There was one thing that might shut Marx Marvelous up, and Amanda realized that she must quit postponing it. Alas, however, she could not bring it off.

"I'm sorry, Marx Marvelous, but I can't fuck you." It was ten o'clock at night, Amanda was dressed in a silken lavendar tunic upon which had been embroidered scenes from the biography of the queen who chased butterflies while awaiting death. Amanda stood in the doorway of Marx's garage apartment. Her long lashes twitched, fluttered and jerked again, as if they were a pair of feather dusters being machine-gunned against an igloo; and then they drooped elegantly, tugging her lids half the distance over the curve of her eyeballs. "You undoubtedly believe that I have been leading you on, but the truth is I've discussed it several times with John Paul and we have decided that it would not be wise. You're an attractive man and I'd like to, but it would not be smart."

Marvelous, who wore only the trousers to his checkered suit, pulled nervously at a hair on his chest. "So," he said with some bitterness, "Your liberated husband does care if you go to bed with other men." Archimedes, who discovered the principal of the lever, once said "Give me a place to stand on and I could move the world." Archimedes could have stood on Marx's lower lip.

"No, that is not the case. As long as it's done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn't mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy." Her smile was the pride of Botticelli's cherubs.

"Then why the hell did you get married?"

What has marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I'm knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen won't wash our love away."

"Then why do you deny me?" w hined Marx. He stared at the floor.

Amanda closed the door and moved closer to him. She kissed his cheek. "Marx," she said tenderly, "you are as sensitive as you are stubborn. And, you're, well, shall we say - terribly impressionable. Also, you tend to be possesive. These are basic characteristics of Cancerians. I know you have no use for astrology but you can't deny that those are your traits. And neither John Paul nor I feel that you could handle a simple, free relationship with me. No sooner would we begin than you'd be in love with me, which is beautiful except that you'd make it so complex. You'd demand more of me. You'd be possesive and play ego games. You'd be jealous of John Paul. Before long, you would create tension... between all three of us. Then where would we be? Friction at the Captain Kendrick. No, I just don't think you're ready."

Marx Marvelous slowly, desperately, sank to his knees. He embraced Amanda's legs. He buried his head in her perfumed tunic, in her crotch. His body shuddered. He sobbed against her pelvis, he whimpered. He clung to her tightly, perhaps ashamed now to let go.

For awhile, Amanda stood absolutely still. Then she began to caress his fine sandy strands, her fingers twisting his hair in phantom knots. He relaxed a bit. He kissed her through the fabric. (Amanda, if you're leving, you'd better leave now!) Gradually, like the falling of leaves or the bursting of buds or the other so gradual as to be nearly imperceptible dramas of nature, she pulled up her tunic and slipped her panties down around her calves. When the parachute of love descended, Marx Marvelous was face to face with her enchanted gypsy snatch.

So quietly did Amanda stand that the whole Sagit Valley, animate and inanimate, from the Cascades to the Sound, seemed on the point of standing quietly with her while he kissed and nibbled her about the groin. His tongue made a few exploratory licks, as if he were a child testing the flavor of a lollipop. She grew impatient and thrust her pubus toward him, and then and then...His tongue curled and thrust inside of her, his mouth mashed against her, the tip of his nose glistened with her juices. And then and then and then...Into the sucking of her went all the bafflement, all the rage, all the immense crazy consuming speechless frustration of his ineffectual genius. He lapped up the sweet darkness, his tongue drum-rolled against her clitoris, he sucked his way toward the plub of her womb. And then and then and then...

Her orgasm spanned a career that began with a delicate shudder and ended nearly two minutes later (his face against her all the while) with an volcanic gypsy moan. As first, she came gently, as a moth might; then, losing control, she writhed and wallowed in hot cat spasms of crude delight. He thought she would never stop. She feared she would dissolve. Her nectars wet his neck and her thighs. Her clitoris was a ladyfinger cloud pump - and she groaned with animal dignity as it throbbed. Pumped it fishy billows. Its honey and sparks. It was the greatest of the imperfect ventiloquist acts: when his lips moved, her body sang.

After Amanda's pulsations had subsided, she wiped off Marx's face with the hem of her tunic. She pulled up her panties and hugged him good-bye. He was dizzy and ready for sleep. He had come, too. And he never wore those checkered trousers again.

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course. As yet he hasn't put a strain on it. The reader, with his training in psychology (via novels, films, TV, Ann Landers, etc) knows why.

Our sandy-haired young thinker is desperately searching for something in which to believe. Isn't he? As a child he was too sensitive and too bright to be attracted to his family's Baptist fundamentalism for very long. He turned to science almost as a substitute. How cool it was in comparison, how clean and cogent. But that didn't last. With his understanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainity Principal, he began to realize that every system that science proposed was a product of human imagination and had to be accepted with a faith as nearly as blind as the religious beliefs which he had jettisoned. Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationship of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the Fish or the Lamb.

What now, dear Marvelous? A fresh examination of traditional religion found it as deficient in function as in creative energy: the wildest scientific postulates seemed sound (and alive!) in comparison. Paradoxically, his investigations in pure science, in abstract mathematics, and theoretical physics, frequently led him into areas of thought that he could only describe as...well, say it, Marx: metaphysical. How could that be? The mental processes of religion and pure science may be similar, but the ends are different. It is not the purpose of science to make a man feel whole, to produce a kind of elated happiness.

Why not?

It is a pity that Marx Marvelous should amplify that particularly Western quarrel of science and religion. But he was so terribly ambivalent. Thrashing about within him were two of the major and vital quests of the human spirit - the search for fact and the search for value. Why did the facts he pursed prove to be so impoverished in value, why were the value systems he examined so contrary to fact? Could mysticism help him? Various sources informed him that in the lifesystem known as mysticism there was a harmonium of fact and value. But Marvelous recoiled from mysticism with immediate distaste. Mysticism was so corny, so adolescent, so cluttered with dusty and discredited modes of thought, so clouded with wooly abstractions. No good. No good. He clung to science as a wino clings to a doorjamb. But the deep division within kept spreading it cheeks.

Compounding the spread was yet another side of his personality, the side that had a tooth for the whimsical and outlandish, the side that rutted in him like a lewd and unpredictable springtime compared to a solid autumn that had settled upon his more public self. The less said about that side, the better. Student of Kepler do not stress his lifelong belief in fairies any more than biographers of Benjamin Franklin dwell upon his illegitimate children, his venereal disease. Pass.