The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Vengeance of Toffee, by Henry Farrell

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Title: The Vengeance of Toffee

Author: Henry Farrell

Release Date: April 19, 2021 [EBook #65113]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

THE VENGEANCE OF TOFFEE

By Charles F. Myers

The world was on the brink of atomic war and

nothing, it seemed, could prevent it. But

Toffee had a plan—and a little magic to boot!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy

February 1951

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The bombs ticked—in remote places—behind locked and guarded doors. The bombs ticked, and the terrible sound was distinct in the farthest corners of the world—wherever a man picked up a newspaper, turned on a radio—or paused to listen to the beating of his own heart. A Bomb ... H Bomb ... X Bomb—the bombs ticked louder and louder with the growing hours—and each man dwelt alone now with the dark spectre of his own trembling fear.

"Yesterday we perfected a new kind of totalitarian death...." (It was difficult to remember the pleasant, relaxed voice which had once given the announcer his popularity, for now it seemed that his breath passed over taut nerves rather than vocal cords. But no one noticed; it was only what he said that mattered now, not how he said it. Fear fed on fear with an avid, indiscriminate appetite—and flourished from the diet.)

"Today we can only be certain that the foreign powers will have caught up with us within the next few hours.

"Can you remember the Atomic Age, ladies and gentlemen? How long ago that was! And yet how swiftly we have progressed from that to the Age of Human Terror.

"The X Bomb—the incomprehensible unit of power and destruction which dwarfs the human soul and reduces it to a negligible fraction of quivering fright—just one small fraction contributing to the monstrous organism of terror which has lately become our modern civilization. How wretched we are to be living in a civilization in which the word 'city' has been rendered obsolete by the word 'target.' The New York Target ... the Chicago Target ... the Salt Lake and San Francisco Targets. How wretched we are.

"And is it strange that these targets which were once cities are being deserted? Is it strange that men have begun to run from the bombs even before they have begun to fall? That is the nature of terror.

"For the first time in its history the nation looks upon a nomadic society—largely that group of the working people who have ceased working to wander aimlessly, seeking safety within our own borders—living by thievery and lawlessness. Crime has increased so rapidly of late that a comparative estimate is impossible. That, too, is the nature of terror.

"Today the government would force these erstwhile workers back to the hearts of the targets—force them by law back to the factories to engage again in the production of death and destruction.

"'Necessary,' the statesmen say. 'Necessary to national safety.' But with the statesmen's words comes the obvious question: Is there still any national safety left for any nation? Does it exist anywhere, to be preserved? Haven't the fleeing nomads asked themselves this question already, turning their frightened eyes to the unprotecting skies?

"But the statesman must speak—and he must speak logic, even now when logic has deserted us, and words can no longer save us. Every man—statesman or otherwise—knows that it is no longer a question of whether the bombs will drop—but when they will drop—and who will drop them—we or they?

"It is true that no nation has declared war, but terror declares its own war. Can we wait another day to take the initiative? Can they? The undeclared enemy may destroy us tomorrow—or tonight—even within the next few minutes. I may not live to finish this broadcast—and you may not live to hear it...."

Suddenly there was a sharp click, and the voice stopped, silenced as effectively as though a wire had been knotted about the speaker's throat. Marc Pillsworth, startled at the sudden silence, snapped forward in his chair and looked up. Julie, the lamp light slanting sharply across her face, glared down at him with tense irritation. She removed her hand significantly from the radio switch.

"I'm telling you, Marcus Pillsworth," she said menacingly, "I can't stand any more of it. If you turn on that bloody instrument again—if you so much as twitch your bony finger in its direction—one of us is going to die of unnatural causes, and you may have read that the female is notoriously more long-lived than the male."

Marc stared at her incredulously through the chill dimness of the living room. Then he sighed heavily. This also was the nature of human terror: every man was married to a shrew these days. Women simply weren't up to it.

But Julie had been better than most—until now. He looked at the tightly drawn lips, the circled eyes and tried to remember his wife's cool blonde beauty as it had been only a month ago. The contrast was disquieting. Well, these were harrowing times for her.

But they were just as harrowing for everyone else—for him. She ought to realize that. Suddenly, unaccountably, Marc felt his self-control slipping away from him with all the sleazy inevitability of a pair of silk shorts with rotten elastic. Suddenly the distorted face across the room was not at all the face of his wife, but the face of a vindictive stranger who had invaded his rights and his privacy with definite malice in mind. Reason left him, and, with a black sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he felt the last measure of his reserve trickle down the drain. Gripping the arms of his chair, he jutted his face out into the light and deliberately leered.

"With the world coming down around our ears," he snarled, "I suppose you expect me to sit here complacently simpering and snickering and snapping my gum like an addled adolescent? Don't you care that we may all go to blazes in the next few minutes?"

"No!" Julie screamed, fitting a direct answer to a direct question. "No, I don't care. I'm tired of caring. I'm tired through with caring. And I'm tired of you sitting there with those great elephantine ears of yours hinged to that radio. You've been at it day in, day out, day in, day out, day in...!"

"Stop repeating yourself like some idiot tropical bird," Marc snapped.

"Why don't you ever go down to the office any more?" Julie asked with womanly logic. "Why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?"

In heavy martyrdom Marc lifted his eyes to the ceiling. What was the use? Why go through it all again? He'd explained to her a million times that he no longer had any reason to go to the office. The advertising business had been one of the first to suffer. Who cared what the advertising industry had to say at a time like this? Who wanted to be beautiful or healthy or envied when there wasn't any future in it?

"Turn the radio on," he said steadily.

Julie's eyes actually sparked flame. "What? Do you really have the grassy green gall to ask me to turn that thing on again? I don't believe my ears!"

"I'm not asking," Marc said slowly, "I'm instructing you to."

"Hah!" Julie snorted to some invisible spectator. "Listen to him!" She eyed him nastily. "Ask me to shinny up the doorsill and do a swan dive into my cocktail. I'll do that sooner."

Marc met her gaze for a moment and momentarily declined the challenge. "I suppose you just want to sit here and never know what hit you?"

"Exactly," Julie said. "For heaven's sake what does it matter what hits us after we're dead? At least I don't want to sit here chewing my nails while some morbid-minded deficient drives me into a state of complete nervous collapse."

Marc disengaged himself from his chair. She had a point there, though he'd rot before he admitted it. With considerable unconcern he moseyed across the room and glanced out the window. Then he stopped and leaned closer to the pane. Across the street the world was already ablaze. The night sky glowed red with flame.

"My God!" he cried. "The Fredericks are on fire!"

Julie moved to his side and stared out the window.

"Who are those people?" she asked. "The ones sitting on the lawn there?"

Marc directed his gaze to the right. He should have seen them sooner, except that one's sense of logic, when one is witnessing a fire, does not readily encompass a group of people lounging on blankets in the glowing radiance—especially when those people are concerned more with food, drink and cards than with the fire—and more especially when the owners of the flaming dwelling are prominent among those present....

"Aren't those the Fredericks?" Julie asked.

"Do you suppose they've noticed the house?" Marc asked. "But I suppose they must."

"Maybe not," Julie said. "They've been drunk for days. It started out as a house warming party. Do you suppose this is their idea of a joke?"

Marc turned away. "The papers are full of this sort of thing. The anxiety has driven people mad." Then suddenly he stiffened. "Maybe they've heard something! Maybe they've decided to burn their home rather than let the enemy do it for them." He ran to the radio and snapped the switch.

"Beside every man stalks the black shadow of doom...!" the announcer groaned.

At the window Julie instantly snapped to a position of rigid erectness. With cold fury she turned and regarded Marc's lank figure bent attentively to the radio speaker. Her eyes rested on her husband's impassive posterior, and glittering, unbridled madness flickered in their depths.

"When will the attack fall?" the announcer inquired, and Julie answered him without hesitation. "Now, brother," she murmured. "Right now!"

Unaware of the declaration of hostilities from the rear, Marc hung on the words of the announcer: "We can only brace ourselves and hope...."

It was a pity he did not have the foresight—or perhaps hindsight—to follow the announcer's advice. In the next moment Julie's foot, propelled so as to accomplish the same work as an iron sledge, completed an arc that terminated in what might crudely be called a bull's eye.

With a scream of mortal agony, Marc started forward, and jutted his head forthwith into the speaker of the radio. There was a dreadful splintering sound, and then with a squeal, not unlike Marc's, the announcer fell silent.

Marc was unaware of this latter development; both his soul and body were too consumed with throbbing pain to be concerned any longer with such trivialities as the X Bomb and the demise of the world. The world could go to hell in beach sandals and it would be as nothing to the awful thing which had befallen him. Thrusting his hands forcibly to the seat of his anguish, he dislodged his head from the radio and regarded Julie from a crouching position. Clutching himself in a most unmindful way he stared up at his mate with almost animal loathing.

"What a rotten thing to do!" he rasped. "And what a fiendish place to do it! You ... you're ... you're inhuman!"

Julie laughed evilly. "I warned you, you reptile! I told you I couldn't stand any more!"

Marc grimaced as a new wave of pain surged upward through his body. "I just hope you're proud, waiting until a man's got his back turned and then kicking him in the...!"

"There's no need to be crude about it," Julie cut in quickly.

"That's funny, that is!" Marc snapped, baring his teeth. "Me—crude! What about you? I suppose you've been the perfect little lady in this affair? I'm not surprised you can't bear to face your crime!"

"Vulgar!" Julie yelled. "Vulgar, skinny man!"

Marc glanced at the radio. "You've ruined it!"

"You ruined it yourself. Though I will say that if you hadn't, I had every intention of taking a meat axe to it."

"And to me, too, I dare say. A nice way for a wife to go on to a husband who has cherished and protected her."

"Oh, stop it, you ninny," Julie said. "Stop carrying on as though I'd murdered you."

"I'd have preferred to be murdered," Marc said, shuddering with pain.

"Stop crouching like that," Julie said. "And stop holding yourself in that suggestive way. You look like a child with uncertain habits. Straighten up."

Marc considered the matter of straightening up; never had he felt so strongly the need to rise to his full height. He relinquished his grip on himself and tried to unbend. Instantly he fell back into the crouching position with a cry of pain.

"I can't!" he cried. "I can't straighten up!"

Julie's expression swiftly undertook a series of transformations ranging from suspicion to chagrin to abject contrition.

"Of course you can," she said anxiously. "Try."

"I can't, I tell you!" Marc gritted. "And it serves you right. As a matter of fact I hope I stay this way, and you have to spend the rest of your days explaining to everyone how it happened. You've dislocated my sacroiliac, that's what you've done, you brutish female!"

"Oh, no!" Julie gasped. "Oh, Marc!" She ran toward him.

"Get away from me!" Marc snarled. "Don't you touch me, you Judith Iscariot!"

"Oh, dear!" Julie wailed. She held our a hand. "I'll get a doctor, the one down the block. Don't do anything. I'll be right back." She started toward the door.

"Tell him how it happened!" Marc called after her spitefully. "Tell him how you kicked your own husband in the...!"

But the door slammed as Julie hurried out of the house and down the steps.

Marc returned his hands gingerly to his pulsing bottom and stared gloomily at the floor.

"Damn!" he said. "Damn, damn, damn!"

The doctor strapped a final length of adhesive across Marc's back and helped him into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

"It may be tender for a day or two," he said. He helped Marc into his pajama coat. "You'll be all right, though. You can have Mrs. Pillsworth take that tape off for you at the end of the week."

"I'll wear it to my grave," Marc snapped, "before I'll permit that woman to touch me again."

"Now, now, Mr. Pillsworth," the doctor temporized. "You'll feel better in the morning." He turned and picked up his case. "I imagine those sedatives will take care of everything for tonight."

"Thank you, doctor," Marc said gratefully, and sank back rigidly on the bed. Lying down, held stiffly by the tape, he was forced to watch the doctor from the corner of his eye.

"Goodnight, doctor."

"Goodnight." The doctor nodded from across the room and opened the door to leave. Julie was revealed wringing her hands in the hallway. She stepped forward.

"How is he, doctor?" she asked. "May I see him now?"

"Keep her out!" Marc growled from his pillow. "If she so much as sticks a hand in here I'll bite it!"

The doctor took Julie's arm. "Don't worry," he said. "Everyone's a little neurotic these days." He guided her back into the hall and closed the door.

Marc shifted his gaze from the door to the ceiling. The laughter of the Fredericks and their guests drifted in through the open window, and he reflected on its quality: it was the laughter of desperation, not abandoned. Then the scream of a fire siren sounded faintly in the distance, and a woman echoed the cry weirdly from somewhere down the block—another patient for the good doctor.

Marc closed his eyes and waited for the sedatives to work. An echo of pain throbbed along his spine. He tried to shift a bit, but the tape held him in place, and the pain was only worse for the effort. He looked at the ceiling again and noted its singular blankness without pleasure. Finally he decided to turn his mind to other things—to the past and happier circumstances. Instantly, without any conscious cooperation, Toffee's pert face stirred in his memory. The ghost of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.

Not that the thought of Toffee was undilutedly pleasant. The gamin creature of his mind had a strong predisposition for trouble as well as pleasure—a sort of special magnetism that drew calamity to herself as well as the hapless souls around her. And yet the basic feeling, when thinking of Toffee, was one of distinct cheer. If trouble came to her it was never altogether unmixed with a certain element of hilarity. There was always a dash of excitement at least.

Naturally Toffee had not been in Marc's mind at all these last few months. For one thing he had been much too concerned with the perilous state of the world, and Toffee, not a consistent inhabitant of this world, or much of any other, was difficult to picture in conjunction with truly worldly matters.

If it could be said that Toffee lived at all, it would have to be the Valley of Marc's mind. Not that she wasn't quite real; it was just that she did not exist materially unless she was projected into the material world through Marc's imagination. After that she was as flesh and blood as anyone—indeed, to an almost overwhelming degree at times.

If Marc had grown used to this strange circumstance—that his mind could actually create a living, breathing perfect hellion of a redhead—it was only by virtue of repetition. The human mind can adjust to the wildest of impossibilities in time, if it is only subjected to them often enough.

The smile grew on Marc's lips as he considered the provocative form and features of Toffee. It was a vision to prod the sternest lips into a smile.

Then the smile vanished as Julie's footsteps sounded outside in the hallway. Marc listened to their approach, turning his eyes toward the door.

He could almost see her standing there in the hallway beyond the closed door. Desolated with remorse, she would be, undecided. A trickle of compassion gullied the surface of Marc's resentment. After all, she had really meant to hurt him. He would have called out to her, but the footsteps sounded anew and retreated down the hall. A moment later a door opened and closed. Marc sighed; tomorrow would be time enough to make it up to her.

He closed his eyes as a slow drowsiness began to seep through his lean body—probably the sedatives going to work. His mind wandered aimlessly for a moment, then collided, quite forcibly, with a sudden realization; during the last hour—for the first time in weeks—his thoughts had turned away from the dismal state of the world and centered on himself. For a whole hour his interest had been entirely absorbed in a simple domestic crisis—a little thing like a fight over the radio!

