"Where has the dorg been sighted, Adian?" Riddle asked him.

"Down in the Winding Stair Mountains of -- ah -- Oklahoma," Durchbruch chirped, and bounced around in eagerness to be at it.

"Then let's fly down there right now," Riddle offered. "I used to own an airplane. I wonder if I still have it."

"Yes, you still have it," Annalouise told him.

"Good, let's go." All of them, Dordogne the mad cartoonist, Hames Riddle the trilobal psychologist, Adrian Durchbruch the crash-oriented Chief of Remedial Ecology, and Annalouise Krug the Amalgamated Youth went out to Riddle's place and got in the plane.

"Which way is Oklahoma?" Riddle asked when they were airborne. "Listen to the sound of that engine, people, to the sound of any engine anywhere. Do yen kwow that functionally the engine sounds have no purpose? The various engines produce their monotonous noises solely to hynotize human persons. Then the engines are able to --" But Riddle's warning words were suddenly blocked out by the engine's sudenly increased noise volume. Engines will do that every time the stibject is about to be discussed.

The world was in pretty short supply as to food. The miracle of the barley loaves and the fishes had fed the multitudes for a long time. Barley had been developed that would yield five hundred bushels an acre, and billionsand billions of fishes had been noodled out of the oceans. The oceans, however, are mostly desert, so have they always been; and the oases and streams and continental shelves of them had been harvested to their limits of both fish and plankton. And on land all the worthy areas were producing to their utmost, and still it was not enough.

The solution: Turnip or Tetrapod. A plant was needed that would grow more lush than barley, more lush than grass, that would be fully edible for humans in both top and bottom of it, that would grow on even the worst land.

And such a plant was being searched for carefully. More than that, it was being invented every day, everywhere, everyhow. But the new plants were not really good enough.

And a four-footed annual (they are the best kind) was being searched out It would have to be a fine fleshed and multiple-bearing annual, with as many litters as possible a year; one that would grow quickly to great size and succulence; one that could eat and thrive on anything, anything, even -- one that could eat -- About that time, the mad cartoonist J.P. Dordogne invented just such an annual in his comic strip. It was a big, comical, rock-eating animal. It struck the popular fancy and humor at once, though it did not at once put anything into the popular stomach. It was a shambling hulk of an animal, good-natured and weird. It ate earth and rocks and anything at all. It didn't even need vegetation, or water. It grew peculiarly fat on such feeding.

And the dorg had a fine slow wit as shown in the comic strip dialogue balloons. The people liked the dorg and especially liked the idea that the aninial could grow so large and toothsome on nothing but rocks and earth. The aninial was not loved the less because there was something unreal and mad about it, even beyond the unreality of all things in that medium. Something else: the dorg in the comic strip was always feeling bad: there was an air of something momentous about to happen to him.

The dorg filled an inner need, of emotion if not of stomach yet. It became the hopeful totem of the people on the bitig edge of hunger. And the dorg was unmistakable; that was what gave the news reports their sharp interest. There was recognition and recollection of the dorg as matching a buried interior image. It could not be mistaken for something else. The sighters had sighted the dorg, or they had suffered hallucination. But they had not mistaken some other object or creature for the dorg. And Dordogne the cartoonist, a bland little man except for the mad black eyes, was scared stupid by reports that the cartoon animal had actually been seen, alive and all.

It was then that there appeared, in Primitive Arts Quarterly, an off piece by the trilobal psychologist James Riddle. The piece was titled "Lascaux, Dordogne, and the Naming of the Animals." The essay contained this strange thesis: "What happened in the cave art days of Lascaux was the 'Naming' of the Animals. The paintings were the namings, or at least they were an aspect of the namings. It must be understood that this was concurrent with the creative act. The depicted animals were absolutely new then. if the paleozoologists say otherwise, then the paleozoologists are wrong. The men also were absolutely new then.

