congregation.”

“You’ve heard it,” I said.

The rock was silent again.

Finally, he said, “Listen, I like your idea of religion. I’m not altogether happy being a Slave of the Rock, even if I am the chief Rock. How about if I converted and came back with you, and made the tenth for the minyan?”

I thought about that for a while. “Well,” I said slowly, “the Talmud does say, ‘Nine free men and a slave may be reckoned together for a quorum,’ but against that is quoted that Rabbi Eliezer went into a Synagogue and didn’t find ten there, so he freed his slave and with him completed the number, but if there had only been seven and he had freed two slaves, it wouldn’t have been kosher. But with one freed slave and the Rabbi it made ten. So, clearly, as all agree, eight freemen and two slaves would not answer the purpose. But, if you just put yourself in my place for a moment, you’re not, even remotely speaking, my slave. You’re the Slave of the Rock. And besides, it takes a long time to convert. Can you speak Hebrew? Even a little?”

“What’s Hebrew?”

“Forget it. How about keeping kosher?”

“What are they? I’ll keep them if it’s part of the program. After all, when you’ve been a Rock, eating bugs all your life, keeping some kind of pet doesn’t sound too difficult.”

It was hopeless. For a minute there I gave it a maybe, you know what I mean. But the more I thought about it, even if I could summon up the chutzpah to go back to Reb Jeshaia with a rock, not with a Kadak, it wouldn’t work. This Rock was a nice enough fellow, you know what I mean, but even as I sat there pondering, he shot out that ick tongue of his, and snared a buck-fly and whipped it in that move he thought was such a sensational thing, and splatted it all over the place, and started eating it. And clearly, very clearly, Genesis 9:4 forbade animal blood to all the seed of Noah, so how could I bring a Rock back and say, here, I freed this Slave of the Rock, and he’ll be the tenth man, and then right in the middle of Adonai, out would come that crummy tongue and eat a bug off the wall. Forget it.

“Listen,” I said, as gentle as I could, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, “it’s a strictly great offer you’ve made, and under other circumstances I’d take you up on that, you know what I’m saying? But right now I’m really pressed for time and it would take too long for you to learn Hebrew, so let’s let it sit for a while. I’ll get back to you.”

He wasn’t happy about that, I could tell. But he was a real mensch. He told me he understood, and he wished me good luck with the Fleshists, and he let me run away fast. I could see his point, though, and I was very sorry about his not being a possible. I mean, how would you like it to sit all day baking in the sun, with birds making pish in your face, and the best you got to look forward to is a juicy bug.

And if I’d known what I had coming, what tsuris, I’d have gladly only, happily yet, you can believe it, taken that Rock back with me, bug dreck and all. Believe me, there are worse things than a rock that eats bugs.

I’ll make a long story short. I followed the trail of that putz Kadak from the pit of the Fleshists (where I lost the use of my pupik, all my coin, the sight of one eye in the back, the second arm on the left side, and my yarmulkah), to the embarkation dock at the spaceport where the sect called the Denigrators were getting on board ships for that Bromios (where I got beat up so bad I crawled away), to the lava beds where the True Believers of Suffering were doing their last rites before leaving (where I suffered first degree miserable and such a pain you wouldn’t accept over half my poor body), to the Tabernacle of the Mouth (where some big deal prophet that was all teeth bit off the tip of one antenna, God knows why, maybe out of pique at being left behind), to the Caucus Race of the Malforms (where I fit right in, as crapped up and bloody as I was), to the Lair of the Blessed Profundity of the Unspeakable Trihll (which I could not, even if I had several mouths, pronounce… but they punched and kicked me anyhow, really sensational people), to the Archdruid of Nothingness, always following that miserable creep Kadak from religion to religion—and let me tell you, no one had a good word for that schmuck, not even the worst of those heathens—and it was there, kayn-ahora, that the Archdruid told me the last he’d seen of Kadak was ten years earlier, when he had changed him into a butterfly, and sent him out into the desert to hopefully drop dead in the heat.

Which is why, finally, I’m standing here talking to you, dumb creep butterfly. So now I’ve told it all, and you see what a puke condition I’m in, don’t for a minute think that Avram or those others will respect me for what I did, they’ll only nuhdz me about how long it took, and that’s why you got to come back with me.

Not a word. Not a sound through all this. Not a flap or a flitter or a how are you Evsise. Nothing.

