“But what, papa, if it ever gets so nobody up there believes in them? Do they die?”
“Um-m-m—theoretically, yes. But there’s one thing saves us. There are some humans who believe anything. Or anyway don’t actually disbelieve in anything. That group is a sort of nucleus that holds things together. No matter how discredited a belief is, they hang on by doubting a little.”
“But what, papa, if they conceive of a new mythological being? Would he come into existence down here?”
“Of course, kid. That’s how we all got here, one time or another. Why, look at poltergeists, for instance. They’re newcomers. And all this ectoplasm you see floating around and getting in the way, that’s new. And—well, like this big guy Paul Bunyan; he’s only been around here a century or so; he isn’t much older than you are. And lots of others. Of course, they have to get invoked before they show up, but that always gets done sooner or later.”
“Gosh, thanks, papa. I understand you a lot better than I did Ashtaroth. He uses big words like transmogrification and superactualization and what not.”
“O. K., kid, now run along and play. But don’t bring any of those darn water elemental kids back with you. The place gets so full of steam I can’t see. And a very important personage is going to drop in.”
“Who, papa?”
“Darveth, the head fire demon. The big shot himself. That’s why I want you to run along outside.”
“Gee, papa, can’t I—”
“No. He wants to tell me about something important. He’s got a human being on the string, and it’s ticklish business.”
“How do you mean, got a human being on the string? What’s he want to do with him?”
“Make him set fires, of course, up there. What Darveth’s going to do with this guy will be good. He says better than he did with Nero or Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. It’s something big on, this time.”
“Gee, can’t I watch?”
“Later, maybe. There’s nothing to watch yet. This guy’s still just a baby. But Darveth’s farsighted. Get ’em young, that’s his idea. It’ll take years to work out, but it’ll be hot stuff when it happens.”
“Can I watch, then?”
“Sure, kid. But run along and play now. And keep away from those frost giants.”
“Yes, papa.”
It took twenty-two years for it to get him. He fought it off that long, and then—blooie.
Oh, it had been there all along, ever since Wally Smith was a baby; ever since—well, it was there before he could remember. Since he’d managed to stand on babyhood’s thick stubby little legs, hanging on to two bars of his play pen, and had watched his father take a little stick and rub it across the sole, of his shoe and then hold it to his pipe.
Funny, those clouds of smoke that came from that pipe. They were there, and then they weren’t, like gray phantoms. But that was merely interesting in a mild way.
What drew his eyes, his round wide wondering eyes, was the flame.
. The thing that danced on the end of the stick. The thing that flared there, ever-shape-changing. Yellow-red-blue wonder, magic beauty. One of his chubby hands clung to the bar of the play pen, and the other reached out for the flame. His; he wanted it. His.
And his father, holding it safely out of reach, grinning at him in proud and blind paternity. Never guessing.
“Pretty, huh, sonny? But mustn’t touch. Fire burn.”
Yes, Wally, fire burns.
Wally Smith knew a lot about fire by the time he was in school. He knew that fire burns. He knew it by experience, and it had been painful, but not bitter, experience. The scar was on his forearm to remind him. The blotchy white scar that would always be there when he rolled up his sleeves.
It had marked him in another way, too. His eyes.
That had come early, also. The sun, the glorious sun, the murderous sun. He’d watched that, too, when his mother had moved his play pen out into the yard. Watched it with breathless fascination until his eyes hurt, and had looked back at it again as soon as he could, and had stretched up his little arms toward it. He knew that it was fire, flame, somehow identical with the thing that danced on the end of the sticks his father held to his pipe. Fire. He loved it.
And so, quite young, he wore glasses. All his life he was to be nearsighted and wear thickish glasses.
The draft board took one look at the thickness, of those lenses and didn’t even send him around for a physical examination. On the thickness of his lenses, they marked him exempt and told him to go home.
That was tough, because he wanted to get in. He’d seen a movie newsreel that showed the new flame throwers. If he could get one of those things to operate—
But that desire -was subconscious; he didn’t know that it was a big part of the reason he wanted to get into uniform. That was in the fall of ’41 and we weren’t in the war yet. Later, after December, it was still part of the reason he wanted to get in, but not the major part. Wally Smith was a good American; that was even more important than being a good pyromaniac.
Anyway, he’d licked the pyromania. Or thought he had. If it was there, it was buried down deep where most of the time he could avoid thinking about it, and there was a “Thus Far, No Farther” sign across one passage of his mind.
That yen for a flame thrower worried him a bit. Then came Pearl Harbor and Wally Smith had it out with himself to discover whether it was all patriotism, that made him want to kill Japs, or whether that yen for a flame thrower figured at all.
And while he mulled it over, things got hotter in the Philippines and the Japs moved down Malaya to Singapore, and there were U-boat off both coasts and it began to look as though his country needed him. And there was a fighting anger in him that told him the hell with whether or not it was pyromania—it was patriotism even more, and he’d worry about the psychiatry of it later.
He tried three recruiting stations, and each of them bounced him back. Then the factory where he worked changed over and— But wait, we’re getting a bit ahead of things.
When little Wally Smith was seven, they took him to a psychiatrist. “Yes,” said the psychiatrist, “pyromania. Or anyway a strong tendency toward pyromania.”
“And…uh…what causes it, doctor?”
You’ve seen that psychiatrist, lots of times. In yeast ads. Identified—probably correctly—as a famous Vienna specialist. Remember when there was that long line of famous Vienna specialists who advocated eating yeast for everything from moral turpitude to ingrowing toenails? That, of course, was before the Nazi steamroller crossed Austria and blood began to flow like wein. Well, make a composite picture in your mind of the Vienna yeast dynasty and you’ll know how impressive that psychiatrist looked.
“And…uh…what causes it, doctor?”
“Emotional instability, Mr. Smith. Pyromania is not insanity, I wish you to understand. Not as long as it remains… ah…under control. It is a compulsion neurosis, predicated upon emotional instability. As to why the neurosis took that particular channel of expression; somewhere back in infancy there must have been a psychic trauma which—”