The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Maybe. Except for that stunt with the iron ball, which was, by the way, what we’d already gotten the strongest complaints about. Have we got your permission,” Ken asked whimsically, “to ride a bit hard on Chi Mu Eta about that one?”

  “Master! Yes, Master. I suppose that one might at least undergo modification.”

  At the door, the pledge paused and half turned back. “Master ... Ken ... Is part of this hazing ritual designed to build esprit de corps among the pledges by uniting them against a perceived common enemy, even an enemy whom they recognize as about to transmogrify into a body of friends and comrades?”

  “I never thought about it quite that way, Davy, but you could have something there.”

  The mock-pledge grinned back, very briefly. “I confess that, even with so resolute and irreclaimable a Gosh-Darned Independent as myself, it sometimes approaches its goal.”

  * * * *

  After lunch, Ken spent a few hours visiting places and seeing people. When he returned to Cadmus House and went upstairs to get ready for dinner, he found Davison back at work with his feather, dusting the woodwork, something softly and lightly operatic on his lips and a manila folder at his feet. “Master, sir, Master,” he said at once on seeing the upperclassman. “Here it is.” Bowing as he presented Ken with the folder.

  “Thanks, slave. Come on in.”

  The pledge-under-false-pretences followed Ken into his room, where he remained standing at attention.

  “Well, Thesaurus, you had nothing to do with Red Terhune getting rejected. Chi Mu Eta liked all three of them almost equally, so they drew straws. And Red seems to be getting along fine with Pi Rho this year. They say they’ll be delighted to get him.”

  “Master! Thank you, Master.” Davison’s smile was quick and relieved. “That was the one conscience-stricken blot on an otherwise diverting memory. In curiosity…how had I already happily managed to sabotage my own chances?”

  “First, by asking for a second cup of coffee—a little too complacent at that point for their tastes. And then, you were the only one of the four who actually pulled the cord himself in that iron ball test. Anyway, Chi Mu Eta agrees to retire that one in exchange for a watchdog’s indulgence on the rest of their funhouse. As for you, we’ve agreed to let you go through with it all tonight up to the end, then just skip the final oath if you like.”

  “Master, thank—”

  “One condition,” Ken cut him off. “We’re not at all sure how long you can keep pulling off this plan of collecting a ritual hazing every year, but we’ll do what we can to keep your big secret off the Greek grapevine, as long as you do your best to pledge those fraternities we’re watching the hardest.”

  * * * *

  With the new fall term, and the dawn of its rush week, Ken—now a senior—handed Davy the promised list of fraternities to concentrate on.

  “Pi Rho?” The junior cocked his brow. “The house which assimilated my erstwhile compatriot Red Terhune last year?”

  “And as far as we know, with an easy and well within bounds minimum of hazing. In fact, nobody on this campus has lodged any complaints about our Pi Rho chapter since a year or two before my own time. But it’s a national, with a more or less established initiation ritual, and almost every year they get complaints of abuses at some campus or other, somewhere in the country.”

  Davison grinned. “In any event, it sounds a prize acquisition for my collection.”

  * * * *

  Time continued going by. The Sunday afternoon following the triumphal wrapping up of Hell Week found Ken in the Cadmus House living room, beating Thorvald at chess while Mama Comfrey smiled at them from over her embroidery hoop and Egri, old Photos, and a couple of frat brothers did some serious after-dinner napping on couch or floor, the heads of the humans draped deep with Sunday newspapers.

  When Davison showed up, manila folder in hand.

  “Well, Thesaurus,” Ken greeted him, glancing up very briefly and looking right down again to pin Thorvald’s remaining bishop. “Another one for your collection?”

  “The last, I fear. It was, after all, a rather fatuous hobby.”

  His voice was so unexpectedly sober that Ken looked back up, eying him closely. As a senior, Ken Arrowsmith had gained the perspective to appreciate how much a single year, even a single term, could mature people of college age; but his one-time pledge slave looked about three years older now than the last time they had met, only days ago.