"Some, perhaps all, of these cave paintings were anticipatory: the paintings appeared a slight time before the animals themselves appeared. My evidence for this is subjective, and yet I am as sure of this as I am of anything in the world. In several cases, the animals, when they appeared, did not quite conform to their depictment. In several other cases, owing I supposed to a geodetic accident, the corresponding animals failed to appear at all.

"It is certain that this art was anticipatory and prophetic, heralding the appearance of new species over the life horizon. It was precursor art, harbinger art. It is certain also that this art contained elements ofeffective magic; it is most certain that the species were of sudden appearance. The only thing not certain is just to what extent the paintings were creative of the animals. There is still fluid mystery about the mechanism of the sudden appearance of species. The paleontologists cannot throw any light on this mystery at all, and the biologists cannot. But the artist can throw light on it, and the psychologist can. It is clear that a new species appears, suddenly and completely developed, exactly when it is needed.

"And a new species is needed exactly now.

"It is for this reason that there is peculiar interest in a recent creation of the cartoonist Jasper Pendragon Dordogne. He has depicted a new species of animal. I do not believe that Dordogne realizes what he is doing.

He isn't an intelligent man. I do not believe that the Lascaux cave painters realized what they were doing. But the art of J.P. Dordogne, like that of the old cave painters, is anticipatory, it is prophetic, it is precursor art, harbinger art. The new species of animal will appear almost immediately, if it has not already appeared. The exact effect that the cartoonist will have on the appearing species we do not know. The effect that we may be able to have on the cartoonist will not be exact, but it can be decisive.

"Above all, let us see it happen, if this is at all possible. Let us witness the appearance of a new species for once. It should answer very many questions. It should give the final answer to that dreary and tedious remnant of evolutionists that still lingers in benighted areas. Let our hope and our effort be toward this being a permanent appearance. Very many of them have not been permanent."

Adrian Durchbruch, the newly appointed Chief of Remedial Ecology, had read the James Riddle article in Primitive Arts Quarterly on his first day on the job. He immediately requisitioned the mad-eyed cartoonist J.P. Dordogne and the trilobal psychologist for his program. They were both referring to the animal that the world and the project were looking for. However the two men might have their information confused, they did seem to have information of a sort.

When Durchbruch incorporated himself and these other two men into his project, he also had to include a member of Amalgamated Youth to keep it legal. He accepted Annalouise Krug gladly. You should see what most members of Amalgamated Youth are like.

The reports of the actual sightings of the animal had come in immediately. And the four persons flew down to the area immediately.

Riddle landed the plane in tall grass near Talihina, Oklahoma, and the four dorg-seekers got out.

"We will immediately contact the local -authorities," Adrian Durchbruch began as he bounded around on his feet on the springy ground, "and we will find whether --"

"On, shut up, Adrian," Riddle said pleasantly. "This lady here knows where it can be found. If that were not so, I would have landed in some other place where a lady would know all about it. Time spent checking with authorities is always time lost. Where is the dorg, lady?"

"It went up in the high pasture this morning," said the lady that was there. "It has been feeling so bad that we were worried about it. And you are the only one that knows what's the matter with it. You, mad-eyes, I'm talking to you. You know what is bothering it, don't you?"

"Gosh, I'm afraid I do," the cartoonist Dordogne grumbled sadly. "I've been afraid to say it or draw it, though. If it is true, then it will push me clear over the edge, and everyone says I haven't far to go. Don't let it happen! I don't want to be that crazy."

"My husband followed him up there a while ago," the lady said, "and he took his big Jim Bowie knife with him, in case we guessed right about it. They can't hardly do it by themselves, you know. They're not built for it. 0h, here they come now, and the little one is with them." The man, and the big dorg (moving painfully), and the little dorg were coming down the slope.

"But the big dorg is male!" Annalouise Krug cried out in unbelief.

"Yes, they have such a hard time of it," the lady said. "There isn't any other way to get anything staricd, though."

The man and the big male dorg and the little female dorg came down to them.

