The Best of L Sprague De Camp Part 1

The Best of L Sprague De Camp.

De Camp, L Sprague.

To be published by Ballantine as a Del Rey Book Printed in the United States of America

ACXNOWLEDGMENTS.

"Hyperpilosity," copyright (c) 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, April 1938. Copyright renewed 1965 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"Language for Time Travelers," copyright (c) 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, July 1938. Copyright renewed 1965 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Command," copyright (c) 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, October 1938. Copyright renewed 1966 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Merman," copyright (c) 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, December 1938. Copyright renewed 1966 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"Employment." copyright (c) 1939 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, May 1939. Copyright renewed 1966 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Gnarly Man," copyright (c) 1939 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown, June 1939. Copyright renewed 1966 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"Nothing in the Rules," copyright (c) 1939 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown, July 1939. Copyright renewed 1966 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Hardwood Pile," copyright (c) 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown, September 1940. Copyright renewed 1968 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Reluctant Shsmau," copyright (c) 1947 by Standard Magazines, Inc., for Thrilling .X'onder Stories, April iq.~'.

"The Inspector's Teeth," copyright (c) n~o by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, April 1950. Copyright renewed 1977 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Guided Man," copyright (c) 1952 by Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories, October 1952.

"Judgment Day," copyright (c) ~ b~ Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, August 1955.

"A Gun for Dinosaur," copyright (c) 1956 by Galaxy Publis.h.i.+ng Corporation, Inc., for Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1956.

"Reward of Virtue," copyright (c) 1970 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Maga. zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1970.

"The Emperor's Fan," copyright (c) 1973 by Random House, Inc., for Astounding.

"The Ameba," copyright (c) 1973 by L. Sprague de Camp.

"The little Green Men," copyright (c) 1976 by L. Sprague de Camp. "Two Yards of Dragon," copyright (c) 1976 by Lin Carter for Flas.h.i.+ng Swords No. ~.

To Foul and Karen Anderson: skaal.l

L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP-.

ENGINEER AND SORCERER.

As A STUDENT of the myriad ways of man, L. Sprague de Camp has from time to time looked upon his own society with the same objective eye he uses on peoples whom geography or history make strange to most of us. He himself does not seem to find them very alien- and he has encountered many at first hand. Though he knows more about cultural differences than most professional anthropologists, his basic judgment appears to be that human beings everywhere and everywhen are much the same at heart: limited, fallible, tragi-comic, yet endlessly interesting. So in the civilizations of antiquity or among more recent "primitives" he sees engineers and politicians not unlike ours, while among us he discovers taboos and tribal rites not unlike theirs. The insight has directly inspired at least one story and added philosophical depth as well as occasional piquant ironies to most of the others.

Therefore I wonder what he thinks of this curious custom we have of prefacing a collection of one writer's work with the remarks of a colleague. It strikes me as especially odd when the former is senior to the latter, and senior in far more than years. That is, I was a boy when L. Sprague de Camp's first stories were published; I spent a decade being awed by his erudition and captivated by his ability to tell a story, none of which has changed since. When I began to write professionally myself, it became clear, once I was. .h.i.tting my stride, that there was a considerable de Camp influence on me, though I will never match him in any of those areas he has made uniquely his own. In short, what the deuce am I doing introducing him?

The sole rationale that comes to mind is this. De Camp belongs to that generation of writers whom John Campbell inspired to create the golden age of science fiction and fantasy, beginning about 1937 when he took the helm of what was then called Astounding Stories. Critics be d.a.m.ned, it was the golden age in all truth, when people such as Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Kuttner (especially as "Lewis Padgett"), Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, George 0. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, and more and more either appeared for the first time or, for the first time, really showed what they could do. De Camp stood tall in this race of giants. Gifted new writers have made their considerable marks on the field throughout the years afterward, but the excitement-the sense of utterly green pastures suddenly opened-will never come again. Comparison to the Periclean and Elizabethan periods may strike you as overdrawn, but you might think of jazz in its heyday, or quantum physics in the 1920'S and '30's, or cosmology and molecular biology today.

The era was brief, choked off-though not overnight-by America's entry into World War Two. A number of key creators found that they had more urgent business on hand than writing stories. They included de Camp.