Look. I’m not going to tummel with you, Mr. I-Can’t-Make-Up-My-Mind-What-Kind-of-Religion-I-Want-To-Be butterfly.

You think I stood here all this time, sinking in up to my rims in sand, just to tell you a cute story? I know you’re Kadak! And how do I know?

Go ahead, snuffle like that again and ask me how I know!

Come on. You’ll come either by yourself or I’ll drag you by your wings, you know for a butterfly you’re not even a nice-looking butterfly? You’re an ugly, is what you are. And as for being a Jew, only that by birth, such a disgrace to the entire blue Jews on Zsouchmuhn.

As you can see, I’m getting angry. You’ve gotten me raped, crapped on, burned, maimed, crippled, blinded, insulted, run around, exposed to heathens, robbed, sunburned, covered with bug shmootz, altogether miserable and unhappy, and I’ll tell you, very frankly, you’ll come with me, Mr. Kadak, or I’ll choke you dead right here in this farblondjet desert!

Now what do you say?

I thought that’s what you’d say.

“Here he is.”

Yankel didn’t believe it. Chaim laughed. Shmuel started to cry, his nose running green. Snodle coughed. And Reb Jeshaia hung his head. “I should have sent Avram,” he said.

Avram looked away. Like a dead leaf it should fall off.

“Here he is, is what I said, and here he is, is what it is,” I said. “This is your Kadak, may he rot in his cocoon.”

Then I told them the whole story.

At least they had the grace to be amazed.

“This is what makes the minyan?” Moishe said. “This?”

“Make him change back, and that’s him,” I said. “I wash my hands of it.” I went over in a corner of the shoul and settled down. It was their problem now.

For hours they went at him. They tried everything. They threatened him, they begged him, they implored him, they intimidated him, they cajoled him, they shmacheled him, they insulted him, they slugged him, they chased his tuchis all over the shoul….

Sure. Of course. Wouldn’t you know. That rotten Kadak wouldn’t change back. At last, he found a thing he wanted to be. A dumb creep butterfly.

With a snuffle. Still with a rotten snuffle. Did you ever know how much worse a butterfly snuffles than a person?

You could plotz from it.

And finally, when they couldn’t get him to change back—and if you want to know the truth, I don’t think he could change back after that weirdnik buhbie Archdruid changed him—they held him down and Reb Jeshaia made the rabbinical decision that his presence was enough, in this great emergency. So Meyer Kahaha sat on him, and we started to sit shivah, finally, for Zsouchmuhn and for Snodle.

And then Reb Jeshaia got a terrible look on his face and he said, “Oh my God!”

“What!? What what!?” I yelled. “What now, what?”

Very softly, Reb Jeshaia asked me, “Evsise, how long ago did the Archdruid say he changed Kadak into this thing?”

“Ten years ago,” I said, “but what—”

And I stopped. And I sat down again. And knew we had lost, and we would still be there when the gonifs came to rip the planet out of orbit, and we would die, along with the crazies in the Apostate Cathedral and the nafkeh, and the Rock and the Archdruid and everyone else who was too nuts to get safely away the way they were supposed to.

“What’s the matter?” asked Meyer Kahaha, the oysvorf “What’s wrong? Why does it matter he’s been a butterfly for ten years?”

“Only ten years,” said Shmuel.

“Not thirteen, schmuck, only ten,” said Yankel, sticking his pointing arm in Meyer Kahaha’s ninth eye.

We looked at Meyer Kahaha till the light dawned, even for him. “Oh my God,” he said, and rolled over on his side. The butterfly, that miserable Kadak, fluttered up and flew around the shoul. No one paid any attention to him. It had all been in vain.

Scripture says, very clearly there should be no mistake, that all ten of the participants of a minyan have to be over thirteen years old. At thirteen, for a Jew, a boy becomes a man. “Today I am a man,” it’s an old gag. Ha ha. Very funny. It’s the reason for the bar mitzvah. Thirteen. Not ten.

Kadak wasn’t old enough.

Still dead, still lying on his face, Snodle began weeping.

Reb Jeshaia and the other seven, the last blue Jews on Zsouchmuhn, now doomed to die without ever again gumming their lust-nest concubines, they all slumped into seats and waited for destruction.

I felt worse than them. I hurt in more places.

Then I looked up, and began to smile. I smiled so wide and so loud, everyone turned to look at me.

