It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the wild flutter of fading heart-beats.  The poem swung in majestic rhythm to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebular in the darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the screaming of planets and the crash of systems.

“There is nothing like it in literature,” Martin said, when at last he was able to speak.  “It’s wonderful!—­wonderful!  It has gone to my head.  I am drunken with it.  That great, infinitesimal question—­I can’t shake it out of my thoughts.  That questing, eternal, ever recurring, thin little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears.  It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions.  It is insatiable with microscopic desire.  I now I’m making a fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me.  You are—­I don’t know what you are—­you are wonderful, that’s all.  But how do you do it?  How do you do it?”

Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.

“I shall never write again.  I am a dauber in clay.  You have shown me the work of the real artificer-artisan.  Genius!  This is something more than genius.  It transcends genius.  It is truth gone mad.  It is true, man, every line of it.  I wonder if you realize that, you dogmatist.  Science cannot give you the lie.  It is the truth of the sneer, stamped out from the black iron of the Cosmos and interwoven with mighty rhythms of sound into a fabric of splendor and beauty.  And now I won’t say another word.  I am overwhelmed, crushed.  Yes, I will, too.  Let me market it for you.”

Brissenden grinned.  “There’s not a magazine in Christendom that would dare to publish it—­you know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort.  I know there’s not a magazine in Christendom that wouldn’t jump at it.  They don’t get things like that every day.  That’s no mere poem of the year.  It’s the poem of the century.”

“I’d like to take you up on the proposition.”

“Now don’t get cynical,” Martin exhorted.  “The magazine editors are not wholly fatuous.  I know that.  And I’ll close with you on the bet.  I’ll wager anything you want that ‘Ephemera’ is accepted either on the first or second offering.”

“There’s just one thing that prevents me from taking you.”  Brissenden waited a moment.  “The thing is big—­the biggest I’ve ever done.  I know that.  It’s my swan song.  I am almighty proud of it.  I worship it.  It’s better than whiskey.  It is what I dreamed of—­the great and perfect thing—­when I was a simple young man, with sweet illusions and clean ideals.  And I’ve got it, now, in my last grasp, and I’ll not have it pawed over and soiled by a lot of swine.  No, I won’t take the bet.  It’s mine.  I made it, and I’ve shared it with you.”