Hostilities having ended for the time being, he returned to his proper business and had much to do with pulling science fiction out of the dismal state into which it had fallen. Besides Astounding as of yore, he was an important contributor to numerous other magazines in the field. The publication of science-fiction books, not as rare oneshots but as a regular thing, was being pioneered then, and his became landmarks. Of all this, more anon.

However, he began increasingly to write other things. These included some grand historical fiction but became primarily nonfiction, with emphasis on science, technology, and the history of these. Factual material, accurately and vividly presented, was not new to him -he had written it from the start of his career-but soon it comprised the overwhelming bulk of his output. I don't know whether to regret this or not. On the one hand, we have doubtless lost a number of marvelous yarns; on the other hand, we do have these perfectly splendid books about elephants and ancient engineers and H. P. Lovecraft and dinosaurs and. . .

Luckily for us, of recent years L. Sprague de Camp has from time to time been coming back to storytelling, especially to fantasy. (He is also pleasing aficionados with light verse and familiar essays, but these are of less immediate interest to a reading public starved for honest narratives in which real things happen to persons one can care about.) And thus we arrive at a justification for this foreword: the fact that many younger folk may not be acquainted with his fiction, and in any event will not know what a towering figure he has been-and is-in the field of imaginative literature. The present book, which spans most of his career, ought to remedy that. If you haven't read a de Camp tale before now, you have a treat in store, and I am here to tell you so.

Second, since an anthology can hold but a limited part of an author's work, you might allow me to steer you onto other things, as well. 'What follows will not be a bibliography or a scholarly study, but just a ramble through a few of the good memories, literary and personal, that Sprague has given me. A lot will be omitted; I should not take up s.p.a.ce which could be used for an extra story. But perhaps you will get a better idea of his achievement and of what to watch for in bookstores and libraries than you would from something more formal.

As I have remarked, he began writing nonfiction early on. Indeed, his very first published work was an important book, still in print and once cited in a Supreme Court decision, whose self-explanatory t.i.tle is Inventions, Patents, and Their Management. Not being an inventor of anything except occasional recipes, I must confess to never having read this. However, in my teens I was delighted and enlightened by the articles he wrote for Astounding, pieces like "The LongTailed Huns" (on urban wildlife), "The Sea King's Armored Division" (on h.e.l.lenistic science and engineering), and "Get Out and Get Under" (on the history of military vehicles). The subjects demonstrate the range and depth of his interests; the t.i.tles indicate the humor with which he made the facts sparkle.

That humor became an emblem of his in science fiction, doubly welcome because it has always been in short supply there, and in fantasy, where it matched the funniest things ever done in a field which has nurtured a lot of sprightliness. His humor was often called "wacky," but I think that's the wrong word. De Camp constructed his stories every bit as carefully, with the same respect for fact and logic, as he did his nonfiction. (He still does, of course.) Much of the laughter came from the meticulously detailed working out of the consequences of a bizarre a.s.sumption.

For instance, in the short novel Divide and Rule, extraterrestrial conquerors have imposed a neo-medieval culture on Earth as a way of keeping the human race from uniting to overthrow them. The story opens with Sir Howard van Slyck, second son of the Duke of Poughkeepsie, riding along in chrome-nickel armor, puffing his pipe, near the tracks of the elephant-powered New York Central. Upon his plastron he bears the family arms-which he calls a trademark-consisting of a red maple leaf in a white circle with the motto "Give 'em the works."

In another short novel, Solomon's Stone, there is a parallel universe in which Earth is inhabited by those people whom we daydream of ourselves as being. The mind of the shy, bookish hero is transferred to the body of the alter ego he had always supposed was purely imaginary, a French cavalier like d'Artagnan. Practically every man is big, muscular, and handsome; every woman ravis.h.i.+ngly beautiful. New York is a wild conglomeration of ethnic types, ranging from the Siegfrieds in Yorkville to a Middle Eastern sultan complete with harem (who in our world is really a bachelor clerk at the YMCA). With so many aggressively macho toughs around, society is pretty chaotic, though a government of sorts does exist and even maintains a small army, which consists almost entirely of generals and is commanded by the only private it has.

