"I hear noises every night, though I sleep with the earphones on, and all outside noise is supposed to be cut out. It must be that I dream the noises.

"Did you dream last night? Did you dream anything about a murder or a dead person?" Gold asked.

"Yes. About seven dreams like that."

"Tell us one of them."

"Which one?"

"Hell, I don't know. We're shooting blind. Tell us one."

"Well, this one, it's kind of silly. This was a long time ago, or anyhow it took place in a cabin and by candlelight. We sat wake over a corpse. We cracked and ate walnuts, but someone objected when we threw the shells in with the corpse, though that was a good place to throw them. Then someone else."

"Oh Judas!" said Captain Keil.

"I believe that is enough of that one," Captain Gold said. "Were all of the seven dreams like that?"

"All of them about murder or corpses, yes. All of them kind of silly."

"Seven story dreams we have yet," Keil said. "We're getting nowhere."

"Then we'll get somewhere," Gold said. "Handle, have you any idea who killed Minnie Jo Merry?"

"I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry."

"What?"

"I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie --"

"You are talking for the record?"

"Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed --"

So they took him downtown, but first they gave orders for a new lock to he put on George Handle's door and they left a guard at the apartment building.

Naturally they didn't leave it at that. The confession of the half-fool was complete enough. There were odd elements in it, but he was an odd man. He said that he had killed the girl in a dream; that he had risen and gone to her room and strangled her and thrown her out of the open window because he was jealous. Then he had gone back to his bed, to other dreams.

Yet there were points about that murder that hadn't been given out, that only the killer could have known; George Handle knew them Nevertheless, the two captains continued to check during that morning.

They found that Minnie Jo was an inefficient but promising worker for a stationery company. Her particular girlfriend believed that Minnie Jo ran around only with the men where she lived. They checked the places she frequented, and she had been seen with all the men.

She had been out with Gadherry and with Handle often, and with Izzard nearly as often. She had even been seen dining with the sardonic Nazworthy at a sardonic place run by two Bulgarian brothers. She often went to Webbers, and sometimes drank coffee in the kitchen with the dishwasher Lamprey. It was believed by them at Webbers, though, that this was mere kindness on her part.

Minnie Jo had even been seen drinking Irish coffee with Dillahunty in the after-midnight hours at Maddigan's. Nor was she the only girl a third his age that he brought in. The sap was not all dead in him yet.

They found that Dillahunty was well liked, Handle was liked, and even poor Lamprey was liked.

Izzard was not liked, Gadberry was not liked, Nazworthy was not liked."We can tell nothing by that," Keil said. "Handle has confessed, and it makes no difference that the people who know him like him. There is nothing to tie onto the others, even if Gadberry is selfish, Izzard is demanding, and Nazworthy is sardonic. We still have the fact that Handle has confessed."

"Yes. Repetitiouslv. But to be sure, let's go hear him again. Again, George Handle told them, "I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie --"

"He sounds like --"

"Yes, doesn't he?" Keil interrupted Gold. "Let's go look for it."

"Has anybody been trying to get into Handle's room?" they asked the guard at the apartment.

"Gadberry has. Says Handle owes him money. Says he was to go in and get it. Says he wears Handle's shirts, and this locking out puts him to grave inconvenience. Handle never locked his door, according to him. Gadberry was disappointed to find the new lock on it. He seems pretty nervous now." They found Gadberry.

"Come on with us. We'll go to his room and get it."

"What? Get what?"

"What you were trying to get. What is making you nervous that you couldn't get? It will be here, somewhere with the bunch of them. Quite a few of them here, aren't there, Gadberry?"

They were in Handle's room now.

"I don't know what you mean," Gadberry protested.

"The tapes, the wires, the records. How long would it take to play them all?"

"I don't know."

"You know pretty well. It would take about forty hours or more, wouldn't it? Will you find it for us, or must we play them all? And you will listen."

"I won't listen to forty hours of that drivel. I'll find it for you. I'd have said that nothing could break me down, but that surely could."

"Why did you kill the girl, Gadberry?"

"Jealousy, frustration, curiosity..."

"I can understand the jealousy. She was an attractive girl. What was the frustration?"

"She was almost perfect, but not quite, and it is that which is just short of a masterpiece that infuriates. It is so near -- yet it misses. I'm always in anger to destroy a near-masterpiece."

