A Darkness in my Soul
by Dean R. Koontz
Version 1.0
A #bw release

ONE
Divinity Destroyed...

I

For a long while, I wondered if Dragonfly was still in
the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still floated
in airlessness, blind eyes watchful. I wondered whether
men still looked to the stars with trepidation and whether
the skies yet bore the cancerous seed of mankind. There
was no way for me to find out, for I lived in Hell during
those days, where news of the living gained precious little
circulation.

I was a digger into minds, a head-tripper. I esped. I
found secrets, knew lies, and reported all these things for
a price. I esped. Some questions were never meant to be
answered; some parts of a man's mind were never intend-
ed for scrutiny. Yet our curiosity is, at the same time, our
greatest virtue and our most serious weakness. I had
within my mind the power to satisfy any curiosity which
tickled me. I esped; I found; I knew. And then there was
a darkness in my soul, darkness unmatched by the depths
of space that lay lightless between the galaxies, an ebony
ache without parallel.

It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone, a
mundane enough beginning.

I put down the book I was reading and lifted the
receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"

"Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it
correctly—Sim-ee-on.

It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewil-
dered, two things he never was. I recognized his voice
because it had been—in years past—the only sound of

sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling
self-seekers and power-mongers. I esped out and saw him
standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously
drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk.
The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls,
three telephones, and three-dimensional television screens
for monitoring interoffice activity—the work space of
someone of more than a little importance.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is.
You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in
something private."

He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my
agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a
week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone
which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched
deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his
thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one
person in the world I would not esp for purely personal
reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never
have to worry about losing it.

"Why so nervous? What kind of job?"

"Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how
much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If
you take this job, you're not going to need money for a
long while. You won't have to go around snooping
through a hundred government heads a week."

"Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living
beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this
to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer
had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our
price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.

"I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect
you in—say twenty minutes."

"I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle
and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach
belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic,
roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose
and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes,
breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial
Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of
my life....

I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell
with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I

wanted to go, especially at night, when everything would
seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter
colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did
not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employ-
ees to keep me in spending money, for I was not only
required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal
(as the government defined that) private practices and
beliefs of those I scanned, violating privacy in the most
insidious of fashions; secondly, I had just promised Harry
I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when
that mad Irishman had ever let me down.

I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the
gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles
and miles of delicate copper wires.

I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into
overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the
popular Nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would
most likely have been in prison at that moment—or in a
preventive detention apartment with federal plainclothes
guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is
only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison.
When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild
talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound"
me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under
federal control for "the betterment of our great country and
the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter."
It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy
language to call it what it was—illegal and immoral im-
prisonment of a free citizen. He fought the legal battle all
the way to nine old men in nine old chairs, where the case
was won. I was nine when we did that—twelve long years
ago.

It was snowing outside. The harsh lines of shrubbery,
trees, and curbs had been softened by three inches of
white. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar,
which amused me and helped settle my nerves a bit. One
would imagine that, in 2004 A.D., Science could have
dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.

At the first red light, there was a gray police howler
overturned on the sidewalk, like a beached whale. Its
stubby nose had smashed through the display window of a
small clothing store, and the dome light was still swiveling.
A thin trail of exhaust fumes rose from the bent tailpipe,
curled upwards into the cold air. There were more than

twenty uniformed coppers positioned around the intersec-
tion, though there seemed to be no present danger. The
snow was tramped and scuffed, as if there had been a
major conflagration, though the antagonists had disap-
peared. I was motioned through by a stern-faced bull in a
fur-collared fatigue jacket, and I obeyed. None of them
looked in the mood to satisfy the curiosity of a passing
motorist, or even to let me pause long enough to scan their
minds and find the answer without their knowledge.

I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a
Marine attendant to park. As I slid out and he slid in, I
asked, "Know anything about the howler on Seventh?
Turned on its side and driven halfway into a store. Lot of
coppers."

He was a huge man with a blocky head and flat
features that looked almost painted on. When he wrinkled
his face in disgust, it looked as if someone had put an
eggbeater on his nose and whirled everything together.
"Peace criers," he said.