Marc's mind spun with the thought. In the last few months things—the matters of men's lives—had somehow gotten themselves all turned around backwards. People had ceased to concern themselves with the really important things—fighting over a radio, for instance—and had turned to the childish business of blowing up the world.

Marc paused to sum up these thoughts. Somewhere they contained a very great and very simple truth, though they were all snarled up. Somehow his dislocated sacroiliac and the troubles of the world were subtly related....

The drowsiness washed over his mind again, and the thought was carried away on the crest. He reached after them, but couldn't quite make it. There was but one last glimmer:

"What this world needs," Marc murmured, "is a good five ton kick in the...."

His eyes closed, and instantly his chest began to rise and fall with the deep, regular breathing of complete sleep.

A warm breeze dusted the edge of the curtain and set it rippling. Somewhere in the night, in the distance across the city, a siren wailed with inconsolable melancholy. A cat stalked the intersection, as silent and intense as his leopard-long shadow. In his narcotic slumbers Marc rolled a bit to one side and made a small whimpering sound as the adhesive pulled at his back. He lay back and was still.

But Marc had dismissed all conscious memory of his injury some time hence. In the same moment when he had fallen asleep he had left the room of the rippling curtain and unhappy echoes and had passed into the untroubled, all-black world of unconsciousness.

Now, however, he stirred again, and with that almost indiscernible movement, leaped from the darkness into lighter regions; into the secret, all-things-are-possible world of his subconscious—into the world where dreams can become more real than reality itself. Marc paused on the brink of this world for one tremulous moment, then plunged forward....

Brilliant light shot up to meet him so that he had to close his eyes against the glare. Then, slowly, he opened them again. Much like the sensation of stepping onto cool lawn after having walked barefoot on scorching concrete, pain was swiftly followed by almost unbearable pleasure.

Before Marc's gaze a soft greenness stretched away from him into graceful rising slopes and cool shadowed hollows—artfully like a display of green velvet in a shop window. On the rise of the most distant knoll stretched a forest of strange trees which held at once a cathedral of stateliness and a feathery pliability. Weaving slightly with the breeze they were mindful of nothing so much as a handful of royal plumes stuck into the earth at the whim of a bemused child. The Valley of The Subconscious Mind....

Marc knew instantly where he was; he'd been there often enough before. He glanced around in search of some movement, some flash of animated color. But there was nothing. He started up the rise, stretching his long legs purposefully before him. Surely she would be there, probably among the trees.

But she was not. Nor was there any sign of her. Marc moved to the crest of the knoll where the trees were the thickest, but the far horizon proved to be obscured by a blue mist that swirled and disported itself in the way of something alive. He stood there for a long moment, turning slowly, watching anxiously for any sign, but there was none. Finally he sat down, braced his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hand. Disappointment welled inside him—and hurt too; always before she had been right there to meet him at the moment of his arrival.

He stiffened with a sudden, dreadful thought: what if Toffee wasn't there at all? What if she had ceased to exist? Wasn't it possible since she was only a product of his imagination? He stood up and again scanned the horizon. He bent down to peer into the shifting frontiers of the mists.

And then it happened. It was low and mean and sharply reminiscent of a similar agony which had befallen him in another time and place that he couldn't rightly remember. Grabbing himself uninhibitedly he doubled forward and sat down heavily on the ground.

Then it was over as swiftly and surprisingly as it had begun. The air rippled with musical, feminine laughter, somewhere behind him. Marc swung around.

Lovely as ever, her mist-textured tunic only served to cast a cool greenish tint on the flesh of the outrageously perfect body beneath it. As she moved from beneath the trees, her flaming hair fell loose about her shoulders, as free and wild as the spirit it adorned. Though her full red lips quivered with laughter, the real laughter was in the depths of her green eyes. She paused for a moment, then ran forward and sat down lightly at his side. She eyed him with mischievous amusement.

"You dilapidated old despot," she smiled. "It's about time you showed that simpering old face of yours around here again."

Marc, mindful of his recent discomfiture, returned her gaze with chilly suspicion. But if Toffee noticed she pretended not to. With a quick maneuver which was executed with the skill and precision obtainable only through long and diligent practice, she twined her arms about his neck and kissed him full upon the mouth. Marc received the kiss with unblinking aloofness. His gaze remained hostile even as she leaned back from him.

"You kicked me," he said injuredly.

Toffee's eyes widened with enormous innocence. "You've got it wrong. I kissed you, that's all."

"Kicked," Marc said stubbornly. "You kicked me."

"Where?"

"Never mind."

"I was yards away from you at the time," Toffee said. "You saw me, yourself."

Marc reflected. It was true; she hadn't even been in sight. Still, experience had taught him that she was capable of anything, perhaps even a long-distance boot in the bottom.

"Well, somebody did it," he said sullenly.

"I swear it wasn't me," Toffee said stoutly. "I swear it on the old bald head of my maternal grandfather."

"You haven't got a maternal grandfather," Marc said shortly. "Don't talk nonsense."

"If I had a maternal grandfather," Toffee amended smoothly, "and he had an old bald head, I would unhesitatingly swear on it."

"You would just as unhesitatingly lop it off with an axe, too," Marc said, "if it served your purpose."

"Who wouldn't?" Toffee said. "Who wants an old bald head around all the time? Even a maternal grandfather's?"

"You haven't got a grandfather," Marc reminded her sharply, "maternal or otherwise."

"Certainly, I have," Toffee said stoutly. "I just swore on his old bald head, didn't I? Or did I swear at his old bald head? I wouldn't be surprised. He's always whining around about how maternal he is, and I know darned well he's never been a mother in his life. It's disgusting."

"Sometimes I wonder why I even listen to you," Marc said. "I only get dizzy."

"Well, it's no wonder I'm flighty with that nasty old man under foot all the time," Toffee said. "If you'd just speak to this maternal grandfather of mine and tell him to stop sticking his old bald head into everything...."

"Stop!" Marc cried. "If you go on any more about it I'll start foaming at the mouth!"

Toffee lay back on the grass and stretched her arms thoughtfully above her head.

"Anyway," she said. "I swear my foot has not so much as brushed the seat of your pants." But even as she said it a smile played fleetingly at the corners of her mouth.

Marc turned to her, prepared to the last inflection to inform her that he would trust her only a little less farther than he could hurl a steam shovel with his bare teeth, but he did not speak. His gaze went to her left hand and remained there.

In all the time he had known her Marc had never seen Toffee wear even a single piece of jewelry: it was taken for granted that her charms were sufficient unto themselves without any superficial ornamentation. One might be silly enough to apply gilt to a lily, but never to a gold piece. Therefore, he was surprised now to glance down and see quite a large ring on her finger.

And the ring itself was quite as remarkable as the fact of Toffee's wearing it. Marc had never seen anything like it before and was willing to bet a tidy sum that no one else had either.

The metal part of the ring was neither silver nor gold, yet faintly resembled both—with a strange translucent quality that seemed altogether unreal. It had been fashioned into a design that was both simple and beautiful. But it was really the stone which caught and held Marc's eye.

Such a stone was simply not possible! It resembled an emerald of the largest, rarest and most beautiful kind, and yet it was not an emerald. No mere emerald, no natural chemical fluke, could possibly have the life—the almost living vitality—of this stone. It gave off a light that met the eye with something like an electrical shock. But that wasn't all. It was the feeling you got just from looking at it—that the stone both absorbed from and contributed to the living atmosphere around it. The thing actually assumed a personality as you stared at it. Marc felt a shiver of apprehension.

"Where did you get that ring?" he asked.

"Oh, that," Toffee said negligently. "Just something I dreamed up out of my head—the way you dream me up."

"You mean...?"

"Sure," Toffee nodded. "You aren't the only one around here who can do cerebral somersaults. After all, I'm right here at the source. As a matter of fact it was something you said that gave me the idea."

"What do you mean?" Marc asked. "What did I say?"

"Oh, I forget just how it went right now," Toffee said. "Besides there'll be lots of time for all this dull conversation later. Right now...."

"Are you trying to hold something back from me?" Marc asked suspiciously.

"Nothing," Toffee said. She pulled herself closer, brushed her lips playfully across his cheek. "Absolutely nothing." She slipped her arm around his neck.

The next few seconds were characterized with quiet struggle as Marc disengaged himself from her determined embrace.

"Next time hold something back," he said confusedly. "There's just so much that human flesh and blood can stand, you know."

"And you have so little of either," Toffee said. She gazed at him reflectively. "Kissing you is like tying on your bib over a plate of bleached bones."

"Leave it to you to paint a disgusting picture," Marc shuddered.

"Give me a good heaping plate of bleached bones any time," Toffee said. "I'd prefer it."

"May I remind you," Marc said coolly, "that it was you who hurled yourself into my arms? You seemed to be all for it at the time."

"Merely the touch of the artist," Toffee said archly. "Just fitting myself into a part."

"Have I ever thought to tell you," Marc said, "that you are the most unprincipled, low-minded...?"

Then suddenly his voice dried in his throat. His gaze darted away from Toffee's face and swept frightenedly across the horizon.

"Oh, my gosh!" he cried.

Suddenly, like a slow dissolve in a movie, the little valley was simply melting away into black nothingness. Already the distant trees had disappeared. Marc jumped to his feet.

"Look!" he yelled. "Look!"

Toffee was instantly beside him. For a moment she gazed on the horrifying spectacle, then tugged imperatively at his sleeve.

"Come on!" she cried. "Let's run!"

But as they turned in the other direction the blackness only rushed at them anew; it was coming all around them. They stopped short.

"Will we drop away into nothing?" Toffee wailed, "or just melt away with everything else?"

"We'll find out soon enough," Marc moaned.

And perhaps a bit sooner, it seemed, for even as Marc spoke, the darkness swooped to within yards of them.

Toffee drew close to Marc, trembling a bit, and he placed his arm about her shoulders. They stood in expectant silence for a moment, watching the greenness disappear around them. Then, all at once, it was gone beneath them.

It was just as they plunged downward into the darkness that Toffee threw her arms about Marc's neck and held tight....

The world reeled drunkenly through space ... whirled away with egg-shaped lopsidedness ... and then there was nothing left anywhere but the original dough from which everything had been made in the first place ... messy, clammy stuff ... and you sank deeper and deeper into it no matter how hard you struggled. Marc tried to cry out....

And then there was an answer, a scraping of metal on metal. A light showed ahead, dulled and heavily diffused, but it came suddenly. A voice spoke encouragement....

"Just a minute, and I'll dig you out. How you ever managed to get snarled up like that flat on your back...."

The voice continued scolding him with affection, and a minute later the doughy mass was pulled aside, and he could see that it was only the perspiration-covered sheets. He looked at them, then beyond them to Julie's gently smiling face. Morning was crowding into the room through the windows behind her.

"'Morning," he said sheepishly. "Thanks."

In silence Julie handed him a glass of orange juice, and he boosted himself forward to drink it.

"How's your ... your back?" she asked tentatively. "Is it better?"

Marc returned the glass to her, tried a few movements involving his mummified spine. There was no definite pain, only a suggestion of stiffness.

"Brand new," he said, and smiled.

"Oh, I'm so relieved!" Julie breathed. She sat down close beside him on the bed. "I'm sorry, Marc."

For a moment they only looked at each other. Then, suddenly breaking into laughter, they fell into each other's arms.

"Oh, Marc!" Julie cried. "I haven't been so happy in months. I don't know why. Nothing's changed; everything's in the same old mess, and considering what I did to you last night I ought to feel just awful. But I don't, and I just can't explain it."

"Maybe I can," Marc said slowly. "I think ... just before I fell asleep last night ... I think something very important occurred to me. I think...!"

Suddenly his voice degenerated into a thin wheeze as the air rushed out of his lungs. He looked as though nothing of even minor importance had passed through his mind from the day of his birth. Julie looked up at him with anxious surprise.

"What is it, dear?" she asked. "What's wrong?"

Marc didn't answer; he only stared—into the mirror across the room. Even as he watched, the horrifying thing he had witnessed a moment before repeated itself.

Across the room, almost exactly opposite the mirror was a small alcove, just big enough to accommodate his desk and filing cabinet. When the compartment was not in use a set of curtains concealed its existence. It was the reflection of these curtains and their sudden curious behavior which had set Marc's hair on end.

For curtains which were meant only to hang blissfully on metal rods and behave themselves, these were weaving about in a most distressing fashion. In fact they were carrying on in such a loose-minded way that it was a wonder Marc did not return his head to the cover of the soggy sheets and leave it there just to be spared the sight.

As it was, Marc peered wildly into the mirror as the curtains suddenly parted themselves, took on individual lives of their own, and began to twist about in the air in a way that defied all reason. This continued for several seconds, then matters got worse.

The curtain on the left retreated from the performance and hung limp. Marc sighed a sigh of relief, only to catch his breath in a new convulsion of horror. The curtain on the right, not content with behaving like something human, had decided to look like something human as well. Actually, in the manner of a close fitting dress, the thing began to assume bumps and hollows of an extremely feminine and alarming nature. It was then, and only a moment before a flash of red hair showed around the edge of the curtain, that Marc realized the awful truth of the situation; Toffee had materialized. She had materialized in his bedroom, without any clothes, and was trying to fashion a dress for herself from the draperies.

"Darling!" Julie cried. "Why are you looking like that? What's the matter?"

Julie's voice suddenly reminded Marc of the real danger in the situation. He glanced up, reached out and gripped Julie's shoulders just in time to prevent her turning about to see what he was staring at.

"There's nothing wrong!" He laughed falsely. "Everything's wonderful! Wonderful! Go get me some breakfast!"

"What?" Julie asked confusedly.

But Marc's gaze had again been captured by a movement in the mirror. As he looked up Toffee's reflection smiled brightly at him and waved.

"Stay where you are!" Marc gibbered. "Go back!"

"What?" Julie asked.

Marc looked at her unhappily. "I'm starving!" he gibbered. "Get me something to eat! I may start gnawing on the bedpost in a minute!"

"But you just said for me to stay where I was. Why?"

"Yes, yes, I know," Marc said. He smiled feebly. "What I mean is that I'm hungry and want breakfast, but I hate to see you leave to get it because ... because it's so nice to see you this morning...."

Julie smiled uncertainly and patted his head. "I'll get you something right away," she said. "But I'll hurry."

"Oh, don't!" Marc said. "Take all the time you want!"

Julie looked at him quizzically and started to rise from the bed. Unfortunately for everyone's peace of mind Toffee chose that moment to stick one shapely leg around the edge of the curtain.

"Don't!" Marc yelled.

Julie sat down quickly and reached a hand to Marc's brow. "But how can I get breakfast if I don't leave?" she asked patiently.

Marc turned to her with an harrassed expression. "You can't!" he cried. "That's just it! So leave! Go on! Go 'way!"

"What!" An expression of utter hopelessness came over Julie's face.

"Go!" Marc said desperately. "Hurry!"