"It wasn't much trouble," the man said. "He went to sleep."

"The Tardemah, the deep sleep," Riddle said reverently. "I should have guessed it."

"Then I cut him open and took her out of his side," the man said. "They will both be all right now."

"Bu Caesarean section," Annalouise mumbled. "Why didn't we all guess it?" There was a loud snapping noise. "What was that?" Adrian demanded, bouncing around.

"My mind just snapped," Dordogne said woozily. "I won't bother to keep up appearances any longer. Now I will be crazy with a clear conscience."

The little dorg was near grown within one month and was impregnated. In another mornh she produced a litter of ten. In another five weeks another, and in another five weeks still another. And the young ones produced at two months, and again in five weeks, and again in another five weeks. Quite soon there were a million of them, and then one hundred million, shipped all over the world wow. These were big cow-sized animals of excellent meat, and they ate only the rocks and waste hills where nothing had ever grown, turning it into fertile soil incidentally.

Soon there were a billion dorgs in the world ready for butchering, and the numbers of them could be tapered off as soon as it seemed wise, and there was enough meat for everyone in the world.

"I have only one worry," the trilobal psychologist James Riddle said as he met with Adrian Dirchbruch and Annalouise Krug in a self-congratulatory session. J.P. Dordogne the mad cartoonist was in a sanitarium now and was really mad. "I keep remembering a part of those cave paintings at Lascaux."

"What were they, James?" Annalouise Krug asked. Annalouise was not so much in the fashion as she had once been. Well-fed nations somehow set their ideals on more svelte types.

"They were the crossed-out animals, the chiseled-over animals, the funny-looking animals. They are funny-looking to us only because we have never seen them in the flesh. They are the animals that did not survive. We don't know why they did not. They were drawn originally with the same boldness as the rest of them."

"We don't know what the odds are," Adrian said worriedly, forgetting to bounce. "We have no way at all to calculate them. It is so hard to take a census of things that aren't. We will keep our fingers crossed and all fetishes working full time. Without primordial fetish there wouldn't have been ally animals or people at all."

It went on smoothly for a year and a day after the dorgs had struck their proper world balance. There was plenty of meat for everyone in the world, there were plenty of dorgs, and they had to be segregated to prevent their being too many.

Then the index of dorg fertility fell. The numbers of them were raised up past the safe level again only by unsegregating all flocks. The index fell again and continued to fall. It disappeared.

The last dorgs were born. There was breathless waiting to see if some of them mignt not be fertile. They weren't. It was all over with, and the world wailing raised higher it had ever been.

"What we need is fresh insights, youthful impetus, not the woeful stutterings of aged minds," Annalouise Krug was saying. "Aren't there anyother animals that can live on rocks?"

"No," Adrian Durchbruch said sadly.

"Where does the species male come from in the first place?" she asked.

"It appears for the first time on a Monday morning in a comic strip or on a cave mural," James Riddle said. "I believe it is something about the syndication that new formats in cartoons always appear on Monday mornings."

"Before that, I mean. Where does the male come from?" Annalouise said.

"I don't know," Riddle groused.

"Well, somebody had better remember something right now," Annalouise stated with a curious menace. "Riddle, what good does an extra lobe do you if you can't remember something special? Come up with something, I say."

"I can't. There is nothing else to come up with," Riddle said. But Annalouise picked the psychologist up and shook him till he near fell apart.

"Now remember something else," she ordered.

"I can't, Annalouise, there is nothing else to rememeber."

"You have no idea how hard I will shake you if you don't conic up with something. " She gave him an idea of just how hard she could shake him.

"Now!" she ordered.

"On, yes, since my life is on the line, I will remember something else,"

Riddle moaned, with not much wind left in him. "There are others of those cave paintings that are most curious. Some of them are printed and carved over and over and over again, always in the same region. Most of them are of the common animals of today. Did it come that close, do you think, with even the common ones of them? One at least (and this gives me some hope) was a common annual of today that had been crossed out as having failed. But someone was not content to let it remain crossed out. It was redrawn with great emphasis. And then redrawn and expanded again and again, always in the same region. "

"Let's go to Dordogne right now with plenty of drawing materials,"

Adrian snapped.

"But Dordogne is crazy," Annalouise cried. "Always in what same region, Adrian?"

"We're crazy, too, to think of it," Adrian hooted, "but let's go to him right now."

"What region, James?" Annalouise insisted. "Always drawn over and over again in what same region?"

"The belly. Let's go to Dordogne."

They had Dordogne on his feet and drawing dorgs so pregnant that their bellies drug the gromid. He was dazed, though, and sniffling.

"When you've drawn one pregnant dorg you've drawn them all," he whimpered.

But they kept him at it. He collapsed, but thy jerked him back to the task again. Who knows which may be the quickening stroke? "On your feet, Dordogne," they yelled, "Do it one more time!"

AND NOW WALK GENTLY THROUGH THE FIRE.

"The Ichtyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds. They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum also. It's only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. There is also the fact that most of them are very young, or at least of a youthful appearance. Their threat to us Is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It's a double danger they offer us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect tofight them. They'd almost trick us into organizing to hunt down their organization.

"Oh, they can live near as loosely as ourselves in their deception.

These builders can abandon buildings in their trickery. They'll live in tents, they'll live in huts, they'll live under the open sky as easily as do ourselves, the regular people. But observe (they trick us there again: observation is a quality of theirs, not of ours), notice that everything they do is structured. There is always something structured about their very tents; there is something peculiarly structured about their buts; they even maintain that there is something structured about the open sky. They are the Institutional People.

"The Queer Fish claim that Gaea (Earth) is the most anciently peopled of the worlds and that they themselves are the most ancient people. But they set their own first appearance in quite late times, and they contradict the true ancientness of humans and proto-humans.

"The Queer Fish have been bloody and warlike in their times. They have been Oceanic as well as Sky-Faring, in some cases beyond ourselves in that phase. They have even been, in several peculiar contexts, creative. They are not now creative in the arts (they do not even recognize the same arts as we do). They are certainly not creative in the one remaining genuine art, that of unstructured music. They are something much worse than creative now: they are procreative in the flesh. Their fishy flesh would have already become dominant if they hadn't been ordered hiinted to extinction. Even in this they force us to come out of ourselves, to use one of their own words.

"They force us to play their game. We have to set up certain structures ourselves to effect their destruction. We even need to institute certain movements and establishments to combat their Institutionalism and Establishmentalism. They are, let us put it plainly, the plague-carriers.

Sball we, the Proud Champions of the Destroyed Worlds, have to abandon a part of our tbesis to bring about their unstructuring, their real destruction? Must we take unseemly means to balk their fishy plague? We must."

"Problem of the Queer Fish."

Analects. - The Putty Dwarf Judy Thatcher was moving upcountry in a cover of cattle. The millions of feral cattle were on all the plains. Most of these cattle were wobble-eyed and unordered. But an ordered person, such as Judy, would have ordered cattle; she could draw them about her like with a sense of structure a cloak, whole droves of them. A person could manipulate whole valleys of these cattle, could turn them (the smaller units turning the larger), could head them any way required, could use them for concealment or protection, could employ their great horned phalanxes as a threat. Judy Thatcher had some hundreds of her own ordered bulls. Being magic (she was one of the Twelve) she could manipulate almost anything whatsoever.

But most of the cattle of the plains were not quite cattle, were not ordered cattle. Most of the horses were not quite horses, nor the dogs dogs.

Most of the people were no longer quite people (this from the viewpoint of the Queer Fish; Judy was a Queer Fish).

Judy was a young and handsome woman of rowdy intellect. She had, by special arrangement, two eyes outside of her bead, and these now traveled on the two horizons. These eyes were her daughter, traveling now about two miles to the East and right of her on a ridge, and her son moving on another ridge three miles to her left and West. She was a plague carrier, she and hers. All three of them were Queer Fish.

The son, on her West and left, worked along a North-running ridge in those high plains and be could scan the filled plain still farthcr to the West. He could mark every disordered creature on that plain, and he had also been marking for some time one creature that was wrongly ordered but moving toward him with a purpose. This son, Gregory, was twelve years old. Being of that age, be knew it was time for a certain encounter. He knew that the creature, wrongly ordered and moving towards him with a purpose, would be a party to that encounter.

This always happens to boys of that age, when they are of the ripe time for the Confirmation or the Initiation of whatever sort. Many boys, unstructured boys, amazed boys of the regular species, boys of the Queer Fish even, are not conscious of the encounter when it comes. It may come to them so casually that they miss its import. It may come as wobble-eyed as themselves and they accept it without question. It may even come to them in dream state (whether in waking or walking dream, or in night dream), and then it sinks down, yeasting and festering a little bit but not really remembered, into their dream underlay. But many boys, particularly those of the Queer Fish species, know it consciously when it comes, and they negotiate with it.

(As to the ritual temptation of girls, that is of another matter, and perhaps it is of earlier or later years. Any information must come from a girl, or from a woman who remembers when she was a girl. Many do not seem to remember it at all. Most will deny it. Some will talk around it, but they do not talk of it directly. You may find an exceptional one who will. You may be an exceptional one who knows about it. But it isn't in the records.) Gregory Thatcher, being twelve years old and in his wits, was tempted by a devil on a high spot on that ridge. There had been a cow, a white-eyed or glare-eyed cow, coming blindly towards him. The cow had no order or purpose, but someone in the cow came on purpose. Then the cow was standing, stock-still, blind-still, too stupid to graze, too balkish to collapse, less anlinate than a stone cow. Whoever had been in her had come out of her now.

Where was he?

There was a little flicker of black lightning, a slight snigger, and he was there.

"Command that these stones be made bread," he said (his heart not quite in it). He was a minor devil; his name was Azazel. He wasn't the great one of that name, but one of the numerous nephews. There is an economy of names among the devils.

"Does it always have to start with those same words?" Gregory asked him.

"That's the way the rubric runs, boy," Azazel jibed. "You Fish are strong on rubric yourselves, you're full of it. Play the game."

"We are the rubric," Gregory said easily, "in the first meaning, the red meaning. We're the red ocher, the red earth."

"A smart Fish I have, have I? You heard the words 'Command that these stones be made bread.' Do it, or confess that you are unable to do it. You Fish claim powers."

"It is easy enough to make bread with these stones," said Gregory. "Even you can see that they are all roughly quern stones, grinding stones. They are all flat or dished limestones and almost any two will fit together. And the wild wheat stands plentiful and in full head. It's easy enough to thresh it out by rubbing the ears in my hands, to grind it to meal or to flour between your stones, to mix with water from my flask and salt from my pack, to build a fire of cow chips and make bread cakes on one of the flat rocks put to cap the fire. I've dined on this twice today. I'd dine with you on it now if fraternizing were allowed."

"It isn't, Greg. You twist the words. They are 'Command that these stories be made bread,' not 'Command that these stones make bread.' You fail it."

"I fail nothing, Azazel." (The two of them seemed about the same age, but that was not possible.) "You'll not command me to cornmand. On with it, though."

"Cast thyself down from this height," Azazel ordered. "If you are one of the elect you'll not be dashed to pieces by it."

"I'll not be dashed to pieces yet. It's high but not really steep. Not a good selection, Azazel." "We work with what we are given. The final one then -- the world and all that is in it --." Here Azazel went into a dazzle. He was real enough, but now he went into contrived form and became the Argyros Daimon, the Silver Demon who was himself a literary device and diversion. He waved a shimmering silvery band. "The world and all that is in it, all this I will give you, if --." Then they both had to laugh.

"It isn't much of a world you have to offer," Greg Thatcher grinned.