I couldn't see why he should bother lying to me, so I
didn't go through the bother of using my esp, which
requires some expenditure of energy. "I thought they were
finished," I said.

"So did everyone else," he said. Quite obviously, he
hated the peace criers, as did most men in uniform. "The
Congressional investigating committee proved the volun-
tary army was still a good idea. We don't run the country
like those creeps say. Brother, I can sure tell you we
don't!" Then he slammed the door and took the car away
to park it while I punched for the elevator, stepped
through its open maw, and went up.

I made faces at the cameras which watched me, and
repeated two dirty limericks on the way to the lobby.

When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second
Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to
an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was
approved, and followed him to another elevator in the
long bank. Again: up.

Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a
cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and
went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the
officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of
alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in
brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly

child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men stand-
ing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say
something of monumental importance.

I didn't say anything at all.

The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by
the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike
flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize
him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.
There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined
countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for
the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the
words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes,
and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.
"You're the one they sent for."

For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not
certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless
uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose
in me most nights when I considered my origins and the
pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.

"You," the child said again.

"Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.

No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure
the freak in the chair was finished.

He wasn't.

"I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry
you came here. I'm going to see to that."

II

"That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his
chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to
explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes
were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought
specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his
attention.

The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left
me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath

rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering
there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely
that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle
of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and
loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the
wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living
here and the congressmen who had supported the project
since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a
Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than
eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped
super-genius who was no more than three years old but
who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of
a century of operation.

For the government, that's a winner.

"I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.

"Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called
General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with
exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything
but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a
boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.

"I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of
mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work
here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've uner-
ringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.
But this just doesn't scan like that."

"You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen
snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought
this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in
areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as
useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing
out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've
threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The
trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost
said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough
self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply
go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything
back."

"How much did you say?" I asked.

"A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."

It pained him to say that.

"Double that," I said. For many men, the single hun-
dred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of
inflation.

"What? Absurd!"

He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't
even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that,
among other things, the child had given them an almost
completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would
make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone,
a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hun-
dred big ones with an option to demand more if the work
proved more demanding than I anticipated.

"Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and
board," Morsfagen said.

He had an ugly face.

"Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang
punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.

He wanted to hit me.

His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly
pierced the skin—they protruded so harshly.

I laughed at him.

He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.

The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair
and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the
most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke
of madness.

III

The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been
moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all
that transpired.

"The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part
of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.
After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250
cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The white-
smocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp,
pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the
maintenance of one of his machines.

The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the
scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and

not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I
was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by
the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my
chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something
were trying to burst free of me.

"What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.

"He hasn't any."

"No?"

"No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need
more."

I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some
churches deny me one; but then churches have been
denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the
world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the
galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of
inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed
for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.

A team of doctors administered the drug.

"Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had
both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't
anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that
overhung the room.

I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be
there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the
confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his
unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for
the assault upon his mental sanctity.

Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the
blackness of his mind, flailing . . .

... and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes
where the eyes should have been.

They mumbled things in their alien language, and they
prodded me with cold instruments.

When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange
triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physi-
cian who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue
against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were
supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything
intelligent to say.

"You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.

Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of
the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see
hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks
of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shout-

ing in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers
seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
"What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid with-
out results."

"I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as
that. No need for hysterics."

"But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested,
insinuating himself between the general and myself.

"Not to worry."

"What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen
asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not
less.

"He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell
into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts,
or a great many of them, come from what we would
consider the subconscious."

Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"

"I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and
what isn't, I'll be all right."

I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped
the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the
walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even
stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I
looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on
the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland
expression, and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thou-
sand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't
you?"

He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He
quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted
the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two,
subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.

I watched, looking unshaken.

He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He
demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay what-
soever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started
fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and
vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter
frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be
on time the following day.

"Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.

"Not my luck, but my weight," I said.

"He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a
bastard."

"I know. That's why I needle him."

"When did the masochism arise?"

"Not masochism—my well-known God-syndrome. I was
just passing one of my famous judgments."

"Look," he said, "you can quit."

