The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis Page B

I am living in an icehouse with a crazy man and eating garbage? Such conditions. Yes, and I am half crazy myself from inhaling mercury fumes. How can I laugh? Much better I was living in Mu fifty thousand years ago.”
    Following these remarks there was a lull, a highly charged calm, and then with no warning the professor sprang. He threw his arms around June and buried his face in her stiff and tawny wavelets and called her his “little mole” and his “tulip.”
    June was taken by surprise. From cultivated men she expected more chat, a longer stalking period, as with Austin, who had sat on this same sofa and pawed her a little in an absentminded way, and pecked her on the cheek, but never making a decisive move. Perhaps he had held back out of wariness, sensing the steady gaze of Mother Mack on the back of his neck, she with one inflamed eyeball pressed to a door crack and her teeth bared in a rictus from the painful effort to see and hear everything. Or from a failure of nerve, or concern about the difference in their ages. Or from a simple lack of ardor. Whatever his reasons, Popper had been much too slow off the mark to suit June and had thereby forfeited his chance.

ON MONDAY morning Popper awoke in a tangle of blankets. He lay there and turned matters over in his head. Why could not their production of gold be further facilitated by nature? Get some bugs to eat the bagweed. Then feed the bugs to frogs and the frogs in turn to snakes. At each step of the pyramid there would be a greater accretion of gold, and at the apex, serpents of gold, their scales glittering with the stuff. He must present the idea to Cezar.
    He also resolved to stop drinking and to ask June Mack to marry him.
    â€œToday’s the day, Squanto.”
    He got up and for the first time in months went through his Gnomonic breathing exercises. One could fall off the Jimmerson Spiral but one could also swing back aboard. He boiled some eggs, a long business at this altitude, and made coffee with the same water. He ate two eggs and left two for Cezar. On one he idly scrawled, Help. Captive. Gypsy caravan . Cezar wasn’t such a bad fellow. A pouting little pedant and much too full of himself but a man of some substance for all that. What was their production of gold anyway? He must ask Cezar.
    â€œWatch this,” he said to the bird, and went about collecting bottles and pouring rum down the sink. Renunciation was not only exhilarating, it was easy.
    Squanto was resting in the sunken crown of an old felt hat. His head was pulled down into his shoulders and his neck feathers were fluffed out against the cold drafts. He had the crazed look of a setting hen. Popper spoke words of assurance to him. Spring was just around the corner. June would suffuse their dreary lives with sunshine. Her very name gave promise of it.
    There was a lot to be said for the ladies, he told the unblinking bird, apart from their physical charms. They were loyal. Hard workers. They were on the whole a civilizing force and had made good fathers and useful citizens out of many a slavering brute. Women were brave too and not the least bit squeamish about the corruptions of the flesh. If anything they were attracted to that muck. All those nurses. At the same time you must keep them in check or they would drive you crazy. They would presume and push. They were contentious, unreasonable, expensive, randomly vicious and would demand far too much of your attention. There was nothing meaner than a mean woman. With their gabble and nagging they could give you a preview of Hell. But that was the worst of it and there was much to be said for them.
    As he was leaving, Popper paused in the doorway and said, “Just a little longer, Squanto. Hogandale is not such a bad place. We’ll look back on all this later and have a good laugh together.”
    He took the noon bus to Rollo and went directly to the barbershop in the basement of the Hotel Rollo. There in a