But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.
Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness.
The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved, and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.
Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.
Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.
“I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can’t go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”
“That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.
Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn’t there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone—” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?
“What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.
“May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You’ve got today’s Journal in your hand and still you ask?”
Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”
Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.
“Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.
“Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”
“Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”
“You’re witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”
“Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn’t remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang on to it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”
“We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”
“No,” said Vincent Rue.
“No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.
“No. I didn’t see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.
“Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn’t we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin’s Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”
It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus’s Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)
The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called—(wait a bit)—
“Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.
“It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”
“It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”
“What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”
“Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”
“We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.
“Drakes’ teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else’s voice. He seemed startled at his own words.
“Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”
“Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.
“Dragons’ sauce,” said the waiter.
“Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.
“I don’t seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”
“I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”
Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweated so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking. The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn’t reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?