"So you destroyed her. And the third element was your curiosity, like when you said 'The girl was somehow completed in death.' You had to see how she would look dead."

"Yes. That knowledge was necessary to my work." Gadberry had located the tape for them, and Captain Keil was threading it into the machine.

"I suspect that you weren't accurate in your appraisal to us of Miss Merry, Gadberry. You said that she hadn't eyes, and other things."

"I lied. She had eyes, and she wasn't conventional. She was near perfect; gentlemen. So near."

"And in preparation for the murder it was only necessary for you to condition the easily led George Handle to a confession?"

"Astute of me, was it not, Captains?"

The machine played now in the compelling voice of Gilford Gadberry, as it had night after night played to George Handle, in his sleep, till he had learned to answer on cue; and the cue, of course, was the question: "Who killed Minnie Jo Merry?"

"Pretty uninspired," Gadberry had to admit, "but I had to assume uninspired questioners, to whom the cliche would come naturally."

The machine went on to recount certain abominations that only the killer knew he would commit, but the voice of that most polished adman returned again and again to the command: "Say, 'I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangledher and threw her out the window. I killed --'"

THE WORLD AS WILL AND WALLPAPER.

A template, a stencil, a plan.

Corniest, orniest damsel and man, Orderly, emptily passion and pity, All-the-World, All-the-World, All-the-World City.

13th Street Ballad There is an old dictionary-encyclopedia that defines a City as "...a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained." The dictionary-encyclopedia being an old one, however (and there is no other kind), is mistaken. The World City is economically self-contained.

It was William Morris who read this definition in the old book. William was a bookie, or readie, and he had read parts of several books. But now he had a thought: If all the books are old, then things may no longer be as the books indicate. I will go out and see what things are like today in the City.

I will traverse as much of the City as my life allows me. I may even come to the Wood Beyond the World that my name-game ancestor described.

William went to the Permit Office of the City. Since there was only one City, there might be only one Permit Office, though it was not large.

"I want a permit to traverse as much of the City as my life allows me,"

William told the permit man. "I even want a permit to go to the Wood Beyond the World. Is that possible?"

The permit man did a little skittish dance around William, "like a one-eyed gander around a rattlesnake." The metaphor was an old and honored one, one of the fifty-four common metaphors. They both understood it: it didn't have to be voiced. William was the first customer the permit man had had in many days, though, so the visit startled him.

"Since everything is permitted, you will need no permit," the permit man said. "Go, man, go."

"Why are you here then?" William asked him. "If there are no permits, why is there a Permit Office?"

"This is my niche and my notch," the permit man said. "Do away with me and my office and you begin to do away with the City itself. It is the custom to take a companion when you traverse the City."

Outside, William found a companion named Kandy Kalosh and they began to traverse the City that was the World. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words "Beginning of Stencil 35,352." The City tipped and tilted a bit, and they were on their way.

Now this is what the City was like: It was named Will of the World City, for it had been constructed by a great and world-wide surge of creative will. Afterward, something had happened to that surge, but it did not matter; the City was already created then.

The City was varied, it was joyful, it was free and it covered the entire world. The mountains and heights had all been removed, and the City, with its various strips of earth and sweet water and salt water, floated on the ocean on its interlocking floaters. As to money values, everything was free; and everything was free as to personal movement and personal choice. It was not really crowded except in the places where the people wanted it crowded, for people do love to congregate. It was sufficient as to foodstuff and shelter and entertainment. These things have always been free, really; it was their packaging and traffic that cost, and now the packaging and traffic were virtually eliminated.

"Work is joy" flashed the subliminal signs. Of course it is. It is a joy to stop and turn into an area and work for an hour, even an hour and a half, at some occupation never or seldom attempted before. William and Kandy entered an area where persons made cloth out of clamshells, softening them in one solution, then drawing them out to filaments on a machine, then forming (notweaving) them into cloth on still another machine. The cloth was not needed for clothing or for curtains, though sometimes it was used for one or the other. It was for ornamentation. Temperature did not require cloth (the temperature was everywhere equitable) and modesty did not require it, but there was something that still required a little cloth as ornament.

William and Kandy worked for nearly an hour with other happy people on the project. It is true that their own production was all stamped "Rejected"

when they were finished, but that did not mean that it went all the way back to the clamshells, only back to the filament stage.

