“H. G. Wells story,” George murmured.
“I beg your pardon?” said the starchy man.
“Nothing.” George motioned to the bartender and ordered a round of drinks. Atkins on took gin and ginger ale, and the starchy man kirschwasser.
“Why hasn’t the trump been blown?” Atkinson asked, with the air of one tolerating noisy children.
“Because it’s lost,” the starchy man replied promptly. “When the time came to blow it, it wasn’t in Heaven. This wicked, wicked world! Ages ago it should have been summoned to meet its master.” He drooped his eyelids.
George felt his tongue aching with the repression of his wish to say, “Plagiarist!” Atkinson said, “Oh, fooey. How do you know the trump’s been lost?”
“Because I have it here,” the starchy gentleman answered. “Right here.” He patted his trumpet case.
George and Atkinson exchanged a look. George said, “Let’s see it.”
“I don’t think I’d better…”
“Oh, go on!”
“Well… No, I’d better not.”
Atkinson leaned his elbows on the bar and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers. “I expect there’s nothing in the trumpet case actually,” he said indifferently. “I expect it’s only a gambit of his.”
The soft, wrinkled skin of the man who was drinking kirschwasser flushed red around the eyes. He put the trumpet case down on the bar in front of George with a thump, and snapped open the lid. Atkinson and George bent over it eagerly.
The trumpet case was lined with glossy white silk, like a coffin. Against the white fabric, gleaming with an incredible velvety luster, lay a trumpet of deepest midnight blue. It might have been black, but it wasn’t; it was the color of deep space where it lies softly, like a caress, for trillions of miles around some regal, blazing star. The bell of the trumpet was fluted and curved like the flower of a morning glory.
Atkinson whistled. After a moment he paid the trumpet the ultimate tribute. “Gosh,” he said.
The man with the trumpet said nothing, but his little mouth pursed in a small, tight, nasty smile. “Where’d you get it?” George queried. “I’m not saying.”
“How do you know it’s the last trump?” Atkinson asked.
The starchy man shrugged his shoulders. “What else could it be?” he asked.
The door at the front of the bar opened and three men came in. George watched them absently as they walked the length of the bar counter and went into the rear. “But… you mean if this thing were blown, the world would come to an end? There’d be the last judgment?”
“I imagine.”
“I don’t believe it,” Atkinson said after a minute. “I just don’t believe it. It’s an extraordinary looking trumpet, I admit, but it can’t be… that.”
“Ohhhhh?”
“Yes. If it’s what you say, why don’t you blow it?”
The starchy man seemed disconcerted. He licked his lips. Then he said, in rather a hostile tone, “You mean you want me to blow? You mean you’re ready to meet your maker—you and all the rest of the world—right now? Right this minute? With all your sins, with a ll your errors of commission and omission, unforgiven and unshriven on your head?”
“Sure. That’s right. Why not? The longer the world goes on existing, the worse it’ll get. As to sins and all that, I’ll take my chances. They couldn’t be much worse than what—” Atkinson made a small gesture that seemed to enclose in itself the whole miserable, explosive terrestrial globe—“than what we have now.”
Under his breath, George quoted, “‘We doctors know a hopeless case—’”
The starchy man turned to him. “Do you agree with him, young man?” he demanded.
“Yep.”
The man with the trumpet turned bright red. He reached into the case and picked up the trumpet. As he lifted it through the air, George noticed what a peculiarly eye-catching quality the celestial object had. Its color and gloss had the effect on the eye that a blare of horns has on the ear. Heads began to turn toward it. In no time at all, everyone in the bar was watching the starchy man.
He seemed to pause a little, as if to make sure that he had the attention of his audience. Then he drew a deep, deep breath. He set the trumpet to his lips.
From the rear of the bar there burst out a jangling, skirling, shrieking, droning uproar. It was an amazing 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.