BEWARE, ALL YOU tyrants!
I come to help the underdogs —
no matter what their color, creed or race!
Alerted by their watchmen, who were mostly Seminoles, the Red-Necked Ofays of the Okefinokee Reservation came hurtling out of their soggy holes and nests with such violence that the alligators and water moccasins went hurtling back into theirs. Reptiles can take only so much excitement.
With hoarse cackles of happiness, the emaciated whites and their Red Indian fellow-reservationists floundered about snatching at the little transparent packets of hominy grits, chitterings, and moonshine originally intended for the poor Black trash of Appalachia, but now miraculously diverted and felling like manna from the sweaty southern sky.
Along with the hillbilly ambrosia and nectar, a faint cry haunting as the flight of the flamingo lingered in those same dismal hot heavens: “Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofay!”
The Red-Necked Ofays paused in their snatching to lift a ragged cheer.
This was not the first exploit of the mysterious marauder who had thus far left no due to his identify except a cry from the sky. Most folks now attributed to him the signs, “Whitey lives!” which a month ago he begun to appear scrawled big in shiversomely daring spots, such as the front wall of the Black House in Memphis. Then a week ago a boisterous party of Luxor Blacks on a sweep-and-annoy excursion through the Bayous Reservation had had their persons and swamp buggies deluged with Yazoo mud “Courtesy of the Endfray of the Ofay!” Many intellectual and fashionable Blacks had secretly approved this literally dirty trick, since the chivvying and terrorizing of helpless Ofays was beginning to be considered uncouth behavior. Then only yesterday a 17-year-old white concubine of the Caliph of Harlem had been kidnapped by the Endfray and levitated back to her tribe in the Great Barrens Reservation. Reactionary and moralistic Blacks, long detesting the Caliph for his contempt of the strict rules against miscegenation, had openly praised the act. In fact, only the rescued and windblown white girl had been completely unhappy about the whole business. But no Blacks could be expected to approve the food drop, which not only upset the national economy, but also violated the even stricter laws against interfering, by helping the weak, with the divine principle of survival of the fittest.
The Black wardens of the Okefinokee melted with their furious and frightened messages the wires to Memphis, Cairo, Thebes, Luxor (once Vicksburg and Natchez) and the other great Government cities of the American Nile.
Within ten seconds two squadrons of Black Angels based on Karaak had scrambled and another was screaming down through the stratosphere.
At her palatial HQ in Memphis, Her Serene Darkness noted the disturbance and ordered that samples of the food packets be recovered and rushed to her. She did not, nevertheless, shift one black iota of her essential concentration off the great war that was being fought between North America and Africa to Make the World Safe for Black Supremacy, by determining which Blacks really were supreme.
Ten seconds more and all three squadrons of Black Angels were reversing course west as quickly as their already great velocity would permit, and then shifting into overdrive.
Word had come that there had Been another drop of mysteriously diverted viands — this time on the Death Valley Reservation of the Bearded and Beaded Ofays.
Once again there had come that weird cry from the sky: “Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofay!”
Along with the packets of fruit and saffron-tinted, precooked rice land vegetables, there were falling foam - packaged Tibetan prayer wheels, smuggled no man might say how through the Nirvana Screen.
