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corpse of a floating dead thing, and paused only a moment as if to remind him that this was not his,
Talbot’s, domain, but his own.
Like Talbot, the fish would not die.
Talbot sat at the lip of the crater for a long time, looking down into the bowl that held the
lake, and he watched the corpses of dead dreams as they bobbed and revolved like maggoty pork in
a gray soup.
After a time, he rose, walked back down from the mouth of the crater, and resumed his
journey. He was crying.
When at last he reached the shore of the pancreatic sea, he found a great many things he had
lost or given away when he was a child. He found a wooden machine gun on a tripod, painted olive
drab, that made a rat-tat-tatting sound when a wooden handle was cranked. He found a set of toy
soldiers, two companies, one Prussian and the other French, with a miniature Napoleon Bonaparte
among them. He found a microscope kit with slides and petri dishes and racks of chemicals in nice
little bottles, all of which bore uniform labels. He found a milk bottle filled with Indian-head
pennies. He found a hand puppet with the head of a monkey and the name Rosco painted on the
fabric glove with nail polish. He found a pedometer. He found a beautiful painting of a jungle bird
that had been done with real feathers. He found a corncob pipe. He found a box of radio premiums:
a cardboard detective kit with fingerprint dusting powder, invisible ink and a list of police-band call
codes; a ring with what seemed to be a plastic bomb attached, and when he pulled the red finned
rear off the bomb, and cupped his hands around it in the palms, he could see little scintillas of light,
deep inside the payload section; a china mug with a little girl and a dog running across one side; a
decoding badge with a burning glass in the center of the red plastic dial.
But there was something missing.
He could not remember what it was, but he knew it was important. As he had known it was
important to recognize the shadowy figure who had moved past the surgical lamp at the top of the
navel shaft, he knew whatever item was missing from this cache...was very important.
He took the boat anchored beside the pancreatic sea, and put all the items from the cache in
the bottom of a watertight box under one of the seats. He kept out the large, cathedral-shaped radio,
and put it on the bench seat in front of the oarlocks.
Then he unbeached the boat and ran it out into the crimson water, staining his ankles and
calves and thighs, and climbed aboard, and started rowing across toward the islets. Whatever was
missing was very important.
The wind died when the islets were barely in sight on the horizon. Looking out across the
blood-red sea, Talbot sat becalmed at latitude 38° 54’ N, longitude 77° 00’ 13” W.
He drank from the sea and was nauseated. He played with the toys in the watertight box. And
he listened to the radio.
He listened to a program about a very fat man who solved murders, to an adaptation of The
Woman in the Window with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, to a story that began in a great
railroad station, to a mystery about a wealthy man who could make himself invisible by clouding the
minds of others so they could not see him, and he enjoyed a suspense drama narrated by a man
named Ernest Chapell in which a group of people descended in a bathyscaphe through the bottom of
a mine shaft where, five miles down, they were attacked by pterodactyls. Then he listened to the
news, broadcast by Graham MacNamee. Among the human interest items at the close of the
program, Talbot heard the unforgettable MacNamee voice say:
“Datelined Columbus, Ohio; September 24th, 1973. Martha Nelson had been in an institution
for the mentally retarded for 98 years. She is 102 years old and was first sent to Orient State Institute
near Orient, Ohio, on June 25th, 1875. Her records were destroyed in a fire in the institution some
