The cell door slammed behind Utka.

He'd been dreaming of Enemy imprisonment, but awoke to hammering at his own door. A few tenants beneath screamed in outrage and Aunt Polly, the porter, shouted back: "Be quiet! Here is Authority."

The door fell open. "Number Two, we arrest you in the name of the law."

Taken to Cell 404 in the blackest tower of the House of Villains, he smoked a cigarette, telling himself: "So, you are going to be shot." Most of the old guard were already liquidated... Mufasa, Old Jock, Davey Crockett... and, of course, the Founder dreamed onwards in his cryonic chamber.

Utka had a toothache and a craving for news or, at least, breakfast - but a bald, scarred officer said, "You have not cleaned your cell." Querulous intellectual, conspiring against law and order. No bread, not one coffee bean! Number 402, tapping on the wall, asked...

WHEN DID YOU LAST SLEEP WITH A WOMAN?

Number Two racked his brain. Daisy came to mind, Esmeralda... then there was Petunia of the Enemy's underground. She wrote slogans on walls by night and turned in her comrade for printing pamphlets which contained phrases the Party could not accept. "The decisive factor," Number Two had told Porky, "is unbroken will. Ours is a narrow path, with neither retreat, nor compromise. You are expelled from the Party."

Porky had begun to cry and stammer - "W-what will h-happen to m-m-me?"

He'd disappeared. A week later, the Enemy arrested Utka, sentencing him to three years' labor, making munitions to be used against the Party.

He smoked his last cigarette, thinking: "Our will was hard and pure, the People should've loved us. But they hate us." In a photograph of delegates to the First Congress, he'd sat to the left of the Founder, Number One further down the table. They'd been an entirely new species: militant toons. Where were they now - these holy, disturbed icons of bygone days - Dumbo, Si and Am, J. Worthington Foulfellow?

In a haunted forest over seven jeweled hills and seven waterfalls, he'd incited a miners' strike - Doc, Dopey, Grumpy and the rest called him "comrade from Over There". They worked all day in mines owned... Utka shrunk with shame... by his American uncle, drank all night and shared Snow White generous attentions communally. They'd certainly not whistled when Utka explained the Party's settlement of the strike - saying "that is how blacklegs always talk." Utka sent a telegram to Scrooge and... heigh-ho!... t'was back to work they went. Except for Dopey, who'd hanged himself.

Even then, the Party knew only one crime - disobedience, and one punishment - death.

The scarred officer... fearful prisoners called him the Iceman... marched Utka past a spiral staircase and narrow, windowless courtyard to the Magistrate, his old friend Geef, sitting under a wooden placard, stating: "You Can Always Be Number One". "Don't wantcha to be shot, ol' Pal," Geef said, offering him a cigarette.

"Touching. Why are your people shooting me?"

"For grammatical reasons... hyuk, hyuk!"

"At one time," said Number Two, "you and I and Number One were Three Amigos. Or was it Gay Caballeros? Anyway, we knew more than men have ever known about mankind. Where did it go wrong?"

"When did you join the organized opposition?" Geef persisted. "When Esmeralda came under suspicion, and you were slow to denounce her?"

"For Walt's sake, stop this comedy," said Number Two, his tooth aching again. "Is it my fault revisionists spared her life and Quasimodo's, not to mention that annoying theorist, Jiminy Cricket?"

Geef lit another cigarette. "Do you want us to believe you denounced Esmeralda... and others not spared by bourgeois sentimentality... just to save your own head? Remember... we hold proof of your conspiracy against Number One!"

"Fwaak, awwk!" Utka lost his temper. "Proof?"

"Confessions. From Herbie, the Tramp, even Smee! Now, we'll concoct your confession and be done. Two or three years exile - and you're back in the ring again. This next decade will decide the fate of the world. Don't you want to be alive for that? Take a fortnight to make up your mind."

In Paris, the Iceman had been betrayed by a reactionary comrade, Lumiere, who'd dripped hot wax over his skull. His name and position owed to his having kept silence - never sleeping, never eating. "I do not believe Number Two will capitulate," he predicted.

"When he's thought everything out to its logical conclusion, he will," said Geef.

"In Frontierland," the Iceman reminisced, "this little wooden toon was brought before me, some cowboy. When I tried reason instead of beating him, he thought me half-witted. His ears were blocked up by the wax of centuries of hydrocarbonist mental paralysis. Melt the toon, and the wax melts too."

Number Two always believed he knew himself well. He and Geef had hunted gold and ghosts with Number One, their roles could well have been reversed. "Grammatical Fiction!" he raged, sliding into day-dreams of Esmeralda. "Do what you like to me," she'd said. It was the time of great trials - photographs disappearing from walls, books from libraries. Her imbecile bell-ringer had been arrested "over there". The scent of her large, lazy body had never left him.

Arrested in an Enemy province, Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle... 406... served twenty years, took the first train to Fantasyland upon release and was promptly re-arrested. Now he was a little old man with a gray blanket around his shoulders... they took their exercise, walking the tundra of the House of Villains in circles, Rip humming an old revolutionary tune: "When You Wish Upon A Star". Number Two's barber leaned into his ear and whispered:

"Die in silence."

The day before Geef's deadline expired, Utka felt premonitions in the air. POLITICAL DIFFERENCES ARE BEING SETTLED 402 tapped.

EXECUTIONS?

