The Toynbee Convector

“See my point? Now what else do we do so’s not to be bored?”

“Hold a massacre?”

“No massacres here in dogs’ years. Lord, even our police chiefs honest! Mayor—not corrupt! Madness. Whole town faced with stark staring ennuis and lulls! Last chance, Charlie, what do we do?”

“Build a mummy?” Charlie smiled.

“Bulldogs in the belfry! Watch my dust!”

The old man, cackling, grabbed bits of stuffed owl and bent lizard tail and old nicotine bandages left over from a skiing fell that had busted his ankle and broken a romance in 1885, and some patches from a 1922 Kissel Kar inner tube, and some burnt-out sparklers from the last peaceful summer of 1913, and all of it weaving, shuttling together under his brittle insect-jumping fingers.

“Voila! There, Charlie! Finished!”

“Oh, colonel.” The boy stared and gasped. “Can I make him a crown?”

“Make him a crown, boy. Make him a crown.”

The sun was going down when the colonel and Charlie and their Egyptian friend came down the dusky backstairs of the old man’s house, two of them walking iron-heavy, the third floating light as toasted cornflakes on the autumn air.

“Colonel,” wondered Charlie. “What we going to do with this mummy, now we got him? It ain’t as if he could talk much, or walk around—”

“No need, boy. Let folks talk, let folks run. Look there!” They cracked the door and peered out at a town smothered in peace and ruined with nothing-to-do.

“Ain’t enough, is it, son, you’ve recovered from your almost fatal seizure of Desperate Empties. Whole town out there is up to their earlobes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always and forever Sunday! Who’ll offer salvation, boy?”

Amon Bubastis Rameses Ra the Third, just arrived on the four o’clock limited?”

“God loves you, boy, yes. What we got here is a giant seed. Seed’s no good unless you do what with it?”

“Why,” said Charlie, one eye shut. “Plant it?”

“Plant! Then watch it grow! Then what? Harvest time. Harvest! Come on, boy. Er—bring your friend.”

The colonel crept out into the first nightfall.

The mummy came soon after, helped by Charlie.

Labor Day at high noon, Osiris Bubastis Barneses Amon-Ba-Tut arrived from the Land of the Dead.

An autumn wind stirred the land and flapped doors wide not with the sound of the usual Labor Day Parade, seven tours cars, a fife and drum corps, and the mayor, but a mob that grew as it flowed the streets and fell in a tide to inundate the lawn out front of Colonel Stonesteel’s house. The colonel and Charlie were sitting on the front porch, had been sitting there for some hours waiting for the conniption fits to arrive, the storming of the Bastille to occur. Now with dogs going mad and biting boys’ ankles and boys dancing around the fringes of the mob, the colonel gazed down upon the Creation (his and Charlie’s) and gave his secret smile.

“Well, Charlie...do I win my bet?”

“You sure do, colonel!”

“Come on.”

Phones rang all across town and lunches burned on stoves, as the colonel strode forth to give the parade his papal blessings.

At the center of the mob was a horse-drawn wagon. On top the wagon, his eyes wild with discovery, was Tom Tuppen, owner of a half-dead farm just beyond

town. Tom was babbling, and the crowd was babbling, because in the back of the wagon was the special harvest delivered out of four thousand lost years of time.

“Well, flood the Nile and plant the Delta,” gasped the colonel, eyes wide, staring. “Is or is not that a genuine ole Egyptian mummy lying there in its original papyrus and coal-tar wrappings?”

“Sure is!” cried Charlie.

“Sure is!” yelled everyone.