It had a small staff at first: High-Life Higgins, Good-Time Charley Wu, Hilda the Hoop, Margaret the Houri, people like that. They had only a vague idea of what they wanted. They sifted the legends of the pleasure places: Fiddlers' Green, Maybe Jones' City, Barbary, Valhalla on the Rocks.

"If we could only resurrect the men who first had these visions, we'd have a stating place," said High-Life. "We've a dozen projects going, but none of them has the touch of a master. Could we find any of these great dreamers --""But Maybe Jones is still alive," said Hilda. "They say he still travels trying to find his place again."

"Great green gophers! Send for him!" howled Good-Time Charley Wu.

"It's originals like him that we want."

Word came to Maybe Jones on a distant planet that a group of people had some knowledge of the Perfect Place, and that they wanted to pool their knowledge with his.

Maybe burned up very light itself getting to them. This was it!

The Planning City had grown into a vast complex of buildings. Maybe Jones pa.s.sed the very large building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Islands. Over its doorway was the motto "Adagios of Islands, 0 my Prodigal"

from Crane.

"Not quite what I had in mind," said Maybe Jones.

He pa.s.sed the large building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Fields. Over its doorway was the motto -- "If I was thirsty, I have heard a spring, If I was dusty, I have found a field,"

from Belloc.

"The fields are always too far from town," said Maybe. Then, right across the street, he saw it, the small building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Cities. And over its doorway was a verse from the immortal Hiram Glotz: "Let sheep lie down in gra.s.s! I'll toe the rail!

I've got a thirst that ain't for Adam's ale!

I'll trade your fields of green for bistros brown Where 'Dusty' is a red-haired girl in town."

"Now that is a little bit more like it," said Maybe Jones. He went in and boldly announced himself, and they fell all over his neck.

"Margaret!" Maybe cried to the Houri. "You were there! You know where the Perfect Place is!"

"Maybe, I've been everywhere," she said. "I like them all. I think they're all perfect once you get things to going. I've been told that I lack discernment. Boys, you can't have everything, so that discernment has got to go when it gets in the way of exuberance. No, Maybe, I've run into you lots of times, but I just can't place your place. We'll build it though. Just don't leave me out of it."

"The pitch is this," said High-Life Higgins, after they had eaten and drunk and made cheer to excess. "We have now arrived at the three ultimates: Immortality, Heaven, h.e.l.l. We have just achieved the first of them. We are now setting up projects to construct the other two, on the premise that one man's Heaven is another man's h.e.l.l. We must build final enclaves for people of every choice. We cannot sit idly by and ask what we would do with the after-life. This is the afterlife. It became so as soon as immortality was achieved."

"Will you build my Perfect Place?" asked Maybe with hope.

"Sure. And ideas like yours are what this bureau needs. You wouldn't believe what some of the other bureaus have to work with. They get the arty ducks and the philosophy buffs and the peace-and-benevolence beats. Why, you get on jags like that and you'll be tired of them in a thousand years or less. How are they going to stand up through eternity? The Green Fields might do, for the green among us. The Islands might do, for those of insular mind and soul. But our own small bureau caters to the high-old-time, rather than the peace-eternal, crowd. We believe here (we know we are not the majority, but there has to be something for everyone) that the rooting old good-time town and the crowd that goes with it can stand up to the long-time gaff as well as anything. Would you like to see some of the work we havebeen doing?"

"I certainly would," said Maybe. "It might strike me as a little amateurish, but I'm sure it's in the right line."

"By our total recall methods we are able to reconstruct the Seven Sin Cities of History, Jones. They are the folk dreams that have also been raucous facts. The selection is one-sided, being out of the context of the old Western Civilization from which most of us descend. But they were such a hopping bunch of towns that (under the old recension) they had to be destroyed: by blast-from-Heaven, lava-flow, earthquake, sinking-in-the-sea, cow-fire, earthquake again and fire, hurricane and tidal wave. They were too hot to last.

"Here is Sodom. Now take a close-up of its old Siddim Square District where they had such a noisy go of it before it was wiped out. Go down and sample it."

Maybe Jones sampled old Sodom. He was back in about an hour.

"It's about as good as you could expect from that time," he said.

"The drinks were too sweet and sticky. So were the girls. The music was only fair. How do you tune a ram's horn anyhow? But, man, it won't stack up with the Perfect Place at all."

"Try Pompeii," said Good-Time Charley Wu. "We'll set you down on the corner of Cardo and Dec.u.ma.n.u.s streets. That was the first red light district to be so lighted and so named. Don't cut it too close. Watch out for the hot lava when you leave."

Maybe Jones was back from Pompeii in half an hour.

"It's strictly Little Italy and Little Egypt stuff," he told them, but he was smiling. "It's all right for a gag. It's fun. But it isn't on the same side of the street with the Perfect Place."