  It had to be mostly the face, its expression ... sober, subdued, even somber. Ken didn’t think he’d ever seen Thesaurus like this before. The laughter might still be there, buried deep down somewhere, but it didn’t look likely to bubble forth again anytime very soon.

  “Davy, what’s wrong?” Ken went on. “Was it that bad? What did they do?”

  “What?” the junior shook his head. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I think you’ll find no grounds for complaint here, Ken.” Handing over his report. “Indeed, it should help lay any possible current suspicions of Astoria’s Pi Rho chapter properly to rest.”

  “Bad news from home, then?” the housemother guessed. So she had noticed it, too. Even the dog and cat seemed to have noticed it, by the way both of them padded over to Davison, Photos sitting down at his feet and whining a little.

  “Oh, no, Mama Comfrey,” the junior replied, bending to rub the dog’s ears. “When last I heard, all were swimming along quite prosperously and comfortably.”

  “All right, ex-slave,” Ken repeated, “what’s wrong, then? Out with it.”

  Davison hesitated several seconds before replying, as if it was being drawn out of him, “It may…after all…be true that everyone has a breaking point. Possibly unsuspected even by the individual concerned. Let me say only that I think I may—perhaps—have a better appreciation than before of my fellow mortals’ weaknesses. For the details…they are proprietary to myself. They have no relevance whatever to any alleged malpractice on the part of Astoria’s Pi Rho chapter, nor do they constitute any evidence of alleged abuses. But they are rather embarrassing to me, personally, and I should prefer to say nothing else, except to beg everyone’s pardon.”

  “Pardon for what?” Ken couldn’t help exclaiming. But the younger man just bowed and left without another word, the old dog at his heels.

  “We might find a clue somewhere in his report,” suggested the housemother.

  There were three copies. Ken handed Mama Comfrey the top one, gave Thorvald the first carbon, and kept the second carbon for himself. They read intently, Photos padding back meanwhile to lie down with a heavy sigh at Thorvald’s feet.

  All three finished at about the same time, and looked at one another.

  “Well,” Ken began, “there’s plenty of stuff in here that other floaters might lodge complaints about, but our Kid Thesaurus seems to have taken it all as just one more grand funhouse adventure.”

  Mama Comfrey tapped the last page thoughtfully. “I would guess he must have left something out ...”

  Thorvald began, “I wonder…considering Pi Rho’s famous Glee Club ...”

  The front doorbell chimed, cutting Thorvald off. One of the napping brothers roused himself, went to answer it, and soon brought in the current pledge boss of Astoria’s Pi Rho chapter, Caruso Jones.

  “Whatever complaints he brought you—” Jones began—”we know he came in here with a folder—it’s all lies or else gross exaggerations!”

  “I’d be a little more careful about jumping to conclusions, if I were you,” Ken answered him. “If you’re talking about your ex-pledge Davison. He made us this report on our own request, and it’s got nothing—”

  If Jones was listening at all, he wasn’t hearing much. “Our rites evolved historically, they’ve been modified in strict accordance with modern guiderules, they’re the same all over the Reformed States of America, and here at Astoria we’ve
gentled ’em down even more! We don’t tie anyone up before putting him in the car trunk anymore—never more than one to a trunk—we make sure the trunks’re clean and well ventilated—we don’t even gag anyone till we get where we’re going and take him out, just the blindfold—”

  “Relax, Caruso,” Thorvald cut him off.

  Ken added, “Here’s what Davison has to report about that. His exact words.” Locating them, Ken read aloud: “‘Clean, fresh-smelling, well cushioned, innocent of superfluous clutter, and as nearly commodious as the trunk of a car can ever be called, furnished even with a pillow for the head. All in all, a surprisingly unobjectionable recreation of the fetal position for the nine minutes’ or so duration of the journey—having stripped myself of watch, wallet, and so on, as per instructions, before quitting my dorm, and in any case being blindfolded, I timed the ride by means of the venerable “hippotamus-one” count.’”