In the cla.s.sic Harold Shea stories, written in collaboration with the late Fletcher Pratt, we are taken to a whole series of universes where various myths or literary works are strictly true. For example, in "The Mathematics of Magic," Shea finds himself in the world of Spenser's The Faerie Queen. At one point, traveling through a forest with the virginal Beiphebe, he encounters the Blatant Beast, a monster that will devour them unless it is given a poem it has not heard before-and in such an emergency, the single poem he can think of is the luridly gross "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell." Magic works here, by strict rules of its own, and at another point Shea seeks to conjure up a unicorn for a steed-but he doesn't phrase the spell quite clearly enough, and gets a rhinoceros instead. I needn't go on, for happily the first three of these stores are again available, collected together as The Corn pleat Enchanter.

Nor does s.p.a.ce permit me to give more examples of this particular source of de Campian humor. It isn't necessary anyway; you can find plenty for yourself in the stories gathered here, in which you will also note an equally important source of humor, character.

De Camp's people are never stereotypes. They are unique and often think and act in ways that are funny. Like Moliere or Holberg, cle Camp observes them with a slightly ironic, basically sympathetic detachment, and then tells us what he has seen. .We laugh, but all too often we recognize ourselves in them.

The humor, and oftimes the pathos, of character became particularly evident in the postwar "Gavagan's Bar" stories, also written in partners.h.i.+p with Pratt. Gavagan's Bar is a friendly kind of neighborhood place, whose steady customers all know one another, and the genial bartender, Mr. Cohan (Cohan, if you please), does his best to keep it that way. But people do come in who have the strangest tales to tell, and sometimes a breath of that strangeness blows through the establishment itself. "These little whiskey fantasies," as Groff Conklin called them, usually evoke very gentle laughter.

Indeed, offhand the postwar stories of de Camp's seem rather different from the prewar ones: more serious, frequently downright somber. However, this is not true. There has been a s.h.i.+ft of emphasis, as might be expected of a writer who is not content to repeat himself endlessly but, instead, keeps experimenting and developing. Yet recent stories have had their wit, and early stories had their gravity.

His first major piece of fiction, the novel Genus h.o.m.o, in collaboration with the late P. Schuyler Miller, contains comic moments but is essentially a straightforward tale of a busload of travelers-the believably ordinary kind you meet on a Greyhound-who end up in the far future, when mankind is long extinct save for them, and apes have evolved to intelligence. Though the conclusion is hopeful, the narrative does not pretend that the opening situation is anything but catastrophic, and tragedies as well as triumphs occur.

Another early novel, Lest Darkness Fall, ill.u.s.trates this combination of qualities still better. It is, in a way, de Camp's answer to Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee started modern technology going in Arthurian Britain with the greatest of ease. Martin Padway is scholarly, even a little timid, but a highly knowledgeable man. This much was necessary for the author to postulate, else his protagonist would soon have died a messy death, after being hurled back to Ostrogothic Italy of the sixth century A.D. Nevertheless, Padway has a terrible time as he struggles to introduce a few things like printing, which may stave off the Dark Ages he knows will otherwise come. He never does manage to make gunpowder that goes Bang! instead of Fizz-zz. His most successful innovations are the simplest, like dou ble-entry bookkeeping or an information-carrying line of semaph.o.r.es. Here de Camp was at his most rigorously logical.

The book is full of hilarious scenes. For instance, when Padway catches a bad cold, his main problem is how to avoid the weird remedies that well-meaning friends try to apply to him. Yet when war breaks out, its horrors are quietly described; we are not spared.

Thus the stories of later years represent no mutation, but rather a steady evolution.

The tales of the Viagens Inter planetarias are, in fact, quite like their predecessors. These are straight science fiction-so much so that de Camp does not permit his characters to exceed the speed of light through "hypers.p.a.ce" or any similar incantation, but confines them to the laws of relativistic physics and the nearer stars. That, though, gives the same scope for exotic settings and exciting adventures that Haggard found in the then unmapped parts of Africa. The humorous possibilities are fully realized; an example in the present collection is "The Inspector's Teeth." Likewise realized are the possibilities of derring-do-and, occasionally, pain and bitterness.

The historical novels show the same meticulous care throughout and the same general line of development, from the comparatively light-hearted An Elephant for Aristotle and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (my personal favorite) to The Golden Wind, which holds a poignant depiction of, what age can do to a man and how the spirit can rise above that.