Julie stared at him for a long moment. "Are you sure you aren't harboring some sort of terrible grudge against me for what I did last night?" she asked slowly. "I'll understand perfectly if...."

"No, no, no!" Marc broke in. "I was never more fond of you than I am right at this minute. Go away."

"All right," Julie said. "I'm going. But don't call me back this time the minute I make a move for the door."

"I won't," Marc said. "I'll be silent as the grave."

Julie leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the forehead, then started across the room toward the door. "I'll be back practically instantly."

Quickly, Marc whirled around and stared in the direction of the alcove. As he did so the blood in his veins was sorely put to it whether to run hot or cold; Toffee, curve-some as a serpent and twice as fleshy, had stepped from behind the curtains and, at the moment, had arranged herself into a posture of highly seductive nature. This, judging by her expression, she considered humorous in the extreme. Not so, Marc.

"No!" he cried. "Stop!"

Julie did not bother to turn around; she merely stopped where she was in the doorway and placed her hands carefully on her hips. "Oh, no!" she groaned. "I've married a man who fancies himself a traffic signal!"

"No!" Marc yelled. "Not you!"

"Then who?" Julie asked with threadbare patience. "The twenty-seven little men with pointed heads sitting on the bureau? Is that who you mean, dearest?"

"Just go!" Marc implored her. "Go!"

"Stop, go, stop, go, stop go!" Julie shrilled. "I am not operated electrically. More's the pity!" Slowly she started to turn around to face her ever-changing spouse and—eventually—the nakedest redhead any wife ever had the sheer horror of discovering in her husband's bed chamber.

Marc felt fate bearing down on him in a way that made him understand the feelings of a deeply rooted daisy looking up at an approaching steam roller. He turned away and closed his eyes in the cowering aspect of one who expects to receive a load of brickbats on the nape of the neck. He stood, his nerves alerted against Julie's cry. There was a beat of silence—then it came.

But it was not the cry that Marc had braced himself against. This cry was sharply out of character, not at all the triumphant cawe of a wronged wife laying hand to definite proof of her husband's perfidy. This was sheerly, unmistakably a cry of basic, physical pain.

Marc opened his eyes and turned around, then started back with a gasp of surprise. Julie, the beauty who always walked in regal stateliness, whose every move and gesture was a masterpiece of living poetry, was suddenly squatting in the doorway, clutching at herself in a way which was not only ungainly but downright repellent.

For a long moment surprise rendered Marc totally incapable of action. Then with a burst of logic and simultaneous realization, he whirled in Toffee's direction. Suddenly, this whole shuddering situation was all too clear to him.

Toffee, now completely emerged from her place of hiding, turned and smiled at him in a conspiratorial and knowing way. Marc noticed that her left hand was raised significantly in Julie's direction, while the right was held over the face of the curious ring, as though shading it.

He stared at her in horror; he couldn't imagine exactly what part the unearthly ring was playing in Julie's unlovely predicament, but he was absolutely certain that it was responsible to some degree or another. He was stunned beyond caution.

"Stop that," he demanded angrily. "Stop that instantly!"

Julie, still crouching in the doorway, her back to the room, trembled violently and turned her eyes to the ceiling.

"Do you think I'm doing this because I like it?" she gritted between clenched teeth. "Do you actually imagine I wouldn't stop it if I could, you beast?"

"Now, Julie...!" Marc turned about, held out an imploring hand to her arched back.

"You shut up, you vindictive vermin!" Julie hissed, announcing her sentiments through the length of the outer hallway. "So you bear no grudge, huh? Hah! I'm only surprised you didn't break your back under the load!"

"Julie...!" Marc pleaded. "You don't under...!"

"No!" Julie broke in. "Oh, no! Don't you dare say I don't understand! And don't tell me I don't know when I've been brutally, wantonly and vengefully kicked from and in the rear!"

"Julie!" Marc gasped. "I didn't kick you. I know it's hard to believe, but...."

"You're darned tootin' it's hard to believe!" Julie sneered. "In fact it's impossible to believe, you liar!"

"But...!"

"Well, aren't you at least going to call the doctor? As inhuman as we both now know you to be, there must be some slim thread of decency somewhere in the tacky fabric of that character of yours."

Marc turned beseechingly to Toffee.

"Please," he implored her. "Please! You're not helping matters, you know, in taking that attitude."

"Ohhh!" Julie groaned. "I didn't take this attitude, I was kicked into it!"

With a bland smile Toffee nodded to Marc. Then carefully she removed her hand from the ring, and there was a bright glitter from its surface. Toffee winked broadly and stepped back into the alcove. In the doorway Julie straightened instantly and turned around, her hands clenched tightly at her sides. She stretched her back tentatively.

"Well, I'm all right again," she announced heavily. "No thanks to you, Mr. Wife Kicker!"

"Julie ..." Marc began, "you've got to listen to me!"

"Oh, no, I don't!" Julie corrected him emphatically. "I don't have to listen to you. All I have to do is convince myself that I like that lamp over there too well to shatter it on your skull." Calming herself with an effort, she eyed him with controlled malevolence. She breathed deeply. "I think I can trust myself now not to run to the kitchen for the ice pick." She turned away. "Goodbye, Mr. Marcus Pillsworth!"

"Julie...!"

"And may your soul blister in everlasting hell!" Julie added as she swept out of the room and into the hallway.

Marc stood undecided for a moment. He started toward the hall, then checked himself and spun around in the direction of the alcove. Two striding steps brought him to the drapes, and with a single sweeping gesture of outrage, raked them aside. Toffee was disclosed sitting on the edge of the desk, one leg crossed casually over the other, blowing on her nails. She glanced up and smiled innocently.

"Lo," she said.

"Why you slithering little reptile!" Marc barked. "Of all the witless stunts...!"

Toffee waggled a slender finger at his costume. "Has anyone ever told you how cunning you look in those pajamas?" she murmured. "Are they ripped that way on purpose for ventilation?"

With a seizure of modesty Marc snatched at the curtains and clutched them around him. He looked rather like a Roman senator with his toga slipping. Toffee laughed.

"I thought that would put the muzzle on you, you old Puritan," she said.

Marc drew himself up to his full six feet and two inches, and eyed her with lofty disdain. "You're in a nice position to talk," he observed frigidly.

"I'm in a nice position for a lot of things," Toffee sighed, "but you'd never notice."

Marc cleared his throat and averted his eyes. "Don't be brazen," he said. "I would offer you these curtains if I didn't need them so desperately myself."

"Always the perfect host," Toffee commented.

"Never mind me," Marc said. "What about you? Whatever possessed you to do a thing like that?"

"Like what?"

"Oh, stop it," Marc said wearily. "It was perfectly evident that you were at the bottom of that little demonstration."

"At the bottom?" Toffee laughed. "You put it so well. Unless you wanted to say I was at the seat of things."

"There you go. Just give you a simple statement and you squeeze enough dirt out of it to start a truck farm." Marc agitated his drapes. "Either you tell me what you're up to or I'll stop projecting you if I have to belt myself over the head with a sledge hammer."

Toffee smiled slowly. "I might as well make a clean breast of it," she said. "If the anatomical reference doesn't strike you as too racy?"

"Never mind," Marc said shortly. "You wouldn't recognize a moral scruple if it were presented to you in a glass jar."

"Very well," Toffee said. "Apparently you've guessed the function of my ring." She held up her hand and the fearsome ornament glittered brightly. "Actually the stone projects a ray which, in effect, sensitizes the bones and tissues of the human body, separates them slightly according to how long you time the concentration, and holds them apart. Maybe you noticed that Julie, just before her accident, was slightly taller than usual. Anyway, once you have the subject focused, it's only a matter of breaking the ray quickly with the other hand. Things, drawn apart and out of line snap back with such a force that the subject might just as well be struck with a hammer." She looked at Marc. "See what I mean?"

"I think so." Marc said slowly. "In other words you focused the radiation on the base of Julie's spine, drew ... uh ... things out of line, broke the suspending force suddenly, so that they jarred together with such momentum that they were thrown out of place ... the sacroiliac, in this case."

"Exactly," Toffee said. "In effect, I simply gave your wife a good rousing kick in the...."

"Croup," Marc supplied quickly.

"In the croup," Toffee agreed. "And when I wanted her to get over it I merely pulled the ... things ... apart again, then released them more gently so as to return them to their proper adjustment."

"But what I want to know," Marc said evenly, "is just what possessed you to demonstrate this diabolical little gadget on Julie?"

"Two reasons," Toffee explained. "First to make sure the ring works the way I planned it, second to get Julie out of the way."

"Get her out of the way?" Marc repeated apprehensively. "Now look here if you have any sordid notions about a dalliance on a divan, for instance...."

"I always have those notions," Toffee said. "However at the moment I'm having them in conjunction with other notions." She smiled prettily. "I've come to straighten out the world."

"You what?" Marc asked incredulously.

"You will admit it needs straightening out?" Toffee asked complacently.

"Well, yes," Marc said. "But believe me the one thing it doesn't need is your ministrations. It couldn't take it. And I wish you'd get rid of that filthy ring."

"Why should I?" Toffee asked. "After all it was just as much your idea as mine."

"My idea?" Marc said. "How do you figure that?"

"You said it plain as anything," Toffee said, "last night, just before you went to sleep. You said the world needed a good swift kick."

"Oh, my gosh!" Marc said. "And so you've...!" He pointed at the ring.

Toffee nodded proudly. "I'm the girl that's right in there with the goods. Everything will be just dandy in no time."

"Oh, Lord!" Marc groaned. "Of all the things I've said in my life, you would have to pick on that!" He stopped, sighed heavily, looked at her long and wearily. "Well, you can just pack up your ring and your sex appeal and trot right back to where you came from. Of all the idiotic notions...!"

"Huh-uh," Toffee shook her head. "It's an idea that appeals to me. Besides, if enough of the right people get kicked in the right places ... well, what have we got to lose?"

"Also," Marc said coolly, "I don't believe I thanked you yet for wrecking my home. I take it that is a sample of your methods for establishing unity and good will?"

"Good will?" Toffee smiled. "I have other methods for that." She slid off the edge of the desk and moved purposefully toward him.

"You lay a hand on these drapes," Marc said nervously, "and I'll scream. I mean it! Julie is still here, you know."

Just then, as though to deliberately make a liar of him, the front door slammed downstairs.

"We are quite, quite alone," Toffee murmured significantly.

"Go away!" Marc said, trembling in his draperies. "Go back where you came from. Heaven knows things are bad enough already...."

"Oh, stop it," Toffee said. "We have business to attend to."

"Business?"

"Yes. As long as I've gotten myself all materialized to save the world I suppose I might just as well pitch in and get it over with. Business before pleasure, as they say. I figure I can have these world affairs you've been brooding over set ship-shape in less time than it takes a flat-chested girl to shuck on her girdle. Then I'll be free to concentrate on you without interruption."

"No!" Marc said suddenly. "I don't know why I waste my time listening to this prattle. Save the world! Indeed! I'm taking you down to the office where you can't harm anyone and leave you there till you decide to evaporate. Both the world and I have enough headaches already."

"You've dropped your drapes," Toffee observed mildly.

"Hang the drapes!" Marc said forcibly and, taking a hitch in his gaping pajamas, strode into the bathroom ... and locked the door.

Driving, particularly toward the center of the city, had lately become hazardous; the motorist never knew what insanity awaited him just around the next corner. At an intersection Marc stopped the car before a group of white-haired, bonneted old ladies who were gleefully engrossed in a game of croquet that had something to do with knocking your opponent's ball into an open manhole. At the sound of Marc's horn one of the aged gamesters glanced around demurely and peered at him through silver-rimmed glasses.

"Can it, you creep," she shrilled. "You wanna louse my shot?"

She might have said more except that her attention was suddenly drawn to the manhole, where the grimy head of a workman rose slowly like a soiled and rather timid moon. Lifting her skirts delicately so that only the minimum of ankle was exposed the lady minced daintily forward and belted the head a stunning blow with her mallet. Without a murmur the head retreated once more into the deeps of the city sewage system.

"Danged whelp keeps poppin' up and spoilin' our innocent fun," the old lady said sullenly. "Does it just to aggravate us." She turned to one of her companions. "Shag me the bottle, Lana."

The lady in question produced a bottle of bourbon from the folds of her skirt. "Right-o, Rita," she said. "Blood in your eye!"

Marc shook his head sadly, but Toffee, huddled beside him in one of his topcoats, saw a certain charm in the sketch.

"Personally," she said, "I like to see folks growing old disgracefully. It makes the inevitability of age more attractive. After a lifetime of perfecting sins and vices you ought to be able to take them with you at least as far as the grave."

Passing by this bit of lopsided philosophy, Marc wheeled the car onto the sidewalk and skirted the field of play.

"The whole world's gone mad," he murmured.

It was a block later, at the sight of the Empire Department Store, that Toffee instructed Marc to stop the car.

"I want to pick up a few fine feathers," she explained. "I may want to take a flier later on."

"You won't need clothes," Marc informed her. "The office is most informal these days, especially since the staff has left."

"If I'm going to languish," Toffee said, "I'm going to do it in silks and satins. Besides, if you don't stop I'll darned well cripple you with my jewelry."

Marc pulled the car to the curb without further discussion.

They left the car and entered the Empire, where aisles and counters stretched into the distance over gleaming floors. A dark girl with circles under her eyes lounged dreamily at a counter displaying gloves and handbags. They approached. But just as they did so a short, stocky individual in a turtle-neck sweater hurried up to the girl from the opposite direction. He stopped abruptly and stuck a revolver in the girl's face, waggling it just beneath her nose. Crossing her eyes drowsily, the girl observed the gun, then the man.

"Oh, fer Cris'sake," she murmured.

"Hand over the cash, sister," the man growled.

"Okay," the girl yawned. "Only don't rush me, see?" She reached under the counter and brought forth a bag such as money is kept in. She scratched herself delicately and dropped the bag on the counter. "I figured I'd have it ready this time," she said. "Anything else, sir?"

"Yeah," the thug snarled, brandishing the gun anew. "Now lay down on the floor and don't open your trap until I'm gone."

"Aw, that corny routine, huh?" the girl sneered.

"G'wan!"

The girl shrugged indifferently, then boosted herself away from the counter and disappeared slowly beneath its horizon. The thug departed in the direction of the street.

For a moment Marc and Toffee were left to ponder this episode in solitude, then the girl slowly reappeared, leaned her elbows on the counter. She swiveled her bored eyes in their direction apathetically.

"Yuh want something?" she drawled.

"Aren't you going to scream or something?" Toffee asked with quiet curiosity.

"Scream?" the girl asked. "What'd I want to scream for?"

"Well," Toffee said. "It may be that I'm just the excitable type, but if I'd just been robbed I'd sound off like a crash alarm."

"Oh, that," the girl murmured. "That wasn't nothing, honey. Take a look over there."

Marc and Toffee gazed in the direction she indicated—a counter laden with expensive handbags. As they looked a hand darted furtively from beneath the counter, grasped one of the bags and instantly disappeared again. A moment later the action was repeated.

