Sometimes physical pain is a precognition of wicked things about to come, Father Handy thought, and in your case; is that it, do you know what I shall—must—tell you today? No choice, because what am I, if not a man-worm who is told; who, on Tuesday, tells, but this is only one day, and just an hour of that day. “Tibor,” he said, “wie geht es Heute?”

“Es geht mir gut,” Tibor responded instantly.

They mutually loved their recollection and their use of German. It meant Goethe and Heine and Schiller and Kafka and Falada; both men, together, lived for this and on this. Now, since the work would soon come, it was a ritual, bordering on the sacred, a reminder of the after-daylight hours when the painting proved impossible and they could—had to—merely talk. In the semigloom of the kerosene lanterns and the firelight, which was a bad light source; too irregular, and Tibor had complained, in his understating way, of eye fatigue. And that was a dreadful harbinger, because nowhere in the Wyoming-Utah area could a lensman be found; no refractive glasswork had been lately possible, at least as near as Father Handy knew.

It would require a Pilg to get glasses for Tibor, if that became necessary; he blenched from that, because so often the church employee dragooned for a Pilg set off and never returned. And they never even learned why; was it better elsewhere, or worse? It could—or so he had decided from the utterances of the 6 P.M. radio—be that it consisted of both; it depended on the place.

And the world, now, was many places. The connectives had been destroyed. That which had made the once-castigated “uniformity.”

“ ‘You understand,’ “ Father Handy chanted, singsong, from Ruddigore. And at once Tibor ceased drinking his coffee.