The starving descendants of ancient hippies, beats, cultists and movie moguls had come boiling up out of the furnace-hot mouths of their caves and holes. Even outside the reservations, holes were a popular residence in those exciting times when Black atom bombs were in the air and when all mankind was preoccupied, to a degree at least equal to his interest in space, with Earth’s molten, slow-churning mantle, rich in mohole-minable radioactivies and also a source of strange and mighty powers when properly tickled by CDEF (Coleman - Dufresne Electrogravitomagnetic Fields) or by magic spells. For in the new world sorcery and science walked arm in arm, sometimes so closely that none might tell which was which, or who was holding the other up. And the density and darkness of Earth’s interior suited the Black Age. Russia, which ever since Dostoyevsky Day had shifted her fundamentally introspective and peasant interests from the sky to the East European plains and Siberian steppes, had used CDEF (and possibly some Tungu chants) to carry by slow convection and concentrate vast sub-critical masses of fissionable radioactives underneath all the world’s continents. Increased CDEF tickling would produce unimaginably destructive earthquakes — the so-called mantle bombs that were the USSR’s doomsday answer to aggression. Africa and North America utilized the same methods to enrich the radioactives they took from their mohole mines. Australia had employed CDEF and bone-pointing Aboriginal magic to accelerate continental drift, so that the great down-under island, shoving Tasmania before it, was now separated from Antarctica by only a narrow strait. Australia enjoyed a Canadian climate and was hemmed by extremely rich fisheries. While the great Buddhist hegemony of Sino-India had used CDEF (possibly) and yoga and zen (certainly) to create the Nirvana Screen.
In response to the echoing cry from the dry sky, the Beaded and Bearded Ofays touched fingertips to foreheads and briefly meditated their gratitude.
In the fringes of her awareness, Her Serene Darkness noted this food-drop also, and she gave the same order.
Over the Pacific, a tiny Westward - speeding vehicle reversed course instantaneously, and so of course without circling, to return momentarily to a point over Death Valley and shout down, “The Endfray thanks you for your prayers.”
The Ofays below rejoiced, while by the psionic grapevine that tenuously links unfortunates, a little hope was kindled in the Swarthy Ofays of the Chihuahua Reservation, the Stunted Ofays of the Jersey Flats, the Giant Ofays of the Panhandle Reservation, the Long-Haired Ofays of the Tules, and even in the Wild or Unfenced Honkies of the Rocky Mountains, the Black Hills, and the Badlands.
The Endfray’s linear loop wasted enough time to let the Black Angels zero in on him, her, it or them, with their radars and telescopes. With hardly a millisecond’s delay, they aimed and activated their deadly lasers, rocket bombs and constriction fields.
The Endfray went zigzagging west again just in time. His evasive tactics were masterly. He seemed able to anticipate each move of his pursuers. Mini-atomics burst into searing violet spheres about him, red laser-needles lanced past him, space itself was squeezed and wrenched, but he bobbed along unharmed like a Ping-pong ball in a tornado.
For an instant one Black Angel telescoped him clearly. The fleeing vehicle was incredibly tiny, the size and shape of a chunky dwarf’s spacesuit, snow white in hue, and across it went the red letters “Endfray of the Ofay.” There were no jets or antennae. It flashed out of sight perhaps a microsecond before a laser pierced the space it had occupied.
Yet despite or perhaps because of the Endfray’s ingenious doublings and dartings, the Black Angels were gaining on him. He veered south, but Australia sent up a line of warning star rockets. He veered north, but when he neared the moored, melancholy black balloons marking the Russian border, they moaned, “Nyet, nyet,” at him and he once more reversed course and sought the Equator.
The blue of the sky ahead became grainy and glittering like a holograph. It extended down to sea level, blotting out Borneo and the western shore of Celebes.
Without hesitation the Endfray plunged, at precisely 120 degrees east longitude, into the Nirvana Screen.
Chanting their fatalistic death chants, the pilots of the Black Angels sent their slim ebon ships after him.
Without perceptible passage of time, pursued and pursuers emerged over the Indian Ocean at 60 degrees east longitude.
The same thing would have happened in reverse if they had been traveling east, or at 45 degrees north latitude and the Equator if they had been traveling along a north-south vector. It was the Orient’s master mystery, greater than the rope trick. Truth to tell, no one outside knew for sure whether India and China still existed inside the Nirvpia Screen, or not. Explanations ran the gamut from spacewarp to mass hypnosis and the Nigerian null-sprll. While what the super scientific and/or superphysic Buddists of the Fourth Dimensional Path ought do if they ever came out, chilled even Earth’s blackest blood.