"What in the...?" Marc said.

"A purse snatcher," the girl said. "He's good, too. He can clean out a whole counter in half an hour sometimes."

"Don't you care?" Toffee asked.

"I should care," the girl shrugged. "They're stealin' the store blind from end to end. What's the diff? What's the store going to do with money when it's blasted off the face of the earth?"

Toffee and Marc, before they had had time to digest this, were diverted by a small movement at the end of the counter. The face of the thug who had presumably just departed appeared briefly from behind a display of gloves.

"Psst!" it said.

"The place is infested!" Toffee said.

"Excuse me," the salesgirl said, "I'll be right back. If you see anything you like just slip it into your stocking, honey." She ambled over to the glove display. "Yeah?" she inquired.

The face was joined by a hand bearing the money bag.

"Here," he said, "I din' take nothin' outa it."

"Don't you want it?" the girl asked.

"Let's do it over again," the thug said. "Only this time give it a little somethin', will yuh? Scream and carry on a little bit so's I can get the feel of it better."

"Oh, okay," the girl said listlessly. She accepted the bag and returned to Marc and Toffee. "Whatta pest," she said. "All day all he does is hold me up, that's all, just hold me up. I get tired of it."

"Doesn't the manager mind this sort of thing?" Marc asked.

"Geez, no," the girl said. "The manager don't mind anything any more. Why should he? He'll cork off just as fast as the janitor when the bombs drop."

At this juncture the thug stepped from behind the glove display, waving his gun excitedly.

"This is a stickup!" he announced.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the girl murmured. "What else?"

"Go on an' scream," the bandit said in a lower tone. "You said you would. You promised."

"So okay," the girl agreed. She turned to Marc and Toffee. "You see how it is—borin'." Then she threw back her head and gave vent to a shriek that echoed back from the high ceiling with all the painful discord of a trainload of jealous opera stars going through an underpass in full voice. When it was over she leaned back on the counter and stifled a yawn. "So was it okay?" she asked.

"Not bad," the bandit said admiringly. "Now hand over the dough and git down on the floor!"

"Aw, have a heart," the girl said. "I've been down on the floor so much today I'm beginning to feel like a dust mop." She nodded to Marc and Toffee. "Make them get down on the floor for a change."

The thug glanced around, then quickly away. "I couldn't!" he whispered. "They're total strangers!"

"Take the money and git," the girl said. "And don't come bringin' it back, 'cause I'm through for today. I'm bushed."

"Okay," the thug said. "Okay. You don't have to get sore about it!" Drawing himself up, he departed in a huff of indignation.

"Now," the girl said. "What was it you wanted?" But just then the hand of the purse snatcher eased up to the counter and started edging toward her. She reached out and dealt it a stinging blow. "Sometimes he takes it into his head to pinch some things that ain't purses," she explained. "A girl's got to keep an eye on the shifty little devil or she might get the shock of her life."

"Where could we find the manager of the store?" Marc asked. "I think if we talked to him directly...."

Just then from across the store came the fearsome sound of steel jaws closing with a vicious snap, this accompanied by the clatter of chains and a blood-chilling shriek of pain.

"That's the manager now," the girl said unconcernedly. "I guess Dolly's got him trapped again. I'd know his scream anywhere."

"Trapped?" Toffee asked.

"Yeah. Over in the sport's department. Last week she got him in a lion snare, but I guess she's back to her bear traps this week. They cripple him up so he can't get away so fast."

"This Dolly," Toffee said. "She bears the manager ill will?"

"Oh, no," the girl said. "She's crazy about him. She's been after him for years and never got anywhere at all. I guess she figures time's runnin' out."

"And this sport's department," Toffee asked. "They have a department just for sports? I mean, is this manager considered a sport?"

"He's game," the girl said. "Let's put it that way. The sports department is where they sell equipment."

"At least this Dolly suits the locale to the action," Toffee said.

Just then the atmosphere was rent with another bellow of agony.

"Come on," Marc said. "The poor devil needs help."

"Be careful," the girl called after them as they started away. "He's mean when he's cornered. Snarls and spits like a mad badger. And that Dolly, she's been mean all her life."

Marc and Toffee hurried to the sports section and stopped at the entrance with a gasp of dismay. At the far end of the department a camping display was being utilized for a scene of mad action.

A young man of immaculate and personable countenance, one foot held fast between the jaws of a mammoth bear trap, was energetically distorting his features and making loud sounds of dissatisfaction.

The cause of his predicament, a large, athletic, sharp-featured female, wearing tortoise shell glasses and tennis shorts, stalked him from behind a teepee. She was carrying a baseball bat, and a mad light glittered in her eyes. It would have been apparent to even a retarded child with a disturbed psyche that the young man's chances were slim.

As Toffee and Marc watched, the young lady with the glasses leered evilly from around the edge of the teepee and flourished her bat in a few practice swipes.

"Ho-ha!" she cried with primitive triumph. "So I've got you at last, you stinker!" She paused to cackle fiendishly to herself. "You won't get away this time. I'm going to pound that thick coco of yours so hard you won't wake up for centuries. And when you wake up—you know what?"

The young man, who had ceased to snarl at the beginning of this overwrought recital, looked around apprehensively. "No," he said. "What?"

"You are going to find yourself married, wed, hitched, spliced, mated, united, espoused, wived, coupled, joined and made one with me. You are going to be mine in twenty-three languages, in fifteen churches, ten civil ceremonies and a couple of uncivil ones I just thought up myself. How do you like them apples, Mr. Smart-stuff?"

"No!" the young man yelped, reaching for the jaws of the trap. "No! Never!"

"Let go of that trap!" the girl yelled. "I'll lop your ears off just for the sheer hell of it!"

"We'd better lend a hand here," Marc said. "She'll kill him with love."

"I can't help admiring her frank, forthright manner," Toffee said. "And you can't deny that her intentions are almost too honorable. But I can see where a man might consider her undainty, especially the choosy kind." Marc started forward, but she reached out a hand and drew him back. "I'll take care of this," she said. She raised her hand and faced the ring in the direction of the infuriated Amazon.

"Hurry up!" Marc said. "Shoot the current to her before she mashes him to a pulp!"

Toffee carefully surveyed the scene of primitive love run amok. The assault on the hapless manager, no longer merely imminent, was developing rapidly into a crashing reality. The love-crazed Dolly had risen to her toes and hunched forward to gain the maximum devastation from the blow.

"Hurry!" Marc said, and Toffee drew her hand down sharply over the face of the ring. The results in addition to being instantaneous were staggeringly bizarre.

The stalking murderess abandoned her batting stance with a cry and straightened up throwing her hands over her head. The bat, gaining its freedom all of a rush sailed high in the air and fell to the floor with a crash. Dolly, as suddenly as she had righted herself, fell into a tormented crouch and hugged her bottom with both arms in a fair fit of devotion to the awful thing. Her glittering eyes seemed to spin wildly in their sockets, and she clenched her teeth in a manner suggesting that she had bitten into a high voltage socket and was prepared to blow a whole bin full of fuses.

"Yeeeee-ow!" she yelled in shrill tones.

The captive manager, having devined from the tone of Dolly's voice that the skull-splitting project had run into a snag, opened his eyes and glanced around hopefully. One peek, however, and his expression underwent a change, so that he looked for all the world like a young man who would have preferred immeasurably having his skull crushed to being confronted in this awful way with a crouching, teeth-gritting female who beyond any question of a doubt was preparing to spring upon him and rend him limb from limb with her bare fangs. He shuddered visibly and looked away. His lips quivered over prayers for an easy deliverance of his immortal soul. Toffee and Marc hurried forward to reassure him.

Once the young man was released, he mopped his brow, glanced around with a sigh, and instantly spotted the fact that there remained something in the situation to be explained.

"What's the matter with her?" he asked of his erstwhile captor. "Why is she all hunkered down like that?"

"Either she's a hard loser," Toffee murmured, "or she needs more roughage. It's hard to say at a glance." She made a quick surreptitious pass at her ring, and the girl in question fell back limply on the false grass before the teepee.

"Who prodded me with a riveting machine?" she asked belligerently.

"I wish I had," the manager said, rubbing his ankle. He looked at the trap. "Damn thing's got a nasty bite. I tell you if I were a bear I'd be very careful around those things."

"You can't blame a girl if she's got ingenuity," Dolly said sullenly. "I almost got you, too, you slippery devil."

"You're fired," the manager said loftily.

"Oh, yeah?" Dolly said. "I don't quit, see? I haven't even tried guns, knives, hand grenades, bayonets, hand-to-hand combat and mousetraps yet. I'm starting in on light side-arms tomorrow."

"Look," Marc said to the manager. "The young lady would like something to wear. We're in a hurry. I've got to get back home...."

"Fine," the manager said. "I was on my way to the fashion salon when this morbid little affair befell me. I'm to meet Congressman Bloodsop there, too; he wanted to sit and look at the models. Come along."

And the three of them left, leaving the luckless Dolly thoughtfully testing the blade of a machete with the tips of her fingers.

"You see?" Toffee said to Marc. "You see how easily differences can be settled under the proper guidance?"

The salon, it turned out, was on the fifth floor of the Empire. On the way the manager paused briefly in the silver department to confer with a small, detached looking lady called Miss Winters.

"Things going well?" he asked.

"Oh, divinely!" Miss Winters twittered. "Just like magic. They're simply cleaning out the department."

"Bolting the meat and picking the bones, eh?" the manager beamed. "Stealing everything in sight, are they?"

"Oh, just!" Miss Winters nodded. "To give them encouragement, every so often I close my eyes and feign deep concentration. Every time I open my eyes the place looks just a little more like a desert wasteland."

"Just blinking away the merchandise, so to speak?"

"How cleverly you put it, Mr. Baker! You always were the one with the well-turned phrase, though." She colored prettily at her own boldness. "How would you like to hear that we've lost better than twenty thousand dollars just since opening this morning?"

"Splendid!" Mr. Baker said. "Splendid! Just keep up the good work, Miss Winters, and we'll be out of business in no time at all." As he turned away he smiled broadly at Marc and Toffee. "The sooner we unload all this junk the sooner we can close up and await the end with composure. As a matter of fact the advertising department has devised a little slogan: Steal at the Empire Before you Roast in Hellfire! Clever, eh?"

"Frightfully," Toffee said, "in the strictest sense of the word."

"Good grief," Marc said. "They're so used to the idea of dying, they're getting flip about it."

"Maybe it's all for the best," Toffee said. "At least their last days will be pleasant."

In the grey coolness of the fashion salon, Toffee, Marc and Mr. Baker, the manager, sank into low, comfortable chairs and accepted the services of a dark, aloof young lady who brought them drinks in tall, cool glasses. An orchestra played muted background music as from a misted distance. All in all the salon was a den of pleasant relaxation.

Girls of all types and unparalleled beauty paraded constantly in the latest words from the fashion centers of the world. Some of the fashion designers, Toffee concluded approvingly, were given to very brief and suggestive words. She also noted—again with approval—that most of those in attendance were males.

"They come here to make dates with the models," the manager explained. "But then the models come here to make dates with the men, so it's all right. I see Congressman Bloodsop hasn't arrived yet."

Toffee leaned forward interestedly. "The congressman?" she said. "Tell me, is this Congressman Bloodsop a man of influence? Does he have connections in high places?"

Marc interrupted the answer. "Pick out some clothes and let's leave," he said impatiently. "I have to get home and start looking for Julie."

"That can wait," Toffee said airily. She turned back to Mr. Baker with a smile. "You were saying...?"

"The congressman has the best of connections," he said. "He's only been in office six months and he's already bilked the nation of millions."

"I see," Toffee said thoughtfully. "And if you were me and were picking out a dress that would interest Congressman Bloodsop what kind would you choose?"

"Something unobtrusive," the manager said. "Nothing to obscure the view."

"I see," Toffee said. "The old gaffer has an eye out?"

"Both eyes. And so far out you could tick them off with a match."

"Something of a rounder, eh?"

"Everything of a rounder."

"Sounds almost too easy," Toffee mused.

"Here, now," Marc broke in. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing," Toffee said with great innocence. "A girl likes to make a good impression on persons of importance." She pointed to the model across the room who was displaying, besides quite a lot of epidermis, a dress made of a vaporish material which had been cut with an extremely frugal hand—almost grudging. "That dress—could I have that one?"

"Oh, that's a dinger, isn't it?" the manager said approvingly. "You might say it was practically made for Congressman Bloodsop." He brought the model over with a nod of the head.

"Madam wishes to see the dress?" the girl asked.

"Madam wishes to see the dress on madam," Toffee said. "The sooner the better."

"You got guts, honey," the model said. "And you'll need them, too, to keep this thing up."

The two of them adjourned to the dressing rooms and Toffee returned a moment later, the very picture of the most recent thing in scandalous chic. She joined Marc and Mr. Baker and took her place between them.

"How do you like it?" she asked Marc.

"You'd be more modest in a plastic shower curtain," Marc said. He boosted himself forward. "Come on."

"I want to meet the congressman," Toffee said. And even as she spoke a portly gentleman with a ruddy face and almost theatrically white hair appeared in the entry and started forward. "And I think I'm about to."

At the manager's limp wave, Congressman Orvil Bloodsop, the accomplished absconder of public funds, presented himself before the company. His eyes, true to forecast, registered a lively appreciation at the sight of Toffee. He nodded perfunctorily to Marc.

"These are some people I met in sporting goods," the manager said. "I haven't the least idea what their names are—or if they have any at all. They can tell you, if they think it's wise."

"What's in a name?" the congressman said with hackneyed gallantry. He got himself a chair and wedged it deftly between Toffee's and the manager's. "It's the ... uh ... heart that counts, eh?" He settled himself with a snort. "I don't believe I've ever seen you around before, dear. Where are you from?"

Toffee lowered her lashes with artful mystery. "A long way away," she said huskily.

"Stop that," Marc said. "Stop sounding like a movie vamp with a bad cold and come on."

"I have things to discuss with the congressman, haven't I, Congressman Bloodsop?"

"Why, of course, dear," the congressman said, leering at the things he hoped she referred to.

"What things?" Marc asked crudely.

"You'll see," Toffee said. "Enjoy the passing scenery." She turned back to Congressman Bloodsop. "I hear you've got some wonderful connections."

"Some of the best, dear."

"In Washington?"

"Straight up to the President," Orvil Bloodsop boasted. "All the way up."

"The President?" Toffee said. "Who's that?"

The congressman looked at her twice to make sure she wasn't joking. "Why the President is Lemons Flemm," he said. "You know that. But perhaps you remember Lemons when he was a television comedian. That's how Lemons got elected, you know.

"During campaign time Lemons' sponsor refused to give up his air time for the candidates speeches. As a result everyone was trying to watch Lemons and the candidates at the same time, and they got confused. When they counted the votes, Lemons was elected.

"And he's made the most entertaining president we've ever had. Taxes up one day and down the next. Anything for a laugh. Anything and everything goes."

