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  Nancy Peters was nervous. She felt that the annihilating grimace was about to strike again on Mary’s lightning-gash mouth. But it was time for the test of strength. Nancy spoke the new slogan that had been selected for presentation to the world that very night, a wonderfully convincing and powerful slogan that should bring this random Mary Smorfia to heel if anything could. And she spoke it with all the absolute expertise of the Crocodile’s Mouth behind her.

  The Grimace! And the slogan was destroyed forever. And (grimacing horror turned inward) Nancy caught the contagion and was doing the grimace herself. She was quite unable to get the thing off her face.

  Sheer humiliation overwhelmed the Nancy person, who had suddenly been made small. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure and unease.

  “Do you want to make twenty thousand dollars, Mary?” Nancy asked after she had returned from the jane where she had daubed her flushed face and cooled her flustered body.

  “Twenty thousand dollars isn’t very much,” Mary Smorfia sounded out of her panoramic mouth. “I make eighty-eight fifty now after everything. I could make a lot more if I wanted to go along with the cruds.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars is very much more,” Nancy Peters said enticingly.

  “It is very much more cruddy, kid.” Mary Smorfia grimaced. Grimaced! Not again! Nancy Peters fled in deflated panic. She felt herself dishonored forever.

  Well, do you think it is all water-melon pickles and pepper relish, this unilaterally creating all the images and attitudes for the whole world? It isn’t. It is a detailed and devious thing and the privileged Disestablishment had been building it for centuries. (The Establishment itself had been no more than a figure of speech for most of those centuries, a few clinging bits of bark: the heart of the tree had long been possessed by the privileged Disestablishment.) Three quick random persons could not be permitted to nullify words from the Mouth itself.

  MORGAN AYE of ABNC located Clivendon Surrey in Speedsters’ Café. Clivendon was a lank and fair-haired man with a sort of weariness about him, a worldliness that had to be generations old. He had the superior brow and the thoroughbred nose that isn’t grown in short centuries. He had the voice, the intonation, the touch of Groton, the touch of Balliol, the strong touch of other institutions even more august. It was a marvelous voice, at least the intonation of it. Clivendon’s employer once said that he didn’t believe that Clivendon ever spoke in words, at least not in any words that he was ever able to understand. The intonation was really a snort, a sort of neigh, but it carried the cresting contempt of the ages in its tone. And it was contagious.

  Clivendon was really of Swedish extraction and had come off a farm near Pottersville. He had developed that intonation for a role in a high school play. He had liked it and he had kept it. Clivendon was a motorcycle mechanic at Downhillers’ Garage.

  “Do you work alone?” Morgan Aye asked Clivendon.

  “Naeu. You work alone and you got to work. You work with a bunch and you can slip out from it,” Clivendon intoned. Yes, he talked in words and the words could be mostly understood. But the towering intonation was the thing, the world-wilting contempt of the tone. This man was a natural and Morgan felt himself a foot shorter in the very presence of that tone.

  “Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Mary Smorfia?” Morgan asked fearfully.

  “That’s a funny thing.” The tone cut through ear-wax and the soft spots of the spleen. “I had never heard of them but Mary Smorfia called me up not thirty minutes ago and said that she wanted both of us to meet Mike. So I’ll meet them in about twenty minutes, as soon as the clock there says that I’m supposed to be off work at Downhillers’ Garage.”

  “Don’t meet them!” Morgan cried out violently. “That might be the closing of the link, the setting up of a league. It might be an affront to the Mouth itself.”

  The tone, the neigh, the snort, the sharp edge of a wordless intonation sent Morgan reeling back. And there were echoes of it throughout Speedsters’ Café and in the streets outside. The tone was as contagious as it was cutting.

  Morgan started to speak the newest selected slogan from the Mouth—and he stopped short. He was afraid of the test of strength. Two very expensive slogans had already been shattered today by these randoms. “No malice in the three,” the computer had said and: “without malice, there’s no handle to get hold of a thing,” John Candor had stated. But somewhere in that mountainous and contagious contempt of tone that belonged to Clivendon Surrey had to be some malice. So Morgan Aye reached for what had always been the ultimate weapon of the Crocodile’s Mouth. It always worked—it always worked if any malice at all existed in the object.

  “How would you like to make five thousand dollars a week?” he whispered to Clivendon.

  “What garage pays that much?” Clivendon asked in honest wonder. “I’m not that good a motorcycle mechanic.”

  “Five thousand dollars a week to work with us at ABNC,” Morgan tempted. “We could use you in so many ways—that marvelous scorn to cut down any man we wished! You could lend the intonations of your voice to our—”

  The neigh was like a thousand sea stallions breaking up from the depths. The snort was one that crumbles cliffs at the ends of the earth. Morgan Aye had gone ghastly white and his ears were bleeding from the transgression of that cutting sound. There were even some words in Clivendon’s sounding—“Why, then I’d be one of the birds that picks the shreds of flesh from between the teeth of the monster.” Blinding hooting contempt in the tone and Morgan Aye was in the street and running from it.

