The Fear In Yesterday's rings

in the rows behind them sat the dozen or so freaks who, with Garth, Harper, and me, were also shareholders in the circus. Everyone looked most pleased on the occasion of this, the grand reopening of Statler Brothers Circus.

And well they might. There had originally been a matinee and an evening performance scheduled for the opening day. Then the — state troopers had called at eleven o'clock in the morning to tell us the roads were jammed with cars and that people were coming from all over the region to see us. Phil had hastily scheduled an extra late afternoon performance and was even thinking about adding a midnight show to accommodate the tens of thousands of people parked in cars, vans, and campers all over the local county fairgrounds.

Garth had been promised that he could ride the elephant in the midnight show.

But, of course, it wasn't the elephant, or the circus, the people were coming to see. They were coming to see the 'werewolf- or, as Phil's ads put it, the EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD, BROUGHT BACK THROUGH THE CLOUDY MISTS OF PREHISTORIC TIME BY MAD SCIENTISTS.

Now, that was a draw. Already, the big indoor arenas from coast to coast, and in Europe, were offering exorbitant financial guarantees if the Statler Brothers Circus, with its strange creature, could be booked sometime before the close of the century. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see a lobox.

For a time there had been considerable pressure from some quarters, understandably, to kill Coyote-the name Harper and i had decided on for the lobox, for no other reason than the fact that it made us smile-and all the female hybrids and younger breeding stock, to destroy them all as killers and menaces, but cooler heads had prevailed. It had been patiently pointed out that a lobox could not be held responsible for its natural instincts, any more than a leopard, tiger, or other wild beast. The evil existed in the men who had exploited those instincts to murder other men. Loboxes were killers, yes, but they weren't murderers. In any case, there was a very real chance that the lobox would once again become extinct if Coyote died before a solution could be found to the genetic problem that had doomed it to extinction in the first place. Somehow, Coyote had to keep making babies with the hybrids, and a way had to be found to diversify the gene pool of the offspring.

When it was decided that the creatures would not be destroyed, and when no individual, organization, or corporation had rushed forward to claim rights to the lobox, ownership to Coyote and the animals in the van had gone by default to the Statler Brothers Circus, through me, and it was further decided-at my insistence-that I would be 'nature conservator' on behalf of the animals. I'd arranged for them to spend the off-season, half a year, in a special compound in the Bronx Zoo-named, again at my insistence, the Nate Button Crypto-zoological Research Center-where experimenters would study them and work to keep the species alive. There was speculation that loboxes, properly trained, could become the greatest 'Seeing Eye dogs' ever, and much talk about all the other uses the animal could be put to.

I didn't much care, as long as the military-ours or anyone else's-didn't get hold of them. Or the CIA. Or anyone else who would use them to kill.

'We're going to be married, of course, aren't we, Robby?'

Suddenly I felt light-headed, short of breath. 'Say what?'

'You heard me. I just offered you a proposal of marriage.'

'No, Harper, we're not going to be married.'

'I'm serious, Robby. I love you, and I know you love me.'

'I certainly do love you, Harper,' I said, glancing around me at all the thousands of pairs of eyes following our progress. 'But I can't marry you.'

'Why not?'

'Wild things should stay wild.'

'Are you talking about you or me?'

Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat. Not trusting myself to speak, I simply shook my head. I was, I realized, very happy- even if I couldn't marry Harper. She loved me, and I considered that a great gift.

Then Harper's arms tightened even more around my waist, and I could feel her lips against my right ear. She continued, 'It's because you're a dwarf, isn't it?'

'Maybe,' I said tightly, after a long pause.

'Oh, really, Robby,' she said in an exasperated tone. 'With all the remarkable things you've accomplished in your life, don't you think it's past time you stopped worrying about being a dwarf?'

'But I am a dwarf, Harper. It's not something you grow out of, if you'll pardon the expression.'

'It's not what I meant, and you know it.'

Suddenly I recalled the innumerable times Garth had joked- half seriously-about my constant need to overcompensate. He was right, of course. Certainly, if Robert Frederickson had not been born a dwarf, he would never have become Mongo the Magnificent. And the chances are that he would never have become a Ph.D. criminologist and college professor, earned a black belt in karate, or become a private investigator. Still, loving and being loved by a woman like Harper Rhys-Whitney in marriage was not an adventure I was ready for. I did not have the courage for that kind of undertaking and wondered if I ever would. But I did have the courage to give Harper- and myself- honesty.

'I'm afraid of you, Harper,' I said evenly. 'I'm more afraid of you than I ever was of Coyote and the other loboxes. A lobox might take my life, but you could take my soul. You wouldn't mean to, but it could happen. It would be something I might do to myself through insecurity and self-doubt. Precisely because you are so beautiful and so desirable, and because I love you so very much, I'm afraid of marrying you. It would make me even more vulnerable than I am. If I marry you, the first thought I'll have every morning when I wake up is that I'm a dwarf. I just don't have the courage it takes to accept love, Harper, and maybe I never will.'

I thought-maybe hoped-she would argue with me. Instead, she squeezed me hard, said, 'I think I understand.'

'Thank you.'

'Do you think that someday you might have the courage and good sense to make me happy by marrying me?'

'Maybe someday,' I said carefully.

'So maybe I'll just hang around and wait. Hell, it's not much of a commute between Florida and New York, especially when you have your own plane, and I like the city almost as much as you do. Do you think you can handle it if we spend a lot of time together?'

I swallowed hard, managed to say, 'That would … be just fine with me, Harper.'

'Good,' she said. Then she pulled my head back, leaned over my shoulder, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Mabel pivoted, and the crowd roared.