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"I'd like to send it to my wife," Benoway replied.

"Good idea. Sold!"

"What would a woman want with a thing like that?" an acidulous, sallow-faced officer asked.

"I don't know," Benoway replied. "She might like to see it. See what things are like out here."

"What are you doing? Dressing her up like a savage?" the officer persisted.

"I'm not doing anything. I'm sending her a present."

"It's a hell of a present, if you ask me."

"Nobody asked you," Fry broke in. "These tusks are strange things," he continued. "Have you heard how they grow them?" He repeated what Billis had told him.

"That's absolutely grotesque!" the same officer persisted. He was an unhappy, indifferent fellow.

"Perhaps so," Fry agreed. "A friend tells me they're the center of all native religion."

"They would be!" the sallow officer said grudgingly. "This godforsaken place."

"If it's their religion, it's their religion," Fry said, not wanting to be drawn into an argument, yet not wanting to miss a good fight if one were available. "Sort of like Episcopalians and Buddhists. You can't throw out the whole religion because it's not logical."

"But this filthy stuff! The pain! The misery!"

"Now look, friend. I'm not defending the damned pigs," Fry said. "But for heaven's sake, be consistent. I suppose you're a religious man. You probably believe in something. No, don't tell me what it is. But if it's Christianity, the central fact of your religion is that a living man endured hours of untold agony so that you might be saved." The argumentative officer gasped. "So that you might be ennobled."

"Fry," the officer said, "I always thought there was something wrong with you!"

"Wait a minute! I'm not in this. Leave me out. But you made some statements that needed challenging!"

"All that misery. Yes, even torture!"

"I know," Fry said patiently. "Pain is at the center of all religions. Almost all beauty, too. Fine things, like human beings, for example, are born of pain. Of great suffering. Of intense, in-driving horror. Fine things never come cheaply. Suppose the hog had run wild, ground down his tusks? Done what he had damned pleased? Who would have been richer, or wiser, or better? Only the hog and the guy that finally ate him. But as it was! Well, that boar ennobled the life of an entire village."

"And the boar himself?" the sallow officer asked.

"Friend," Tony said. "I'm going to say a pretty harsh thing. Now please don't get mad at me. But here goes. You seem like a funny man to ask such a question. Really you do. No one in this room ought to ask a question like that. Because you are the wild boar. You are staked out unwillingly to your own little troubles. Your tusks are growing in upon you. From the way you look I think you are feeling the misery. Tony looked at the officer and grinned that silly grin of his.

"Just what do you mean?" the officer asked, leaning forward.

"Oh, damn it all," Tony said. "Who started this anyway?"

"You did," the officer replied.

"Well, what I mean is this. I'm arguing from analogy. Here you are, staked out on a jungle island. God knows you didn't elect to come here. Most of you fellows are naval officers because the draft was hot on your necks, and you know it. Each month you are here you grow older and most of you grow poorer. Take Doc Benoway. If he was back home he could be making a thousand dollars a month, or twice that. Yet he's out here. His wife is growing older. He begins to worry about things. The next push. He may be the one that doesn't make it. What holds you fellows here? A three-foot chain to the stake of custom? An idea of patriotism? I don't know why I act the way I do. But if you're interested..."

"Go ahead."

"I think there must be something ennobling in this vast and timeless waste. Not to me, but to somebody who follows me. Look, the boar that raised that tusk is dead. He may have been dead fifty years. Yet here we sit admiring it. Well, fifty years from now somewhere... Let's say in Des Moines, Iowa-some high school girl will suddenly catch a faint intimation of what we accomplished