Constant was rapt, imagining that the fountain was running. The fountain was very much like an hallucination – and hallucinations, usually drug-induced, were almost all that could surprise and entertain Constant any more.
Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.
Somewhere on the estate a mastiff bayed. The baying sounded like the blows of a maul on a great bronze gong.
Constant awoke from his contemplation of the fountain. The baying could only be that of Kazak, the hound of space. Kazak had materialized. Kazak smelled the blood of a parvenu.
Constant sprinted the remainder of the distance to the house.
An ancient butler in knee breeches opened the door for Malachi Constant of Hollywood. The butler was weeping for joy. He was pointing into a room that Constant could not see. The butler was trying to describe the thing that made him so happy and full of tears. He could not speak. His jaw was palsied, and all he could say to Constant was, “Putt putt – putt putt putt.”
The floor of the foyer was a mosaic, showing the signs of the zodiac encircling a golden sun.
Winston Niles Rumfoord, who had materialized only a minute before, came into the foyer and stood on the sun. He was much taller and heavier than Malachi Constant – and he was the first person who had ever made Constant think that there might actually be a person superior to himself. Winston Niles Rumfoord extended his soft hand, greeted Constant familiarly, almost singing his greeting in a glottal Groton tenor.
“Delighted, delighted, delighted, Mr. Constant,” said Rumfoord. “How nice of you to commmmmmmmme.”
“My pleasure,” said Constant.
“They tell me you are possibly the luckiest man who ever lived.”
“That might be putting it a little too strong,” said Constant.
“You won’t deny you’ve had fantastically good luck financially,” said Rumfoord.
Constant shook his head. “No. That would be hard to deny,” he said.
“And to what do you attribute this wonderful luck of yours?” said Rumfoord.
Constant shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “I guess somebody up there likes me,” he said.
Rumfoord looked up at the ceiling. “What a charming concept – someone’s liking you up there.”
Constant, who had been shaking hands with Rumfoord during the conversation, thought of his own hand, suddenly, as small and clawlike.
Rumfoord’s palm was callused, but not horny like the palm of a man doomed to a single trade for all of his days. The calluses were perfectly even, made by the thousand happy labors of an active leisure class.
For a moment, Constant forgot that the man whose hand he shook was simply one aspect, one node of a wave phenomenon extending all the way from the Sun to Betelguese. The handshake reminded Constant what it was that he was touching – for his hand tingled with a small but unmistakable electrical flow.
Constant had not been bullied into feeling inferior by the tone of Mrs. Rumfoord’s invitation to the materialization. Constant was a male and Mrs. Rumfoord was a female, and Constant imagined that he had the means of demonstrating, if given the opportunity, his unquestionable superiority.
Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again – morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically. Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dis. mantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.
Constant, who had offered his services to God as a messenger, now panicked before the very moderate greatness of Rumfoord. Constant ransacked his memory for past proofs of his own greatness. He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold. Constant found his memory stuffed with rumpled, overexposed snapshots of all the women he had had, with preposterous credentials testifying to his ownership of even more preposterous enterprises, with testimonials that attributed to him virtues and strengths that only three billion dollars could have. There was even a silver medal with a red ribbon – awarded to Constant for placing second in the hop, skip, and jump in an intramural track meet at the University of Virginia.
Rumfoord’s smile went on and on.
To follow the analogy of the thief who is going through another man’s billfold: Constant ripped open the seams of his memory, hoping to find a secret compartment with something of value in it. There was no secret compartment – nothing of value. All that remained to Constant were the husks of his memory – unstitched, flaccid flaps.
The ancient butler looked adoringly at Rumfoord, went through the cringing contortions of an ugly old woman posing for a painting of the Madonna. “The mah-stuh – ” he bleated. “The young mah-stuh.”
“I can read your mind, you know,” said Rumfoord.
“Can you?” said Constant humbly.
“Easiest thing in the world,” said Rumford. His eyes twinkled. “You’re not a bad sort, you know – ” he said, “particularly when you forget who you are.” He touched Constant lightly on the arm. It was a politician’s gesture – a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone.
“If it’s really so important to you, at this stage of our relationship, to feel superior to me in some way,” he said to Constant pleasantly, “think of this: You can reproduce and I cannot.”
He now turned his broad back to Constant, led the way through a series of very grand chambers.
He paused in one, insisted that Constant admire a huge oil painting of a little girl holding the reins of a pure white pony. The little girl wore a white bonnet, a white, starched dress, white gloves, white socks, and white shoes.
She was the cleanest, most frozen little girl that Malachi Constant had ever seen. There was a strange expression on her face, and Constant decided that she was worried about getting the least bit dirty.
“Nice picture,” said Constant.
“Wouldn’t it be too bad if she fell into a mud puddle?” said Rumfoord.
Constant smiled uncertainly.
“My wife as a child,” said Rumfoord abruptly, and he led the way out of the room.
He led the way down a back corridot and into a tiny room hardly larger than a big broom closet: It was ten feet long, six feet wide, and had a ceiling, like the rest of the rooms in the mansion, twenty feet high. The room was like a chimney. There were two wing chairs in it.
“An architectural accident – ” said Rumfoord, closing the door and looking up at the ceiling.
“Pardon me?” said Constant.
“This room,” said Rumfoord. With a limp right hand, he made the magical sign for spiral staircase. “It was one of the few things in life I ever really wanted with all my heart when I was a boy – this little room.”
He nodded at shelves that ran six feet up the window wall. The shelves were beautifully made. Over the shelves was a driftwood plank that had written on it in blue paint: SKIP’S MUSEUM.
Skip’s Museum was a museum of mortal remains – of endoskeletons and exoskeletons – of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chiton – of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone. Most of the specimens were those that a child – presumably Skip – could find easily on the beaches and in the woods of Newport. Some were obviously expensive presents to a child extraordinarily interested in the science of biology.
Chief among these presents was the complete skeleton of an adult human male.
There was also the empty suit of armor of an armadillo, a stuffed dodo, and the long spiral tusk of a narwhal, playfully labeled by Skip, Unicorn Horn.
“Who is Skip?” said Constant.
“I am Skip,” said Rumfoord. “Was.”
“I didn’t know,” said Constant.
“Just in the family, of course,” said Rumfoord.
“Um,” said Constant.
Rumfoord sat down in one of the wing chairs, motioned Constant to the other.
“Angels can’t either, you know,” said Rumfoord.
“Can’t what?” said Constant.
“Reproduce,” said Rumfoord. He offered Constant a cigarette, took one himself, and placed it in a long, bone cigarette holder. “I’m sorry my wife was too indisposed to come downstairs – to meet you,” he said. “It isn’t you she’s avoiding – it’s me.”
“You?” said Constant.
“That’s correct,” said Rumfoord. “She hasn’t seen me since my first materialization.” He chuckled ruefully. “Once was enough.”
“I – I’m sorry,” said Constant. “I don’t understand.”
“She didn’t like my fortunetelling,” said Rumfoord. “She found it very upsetting, what little I told her about her future. She doesn’t care to hear more.” He sat back in his wing chair, inhaled deeply. “I tell you, Mr. Constant,” he said genially, “it’s a thankless job, telling people it’s a hard, hard Universe they’re in.”
“She said you’d told her to invite me,” said Constant
“She got the message from the butler,” said Rumfoord. “I dared her to invite you, or she wouldn’t have done it. You might keep that in mind: the only way to get her to do anything is to tell her she hasn’t got the courage to do it. Of course, it isn’t an infallible technique. I could send her a message now, telling her that she doesn’t have the courage to face the future, and she would send me back a message saying I was right.”