"I don't know," the Dutchman said.

But one of the men there had affinity with two large birds of the kind called radjatualt, who were larger than others of their species and special in several ways. They preyed over the ocean as well as over the land (they were, in fact, sea-eagles), they talked more canny than parrots, and they were more intelligent than the Tekderek, the crane. The man went out of the Dutchman's house and whistled loudly. The two big birds appeared as two dots in the sky, they came on very rapidly, and then they were there with the men.

"Oh yes, I've heard of you two fellows," the Dutchman said to the birds.

"If one of you were flying high over Ganedidalem and the other over Berebere, could you still see each other at that distance?"

"Yes, if we were high enough, we could still see each other," one of the birds said.

"And would you he too high to see our ready-signal from the shores then?"

"No, we could see that too," the other bird said. "Tell us what you want us to do."

The Dutchman carefully told them about the affair. Then he said, "The one of you fly now to Berebere and find the men there. Tell them how it is, Tell them that we start now and will be at our place in the early morning. Let them be at their place then too. And caution them to be clear of the Hinges when they do it, on the outside of them, or they may find themselves turned over when it happens. In the morning you two birds will give the signal to each other and to us so we can do it together."

The one bird flew off to Berehere. The twelve leading men, each one taking three lesser men with him, east off in twelve fishing boats. They set sail on the evening wind; and with the wind and the oars going all night, they were off Ganedidalem in the early morning.

They found the great Hinge in an inlet, just where legend had always said it should be. They took the twelve windlass winches off the twelve fishing boats, and the Dutchman rigged them to the kapok-wood axle of the World Hinge. There would he no trouble about the same thing up at Berebere.

The men at Berebere are handier and more mechanical than the men of Obi.

Then four men stood at each windlass to throw their weight to the thing.

The Dutchman gave the ready signal to the bird in the sky. Then they waited.

One minute later, the bird flared his great wings and began to dive straight down for signal. Long leagues to the north, off Berehere, the other bird did the same thing.

"Heave!" cried the Dutchman. "All heave! For our lives, it is now or it is nevermore with us!" And all heaved at the windlass winches, turning the cranks while the ropes sounded and moaned.

Then the groaning of the World Hinges, more horrible than could he believed! The Earth shook, and the Island smoked and bawled. This was unnatural, it was a violation. Always before, the hinges had turned from natural forces in the earth that had come to their term and time.

Groaning yet more horrible! The ropes cried like infants from the strain on them, the cranks whined with the sound of hard wood about to shatter. The Hinge groaned a final terrible time. There was the shock! And the shockwave.

Then they were done with it, or they were undone forever.

"Let us go back to Obi Island and wait," the Dutchman said. "I believe that it turned over when the Hinge groaned last and loudest. If the raiding stops, then we have done it. If it has not stopped, then we are dead forever."

"Let us go to Jilolo Island and not wait," the Obi men said. "We will have bloody death there, or we will have us a lot of fun."

The Obis with the Dutchman rowed and sailed for Jilolo all day, and came there in the evening. They found Jilolo men. They pushed them down, they stole their fish and fruits and boats, they pushed them in the water and laughed at them. This was the fun they hadn't had for a long time.These were Jilolos of the same names and appearances as the horrible killers of the last time, but they were different. You could push them down and take advantage of them; you didn't have to be afraid of them. For they were also the men of the same names and appearances of the time before last, and they only smiled sadly when they were robbed and pushed down.

The Obi men called the girls and young women who had been stolen from them, and took them in the boats with them and went home. So peace returned, and it was all as it had been before with them.

Only not quite.

These girls and young women, robbed from the Obi and now taken back by them, had been on Jilolo when it turned back. It was in reverse with them.

With the turning back, they became their own counterparts from under the world, the meanest, most troublesome women ever found anywhere, yet of the same names and appearances as the girls and young women before. They raised hell from one end of Obi to the other when they got home, and they kept it up all their lives.

So it was a troubled peace that came to Obi. Even so, many said it was better than to be killed by the Jilolo. Others said it was about the same thing.

That is the only place, there in the western Moluccas, where the World Hinges do really turn and a whole region may experience this revolution. The other places are almost surely fable.

A man just back from high Armenia says he examined the hinges there and they are bronze turned green with great age. They apparently have not turned since the drying of the flood. And if Armenia would turn over, who would know it? You can turn an Armenian upside-down and hardly tell it. Those fellows look about the same on both ends.

