ke blooms that garnished every corner. With
Pfleugersville itself.

Obviously the hour was late, for, other than himself, there was no one
on the streets, although lights burned in the windows of some of the
houses, and dogs of the same breed and size as Zarathustra occasionally
trotted by. And yet according to his watch the time was 10:51. Maybe,
though, Pfleugersville was on different time. Maybe, here in
Pfleugersville, it was the middle of the night.

The farther he progressed into the village, the more enchanted he
became. He simply couldn't get over the houses. The difference between
them and the houses he was familiar with was subtle, but it was there.
It was the difference that exists between good- and not-quite-good
taste. Here were no standardized patios, but little marble aprons that
were as much a part of the over-all architecture as a glen is a part of
a woods. Here were no stereotyped picture windows, but walls that
blended imperceptibly into pleasing patterns of transparency. Here were
no four-square back yards, but rambling star-flowered playgrounds with
swings and seesaws and shaded swimming holes; with exquisite doghouses
good enough for little girls' dolls to live in.

He passed a school that seemed to grow out of the very ground it stood
on. He passed a library that had been built around a huge tree, the
branches of which had intertwined their foliage into a living roof. He
passed a block-long supermarket built of tinted glass. Finally he came
to the park.

He gasped then. Gasped at the delicate trees and the little blue-eyed
lakes; at the fairy-fountains and the winding, pebbled paths.
Star-flowers shed their multicolored radiance everywhere, and starlight
poured prodigally down from the sky. He chose a path at random and
walked along it in the twofold radiance till he came to the cynosure.

The cynosure was a statue--a statue of a buck-toothed, wall-eyed youth
gazing steadfastly up into the heavens. In one hand the youth held a
Phillips screw driver, in the other a six-inch crescent wrench. Standing
several yards away and staring raptly up into the statue's face was the
youth himself, and so immobile was he that if it hadn't been for the
pedestal on which the statue rested, Philip would have been unable to
distinguish one from the other.

There was an inscription on the pedestal. He walked over and read it in
the light cast by a nearby parterre of star-flowers:

FRANCIS FARNSWORTH