"We both need the money. Especially me."

"Maybe there are other things more important than
money."

Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled
out of the hex-painted room.

"More important than money?"

"I've heard it said..."

"Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's
more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more
important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or
in splendor."

"Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving
me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited
along with his last name.

"What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.

"It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You
should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."

"I have. I don't like them."

"There's an old Irish legend which says——"

"Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry,
aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me
to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with
someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can
perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world
made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if
we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my
cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky
and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."

Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door
behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.

Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal
tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with
all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not
so cynical after all.

I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid
out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small
curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and

obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind
me.

The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down
because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see
amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a
picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't
understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the
former than I felt.

I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the
newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a
voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for
cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking
announced late today that it had developed a weapon
equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the
Western Alliance ..." (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss
pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in
unconscious sardonic wit) "... According to Asian sources,
the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms . . ." (Sa-baba,
sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) ". . . above Earth's atmosphere,
capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant
strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeen-
mile-wide swaths of territory ..." (Hemorrhoids really can
be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on
the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded
out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and
just how painless.) ". .. Members of the New Maoism said
today that they had assurances from . . ."

I turned it off.

No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of
that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the
world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible back-
ache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of
peace and good will made these last fourteen years of
tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by compari-
son. That was why the young peace criers were so mili-
tant. They had never really known the years of peace, and
they lived with the conviction that those in power had
always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they
had been old enough to have experienced peace before the
cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamor-
phosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very
young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been

reading since before I was two and spoke four languages
by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the
present chaos more maddening.

Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear
accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thou-
sand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled
half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare
people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted things the AC labs
produced (their failures), which were sent away to rot in
unlighted rooms under the glossy heading of "perpetual
professional care." Anyway, I turned the radio off.

And thought about Child.

And knew I should never have taken the job.

And knew that I wouldn't quit

IV

At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and
my paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the
book so I wouldn't accidentally see her face, and I began
reading Lily. It was a mystery novel, and a mystery of a
novel. The prose was not spectacular, actually intended
for the average reader seeking a few hours of escape.
Still, I was fascinated. Through the chapters, between the
lines of marching black words, a face seen at a party weeks
before kept drifting through my mind. A face which I had
been fighting to forget. . ..

Amber hair, long and straight.

"See that woman? Over there? That's Marcus Aureli-
us. Writes those semi-pornographic books, like Lily and
Bodies in Darkness, those."

Her face was sculpted, smooth planes and milky flesh.

Her eyes were green, wider than eyes should be, though
not the eyes of a mutant.

Her body was graceful, provocatively in vogue.

Her...

I ignored what he was saying about her, all the foul
things he suggested, and studied amber hair, cat's eyes,
fast fingers touching that hair, clasping a glass of gin,
jabbing the air for emphasis in conversation....

When I was finished with the book, I went and made
myself some Scotch and water. I am not a good bartender.

I drank it and pretended I was about sleepy enough for
bed. I stood on the patio, which is slung over the side of
the small mountain which I own, and I watched the snow.

I got cold and went inside. Undressing, I went to bed,
nestled down in the covers, and thought about ice floes
and blizzards and piling drifts, letting myself find sleep.

I said, "Damn!" and got up and got more Scotch and
went to the phone, where I should have gone as soon as I
finished the last page of the novel.

I could not understand the logic of what I was doing,
but there are times when the physical overrides the cere-
bral, no matter what the proponents of civilized society
might say about it.

Punching out the numbers for directory assistance, I
asked for Marcus Aurelius' number. The operator refused
to give me her real name and number, but I esped out and
saw it as she looked at the directory in front of her:

MARCUS AURELIUS Or MELINDA THAUSER;  22-223-296787/
UNLISTED.

So I said sorry and hung up and dialed the number I
had just stolen.

"Hello?"

It was a competent, businesslike voice. Yet there was a
sultriness in it that could not be ignored.

"Miss Thauser?"

"Yes?"

I told her my name and said she would probably know
it and then sounded pleased when she did. It was all as if
someone were possessing me, directing my tongue against
the will of the screaming particle of me that demanded I
hang up, run away, hide.

