The Midas Plague

He shrugged deprecatingly. “Just the first stanza,” he said. “I don’t know if you got much out of it.” “Well, no,” Morey admitted. “Second stanza,” Bigelow said firmly:

Hegal saw it, saw it clear;
Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:
O’er his shoulder saw it plain,
Turned it upside down again:
Yang
And Yin.

There was an expectant pause. Morey said, “I—uh—” “Wraps it all up, doesn’t it?” Bigelow’s wife demanded. “Oh, if only others could see it as clearly as you do! The robot peril and the robot savior. Starvation and surfeit. Always twoness, always!”

Bigelow patted Morey’s shoulder. “The next stanza makes it even clearer,” he said. “It’s really very clever—I shouldn’t say it, of course, but it’s Howland’s as much as it’s mine. He helped me with the verses.” Morey darted a glance at Howland, but Howland was carefully looking away. “Third stanza,” said Bigelow. “This is a hard one, because it’s long, so pay attention.”

Justice, tip your sightless scales; One pan rises, one pan fails.

“Howland,” he interrupted himself, “are you sure about that rhyme? I always trip over it. Well, anyway:

Add to A and B grows less;
A’s B’s partner, nonetheless.
Next, the Twoness that there be
In even electricity.
Chart the current as it’s found:
Sine the hot lead, line the ground.
The wild sine dances, soars and falls,
But only to figures the zero calls.
Sine wave, scales, all things that be
Share a reciprocity.
Male and female, light and dark:
Name the numbers of Noah’s Ark!
Yang
And Yin!

“Dearest!” shrieked Bigelow’s wife. “You’ve never done it better!” There was a spatter of applause, and Morey realized for the first time that half the bar had stopped its noisy revel to listen to them. Bigelow was evidently quite a well-known figure here.

Morey said weakly, “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

He turned hesitantly to Howland, who promptly said, “Drink! What we all need right now is a drink.”

They had a drink on Bigelow’s book.

Morey got Howland aside and asked him, “Look, level with me. Are these people nuts?”

Howland showed pique. “No. Certainly not.”

“Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole business of twoness mean anything?”

Howland shrugged. “If it means something to them, it means something. They’re philosophers, Morey. They see deep into things. You don’t know what a privilege it is for me to be allowed to associate with them.”

They had another drink. On Howland’s book, of course.

Morey eased Walter Bigelow over to a quiet spot. He said, “Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what’s this about the robots?”

Bigelow looked at him round-eyed. “Didn’t you understand the poem?”

“Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms so I can tell my wife.”

Bigelow beamed. “It’s about the dichotomy of robots,” he explained. “Like the Utile salt mill that the boy wished for: it ground out salt and ground out salt and ground out salt. He had to have salt, but not that much salt. Whitehead explains it clearly—”

They had another drink on Bigelow’s book.

Morey wavered over to Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily, “Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanaquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen.”

She grinned smugly at him. “Brown hair,” she said dreamily.

Morey shook his head vigorously. “Never mind hair,” he ordered. “Never mind poem. Listen. In pre-cise and el-e-men-ta-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the world today.”

“Not enough brown hair,” she said promptly.

“Never mind hair!”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “Too many robots. Too many robots make too much of everything.”

“Ha! Got it!” Morey exclaimed triumphantly. “Get rid of robots!”

“Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn’t eat. Everything is mechanized. Can’t get rid of them, can’t slow down production—slowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all these—”

“No!” Morey said violently. “What should we do?”

“Do? I’ll tell you what we should do, if that’s what you want. I can tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

“What we should do is—” Tanaquil hiccupped with a look of refined consternation—“have another drink.”

They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her.

Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really worked at it.

He paid the price, too. For some little time before his limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there…

It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole morning’s hangover to the effort. It was important to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn’t even remember what the reason was; and finally he dismissed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow’s remarkable figure was natural.

He did, however, know that the next morning he had waked in his own bed, with no recollection of getting there. No recollection of anything much, at least not of anything that fit into the proper chronological order or seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink when he and Howland, arms around each other’s shoulders, composed a new verse on twoness and, plagiarizing an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous bar-room:

A twoness on the scene much later
Rests in your refrigerator.