"I see," Toffee said. "This comedian, then, is at the head of the government?"

"Right on the top of the heap. However, if any of us ever live to see another election I doubt that Lemons will be reelected. It seems that during the campaign there were a lot of people who thought the candidates were a lot funnier than Lemons."

"But this Lemons Flemm is running things?"

"A mile a minute," Orvil Bloodsop nodded.

"Then if someone were in possession of a really decisive secret weapon he'd be the man to contact, wouldn't he?"

"I doubt if he'd be interested," the congressman said. "Secret weapons have been done to death lately. Everyone's sick of them."

"Suppose this were something that gets in there where it does the most good and really makes itself felt?" Toffee asked anxiously.

"Something to make 'em rare back and take notice, huh?"

"Exactly."

"I see," the congressman said. "Then you're a foreign spy, aren't you, selling out the old country? You've already said you were from far away. Tell me, how do you like our little country?"

"Love it," Toffee said. "That's why I want so badly to meet your President." She crossed her legs carefully, and no part of the movement was overlooked by the congressman.

"I see," he said. "You want to get up in the world where the bidding is high?"

"That's the idea," Toffee said. "Sort of wriggle my way into the affairs of state, so to speak."

"Brings to mind an exciting picture," the congressman commented. "Of course the best way to crash Washington society is to be investigated by the Congress. You may not believe it, dear, but we've made some of the very best international figures. But it's difficult to be investigated, especially for a spy like yourself, with credentials and all. That's too easy, and we have to concentrate on the more difficult cases—our personal enemies, for instance. However, a girl with your—uh—attributes might prove of sufficient diversion to warrant special attention."

"This Congress," Toffee said. "What is it?"

"Oh, just a body of men."

"Really!" Toffee's interest shot ahead like an arrow discharged from a sixty pound bow. "I would be investigated by this body of men?"

"Minutely, honey," the congressman assured her. "And from every angle."

Toffee was almost beside herself with anticipation; she almost forgot the purpose at hand. "I'll kill 'em," she said. She composed herself. "Could you arrange to have me hauled up for investigation?"

"Well ... I wouldn't do it for just anyone, you know."

"But you would for me, wouldn't you? Don't forget; I do have a secret weapon."

"I'm not forgetting," the congressman murmured. "No, indeed. However, I'll have to convince the Congress that you're a substantial menace." He was thoughtful for a moment. "I think I'll call the Congressman from Idaho and say that you've been insulting his wife. I think something can be worked out." He rose.

"Just a minute," Toffee said. "There's just one more thing; include my friend, Mr. Pillsworth. Say he's been insulting Texas."

"Well...." the congressman hesitated.

"Please," Toffee cooed. "He might get his feelings hurt if we left him out."

"Well, okay," the congressman agreed, and left.

Seeing that there was an opening, Marc edged closer. "Is the congressman leaving?" he asked.

"He'll be right back," Toffee said pleasantly. "He's gone off to arrange something for me."

"What?" Marc said evenly. "Just what has he gone off to arrange?"

"Oh, just a little investigation."

"What kind of an investigation?"

"He mentioned something called Congress," Toffee said. "I think it's some kind of a club he belongs to."

"A Congressional investigation?"

"Uh-huh," Toffee nodded. "I believe those were his very words."

"Who's going to be investigated?"

Toffee smiled the sublimely innocent smile of one of heaven's nicer angels. "Me," she announced, "and you."

"What!" Marc jumped to his feet as though he'd been wrenched by a pulley. "Why you...! What did you tell that old idiot?"

"Nothing really," Toffee said. "I just told him I had a secret weapon, and he assumed the rest. He's including you as a personal favor."

"Dear God in heaven!" Marc yelped. "Let's get out of here before he comes back!"

"Oh, no!" Toffee cried. "I have to wait and see if he could arrange it."

"Come on!" Marc said, taking her by the arm and dragging her out of her chair. "Where'd he go? We'll go the other way."

"I must say I don't understand your attitude," Toffee said woundedly, following him into the entry. "After I worked like a demon to charm the daffy old vulture...."

"Just like a demon!" Marc said hotly. "Exactly like a demon! You take the words from my mouth."

"And I should dip them in cyanide and put them right back!" Toffee said. "I suppose it hasn't penetrated your blunted intelligence that I'm only trying to do something to help save this preposterous world of yours."

"I see," Marc said. "You propose to save the world by ruining me. That makes such brilliant sense it fairly blinds me." By now they had reached the outer hallway and were covering space rapidly in the direction of the elevators.

"I'm not going to stand for it!" Marc said testily. "And that's my message to you." He stopped before the elevators and placed his finger firmly to the button. "If you think I'm going to allow my life to be governed by the noxious fermentations of that fluttering mind of yours ... you're wrong!"

Toffee parted her lips for an angry reply, but just then the door across the hall opened, and Congressman Bloodsop appeared on the scene. His ruddy face was wreathed with smiles.

"Ah, there you are!" he boomed expansively. "Well, the news is good tonight. You're to be investigated tomorrow. I'm to take you into custody right now, and there'll be a couple of government boys to guard you. You're to stay at my home under guard tonight, and we'll fly up to Washington in the morning for the festivities." He swayed back on his heels in a seizure of self-appreciation. "Fast action, eh?"

"Mr. Bloodsop...!" Marc sputtered. "Mr. Bloodsop...!"

But the congressman held up a hand. "No need to thank me, boy," he said. "It's nothing to pull a few strings for friends."

"Mr. Blood...!"

Just then the elevator doors slid back to disclose Dolly, the impassioned wild-gamester, struggling with the stringy vagaries of an enormous tuna net. She staggered forward and paused to disentangle a cork float from the door latch. Then, hunched forward under her burden, she started determinedly toward the salon.

"On the scent again already?" Toffee inquired amiably.

Dolly stopped and peered back over her muscular shoulder. "Uh-huh," she panted. "Only this time I've got a switcheroo for the sonofagun. This time I not only toss him into the trap but fling myself in after him." She winked. "Get it?"

"In detail," Toffee said. She turned to Marc. "Isn't it nice to meet a girl who knows her own mind—even when it's cracked seven ways to Sunday?"

"You should know," Marc glowered. "You should damned well know, you little heller."

Congressman Bloodsop's study was a mammoth vault paneled solidly with the finest oak that purloined money could buy. It was vast-ceilinged and set solidly at one end with leaded windows of a thousand panes. Beyond the windows, like a magazine illustration, one could see formal gardens softened with twilight. To Toffee's mind it fairly stank with class.

From the depths of her leather-covered chair, she lowered her coffee cup to the table and observed the spectacle of Congressman Bloodsop sitting like a high magistrate behind a kennel-sized mahogany desk.

"Do the guards have to stay outside in the hallway?" she asked. "Won't they be lonesome?"

"A matter of form, dear," the congressman said. "Looks good. Besides, I've told the maid to give them tea."

Marc standing beside the fireplace stirred with agitation. "Mr. Bloodsop...!"

The congressman raised his eyes with slow patience. "Young man," he said evenly. "Is there something the matter with you? What is this curious compulsion of yours to rasp my name every few minutes? If you have something to say, say it."

"Yes, Marc," Toffee said sweetly. "Don't let the congressman think you're dull."

Marc choked, presumably with emotion. "I only wanted to inquire just why I can't use the telephone to try to find my wife?" he said in a strained voice.

"Another matter of form," the congressman said. "Good heavens, man, do you really care so much to find your wife? It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever heard of. I must remind you that you and the young lady now constitute a matter for official inquiry."

Marc clenched his fists tight at his sides. "Oh, Christ!" he wailed.

"At least he's shouting for someone else for a change," the congressman said complacently. "An erratic type. Subversives usually are, though. Next he'll be calling for Phillip Morris."

"Poor Marc," Toffee put in appealingly. "He just can't bring himself to view the end of civilization with the same happy composure the rest of us do. It upsets him."

"No use fighting the inevitable," the congressman said. "When the whole country has gone gypsy, you might just as well snatch up your skirts, so to speak, and join in the innocent merriment."

"Seems a trifle fatalistic," Toffee said. "Sometimes I rather agree with Marc that you owe it to yourself to resist to the end ... even if it's only an attitude. It seems more ... human ... somehow."

"Thank you for that much," Marc said with heavy irony. "At least my attitude pleases you."

"Welcome, I'm sure," Toffee murmured, then turned back to the congressman. "Tell me, congressman, just who is it that's going to do all this bomb dropping anyway? I haven't heard any name mentioned yet."

The congressman gazed at her. "You mean you're not really one of them, after all? You're with another interest?"

"A private concern, you might say," Toffee said.

"Well, it's a good thing we're investigating you then," the congressman said. "One does like to know who's killing one, you know. It gives you a clue whom to curse with your dying breath."

"But getting back to these others," Toffee said, "who is it? What country, I mean?"

"Why, You Know Where, of course," the congressman said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You Know Where, who else?"

"Did someone put something in my coffee," Toffee asked, "or are you just being terribly coy about this thing?"

"I'm not being coy at all, damm-it," the congressman said. "You Know Where is the country."

"Good grief," Toffee said, "now he's lapsing into baby talk. Very well, congressman, if you can't bring yourself to tell me the name of the country in a straightforward manner, perhaps you'll just mention the man who's at the head of it. Just as a hint."

"You Know Who," the congressman said flatly.

For a long moment there was silence as Toffee gazed toward the gardens with apparent serenity.

"All right, congressman," she said presently. "Just forget the whole thing. Forget I even mentioned it."

"Come here," the congressman said, drawing a globe atlas forward across his desk. "I'll show you."

Toffee got up and crossed to the desk. She followed the congressman's finger as it swept across the United States, brushed aside the Hawaiian Islands, and came to rest on a large country on the soiled outskirts of Europe. Quite plainly the country was marked: YOU KNOW WHERE.

"For heaven's sake!" Toffee exclaimed. "Why, that's...!"

"Don't!" the congressman broke in frightenedly. "Don't say that name! It's illegal. It was the government's idea that we should ignore the country, refuse to recognize it. It was hoped that if we just didn't speak to it any more and acted as though we didn't know it was there, it would go away and leave us alone. The use of the name was outlawed five years ago. Unfortunately, it's still there so we have to call it something."

"Very shrewd," Toffee said. "Reminds one of the tactics of sulky children. And this You Know Who, I suppose, is the head of the government there?"

The congressman reached across the desk and drew a newspaper toward them. On the front page was the picture of an elderly man in a short choke-collar effect. He had penetrating eyes and a drooping mustache.

"Oh," Toffee said, "you mean...!"

"You Know Who," the congressman supplied quickly.

"Of course," Toffee agreed. "Then as I see it the country is faced with the question of whether You Know Who from You Know Where is going to drop you know what on the USA?"

"Not whether," the congressman amended, "but when. Otherwise, you have stated the situation in a nutshell."

"And I can't think of a better place for it either," Toffee murmured. "Outside of a pecan pie it's the nuttiest situation I've ever heard of."

"Well," the congressman said, "there's nothing to be done about it now. Unless, of course, your secret weapon has some bearing on the crisis. But I doubt it. We've piled secret weapon on secret weapon and the situation has simply worsened with each one. It's very disheartening."

"I see," Toffee reflected. "It makes a murky state of affairs. However, if you could get people away from the idea of blowing each other up and reduce them to the oldfashioned, intimate methods of warfare...."

"Oh, Lord!" Marc moaned aggrievedly.

"Well," the congressman sighed, "he's still in the religious cycle at least."

At that moment the door opened at the far end of the room, and a heavy-lidded French maid appeared in the opening and leaned exhaustedly against the sill.

"Someone smeared a French pastry on the woodwork," Toffee commented dryly.

"I have served the gentlemen in the hall tea for three hours," the maid sighed, shoving her hair out of her eyes. "They are the devil himself. They play funloving games, like children." She paused and sighed again. "Dinner is served, I presume."

The congressman boosted himself out of his chair. "I will speak to those funloving gorillas in person," he said. He turned to Toffee. "Are you hungry, my dear?"

"Famished," Toffee said, and looked at Marc. "And you?"

"Yeah," Marc said dolefully. "My wife is gone, my business is ruined, my world is about to go up in smoke—but what the heck!"

He turned a sardonic eye on the congressman. "Lead on," he said. "Play, gypsy, play!"

Toffee sat down gingerly on the corner of the bed and surveyed the congressman's best guest room with voluptuous appreciation. It was a production in lace and rococo gilt in which the curly-cued, beflounced bed was lost like a fireworks display in a gaudy sunset. Toffee only regretted that such splendor, for her part, was only to be wasted.

It was not that she would not have willingly stayed the night there, had she the choice—but she had not. Being a thought projection of Marc's conscious mind, she would not exist in the material world when Marc slept. She had to return to the land of his imagination until he awoke again; then she would rematerialize wherever she chose. She looked at the bed, imagined the roseate picture of herself amongst the linens and laces, and sighed a sigh of regret.

She removed herself from the bed, went to the door and listened. There were sounds; the guard was still there. The other guard would be posted at Marc's door.

Toffee glanced at the ornamental clock on the bedstand. It was well after midnight, and she was still in the land of reality. That meant that Marc was still awake—and still worrying about Julie—and the bombs.

She crossed to the bed, sat down as before, and ran her hand absently over the lace coverlette. Something had to be done to help Marc before he became a nerve case. It was true that she had gained the attention of the law makers, but now it seemed that the law makers were as irresponsible a group as one could wish for. And there might not be much time left. Something had to be done ... something big ... and in a hurry. If either side could be made to see the sheer idiocy of the situation. If, for instance, You Know Where....

Suddenly Toffee stood up.

"My gosh!" she cried. "If I could only...!"

She stopped suddenly and a gasp came to her lips. Even as she did so her very being seemed to fade a bit.

"Oh, no!" she cried. Then slowly she became more completely materialized again; Marc had yawned. She ran to the door and threw it open. Instantly the guard, a youngish ape in a dark suit, appeared before her.

"Yes, miss?"

"I've got to see Mr. Pillsworth!" Toffee cried. "He's going to sleep and he mustn't! Not yet." She started forward, but the guard stood firm.

"Sorry, miss," he said. "You're not permitted to see Mr. Pillsworth tonight."

"But I must!" Toffee cried. "He has to stay awake until...!"

"I'm sorry, miss," the guard said, then looked at Toffee more closely. "Aren't you feeling well, Miss? You look a trifle pale around the gills."

"And what's worse," Toffee said, "I feel pale too."

"Well," the guard said helpfully, "I saw an advertisement once about a lady who recommended a vegetable compound very highly. Of course I couldn't be positive but I believe the lady's name was Sylvia Pinkham, or something of the sort. She was a very kind looking old lady...."

"Look," Toffee put in distractedly, "could I go to the study if you came with me? It's terribly important."

"Well," the guard reckoned, "all right. But don't you think you ought to lie down. This lady ... Sylvia ... seemed to think that other ladies should lie down...."

"Blast Sylvia Pinkham," Toffee said. "And blast her compound, too. Come on. Hurry!"

