There’s this guy I know, he’s ten feet tall, he’s got a flying machine. Where it’s not bars it’s cogs; where it’s not cogs, it’s wheels. He flies to Mars, and comes down splashing in a huge ocean. Now can you explain that, I say to him, how the red planet has water and you find it. Man, he says, it’s like magic, I was looking for gold; now, if I was looking for water…

But hey, he’s got a speed machine, a real hot rod, and he races with the devil. Not hight stakes, no souls on the line; the devil says he has enough to be getting on with, and this guy he wouldn’t know what to do with a soul if he got one — he’s only got an eye for machines. But the devil, sure he plays dirty, and this guys ends up all smashed in a hospital. And what isn’t broken is bent; what isn’t bent is still breathing. And he says he’s invented a machine that can distil the human spirit. And I laugh, there’s no market for that sort of stuff these days. But when the guy gets out from hospital he makes this drink that everyone wants to buy. It makes them feel good, but they don’t know why. It starts seventeen wars, three rebellions and many heart attacks — I think we all know that too much of a good thing isn’t good for anyone.

The guy gets out of drinks, of course, because they don’t <em>move</em>. And he builds an ocean liner, and sails off into the sunset. When he comes to this lovely desert island he slips off his ship onto the sand and stretches out in the sun. So he’s asleep when the cannibal tribe come and tie him up, and he’s all boiling up when he wakes. Well, he says to these cannibals, have some of this to drink with your meal.

And they drink the human spirit and now cannibals rule the earth, which has solved a lot of problems, though a lot of folks find it hard to take that the President wears a bone through his nose.

Meanwhile I am living at the top of a fifty-storey skyscraper with a whole city laid out beneath me. My only possession is the thigh bone of my mechanical friend, which talks to me and sings me lullabies. We sleep together in a lovely, silk-sheets waterbed, and every morning I take him for a good long walk in the park, by the huge cauldron where they cook political prisoners these days.

And on a starry night when I see a light flashing in the sky I know another guy is off to Mars to look for water, and when he comes back he’ll be the man with the most gold on a planet where the currency is stones with holes.

And my pet thigh bone will croon me a lullaby and encourage me to take a long draught of the human spirit, and get in my speed machine, built to his specs, and then the pair of us will take on the devil, and burn that sucker right to hell.