Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz stretched on his couch, his long spider fingers laced on his chest.

«It has been no easy thing to come forth on land,» he sibilated. «Some days I was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the shore-strewn octopi, at least with tentacles, or the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But I have built my spine, year on year, and now I walk among the land men and survive.»

He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued:

«I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a wharf bungalow, to a shore-tent and then

back to a canal in a city and at last to New York

an island surrounded by water, eh? But where,

where, in all this, I wondered, would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his mad love and activity?

«It was one afternoon in a building with the world's longest elevator that it struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down, down, down, other people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the floors whizzing by the glass windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash, conscious, subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark, light, plummeting, falling, ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high exhilaration, id, ego, id, until this shout blazed from my raw throat in a great all-accepting, panic-manic shriek:

«'Dive! Dive!'

«I remember,» I said.

'Dive!' I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in shock, peed merrily. Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find one-sixteenth of an inch of pee on the floor. 'Have a nice day!' I said, jubilant with self-discovery, then ran to self-employment, to hang a shingle and next my periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated unterderseaboat all these years. Too stupid to see in it my psychological future and my final downfall, my beautiful artifact, the brass genitalia of psychotic research, the Von Seyfertitz Mark Nine Periscope!»