Africa loomed, the continent that was the home of the biggest animals, the biggest magics and the biggest bombs in the world. [The Endfray climbed steeply. Already at greater altitude, the Black Angels rode the hypotenuse of a collision course.
Ninety miles from intercept, magnibombs mashed the stratosphere everywhere around the Endfray and coalesced into one massive incandescence.
Veering off with hardly nanoseconds to spare, the Black Angels’ wing commander bounced home his message off the most convenient orbital relay: “Target destroyed by African antispacecraft fire.”
But before it was received at Memphis, there was dropping on the Fierce Fuzzy, or Bluecoated Ofays of the Chicago Craters Reservation, a shower of packeted food — wienerschnitzd, corned beef and cabbage, Irish whisky, beer — and foam-crated roller skates, the latter diverted from a shipment intended for the great gladiatorial ring at Cairo. While down the slants of rain from the dismal sky there resounded, “Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofay!”
No one knew why the Chicago Craters Ofays were called fuzzy, or simply refered to as “the fuzz,” since all of them were totally bald from residual radioactivity. It was one of recent history’s many mysteries, about which thought was discouraged. But anyone could figure out that roller skates would be an excellent means of transportation on crater glass. And by now everyone, Black or White, knew that the Endfray was an impudent and unbearable affront to absolute authority.
Her Serene Darkness made a decision and took her mind completely off the war. She could safely do this because her uncles were good generals and because her psionic intelligence organization was the world’s best, with vast powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis and teleportation, from the orbiting espers each shuteyed in her capsule to the Blacks in Blackness: whole psionic families which had lived for generations in deep-buried, absolutely anechoic, a-optical psi-spy-proof environments, their only connections with the upper world being inbound nutrient-pipes and oxypipes and quartz-cable ultraviolet conductors and outbound waste-pipes and report lines. Psionic Intelligence’s chief task was to spot and course-chart bombs lobbed over from Africa and up from Argentina and Brazil, where Africa had an enormous beachhead, and then either turn them back by telekinesing their controls, or else guide atomic interceptors to them. Her Darkness was certain that her espers were the world’s finest because she had been their working chief before taking over her largely conscious, nonpsionic imperial duties.
Now like an arboreal black leopard — slim, flashing-eyed and dangerous — she gazed down the Watusi-Hottentot gap between her and her pages.
“Summon me my psychia-witches and sorceresps,” she commanded.
The patter of sprinting bare feet faded from the tesselated floor, which was a great, diagrammatic map of Earth and the spaces around. Turning her beautiful, small head on her slender, long neck, Her Darkness gazed out between the narrow pillars of Vermont marble fretted with California gold at the rippling blue Mississip, and she meditated.
A page entered and knelt to her, lifting a golden tray on which gleamed glassy packets, samples from the Endfray’s food-drops. She silently indicated where to set it.
A tall, glossy warrior in HQ harness folded his arms in the Communications doorway and intoned, “Acapulco, Halifax and Port of Spain have sustained medium to severe damage from nuclear, near-misses. Our rockets intercepted, but not in good time. Orbital warnings on the three African attacks were late and inadequate.”
“What from the Blacks in Blackness?” Her Serenity inquired.
“No warning whatever from that quarter.”
She nodded dismissal and returned to her meditations.
Yet it seemed hardly picoseconds before the Presence Pavilion was once more full and silent, except for the faint susurrus of the most respectful breathing and the pounding of frightened hearts.
Slowly, one by one, Her Darkness gave her assembled psychiawitches and sorceresps the leopard look which her populace expected of her and loved, especially when they did not have to face it.
Those gathered in the pavilion were almost as tall as she and even more gorgeously clad, but they crouched away from her and ducked their heads like terrified children.
Then she asked in a voice that set them shivering, “Why is our newest and insolentest enemy uncaught by you, nay, unreported even,” and without waiting for an answer commanded, “Read me the mind of the Endfray. Ice it and slice it, dice it and rice it. Skewer him in space, nail him in time.
