Jeepers, it sure would, Mister Information! Wow, I-I can’t wait to see Happyville!

Happily, he doesn’t have to wait at all. One of the dacoits comes leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let’s-get-to-it grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms comes pincering up out of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers the colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on his ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering oh shit, which even dacoits do too.

“You are under the mountain,” a voice announces. Stony cave-acoustics in here. “Please remember from this point on to obey all pertinent regulations.”

His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic with rolling headlamp eyes. It is shaped something like a crab. “That’s Cancer in Latin,” sez the robot, “and in Kenosha, too!” It will prove to be addicted to one-liners that never quite come off for anyone but it.

“Here is Muffin-tin Road,” announces the robot, “note the smiling faces on all the houses here.” Upstairs windows are eyes, picket fence is teeth. Nose is the front door.

“Sa-a-a-y,” asks the colonel, taken by a sudden thought, “does it ever snow here in Happyville?”

“Does what ever snow?”

“You’re evading.”

“I’m evading-room vino from Visconsin,” sings this boorish machine, “and you oughta see the nurses run! So what else is new, Jackson?” The squat creature is actually chewing gum, a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, very malleable, even sending out detachable molecules which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalterwerke, developed by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a damn fair approximation of Beeman’s licorice flavor to the robot crab’s brain.

“Mister Information always answers questions.”

“For what he’s making, I’d even question answers. Does it ever snow? Of course it snows in Happyville. Lotta snowmen’d sure be sore if it didn’t!”

“I recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow right up the walk, like a visitor who expects to be let in. Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted there… . Ever get that in Happyville?”

“Old stuff,” sez the robot.

“Anybody ever open his front door, while the wind was doing that, eh?”

“Thousands of times.”

“Then,” pounces the colonel, “if the door is the house’s nose, and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white crystals are blowing up from Muffin-tin Road in a big cloud right into the—”

“Aagghh!” screams the plastic robot, and scuttles away into a narrow alley. The colonel finds himself alone in a brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and adobe colors sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops, streets, not a tree in sight, and who’s this come strolling down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it’s Laszlo Jamf himself, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a ’37 Ford against the World’s ups and downs, which are never more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to wistfully gauze, inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wearing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender, a color for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows, minor-keyed lieder about days gone by, plaintive pianos, pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday walks by canals… here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely, attentively on this afternoon, and the bells across the canal are tolling the hour: the men have come from very far away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mission of some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the other’s role… .