“He’s gone crazy,” said Chaim.

“It’s better that way,” said Shmuel. “He won’t feel the pain.”

“Poor Evsise,” said Yitzchak.

“Dummies!” I shouted, leaping up and rolling and hopping and unwinding like a tummeler. “Dummies! Dummies! Even you, Reb Jeshaia, you’re a dummy, we’re all dummies!”

“Is that a way to talk to a Rabbi?” said Reb Jeshaia.

“Sure it is,” I yowled, reeling and rocking, “sure it is, sure it is, sure it is, sure it is…”

Meyer Kahaha came and sat on me.

“Get off me, you schlemiel! I know how to save us, it’s been here all the time, we never needed that creep snuffle butterfly Kadak!”

So he got off me, and I looked at them with great pleasure because I was about to demonstrate that I was a folks-mensch of the first water, and I said, “Under a ruling in Tractate Berakhot, nine Jews and the holy ark of the law containing the Torah may, together, hey nu, nu, do you get what I’m saying, may together be considered for congregational worship!”

And Reb Jeshaia kissed me.

“Evsise, Evsise, how did you remember such a thing? You’re not a Talmudic scholar, how did you remember such a wonderful thing?” Reb Jeshaia hugged and kissed and babbled in my face at me.

“I didn’t,” I said, “Kadak did.”

And they all looked up, as I’d looked up, and there was that not-such-an-altogether-worthless-after-all Kadak, sitting up on top of the Holy Ark, the Aronha-Kodesh, the sacred cabinet holding the sacred scrolls of the Lord. Sitting up there, a butterfly, always to remain a butterfly, sitting and beating his wings frantically, trying to let someone know what he knew, something even a Rabbi had forgotten.

And when he came down to perch on Reb Jeshaia’s shoulder, we all sat down and rested for a minute, and then Reb Jeshaia said, “Now we will sit shivah. Nine men, the Holy Ark and one butterfly make a minyan.”

And for the last time on Zsouchmuhn, which means look for me, we said the holy words, this last time for the home we had had, the home we would leave. And all through the prayers, there sat Kadak, flapping his dumb wings.

And you want to know a thing? Even that was a mechaieh, which means a terrific pleasure.

Ellison’s Grammatical Guide and Glossary for Goyim

Adonai—The sacred title of God. Pronounced ah-doe-NOY.

averah—Loosely, an unethical or undesirable act.

bar mitzvah—The ceremony, as in many cultures, of the beginning of puberty; held in a temple, it is the ceremony in which a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy reaches the status and assumes the duties of a “man.”

bialy(ies)—A flat breakfast roll, shaped like a round wading pool, sometimes sprinkled with onion.

bissel—A little bit.

brechh—A sound you make when varfing.

bris(es)—The circumcision ceremony.

buhbie—Usually an affectionate term of endearment, although occasionally it is used sardonically.

bummerkeh—A female bum, a loose lady. A nafkeh.

chutzpah—Gall, brazen nerve, audacity, presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.

dreck—Shit, dung, garbage, trash, excrement, crap.

Evsise—A native of Theta 996:VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici. (See illustration.)

farblondjet—Lost (but really lost), mixed-up, wandering around with no idea where you are.

farchachdah—Dizzy, confused, dopey, punchy.

feh!—An exclamatory expression of disgust.

folks-mensh—This has many meanings. In the story it is intended to convey the meaning of a person who is interested in Jewish life, values, experience, and wants to carry on the tradition,

galus—An exile.

Gentile—The goyim. Non-Jews.

gevalt!—A cry of fear, astonishment, amazement.

glitch—A shady, not kosher or reputable affair.

goldeneh medina—Literally, “golden country”; originally, it meant America to Jews fleeing the European pogroms; a land of freedom, justice, and rare opportunity. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

gonif(s)—A thief, a crook; sometimes said with affection

goniffed—to mean a clever person; a dishonest businessman; the act of stealing, as in swiping Zsouchmuhn out of its orbit,

guderim—My mother used to say, “That kid is eating out my guderim from aggravation,” which leads me to believe the word means, literally, heart, guts, liver-and-lights, stomach, everything in the middle of your body. Pronounced: guh-DARE-im.

