“This may seem irrelevant, gentlemen, but I assure you it isn’t. Consider two other students’ testimony. Both swore they saw the neck of a bottle sticking from the professor’s overcoat pocket as it hung in his office. It was uncapped. And, though it was freezing outside, the professor, a man famed for his aversion to cold, had both windows open. Perhaps to dispel the fumes from the bottle.

“After the fight, Peggy Rourke was asked by Dr. Durham to come into his office. An hour later, Miss Rourke burst out with her face red and her eyes full of tears. She told her roommate that the professor had acted like a madman. That he had told her he had loved her since the day she’d walked into his classroom. That he had known he was too old and ugly even to think of eloping with her. But, now that ‘things’ had changed, he wanted to run away with her. She told him she had always been fond of him, but she was by no stretch of the imagination in love with him. Whereupon, he had promised that by that same evening he would be a changed man, and that she would find him irresistible.

Major Lewis cleared her throat. “Mr. Temper, streamline the details, will you please? These gentlemen are very busy, and they’d like the bald facts. The bald facts, mind you.”

I continued, “The bare facts are these. Late that night, shortly after the ball broke up, a hysterical Mrs. Durham called the police and said her husband was out of his mind. Never a word that he might be drinking. Such a thing to her was unthinkable. He wouldn’t dare…”

Major Lewis cleared her throat again. I shot her a look of annoyance. Apparently, she failed to realize that some of the details were necessary.

“One of the policemen who answered her call reported later that the professor was staggering around in the snow, dressed only in his pants with a bottle sticking out of his hip pocket, shooting red paint at everybody with a spray gun. Another officer contradicted him. He said the doctor did all the damage with a bucket of paint and a brush.

“Whatever he used, he covered his own house and some of his neighbors’ houses from roof to base. When the police appeared, he plastered their car with the paint and blinded them. While they were trying to clear their eyes, he walked off. A half-hour later, he streaked the girls’ dorrn with red paint and scared a number of the occupants into hysteria. He entered the building, pushed past the scandalized housemother, raced up and down the halls, threw paint over anybody who showed his head, seemingly from a bottomless can, and then, failing to find Peggy Rourke, disappeared.

“I might add that all this time he was laughing like a madman and announcing loudly to all and sundry that tonight he was painting the town red.

“Miss Rourke had gone with Polivinosel and some of his fraternity brothers and dates to a restaurant. Later, the couple dropped the others off at their homes and then proceeded, theoretically, to the girls’ dormitory. Neither got there. Nor were they or the professor seen again during the two years that elapsed between that incident and the time the Onaback papers quit publishing. The popular theory was that the love-crazed professor had killed and buried them and then fled to parts unknown. But I choose, on good evidence, to believe otherwise.”

Hurriedly, for I could see they were getting restless, I told them of the bull that had appeared from nowhere at the foot of Main Street. The stockyards later reported that none of their bulls was missing. Nevertheless, too many people saw the bull for the account to be denied. Not only that, they all testified that the last they saw of it, it was swimming across the Illinois River with a naked woman on its back. She was waving a bottle in her hand. It, and the woman, then plunged into the forest on the bluffs and disappeared.

At this there was an uproar. A Coast Guard Commander said “Are you trying to tell me that Zeus and Europa have come to life, Mr. Temper?”

There was no use in continuing. These men didn’t believe unless they saw with their own eyes. I decided it was time to let them see.

An anthropologist would have seen at once that this wasn’t a monkey, either. It was true that she did have a prognathous muzzle, long hair that covered her whole body, long arms, and a tail. But no monkey ever had such a smooth, high brow, or such a big hooked nose, or legs so long in proportion to her trunk.

When the cage had come to rest beside the platform, I said,

“Gentlemen, if everything I’ve said seemed irrevelant, I’m sure that the next few minutes will convince you I have not been barking up the wrong tree.”

I turned to the cage, caught myself almost making a bow, and said, “Mrs. Durham, will you please tell these gentlemen what happened to you?”

Then I waited, in full expectation of the talk, torrential and disconnected but illuminating, that had overwhelmed me the previous evening after my buddies had captured her on the edge of the area. I was very proud, because I’d made a discovery that would shock and rock these gentlemen from their heads of bone to their heels of leather and show them that one little agent from the F.D.A. had done what the whole armed forces had not. Then they wouldn’t snicker and refer to me as Out-of-Temper by Frothing-at-the-Mouth.

I waited…

And I waited…

And Mrs. Durham refused to say a word. Not one, though I all but got down on my knees and pleaded with her. I tried to explain to her what giant forces were in balance and that she held the fate of the world in the hollow of her pink hairless palm. She would not open her mouth. Somebody had injured her dignity, and she would do nothing but sulk and turn her back on all of us and wave her tail above her pink panties.

She was the most exasperating female I’d ever known. No wonder that her husband made a monkey of her.

Triumph had become fiasco. Nor did it convince the big shots when I played the recording of my last night’s conversation with her. They still thought I had less brains than hair, and they showed it when they replied to my request for questions with silence. Major Alice Lewis smiled scornfully.

Well, it made no difference in my mission. I was under orders they hadn’t power to countermand.

At 7:30 that evening, I was outside the area with a group of officers and my boss. Though the moon was just coming up, its light was bright enough to read by. About ten yards from us, the whiteness of snow and cold ended, and the green and warmth began.

General Lewis, Major Lewis’ father, said, “We’ll give you two days to contact Durham, Mr. Temper. Wednesday, 1400, we attack. Marines, equipped with bows and arrows and airguns, and wearing oxygen masks, will be loaded into gliders with pressurized cabins. These will be released from their tow-planes at high altitude. They will land upon U. S. Route 24 just south of the city limits, where there are now two large meadows. They will march up South Adams Street until they come to the downtown district. By then, I hope, you will have located and eliminated the source of this trouble.”

She stood there, shivering, in her bra and panties, while I was stripped down to my own shorts. Once we were safely in the woods, we would take off the rest of our clothes. When in Rome…

Marines with bows and arrows and BB guns—no wonder the military was miserable. But, once inside the Area controlled by my former professor and his Brew, firearms simply refused to work. And the Brew did work, making addicts of all who tasted it.

All but me.

I was the only one who had thought to have myself conditioned against it.

Dr. Duerf asked me a few questions while someone strapped a three-gallon tank of distilled water to my back. The doctor was the Columbia psychiatrist who had conditioned me against the Brew.