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But there were fewer messages with each passing week. At last there were none.

I was forgotten.

Thus did my Presidency end—two thirds of the way through my second term.

And something else crucial was petering out almost as quickly—which was my irreplaceable supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil.

Hi ho.

• • •

I dared not count my remaining pills until I could not help but count them, they were so few. I had become so dependent upon them, so grateful for them, that it seemed to me that my life would end when the last one was gone.

I was running out of employees, too. I was soon down to one. Everybody else had died or wandered away, since there weren’t any messages any more.

The one person who remained with me was my brother, was faithful Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, the dishwasher I had embraced on my first day as a Daffodil.

40

BECAUSE EVERYTHING had dwindled so quickly, and because there was no one to behave sanely for any more, I developed a mania for counting things. I counted slats in Venetian blinds. I counted the knives and forks and spoons in the kitchen. I counted the tufts of the coverlet on Abraham Lincoln’s bed.

And I was counting posts in a bannister one day, on my hands and knees on the staircase, although the gravity was medium-to-light. And then I realized that a man was watching me from below.

He was dressed in buckskins and moccasins and a coon-skin hat, and carried a rifle.

“My God, President Daffodil,” I said to myself, “you’ve really gone crazy this time. That’s ol’ Daniel Boone down there.”

And then another man joined the first one. He was dressed like a military pilot back in the days, long before I was President, when there had been such a thing as a United States Air Force.

“Let me guess:” I said out loud, “It’s either Halloween or the Fourth of July.”

• • •

The pilot seemed to be shocked by the condition of the White House. “What’s happened here?” he said.

“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that history has been made.”

“This is terrible,” he said.

“If you think this is bad,” I told him, and I tapped my forehead with my fingertips, “you should see what it looks like in here.”

• • •

Neither one of them even suspected that I was the President. I had become quite a mess by then.

They did not even want to talk to me, or to each other, for that matter. They were strangers, it turned out. They had simply happened to arrive at the same time—each one on an urgent mission.

They went into other rooms, and found my Sancho Panza, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, who was making a lunch of Navy hardtack and canned smoked oysters, and some other things he’d found. And Carlos brought them back to me, and convinced them that I was indeed the President of what he called, in all sincerity, “the most powerful country in the world.”

Carlos was a really stupid man.

• • •

The frontiersman had a letter for me—from the widow in Urbana, Illinois, who had been visited a few years before by Chinese. I had been too busy ever to find out what the Chinese had been after out there.

“Dear Dr. Swain,” it began—

“I am an undistinguished person, a piano teacher, who is remarkable only for having been married to a very great physicist, to have had a beautiful son by him, and after his death, to have been visited by a delegation of very small Chinese, one of whom said his father had known you. His father’s name was ‘Fu Manchu.’

“It was the Chinese who told me about the astonishing discovery my husband, Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald, made just before he died. My son, who is incidentally a Daffodil-11, like yourself, and I have kept this discovery a secret ever since, because the light it throws on the situation of human beings in the Universe is very demoralizing, to say the least. It has to do with the true nature of what awaits us all after death. What awaits us, Dr. Swain, is tedious in the extreme.

“I can’t bring myself to call it ‘Heaven’ or ‘Our Just Reward,’ or any of those sweet things. All I can call it is what my husband