380 IS TO BE SHOT.

WHAT IS HIS NAME? Rubashov tapped.

BERT. They'd been roommates in British exile. As warders dragged the condemned sweep past, he called out "Chim, chim, chirree..." and, when Utka awoke in darkness, Magistrate Geef was standing over his bed with a bottle of brandy.

"The Iceman ordered Bert dragged past your cell - against my explicit instructions. Apage Musculus!"

"Why did you execute him?"

"The chimney question. Bert advocated construction of big chimneys for prosecuting big revolutions. Number One and the Party advocate smaller chimneys. We're passing through an epoch of reaction." He poured a drink. "We may not regard the world... hyuk! hyuk!... as our metaphysical brothel!"

"Did Cruella..." Utka challenged, "have a right to kill those dogs?"

"You wax childish. One Hundred and One Dalmatians? Madam deVil's a fool and a criminal because she kills in her personal interest. If she'd sacrificed a hundred... a thousand and one dogs for the Party, then the equation would stand. Now, we are consequent..."

"And look at the consequences of our consequence! Our Party churns out banal dialectic and, through our alliance with Miramax, vile, psychopathic junk."

"Come along and sing our song, and join the family," Geef wheedled. "M-I-C-K-E-Y. M-O-U-S-E. Mickey Mouse!"

"Donald Duck!"

"Remember, Utka, individualism... your duckness... leading to martyrdom is but another form of moral cowardice."

Number Two turned away. "I'll think it over again."

When they took him again, the warders were Miramax thugs... that Sling Blade guy and Frida Kahlo, Ozzy Osborne, Bette Midler, several plug-uglies from Pulp Fiction... and it was the Iceman sitting behind the Magistrate's desk, reading the Party's accusations.

"You gained your first position by liquidating Peter Pig, then tried to overthrow the Party in San Bananador. As Home Defense warden, you slept on the job!" The stenographer frowned with disgust as the Iceman read the final, crowning accusation, that Utka had conspired against Chairman Mikhail by influencing a restauranteur to put Warfarin in the cold snack Number One took for lunch at the House of Mouse. "Do you plead guilty?" the Iceman asked.

"I plead guilty to having liquidated Peter Pig, as Number One liquidated Oswald Rabbit. Where is Geef?"

"He has been shot for that placard, and bourgeois sentimentalism in your case. Now... you disavow your disavowal of Esmeralda?"

"Yes. I lied."

"But, this time, you tell the truth?"

Poor Geef! Olympic hero and first toon in space. "Yes."

The warders brought in chef Pierre. "Do you recall this man?"

"I... I've patronized Chez Pierre."

"And, through your duckness, ducked out on your bill?"

"I washed dishes..."

"Badly. Pierre, did this fellow incite you to villainy?"

"He insinuated I should place rat poison in Number One's lunch."

Over the next few days, Utka was confronted with further witnesses... so many that he lost track of time. Dr. Syn from Romney Marsh glared at him insanely, saying: "Number Two? I am not Number Six, I am a human being." His own nephews swore he'd abused them with cigars and stolen money from their piggy bank... a toon he scarcely remembered brought up that South Pole mission where he'd eaten penguins. "So, not only a traitor but a cannibal!"

"If Pluto was a dog," Utka replied, "who was Geef?" and, when sparks abruptly exploded from the Iceman's nose and lips, Miramax thugs burst in with an engineer, Gyro Gearloose, who opened the Magistrate's head, exposing wires and coils and circuits.

"The Magistrate is a machine?" Number Two marveled.

"An audio-animatronic interrogation unit, to be precise," said Gearloose. "The Party believes machines more reliable than toons or humans. Their capacity for simultaneous banality and violence is uncompromised by the fiction of personality." And the assassins glowered.

"Now, cannibal" said the restored Iceman, "did you not write: 'For the masses, politics must be coloured as gingerbread men, falling from an airplane?' Here is your confession. Sign it!"

And he pushed, across the desk, a document whose characters shimmered and morphed as any flowerpot of Mathemagicland and, in the portrait behind him, the Red Queen smiled and liberty vanished, leaving only its smirk behind.

"The disgraced Number Two confessed fully to many heinous crimes attributed to him," Pollyanna read the Party organ to Aunt Polly, "and must pay, in full, the price for his treason."

"Politicians!" Polly snorted. "No good, not a one, and I should know - I married one!"

In the House of Villains, Utka paced, thinking of Peter Pan, who'd lost his shadow then, in the purges, his head. Night's sky through Cell 404's barred window reminded him of Geef "...there goes my glider, and I... bye-bye!" The Party despised the infinite as the individual; it was all about focus groups, now... measured dialogue, cheap sentimentality, product placements. An oceanic bottom line had swamped the grammatical fiction as surely as the contempt that greeted Fantasia 2000. One cannot build Paradise with pixels.

There came a tapping from 402... THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU.

The sky began to turn pink, dark birds circled the tower. Looking back, it seemed to Utka that he'd run amuck - a duck amuck, the Enemy portrayed it - with reason. A phalanx of Miramax thugs in "Scream" and "Halloween" masks dragged him forth, 402 tapping...

FAREWELL! I ENVY YOU!

and, as he descended the spiral staircase, his toothache vanished, as if by the Blue Fairy's grace. A dull blow struck the back of his head and a wave carried him up Splash Mountain against the current and into the tapestry of dreams... first star to the left... a shrug of eternity.

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