“Goodby,” he said. “Thank you.” He held out his hand to them in leave-taking. But all of them, the men too, kissed him lightly and lovingly on the cheek.
“Goodby, dear human man,” the girl with the copper hair said. “Goodby, goodby.”
He left the ship. He stood at a distance and watched it lift lightly and effortlessly to the height of the trees. There was a pause, while the ship hovered and he wondered anxiously if something had gone wrong. Then the ship descended a few feet and the copper-haired girl jumped lightly out of it. She came running toward him, one of the small, squat bottles in her hand. She held it out to him.
“I can’t take it—” he said.
“Oh, yes. You must. We want you to have it.” She thrust it into his hands.
She ran back to the ship. It rose up again, shimmered, and was gone.
Joe da Valora looked at where the ship had been. The gods had co me and gone. Was this how Dionysus had come to the Greeks? Divine, bearing a cargo that was divine? Now that they were gone, he realized how much in love with them he had been.
At last he drew a long sigh. He was where he had always been. His life would go on as it always had. Taxes, licenses, a mountain of paperwork, bad weather, public indifference, the attacks of local-optionists—all would be as it had been. But he had the bottle of wine they had given him. He knew there would never, in all his fore seeable life (he was sixty-five), be an event happy enough to warrant his opening it. But they had given him one of their last three bottles.
He was smiling as he went back to the house.
THE INVESTED LIBIDO
Dentautasen has a rather dubious reputation even in Martian psycho-pharmacology. Conservative medical opinion frowns on its use except in the desperate cases, for people who already feel so bad that any change one can produce in them is an improvement. The drug’s action is drastic and unpredictable. But, Mars being Mars, there are no restrictions on its exportation from the planet. And the short-sighted skullduggery Mars runs to has been known to result in its being substituted for senta beans, which it somewhat resembles.
This batch of dentautasen got into commerce as senta beans via an unscrupulous herb collector, a bribed inspector, and a customs official, on Earth, who was thinking of something else at the time. The pharmaceutics manufacturer who bought it tasted it perfunctorily—dentautasen is much like senta chemically except that it has a short chained radical at one side of its elaborate molecule—and then used it in a syrup of senta beans. The syrup was labelled, “a grand old Martian remedy for relief of functional intestinal irregularity (bowel stasis)”, and duly went on the drugstore shelves. It was the irony of fate that Wilmer Bellows, who was loaded to the gills with psychiatric drugs already, should have bought a bottle of it thinking it was something like castoria.
Wilmer’s psycho-therapist was on vacation, or Wilmer would have asked him about the syrup before taking it. As it was, Wilmer swallowed a tablespoonful of the syrup, took four neuroquel tablets and a deutapromazine capsule, and got into bed. He got out again immediately. He had forgotten to practice libidinal investment with his machine.
The therapist had diagnosed Wilmer’s difficulty, which he referred to as “depersonalization,” as proceeding from Wilmer’s lack of libidinal investment in Wilmer’s own self. What Wilmer experienced was a feeling of being entirely detached from his person and personality. His ego seemed to hover impersonally over his body and watch it, clockwork-wise, going through its daily tricks; he would look at his hand and wonder whose hand it was, or speculate numbly as to who the person was who sat in Wilmer’s chair. It was a horrid feeling, though only intermittent, and Wilmer had spent a lot of time and money trying to get rid of it. He had not had much success.
The machine for practicing libidinal investment was something like a stroboscope. Discs rotated, slots shot in and out across them, lights flashed. Wilmer looked in at the eyehole and tried to feel libidinally involved with himself.
After fifteen minutes of eyestrain, he was ready for bed. He got between the sheets. The neuroquel and the deutapromazine made him sleepy; the dentautasen opposed their action. Wilmer felt feverish. When he got to sleep, he dreamed about Dr. Adams, his therapist.
He woke, however, feeling much better. He had none of the hideous moments of depersonalization while he was shaving, his breakfast tasted pretty good. He decided he would visit the city aquarium after breakfast. Looking at marine life was one of the few things he enjoyed.
It was a fine sunny day. He
Snakes? Wilmer stopped walking so suddenly that the man behind him bumped into him. What was the matter with him? Was he going psycho? And yet for a moment he’d had the definite impression that big snakes had been gliding effortlessly along the curbing. He hadn’t been particularly afraid of them.
He was sweating. He looked about himself wildly. For a moment his ego seemed to hover bee-like in the air above him—above the little girl with the pink parasol, above the brown paper parcel the brisk old lady was carrying, above the wide furry dog who was irrigating a lamp post. He was all of them, he was none of them. Who was he?
His eye fell on a manure bun in the street, relic of one of the horse-drawn carriages that were currently fashionable. No.
The echoing, wet-smelling building soothed him. Early as it was, there were quite a few people looking into the greenish light of the cases, and that soothed him too.
He looked at a case with sea horses, sea stars, and a lobster. He looked at a case with sea roses and sea anemones. He looked at a case with a flat fish and two ugly, poisonous Scorpaena. He looked at a case wi— Suddenly the hovering depersonalization descended on him crashingly. Descended? No, he was being sucked up into it. He was being drawn up a varnished staircase into a hideous vacuum, a spiral of emptiness.
He had to stop somewhere, he couldn’t go on. The little girl, the parcel, the dog, the manure bun? He must be one of them, he must be somebody, he—His eyes were fixed wildly on the glass of the tank before him. His hand had gone to the knot of his tie. He didn’t know who he was any longer, but he was aware of sweat pouring down his back. If he had had enough ego left for prayer, he would have prayed.
Lib—invesnt—if he could lov—There was a sort of click and a feeling of pressure released in his ears. He drew a long, shaky breath. A weak smile of gratitude spread over his face. He knew who he was at least, at last he loved himself. It was the squid in the tank before him. He loved the squid. Because he was the squid.
The green water slid over his back. He sucked in deliriously salty water, pushed it on out, and jetted backward silkily. A frond of tentacles moved to his beak and then away again.
He jetted backward exuberantly once more.
How much of his new sensations was hallucinatory and how much was a genuine empathy cannot be decided. The action of dentautasen is very obscure. Wilmer, at any rate, was happy. He had never felt this good before.
He hung over the tank lovingly. Though he felt that he was the squid, some physical limitations remained. He could feel identified with it only when he could see it. He knew intuitively that he would feel depersonalized again when he was no longer near his “self.”
The keeper fed him around four. The food was delicious; he was angry at the keeper, though, because he was so stingy with it.
The aquarium closed at five-thirty. Wilmer left reluctantly, with many a backward glance. On the way home he realized that somebody, probably a sort of Wilmer, was hungry. He stopped at a hash house on the corner and