"Honest labor is never lost," William said as solemnly as a one-horned owl with the pip.

"I knew you were a readie, but I didn't know you were a talkie," Kandy said. People didn't talk much then. Happy people have no need to talk. And of course honest labor is never lost, and small bits of it are pleasurable.

This portion of the City (perhaps all portions of the City) floated on an old ocean itself. It had, therefore, a slight heave to it all the time.

"The City is a tidy place" was an old and honored saying. It referred to the fact that the City moved a little with the tides. It was a sort of joke.

The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen. For much of this traverse the City had been familiar to William but not to Kandy. They had been going west, and William had always been a westing lad. Kandy, however, had always wandered east from her homes, and she was the farthest west that she had ever been when she met William.

They came to the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers.

These swimmers were very good, and great numbers of curiously shaped fish frolicked with them in the green salt-fresh pools. Anyone who wished to could, of course, swim in the Water Ballet, but most of the swimmers seemed to be regulars. They were part of the landscape, of the waterscape.

William and Kandy stopped to eat at an algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on ~5th Street. Indeed, Kandy worked there for half an hour, pressing the plankton and adding squirts of special protein as the people ordered it.

Kandy had worked in quick-lunch places before.

The two of them stopped at the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on ~6th Street. They wrote their names with a stylus in wax when they went in, or rather William wrote the names of both of them for Kandy could not write. And because he bore the mystic name of William, he received a card Out of the slot with a genuine Will of the World verse on it: This City of the World is wills Of Willful folk, and nothing daunts it.

With daring hearts we hewed the hills To make the World as Willy wants it.

Really, had it taken such great will and heart to build the City of the World? It must have or there would not have been a Will of the World Exhibit Hall to commend it. There were some folks, however, who said that the building of the World City had been an automatic response.

Kandy, being illiterate (as the slot knew), received a picture card.

They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on ~7th Street. This part of the City was new to William as well as to Kandy.

The cliffs and caves were fabricated and not natural cliff dwellings, but they looked very much as old cliff dwellings must have looked. There were little ladders going up from one level to the next. There were people sitting on the little terraces with the small-windowed apartments behind them. Due to the circular arrangement of the cliff dwellings, very many of the people were always visible to one another. The central courtyard was like an amphitheater.

Young people played stickball and Indian ball in this area. They made music on drums and whistles. There were artificial rattlesnakes in coils, artificial rib-skinny dogs, artificial coyotes, artificial women in the act of grinding corn with hand querns. And also, in little shelters or pavilions, there werereal people grinding simulacrum corn on apparatus.

Kandv Kalosh went into one of the pavilions and ground corn for fifteen minutes. She had a healthy love for work. William Morris made corn-dogs out of simulacrum corn and seaweeds. It was pleasant there. Sometimes the people sang simulacrum Indian songs. There were patterned blankets, brightly collared, and woven out of bindweed. There were buffoons in masks and buffoon suits who enacted in-jokes and in-situations that were understood by the cliff-dwelling people only, but they could be enjoyed by everyone.

"All different, all different, every block different," William murmured in rapture. It had come on evening, but evening is a vague thing. It was never very bright in the daytime or very dark at night. The World City hadn't a clear sky but it had always a sort of diffused light. William and Kandy traveled still farther west.

"It is wonderful to be a world traveler and to go on forever, William exulted. "The City is so huge that we cannot see it all in our whole lives and every bit of it is different."

"A talkie you are," Kandy said. "However did I get a talkie? If I were a talkie too I could tell you something about that every-part-of-it-is-different bit."

"This is the greatest thing about the whole World City," William sang, "to travel the City itself for all our lives, and the climax of it will be to seethe Wood Beyond the World. But what happens then, Kandy? The City goes on forever, covering the whole sphere. It cannot be bounded. What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?"

"If I were a talkie I could tell you," Kandy said.

But the urge to talk was on William Morris. He saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an arm band with the lettering "Monitor" or it. Of course only a readie, or bookie, like William would have been able to read the word.

"My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood Beyond the World," William told the erect and smiling man, "for I also am a William Morris. I am avid to see this ultimate wood. It is as though I have lived for the moment."

"If you will it strongly enough, then you may see it, Willy," the man said.

"But I am puzzled," William worried out the words, and his brow was furrowed. "What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?"