Kaddish—A prayer glorifying God’s name. The most solemn and one of the most ancient of all Jewish prayers; the mourner’s prayer.

kayn-ahora—The phrase uttered to show that one’s praises are genuine and not contaminated by envy.

kike—A word you won’t find in this story.

kosher—As a Hebrew-Yiddish word it means only one thing: fit to eat, because ritually clean according to the dietary laws. As American slang it means authentic, the real McCoy, trustworthy, reliable, on the up-and-up, legal.

krenk—An illness. Also used to mean “nothing” in a sentence like, “He asked me for a loan of fifty bucks; a krenk I’ll give him!”

mechaieh—Pleasure, great enjoyment, a real joy. Pronounced: m’-KHY-eh, if you roll the kh like a Scotsman.

mensch—Someone of consequence, someone to emulate and admire; a terrific human being; I always pictured a mensch as someone who knew exactly how much to tip.

meshiginah, meshugge, mishegoss—Crazy, nuts, wildly extravagant, absurd. There are spellings for male and female, but I’ve written it the way it sounded when my mother called me it. Meshugge is to be a meshiginah and mishegoss is the crazy stuff a meshiginah is doing.

minyan—Quorum. The ten male Jews required for a religious service. Solitary prayer is laudable, but a minyan possesses special merit, for God’s Presence is said to dwell among them.

momzer—A bastard, an untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person.

naches—Proud pleasure, special joy, pride-plus-pleasure.

nafkeh—Also nafka. A prostitute.

nu(?)(!)—A remarkably versatile interjection, interrogation, expletive; like, “So?”

nuhdz, nuhdzhing—To bore, to pester, to nag, to be bugged to eat your asparagus, to wake up and take her home, etc.

oysvorf—A scoundrel, a bum, an outcast, an ingrate.

pisher—A young, inexperienced person, a “young squirt,” an inconsequential person, a “nobody.”

plotz—To split, to burst, to explode; to be outraged; to be aggravated beyond bearing.

punim—Face.

pupik—Navel. Belly-button.

putz—Literally, vulgar slang for “penis” but in usage a term of contempt for an ass, a jerk, a fool, a simpleton or yokel. It is much stronger than schmuck and shouldn’t be used unless you know some crippling Oriental martial art-form.

Reb—Rabbi.

schlemiel—A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a clumsy, gauche, butterfingered person; a social misfit; this term is more pitying than schlimazel and more affectionate by far than schmuck.

schlimazel—Same as above, but different in tone. A schlimazel believes in luck, but never has any. The terms are often interchangeable, by people who don’t perceive the subtle differences.

schmuck—Literally, a penis, but in common usage, a dope, a jerk, a boob; or, a son of a bitch.

Shabbes—The Sabbath.

Shema—The first word of the most common of Hebrew prayers: “Shema Yisrael,” Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One!

shikker—A drunk or, as an adjective, drunkenness.

shikseh—A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

shivah—The seven solemn days of mourning for the dead.

shmachel—To flatter, to fawn, to butter up, usually to outfox someone to get them to do what you want.

shmatehs—A rag, literally. But in common usage to mean a cheap, shoddy, junky dress.

shmootz—Dirt.

shoul—Synagogue.

shpilkess—As my mother used it, to mean aggravation, an unsettlement of self, jumping stomach. But I’ve been advised it really means “ants in the pants.”

Shtumie—Another word like schlemiel, but more offhand, less significant; the word you use to bat away a gnat.

shtup—To have sexual intercourse.

shtupping—See shtup.

tallis—Prayer shawl, used by males at prayer at religious services.

Talmud—A massive and monumental compendium of sixty-three books: the learned debates, dialogues, conclusions, commentaries, etc., of the scholars who, for over a thousand years, interpreted the Torah, the first five books in the Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses. The Talmud is not the Bible, it is not the Old Testament. It is not meant to be read, but to be studied.

t’fillin—Phylacteries worn during morning prayers by Orthodox males past the age of bar mitzvah.

Tisha B’ab—“The blackest day in the Jewish calendar.” Usually falls during August, climaxing nine days of mourning during which meat is not eaten and marriages are not performed. Commemorates both the First (586 B.C.) and Second (A.D. 70) destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. A deadly day of sorrow.

tsuris—Troubles.

tuchis—The backside, the buttocks, your ass.

tummel—Noise, commotion, noisy disorder.

tummeler—One who creates a lot of noise but accomplishes little; a fun-maker, a live wire, a clown, the “life of the party.” You know when Jerry Lewis does a talk show and he starts eating the draperies and screaming and running so much you change the channel? He’s tummeling.

varf—To puke. Brechh.

yarmulkah—The skullcap worn by observing Jewish males.

yeshiva—A rabbinical college or seminary.

yorzeit—The anniversary of someone’s death, on which candles are lit and an annual prayer is said.

zetz—A strong blow or punch.