As to the Germanies, those hinges in the Camic Alps and in the Wangeroog are of badly rusted iron. Nobody can tell when they turned last, but should they turn now (the shape they are in) it would make a groaning heard around the world. Besides, if this country had turned in modern centuries, there would have to be some indication of it; some stark frightful thing would have happened there comparable to the revolution of the Jilolos. The people and places, keeping the same names and appearances, would have become immeasurably different in not too subtle ways, would have become violent and appalling. Is there any report of such a thing happening in our own days or those of our fathers?

And in the Pyrenees, is there any indication that they have turned, lately or ever? Rock-crystal does not rust, but it does acquire a patina of unuse. Yet one has said of the Canigou, which I take to apply to all the Pyrenees and all the people in them, that it is unchanging forever, but that it is created anew every morning. The Hinges at Aneto and Hendaye either do not turn at all or they turn every night.

ISHMAEL INTO THE BARRENS.

Sometimes, however, a group of animals about to become extinct undergoes considerable change of a pathological nature before it disappears from the scene.

Douglas Dewar It was early in the morning, which was illegal. Which is to say that it was illegal for persons to be about in the early morning. And yet there were a few people, some alive and some dead, scattered about in the morning hours.

Most of these were yellow-card people doing necessary work in those hours; another few were authorized nothoi-hunters; the rest were outlaws. All of the dead people lying in the streets were outlaws; but some of the live people also were outlaws unknown.

Really, there was no need for anyone to be about at this time; and if the world were ordered in a perfectly legal manner there would have been none.But the world was not perfectly ordered. There was outlawry and the breaking of the hours rules.

There were the working hours for those of the age when work was still required, and concurrent with these were the basic-enjoyment hours for those beyond that age. Then there were the swinging hours for all (compulsory). And finally there were the morning hours, the forbidden hours -- the hours for sleep, for rest, for completing a trip: these were from the fifth hour of the day till the thirteenth. Timers were adjusted so that the sunrise was always in the forbidden hours; and indeed no really good person had ever seen the sun rise, except certain very old ones who had seen it in their uninstructed youths. "No good person was ever the better for seeing the sun rise," it is written in the Analects.

It was an old and dirty city in the glare of the early illegal sun, but the yellow-card street-sweepers would soon clear away the worst of the debris.

The swinging hours always left their clutter, as was their right. Here were yesterday's cut flowers in heaps, many thousands of broken balloons, posters torn and shredded, remnants of food and drink and vein-main, papers covered with scatter-print, discarded litter and clothing.

Here also, right on the edge of a pile of broken guitars, a woman was lying twisted and grubby. She was very young and very dead. She was not, however, a casualty of the swinging hours, but of the early morning hours. And there was another one some distance from the first, blowsier and bloodier.

They were not rare in the morning hours in the city. Very soon the sweepers would cart them away. By the thirteenth hour all would be clean again, and the Gentle World would begin another day.

But here is the heroine, a live one, perhaps a lively one. Should she not be a platinum woman, scatter-ornamented and beautiful, according to the norms? Or a shiiiing ebony or a creamy chocolate? Should she not be adjusted and legal? Flowery and scatter-eyed? Should she not be of the multiplexity, nonlineate, a Scan, an Agape Apple, a Neutrina, a Pop Poppy? A Poster Coaster at the very least? Should she not be a Happy Medium, a Plateau Potato, a Twanger, a Mime, a Dreamer, and Enhincer-Dincer? Are these not the aspects of a heroine?

Nah, she wisn't like that at all. She was a Morning-Glory, which is illegal. She was a Gown-Clown, which is also illegal. She was not flowery, not scatter-eyed. She wasn't even quite beautiful though she rather wished that she were, And yet perhaps she was, in another way, in an old and almost private way.

She had form. But was it not now bad form to have form? She had grace and face. She had a forky tongue and a willful way. She even had a measure of gaiety. She was tall and full. Her hair was midnight-black with green starlights in it (really). Her eyes were even blacker with deeper lights. She had a strong element of stubbornness in her, which is illegal. She was a flower-tender, and she was not enchanted with the job. (Something had gone out of the flowers, something had gone out of them.) Her name was Janine Pervicacia. To the people she was Jane the Crane, but she wasn't so leggy as all that.

The flowers, especially those that were to be cut this day, needed care in the morning hours, and for that reason this yellow-card girl was tending them. But she tended them lineately, which was illegal.

Here is the hero. Should he not be a Swing, a Slant, a Cut, according to the norms? A Spade, a Btick, a Whanger? Should he not be a Head, a Flash, an Etch, a Neutrino yet, a Burn, a Vein, a Flower? Yeah, but he wasn't like that.

He wasn't that kind of hero at all. He was a Dawner, he was a doggedly pleasant man, he was even a sort of battler ("He saith among the trumpets, Hal ha; and he sinclielli the battle afar off" -- Job), he was friendly; he was even intelligent on some subjects and murderous on others. He was big enough and thick enough; his hair was brambled but short. The people said that hewould be the father of Ishmael. He didn't know what they meant; either did the people. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. He was a yellow-card steet-sweeper, and his name was Morgan Saunders.

He was making his rounds, cleaning up after the swingers. He growled when he came to the twisted and grubby woman who was very young and very dead.

"Secret hid in the bottom of a well, May the nothoi-hunters all go to hell," he chanted, which is illegal (the nothoi-hunters are authorized). He had a very hassle of a time bending the dead woman in the middle (he saw now that she was only a girl) and stuffing her into his wheeled canister. He quickly covered her with shards of broken guitars so she would be hidden from his eyes.

Then he saw Jane the Crane tending flowers. He did not know her. This was her first morning back on the job after a term in a disorderly house. She was tending the flowers as if they were in straight lines, as if they were in rows, going down one file of them and back another. But only in tier mind were they in rows.

"That is not the allowed way to tend flowers, girl," Morgan spoke to her very low. "You must not consider them as growing in rows, even in your thought. Consider them as random scatter-clusters, or there will be a black mark on your record. Consider them as a revolving nexus of patternless broken volutes. They grow random in nature, you know, and the Gentle World is all for the random. I am only trying to help you."

"I know you are. The things I have been put through by people trying to help me! I tell you, though, that nothing grows random in nature. Everything falls into patterns. And flowers very often do grow in terraced tiers and in tufted rows. I've seen them."

"That is very dangerous talk," said Morgan Saunders, "and I believe that the nothoi-htinters are eyeing us even now. Is it possible that I will see you here again tomorrow? Do you know the doubled-up girl in my canister?"

"I know her. Her name is Agar. Yes, it is possible that you will see me here again tomorrow. It is possible that I will be the doubled-up dead girl in your canister tomorrow."

Then Morgan Saunders went on his way, picking up old flowers and broken balloons and guitars and dead women. He went on past the Pop Palace with its high sign in psychedelic dancing dots: "THE GOLDEN DWARF, MAN, MAN, THAT'S MAN!".

And Janine Pervicacia continued to tend the flowers (those that would die today), moving her hands as if the Flowers were in rows; and they weren't.

This is a love and hate story (both were illegal) from the False Terminal Days that were the middle or the twenty-first century. It is very difficult to decode the story and lay it out for the reason that (even in its illegal form) it was printed in scatter-print. No other sort of print was available. Every printing machine, even the small household ones used by private individuals, was both a scatter-printer and a randoming machine. Each letter could have many different shapes and colors, and these were so blended that no two colors or shape-styles might come together, or that nothing might range itelf into lines even accidentally.

Scatter-print was the flowering of 150 years of pop-posters. It shouted a complex nonlineate message, or else it did not: but it shouted. There was difficulty that about a third of the signs were not letters at all, had no meaning or sound value to them: and their blending in made the words difficult to read -- if one were still a reader and not a depth comprehender. There was also a difficulty in that it wis illegal to number pages; ever; in anything, long or short. Pages must be fed in unnumbered, and they were then randomized.

And they are very difficult to unrandom.

For this reason there will be anomalies and inconsistencies in this story, for all that we try to untangle it and set it in line. It was (in itsfirst form) an illegal private record by a grieving friend, but we cannot be sure of the order it should fall into. We do not know for sure whether Jane the Crane was the doubled-up dead girl in the canister on the first morning or on the one-thousandth. We do not know when the destruction of Morgan Saunders took place, whether before the birth of Ishmael or after, but we have set it before. And we do not know whether the interlude of the odd man and the Odd God is truly a part of this account or whether it should be interluded at the point we give it or at another. We can but guess how long Jane the Crane was in a disorderly house, and we cannot always tell flashback from future glimpse. We try.

The next morning (we cannot be sure that it was the next morning, but it was a different morning) Morgan Saunders slowed his cleaning and sweeping as he came near where Janine Pervicacia was tending flowers. It was summer now (flowers, of course, must be grown in all seasons) and perhaps it hadn't been the other time. Janine (Jane the Crane) was revealed as a gown-clown in an old unrevealing dress. There was scarcely a square foot of her body exposed. She worked now with a carefulness and neatness that were unusual. This girl might be beyond help.

"There are dangerous and divergent things in your manner," Morgan said in a low voice. "If you are not more careless you may be sent to a disorderly house. I am only trying to help you."

"I've already been in the disorderly house," Janine said cheerlessly."I was discharged as incurable and always to be watched."

"How was it there?" Morgan asked. "I have always been afraid of it, for myself. I have been threatened with it, and I am always careful to assume the careless manner."

"It was horrible and depressing. I was put in with very small children, five and six years old. We were taught artless art. "Form is only the pedestal. Deformity is the statue,' one of the instructors said that first day. 'The trick is to smash the pedestal completely and yet leave something of the statue, Deformity is beauty, always remember that. Form, which is pattern, is always ugly.' That's what he told us. We had classes in pop-posters, which are hand-done scatter-print. We had classes in Lump the Lump, which is plastic modeling. We had classes in finger painting, and paintings by chimpanzees were used as models and suggestions. I noticed of the children that though many of them were handsome and even-featured when they first came to the disorderly house, their features soon altered. One eye would become larger than the other. The two sides of their faces would no longer match. One side of their months would be pulled down and the other pulled up. They would come to look as crooked as most people do look. The instructors could tell at a glance which children were being inculcated with the proper sense of deformity: those who themselves became deformed. We talk too long. I am sure we will be watched."

"Wait. We have so much of dinger to spend anyhow. Let us spend a little of it now." And Morgan himself was doing a dangerous thing. He was smoking a short fag, but it was not what you think: not potty, not dotty, not snow, not glow, none of the approved high things. It was old, forbidden, non-mind-enhancing tobacco. "What else did they try to teach you in the disorderly house?"

"Guitar," said Jane the Crane. "That remains the worst of all experiences, the hell-thing that certain humans can never accept. I still wake up screaming at night (working in the mornings, I sometimes sleep illegally during the swing hours of night) at the oppressiveness, the whining meanness of it. It is the only instrument that is always random, that does not have to be randomized. Oh, the twang, twang, twang, the eternal flatness of it! 'After all, is not the purpose of life on earth to accustom the people to life in hell?' one of the instructors asked. This is one of the permanent quips of the disorderly houses, of course, but the way the instructor said it in a deformed voice out of a deformed face shook me. It is true, Morgan, it is true. Or isit?"

"It is not everywhere true, Janine. It is not my purpose, but it is theirs. What else did they teach the children and fail to teach you?"

"Crudity, nudity; presbys and lesbos; monophony, cacophony; profanity, urbanity; muggery and buggery. Narcosis. Doggery. Flesh-mesh. Much else. Does that stuff not curdle the convoluted ears of you? It should."

"Do they not have a course to teach ducks to swim? But it seems that a little bit of this would be beyond the scope of five- and six-year-olds, Janine, especially beyond those who had to be sent back for corrections."

"Never mind, they would remember it and they would be ready for it when their time came to appreciate it. Go now. We have spent too much danger and we are watched."

"Will I see you here again tomorrow, Janine?"

"Tomorrow or next season, or someday, or never."

"Will you think of me?"

"I will think of you as if this were another world, towering where it was meant to be high, ordered where it should be ordered, free in the great central things, and free from the dwarfed and compulsory freedoms. I will think of you, Morgan, in ways that are presently unthinkable."

Janine (Jane the Crane) turned back to caring for her flowers, which she liked but was not impassioned over. And Morgan Saunders went on about his sweeping and cleaning, past the Pop Palace, past the Dog Temple, past Levelers' Loggia, past the Pseudo-Parthenon, past Humanity Hall with its great poster in electric scatter-print raising its headless torso into the sky: "MAN, THIS GELDED GLORY OF THE LEVEL WAY.".

In the False Terminal Days that were the middle of the twenty-first century the population plateau had been reiched. It had not been reached in perfect peace. In an odd piece entitled The Analects of Issac we encounter the phrase "the conflicts created in a society which sees in population stability the only hope of the human race." There were conflicts.

There had been hard feelings. Blood had run in the rivers in some localities. But every casualty of this conflict had become part of the feedback of the population-stability calculators. It was settled now. it was enforced. But the confingt continued, and it must still continue till the total death of one or both of the antagonists. It had become one-sided. It looked like the conflict between an elephant and a day fly. But there were irreconcilables. There were die-hards among those midges. And there were also hard-abornings, illegitimate and double-damned and defiant. The plateau had been reached, but there were bumps on the plateau.

Stable population. And the second step (very nearly achieved already) was population homogeneity. For fifty years the restrictions had been most selective. By now those of extreme colors were about of equal number, and the great central blending out-numbered them both. Hereafter, only progeny-crosses between the two extremes or out of the central blending could be permitted; none at all among either extreme.

In any case, with the stack-up (old never die; they don't even fade away) a kid-card now cost a quarter of a million dollars. That was very high, and perhaps it would go even higher.

In any case, again, as either both-white or both-black, there would be an impediment between Janine Pervicicia and Morgan Saunders. (They hadn't talked about a union at all, but they had begun to think about it.) This impediment is mentioned in the old scatter-print record written by the grieving friend. But this record does not indicate which was the color of their impediment, and we do not know it either.

A flower-care inspector had been plaguing Janine Pervicacia. He could not fault her that the flowers in her care were insufficient in numbers and vitality. It was something else. The flowers from her care were reported to be out of sympathy with the flower people. They had not the right attitude to allthis. They had developed sympathies of their own, or of Janine's; and the flower people could feel the alienation, and they complained. There is a fine line here. There really is sympathy and antipathy even in cut flowers, but it is liable to exaggeration and subjectivity by the flower people.

"You will have to conform," the flower-care inspector told Janine.

"There is complaint."

"Conform to what?" she asked. "Form is damnable to you."

"You will please to cease using words as having direction, Jnne the Crane flower-carer Fifth-class," he said sharply. "Words are like confetti, like stars, like snowflakes, like -- there simply are not words for words! You must conform to nonconformity, of course. Your lineate overview will minimize you in the simultaneous multidepth mosaic appraisal."

"Oh, that! I have already been weighed and found wanting. Do what you will with me, but do not stand and goggle it me."

"We could have a meeting during the swinging hours and come to a certain understanding with each other."

"I'll see you in the Barrens first!"

"Then, if you will not be affectionate or gentle or human, you must improve on your work. Your flowers must show more feeling at once."

"They will show more feeling!" Jane of the forky tongue cried. "They'll bark it you! They'll snap at you with their severed heads!"

Jane the Crane was getting many marks against her record.

And an Official Instigator had been plaguing Morgan Saunders. Oh, must talk to in Official Instigator. They are privileged. They have rights of entry into property and dwellings, and into minds. But they are not direct. They nibble at you; they potshot; they speak in randomized riddles.

This was a very old Instigator; of the very first generation of them. He wore a pop button ("Never trust anyone under ninety"); he wore a pop beard which was perhaps infested; he wore a loincloth, he wore shamble-sandles; he wore flowers and sashes and ribbons and jewelry, but no real garment. He rated as old even in a world made up mostly of old people. He was an Ancient Hippie indeed.

"You find me objectionable, Morgan in my hands," he sniped, "and that is a most dangerous finding of yours. You are an alien to the Gentle World, Morgan, and you are known as the philosopher of the street-sweepers. But the world doesn't need a philosophy -- not a rigid street-sweeper philosophy, at any rate. We will snip those rigid corners off you, or we will snip that rigid head off you. Whence are you named? Yours isn't a name from the randoming machines. Therefore it is an illegal name. In one old context Morgan meant 'from over the sea'; in another it meant 'morning', which is very significant in your case."

"In still another case it meant a pony, old man," Morgan said. "A very stylish pony."

"Can a Morgan pony sire a wild ass?" (Somehow the old Instigator already knew about the wild-ass boy Ishmael, who was not even conceived yet, much less born.) "But run, Morgan, run," the old Instigator went on. "We will catch you with our gentle pursuit. Why do you resist us who are kind to every living creature?"

"Kind to every living creature, old man? But you murder the nothoi."