Either he really was dead, he thought, or he had been pronounced so by mistake. That had happened to other people, he knew, and it was entirely possible—not to say fitting—that it had happened to Michael Morgan. Then a great fear of the choking earth seized him, and he pounded on the coffin lid with his fists and screamed. But no sound came from his lips, and the lid was silent under his hammering.

Frantically he called his wife's name and cursed her when she continued her ivory weeping. The priest intoned his liturgy and looked warningly at the boys when they dragged their feet; the pallbearers shifted the coffin on their shoulders; and Michael Morgan wept silently for his silence.

And then suddenly he was calm. Frenzy spent, he lay quietly in his coffin and knew himself dead.

So there you are, Morgan, he said to himself. Thirty-four years of one thing and another, and here is where it ends. Back to the earth—or back to the sea, he added, because he could never remember where it was that all protoplasm eventually wound up. His consciousness did not startle him too much. He had always been willing to concede the faint possibility of an afterlife, and this, he supposed, was the first stage. Lie back, Morgan, he thought, and take it easy. Sing a spiritual or something. He wondered again if there might not have been some mistake, but he didn't really believe it.

A pallbearer slipped and nearly dropped his end of the coffin, but Michael did not feel the jolt. "I don't feel particularly dead," he said to the coffin lid, "but I'm just a layman. My opinion would be valueless in any court in the land. Don't butt in, Morgan. It was a perfectly nice funeral till you started causing trouble." He closed his eyes and lay still, wondering absently about rigor mortis.

The procession stopped suddenly, and the priest's voice became louder and firmer. He was chanting in Latin, and Michael listened appreciatively. He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it's different, he thought, when it's your own funeral. You feel it's one of those occasions that shouldn't be missed.

He knew no Latin, but he clung to the falling words of the chant, knowing them to be the last human words he would ever hear. "Ashes to ashes," I suppose it means, he thought, "and dust to dust." That's all you are now, Morgan—a cup of dust scattered to the wolves of night. He considered the phrase and rejected it reluctantly. What, after all, would wolves want with dust?

The first clods fell on the coffin lid, sounding for all the world like a knock on the door. Michael laughed inside his head. Come in, he thought, come right in. The house is in a bit of a mess right now, but I'm always glad of company. Walk right in, friend. This is Open House.

Sandra was crying loudly and quite thoroughly now, but her sobs were beginning to sound like yawns. Poor Sandy, Michael thought. They probably got you up early for this, too. I'm sorry, lass. Just a minute or so—then you can go home and go back to sleep.

The earth-sounds became fainter. Presently they stopped.

Well, here we are, said Michael Morgan to himself. He realized the absurdity of the words and defiantly thought them again. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are. Here we all are. Here we go around the prickly pear. Prickly pear. Here we are, prickly pear. Over here. He stopped that finally, and thought about Heaven and Hell and Sandra.

He had never believed in either of the first two during his life, and he saw no reason to start now. I'm in this worm Automat for the duration, he thought, and in a few minutes I will turn over and draw eternity up around my neck and go to sleep. If he was wrong, one of two Old Gentlemen would be around to see him shortly, and a number of things might finally become clear. In the meantime, he decided to think about Sandra.

He had loved Sandra. Thinking about it in a detached fashion, he dared anybody not to love Sandra. She was all the world's loved objects in one, and she showed them off slowly and lazily, like a revolving dish of diamonds in a jeweler's window. Besides, she looked needing, and she had a sad mouth.

They had met at the small reception that had been given for him when he joined the Ingersoll faculty. She had come with her uncle, who taught geology. Their glances had crossed, and he had put down his drink and gone to her. Within fifteen minutes he had been quoting Rimbaud for her, and Dowson, and Swinburne, and his own secret songs. And she had heard and understood: Michael wanted to go to bed with her. So they were mature and civilized, and she took him into her huge, warm bed, in which she managed to look quite affectingly lost.

Michael loved that lost quality of hers. It made him feel necessary and useful. He discovered a strong protective streak in himself, and was in turn irritated by it, amused by it, and vastly delighted with it. He was all the more captured by her moments of cool brilliance and lazy wit; it made her three-dimensional. And Michael had ridden in search of the third dimension for a long time.

So they were married, and Michael received what the president called "a bit of a raise." It was just that, but it enabled Michael and Sandra Morgan to move into an apartment in Yorkchester and Sandra to quit her art-gallery job. They had been married for four years, and much of it had been happy.

And now he was dead, Michael thought. Dead and buried, humus for the hungry earth. And he would never see Sandra again. The thought hurt him, even through the numbness that had stroked him with its witch-fingers. His body was nothing to him now, but a deal of his soul seemed to have been left where Sandra was, and dead, he felt naked and somehow incomplete.

He prayed for sleep, and when it did not come he invented ways of passing the time. He broke down his life into periods marked Youth, Harvard, Europe, Korea, Ingersoll, and Sandra, and examined them carefully and objectively. First he decided that his life had not been wasted, and shortly after, he decided that it had. He thought of all the tiny factors that had gone to make up the mortal existence of Michael Morgan, enumerated them, weighed them, and decided that they had individual meaning but no collective significance; and then he thought it might be the other way round. With death, he had discovered, there came the power of disinterested scrutiny of the way he had come. Along with it, however, came a peculiar lack of interest in much of what had once been a very important world. Only Sandra seemed real now—Sandra and perhaps the good New York springs and finding the one student in his class who understood the lonely steel mill that was Bismarck and the ice emperor Bonaparte.

After that he tried to recall all the great music he had ever heard, and quickly discovered that his education had not been nearly so complete, his interest so great, and his memory so retentive as he had hoped. Only the Chopin Preludes that he had learned as a boy stayed with him, along with some Rimsky-Korsakov, a few passages from the Ninth, and a plaintive, wandering strain he decided was Weill. The rest was gone, or he was gone from it, and he was sorry because it would have been nice to have music.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Suddenly he remembered an early morning with Sandra before they had been married. They had sat at her little kitchen table, eating bread-and-jelly sandwiches. She had gone to the icebox for a bottle of milk, and he had sat and watched her move. Her feet made a very small, among-friends sound on the linoleum. As he thought of it now, the pain seemed to snap him like an icicle. He cried out, hearing it as a great animal yawp of terror—and then he was standing beside his own grave, calling, "Sandy! Sandy!"