V.

STEN: Stencil reached his majority three years after old Stencil died. Part of the estate that came to him then was a number of manuscript books bound in half-calf and warped by the humid air of many European cities. His journals, his unofficial log of an agent's career. Under 'Florence, April, 1899' is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: 'There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report.'   MARG: A woman.   STEN: Another woman.   MARG: It is she you are pursuing? Seeking?   STEN: You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother. The question is ridiculous.   Since 1945, Herbert Stencil had been on a conscious campaign to do without sleep. Before 1945 he had been slothful, accepting sleep as one of life's major blessings. He'd spent the time between wars footloose, the source of his income then, as now, uncertain. Sidney hadn't left much in the way of pounds and shillings, but had generated good will in nearly every city in the western world among those of his own generation. This being a generation which still believed in The Family, it meant a good lookout for young Herbert. He didn't freeload all the time: he'd worked as croupier in southern France, plantation foreman in East Africa, bordello manager in Greece; and in a number of civil service positions back home. Stud poker could be depended on to fill in the low places - though an occasional mountain or two had also been leveled.   In that interregnum between kingdoms-of-death Herbert just got by, studying his father's journals only by way of learning how to please the blood-conscious 'contacts' of his legacy. The passage on V. was never noticed.   In 1939 he was in London, working far the Foreign Office. September came and went: it was as if a stranger, located above the frontiers of consciousness, were shaking him. He didn't particularly care to wake; but realized that if he didn't he would soon be sleeping alone. Being the sociable sort, Herbert volunteered his services. He was sent to North Africa, in some fuzzily defined spy/interpreter/liaison capacity and seesawed with the rest from Tobruk to El Agheila, back through Tobruk to El Alamein, back again to Tunisia. At the end of it he had seen more dead than he cared to again. Peace having been won he flirted with the idea of resuming that prewar sleepwalk. Sitting at a cafe in Oran frequented largely by American ex-GI's who'd decided not to return to the States just yet, he was leafing through the Florence journal idly, when the sentences on V. suddenly acquired a light of their own.   'V. for victory,' the Margravine had suggested playfully.   'No.' Stencil shook his head. 'It may be that Stencil has been lonely and needs something for company.'   Whatever the reason, he began to discover that sleep was taking up time which could be spent active. His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to - if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase - for it was V. he hunted - far from being a means to glorify God and one's own godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down.   Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid.   Here in New York the impasse had become acute. He'd come to the party at the invitation of Esther Harvitz, whose plastic surgeon Schoenmaker owned a vital piece of the V. jigsaw, but protested ignorance.   Stencil would wait. He'd taken over a low-rent apartment in the 30's (East Side), temporarily vacated by an Egyptologist named Bongo-Shaftsbury, son of an Egyptologist Sidney had known. They had been opponents once, before the first war, as had been Sidney and many of the present 'contacts'; which was curious, certainly, but lucky for Herbert because it doubled his chances of subsistence. He had been using the apartment for a pied-a-terre this last month; snatching sleep between interminable visits among his other 'contacts'; a population coming more and more to comprise sons and friends of the originals. At each step the sense of 'blood' weakened. Stencil could see a day when he would only be tolerated. It would then be he and V. all alone, in a world that somehow had lost sight of them both.   Until such time there were Schoenmaker to wait for; and Chiclitz the munitions king and Eigenvalue the physician (epithets characteristically stemming from Sidney's day though Sidney had known neither of the men personally) to fill up the time. It was dithering, it was a stagnant period and Stencil knew it. A month was too long to stay in any city unless there were something tangible to investigate. He'd taken to roving the city, aimlessly, waiting for a coincidence. None came. He'd snatched at Esther's invitation, hoping to come across some clue, trace, hint. But the Whole Sick Crew had nothing to offer.   The owner of this apartment seemed to express a prevailing humor common to them all. As if he were Stencil's prewar self,  he presented to Stencil a horrifying spectacle.   Fergus Mixolydian the Irish Armenian Jew and universal man laid claim to being the laziest living being in Nueva York. His creative ventures, all incomplete, ranged from a western in blank verse to a wall he'd had removed from a stall in the Penn Station men's room and entered in an exhibition as what the old Dadaists called a 'ready- made.' Critical comment was not kind. Fergus got so lazy that his only activity (short of those necessary to sustain life) was once a week to fiddle around at the kitchen sink with dry cells, retorts, alembics, salt solutions. What he was doing, he was generating hydrogen; this went to fill a sturdy green balloon with a great Z printed on it. He would tie the balloon by a string to the post of the bed whenever he planned to sleep, this being the only way for visitors to tell which side of consciousness Fergus was on.   His other amusement was watching the TV. He'd devised an ingenious sleep-switch, receiving its signal from two electrodes placed on the inner skin of his forearm. When Fergus dropped below a certain level of awareness, the skin resistance increased over a preset value to operate the switch. Fergus thus became an extension of the TV set.   The rest of the Crew partook of the same lethargy. Raoul wrote for television, keeping carefully in mind, and complaining bitterly about, all the sponsor-fetishes of that industry. Slab painted in sporadic bursts, referring to himself as a Catatonic Expressionist and his work as 'the ultimate in non-communication.' Melvin played the guitar and sang liberal folk songs. The pattern would have been familiar - bohemian, creative, arty - except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence, being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion, and artistic 'soul.' For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications.