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Yes, and somewhere in there the widow passed on to him what she had learned from the Chinese—that they had become successful manipulators of the Universe by combining harmonious minds.

• • •

Yes, and then he had his pilot fly him to Manhattan, the Island of Death. He intended to die there, to join his sister in the afterlife—as a result of inhaling and ingesting invisible Chinese communists.

Captain O’Hare, not wishing to die yet himself, lowered his President by means of a winch and rope and harness to the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

The President spent the remainder of the day up there, enjoying the view. And then, breathing deeply with every few steps, hoping to inhale Chinese communists, he descended the stairs.

It was twilight when he reached the bottom.

• • •

There were human skeletons in the lobby—in rotting nests of rags. The walls were zebra-striped with soot from cooking fires of long ago.

There was a painting of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped on one wall.

Dr. Swain for the first time heard the shuddering whir of bats leaving the subway system for the night.

He considered himself to be already a dead man—a brother to the skeletons.

But six members of the Raspberry family, who had observed his arrival by helicopter, suddenly came out of hiding in the lobby. They were armed with spears and knives.

• • •

When they understood who they had captured, they were thrilled. He was a treasure to them not because he was President, but because he had been to medical school.

“A doctor! Now we have everything!” said one.

Yes, and they would not hear of his wish to die. They forced him to swallow a small trapezoid of what seemed to be a tasteless sort of peanut-brittle. It was in fact boiled and dried fish guts, which contained the antidote to The Green Death.

Hi ho.

• • •

The Raspberries hustled him down to the Financial District at once, for Hiroshi Raspberry-20 Yamashiro, the head of the family, was deathly ill.

• • •

The man seemed to have pneumonia. Dr. Swain could do nothing for him but what physicians of a century before would have done, which was to keep his body warm and his forehead cool—and to wait.

Either the fever would break, or the man would die.

• • •

The fever broke.

As a reward, the Raspberries brought their most precious possessions to Dr. Swain on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. There was a clock-radio, an alto saxophone, a fully-fitted toiletries kit, a model of the Eiffel Tower with a thermometer in it—and on and on.

From all this junk, and merely to be polite, Dr. Swain selected a single brass candlestick.

And thus was the legend established that he was crazy about candlesticks.

Thereafter, everybody would give him candlesticks.

• • •

He did not like the communal life of the Raspberries, which required him, among other things, to jerk his head around perpetually, in search of the kidnapped Jesus Christ.

So he cleaned up the lobby of the Empire State Building, and moved in there. The Raspberries supplied him with food.

And time flew.

• • •

Somewhere in there, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa arrived, and was given the antidote by the Raspberries. They hoped she would be Dr. Swain’s nurse.

And she was his nurse for a little while, but then she started her model farm.

• • •

And little Melody arrived a long time after that, pregnant, and pushing her pathetic worldly goods ahead of her in a dilapidated baby carriage. Among those goods was a Dresden candlestick. Even in the Kingdom of Michigan, it was well known that the legendary King of New York was crazy about candlesticks.

Melody’s candlestick depicted a nobleman’s flirtation with a shepherdess at the foot of a treetrunk enlaced in flowering vines.

Melody’s candlestick was broken on the old man’s last birthday. It was kicked over by Wanda Chipmunk-5 Rivera, an intoxicated slave.

• • •

When Melody first presented herself at the Empire State Building, and Dr. Swain came out to ask who she was and what she wanted,