We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay’s atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland Sea… .

By the time Bland joined up, the Masons had long, long degenerated into just another businessmen’s club. A real shame. Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense-receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow mummery. Not for all of them, though. Now and then you found a throwback. Lyle Bland happened to be one.

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.

Bland found himself coming home to Beacon Hill after meetings late at night, unable to sleep. He would lie down in his study on the davenport, not thinking about anything in particular, and come back with a jolt, his heart pounding terribly, knowing he’d just been somewhere, but unable to account for the passage of time. The old American Empire clock beat in the resonant hallway. The Girandole mirror, passed on by generations of Blands, gathered images in its quicksilver pool that Lyle couldn’t bring himself to face. In another room his wife, varicose and religious, groaned in her sleep. What was happening to him?

Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed davenport, Wall Street Journal with nothing in it he didn’t already know, Lyle Bland rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh! whoosh back in again. He lay there, more terrified than he’d ever been, even at Belleau Wood—not so much because he’d left his body, but because he knew that this was only a first step. The next step would be to roll over in mid-air and look back. Old magic had found him. He was off on a journey. He knew he couldn’t keep from going on with it.

It took him a month or two before he could make the turn. When it happened, he felt it as a turn not so much in space as in his own history. Irreversible. The Bland who came back to rejoin the inert white container he’d seen belly-up on the sofa, thousands of years beneath him, had changed forever.