I wanted distraction from the sweat that streamed down my face.
'Professor,' I said, 'do you remember the last word in Miss Phoebe's letter? It was 'forever.' Do you suppose …?'
'Immortality? Yes; I think that is well within the range of misapplied F.E. Of course complete mastery of F.E. ensures that no such selfish power would be invoked. The beauty of F.E. is its conservatism, in the kinetic sense. It is self-regulating. A world in which universal mastery of F.E. has been achieved—and I now perceive that the publication of my views by the Hopedale Press was if anything a step away from that ideal—would be in no outward wise different from the present world.'
'Built-in escape clause,' I snapped. 'Like yoga. You ask 'em to prove they've achieved self-mastery, just a little demonstration like levitating or turning transparent but they're all ready for you. They tell you they've achieved so much self-mastery they've mastered the desire to levitate or turn transparent. I almost wish I'd read your book, professor, instead of just editing it. Maybe you're smarter than I thought.'
He turned brick-red and gritted out: 'Your insults merely bore me, Norris.'
The highway took a turn and we turned with it. I braked again and rubbed my eyes. 'Do you see them?' I asked the professor.
'Yes,' he said matter-of-factly. 'This must be the retinue of the Duchess of Carbondale.'
They were a dozen men shoulder to shoulder barricading the road.
They were armed with miscellaneous sporting rifles and one bazooka.
They wore kilt-like garments and what seemed to be bracelets from a five-and-ten. When we stopped they opened up the center of the line and the Duchess of Carbondale drove through in her chariot—only the chariot was a harness-racing sulky and she didn't drive it; the horse was led by a skinny teen-age girl got up as Charmian for a high-school production of Antony and Cleopatra. The Duchess herself wore ample white robes, a tiara and junk jewelry. She looked like your unfavorite aunt, the fat one, or a grade-school teacher you remember with loathing when you're forty, or one of those women who ring your doorbell and try to bully you into signing petitions against fluoridation or atheism in the public schools.
The bazooka man had his stovepipe trained on our hood. His finger was on the button and he was waiting for the Duchess to nod. 'Get out,' I told the professor, grabbing my briefcase. He looked at the bazooka and we got out.
'Hail, O mortals,' said the Duchess.
I looked helplessly at the professor. Not even my extensive experience with lady novelists had equipped me to deal with the situation. He, however, was able to take the ball. He was a European and he had status and that's the starting point for them: establish status and then conduct yourself accordingly. He said: 'Madame, my name is Konrad Leuten. I am a doctor of philosophy of the University of Gottingen and a member of the faculty of the University of Basle. Whom have I the honor to address?'
Her eyes narrowed appraisingly. 'O mortal,' she said, and her voice was less windily dramatic, 'know ye that here in the New Lemuria worldly titles are as naught. And know ye not that the pure hearts of my subjects may not be sullied by base machinery?'
'I didn't know, madame,' Leuten said politely. 'I apologize. We intended, however, to go only as far as La Plume. May we have your permission to do so?'
At the mention of La Plume she went poker-faced. After a moment she waved at the bazooka man. 'Destroy, O Phraxanartes, the base machine of the strangers,' she said. Phraxanartes touched the button of his stovepipe. Leuten and I jumped for the ditch, my hand welded to the briefcase-handle, when the rocket whooshed into the poor old Ford's motor. We huddled there while the gas tank boomed and cans and bottles exploded. The noise subsided to a crackling roar and the whizzing fragments stopped coming our way after maybe a minute. I put my head up first. The Duchess and her retinue were gone, presumably melted into the roadside stand of trees.
Her windy contralto blasted out: 'Arise, O strangers, and join us.'
Leuten said from the ditch: 'A perfectly reasonable request, Norris. Let us do so. After all, one must be obliging.'
'And gracious,' I added.
Good old Duchess! I thought. Good old Leuten! Wonderful old world, with hills and trees and bunnies and kitties and considerate people …
Leuten was standing on one foot, thumbing his nose, sticking out his tongue, screaming: 'Norris! Norris! Defend yourself!' He was slapping my face with his free hand. Sluggishly I went into the posture of defense, thinking: Such nonsense. Defense against what? But I wouldn't hurt old Leuten's feelings for the world—
Adrenalin boiled through my veins, triggered by the posture. Spiders.
Crawling hairy, horrid spiders with purple, venom-dripping fangs. They hid in your shoes and bit you and your feet swelled with the poison.
Their sticky, loathsome webs brushed across your face when you walked in the dark and they came scuttling silently, champing their jaws, winking their evil gem-like eyes. Spiders!
The voice of the duchess blared impatiently: 'I said, join us, O
strangers. Well, what are you waiting for?'
The professor and I relaxed and looked at each other. 'She's mad,' the professor said softly. 'From an asylum.'
'I doubt it. You don't know America very well. Maybe you lock them up when they get like that in Europe; over here we elect them chairlady of the Library Fund Drive. If we don't, we never hear the end of it.'
The costumed girl was leading the Duchess's sulky onto the road again.
Some of her retinue were beginning to follow; she waved them back and dismissed the girl curtly. We skirted the heat of the burning car and approached her. It was that or try to outrun a volley from the miscellaneous sporting rifles.
'O strangers,' she said, 'you mentioned La Plume. Do you happen to be acquainted with my dear friend Phoebe Bancroft?'
The professor nodded before I could stop him. But almost simultaneously with his nod I was dragging the Duchess from her improvised chariot. It was very unpleasant, but I put my hands around her throat and knelt on her. It meant letting go of the briefcase but it was worth it.
She guggled and floundered and managed to whoop: 'Don't shoot! I take it back, don't shoot them. Pamphilius, don't shoot, you might hit me!'
'Send 'em away,' I told her.
'Never!' she blared. 'They are my loyal retainers.'
'You try, professor,' I said.
I believe what he put on then was his classroom manner. He stiffened and swelled and rasped towards the shrubbery: 'Come out at once. All of you.'
They came out, shambling and puzzled. They realized that something was very wrong. There was the Duchess on the ground and she wasn't telling them what to do the way she'd been telling them for weeks now.
They wanted to oblige her in any little way they could, like shooting strangers, or scrounging canned food for her, but how could they oblige her while she lay there slowly turning purple? It was very confusing.
Luckily there was somebody else to oblige, the professor.
'Go away,' he barked at them. 'Go far away. We do not need you any more. And throw away your guns.'
Well, that was something a body could understand. They smiled and threw away their guns and went away in their obliging and considerate fashion.
I eased up on the Duchess's throat. 'What was that guff about the New Lemuria?' I asked her.
'You're a rude and ignorant young man,' she snapped. From the corner of my eye I could see the professor involuntarily nodding agreement.
'Every educated person knows that the lost wisdom of Lemuria was to be revived in the person of a beautiful priestess this year. According to the science of pyramidology—'
Beautiful priestess? Oh.
The professor and I stood by while she spouted an amazing compost of lost-continentism, the Ten Tribes, anti- fluoridation, vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, organic farming, astrology, flying saucers, and the prose-poems of Khalil Gibran.
