Outrageous homely bucket
Back turned to her, her mother jerked.Susan, she snapped,“stop it. . . .” In America, as in England, there is a growing ententebetween s-f and poetry— both literary and 'pop'. Dick Allen, who teaches at the University of Ohio and edits the Mad River Review,published a forceful article in Writers' Digestlast year on the uses and usages of surrealist imagery in contemporary poetry and folkrock: Look into my eyes: rain puddles rich with life. My story should be told.* * * *II Without him, certainly, her prognosis would have been poor. Lately the headaches had become more menacing, as she insisted that the applause was growing stormier, the boos and catcalls more vicious. Whatever the psychic mechanism generating the fantasy system, Mangon realized that ultimately she would need him at the studio all day, holding back the enveloping tides of nightmare and insanity with dummy passes of the sonovac. Then, perhaps, when the dream crumbled, he would regret having helped her to delude herself. With luck though she might achieve her ambition of making a comeback. She had told him something of her scheme—a serpentine mixture of blackmail and bribery—and privately Mangon hoped to launch a plot of his own to return her to popularity. By now she had unfortunately reached the point where success alone could save her from disaster.* * * * The questions, whatever their sinister undertones (had he detected them, Mangon would have been deeply shocked) were purely rhetorical, and all their conversations for that matter entirely one-sided. For Mangon was a mute. From the age of three, when his mother had savagely punched him in the throat to stop him crying, he had been stone dumb, his vocal cords irreparably damaged. In all their endless exchanges of midnight confidences, Mangon had contributed not a single spoken word. Yes. For a long time words have been only a sickness in our kind, Krebs said. But ideas can still assort and mean. Take this thought: weve found hominids on thousands of planets, but none more than barely entered on the symbol-using stage. Paleontology proves native hominids have been stuck on the threshold of evolving human minds for as long as two hundred million years. But on Earth our own symbol-using minds evolved in about three hundred thousand years.” That, Hitchcock accused, is a lie! I have definite proof that they are even more intelligent than men.Any men. I say you are deliberately suppressing them because you fear what they could become!” I remember getting home from another job where Id been doing the maintenance on the shuttle-boats for a crew putting up a ring station to circle a planet itself circling Aldebaran. I was gone a long time on that one. When I left the landing complex and wandered out toward the tall weeds at the edge of the beach, I still didnt see anybody. You cant believe that. And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumping.* * * * As were the inimical shapes. JOHNNY BYRNE Quincannon followed, waiting a few seconds to give her time to present herself to the cabin steward. Then he entered slowly, in time to watch the steward show her to her stateroom, the forward most in the starboard row. I fired by automatism as I fell back. The spiders bubble was filled with violet glare instantly followed by green. I was twice walloped by explosion-fronts and knocked down. No, dammit! It was something personal. I was speaking of the penny that never ends, that when it is spent is replaced in the pocket with another penny. It is the poor mans idea of great wealth, of all the riches of the world, to have a penny in his pocket that always gives birth to another penny— Jim, she said, be careful.” There was worry in her eyes. “Youre not a violent man—and you’re not as young as you used to be.”.