Together they hastened down the stairs. On the first floor the guard led the way to the study and switched on the lights. He watched Toffee with concern as she swept past him into the room.

"My, miss," he said. "You're looking paler every minute. You'll soon be nothing more than a ghost the way you're going."

Heedless, Toffee ran to the desk. There she reached for the globe and turned it with a hurried hand. The guard joined her curiously.

"Let's see," Toffee mused. "We're here. You Know Where is there. If you concentrated in a straight line in that direction...."

"Miss," the guard said softly. "I'm sure Miss Sylvia Pinkham wouldn't like it at all...."

"And I wouldn't like Miss Sylvia Pinkham at all," Toffee said shortly. She turned back to the globe. "This must be the capital of You Know Where, this heavy black dot over here. It is, isn't it?"

"Yes, Miss. But if you're thinking of going there, they won't let you in, you know. There's the Brass Curtain."

"I thought it was iron," Toffee said.

"It used to be. But after a few dealings with those people everyone decided it must be brass."

Without comment Toffee snatched up the newspaper and studied the picture of You Know Who as though she were committing the unlovely features to memory. Finally she set it aside and turned to the guard.

"There now," she said. "I think I've got everything fairly straight in mind. There's just one thing. Mr. Pillsworth is going to sleep now. Don't let him sleep too long—just a little while, then wake him up."

"Are you certain he'll want to...?" the guard began.

"Don't forget," Toffee said positively. "It's a matter of life and death."

"Well, okay," the guard agreed. "I'll tell him you said...!"

Then, with a gasp, the poor man's voice descended down his throat with the gritty rattle of a parcel of bones dumped into a disposal. As he watched, shaken to the very roots of his soul, the girl by the desk gradually faded into thin air....

Dusk had come to a distant land.

Toffee stood in the formidable square and looked with disfavor on the great concrete pilings that brooded over the clear area in the center and isolated it from the waning light of day. Functional architecture, with frippery—cold, grey and starkly oppressive. Very functional, like a straight jacket, and just as pleasant to look at.

There were hardly any signs of human life. A couple of men, so grey and so gross that they seemed only a part of the buildings around them, lumbered down the steps of the largest and most formidable of the structures, stopped to look at Toffee curiously, then passed on. Toffee shrugged and turned toward the building from which they had just come. The best way to obtain information, after all, was to ask someone for it. And if those men had just come from the building, life must exist inside the place in spite of appearances.

She had no more than set foot on the steps of the place, however, than life suddenly descended upon her in a rush; two grey-uniformed guards, seemingly patterned very closely on the physical and spiritual makeup of the gorilla, clumped down the steps toward her with bayonets fixed. One of them barked something that, to Toffee, had no specific meaning. The bayonets, pointing in the vicinity of her mid-section, spoke with great eloquence. Toffee felt keenly that the moment called for a disarming smile.

"Don't be silly, boys," she said with arch modulation. "There's no occasion for manly demonstrations."

There was a sputtered, incoherent exchange between the two, interspersed with moments of silence which allowed them time to stare in open-mouthed wonderment at the lightly-swathed redhead before them. Toffee listened to this for what seemed the proper social interval, then started determinedly forward. The bayonets, however, thrust a little closer, took all the verve and sweep out of the gesture.

"Now, kids," Toffee said, "I don't want to have to get rough with you." And so saying she reached out, delicately parted the bayonets, and passed between them. Their owners, obviously unused to this open flaunting of the sword, turned to stare after her in petrified astonishment. After a stunned silence, there ensued a growl-and-spit interchange of thought on the matter.

Though Toffee had no way of knowing it, one aborigine inquired of the other if they were eye to eye in the opinion that they were seeing things. The other replied in the affirmative, adding that if it were not illegal to entertain such notions, he might venture that they had just been bypassed by an angel from heaven. Of course, since everyone knew that heaven and angels did not exist, the notion was silly.

"Nothing descends from heaven but bombs," his companion observed with native starkness. "The Great Leader has said it is so."

"Then it is so, and we are only the victims of a delusion."

Shrugging their massive shoulders they returned to their posts and hoped for the best.

Inside the building Toffee found herself confronted by a wide foyer from which innumerable corridors stretched away in all directions. Guards of a similar stamp to those who had accosted her on the steps literally infested the place, two to the corridor. They seemed so much a part of the sombre decor, however, that Toffee did not notice them at once. She had proceeded nearly to the center of the room before, overtaken by a certain feeling of uneasiness, she stopped and reconnoitered.

As she glanced around, the walls began to bristle with bayonets. She appraised this nasty state of affairs with concern and decided to adopt the policy of the congressman and his colleagues. A song on her lips, if not in her heart, she fixed her eyes straight ahead on the center corridor and resumed nonchalantly in that direction—perhaps if she pretended that these bayoneted orangoutangs were beneath her notice they might go away and leave her alone. They didn't appear to be the friendly, informative type anyway.

For one brief moment it seemed that the ruse, by dint of sheer boldness, was going to work. Toffee was almost to the corridor when one of the benumbed guards suddenly began to vocalize in an overwrought fashion. In a voice that slammed against the vaulted ceiling like a trumpet blast he shouted something that sounded loosely like, "Gamnovitch!" His tone did not convey the feeling of warm welcome. Toffee, sizing the situation up as the sort that only comes to a head with delay, bolted.

She darted into the corridor and kept going at a pace that utilized her lovely legs to the utmost. A noisy clatter from the rear, however, told her that she was not in the sprint just for exercise. She renewed her efforts. Then suddenly stopped.

It wasn't so much that the corridor terminated in a huge doorway only a few yards ahead—though that was bad news enough—the real thing was that before the door there stood not two but four enormous guards, supplied like the others with those ugly weapons. The guards and Toffee caught sight of each other simultaneously, but the really filthy part of it was that the surprise element in the incident shoved the guards into action while it only held Toffee motionless.

Toffee needed no one to tell her she was about to be surrounded. "I would have to get into this place," she sighed. "It must be a barracks for guards." She watched with resignation as the bulky bayoneters formed a prickly circle around her. She chose the most likely-looking of her captors and smiled enchantingly into his sub-ugly face. But the favored one only reciprocated with a small jabbing gesture which was enthusiastically picked up and elaborated upon by his companions. Toffee was the first to realize that the situation was climbing toward that state which is often described as 'serious.'

"Look out, you lumbering oafs," she said hotly. "You could play hell with a lady's dainties with that sort of thing."

She considered her ring and the hoard of armed brutes around her; there were too many of them to deal with effectively. The situation called for help, and Toffee took her cue from the situation; though she didn't know the language she was willing to kick it around a bit.

"Helpovitch!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. "Helpovitch!"

The result that followed was as instantaneous as it was unexpected. No sooner had Toffee's voice split the air of the hallway than the guards froze where they were and stared at her in a transfix of horror. Toffee hadn't the faintest notion of what she had said but she was awfully glad to have said it.

Experimentally she made a movement; the guards remained still. She stepped out of the circle, and one of the guards made a small movement of protest.

"Helpovitch, you rat," Toffee said. "You heard me."

The guard remained motionless.

Toffee paused, selected the door at the end of the hall as her destination, and went rapidly toward it. As she drew abreast of it, it opened just a crack and an ear presented itself in the opening. Apparently someone had been disturbed by the noise in the hall. Toffee leaned forward and placed her mouth close to the ear.

"Helpovitch," she whispered.

There was a moment, then the ear shuddered delicately, after which it turned red and withdrew quickly from sight. Here, Toffee realized, was the sort of ear that responded to a firm hand. She shoved the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind her. Then she turned about—and stopped short.

It wasn't so much the room which, large and marbled, was a gasping matter all in itself—but the room's occupant; the ear had been misleading for its owner was none other than You Know Who himself. Between the Great Leader and Toffee there wasn't much to choose for goggle-eyed surprise. Toffee, however, was the first to recover from the encounter.

"Well," she said, "just the old villain I'm looking for!"

The Great Leader, his eyes retreating back into their sockets, set his mustache atremble with a great sucking breath and launched into a series of resonant sounds.

"Knock it off," Toffee commanded. "You're making a fog in here. Besides, I can't understand a word of that juicy jazz."

"So!" the Leader exploded. "Who iss? How you got har, hah?"

"Well," Toffee murmured relievedly, "at least you can speak English—using the language loosely, that is."

"How come you har, hey?" the Leader insisted truculently. "Why not soldiers kill you forst?"

"They had it in mind," Toffee said, "but I just said 'helpovitch' to them, and they dropped the whole thing."

"Vooman!" the Leader gasped. "You say soch dorty vord it is only sooprise soldiers do not drop teeth along with thing!" He waved his hand. "Go vay, dorty gorl! Screm!"

"For Pete's sake!" Toffee said. "What does the word mean?"

"Don't ask!" the Leader gasped, throwing up his hands. "You make me drop whole thing, too! Go vay or I call soldiers and tall tham shoot you all over—oop!—down!" He started toward the door. "Tarrible gorl!"

"Hold it, Cecil," Toffee said. "You touch that door and I'll pull off a shindig that'll make you sad all over."

The Leader stopped and regarded her uncertainly. "You American vooman spy, hah?" he demanded. "You think you smart. Vell, you be dad soon, vhat you think, hay?"

"I think you're going to be reasonable and do what I say, hey," Toffee answered firmly. "Either that or you're going to get the surprise of your life."

"Who iss you anyway?"

"An avenging angel," Toffee said. "That'll do for now."

"Nonsanse!" the Leader snorted. "No soch thing angel. Anyvay, angel vould not say dorty vords, make soldiers drop things."

"Okay," Toffee said, "so I'm no angel. You're right there, pop. But I'm avenging, and don't you forget it."

A new thought crossed the seething mind of the Leader. "You know who you talk to so mean?"

"Sure, Mac," Toffee said. "I know you."

"Than I tall you drop dad, you gotta do it, hah?"

"Huh-uh," Toffee said, shaking her head. "And let's have no more sass about killing people. Now let's get down to brass doorpulls...."

But just at that moment the soldiers outside not only got down to doorpulls, but pulled them: the room began to swarm.

"If I'd knew you were coming," Toffee said, "I'd have baked a snake." Nevertheless, she retreated warily. The guards paused uncertainly before her and started babbling among themselves.

"Now!" the Leader said triumphantly.

But Toffee pointed imperiously to the gabby guards. "What are those birds saying about me?" she demanded. "I've got a right to know."

The Leader paused to listen, then nodded with comprehension.

"Forst man say he think you foreign spy because you look nothing like voomans from this country. Other man say he's right because if you var from here you vould haf thick lags like his wife who iss von big slob. Forst man say he can say that again for his vife who iss so big slob you gotta say it twice to describe her." The Leader paused to consider this exchange and suddenly smote his brow. "Hey!" he exclaimed. "Now iss clear! You deganerate product of America sant har to make men unrastful with slobbish female population. So!"

"It's a side-line I hadn't thought of," Toffee said and smiled engagingly at the guards. "But if you think it'll work...."

"Iss no good you viggle around and look saxy," the Leader put in sullenly. "You gonna get shot good, you deganerate boopsy daisy." He turned to the guards and shouted an order which had but one meaning in any language. The men instantly formed a single rank with mechanical precision and raised their rifles toward Toffee, albeit with a certain gleam of reluctance in their eyes.

"Now you gonna gat it," the Leader said.

But Toffee only smiled. "I've told you," she said, "I'm an avenging angel. And we angels are practically indestructible."

"Ve see," the Leader snorted. "So!" He turned to the guards and barked an order that touched off a confusion of explosion and gun smoke. In the moment that ensued, as the smoke settled, there was a tense silence. This was followed by a many-throated cry of alarm.

Toffee, still smiling, and completely unscathed, stepped lightly through the screen of smoke and presented herself to the company at large.

"What would you like for an encore?" she asked.

She did not bother, of course, to explain that she could not possibly be destroyed as long as Marc's mind held the image of her as a live being. She would always be just as Marc imagined her and he quite evidently was not thinking of her as dead at the moment.

As she moved forward, the guards took a faltering step backwards. Then, as a man, they turned and fled the room, slamming the door after them.

Toffee shrugged lightly, turned and gazed about. The Leader was no longer in evidence. She paused to consider briefly, then crossed to the large desk in the center of the room, and bent down to peer underneath.

"You may as well come out," she said. "I see you."

The Leader's head appeared apprehensively in the opening. "Go vay," he said. "Vhy you not dad? You crazy?"

"Crawl out of there, Sam," Toffee commanded. "Loosen that tight collar of yours and get set for a lesson in future history. You can frolic about on the floor later."

Slowly the great man emerged and stood before her. Toffee's refusal to die or even get decently dented had shaken him to the very foundations. Furtively he eyed the bullet-scarred wall.

"Shame," Toffee said. "You've been naughty, Jasper. Sit down."

He did as he was told, looking as though he might burst into tears at any moment. "Vhy you not dad lak hangnail?" he insisted. "You got an iron gordle?"

"I simply can't be killed," Toffee said. "I just can't seem to bring myself around to a serious frame of mind about guns and knives and that sort of trash. Which leads me to the problem at hand. I've got a plan for you, kiddo, and though it won't take five years, we've got to shake a leg." She glanced at the row of buttons and the speaker on the desk. "You know what you're going to do?"

"No," the Leader said warily. "Vhat?"

"You're going to start pressing those buttons, one at a time, from right to left. You're going to talk to all the big shots wired to those buttons and you're going to order the country demobilized, tonight."

"Hah?" the Leader said. "And since vhen?"

"Right now," Toffee said. "You are going to have every bomb and every facility for making bombs blown to dust in the cool of the night. Every piece of live ammunition in the country is going to be laid to rest. By your order. So get busy and start having the danger areas cleared."

The Leader only stared at her in blinking disbelief.

"Voop!" he burped with deep emotion.

"And what is the meaning of that remark?" Toffee asked.

"Means you iss goofy. Means you got bats in the bonnet."

"And you're going to have ants in the pants if you don't start pressing your moist little finger to those buttons." Toffee eyed him humorlessly. "Are you going to start pressing or aren't you? You've had the word."

"I'm waste no more time talking foolish with dorty, saxy dame like you," the Leader said petulantly. He got up and started determinedly toward the door. "I call new guards and have them carry you avay."

"I warned you," Toffee said, raising her hand tentatively. "You'll regret it."

But the Leader, unintimidated, continued toward the door. He had just reached out to open it when Toffee brought her hand down quickly over the face of the ring. Events proceeded according to expectations.

As Toffee aimed the magic ring, You Know Who suddenly sprawled across the desk with a howl of pained surprise!

"Halpovitch!" the Leader screamed, and plumped down heavily on the floor. "Oi!" Following the pattern of his forerunners he slapped his hands to his bottom and hugged himself into a knot of pulsating agony. A stream of highly charged verbiage sullied the air.

"You kick me in restricted, top secret area!" he wailed.

"Not exactly," Toffee said. "Though it's a shame. So many people have longed to." She moved closer to her distressed victim. "Going to start punching buttons? If you do I'll take the heat off."