  Jones took a deep, shaky breath and visibly obeyed Thorvald’s suggestion to relax, if only a little. “And the gags—too much history and tradition to leave ’em out completely, but—”

  Thorvald took up the reading, moving his finger down Davison’s page. “‘A gag must inevitably, of its very nature, prove somewhat less than comfortable; but this, being a single twist of loosely-woven cloth applied no deeper than the lips and front teeth, in no way threatened the breath and was, on the whole, less functional than symbolic.’”

  “And when we tie ’em up to the trees,” Jones went on, “the ones who don’t get loose by themselves, we come and get ’em after three quarters of an hour, and never reject anybody for not getting himself untied.”

  Ken already had the right passage. “‘Assuming, of course, that they would leave none of us indefinitely, I felt at mental leisure to search for the promised method of enlarging myself. Finding it a comparatively painless task to slip my feet free of the loop that bound my ankles to the trunk, I gained sufficient slack in the encircling rope to move my hands individually over the bark of the tree until my right fingers located a rough and sawlike edge, over which it required less effort than patience to rub the cord until its fibers parted, enabling me to break loose.’”

  As Ken paused, Thorvald picked up Davison’s narrative. “‘Having attained the liberty of my limbs, I unbandaged my eyes though not my mouth, again following instructions, and groped my way by bright moonlight to the glow of the campfire and sound of singing, where our prospective fraternity brothers waited to welcome us with song, cook-out style refreshment, and the official removal of the gag. Had I even the least legitimate ground for complaint—’”

  Ken saw the Pi Rho man stiffen.

  Thorvald read on: “‘—it might be that the seven of our trees had been too widely separated to have allowed easy teamwork in freeing ourselves as a group; yet that question would no doubt admit effective debate from either side and, in the event, when six of us had achieved enlargement and the campfire through our own efforts, our mentors justified my expectations by going themselves to free the seventh and lead him back into our midst.

  “‘In sum, this traditional Pi Rho hazing, in its general application here at Astoria, strikes me as filled with innocent merriment and redolent of admirable symbolism.’”

  “That’s it?” Jones exclaimed, clearly astonished.

  “Except for the ‘end’ symbol,” Ken affirmed.

  The Pi Rho man grabbed Thorvald’s copy out of his hands and started searching it for himself.

  “All right, Caruso Jones,” Ken demanded. “This exaggerated lie—this complaint you expected him to lay against your chapter—what the hell was it? ’Fess up. What did he leave out? What else happened last night?”

  Having satisfied himself that whatever he had feared really was absent from Davison’s report, Jones slumped down in the nearest chair, gave a few heavy sighs, and eventually ’fessed up. “He didn’t even mention that he was the first one who made it to the campfire, looking tickled as Figaro the Cat with a saucer of cream, and knelt to let Red Terhune—we figured he was the obvious sponsor for Davison—officially take off his gag. The last bit of ceremony—what he doesn’t say anything about—as soon as the pledge reaches the campfire and has his gag removed, he has to sing a song, solo. Almost solo—this year we had Ron Murphy providing harmonica accompaniment.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ken observed softly.

  Seeming not even to hear him, Jones went on, “Anyway, we handed Davison the sheet of words for ‘Clementine,’ he just glanced at them, and started singing.”

  Thorvald commented, “Unh-huh.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like you know what I mean. Well, he got as far as ‘Dwelt a miner,’ when Red jumped up, clapped the gag back around his mouth—”

  Ken saw the housemother gasp.

  Jones didn’t, just went on, “—and we sang him that old limerick, you know, ‘There was a dumb radio crooner, Whose singing was sort of a bloomer. He sang by the hour, Very flat and so sour, That they shot him at once if not sooner.’ That’s Pi Rho tradition, we always do it whenever we get an untunable pledge. It doesn’t mean anything, we don’t make every brother join the Glee Club, we never kick anybody away just for that.”

  The housemother dabbed the corner of one eye with her handkerchief.