  But the echoes of that intonation were everywhere in that part of town, soon to be all over the town, all over the world. It was an epidemic of snorting at the Crocodile’s Mouth itself. Fools! Did they know that this was but one step from snorting at the very Crocodile?

  THE ring had closed. The informal league had formed now. The three randoms had met and united. The Mouth was affronted. Worse than that, all the outpour of the Mouth was nullified. The whole world was rejecting the catchwords that came from the Mouth, was laughing at them, was throwing them away with the uttermost gesture, was monkey-facing them, was snorting them down, was casting them out with bottomless contempt.

  This was the short reign of the secret society of three, who did not know that they were secret. But in their day they closed the Mouth down completely. It was filled with mud and swamp reeds and rotting flesh.

  The Secret Crocodile was lashing its tail with acute displeasure now. The Crocodile’s Mouth had become quite nervous. And what of the little birds that fly in and out of that mouth, that preen the teeth and glean scraps of flesh and slogans and catchwords there? The birds were in quite an unhappy flutter.

  “There is open conspiracy against us by a secret society of three persons,” Mr. James Dandi was saying, “and all the world abominates a secret society. We have this thing to do this day—to cripple it forever in its strength. Otherwise we will be cast out and broken as ineffectual instruments and the Crocodile will bring in strong persons from the Cocked Eye or the Cryptic Cootie to take our places. Surely we are not without resources. What is the logical follow-up to the Fruitful Misunderstanding?”

  “The Purposive Accident,” John Candor said immediately.

  “Take care of it, John,” Mr. James Dandi said. “Remember, though, that he whose teeth we preen is the very bowels of compassion. I believe this is the salient thing in the world in our day. The Compassion of the Crocodile.”

  “Take care of it, people,” John Candor said to his seven talented ones, “remembering always that the Crocodile is the very belly of compassion.”

  “Take care of it,” the seven said to the computer, “always within the context of the jaws of compassion.”

  The computer programmed a Purposive Accident to happen and manufactured such props as were needed. And the Purposive Accident was very well programmed.

  There was no great amount of blood poured out. No persons were killed except several uninvolved bystanders. The secret three were left alive and ambulant and scathed only at their points of strength.

  It happened in the block between the Blind Robbin Bar and Speedsters’ Café when all three members of the secret society happened to be walking together. The papers called it a bomb; they call everything a bomb that goes off like that. It was really a highly sophisticated homing device with a tripartite programming and it carried out its tripartite mission.

  All three randoms, former members of the short-lived secret society, are well and working again. Mike Zhestovitch is no longer a zipper repairman (it takes two talented hands to fix those zippers), but he still works at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners. He runs one of those big pressers now which he can easily do with his powerful and undamaged left hand and his prosthetic right hand. But without his old right hand he can no longer make the contagious primordial gesture that once dumbfounded the Mouth and all its words. You just cannot make the big gesture with a false hand.

  Mary Smorfia still works at the King-Pin Bowling Alley as hamburger waitress and beer buster. She is still small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-frequency eyes), lively, smart, and Italian. Her mouth is still a gash across her face, but now it is twice as great a gash as it used to be, and it no longer has its curled liveliness. Its mobility is all gone, it will no longer express the inexpressible, will no longer shatter a phrase or an attitude. Mary Smorfia is as she always was, except that now she is incapable of the famous grimace.

  Clivendon Surrey is again a motorcycle mechanic at Down-hillers’ Garage and again he spends most of his time in Speedsters’ Café. His vocal cords are gone, of course, but he gets by: he is able to speak with a throat microphone. But the famous intonation, the neigh, the destroying snort are all im
possible for him.

  The trouble is over with. Now again there is only one organization in the world to create the images and attitudes of the world. This insures that only the standard attitudes of the Disestablishment shall prevail.

  IN OUR opening catalog we forgot one group. There is another secret society in the world composed of the good guys and good gals. It has no name that we have ever heard except just the Good Guys and Good Gals. At the moment this society controls nothing at all in the world. It stirs a little, though. It may move. It may collide, someday, even with the Secret Crocodile itself.

  Mean Men

  Mad Man

  THE too-happy puppy came bounding up to him—a bundle of hysterical yipes and a waggling tail that would bring joy to the soul of anyone. The pathetic expectation and sheer love in the shining eyes and woolly rump was something to see. The whole world loves a puppy like that.

  And George Gnevni kicked the thing end over end and high into the air with a remarkably powerful boot. The sound that came from the broken creature as it crash-landed against a wall was a heart-rending wail that would have melted the heart of a stone toad.

  Gnevni was disgusted with himself.

  “Less than ten meters. Should have booted him twelve. I’ll kill the blood-sucking cod-headed little cur the next time. Nothing goes right today.”

  IT was not a real puppy; it was better than a real one. There is something artificial in the joy and carrying on of a real puppy as well as in its hurt screaming. But the antics of this one rang true. The thing was made by a competent artist, and it was well made. It could be set to go through the same routine again at a moment’s notice.

  A Crippled Old Lady came up shaking with palsy. There was real beauty in her face yet, and a serenity that pain could never take away from her.

  “A glorious morning to you, my good man,” she said to Gnevni.

  And he kicked her crutches out from under her.

