To protect the newly reconstituted elephants against improper use, they are initially purchased by the Elephant Supply Corporation, a publicly owned monopoly, which keeps them for two weeks and subjects them to a battery of highly exacting tests, after which the sole of one foot is stamped with the corporation’s logo before the elephant is released into the jungle. We make fifteen elephants in a normal week. Though in the pre-Christmas season we can increase that to as many as twenty-five by running the machinery at full speed, I think that fifteen is just about right.

As I mentioned earlier, the ear section is the easiest single phase in the elephant-manufacturing process. It demands little physical exertion on the part of workers, it requires no close concentration, and it employs no complex machinery. The number of actual operations involved is limited, as well. Workers can either work at a relaxed pace all day or exert themselves to meet their quota in the morning so as to have the afternoon free.

My partner and I in the ear shop liked the second approach. We’d finish up in the morning and spend the afternoon talking or reading or amusing ourselves separately. The afternoon following my dream of the dancing dwarf, all we had to do was hang ten freshly wrinkled ears on the wall, after which we sat on the floor enjoying the sunshine.

I told my partner about the dwarf. I remembered the dream in vivid detail and described everything about it to him, no matter how trivial. Where description was difficult, I demonstrated by shaking my head or swinging my arms or stamping my feet. He listened with frequent grunts of interest, sipping his tea. He was five years my senior, a strongly built fellow with a dark beard and a penchant for silence. He had this habit of thinking with his arms folded. Judging by the expression on his face, you would guess that he was a serious thinker, looking at things from all angles, but usually he’d just come up straight after a while and say, “That’s a tough one.” Nothing more.

He sat there thinking for a long time after I told him about my dream—so long that I started polishing the control panel of the electric bellows to kill time. Finally, he came up straight, as always, and said, “That’s a tough one. Hmmm. A dancing dwarf. That’s a tough one.”

This came as no great disappointment to me. I hadn’t been expecting him to say any more than he usually did. I had just wanted to tell someone about it. I put the electric bellows back and drank my now-lukewarm tea.

He went on thinking, though, for a much longer time than he normally devoted to such matters.

“What gives?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure I once heard about that dwarf.”

This caught me off guard.

“I just can’t remember who told me.”