Sound him from his lowest note to the top of his compass. [Tell me his source, his nature and his fate.”
Instantly a sorceresp of the Seventh Rank babbled, “He is a dwarf white traineed and equipped in a secret laboratory in a branch of the Carlsbad Caverns underlying the White Sands Reservation of the Bulge-Brained Ofays. His aim, unquestionably, is the fomenting of an Ofay revolt, a Honky insurrection. He is now hovering seventeen miles above Aswan - St. Paul.”
Without intervening pause, the Second Psychiawitch chittered, “He is an African agent of Pygmy Extraction, a marauder skilled in teleportation and telepathy. His means of aerial locomotion is a deceit; he uses slowed-down teleportation, not speeded-up field flight. Under cover of the magnibomb blast, he landed unharmed in the territory of our hateful enemies and is now making report to His Terrible Tenebrosity in his shelter-palace beneath Mogadishu.”
“The Endfray is not one, but many,” another took up. “He is radioactive atoms over the Somali coast. He also speeds east intact over old Cleveland on the Dead Sea. Another of these duplicates…”
“By Bast and by Ptah, the End-ray is extraterrestrial,” yet another cut in. “A seven-tentacled amphibian from the fourth planet of pulsing Altair, he is the forerunner of an invasion which…
“By Serapis and Harpocrites, she is an Indian witch, sister to Kali, able to penetrate the Nirvana Screen and let others through, She —”
“The Endfray is a group-minded nation of Black Martian Ants. Only such tiny creatures could survive the changes of momentum that — ”
“The Endfray is a fantasm! That’s why no material weapon can — ”
“That’ll be enough!” Interposed Her Serene Darkness. “When I want improvisations, I’ll summon me my artists.” The faint, jeering notes of an Electronic calliope on a distant pleasure barge seemed an overtone of her scornful contralto voice. “Facts I desire. Where is the Endfray? Take scent and search!” And picking up the gold tray, she scattered its contents across the room in one sweep.
The soaring, transparent food-packets were snatched, sniffed, fingered, held to ear and forehead, passed hand to hand. There were faint growlings and eager whimperings as the assembly transformed into a pack.
Her Serenity directed, “Each search that part of earth or space on which she stands,” referring to the diagrammatic floor map. “Let not one oozy sea cranny or fissure of damp day cave be overlooked, and forget not the far side of the moon. Except you... and you,” she added, beckoning the First Psychiawitch and also the sorceresp of the Seventh Sank who had been first to answer. “The rest, to work! ”
“How many minutes have we for our task?” the Second Psychiawitch ventured. The eyes of most of the others had already dosed or gone blank as the minds behind them dairvoyantly scanned.
“I give you each one hundred seconds.” Then, turning to the Seventh-Rank sorceresp, “You spoke of an Ofay revolt. Where? When?”
“One is planned, Your Darkness. It will begin in Los Alamos and be timed to coinade with an all-out African assault ordered by His Terrible Tenebrosity.”
“Ridiculous!” the First Psychiawitch interjected in a whisper. “Not even His Idiocy would be so stupid as to think the reservation Ofays might be roused to helpful revolution, or the wild Honkies organized for any purpose. Nor would even His Vileness stoop to use such foul and tawdry means.”
In the Communications doorway there appeared a warrior, impassive but white-eyed. Her Serenity showed him her finger. He intoned, “The Blacks in Blackness report that Africa has launched from Casablanca a yehicle with a two-hundred-million-pound first-stage thrust. Window clouds surround it. Its course bends west.”
“Two hundred million?”
“Aye. Ten times that of any known Afric or Americ launching vehicle.”
“It is the revolt-sign!” the Seventh-Rank sorceresp wailed.
“From its size, it’s more likely itself our death-sign, if our interceptors let it get over our land,” the First Psychiawitch remarked coolly.