"No!" the Leader gritted pettishly. "I ponch you in nose!"

"I see," Toffee said. "Suppose I call those guards back in here and let them see you like this? In no time at all the news will get around that the Great Leader has gone off his rocker and is snapping at his own bottom like a beagle after ham hock. A fine laughing stock you'll make, won't you?"

"No!" the Leader pleaded. "No! Oh, soch a pain!"

"Then suppose we have a little friendly cooperation around here?"

"Hokay!" the Leader cried. "I can't stand it no longer!"

Toffee made a pass at the ring and the Leader, after a moment of adjustment, arose.

"How you do soch rotten thing?" he asked.

"You haven't got all the secret weapons," Toffee said. "That's one your agents missed. Now hop to it and start thumbing those discs."

Shaking his head which was heavy with disillusion, the Leader made his way shakily to the desk. He looked at Toffee, then reached for the first of the buttons.

"Don't double cross me," Toffee said, raising her hand. "If you do you'll writhe in agony for the rest of your days."

"Hokay," the Leader said and pressed the button. A moment later a voice answered distantly.

"Halpovitch!" the Leader yelled at the top of his lungs. Instantly Toffee made the necessary gesture, and for the second time the great man assumed the position, placing his equipment as he went. He was moaning low in every sense of the word.

"I warned you," Toffee said. "Trickery will get you nothing but a pain in the terminus."

"All right!" the Leader groaned. "Stop it! I poosh buttons! I poosh 'em twice apiece! I do what you say like a liddle lamb."

Toffee manipulated the ring, and again the Leader picked himself up from the floor. "Let's stop this horseplay," she said, "and get going."

"Horseplay!" the Leader exclaimed, advancing his finger to the buttons. "Horses vhat play mean like you should be on the backs of postage stamps."

It was nearly an hour later when the Leader released the last button and sagged back in his chair, a broken man.

"Iss all," he said. "You have louse up averything. They all say I am insane, but they gonna do it anyhow 'cause I tell 'em, the dumbells. Over-regimented, they are, like a lot of stupid machines."

Toffee glanced out the window at the now-darkened square. "The fireworks should be starting soon, if they're as efficient as you say." She turned back to the Leader. "Is there any way to get to the top of this pile of concrete where we'll have a better view?"

"Opp stairs, sure," the Leader said dully. "Who vants to see?"

"Come on," Toffee said. "This is going to be worth seeing, all that advanced gun powder going up in smoke."

"Hokay," the Leader agreed brokenly. "Who cares now?"

Toffee watched him carefully as he opened a drawer in the desk and slid his hand inside. It was a moment before he extracted a large bottle of vodka.

"For the medicinal purposes only," he explained ruefully. "And I am the sick buckeroo of them all."

Toffee smiled. "Let's get to the top, pop," she said amiably. "Let's tie one on."

Though it occurred miles away, the explosion shook even the solid foundations of the capitol building. Toffee and the leader watched with awe as the whole world, it seemed, suddenly screamed with white fire. The Leader was forced to cling to Toffee for support, and Toffee clung to the bottle strictly as a precaution.

"Beautiful," Toffee breathed as the building ceased to shudder. "It's beautiful to see all that death and destruction destroying itself. Makes you think of those scorpions who sting themselves in the neck when they're mad."

And if the explosions constituted an item of beauty for Toffee, the night was filled to overflowing with the gaudy stuff. The explosions, near and far, continued through the night. Toffee and the despairing Leader sat on the edge of a functional parapet and toasted each new blast with vodka and conflicting emotions.

Below them people churned bewilderedly in the streets like a rising and falling tide. A faint thread of dawn touched the horizon just as the last explosion shuddered across the land.

"Iss all," the Leader mourned soddenly. "All iss gone. You haf made me a tired old man."

"That's all you ever were," Toffee said almost kindly. "You were foolish to try to be anything else." She patted him on the head with groggy sympathy. "I've got a feeling I've got to be running along now. But there's just one more thing before I go...."

"Iss all. Iss all," the Leader moaned. "Iss no more."

"No, not that. All I want to know is what does helpovitch mean?"

The old man lolled his head to one side and looked at her lopsidedly from the corner of his eye. "Iss native slang vord meaning 'democracy.' Iss very dorty vord."

And then, as his beautiful tormentor vanished into thin air, he toppled from his perch on the wall and sprawled flat on his back.

The enemy, a bottle cradled protectively in his arms, had fallen....

Marc had fought the battle against sleep to the last ditch, and there had tripped and fallen squarely into the waiting arms of Morpheus. The sounds, the drone and buzz of Congress, swirled away into limbo and mercifully died. Marc was no longer among those present at the ridiculous investigation.

The only way Marc had been able to go to sleep the previous night was to take as many sleeping tablets as possible, and then a couple more. When Congressman Bloodsop had managed finally to awaken him and to tell him of Toffee's disappearance, it was a long while before he was able to appraise the situation rightly; that Toffee had simply transferred her activities to some other seat of operations, so to speak. Then, once this had soaked into his benumbed brain, it occurred to him that it constituted an ideal state of affairs. With the volatile redhead out of the picture there was an even chance that he would be able to extricate himself from the mess she had created for him and find his way back to Julie.

To accomplish this end he had only to stay awake so that Toffee could not put in an untimely appearance—no mean accomplishment considering the sleeping tablets fermenting in his system. Now he contributed to the congressional activities with a resonant snore.

"And do you persist, Mr. Pillsworth, in the absurd assertion that you did not aid in the escape of the young woman known as Toffee? Mr. Pillsworth!"

Marc stirred and opened his eyes as his name penetrated his awareness.

"Eh?" he yawned, then sat up abruptly as a current of horror flashed up his spine. What chilled him more than the reproving tone and the baleful eye was the realization that he had been asleep. He glanced away from the fuming chairman and subjected the room to a wary search. It was on the return sweep that his most awful expectations burst abloom. Toffee, looking for all the world like an abandoned torch singer on the corner of a piano, was sitting on the outer edge of the podium, one hand poised rakishly on a well-curved hip. She surveyed the assemblage with unmistakable disappointment. Throughout the room several hot games of tick-tack-toe were summarily abandoned as grey, greying, bald and balding heads snapped back in uncharacteristic attitudes of attention. The members of Congress, acting sharply against precedent, sat up and took note of the business at hand.

Since no one else spoke, Toffee took the initiative. "So this is a body of men, is it?" she sneered. "I've seen better bodies on Model T's."

The Chair eyed her with a definite lack of warmth.

"My dear young woman," the Chair said, glaring coldly through his glasses. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"I'm here to be investigated," Toffee said, jauntily crossing her legs. "Get out the tape measure and heave to."

Marc pressed his hands to his temples and sank lower in his seat.

"What!" the Chair said. "You're the young woman known as Toffee?"

"The same," Toffee said complacently. "The very same."

"How did you get there on the stand all of a sudden?"

"Ask me no questions," Toffee said, "and you'll reduce the lie expectancy by at least fifty percent."

Marc's forlorn moan was lost as the Chair cleared his throat. He flicked a pencil in Marc's direction. "Take your place over there with your confederate, please."

"Sure," Toffee said. Abandoning her perch, she leaped lightly to the floor and shoved off in Marc's direction, pausing on the way to pat Congressman Bloodsop on the head. The congressman winked at her, withdrew the pocket flask which had been affixed to his mouth and wiped his lips genteelly on the back of his hand.

"Government," Toffee observed, settling herself happily at Marc's side, "is much the same the world over—full of medicinal purposes."

"Why did you have to show up now?" Marc asked sourly. "They'd have called the whole thing off in another few minutes."

"That's what I like," Toffee said, patting his hand, "a rousing welcome from the one you left behind."

Marc withdrew his hand frigidly and resisted a yawn. "Now we're right back in the same old soup."

Toffee scanned the Congress with a sweeping glance. "Don't tell me you're afraid of this collection of old nincompoops?" she scoffed.

She pointed to a bemused, bald-pated individual across the way who was engaged to the last nerve in the business of engraving a pierced heart in the top of the table in front of him. Across from this exhibit sat a lank citizen who was quietly strumming a guitar and chanting a ballad which had to do with a lonesome cowboy whose horse was dead, house was burned, well was dry, range was barren, and he himself was suffering from pernicious anemia—which individual, nonetheless, wished to assure his faithless sweetheart that she was not to worry for a minute that his affairs were anything other than tickety-boo and that he would 'git' along somehow.

Marc observed these examples of high-minds-at-work with a wry face. "That's just the trouble," he grieved, "they're completely irrational. Heaven knows what they might take a fancy to do to us. Your entrance didn't help any, you know."

"Nonsense," Toffee said. "They're just a bunch of harmless children."

"So harmless," Marc snorted, "they've danced the whole nation right down the path to extinction."

"Oh, that," Toffee said, smiling secretively. "I wouldn't worry about that. I wouldn't waste the time."

"Oh, you wouldn't, wouldn't you?" Marc said annoyedly. "Well, let me remind you, Miss Cotton Brain, that you're subject to the laws of extinction just as much as the rest of us. When I die you go with me, you know, and after the way you've messed up my final hours I will consider it a pleasure to perish just to get even with you. I will laugh as the bombs come crashing down on my roof."

"You're doing me a terrible injustice," Toffee said.

At this point their conversation was abruptly concluded by a heavy rapping from the Chair.

"The Chair addresses the young woman known as Toffee."

"If I'm known as Toffee," Toffee snapped, "then call me Toffee. Stop making me sound like some loose-moraled hussy slinging her hips around in a Klondike saloon."

"Just remain seated," the Chair said severely, "and speak into the microphone on the table. There are some questions for you to answer before we proceed."

Toffee eyed the Chair with raised eyebrows. "Okay," she said. "Shoot." She turned to Marc. "Stop nudging me."

"First of all," the Chair said. "Please make a statement of your political affiliations."

"Political affiliations?" Toffee said, completely bewildered. "If you mean have I ever had anything to do with politicians, I haven't. I might as well say that I think all politicians are a bunch of bums." She turned again to Marc. "Are you ill, dear? Why are you making that awful choking noise?"

Marc repeated the awful choking noise, and the Chair rattled for attention. The Chair also glowered through its glasses.

"What the committee wants to know is which political philosophy do you embrace?"

"None of them," Toffee said. "I wouldn't touch any of them with a pole, much less clasp them to my bosom as you suggest. Aren't you getting a little lewd with all this talk about embracing?"

"Let's put it another way," the Chair said with strained patience. "Of which nation are you a citizen?"

"Why, none of them, of course," Toffee said. "Not that they wouldn't have me, you understand...."

Precisely at this point a door behind the Chair burst open, and a small, musty individual in shirt sleeves hurled himself into the room.

"It's come!" he piped. "It's come!"

"Has someone been praying for rain?" Toffee asked innocently.

The Chair rattled frenziedly. "Just what is it that's important enough to justify this outburst?"

"The news!" the little man jibbered. "I was working down in the Intelligence Department just now...."

"I wondered where they keep all the intelligence around here," Toffee said. "I didn't know they had a department for it."

"Shut up, can't you?" Marc hissed. "You've made enough enemies already to last us out a lifetime."

"You Know Where!" the little man screeched. "You Know Where!"

A murmur of apprehension moved through the room.

"They've attacked?" the Chair asked quickly. "Has the attack begun? Speak up, man!" Then without waiting for a reply, he turned to the gathering at large. "I will now lead you all in prayer."

"No!" the little man cried. "No, no!"

"You don't want us to pray, you nasty little atheist?"

"No!" the little man cried. "Yes! I don't care! But there isn't any attack! There isn't going to be one! You Know Where was demobilized last night. It's a positive miracle! Our agents report rumors about a religious revival going on there. Everyone is talking about an angel with red hair who appeared to the Leader and...."

Marc turned sharply to Toffee with the look of a man who has just been stung by a bee.

"You...!"

"Uh-huh," Toffee said. "We had quite a romp last night, the Leader and I." She spoke through a pandemonium of cheering, crashing bottles and mad guitar music.

"Oh, bury me not on the lone prar-ee!" the lanky Congressman chortled besottedly. "Where the coyotes howl 'cause there's no whisk-ee!"

The Chair added to the din in behalf of a moment of silence and received just a moment.

"Let's knock off for the day," a voice yelled, "and get drunk!"

"We did that yesterday," the Chair said. "We have to think of appearances once in a while, you know. Besides, this new development puts a whole new face on things. It calls for action."

"What about me?" Toffee yelled. "I insist on being investigated."

"Please be quiet, young woman," the Chair said. "You're no longer needed here."

"Thank heavens!" Marc sighed. "Come on, let's leave."

"Certainly not," Toffee said. "I have other business to take care of."

"Oh, no!" Marc cried, and slumped exhaustedly into his chair. "I'm too tired for any more!"

"We must realize," the Chair was saying, "that an opportunity has been placed in our hands. The enemy is helpless. Now is the time to strike!"

There was a pause while this sank in, and then the cheering and rough-housing began again with greater vigor.

"Rickety-rax!" One vaporish congressman giggled, slipping limply from his chair to the floor. "Rickety-rax! Give 'em the axe!"

A colleague at his right launched a squadron of paper darts into the air as the guitarist twanged away at an off-key rendition of the Air Corps Song. This musical interlude, however, came to an unhappy end as the gentleman across the table, finishing the pierced heart with a flourish, picked up an inkwell and emptied it into the bowels of the instrument. There was a splintering crash as the donner received his contribution, guitar and all, across the crown of his head. Undaunted, the man rose from his seat and launched into a lamentable imitation of Jolson doing a mammy song.

"We'll kill 'em!" the cry went up. "We'll give it to 'em in the teeth, the dirty, yella, murderin' rats!"

"Gentlemen!" the Chair pleaded. "Gentlemen! Your enthusiasm and patriotic spirit is commendable. But let's be constructive about this thing. Let's declare war!"

Toffee and Marc, who had been watching this display with rising emotion, got to their feet simultaneously.

"Now just a minute!" Toffee yelled. "Just a minute, you tramps!"

"Precisely," Marc said, steadying himself against the table. "Just a minute."

But their protest was unheard in the din of the merry-making.

"I can see," Toffee said, lifting her hand, "that the time is due to take measures."

"For once," Marc said, "I'm with you one hundred percent." He moved to her side in a limp gesture of staunch support, blinking drowsily.

Toffee eyed the revelling law makers with a selective eye. Her gaze fell to two rotund parties who, their arms clasped about each other's shoulders, were dancing a polka in the aisle. As one of the bulbous rears swiveled in her direction, she let go. It was a direct hit on the target.

With a searing cry the erstwhile dancer unclasped his partner and doubled over, his chops aquiver with an emotion too great for expression.

His partner, at first taken aback, eyed this inexplicable development with bleary gloom. Then he beamed with happy understanding.

"Leap frog!" he yelled joyously. "Hey, fellas! Leap frog!"