Zsouchmoid—A native of Theta 996:VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici, like Evsise. (See illustration.)

(NOTE: The author wishes to give credit where due. The Yiddish words are mine, they come out of my childhood and my heritage, but the definitions were compiled with the aid of Leo Rosten’s marvelous and utterly indispensable sourcebook, The Joys of Yiddish, published by McGraw-Hill, which I urge you to rush out and buy, simply as good reading.)

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Jack Dann has written and edited over sixty books, including Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction; More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction (Jewish Lights); and the international bestselling novel about Leonardo da Vinci, The Memory Cathedral. Already translated into ten languages, The Memory Cathedral won Australia’s Aurealis Award and a selection won the coveted Nebula Award. He lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York. Visit his website at www.jackdann.com.

Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

“On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” by William Tenn. Copyright © 1974 by William Tenn.

“The Golem” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Unto the Fourth Generation” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright © 1959 by Mercury Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles” by Carol Carr. Copyright © 1969 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Goslin Day” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1970 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1974 by Robert Silverberg.

“Trouble With Water” by Horace L. Gold. Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Gather Blue Roses” by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.

“The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Idiots First by Bernard Malamud, copyright © 1963 by Bernard Malamud.

“Paradise Last” by Geo. Alec Effinger. Copyright © 1974 by Geo. Alec Effinger.

“Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay” by Robert Sheckley. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Sheckley. From Galaxy Magazine, reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

“Jachid and Jechidah” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright © 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“I’m Looking for Kadak” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1974 by Harlan Ellison.

Wandering Stars:

An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction

2013 First Digital Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address/fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to permissions@jewishlights.com.

Copyright © 1974 by Jack Dann

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wandering stars: an anthology of Jewish fantasy & science fiction / edited by Jack Dann; with an introduction by Isaac Asimov.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Contents: On Venus, have we got a rabbi / William Tenn—The golem / Avram Davidson—Unto the fourth generation / Isaac Asimov—Look, you think you’ve got troubles / Carol Carr—Goslin Day / Avram Davidson— The dybbuk of mazel tov IV / Robert Silverberg—Trouble with water / Horace L. Gold—Gather blue roses / Pamela Sargent—The jewbird / Bernard Malamud—Paradise last / Geo. Alec Effinger—Street of dreams, feet of clay / Robert Sheckley—Jachid and Jechidah / Isaac Bashevis Singer—I’m looking for Kadak / Harlan Ellison

1. Fantastic fiction, American—Jewish authors. 2. Science fiction,

American—Jewish authors. 3. Jews—Fiction. I. Dann, Jack.

PS648.F3W36 1998

813’.0876088924—dc21

98-10588 CIP

ISBN 13: 978-1-58023-005-6 (quality pbk.)

ISBN-10: 1-58023-005-9 (quality pbk.)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

“On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” by William Tenn. Copyright © 1974 by William Tenn.

“The Golem” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Unto the Fourth Generation” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright © 1959 by Mercury Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles” by Carol Carr. Copyright © 1969 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Goslin Day” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1970 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1974 by Robert Silverberg.

“Trouble With Water” by Horace L. Gold. Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Gather Blue Roses” by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.

“The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Idiots First by Bernard Malamud, copyright © 1963 by Bernard Malamud.

“Paradise Last” by Geo. Alec Effinger. Copyright © 1974 by Geo. Alec Effinger.

“Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay” by Robert Sheckley. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Sheckley. From Galaxy Magazine, reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

“Jachid and Jechidah” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright © 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“I’m Looking for Kadak” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1974 by Harlan Ellison.

Cover art: Genesis: Fourth Day (© 1996) was created by Michael Bogdanow, an artist, lawyer, and musician living with his wife and children in Lexington, Massachusetts. Genesis: Fourth Day is part of his “Visions of Torah” series of contemporary, spiritual works of art based on Torah and other Judaic texts.

Cover design: Maria O’DonNell

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