“Silence,” Her Darkness said, not unkindly. Then, to the room, “The hundred seconds are up. Where is the Endfray?”
In the hundred and seventy-odd faces, eyes opened and/or came alive with spirit, looking toward Her Serenity with a professional confidence which, as the seconds passed and not one of them spoke, transformed, again into fear.
“Has any one of you not completed search?” Her Darkness inquired. “Or failed to make it as thorough as I commanded?”
Heads rotated from side to side. Lips formed, “No.”
“Then the Endfray is nowhere,” the First Psychiawitch whispered in a voice that was not meant to carry, but did.
One cried, “It is as I said. He is a fantasm, invisible to psionic search.”
“No, it is as I said!” another took up. “He is from Altair, and returned there in the twinkling of a self-teleportive thought. We have not searched Altair, only space out to Pluto.”
“When the possible seems to fail, only weak brains grasp at the impossible,” Her Serenity Interposed. “Stellar teleportation takes perceptible time and leaves perceptible clues, as you well know. While fantasms make no teleportive food-drops and leave no psychic scent. No, to solve our problem we must use an apothegm of Sherlock Holmes.”
Eyes grew puzzle'd, while the First Psychiawitch murmured, “Who is that?”
“Sherlock Holmes was a Cryptoblack of vast deductive Intelligence, who lived in — ” Her Darkness rapidly starred herself, moving fingertips to the seven cardinal points — “the Tabooed Times
Everyone else copied Her Darkness and starred herself at once, to ward off any ill hap which might come from mention of a forbidden area of the continuum.
Her Serenity continued, “The Sherlockian apothegm I have in mind is this: when all other explanations are proven false, then the least likely explanation must be the true one. You have not searched all of habitable Earth and Solar space.”
The psychiatrist standing on Memphis said hesitantly, “But, begging Your Serenity’s pardon, I have searched every closet of your secret quarters, including the apartments housing your harem and your laboratories of magic and the vault guarding your secret fortune.”
“It is well that you have,” Her Darkness replied, smiling most dangerously. “But those are not the sole forbidden or esp-proof volumes of Earth.”
“You are thinking of the mantle land core?” one asked.
“I said, ‘habitable,’” Her Darkness snapped. “Can you not guess the other spot I have in mind?” A sorceresp standing just south of Louisville cried out, “I scent the Endfray over Bowling Green! His yector, southwest by west. He speeds. Already he overpasses Clarksville.”
The psychiawitch standing between her and the one on Memphis took up with, “And now I catch his scent in turn. He comes on fast. He is over Paris, Milan, Bells, Brownsville, Covington — ”
“And now — ” the one on Memphis began.
The air screamed. The gold-chased pillars shook, and the purple silken awning snapped and flapped as something white flashed through the pavilion, tumbling by its blast everyone but Her Serenity.
The scream, which had abruptly dropped in pitch as the disturbance went by, land then faded somewhat, now rose again in pitch and volume. “He returns to buzz us once more,” the First Psychiawitch gasped from the floor.
Her Dark Serenity — hair un-spiraled and straight on end, eyes like a mad tiger’s, fists clenched, knees bent, slender feet a-stamp — incanted rapidly,
Null Kull, null Rull,
Null time, null space,
Nidi motion and null Grace.
By Hanged Man, Spades, and Lovers
Be winged-dogged, all that hovers.
Paralysis know, and fear…”
The screaming knifed. The pillars began to shake. Something white —
…And drop down here!
Silence returned with a roar. Something white lay on the tesselated floor — a squat and rigid spacesuit like a white oil drum with stubby cylindrical arms and legs, but windowless and without sign of head.
Her Serenity drew and expelled three gasping but controlled breaths. Her hair recurled with faintest rustlings. Those around craned, leaned in, and peered, though without rising fully from the floor where they had been sent sprawling.
Holding out her right hand prone, Her Serenity commanded, “Arise!”