"I've followed your exploits," she said. "In the papers."

"I've read your books."

She waited.

"I think it's time I had my biography done," I said.
"I've been approached before, but I've always been against
it. Maybe like the primitive tribesmen who feel a photo-

graph locks their soul away inside it. But with you, maybe
it would be different. I like your work."

There was a bit more said, and it ended with me and
with this: "Fine. Then I'll expect you here for dinner
tomorrow night at seven."

I had suggested escorting her to dinner somewhere, but
she had said that was not necessary. I insisted. She had
said that restaurants were too noisy to discuss business. In
the course of the floundering planning, I had mentioned
my cook. And now she was coming here.

I went out and swallowed half a glass of Scotch on the
rocks (as a change from the Scotch and water), which
solved the problems I had just acquired upon hanging the
phone on its hook: a dry mouth and a bad case of the
chills.

It was stupid. Why be so afraid of meeting a woman? I
had met quite famous and sophisticated ladies, wives of
men of state and some of them statesmen themselves.
Yes, I told myself. But they were different. They were not
young and beautiful. That was where the core of my terror
lay, though that seemed just as unfathomable as anything
else.

At two in the morning, unable to sleep, I got heavily
out of bed and walked through the many rooms of my
dark house. It is a fine place, with its own theater and
gaming rooms, a shooting range, and other luxuries. But
there was no solace in seeing all I possessed.

I went into the den and closed the door, looked around
without turning on the lights. The machine stood in the
corner, silent, monstrous. It was what I had gotten up for
in the first place, though I had needed a few minutes to
admit it.

The headrest was ominous, a bulky electrode-strung pad
that curved to encompass the skull.

But my nerves demanded soothing.

The chair that folded into the machine was like the
tongue of some mythical beast, some man-eater and steal-
er of souls.

I could see the hollow compartment which would swal-
low me with a single lick, and it terrified me. But I needed
soothing. My hands twitched, and a tic had begun in the
corner of my mouth. I reminded myself that other gener-
ations never had the advantage of a Porter-Rainey Solid-
State Psychiatrist and that many people, even these days,

could not afford one even when modern technology made
it possible. I forced myself to forget the emptiness that
would take me later. For the moment comfort was
enough. And a few explanations . . .

I sat down in the chair.

My head touched the pad.

The world swiveled up and away, while darkness de-
scended, while fingers probed where they should not be,
while my soul was split open like a nut and the meat of my
fractured personality was drawn forth for a close examina-
tion (in search of worms?).

Proteus Mother taking a thousand shapes, but never to
be caught and held to tell the future. . . .

The life spark flickering, then holding steady as a frozen
flame. And a very vague awareness even in the womb,
where plastic walls were soft and sophisticated thermostat-
ic computers maintained a succor-filled environment. Where
plastic walls were giving—but somehow unresponsive. . . .

He looked up into the lights overhead and sensed a man
named Edison. He sensed filaments even as his own fila-
ment was disconnected from the womb....

And there were metal hands to comfort him. . . .

And ... and ... there ... and...

SAY IT WITHOUT HESITATION! The voice was
everywhere about me, was booming, was reassuring in its
depth of passion.

And there were simu-flesh breasts to feed him. . ..

And ... and ...

OUT WITH IT! The computerized psyche-prober imi-
tated thunderstorms and symphonies filled with cymbals.

And there were wire-cored arms to rock him; and he
looked out of his swaddling clothes and ... and ..,

GO ON!

. . . looked up into a face without a nose and with blank
crystal eyes that reflected his reddened face. Unmoving
black lips crooned, "Rock-a-biiiii-bay-beeeee in theee treeeee
(thriddle-thriddle) tops . . ." The thriddle-thriddle rattling
interjection was, he found, the sound of voice tapes chang-
ing somewhere inside his mother's head. He searched for
his own voice tapes. There were none.

GO ON, GO ON!

And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he
esped an understanding and . . . and . . .

IF YOU HESITATE, YOU WILL BE LOST.

I don't remember it after that.

YOU DO.

No!

Yes. YESYESYES. The machine touched part of my
mind with blue fingers. Dazzling clouds of neon gas ex-
ploded inside my head. I CAN MAKE THE MEMORY
EVEN SHARPER.

