Heaven is the bore of bores, Eliot's novel went on, so most wraiths queue up to be reborn—and they live and love and fail and die, and they queue up to be reborn again. They take pot luck, as the saying goes. They don't gibber and squeak to be one race or another, one sex or another, one nationality or another, one class or another. What they want

being an idiot herself, she noticed practically nothing. "Search me," she said. It was an unappetizing invitation.

"Who are these people?" I ask myself. "What is this unimaginably horrible thing that has happened to them?" And I realized that, in order to get proper answers, I am going to have to cease to be dead. I am going to have to let myself be reborn. Word has just come that I am to be sent where the soul of Richard the Lion Hearted now lives, Rosewater,

rambled on, said such things as, "You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them."

"Ten thousand years from now," Eliot predicted boozily, "the names of our generals and presidents will be forgotten, and the only hero of our time still remembered will be the author of 2BRO2B." This was the title of a book by Trout, a title which, upon examination, turned out to be the famous question posed by Hamlet.

He blew his brains out. But, before he did that, he wrote a family history and he begat poor Fred, the insurance man. Sons of suicides seldom do

Fred, thinking Lila wasn't paying any attention to him, now put down Better Homes and Gardens, picked up what looked like one hell of a sexy paperback novel, Venus on the Half-shell, by Kilgore Trout.

Eliot was locked up in Swarthmore on a drunk and disorderly charge. When he awoke the next morning, the police called his wife. He apologized to her, slunk home.

Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. "The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere