r! The right number, too.
Erich was alone at the bar, but now even he--"Oh, no, this can't be," I
thought--even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was working
the worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but it
was the worst, too. "That's my little commandant," I thought, "no team
spirit."

"So now Lili and Bruce--yes, and _Grossmutterchen_ Maud--have their
little nest," he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice very
hard to get a screech. "But what are the rest of us supposed to
be--cowbirds?"

* * * * *

He crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, "Cuc-koo!
Cuc-koo!" And I said to myself, "I often thought you were crazy, boy,
but now I know."

"_Teufelsdreck!_--yes, Devil's dirt!--but you all seem to be infected
with this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is the
natural and proper end of evolution?--a period of enjoyment and
measuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call
destruction--'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to my
children?'--but which men know as fulfillment.

"You're given good parts in _Goetterdaemmerung_ and you go up to the
author and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but
this Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write an
opera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed
curly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed,
something like that.'

"Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will
be like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure,
to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray
beards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around
indoors to the end of your days, mooning about little baby
cosmoses?--incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the
womb, the little gray home in the nest--is that what you want? It'll
grow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation
of _Kinder_, _Kirche_, _Kueche_--I should live so long!

"Women!--how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the
fireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say,
'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bed
and do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby,
the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the
fetterer, the crippler! Woma