the left side of his face and his left hand was stained with acids and chemicals. But the right side of his face became dissipated and disreputable, with a leer in the eye end a scornful, sneering curve to the lip. He grew a tiny moustache on the right side, waxed it, and twirled it continually. It was rather horrid, but worse was yet to come.

One day the inevitable happened. Tobias J. Koot split in half, with a faint ripping sound and a despairing wail. He was, of course, buried in two coffins and in two graves, the wretched man's fate pursuing him even beyond death.

Well, you can understand how I feel, what with the mirror, the cats in sunsuits and the weasel. Or haven't I mentioned the weasel? I mean the brown one, of course, and he is, perhaps, worst of all. It isn't what he says so much as his sneering, ironic tone. The other weasels, who live in the spare bedroom with the colt, were happy enuf till HE arrived, but now THEY are arranging a schism. As you will readily see, something must be done about it before science-fiction collapses and the standard falls trailing into the dust.

I suggest that we mobilize, and, to avoid dissension, give everybody the rank of general. Then, first of all, we can march to my house and get rid of that weasel.

The Brown One, of course. The others are welcome to stay as long as they like. I feel that they are weak rather than wicked, and need only a good excuse, or should I say example, in order to brace themselves up.

Contributions to the fund for the mobilization of science-fiction and the extermination of brown weasels may be sent to me in care of this magazine. Do not delay. Each moment you wait brings us closer to doom, and, besides, I need a new piano.

H.K.

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GOD BUSTERS

Erick Freyor

Mark Twain, in his mysterious stranger, makes no bones about his sentiments towards Christianity and the God illusion. Speaking of Christian progress he says, "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian, not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The turk and the chinaman will buy these to kill missionaries and converts with."

Again, in speaking of God, comparing the God conception to an impossible dream, he continues, "Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could have made good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!"

One wonders what the Christian Ethiopians thot when the Christian Italians playfully, and undoubtedly with the sanction of the Holy Mother Church, began to spray them with liquid fire, blast their cities, and mutilate their children with the newest Christian improvements on the Christian weapons of war. They probably couldn't quite understand the logic or the fairness of it, but we must not blame the Ethiopians for failing to comprehend, as they haven't had the benefits of Christian civilization for as long a time as the Italians.

Let's put a stop to this shilly-shallying. Let's put these destructive Atheists in their place. The Christians KNOW that God DOES exist. That God is all powerfull. So it would be only a simple matter to arrange an appointment with God, (we don't exactly know what his office hours are,) and prevail upon him to write a message in fire saying, "YOU BET, GOD IS THE REAL MCCOY" or something similar, and spread it all over the sky. That'll convince even the most reluctant Atheists, and it should be a rather simple trick for a God who once stopped the sun (sic!), created a universe in 6 days, and engineered an immaculate conception.

Clarence Darrow, world famous criminal lawyer, the man who made the Silver-Tongued and Godly Bryant appear the verbose addlepate he was, beneath his platitudinous phrases, during the Scopes trial, said, to an interviewer, "All my life I've been an Agnostic. But I am no longer an Agnostic, I am now an Atheist."

THE PENDULUM

Up and down, back and forth, up and down. First the quick flite skyward, gradually slowing, reaching the pinnacle of the curve, poising a moment, then flashing earthward again, faster and faster at a nauseating speed, reaching the bottom and hurtling aloft on the opposite side. Up and down. Back and forth. Up and down.

How long it had continued this way Layeville didn't know. It might have been millions of years he'd spent sitting here in the massive glass pendulum watching the world tip one way and another, up and down, dizzily before his eyes until they ached. Since first they had locked him in the pendulum's round glass head and set if swinging it had never stopped or changed. Continuous, monotonous movements over and above the ground. So huge was this pendulum that it shadowed one hundred feet or more with every majestic sweep of its gleaming shape, dangling from the metal intestines of the shining machine overhead. It took three or four seconds for it to traverse the one hundred feet one way, three or four seconds to come back.

THE PRISONER OF TIME! That's what they called him now! Now, fettered to the very machine he had planned and constructed. A pri—son—er—of—time! A—pris—on—er—of—Time! With every swing of the pendulum it echoed in his thoughts. For ever like this until he went insane. He tried to focus his eyes on the arching hotness of the earth as it swept past beneath him.

They had laughed at him a few days before. Or was it a week? A month? A year? He didn't know. This ceaseless pitching had filled him with an aching confusion. They had laughed at him when he said, some time before all this, he could bridge time gaps and travel into futurity. He had designed a huge machine to warp space, invited thirty of the worlds most gifted scientists to help him finish his colossal attempt to scratch the future wall of time.

The hour of the accident spun back to him now thru misted memory. The display of the time machine to the public. The exact moment when he stood on the platform with the thirty scientists and pulled the main switch! The scientists, all of them, blasted into ashes from wild electrical flames! Before the eyes of two million witnesses who had come to the laboratory or were tuned in by television at