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start life in the water, breathing with gills. At the ordained time the newt sheds his gills and crawls up onto the land, now equipped with air-breathing lungs. Then he returns to the water, where he lives out his days. So it might be convenient to reclaim his gills and breathe underwater again?
    "No glot, clom Fliday," says the Cosmic Uncle. It's the law.
    So, for starters, Joe pulls a baby mule out of the cosmic manger. There is Mary—Mother Mule—and Joseph—the father—and the impossible child with a glowing, pulsing halo.
    A Kansas vet known as Joe Lazarus was the instrument of altered destiny. He had been kicked in the head by a mule and pronounced dead at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, but was returned to life. Like Saint Paul, knocked off his ass on the road to Damascus, after his miraculous recovery, Joe Laz knew what he had to do.
    He set out to produce a fertile mule. He exposed horse and donkey sperm to orgone radiation in a magnetized pyramid, and inseminated the mare—didn't hack it. So Laz went further: he rigged a magnetized stall and bombarded the copulating animals with DOR—Deadly Orgone Radiation. He sewed himself into a goat skin and whipped his beasts to wild Pan music—any woman hit by the Goat God's whip will conceive—and finally he created a fertile mule.
    Skeptics pronounced Joe Laz's mule the most colossal hoax since the Piltdown Man.
    "I had it up my sleeve," Joe deadpanned.
    A quiet, enigmatic former herpetologist residing in Florida challenges Rule Two. His name is Joe Sanford. Bitten by a king cobra, he recovered and devoted himself to the study of newts and salamanders. Sanford claims to have reinstituted gills in mature, air-breathing newts by injections of a lamb-placenta concentrate.
    (The same preparation, in fact, was used by Doctor Kniehaus of Geneva, Switzerland, to turn back the clock for his wealthy patients. To name a few: W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Pope Pius XII, President Eisenhower. I recall seeing Eisenhower waving a tiny American flag from his hospital bed, with a big stupid grin on his face, and wondering if he would ever die. Winston Churchill couldn't qualify, because he couldn't lay off the sauce for six weeks, a prerequisite for the Kniehaus treatment, and no exceptions.)
    Rule Two carries the implicit assumption that time is irreversible. Sanford makes a hole in time, and Joe sloshes through the hybrids.
    It is not necessary to prove anything, simply to state. This is a biologic revolution, fought with new species and new ways of thinking and feeling, a war where the bullet may take millennia to hit. Like the old joke about the executioner makes a swipe with the samurai sword . . . well, missed me that time. But just try and shake your head three hundred years from now.
    Let it come down . . . the ancient barrier between grass eaters and meat eaters. The old dichotomy of carnivore and herbivore has dissolved in primal hunger to spawn creatures who eat flesh or grass at will. Lions graze on the veldt. A herd of carnivorous man-eating wildebeests stalks the villages, creatures who are warm-blooded or cold-blooded according to altered surroundings. At the end of the human line everything is permitted.
    All is in the not done, the diffidence that faltered.
    Let others quaver out: "I dare do all that may become a man, 
    who dares do more is none."
    Not so, says Joe.
    He who dares at all, must dare all.
    When mules foal
    Anything goes.
    When mules glow
    Anything foals.
    Hybrids Unlimited . . . HU HU HU.
    Doctor Whitehorn studied the man sitting opposite him. The man's skull looked as though it were made of a thin metal that had been shattered on the left side and rewelded together, a thin line of red-purple scar tissue tracing the joint.
    As the doctor surmised, Joe's blind left eye was not blind. Joe had devised an artificial eye, wired into the optic center, that presented his mind with pictures, often quite at variance with the reports of the right eye. This was