walked over to the window and looked out at the Hollywood Hills, and nodded at last.
“My God, Terwilliger,” he said. “You really like me that much?”
“It’s hard to put in words,” said Terwilliger, with difficulty.
“So do we finish the mighty spectacle?” asked Glass. “Starring the tyrant terror striding the earth and making all quake before him, none other than Mr. Joseph J. Clarence?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Clarence wandered off, stunned, to the door, where he said, “You know? I always wanted to be an actor!”
Then he went quietly out into the hall and shut the door.
Terwilliger and Glass collided at the desk, both clawing at a drawer.
“Age before beauty,” said the lawyer, and quickly pulled forth a bottle of whiskey.
At midnight on the night of the first preview of Monster from the Stone Age, Mr. Glass came back to the studio, where everyone was gathering for a celebration, and found Terwilliger seated alone in his office, his dinosaur on his lap.
“You weren’t there?” asked Mr. Glass.
“I couldn’t face it. Was there a riot?”
“A riot? The preview cards are all superdandy extra plus! A lovelier monster nobody saw before! So now we’re talking sequels! Joe Clarence as the Tyrant Lizard in Return of the Stone Age Monster, Joe Clarence and/or Tyrannosaurus Rex in, maybe, Beast from the Old Country—”
The phone rang. Terwilliger got it.
“Terwilliger, this is Clarence! Be there in five minutes! We’ve done it! Your animal! Great! Is he mine now? I mean, to hell with the contract, as a favor, can I have him for the mantel?”
“Mr. Clarence, the monster’s yours.”
“Better than an Oscar! So long!”
Terwilliger stared at the dead phone.
“God bless us all, said Tiny Tim. He’s laughing, almost hysterical with relief.”
“So maybe I know why,” said Mr. Glass. “A little girl, after the preview, asked him for an autograph.”
“An autograph?”
“Right there in the street. Made him sign. First autograph he ever gave in his life. He laughed all the while he wrote his name. Somebody knew him. There he was, in front of the theater, big as life, Rex Himself, so sign the name. So he did.”
“Wait a minute,” said Terwilliger slowly, pouring drinks. “That little girl …?”
“My youngest daughter,” said Glass. “So who knows? And who will tell?”
They drank.
“Not me,” said Terwilliger.
Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between them, and bringing the whisky, they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting for the limousines to arrive all lights, horns and annunciations.
It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its own time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas of ocean were divided, each from the other’s motion, by a railroad track, empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously, no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far mountains as you watched.
Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to tremble.
A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat.
The blackbird leaped up over the sea.
The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman’s handcar, its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.
On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead. Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.
As they hit a level straightaway, the machine engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a wheeling halt.
“Out of gas.”
The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.
His wife and son sat quietly looking at the sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.
“Isn’t the sea nice?” said the woman.
“I like it,” said the boy.
“Shall we picnic here, while we’re at it?”
The man focused some binoculars on the green peninsula ahead.
“Might as well. The rails have rusted badly. There’s a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place.”
“As many as there are,” said the boy, “we’ll have picnics!”
The woman tried to smile at this, then turned her grave attention to the man. “How far have we come today?”
“Not ninety miles.” The man still peered through the glasses, squinting. “I don’t like to go farther than that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there’s no time to see. We’ll reach Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want.”
The woman removed her great shadowing straw hat, which had been tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on the shuddering rail car that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.
“Let’s eat!”
The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to the shore.
The boy and the woman were already seated by a spread table-cloth when the man