The rush for the aisle was instantaneous and enthusiastic. As the playful congressmen lined up for the game, Toffee leaped to the top of the table and assumed a firing stance. Taking careful aim as the first gamester wheezed up the aisle and boosted himself aloft over the back of his suffering brother, she executed a neat wing shot which dropped her victim into place with a convulsion of shocked pain.

"Fish in a barrel," Toffee said gleefully.

"Good," Marc said, coming momentarily awake. "There! Get that gaffer on the rise!"

And another congressman doubled in mid-air and came to earth with a rasp on his lips.

"Stacking up nicely, eh?" Toffee said. "Makes a neat exhibit, all of them in a row like that."

The sport continued apace. It wasn't long before the aisle was lined from end to end with tortured congressmen who moaned and wailed like lost souls taking hell's post grad course. Texas, naturally, made the loudest noise.

"Here, now!" he blurted. "What's going on here? What do you fellows think you're doing; you look like a lot of distressed cats who've found cement in the sand box. It doesn't look at all nice. I'm surprised at you, Maine, for being mixed up in this sort of thing. You, too, South Dakota. Young woman, why are you standing on that table?"

"When I go to the circus," Toffee said, "I like to see everything. I wouldn't want to miss this for the world."

"I thought I told you to go home. The Congress has finished with you."

"But have I finished with the Congress?" Toffee said. "That's what I ask myself."

"Get out!" the Chair cried, definitely beginning to show cracks about the outer surface. "Please go home. Please!"

"I'm afraid I can't," Toffee said. She nodded significantly toward the convulsed members. "I'd hate to go and leave so much unfinished business behind. Or should I say so much behind, unfinished business?"

"Do you mean to say that you are in some way responsible for that repellent demonstration in the aisle?"

"I take the credit proudly," Toffee said. "Remember, I said I had a secret weapon? However, I must say that Mr. Pillsworth, here, has given me all sorts of moral support."

"Thank you," Marc said with composure. "Glad to be associated with any enterprise of a worthwhile nature. I'm a real sucker for these toney clambakes."

"Toney!" The Chair snorted in outrage. "I suppose you are able to undo this disgraceful state of affairs?"

"Oh, quite," Toffee smiled. "In a twinkling. But I wonder if I really want to."

"You must," the Chair said distractedly. "With all that moaning and groaning going on down there I can't hear myself think."

"Heaven only knows why you should want to," Marc said, "with your dwarfed powers of reasoning."

"Quiet!" the Chair snapped. "Young lady, I'm telling you to release those men from whatever unattractive thing is ailing them. That's a congressional order!"

"Okay," Toffee said. "But with one stipulation."

"And what is that, may I ask?"

"That you follow the example of You Know Where—and follow it to the last bomb and factory."

"What! Are you actually suggesting that we demobilize the country?"

"I'm telling you now," Toffee said earnestly. "And I'm telling you to do it immediately. Get religion, brother."

"I see," the Chair said quietly. His hand moved cautiously toward an alarm button.

"I'm sorry," Toffee murmured, "but I haven't time to waste on any more guards." She lifted her hand, made the necessary motion, and the Chair departed his moorings with a leap that sent his glasses sailing off into the air.

"Murder!" he screamed, and crashed back into his seat in a fit of acute discomfort.

"Well," Marc sighed. "Fair's fair. These boys have been giving everyone else that localized pain for years. Now they're just getting a shot of their own medicine. By the way, what happened to that little man from Intelligence?"

"He's in with the congressmen," Toffee said.

Dusting her hands lightly, she turned away just in time to see a door swing open to permit the pompous entrance of several over-costumed and over-decorated individuals who had obviously played the army and navy game with the right set of loaded dice.

One, however, stood ahead of and apart from the others. He glittered and shone with all the bogus brilliance of a dime store jewelry counter. From the peak of his duck-tailed blonde hair to the tips of his two-toned shoes—passing quickly over his rust-red jacket and lemon yellow trousers—he was the absolute end and final gasp in well-upholstered commercial entertainers. As he stood impressively in the doorway his shirt front added the final touch of elegance by lighting up with the classical quote: Kiss Me Quick!

"Good night!" Marc said. "President Flemm! And the heads of the War Department!"

As Toffee gazed on this fine new catch, whole vistas of fresh achievement spread themselves before her. "Hail! Hail!" she said. "Deck the halls with poison ivy!"

The President, having had his little joke, had since fallen into a mood for a bit of tribute from what he considered his official flunkies—or straight men. As he waited for the Congress to rise in his honor—without result—an expression of petulance swept over his features. It wasn't as though they weren't aware of his presence; he made himself known surely. Then why didn't the clods snap into it?

He stepped imperiously to the head of the aisle, from whence there issued low sounds of displeasure and suddenly, with a start, found himself faced with a shattering view of a whole row of upturned bottoms.

"Here, now!" he exclaimed. "What sort of greeting is this? If you men have some personal criticism to make against me there must be a nicer way of expressing it!" He swung about to the Chair. "Just who is responsible for this insulting...!"

The words jammed together in his throat at the sight of the Chair whose sightless eyes peered down at him with every evidence of complete loathing. He seemed to snarl. In fact, as the President watched, the Chair actually did bare his fangs and snarl.

"Now, just a minute!" the President cried, taken aback. "Maybe we do have our little differences now and again, but there's no need to get obstreperous about it. Now stop slavering at the mouth in that extraordinary way and tell those old fools in the aisle to turn around right end up."

The Chair only snarled again.

"Oh, very well," the President said coolly. "If that's the attitude you want to take...."

"I don't think you're really going to get anywhere with him," Toffee put in mildly.

The President whirled about. "And who are you?"

"You might say I'm in charge here," Toffee said. "My friend and I. I think you'll discover that the Congress is suffering from shock—in a way." She nodded to the Chair. "With that one, it's something I said." The big brass crowded in curiously from the rear and ogled Toffee with enormous appreciation. "Oddly, you are just the group I've been waiting to see. I've been wanting to tell you that the time has come for you to demobilize the nation—unload all that high-powered ammunition before it goes off and hurts someone."

The President merely stared at her for a moment. Then he shook his head. "Wouldn't get a big enough laugh," he said.

"I take it you are replying in the negative?" Toffee asked.

"You got it, sis," the President said with his customary dignity. "Besides, just where do you get off telling me the time? Who signed you up for the act?"

"Allow me to present my credentials," Toffee said, and raised her hand. "You'll get a kick out of this."

A moment later President Flemm, quite to his own surprise, added acrobatic dancing to his list of talents. Toffee, aware that important persons required her best efforts, added a shot to the President's neck, having already administered to the more logical location.

President Flemm's fine tenor assailed the air with ear-splitting clarity, as his companions edged away in terror. Clutching alternately at his neck and his rear, the man leaped about like a fan dancer deprived of her feathers before a meeting of young business executives. The President gave the performance of a man who was torn in his very soul.

"Think that'll get a laugh?" Toffee asked. And then, lest the President desired companions, she quickly added the efforts of the War Department. The effect was engaging in a primitive sort of way, though there was a great deal of clanking and crashing of brass on brass.

"Any time you gentlemen decide to sit one out," Toffee said, "just let me know. There are plenty of telephones handy with which to spread the good news."

She and Marc retreated to the steps in front of the podium, picking up an abandoned bottle on the way. Toffee settled back comfortably and indulged in a long draft.

"Hey," Marc said, "you might leave a swallow for me. I'm the one who needs the stimulant, you know."

Toffee handed him the bottle, and for a moment they sat silent listening dreamily to the sounds of gnashing teeth and grunted curses that filled the air about them. Marc looked over to where the President and his cronies had fallen into a stupor of misery.

"Looks like the government has collapsed," he observed drowsily. "I might say it has a pain in its brass."

Even as he spoke, the President lifted an enfeebled hand and beckoned to them. "I think the President wishes a word with us."

"Isn't it thrilling," Toffee said, "meeting all these important people on such intimate terms?" She tilted the bottle again. "Let's toddle over and see what the old comic wants."

"This is excruciating!" the President panted as they approached. "You've got to stop it; it's unbearable."

"Now you know how people felt about your jokes," Toffee said. "I take it you're on the verge of capitulation?"

"Over the verge," the President grunted weakly. "Huh, fellas?"

Four sets of clenched teeth bobbed up and down behind him, accompanied by the plaintive rattle of metal.

"Good show, men," Toffee said. "That's using the old heads. Follow me to the telephones the best way you can and start the wires singing—my tune, of course."

Half an hour later Toffee and Marc let themselves out of the room by the back way and walked along the corridor toward the street.

"I'm hungry as an abandoned babe," Toffee said.

Marc regarded her from beneath drooping eyelids. "I don't know if I can stay awake long enough to feed you," he said. Then he stopped and nodded worriedly back the way they'd come. "Are you sure you ought to leave them all groaning around in there like that?"

"Until after the fireworks tonight," Toffee said. "When it comes to backing out on your word those boys could face to the rear and win the Olympic races without straining a nerve. Besides, suffering has a cleansing effect on the soul, they tell me, and that mob in there has the grimiest set of souls I've ever seen. I informed the lot of them that if they welched on this deal they'd stay that way the rest of their lives and would have to be buried in round coffins. We can come back and turn them loose later."

"I suppose you're right," Marc said. "Right now, I've got to have a pot of coffee before I pass out."

By now they had reached the sidewalk and luckily spotted a cab. Waving for the driver's attention, they hurried forward.

It was just as Marc reached for the door of the cab that he suddenly stumbled. All at once his weariness became too great to be borne further; it reached to his very bones and turned them to sawdust. As he went down to his knees the blackness swam in around him. He reached out a hand to steady himself, but there was nothing to cling to. He was vaguely aware of falling....

"Well, now, how'd you like a dame like that!" the cab driver exclaimed, climbing out of the car. "She takes a powder just because the guy gets a snootful and passes out!" He looked down at Marc who, sprawled on the sidewalk, was tuning up for a good solid snore. "I wonder where he belongs?"

Wherever he belonged, Marc at that very moment was lounging in a state of quiet bliss on one of the rising slopes in the valley of his mind. He turned to regard Toffee whose costume had once again become the transparent tunic, and to reflect that Paris would have to go a long way to stitch up anything half as becoming. Toffee smiled back at him and propped herself up lazily on one elbow.

"Well," she said. "It was something of a whirl, wasn't it? I mean it leaves one a trifle dizzy."

"Whirl?" Marc asked. "How do you mean?" Recent events had slipped from his mind in the interval between awareness and slumber.

"The bombs," Toffee said. "The politicians—" she held up her hand and displayed the ring "—and this."

Memory jarred back into place. "Oh, my gosh!" Marc cried. "All those congressmen! And the President! They're all back there...! And you're here...! How'll you ever get them straightened out?"

Toffee laughed. "I won't. There's going to be a terrific run on the Washington doctors for a while, that's all. Anyway, it'll do the old tubs good, give them something to think about next time they start getting gay with the public's time—and redheaded women."

"Anyway," Marc said. "At least it proves that a well-placed jolt in the right place is a lot more powerful than any bomb. I was right in the first place. When warfare gets personal it loses its attraction. I suppose they'll be busy developing more and worse bombs as soon as the shock wears off, but at least the people in the world will have another chance to try and prevent them."

Toffee shrugged lightly. "It just goes to show that world politics are really childishly simple when someone comes along with a firm hand."

"Are you going to keep the ring?" Marc asked.

Toffee shook her head. "I think I'll just dematerialize it; I never did care about gems." She regarded him slowly from the corner of her eye. "I have just one last use for it first."

"Yes?" Marc asked with a note of apprehension. "What's that?"

"Just this," Toffee said. She slid her arms around his neck and drew him close. "One twitch of resistance and I'll double you up like a pretzel."

Marc sighed helplessly. "When you put it that way, what can I do?" he asked, and submitted unflinchingly to her kiss.

It was just as she drew away, just as she brushed her hand over his shoulder, that the ring exploded.

Actually it was only a burst of vibrant green light, but it was so intense that it blinded Marc, blocking Toffee and the valley from sight. Marc squinted against the brilliance and waited for it to die. But when it did there was only an infinite blackness where it had been.

"Toffee?" Marc called tentatively. "Toffee, where are you?"

"Goodbye, Marc," Toffee's voice said through the darkness. "Goodbye, you old reprobate."

Marc moved a bit to one side and felt of the softness beneath him before he opened his eyes. Then he opened them half fearfully, wondering where he was. He looked about slowly, then suddenly sat upright. He was home, in his own room, in his own bed.

But it was dark outside, and the lamp was on. He had passed out on a street in Washington, if he remembered correctly. He was sure that was right, but he couldn't think how he had gotten home. Then he held his thoughts in abeyance and listened; there was the sound of a voice—a man's voice—and it seemed to be coming from downstairs....

"As each bomb bursts and casts out its power for destruction the burden becomes just so much lighter in the hearts of men all over the world. Tonight the bombs send out their light against the darkness, not as instruments of death and hate, but as multi-beamed beacons pointing the way to world peace. This is one of the greatest nights in human history!"

Marc leaped from the bed, drew on his robe which was lying across the bed, and ran out into the hallway. He was nearly to the head of the stairs when he stopped to listen again.

"The mystery surrounding the House of Congress since early today when the order for demobilization was issued from there by the President remains unsolved. Guards have been placed by presidential order at all entrances and exits, and no one, not even the President, has left the inner chamber. The press and other officials have been strenuously barred from entry, even at gun point in some instances. However a number of physicians have received calls from within the chamber and have been escorted into the room. A rumor persists that one of the members—Congressman Wright of Maine—was stricken with the mumps during today's session, placing the entire Congress in quarantine...."

Marc hurried down the stairs and into the living room. He stopped short at the sight of her.

"Julie...!" he cried.

She rose quickly from her chair and switched off the radio.

"I had it fixed," she said. "I was so ashamed." Then her face lighted with joy. "Oh, darling, there's the most wonderful, wonderful news! The President ordered...!"

"I know," Marc said. "I ... uh ... I heard it just now coming down the stairs." He went to her and drew her into his arms, and for a moment they were both still, just holding each other.

"Julie...?" Marc said, and she nodded. "When did you come back?"

"The same night I left, of course," Julie smiled. "I only got as far as the station and I got to thinking that if anything happened ... and we weren't together.... Anyway, I turned right around and came back. I was nearly frantic when you weren't here. I just sat here and cried and blamed myself."

"I see," Marc said. "And ... uh ... how did I get back?"

"The taxi driver brought you. He found your address in your wallet."

"All the way from Washington?"

"He said there was a young lady he wanted to see here anyway, and he only charged half fare." She put her hand to his cheek. "Oh, I was so relieved when I found out you'd only been on a bender. In fact I was a little flattered that you were that desperate without me." She drew closer. "Oh, darling, we both behaved so childishly. We deserved just what we got—a good swift kick in the...."

But Marc kissed her quickly—and for a long time—until he was sure a new topic for conversation had come into her mind....

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Vengeance of Toffee, by Henry Farrell

THE VENGEANCE OF TOFFEE

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