  This time Jones apparently noticed. “Heck!” he cried defensively. “Who knew? After all Red told us about the way Davison sailed right through Chi Mu’s basement of horrors laughing, even pulling his own test of courage string—who knew that a harmless, good-natured little joke like that ...? Aw, hell, Red would’ve taken that gag right back out as soon as we finished the radio crooner song—he could’ve joined the eating and drinking and storytelling right along with all the rest of us. But whenever Red or any of us reached for the knot, he shook his head and moved out of reach, just sat there watching and listening and sometimes tapping his gag a little while all the others got in one by one, sang their songs, got their applause and goodies—like he says, we finally had to go out and rescue Sanch Sandoz ourselves, he’d never even looked for the file edge, just kept trying to twist the rope off ...”

  The housemother interrupted to ask, “Did all of the others sing well?”

  Jones blinked like he was trying to figure out what that had to do with it. “Well, Pat Flanigan’s got a pretty scratchy voice, he’ll never make it into our Glee Club, but he kept on key okay, and that’s the important thing. Anyway, after Sanch finished singing and got cheered, Davison just stood up, took the gag out of his own mouth, told us he was no longer our pledge and didn’t consider himself bound by any oath of secrecy, helped himself to an apple, and walked away. Just like that. Almost calm. Who knew?” the Pi Rho man finished weakly.

  Ken replied, “And you just let him walk away? Alone through the woods at night, nine minutes’ ride away from campus?”

  “Hey, Red and me tailed along after him, out of sight, saw him get to the road and hitch a ride, even got the description of the car that picked him up and the license number, just in case. We did everything we could, short of wrestling him down and tying him up again, didn’t we? Who knew?” Jones repeated. “Do any of you understand it?”

  “Yes,” the housemother sighed, “I do. And he used to love singing so much, too.”

  Ken Arrowsmith sat still and tapped his fingertips together, wondering. Why so many people loved doing things they couldn’t do. And what his own breaking point might be.

  * * * *

  Disclaimer note. This is a work of imaginative fiction. As with the names of characters and places, so with those of the Greek houses: any resemblance to actual fraternities present or past, down to choice and arrangement of letters, is purely serendipitous and coincidental. A check on the Internet having shown me that it would probably be as difficult to create any combination of Greek letters never used by any organization past, present, or future, as to find a personal name of that description—e.g., Alfred
E. Newman—the present author finally decided to let the these purely fictional fraternities stand as named, with the above disclaimer.

  The old apparatus in the Chi Mu Eta basement, however, is all drawn from the De Moulin Catalog No. 437, 1930, available online, though I have in certain cases revised the sometimes ethnically derogative nomenclature and toyed with the exact procedures, assuming that some of the components probably wore out or got lost over the decades, necessitating adaptation. For those of us not used to thinking in metric: a hundred milliliters of water is a bit less than half a cup.

  Nor did I make up the song about the radio crooner. I took it, almost though not quite word for word, from a thin slim songbook called Treasure Chest Community Songster (copyright 1936), p. 61.

  In conclusion, let me offer belated apologies to any of my own old college dorm- and house-mates who happened to be in earshot while I was singing in the bathtub or wherever. For I too am “untunable” (a coinage I prefer to “tone-deaf”); a fact driven home once again to me just the other night in watching one of the Asterix the Gaul movies: the one and only way I knew that Cacofonix/Assurancetourix’s singing was off-key was because the subcaptions told me so; in fact, being an old fan of the books, I had expected a far more obvious assault on anyone’s eardrums.

  * * * *

  Mayday on the Melon was written more or less simultaneously with The Monday after Murder, but has, I think, a lighter touch. Whenever drafting two novels simultaneously, I liked to have them in contrasting moods. Which wasn’t all that easy this time, both being set in the same speculative world.

  MAYDAY ON THE MELON

  Note. It is historically correct to refer to dirigibles with the masculine pronoun. Yes, that surprised me, too, when I started researching this novel.

  Prologue

  They watched it one October day not long after they became officially engaged. It swam, looking lazy and dignified, through the air low enough over Angela’s favorite picnic hill that they thought they saw its passengers wave. So they waved back until its windows were out of sight behind the oaks and maples.