Like the reversed motion picture of a, rigid fall, the white spacesuit swung erect as if its heels were hinged to the floor.
“Emerge!” Her Serenity continued.
The suit did not open, but out of it, as if walking through a white wall, there stepped a handsome black boy who looked nine years old. He wore a loincloth. Though his eyes were shut tight, his face was animated, and he smiled as he looked up.
“My Empress…” he began.
Her slender hands, snaking forward to capture him, clamped tight on air.
A chuckle came from the for end of the pavilion, where the black boy had rematerialized midway between awning and floor. Heads switched around to watch him where he stood on air.
Two sorceresps pointed at him, the one a wand, the other a yellow thighbone.
Three warriors appeared at the Force door, bearing silvery, conenosed hand weapons. Her Darkness snapped her fingers.
Still shut-eyed, the black boy chuckled again. The three warriors swayed like ticked bowling pins, arms tight to sides, legs tight together, bound by the constriction fields their weapons had projected backfiring on them. While pointed wand and thighbone hung limp as cooked spaghetti from the bands of the sorceresps.
“Any more games?” the black boy inquired hopefully. If he’d been chubbier, he’d have seemed like a wingless cupid.
“Who are you?” Her Darkness demanded far more coolly than she felt
“The Endfray, of course, Empress,” he replied, looking at her as directly las if his eyes had been open. “At your service, providing — I humbly beg your pardon — the service suits me.”
“Yet you have helped the Honkies, aided the Ofays — why?” Her Darkness asked automatically. She was still half in shock.
The Endfray’s grin widened and he quirked his face. Finally, “Just for fun,” he said. “No, that’s not true. Fact is, you see, I like stories of wars and battles, and — ”
“As any young Black should,” Her Serenity interrupted approvingly. She was regaining her sense of command, and her mind was beginning to work again.
At her feet the First Psychiawitch took fire from her and cried out, “Indeed yes! Brave battles! Complete courage! Stark strength! Merciless might! Violence and victory!”
The Endfray hung his head. His expression became an odd mixture of embarrassment and defiance. “But you see, Empress, I always like the losing side best. Being with the winners is no fun. But siding with the losers, when all the odds are against them — And you got to admit, it’s hard to imagine a losinger side than the Ofays.”
“Accommodation! Tomism!
Honky-love!” the Second Psychiawitch cried scandalized.
“Don’t you know the first sign of high intelligence is the faculty of violence?” the First Pyschia-witch demanded.
“Inside the Niryana Screen, they think it’s the ability to sit still,” the Endfray countered.
“Strength is virtue. Weakness is sin,” the Leading Sorceresp chanted.
“But you got to remember We were the losingest once, we were the weak ones, we — ” the Endfray continued stubbornly, but his voice was drowned in cries of horror at his unprefaced and unstarred reference to the Tabooed Times.
The warrior appearing iat the Communications doorway did not stand on ceremony, but roared over the din, “Our psionic trackers have lost touch with the African supermissile south of the Azores! The Blacks in Blackness have broken off their reports.”
There was shocked silence, in which the Endfray’s voice sounded out clearly. His grin was gone. “Yes,” he said, “and now, big as a metal moon, it’s approaching Bermuda. Our interceptors rise to destroy it. Counter-missiles shoot from it and become balls of white flame. Our interceptors puff into nothingness. It still comes on.” The Leading Sorceresp pointed at him a shaking arm. “He is an African agent;” she screeched, “sent to disrupt our counsels at this moment of crisis.”
