names.
One hand, they say, washes the other.
A crow was sitting on a branch with a piece of cheese in his bill when a hungry fox, drawn by the smell, stopped under the tree and spoke as follows: “Master Crow, I find you at last! How often your voice has brought down my tears when I heard it in the distance through the foliage! I beg you, sing a ditty for me now, so that I may taste, savor, and relish!”
This was an irresistible speech. The crow opened his beak, dropped the cheese, and cawed his creaky uttermost, high, middle, and low. “Enchanting!” cried the fox, who didn’t like to make enemies, “but, oh dear, what is this?”
“It’s a cheese I was about—” the crow began to answer, but the fox broke in passionately with, “A cheese? So it is. A vile Golgondola! It must not, it shall not beslobber your windpipe!” And picking it up with all his teeth, he gulped it down in a wink. “There,” he said, “I have removed the temptation. Your voice is saved.”
The crow thanked the fox, the fox thanked the crow, and they parted company in high spirits both. And why not? The fox had won a luscious cheese, the crow a glowing compliment, and neither is easy to come by in this world.
Above all the salesmen working for him, the President of the company loved and prized a man whose name was Hank. Hank had eyes that made the ladies dream of naughty adventures in ancient Persia. Beneath his comely nose, a long black moustache pointed to the right and the left like a pair of wings. His hair was curly and neatly trimmed around his attentive ears, his cheekbones looked like small ruddy apples, and his arms seemed to have been forged to carry the helpless out of fire-swept buildings. He was, furthermore, a man of merry monologue who believed in the quality of the product his company sold (I have, alas, forgotten what this was) as devoutly as the Pope believes in the Trinity. As a result, he scoured his territory like a conqueror, selling more units of the product than anyone the company had ever employed. No wonder he was the President’s favorite, and the darling of all the Directors too.
And no wonder, either, that, one morning, as the meeting of the Board of Directors was getting under way, the Chairman confronted the President with rage rampaging in his face, gestures, and words. “The news has come to me,” he thundered, “that our President has fired Hank. Why, Mr. Weamish, did you fire Hank?”
The Board was dumbfounded. The President said nothing.
“Why, why, why?” the Chairman shouted. “What made you do it?”
And still the President was silent. But now the Board was finding its voice. “Confess,” said a cunning Director. “Wasn’t it envy? Was Hank too successful? Did he steal the sunlight from you?”
“Oh no!” cried the President. “I? I envy Hank, I who admired him so, I who gave him raise after raise?”
“What then?” asked another Director. “Did he debauch the typists?”
“He did,” replied the President, “but that was stipulated in his contract.” Several tears were beginning to sprout from his eyes.
“Did he peculate and malversate?” suggested another Director.
“Hank malversate or peculate? Hank? Oh Hank,” blubbered the President, “you who lunched on yogurt when you traveled in order to save the company’s pennies! I never knew a boy as honest as you, except my grandmother in Heaven.”
“Enough!” bawled the Chairman. “Mr. Weamish, you fired our most brilliant salesman, though you were aware that the competition was luring him with bonuses, stock options, and limousines. One last time, tell us the cause, or else you in turn—the rest is blank, but as you all know, my silences are even more terrible than my words.”
And indeed the President was trembling. “Mr. Oglethorpe,” he whispered, “forgive me, but you named the cause yourself.”
“Fiddlesticks! Where? When?”
“The offers from our competitors…every day a new one… oh, I was so afraid that he was going to leave us…so nervous, so terrified…”
“That you fired him?”
“That I fired him.”
And there my story ends. Hank, as you might guess, went on to sell innumerable units of the next product, while the President was condemned to wrap parcels with twine and tape in the stockroom. There, for years to come, he would impart to newcomers and old-timers alike his settled conviction that doing mischief in order to prevent it is a very sad mistake.
Some people believe that the devil is busy day and night tormenting mankind. But that’s a pretty medieval way of thinking. Actually, the devil turned the whole machinery on, so to speak, right from the start; I mean, he made people as ornery as he could and then he left them to their own devices. Now and then he lands here to make sure that everything is going wrong, but then he goes about his interests elsewhere, or else between trips, he relaxes on the homestead in Gehenna.
On one of his tours on Earth, the devil happened into the troposphere just when a few physicists and generals were trying out a hydrogen bomb. The devil’s a tough piece of steak, as you can imagine, but he got burned and jolted all the same, like that time long ago when AX-469 exploded in Galaxy Azazel and the universal pottlewibblets were exterminated. Anyway, after he recovered from the shock, the devil went to talk to the generals and physicists. “Something new is cooking, I see,” he said.
“Yes,” replied the chief physicist, “and we’re pretty proud of it; believe me, it took brains.”
“Tell me more,” said Lucifer. So the physicist gave him the lecture—hydrogen isotopes, tritium, and deuterium, critical mass, self-sustaining reactions, annihilation of matter…. “Excellent, excellent,” said the devil, rubbing his hands together, “but what do you propose to do with it? It seems a pity just to let it drift.”
“Who said anything about drifting?” retorted one of the generals. “This gizmo of ours ain’t no drifter; it’s a proliferator!”
The chief physicist explained: “My colleague is suggesting that scientific discoveries can’t be kept secret forever, as indeed they shouldn’t be when they’re as luminous and far-reaching as this one.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Lucifer, “congratulations to one and all. I look forward to a heartwarming bash. But after the concussion I had today, I think I’ll go watch it from neutral ground.”
“I’m afraid, sir—” the physicist began, but the general got ahead of him with a big laugh. “Neutral ground? Never heard of it! Tell me what it is and where I can find it, haw, haw, haw!” Now, everybody knows
