“Three,” said Deere, blushing and furrowed at the same time.
Themus was pacing back and forth by the time the crowd had hurriedly and self-consciously gotten itself out of rank and clumped around the Cave again.
He paced from one huge stalagmite, kicking it on turning, to the edge of the mud-surrounded pool and began scrabbling in the mud at his feet.
He scooped up two huge handfuls of the runny stuff and carried it a few feet away to a rock surface. Plunking it down he hurried back for another handful. This he carried with wild abandon, spraying those near him with drops of the gunk, till he was back where he had deposited the previous load. Then he stopped, considered for a long moment, then placed the mud gingerly atop the other, at an angle.
Then he hurried back for more.
This he again placed with careful deliberation, tongue poking from a corner of his mouth, eyes narrowed in contemplation.
Then another load.
And another.
Each one placed with more care than the last, till he had a huge structure over four feet tall.
He stepped back from it, looked at it, raised his thumb and squinted at it through one eye. Then he raced back to the deep hole that had been gouged out of the mud and took a fingerful of the stuff.
He ran back, patted it carefully into place, smoothed it with an experienced hand, and stepped back, with a sigh and a look of utter contentment and achievement.
“Ah! Just the way I wanted it,” he said…
…and jumped into the hole.
“Four,” said Deere, tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks.
Themus sat in the hole, legs drawn up and crossed, hands cupping his chin, elbows on knees. He sat.
And sat longer.
And still sat.
And remained seated.
Deere walked over to him and looked down. “What is the fifth act of madness?”
“There isn’t any.” More quickly than anyone could follow, he had swiveled back and his head had revolved on his neck in a blur.
“There isn’t any?”
“I’m going to sit here and not do any more.”
The crowd murmured again. “What?” cried Deere. “What do you mean, you won’t do any more? We set you five. You’ve done four. Why no fifth?” “Because if I don’t do a fifth, you’ll kill me, and I think that’s mad enough even for you.” Though Deere’s back was turned and he was walking away, Themus was certain he heard “Five” from somewhere
“They want you to come back here again after you’ve seen my uncle,” said Darfla, a definite chill in her voice They were walking briskly down a moving traverseway, the girl a few steps ahead of the Watcher. Themus knew he had a small problem on his hands.
“Look, Darfla, I’m sorry about that back there, but it was my life or a little embarrassment for you. It was the first thing I could bring to mind, and I had to stall for time. I’m really sorry, but I’m sure they’ve seen a woman naked before, and you must have been naked before a man before so it shouldn’t—”
Themus fell silent. They continued down the traverseway, Darfla striding forward, anger evident in each long step.
Finally the girl came to an intersection of belt-strips and agilely swung across till she was on the slowest-moving outer belt. She stepped off, took several rapid steps to lose momentum, and turned to Themus.
“We’d better stop in here for a moment and get you something to wear over that Watcher uniform. It isn’t hard to avoid the Stuffed-Shirts,” she said, looking at him with disparagement, “but there’s no sense taking foolish chances.”
She indicated a small shop that was all window and no door, with a hastily painted message across one of the panes. ELGIS THE COSTUMER and IF WE DON’T GOT IT, IT AIN’T WORTH HAVING! They entered through a cleverly designed window that spun on a center-pin.
Inside the shop Darfla spoke briefly to a tall, thin Crackpot in black half-mask and body-tight black suit. He disappeared down a shaft in the floor from which stuck a shining pole.
The girl pulled a bolt of cloth off a corner of the counter and perched herself with trim legs crossed. Themus stood looking at the shop.
It was a costumer’s all right, and with an arrangement and selection of fantastic capacities. Clothing ranged from rustic Kyben farmgarb to the latest spun plastene fibers from all over the Galaxy. He was marveling at the endless varieties of clothing when the tall, thin Crackpot slid back up the pole.
He stepped off onto the floor, much to Themus’s amazement, and no elevator-disc followed him. It appeared that the man had come up the pole the same way he had gone down, without mechanical assistance. Themus was long past worrying over such apparent inconsistencies. He shrugged and looked at the suit the fellow had brought up with him.
Ten minutes later he looked at the suit on himself, in a full-length mirror-cube, and smiled at his sudden change from Underclass Watcher Themus to a sheeted and fetish-festooned member of the Toad-Revelers cult found on Fewb-huh IV.
His earrings hung in shining loops to his shoulders, and the bag of toad-shavings on his belt felt heavier than he thought it should. He pulled the drawstring on the bag and gasped. They were toad-shavings. He tucked the bottom folds of the multicolored sheet into his boot-tops, swung the lantern onto his back, and looked at Darfla in expectation.
He caught her grinning, and when he, too, smiled, her face went back to its recent stoniness.
Darfla made some kind of arrangement with Elgis, shook his hand, bit his ear, said, “How are the twins, Elgis?” to which the costumer replied, “Eh!” in a lackadaisical tone, and they left.
The rest of the trip through the patchwork-quilt of Valasah was spent in silence.
The Crackpots were not what they seemed. Of that Themus was certain. He had been very stupid not to notice it before, and he thought the Watchers must be even more stupid for not having seen it in all their hundreds of years on Kyba.
But there was a factor he did not possess. Garbage and water that ran in different directions through the same pipe, a beggar that knew how many coins he had in his pocket, a girl who could rip out the innards of a dictobox, leaving it so it would work—and somehow he was now certain it would work—without a human behind it, and a full-sized cave built inside a concrete block. These were not the achievements of madmen.
But they were mad!
They had to be. All the things which seemed mysterious and superhuman were offset by a million acts of out-and-out insanity. They lived in a world of no standardization, no conformity at all. There was no way to gauge the way these people would act, as you could with the Kyben of the stars. It was—it was—well, insane!
Themus’s nose itched in confusion, but he refrained from unseemly scratching.
“Don’t I look like Santa Claus?” he said. “Who?” asked Themus, looking at the roly-poly florid face and bushy beard. He tried to ignore the jaggedly yellow scar that reached from temple to temple.
“Santa Claus, Santa Claus, you lout? Haven’t you ever heard of the Earthmen’s mythical hero, Santa Claus? He was the hero of the Battle of the Alamo, he discovered what they call The Great Pyramid of Gizeh, he was the greatest drinker of milk out of wooden shoes that planet ever knew!”
“What’s milk?” asked Themus.
“Lords, what a clod!” He screwed up his lips in a childish pout. “I did immense research work on the subject. Immense!” Then he muttered, under his breath, almost an afterthought, “Immense.”
The old man was frightened. It showed, even through the joviality of his garb and appearance.
Themus could not understand the old man. He looked as though he would be quite the maddest of the lot, but he talked in a soft, almost whispering voice, lucidly, and for the most part of familiar things. Yet there was something about him which set him apart from the other Crackpots. He did not have the wild-eyed look.