And thus the Frankenstein of boy versus machine rolled on. Coast to Coast, planet to planet, the name of Dennis Ogg was on each pair of lips, the face of Dennis Ogg, pixilated and large-eyed, greeted each pair of orbs from out the videosheets and telecasts. Saturday sold out. Standing room only. Crowds jammed to the street. A brass band playing. Celebrities arriving. Helicopters landing. Fred Ajax had never enjoyed such prosperity before. But the best laid plans of mice and men, as an ancient Scot once said, often get bollixed up. The performance was set for three o’clock in the afternoon. The problem, set up by Dr. Hockelbach, was designed to take the giant and malignant-looking Egbert IX slightly less than three hours to solve. At fifteen minutes until three, Fred Ajax was pacing back and forth behind the tent, nervously puffing on his cigar and glancing from time to time at his watch. Ellsworth Cranch was not present. But worse, neither was Dennis. Ten minutes to three. Five minutes. The crowd murmured. The band played. And across the rear of the lot came running a frantic Sailor Burns, his face a picture of panic. “Fred!” the Sailor blurted. “Fred! He’s _gone!_” “He’s—_gone?_ You mean Dennis is gone? You don’t mean Dennis is gone, is that what you mean?” “That’s what I mean,” mournfully declared the Sailor. “But how! How! My grandmother, _how!_ You were supposed to take him to the depthies and bring him back here at two-thirty!” “We were at the depthies, all right,” the Sailor declared. “A swell show, _Blood on the Prairie_, it was called, and—” “Never _mind!_” Ajax roared in excruciating frenzy. “We’ll be booted out of town or worse if Dennis doesn’t show up. What happened?” The Sailor gasped deeply and started his recital. “About two o’clock Dennis got up and said he wanted to go to the men’s room. I said, okay, hurry back. I guess I should have gone along—he _was_ feeling kind of sick—but I wanted to see the serial again, and—” “Sick!” howled Ajax in a vision of disintegration. “Why was he sick?” “I dunno,” the Sailor confessed. “All we were eating was popcorn and chocolate bars and hot dogs with onions and piccalilli and mustard and cotton candy and Orange-dee-lite. I had twelve bottles, but Dennis beat me.” The Sailor beamed. “He had fourteen.” “Since eleven o’clock this morning?” wailed Ajax. “Yep.” “Oh, my God! No wonder he’s sick. For two weeks he hasn’t had anything to eat except popcorn and that damned insidious Orange-dee-lite. Well, what happened, did you just sit there? Didn’t he come back?”