noise; a noise, George thought, to freeze the blood and make the hair stand upright. There must have been ultrasonics in it. It sounded like a thousand pigs being slaughtered with electric carving knives.
Everyone in the bar had jumped at the sudden clamor, but the effect on the starchy man was remarkable. He jumped convulsively, as if he had sat on a damp tarantula. His eyes moved wildly; George thought he had turned pale.
He shouted, “They’re after me!” He shouted it so loudly that it was perfectly audible even above the demoniac noise of the bag pipes. Then he grabbed up the trumpet case, slammed the trumpet in it, and ran out of the bar on his neat little patent leather feet.
The two bagpipers came out from the rear of the bar, still playing, and began to march toward the front. Apparently they had noticed nothing at all of the episode of the dark blue trumpet. The third man followed in the rear, beating on a small drum. From time to time he would put the drum sticks to his upper lip and seem to smell at them.
“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Atkinson said to George over the racket. “Only bar I ever was in where they kept bagpipes in the rear to amuse the customers. The owner’s Scottish, you know.”
The instrumentalists reached the front of the bar. They stood there a moment skirling. Then they executed an about-face and marched slowly to the rear. They stood there while they finished their number. It was long, with lots of tootling. At last they laid their instruments aside, advanced to the bar, and sat down on three bar stools near the center. They ordered Irish whiskey.
“Wonder where he got that trumpet,” Atkinson said thoughtfully, reverting to the man with the trumpet case. “Stole it somewhere, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Too bad he didn’t get to blow it,” George answered. He ordered Atkinson and himself another drink.
“Oh, that!” Atkinson laughed shortly. “Nothing would have happened. It was just a fancy horn. You surely don’t believe that wild yarn he told us? Why, I know what the real reason for all our troubles is!”
George sighed. He drew a design on the bar counter with his finger. “Another one,” he said.
“Eh? What? Oh, you were talking to yourself. As I was saying, I know the real reason. Are you familiar with Tantrist magic and its principles?”
“Unhunh. No.”
Atkinson frowned. “You almost sound as if you didn’t want to hear about this,” he observed. “But I was talking about Tantrist magic. One of its cardinal tenets, you know, is the magic power of certain syllables. For instance, if you persistently repeat Avalokiteshvara’s name, you’ll be assured of a happy rebirth in Heaven. Other sounds have a malign and destructive power. And so on.”
George looked about him. It was growing late; the bar was emptying. Except for himself and Atkinson, the pipers and the drummer, and a man around the corner of the bar from George, who had been sitting there silently against the wall all evening, the stools were empty. He looked at Atkinson again.
“About 1920,” Atkinson was saying, “a lama in a remote little valley in Tibet—” George noticed that he pronounced the word in the austere fashion that makes it rhyme with gibbet—“got a terrific yen for one of the native girls. She was a very attractive girl by native standards, round and brown and plump and tight, like a little bird. The lama couldn’t keep his eyes off her, and he didn’t want to keep his hands off either. Unfortunately, he belonged to a lamistic order that was very strict about its rule of chastity. And besides that, he was really a religious man.
“He knew there was one circumstance, and one only, under which he could enjoy the girl without committing any sin. He decided to wait for it.
“A few months later, when the girl was out pasturing the buffalo, or feeding the silk worms, or something, she saw the lama coming running down the side of the hill toward her. He was in a terrific froth. When he got up to her, he made a certain request. ‘No,’ the girl answered, ‘my mother told me I mustn’t.’ You see, she was a well- brought-up girl.”
George was looking at Atkinson and frowning hard. “Go on,” he said.
“I
“When she came back the lama was sitting on the field in a disconsolate position. She told him it was all right, her mother had said to mind him. He shook his head. He said, ‘The Dalai Lama has just died. I thought you and I could cooperate to reincarnate him. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been a sin. But now it’s too late. Heaven has willed otherwise. The job has already been attended to.’ And he pointed over to a corner of the field where two donkeys were copulating.
“The girl began to laugh. As I said, she was a well-brought-up girl, but she couldn’t help it. She laughed and laughed. She almost split her sides laughing. And the poor lama had to sit there listening while she laughed.
“You can’t excuse him, but you can understand it. He’d wanted her so much, he’d thought he was going to get her, and then those donkeys—Well, he began to curse. He began to curse those terrible, malign Tantrist curses. He’s been cursing ever since.
“Ever since 1920, he’s been cursing. Once in a while he pauses for breath, and we think things are going to get better, but he always starts in again. He says those dreadful Tantrist syllables over and over, and they go bonging around the world like the notes of enormous brass bells ringing disaster. War and famine and destruction and revolution and death—all in the Tantrist syllables. He knows, of course, that he’ll be punished by years and years of rebirths, the worst possible kind of karma, but he can’t help it. He just goes on saying those terrible syllables.”
George looked at him coldly.
“Hunh?”
“I said, you read that story in a book about China called Two Kinds of Time. I read it myself. The donkeys, the lama, the girl—they’re all in there. The only original part was what you said about Tantrist curses, and you probably stole that from someplace else.” George halted. After a moment he said passionately, “What’s the matter with everybody tonight?”
“Oh, foozle,” Atkinson replied lightly.
After a minute or so, the two pipers followed him. That left George, the silent man in the corner, and the instrumentalist who had played on the drum. George decided to have one more drink. Then he’d go home.
The silent man who was leaning against the wall began to speak.
“They were all wrong,” he said.
George regarded him with nausea. He thought of leaving, but the bartender was already bringing his drink. He tried to call up enough force to say, “Shut up,” but heart failed him. He drooped his head passively.
“Did you ever notice the stars scattered over the sky?” the man in the corner asked. He had a deep, rumbling voice.
“Milky Way?” George mumbled. Better hurry and get this over with.
“The Milky Way is one example,” the stranger conceded.
“Only one. There are millions of worlds within the millions of galaxies.”
“Yeah.”
“All those millions of burning worlds.” He was silent for so long that George’s hopes rose. Then he said, “They look pretty hot, don’t they? But they’re good to eat.”
“Hunh?”
“The stars, like clams…”
“Beg your pardon,” George enunciated. He finished his drink. “Misjudged you. You’re original.”
The man in the corner did not seem to have listened. “The worlds are like clams,” he said rapidly, “and the skies at night present us with the glorious spectacle of a celestial clambake. They put them on the fire, and when they’ve been on the fire long enough, they open. They’re getting this world of yours ready. When it’s been on the fire a little longer, it’ll open. Explode.”
George realized that that last drink had been one too many. He didn’t believe what the man in the corner was saying. He wouldn’t. But he couldn’t help finding a dreadful sort of logic in it. “How’ju know this?” he asked feebly at last.
The man in the corner seemed to rise and billow. Before George’s horrified and popping eyes, he grew larger and larger, like a balloon inflating. George drew back on the bar stool; he was afraid his face would be buried in the