As I have said, de Camp came more and more to specialize in nonfiction, fine stuff and highly recommended but outside the purview of this essay. It may have been Conan the Cimmerian who finally lured him back to a reasonable productivity of stories. If that is true, we have much to thank Robert E. Howard for, over and above the entertainment he gave us in his own right.

Vhen the creator of the original Mighty Barbarian died, he left behind him a heap of unfinished ma.n.u.scripts, some involving Conan and some which could be adapted to the series. Perhaps mostly for enjoyment, de Camp undertook to complete the work with collaborators BjOrn Nyberg and Lin Carter. The enthusiastic rediscovery of Conan by the reading public may have surprised him. I don't know. What I do know, and what matters, is that since then he has increasingly been writing original fantasy. You'll find a few of the shorter pieces here. The Goblin Tower and The Clocks of Iraz are two rather recent novels. Let us hope for many more.

I have already admitted that this foreword is not going to be anything like a proper survey of the de Camp canoi. Still, I would like to mention anew certain of his incidental writings-essays, reviews and criticisms, verse, aphorisms-which have appeared over the years in such places as the magazine Amra or his anthology Scribblings, to the pleasure of smaller audiences than they deserve. Unless a major publisher has the sense to gather these together, you may never see them; but they should be mentioned as showing yet another dimension of his versatility.

In person, L. (for Lyon) Sprague de Camp is a tall, trim man of aristocratic appearance and bearing-aristocratic in the best sense, gracious and kindly as well as impressive. More than one woman has confided to me that she tends to swoon over him, but he remains content with his lovely wife of many years, Catherine, with whom he has collaborated on books as well as children.

Born in New York in 1907, he studied at Caltech, MIT, and Stevens Inst.i.tute of Technology, and held down a variety of jobs until he went into full-time writing. As a Navy reservist, he was called up in World War Two and did research and development (alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein), which was a substantial contribution to the Allied cause.

His vast fund of information comes not only from omnivorous reading but from extensive traveling. This isn't just through the tourist circuits, but into strange places hard to reach. He doesn't brag about it, but if you can get him to reminisce, it makes great reading or listening.

By the time this is in print, he will be past his seventieth birthday, but he doesn't look or act it-and, what the h.e.l.l, Goethe wrote the second part of Faust in his eighties. Long may L. Sprague de Camp go on, to the joy of us all.

-Poul Anderson Orinda, California June, 1977

HYPERPILOSITY.

"V/E ALL KNOW about the brilliant successes in the arts and sciences, but, if you knew all their stories, you might find that some of the failures were really interesting."

It was Pat Weiss speaking. The beer had given out, and Carl Vandercook had gone out to get some more. Pat, having cornered all the chips in sight, was leaning back and emitting vast clouds of smoke.

"That means," I said, "that you've got a story coming. Okay, spill it. The poker can wait."

"Only don't stop in the middle and say 'That reminds me,' and go off on another story, and from the middle of that to another, and so on," put in Hannibal Snyder.

Pat c.o.c.ked an eye at Hannibal. "Listen, mug, I haven't digressed once in the last three stories I've told. If you can tell a story better, go to it. Ever hear of J. Roman Oliveira?" he said, not waiting, I noticed, to give Hannibal a chance to take him up. He continued: "Carl's been talking a lot about that new gadget of his, and no doubt it will make him famous if he ever finishes it. And Carl mually finishes what he sets out to do. My friend Oliveira finished what he set out to do, also, and it should have made him famous, but it didn't. Scientifically his work was a sUccess, and deserving of the highest praise, but humanly it was a failure. That's why he's now running a little college down in Texas. He still does good work, and gets articles in the journals, but it's not what he had every reason to suspect that he deserved. Just got a letter from him the other day-it seems he's now a proud grandfather. That reminds me of my grandfather-"

"Hey!" roared Hannibal.

Pat said, "Huh? Oh, I see. Sorry. I won't do it again." He went on: u~ first knew J. Roman when I was a mere student at the Medical Center and he was a professor of virology. The J in his name stands for Haysoos, spelled J-e-s-u-s, which is a perfectly good Mexican name. But he'd been so much kidded about it in the States that he preferred to go by 'Roman.'