  “I am sure that was an accident, sir,” she gasped as she teetered and nearly fell. “Would you be so kind as to hand them to me again? I’m quite unable to stand without them.”

  Gnevni knocked her down with a smacking blow. He then stomped up and down on her body from stem to stern. And with a heavy two-footed jump on her stomach he left her writhing on the pavement.

  Gnevni was again disgusted with himself.

  “It doesn’t seem to do a thing for me today,” he said, “not a thing. I don’t know what’s the matter with me this morning.”

  It was a real lady. We are afraid of dog-lovers, but we are not afraid of people-lovers. There are so few of them. So the lady was not an artificial one. She was real flesh and blood, and the best of both. However, she was neither crippled nor old. She was a remarkably athletic woman and had been a stunt girl before she found her true vocation. She was also a fine young actress and played the Crippled Old Lady role well.

  Gnevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building that was popularly known as the Milk Shed.

  “Bring my things, crow-bait,” he grumbled at a nice young lady assistant. “I see the rats have been in your hair again. Are you naturally deformed or do you stand that way on purpose? There’s a point, you know, beyond which ugliness is no longer a virtue.”

  The nice young lady began to cry, but not very convincingly. She went off to get Gnevni’s things. But she would bring only a part of them, and, not all of them the right ones.

  “Old George isn’t himself this morning,” said the under-doctor Cotrel.

  “I know,” said under-doctor Devon. “We’ll have to devise something to get him mad today. We can’t have him getting pleasant on us.”

  THE required paranexus could not be synthesized. Many substances had been tried and all of them had been found insufficient. But the thing was needed for the finest operation of the Programmeds. It had to be the real thing, and there was only one way to get a steady supply of it.

  At one time they had simplified it by emphasizing the cortin and adrenalin components of it. Later they had emphasized a dozen other components, and then a hundred. And finally they accepted it for what it was—too complex for duplication, too necessary an accessory for the Programmeds to be neglected, too valuable at its most effective to be taken from random specimens. It could be had only from Humans, and it could be had in fine quality only from a special sort of Humans. The thing was very complex, but at the Institute they called it Oil of Dog.

  Peredacha was a pleasant little contrivance—a “Shadler Movement” or “female” of the species that had once been called homo conventus or robot and was now referred to as “Programmed Person.”

  She had a sound consciousness, hint of developing originality, a capacity for growth and a neatness of mechanism and person. She might be capable of fine work of the speculative sort. She was one of those on whom the added spark might not be wasted.

  Always they had worked to combine the best elements of both sorts.

  The Programmed Persons were in many respects superior to the Old Recension Persons or Humans. They were of better emotional balance, of greater diligence, of wider adaptability, of much vaster memory or accumulation and of readier judgment based on that memory. But there was one thing lacking in the most adept of the Programmed that was often to be found in the meanest of the Humans. This was a thing very hard to name.

  It was the little bit extra; but the Programmed already had the very much extra. It had something of the creative in it, though the Programmed were surely more creative than the Humans. It was the rising to the occasion; the Programmed could do this more gracefully, but sometimes less effectively, than could the Humans. It was the breaking out of a framework, the utter lack of complacency, the sudden surge of power or intellect, the bewildering mastery of the moment, the thing that made the difference.

  It was the Programmed themselves who sought out the thing, for they were the more conscious of the difference. It was the Programmed technicians who set up the system. It cost the Humans nothing, and it profited the Programmed very much in their persons and personalities.

  On many of them, of course, it had little effect; but on a select few it had the effect of raising them to a genius grade. And many of them who could never become geniuses did become specialists to a degree unheard of before—and all because of the peculiar human additive.

  It was something like the crossing of the two races, though there could never be a true cross of species so different—one of them not being of the reproductive sort. The adrenal complex sometimes worked great changes on a Programmed.

  There were but a few consistent prime sources of it—and each of them somehow had his distinguishing mark. Often a Programmed felt an immediate kinship, seldom reciprocated, with the Human donor. And Peredacha, a very responsive Programmed, felt the kinship keenly when the additive was given to her.

  “I claim for paternity,” she cried. It was a standard joke of the Programmed. “I claim as daughter to my donor! I never believed it before. I thought it only one of those things that everybody says. The donors are such a surly bunch that it drives them really violent if one of us seeks their acquaintance on this pretext. But I’m curious. Which one was it?”

  She was told.

  “Oh no! Not him of the whole clutch! How droll can you get? He is my new kindred? But never before did I feel so glorious. Never have I been able to work so well.”

  THE assigned job of George Gnevni was a mechanical one. In the ordinary course of things this would be all wrong, for George had less mechanical aptitude than any man ever born. George had very little aptitude for anything at all in the world—until his one peculiar talent was discovered.

  He was an unhandsome and graceless man, and he lived in poverty. Much has been said about the compensations of physical ugliness—mostly the same things that have been said about poverty. It is often maintained that they may be melded behind the dross front, that the sterling character may develop and shine through the adversity.

  It is lies, it is lies! It happens only rarely that these things are ennobling. With persons of the commoner sort it happens not at all. To be ugly and clumsy and poor at the same time will finally drive a man to raving anger against the whole world.

  And that was the idea.