“That’s not true, Empress,” the Endfray protested. “I’ve stuck with America because we are the loisingest side of this war. We are the weak ones. Africa’s going to win, unless I—”
Once again his voice was lost, this time in a din of outrage that broke off only when Her Dark Serenity threw up her arms and aried, “Fools! Have you not yet gaessed who the Endfray is? Have you not yet solved the Sherlockian riddle? The only spot you haven’t psionically searched is psi-proof Mammoth Cave, immemorial home of the Blacks in Blackness and just by Bowling Green. He is clearly one of them, and their best tracker too, highest product of our breeding for psionicity. When he was out on his mad mission to the Ofays, three bombs got through. When he returned home and you could not find him, we got reports on the launching of the African super-missile. When he started here, those reports stopped. And did it not occur to you that he keeps his eyes shut because he has never before been in an environment of optical light? You are all idiots! Endfray, how goes it?”
“The big one zoomed in over Savannah and Macon. Its last counter-missiles blasted those of our coastal and backup defenses. Ten seconds ago it was about to break up over Birmingham and shower all the cities of the Nile with a hundred hydrogen heads.”
“Was?”
“Of course, ‘was,’ Empress. While all these here were squawking, I jiggered its controls and put it into a permanent 93-minute circular Orbit around Terra. I’m going to keep it there too. I’m sorry, Empress, but in spite of you being very bright and right about me, I don’t trust you with that big a bomb. Or His Terrible Tenebrosity, of course. War’s romantic, but destruction’s too realistic.”
Her Darkness turned on him. “You have your nerve!”
His embarrassment returned. “I told you I’m sorry, Empress.”
She paused and turned toward the Communications doorway, where a warrior had appeared. “The super-missile still speeds west,” he rapped out. “Twenty of our interceptors have risen from Colorado Springs and thirty from Frisco to destroy it.”
“Imbeciles! Would you break if up, to do destruction, while it is still over our continent?”
“Don’t worry, Empress,” the Endfray said.
A second warrior appeared behind the first. “Our fifty interceptors have escaped control and formed themselves into two goose wings slanting back from the super-missile. Their radar blips are unmistakable.”
The Endfray grinned. “And now, my Empress, I got to be going. That flock needs looking after.”
A third warrior appeared behind the second. “A bliplet, tiny but unmistakable, has added itself to the fifty blips and one superblip.”
“We know,” Her Dark Serenity said a shade wearily, waving her hand in dismissal. Then, to the First Psychiawitch, who was at last pushing herself up from the floor, “What exactly, Sister, means the word Endfray?”
“O Your Dread Serenity,” the other replied, “now that the taboos are lifting, it comes to me. I take it to be a word of Swine Roman, or Pig Latin if you prefer, a secret language of the Evil Days when Satan-Dis-Ahriman ruled. It was formed from English by putting the last part of a word first and then adding a long A. Even as Ofay means foe, Endfray means friend.”
“Friend of the Foe,” Her darkness intoned tiredly “I might have deduced all from his name alone.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Or Ender of the Fray. Frayender.”
“However you name him, he appears to have a lost-cause fixation and a comics-books mentality,” the First Psychiawitch intellectualized. “Stop,” Her Serenity protested, raising a listless palm. “We’ve heard enough about Honkies for today. Dismiss all.”
Russia noted the super bomb orbiting with its entourage and set off a warning earthquake that quivered all Antarctica. Australa in turn dropped in the Bering Seg a warning bomb that upset a sealer and sent small a tsunami foaming over the beaches of Kamtchatka.
But that night the Ofays in their reservations went to sleep for the first time in a century with hope and even a little confidence in their hearts. Someone cared.
Next day North America and Africa agreed to a bombing halt. It was madness to continue a war which only built up the Endfray’s orbiting armory. They diverted all their research — scientific, psionic and sorcerous — to a hunt for a means of knocking the Endfray out of the high sky. But secretly Her Dark Serenity decided that he would make her ideal successor. She pondered plans to win him over. So did his terrible Tenebrosity.
The Endfray turned his major attention to the plight of the Untouchables behind the Nirvana Screen. There was a cause even more lost than that of the Ofays.
And he still had, for a lost-cause ace in the hole, the Boers and other white trash of the Blancostans and concentration camps of Rhodesia and South Africa.