"You remember that the Great Change, which is what this story has to do with, started in the winter of '97', with that awful flu epidemic. Oliveira came down with it. I went around to see him to get an a.s.signment, and found him perched on a pile of pillows and wearing the G.o.dawfullest pink and green pajamas. His wife was reading to him in Spanish.

"'Leesten, Pat,' he said when I came in, 'I know you're a worthy esstudent, but I weesh you and the whole d.a.m.n virology cla.s.s were roasting on the hottest greedle in h.e.l.l. Tell me what you want, and then go away and let me die in peace.'

"I got my information, and was just going, when his doctor came in-old Fogarty, who used to lecture on sinuses. He'd given up general practice long before, but he was so scared of losing a good virologist that he was handling Oliveira's case himself.

"Stick around, sonny,' he said to me when I started to follow Mrs. Oliveira out, 'and learn a little practical medicine. I've always thought it a mistake that we haven't a cla.s.s to train doctors in bedside manners. Now observe how I do it.. I smile at Oliveira here, but I don't act so d.a.m.ned cheerful that he'd find death a welcome relief from my company. That's a mistake some young doctors make. Notice that I walk up briskly, and not as if I were afraid my patient was liable to fall in pieces at the slightest jar. . .' and so on.

"The fun came when he put the end of his stethoscope on 011veira's chest.

"Can't hear a d.a.m.n thing,' he snorted. 'Or rather, you've got so much hair that all I can hear is the ends of it sc.r.a.ping on the diaphragm. May have to shave it. But say, isn't that rather unusual for a Mexican?' ~ "'You're jolly well right she ees,' retorted the sufferer. 'Like most natives of my beautiful Mejico, I am of mostly Eendian descent, and Eendians are of Mongoloid race, and so have little body hair. It's all come out in the last week.'

"That's funny . . .' Fogarty said. I spoke up: 'Say, Dr. Fogarty, it's more than that. I had my flu a month ago, and the same thing's been happening to me. I've always felt like a sissy because of not having any hair on my torso to speak of, and now I've got a crop that's almost long enough to braid. I didn't think anything special about it. . .'

"I don't remember what was said next, because we all talked at once. But when we got calmed down there didn't seem to be anything we could do without some systematic investigation, and I promised Fogarty to come around to his place so he could look me over.

"I did, the next day, but he didn't find anything except a lot of hair. He took samples of everything he could think of, of course. I'd given up wearing underwear because it itched, and anyway the hair was warm enough to make it unnecessary, even in a New York January.

"The next thing I heard was a week later, when Oliveira returned to his cla.s.ses, and told me that Fogarty had caught the flu. Oliveira had been making observations on the old boy's thorax, and found that he, too, had begun to grow body hair at an unprecedented rate.

"Then my girl friend-not the present missus; I hadn't met her yet -overcame her embarra.s.sment enough to ask me whether I could explain how it was that she was getting hairy. I could see that the poor girl was pretty badly cut up about it, because obviously her chances of catching a good man would be reduced by her growing a pelt like a bear or a gorilla. I wasn't able to enlighten her, but told her that, if it was any comfort, a lot of other people were suffering from the same thing.

"Then we heard that Fogarty had died. He was a good egg and we were sorry, but he'd led a pretty full life, and you couldn't say that he was cut off in his prime.

"Oliveira called me to his office. 'Pat,' he said. 'You were looking for a chob last fall, ees it not? Well, I need an a.s.seestant. We're going to find out about this hair beesiness. Are you on?' I was.

"We started by examining all the clinical cases. Everybody who had, or had had, the flu was growing hair. And it was a severe winter, and it looked as though everybody was going to have the flu sooner or later.

"Just about that time I had a bright idea. I looked up all the cosmetic companies that made depilatories, and soaked what little money I had into their stock. I was sorry later, but I'll come to that.

"Roman Oliveira was a glutton for work, and with the hours he made me keep I began to have uneasy visions of flunking out. But the fact that my girl friend had become so self-conscious about her hair that she wouldn't go out anymore saved me some time.

"We worked and worked over our guinea pigs and rats, but didn't get anywhere. Oliveira got a bunch of hairless Chihuahua dogs and tried a.s.sorted gunks on them, but nothing happened. He even got a pair of East African sand rats-Heterocephalus-hideous-looking things-but that was a blank, too.

