were just about to consider alternative fingerings on the old squeeze box, when the door was flung open.
"Quick nurse, the screen!!"
Sherry pulled down the screen, and turned on the projector.
"Not that screen, you idiot!"
Sherry turned around, flustered. "Dr. Guthrie, I know I am new here --"
"Hell, new, you haven't even been unwrapped yet! Get those screens down. We've got a lunatic on our hands."
Dr. Guthrie was wrestling with a strange figure, dusty and grimy, wearing an old battered hat, jeans and a harmonica in his back pocket, a battered guitar flailing in his hands. He was howling a kind of demented noise.
Bella and Dr. Guthrie wrestled him down onto the table, and strapped him in.
"Doc, doc," the folkie cried. "I gotta get back to the barricades, back on the dusty roads, out to where the little people are, fightin' to breathe free."
"What is he talking about Doctor?" asked Bella when she had a moment to breathe.
"I haven't the faintest idea," replied the steely eyed doctor. "He's delirious."
The man on the table blinked, and smiled up at Sherry Ames. "You can't see it, but we are on the march. From the hootenanies to the Washington Memorial, from the grit on the roads to the hoboes riding the blinds. Can't you hear it? Can't you hear the bells of freedom?"
They all shook their heads. Dr. Guthrie motioned to Bill Bellows to leave the room, and then went over, and took Sherry Aims' arm -- a thrill rushed through her and back out again -- and said, "Look after him for a moment, will you, while Bella and I go consult."
This was giving her a lot of responsibility on her first day, but she would do her best!
Bella smiled from ear to ear, and she and Dr. Guthrie, heads bent close to each other, went into the "Inner Inner Office".
Sherry looked down at the poor busted folkie. In the corner, tossed aside, was his old guitar, covered in every space with the words: "This guitar fights the international conspiracy against human inequality and injustice, rooted in the differential exploitation of resources and control over the means of production."
What could this gibberish mean?
He started up again: "And I ain't marchin' anymore, now that the buffalo's gone!!Workers of the world unite!!Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many strikers did you scab today!! Wobblies! Pinkertons!"
It sounded vaguely historic to her. Was L.B.J. something like a leveraged buyout?
Oh well, it wouldn't be long until breaktime, when she could check up on her investments.
"You see, little lady, its music that binds us all together, heightens the heart crushed in the struggle, calls us to sacrifice for brothers and sisters yet unborn in the great beyond, to make a better world for all!!!!"
He was sort of cute, whatever it was he was going on about, poor man.