"Try Lisbon," said Hilda. "It's sort of a test. In its own centurv Lisbon was spiritually of the West Coast of Africa though geographically in Europe. Don't fall in the harbor going in, and watch the earthquake coming out."

Maybe Jones was in old Lishon for two hours. He liked it. "Man, man!" he said. "It's on a tangent, and not the true line, of course. But, were I not committed to the Perfect Place -- man!"

"Here's Port Royal before it was sunk in the sea," said High-Life.

"Some like it. Some don't."

Maybe was out of Port Royal in half an hour.

"It's all there," he said, "but they forgot to cook it. They even forgot to take the hide off it. People, a place has to have the illusion of smoothness -- that's part of the game. No, Port Royal is strictly a short-haul place."

"Have a go at Chicago before the fire," said Good-Time Charley Wu.

"It had its followers."

Maybe was back from Chicago in fifteen minutes.

"Are you kidding?" he asked. "We were speaking of cities, and you give me a country town. Size isn't the test. Oh, it's all right for boys, but who's going to be a boy for eternity?"

"Two to go," said Hilda. "Try San Francis...o...b..fore the quake and the fire."

So Maybe tried it. He was smiling when he came back. "It dates, it dates," he told them. "For amateur theatricals, yes. For eternity, no."

"One more," said High-Life. "Here is Galveston just before the hurricane and tidal wave of 1900. Try Old Tremont Street downtown where it crosses Post Office Street."

Maybe Jones went down in old Galveston and didn't come back. They sent for him and couldn't find him. He was gone all night. He came back the middle of next morning, looped to the ports and walking with a seaman's roll.

"It's put me in the mood," he cried. "I'm ready to go to work. Hey, that place has a touch of the eternal! I found a way to tune it and visitedGalveston in earlier and later years. I picked up an interesting piece of history too. You know, they never did bury any of the dead people after the hurricanes and tidal waves. They just ground them up and sold them for crab-meat sandwiches. Well, let's go to work. It's brought the Perfect Place back clear to my mind, and I'm ready to get with it."

"Jones, this is the Empyrean, the eternal fire-stuff, that we hold in our hands," High-Life said. "I know that these reconstructed legend cities leave a lot out, but men like you will help us put it in."

"Before I start, can we fix it so a man can get higher and higher and never have to come down?" Maybe wanted to know.

"Yes we can," Good-Time Charley told him. "The hangover, whether physical or spiritual, was a death in miniature. We have whipped it, as we have whipped death itself. We have a free hand here."

"There's got to be a catch to it," said Maybe. "Heavens, or h.e.l.ls, depending on the viewpoint, will be expensive."

"Long-term funding is the answer," said Good-Time Charley. "The longest terms ever -- forever. Put it all in. Set it all down, and we will make it that way."

"Man, man!" said Maybe Jones. He sat down at a table and took a large square of paper. He t.i.tled it modestly: "The Empyrean Aceording to Maybe Jones"

He began to write the specifications, and building was begun on the Perfect Place for people of a certain choice.

"That all the girls be built like clepsydras," he wrote, "you know, the ancient water-clock. It's a much more sophisticated shape than the hour-gla.s.s figure."

"Put me in," Margaret cried. "I'm shaped like a pendulum clock.

Notice the way I swing sometime."

(Listen, this isn't a private place for Maybe Jones. It's for all high-flyers everywhere. There will be plenty of room and variety in it.) "That all the bars be a mile, h.e.l.l, make it two miles, long," Maybe wrote. "That there be high liars there who'll make Live-Man Lutz sound like a parson. That they take the sky off early in the morning so you can get as high as you want all day long. That they have girls who'll make Little Midnight Mullins and Giggles McGuire and Belle h.e.l.lios and Susie-Q look like sheep dogs. That --"

Hey, get in on this if you're going to. They're building it now! If you are an arty duck or a philosophy buff or a peace-and-benevolence beat, then you can go to h.e.l.l -- to your own appropriate bureau -- and be heard.

But if you go for the high-old-time stuff, then make your wants known here.

If you are of the raffish elite and want to go where you can get higher and higher and never have to come down from it, if you want the good-time town and the crowd that goes with it for a long haul (and it's going to be a very long haul), then howl it out so they'll know that you're interested.

If you want anything at all added, tell them now, and they'll put it in.

Contact them by regular mail, or phone or voxo. Or tear out a sheet of this screed, scribble your wants in the margin, and drop it in any mail box. It will get there. The address is: "Bureau of Wonderful Cities. Old Earth."

That's all you need, but get with it. They're building our place now.

ONE AT A TIME

Barnaby phones up John Sourwine. If you frequent places like Barnaby's Barn (there is one in every Port City of the World, and John is a familiar figure in all of them) you may already know John Sourwine; and you will know him as Sour John.

