One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald Page A

sweet women who never raise their voices, and who are fantastically strong and tough and aggressive underneath. He discovered that he had pretended love and created a myth-woman to fit that love, and that underneath she was maybe not a nice person at all. So he could not ever let himself comprehend he was glad she was dying. Accepting Gretchen's silliness gave him a guilt he could admit."
    "So after the LSD, you both could handle the situation."
    "He died damned well, and I helped him die well, and... those insights are still with me, Trav, still helping me. But I had never thought of how... it could relate to the money. Psychedelics give you an acceptance of inevitable things. Sort of-'so be it.' It would have given him the chance to weigh the difference in importance between death and money, and money is so... kind of insipid compared to true identity. Without that experience, Trav, I couldn't stay here. It would smash me to stay here. Now I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
    There is, I thought, almost no useful thing the human animal will not in his eternal perversity misuse, whether it be alcohol, gasoline, gunpowder, aspirin, chocolate fudge, mescaline, or LSD.
    I once helped a baffled father get his daughter out of an acid party in downtown Miami. She went from the party directly into a private sanitarium. She had been a mildly disturbed personality before she got into that cult group. There were nine kids in that small room, aged eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had taken the trip together and they were about three hours into it, and had taken a heavy dose, so heavy there was no relating or identity between any of Page 24

    them. They brooded over the infinite in separate silences, isolated, somnambulistic, while the record-player needle made a hissing sound where, at the beginning of a record, it was trapped in a locked groove. Only two of them were having a bad trip. One boy sat in yoga position in a corner, facing into the corner, beating wearily at the side of his head with his fist and weeping hopelessly. The girl we were after was on her belly, creeping slowly backward; her shift hiked high above her waist by the friction, her eyes full of terror. The kids had not picked anyone to be the gooney-that wingless bird which never flies-so that no one took a bad trip and harmed himself. The girl we took out of there had chewed her fingers to bloody ragged ruin. The others dreamed, swayed, smiled-and we left them there.
    FOUR
    THE NEXT day was Saturday, and after breakfast I had Glory drive me into town and drop me. I told her I would poke around and be in touch. It was another one of those days Chicagoans have no right to expect in December, bright and balmy. My topcoat was more than adequate. I decided a large impersonal commercial hotel would make sense, so I took a cab to the Drake, checked into a single, found Mrs. Heidi Trumbill in the book at the 180 East Burton address, and phoned her. It was ten-fifteen.
    After four rings a female voice said with considurable impatience and exasperation, "Yes? Yes?"
    "Mrs. Trumbill, my name is McGee and..."
    "Please try again at eleven-thirty, will you? I'm working with some acrylic paints, and they're drying so fast I'll lose what I'm after if I keep answering this goddam phone!" She hung up.
    ForcefuIly.
    I went out and walked south on Michigan Avenue. In nice weekend weather it is one of the specialties of the house. Chicago is a strange one. It is not on my list of favorite places. Insofar as restaurants and lounges and hotels are concerned it is strictly hinterland, strictly hick. And as you go down the scale it becomes more shabby and shoddy than rough. I do not know why anyone should expect anything special in that line from a place where the Hefner Empire seems to represent some sort of acme of sophistication, based as it is upon fantastic centerfold mammalians for the pimpled self-lovers, upon a chain of bunny-warrens styled to make the middle-class sales manager