The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Along came the fish and another object immediately behind it. Both went into the croaker’s mouth, the fish sliding down the gullet easily, the large object sticking for a moment before a convulsive swallow drew it in.

For five years, the watertight bamboo jar containing Frigate’s letter to Rohrig had been carried downstream. Considering the vast numbers of fishers and voyagers, it should have been picked up and opened long before. However, it was ignored by all creatures except for the fish whose primary object had been the delectable rotting chub.

Five days before the container came to journey’s end, it had drifted past the area in which its intended recipient lived. But Rohrig was in a hut, surrounded by the stone and wood sculptures he fashioned for trade in booze and cigarettes, snoring off the effects of a big party.

Perhaps it was just coincidence, perhaps some psychic principle was responsible, a vibratory link between the addresser and the addressee. Whatever the cause, Rohrig was dreaming of Frigate that early morning. He was back in 1950 when he had been a graduate student supported by the G.I. Bill and a working wife.

It was a warm, late-May day (Mayday! Mayday!). He was sitting in a small room, facing three Ph.D.s. This was the day of reckoning. After five years of labor and stress in the halls of learning he would gain or lose the prize, a Master of Arts in English literature. If he passed his oral defense of his thesis, he would go out into the world as a teacher of high-school English. If he failed, he would have to study for six months and then try for a second and final chance.

Now the three inquisitors, though smiling, were shooting ques­tions at him as if they were arrows and he was the target-which was the case. Rohrig was not nervous since his thesis was on medieval Welsh poetry, a subject he’d chosen because he believed that the professors knew very little about it.

He was right. But Ella Rutherford, a charming lady of forty-six, though prematurely white haired, had it in for him. Some time ago they’d been lovers, meeting, twice a week in her apartment. Then one afternoon they had gotten into a furious drunken argument about the merits of Byron as a poet. Rohrig wasn’t crazy about his verse, but he admired Byron’s lifestyle, which he considered to be true poetry. Anyway, he liked to take the opposite side of an argument.

As a result, he had stormed out of the apartment after saying some very cruel things to her. He had also shouted at her that he never wanted to see her in private again.

Rutherford believed that he had seduced her just to get a high grade in her course, that he was using the argument as an excuse to quit making love to a middle-aged woman. She was wrong. He was compulsively attracted to older women. However, he was finding her demands too great a strain. He could no longer satisfy her, his wife, two female sophomores, two of his friends’ wives, a female bartender who gave him free drinks, and the superintendent of the apartment building in which he lived.

Five, he could handle; eight, no. He was being drained of time, energy, and semen, and he was falling asleep in class. Thus, he had craftily started violent arguments with his professor, one of the sophomores (it was rumored that she had the clap), and the wife of a friend (she was too emotionally demanding, anyway).

Now, Rutherford, her watery blue eyes narrowed, said, “You’ve done very well in your defense, Mister Rohrig. So far.”

She paused. He felt suddenly chilled. His anus tightened. Sweat poured down his face and from his armpits. He had visions of her sitting up late nights thinking of some way to get him, some horrible, peculiarly humiliating way.

Doctors Durham and Pur quit drumming their fingers. This was getting interesting. Their colleague was burning bright, like the eyes of a tiger about to spring on a tethered lamb. Lightning was going to strike, and the unfortunate candidate was without a ground­ing rod, unless it was up his ass.