"Then the business got into the papers. I noticed a little article in the New York Times, on an inside page. A week later there was a full-column story on page i of the second part. Then it was on the front page. It was mostly 'Dr. So-and-so says he thinks this nationwide attack of hyperpilosity' (swell word, huh? Wish I could remember the name of the doc who invented it) 'is due to this, that, or the other thing.'

"Our usual February dance had to be called off because almost none of the students could get their girls to go. Attendance at the movie houses had fallen off pretty badly for much the same reason. It was a cinch to get a good seat, even if you arrived around 8:oo P.M. I noticed one funny little item in the paper to the effect that the filming of 'Tarzan and the Octopus Men' had been called off because the actors were supposed to go running around in G-strings, and the company found they had to clip and shave the whole cast all over every few days if they didn't want their fur to show.

"It was fun to ride on a bus about ten o'clock and watch the people, who were pretty well bundled up. Most of them scratched, and those who were too well-bred to scratch just squirmed and looked unhappy.

"Next I read that applications for marriage licenses had fallen off so that three clerks were able to handle the entire business for Greater New York, including Yonkers, which had just been incorporated into the Bronx.

"I was gratified to see that my cosmetic stocks were going up nicely. I tried to get my roommate, Bert Kafket, to get in on them too. But he just smiled mysteriously, and said he had other plans. Bert was a kind of professional pessimist. 'Pat,' he said. 'Maybe you and Oliveira will lick this business, and maybe not. I'm betting that you won't. If I win, the stocks that I've bought will be doing famously long after your depilatories are forgotten.'

"As you know, people were pretty excited about the plague. But when the weather began to get warm the fun realty started. First the four big underwear companies ceased operations, one after another. Two of them were placed in receivers.h.i.+p, another liquidated completely, and the fourth was able to pull through by switching to the manufacture of tablecloths and American flags. The bottom dropped entirely out of the cotton market, as this alleged hair-growing flu had spread all over the world by now. Congress had been planning to go home early, and was, as usual, being urged to do so by the conservative newspapers. But now Was.h.i.+ngton was jammed with cotton planters demanding that the Government do something, and they didn't dare. The Government was willing enough to Do Something, but unfortunately didn't have the foggiest idea of how to go about it.

"All this time Oliveira, more or less a.s.sisted by me, was working night and day on the problem, but we didn't seem to have any better luck than the Government.

"You couldn't hear anything on the radio in the building where I lived, because of the interference from the big, powerful electric clippers that everybody had installed and kept going all the time.

"It's an ill wind, as the prophet saith, and Bert Kafket got some good out of it. His girl, whom he had been pursuing for some years, had been making a good salary as a model at Josephine Lyon's exclusive dress establishment on Fifth Avenue, and she had been leading Bert a dance. But now all of a sudden the Lyon place folded up, as n.o.body seemed to be buying any clothes, and the girl was only too glad to take Bert as her lawful wedded husband. Not much hair was grown on the women's faces, fortunately for them, or G.o.d knows what would have become of the race. Bert and I flipped a coin to see which of us should move, and I won.

"Congress finally pa.s.sed a bill setting up a reward of a million dollars for whomever should find a permanent cure for hyperpilosity, and then adjourned, having, as usual, left a flock of important bills not acted upon.

"When the weather became really hot in June, all the men quit wearing s.h.i.+rts, as their pelts covered them quite as effectively. The police force kicked so about having to wear their regular uniforms, that they were allowed to go around in dark blue polo s.h.i.+rts and shorts. But pretty soon they were rolling up their s.h.i.+rts and sticking them in the pockets of their shorts. It wasn't long before the rest of the male population of the United States was doing likewise. In growing hair the human race hadn't lost any of its capacity to sweat, and you'd pa.s.s out with the heat if you tried to walk anywhere on a hot day with any amount of clothes on. I can still remember holding on to a hydrant at Third Avenue and 6oth Street and trying not to faint, with the sweat pouring out the ankles of my pants and the buildings going round and round. After that I was sensible and stripped down to shorts like everyone else.

"In July Natasha, the gorilla in the Bronx Zoo, escaped from her cage and wandered around the park for hours before anyone noticed her. The zoo visitors all thought she was merely an unusually ugly member of their own species.