I told Angela and Newt about it.

"Do you think there's any real danger?" Angela asked me.

"I'm a stranger here myself," I said.

At that moment there was a power failure. Every electric light in San Lorenzo went out.

A Pack of Foma 85

Frank's servants brought us gasoline lanterns; told us that power failures were common in San Lorenzo, that there was no cause for alarm. I found that disquiet was hard for me to set aside, however, since Frank had spoken of my _zah-mah-ki-bo_.

He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards.

I remembered again the stone angel in ilium.

And I listened to the soldiers outside--to their clinking, chunking, murmuring labors.

I was unable to concentrate on the conversation of Angela and Newt, though they got onto a fairly interesting subject. They told me that their father had had an identical twin. They had never met him. His name was Rudolph. The last they had heard of him, he was a music-box manufacturer in Zurich, Switzerland.

"Father hardly ever mentioned him," said Angela.

"Father hardly ever mentioned anybody," Newt declared.

There was a sister of the old man, too, they told me. Her name was Celia. She raised giant schnauzers on Shelter Island, New York.

"She always sends a Christmas card," said Angela.

"With a picture of a giant schnauzer on it," said little Newt.

"It sure is funny how different people in different families turn out," Angela observed.

"That's very true and well said," I agreed. I excused myself from the glittering company, and I asked Stanley, the major-domo, if there happened to be a copy of _The Books of Bokonon_ about the house.

Stanley pretended not to know what I was talking about. And then he grumbled that _The Books of Bokonon_ were filth. And then he insisted that anyone who read them should die on the hook. And then he brought me a copy from Frank's bedside table.

It was a heavy thing, about the size of an unabridged dictionary. It was written by hand. I trundled it off to my bedroom, to my slab of rubber on living rock.

There was no index, so my search for the implications of _zah-mah-ki-bo_ was difficult; was, in fact, fruitless that night.

I learned some things, but they were scarcely helpful. I learned of the Bokononist cosmogony, for instance, wherein _Borasisi_, the sun, held _Pabu_, the moon, in his arms, and hoped that _Pabu_ would bear him a fiery child.

But poor _Pabu_ gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and _Borasisi_ threw them away in disgust. These were the planets, who circled their terrible father at a safe distance.

Then poor _Pabu_ herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favorite child, which was Earth. Earth was _Pabu's_ favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up at her and loved her and sympathized.

And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony?

"_Foma!_ Lies!" he wrote. "A pack of _foma!_"

Two Little Jugs 86

It's hard to believe that I slept at all, but I must have--for, otherwise, how could I have found myself awakened by a series of bangs and a flood of light?

I rolled out of bed at the first bang and ran to the heart of the house in the brainless ecstasy of a volunteer fireman.

I found myself rushing headlong at Newt and Angela, who were fleeing from beds of their own.

We all stopped short, sheepishly analyzing the nightmarish sounds around us, sorting them out as coming from a radio, from an electric dishwasher, from a pump--all restored to noisy life by the return of electric power.

The three of us awakened enough to realize that there was humor in our situation, that we had reacted in amusingly human ways to a situation that seemed mortal but wasn't. And to demonstrate my mastery over my illusory fate, I turned the radio off.

We all chuckled.

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.

Newt was the quickest; he pointed out to me that I had my passport and my billfold and my wristwatch in my hands. I had no idea what I'd grabbed in the face of death--didn't know I'd grabbed anything.

I countered hilariously by asking Angela and Newt why it was that they both carried little Thermos jugs, identical red-and-gray jugs capable of holding about three cups of coffee.

It was news to them both that they were carrying such jugs. They were shocked to find them in their hands.

They were spared making an explanation by more banging outside. I was bound to find out what the banging was right away; and, with a brazenness as unjustified as my earlier panic, I investigated, found Frank Hoenikker outside tinkering with a motor-generator set mounted on a truck.

The generator was the new source of our electricity. The gasoline motor that drove it was backfiring and smoking. Frank was trying to fix it.

He had the heavenly Mona with him. She was watching him, as always, gravely.

"Boy, have I got news for you!" he yelled at me, and he led the way back into the house.

Angela and Newt were still in the living room, but, somehow, somewhere, they had managed to get rid of their peculiar Thermos jugs.

The contents of those jugs, of course, were parts of the legacies from Dr. Felix Hoenikker, were parts of the _wampeter_ of my _karass_, were chips of _ice-nine_.

Frank took me aside. "How awake are you?"

"As awake as I ever was."

"I hope you're really wide awake, because we've got to have a talk right now."

"Start talking."

"Let's get some privacy." Frank told Mona to make herself comfortable. "We'll call you if we need you."