"There's an odd one down here," Barnaby told him.

"How odd?" asked Sour John. He collected odd ones.

"Clear c.o.o.n-dog crazy, John. he looks like they just dug him up, but he's lively enough. "

Barnaby runs a fine little place that offers eating and drinking and covversation, all of them rare and hearty. And John Sourwine is always interested in new things, or old things returned. So John went down to Barnaby's Barn to see the Odd One.

There was no need to ask which one he was, though there were always strangers and traveling men and seamen unknown to John in the Barn. The Odd One stood out. He was a big, spare, tough fellow, and he said that his nanic was McSkee. He was eating and drinking with a chortling pleasure, and they all watched him in amazement.

"It's his fourth plate of spaghetti," Smokehouse confided to Sour John, "and that is the last of two dozen eggs. He's had twelve hamburgers, six coney islands, six crab-burgers, five foot-long hot-dogs, eighteen bottles of beer, and twenty cups of coffee. "

"Blind banking barnacles! He must be getting close to some of the records of Big Bucket Bulge," Sour John exclaimed with sudden interest.

"John, he's broken most of those records already," Smokehouse told him, and Barnaby nodded a.s.sent. "If he can hold the pace for another forty-five minutes, he'll beat them all."

Well, the Odd One was still a spare fellow with a great gangling frame designed to carry fifty pounds more thin the lean fellow now owned.

But he began to fill out even as John watched him and it was not only that he bulked larger almost by the minute, it was also as though a light was being turned on inside him. He glowed, then he shone. Then he begin to sparkle.

"You like to eat, do you, old-timer?" Sour John asked the Odd One, the amazing McSkee.

"I like it well enough!" McSke boomed with a happy grin. "But, more than that, it's just that I'm a bed.a.m.ned show-off! I like everything in excess. I love to be in the roaring middle of it all!"

"One would think that you hadn't eaten in a hundred years," Sour John probed.

"You're quick!" the illuminated McSkee laughed. "A lot of them never do catch on to me, and I tell them nothing unless they guess a little first.

Aye, you've got the liairy ears, though, and the adder's eyes of a true gentleman. I love a really ugly man. We will talk while I eat."

"What do you do when you've finished eating?" asked John, pleased at the comphments, as the waiters began to pile the steaks high in front of McSkee.

"On, I go from eating to drinking," McSkee munched out. "There's no sharp dividing line between the pleasures. I go from drinking to the girls; from the girls to fighting and roistering. And finally I sing."

"A b.e.s.t.i.a.l procedure," said John with admiration. "and when your pentastomic orgy is finished?"

"On, then I sleep," McSkee chuckled. "Watch how I do it some time. I should give lessons. Few men understand how it should be done. "

"Well, how long do you sleep?" Sour John asked, "and is there something spectacular about your sleeping that I don't understand?"

"Of course it's spectacular. And I sleep till I waken. At this I also set records. "

And McSkee was wolfing the tall pile of steaks till Sour John had a mystic vision of an entire steer devoured except for head and hide andhooves, the slaughterer's take.

Later, they talked somewhat more leisurely as McSkee worked his way through the last half-dozen steaks, for now the edge was off his great appet.i.te.

"In all this ostentatious b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, was there not one gluttony more outstanding than the others?" Sour John drew him out. "One time when you outdid even yourself?"

"Aye, there was that," said McSkee. "There was the time when they were going to hang me with the new rope."

"And how did you cut your way out of that one?" Sour John asked.

"At that time and in that country -- it was not this one -- the custom was new of giving the condemned man what he wanted to eat," the incandescent McSkee limned it out in his voice with the lilt of a barrel organ. "I took advantage of the new usage and stripped the countryside. It was a good supper they gave me, John, and I was to be hanged at daybreak.

But I had them there, for I was still eating at dawn. They could not interrupt my last meal to hang me -- not when they had promised me a full meal. I stood them off that day and the night and the following day. That is longer than I usually eat, John, and I did outdo myself. That countryside had been known for its poultry and its stickling pigs and its fruits. It is known for them no longer. It never recovered. "

"Did you?"

"Oh, certainly, John. But by the third dawn I was filled. The edge was off my appet.i.te, and I do not indulge thereafter."

"Naturally not. But what happened then? They did not hang you, or you would not be here to tell about it."

"That doesn't follow, John. I had been hanged before."

"Oh?"

"Sure. But not this time. I tricked them. When I had my fill, I went to sleep. and then deeper and deeper into sleep until I died. They do not hang a man already dead. They kept me for a day to be sure. John, I get a pretty high shine on me in a day! I'm a smelly fellow at best. Then they buried me, but they did not hang me. Why do you look at me so oddly, John?"