Bing in pops a kid with beanie spinning, hands Slothrop another message and spins off again. “The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her on display to all interested customers be present at this address 11:30 a.m.”—in the sky a white clockface drifts conveniently by, hmm only half an hour to gather together my rescue team. Rescue team will consist of Myrtle Miraculous flyin’ in here in a shoulderpadded maroon dress, the curlers still up in her hair and a tough frown fer draggin’ her outa Slumberland… next a Negro in a pearl-gray zoot and Inverness cape name of Maximilian, high square pomaded head and a superthin mustache come zooming here out of his “front” job, suave manager of the Club Oogabooga where Beacon Street aristocracy rubs elbows ev’ry night with Roxbury winos ’n’ dopefiends, yeah hi Tyrone, heah Ah is! H’lo Moitle baby, hyeah, hyeah, hyeah! Whut’s de big rush, mah man? Adjusting his carnation, lookin’ round th’ room, everybody’s here now except for that Mar-cel but hark the familiar music-box theme yes it’s that old-timery sweet Stephen Foster music and sure enough in through the balcony window now comes Marcel, a mechanical chessplayer dating back to the Second Empire, actually built a century ago for the great conjuror Robert-Houdin, very serious-looking French refugee kid, funny haircut with the ears perfectly outlined in hair that starts abruptly a quarter-inch strip of bare plastic skin away, black patent-shiny hair, hornrim glasses, a rather remote manner, unfortunately much too literal with humans (imagine what happened the first time Maximilian come hi-de-hoing in the door with one finger jivin’ in the air sees metal-ebonite-and-plastic young Marcel sitting there and say, “Hey man gimme some skin, man!” well not only does Marcel give him a heavy time about skin, skin in all its implications, oh no that’s only at the superficial level, next we get a long discourse on the concept of “give,” that goes on for a while, then, then he starts in on “Man.” That’s really an exhaustive one. In fact Marcel isn’t anywhere near finished with it yet). Still, his exquisite 19th-century brainwork—the human art it took to build which has been flat lost, lost as the dodo bird—has stood the Floundering Four in good stead on many, many go-rounds with the Paternal Peril.

But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann Allgeier? where’s the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere. Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact, gifted while at the same time flawed by his gift—unfit by it for human living. Myrtle Miraculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossible for humans. She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love them but love is the only miracle that’s beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The others of her class are either homosexuals, fanatics about law ’n’ order, off on strange religious excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to meet eligible men, Myrtle knows it’s no use… . As for Maximilian, he has a natural sense of rhythm, which means all rhythms, up to and including the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless manhole awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb—he is a pilot through Earth’s baddest minefields, if we only stay close to him, be where he is as much as we can—yet Maximilian’s doom is never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel… .