No! I'll tell it.

TELL.

And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he
esped an understanding, and his first words were ... were

FINISH IT!

His first words were: "My God, my God, I'm not
human!"

FINE. NOW RELAX AND LISTEN. My electronic
David sorted through the miasma of our conversation and
interpreted my dreams for me. There wasn't any simple
harp music to accompany his readings, though. YOU
KNOW THAT THE "HE" IS REALLY YOU. YOU
ARE SIMEON KELLY. THE HE OF YOUR ILLU-
SION IS ALSO SIMEON KELLY. YOUR PROBLEM IS
THIS: YOU ARE OF THE ARTIFICIAL WOMB. YOU
WERE CONDITIONED FROM CONCEPTION TO
HAVE HUMAN MORES AND VALUES. BUT YOU
CANNOT HOLD YOUR MANNER OF CREATION UP
TO THE LIGHT ALONGSIDE YOUR MORES AND
THEN MANAGE TO ACCEPT BOTH.

YOU ARE HUMAN. BUT YOUR MORES TEACH
YOU TO FEEL THAT YOU ARE STRANGELY
LACKING IN HUMAN QUALITIES.

Thank you. I am cured now and I must leave.

NO. The thunderstorms were firm in their denial. THIS
IS THE THIRTY-THIRD TIME YOU HAVE HAD THIS
SAME ILLUSION-NIGHTMARE. YOU ARE NOT
HEALED. AND THIS TIME I FEEL MORE BELOW
THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM, AN ARRAY OF
FRAGMENTED TERRORS WHICH SHOULD NOT BE
THERE. TELL ME.

There is no more.

TELL ME. The bonds on the chair were tight around
nay arms and legs. The headrest seemed to suck out the
contents of my head.

Nothing.

A WOMAN. THERE IS A FEMININE SPECTER IN
THOSE TERRORS. WHO IS SHE? SIMEON, WHO IS
SHE?

An author I have read.

AND MET. TELL ME MORE.

Blonde. Green eyes. Full lips like—

SOMETHING MORE.

Full lips.

NO. SOMETHING ELSE.

Let me the hell alone!

TELL ME. It was the voice of a king. The kind who
will not have your head lopped off, but who will decapi-
tate you with words and shame.

Breasts. Big breasts that I— That I—

I KNOW YOUR PROBLEM. I CAN SEE, FROM
YOUR CONDITION, THAT YOU FIND YOURSELF
IN LOVE WITH HER.

No! That's disgusting!

YES. DENIAL DOES NOTHING TO CHANGE RE-
ALITY. REFUSAL TO ACCEPT DOES NOTHING
MORE THAN MAKE EVENTUAL ACCEPTANCE
MORE DIFFICULT. YOU LOVE THIS WOMAN. YET
YOU HAVE THIS COMPLEX WHICH ELUDES ME IN
ITS ENTIRETY. SIMEON, DO YOU REMEMBER THE
SIMULATED FLESH BREASTS?

I remember.

THOSE ARTIFICIAL BREASTS HAVE COME TO
SYMBOLIZE YOUR INHUMANITY TO YOU. YOU
WERE NOT SUCKLED LIKE A MANCHILD, AND
THE LOSS OF THAT HAS DONE STRANGE THINGS
TO YOU. YOU ARE AFRAID OF WOMEN, OF—

No. I'm not afraid of women. She was just disgusting.
You would have had to see her to understand. All this
spoken reasonably, calmly.

NO. YOU WERE NOT DISGUSTED. YOU ARE
AFRAID, BUT NEVER DISGUSTED. YOU BACK
AWAY FROM EVERYTHING WHICH YOU DO NOT
UNDERSTAND IN THIS LIFE. THIS WOMAN IS
BUT ONE PART OF THAT. YOU BACK AWAY BE-
CAUSE YOU CANNOT SEE WHERE YOUR PLACE
AND PURPOSE COULD LIE IN IT ALL. YOU SEE
NO MEANING IN LIFE AND YOU ARE AFRAID TO
SEARCH FOR ONE, FEARING YOU WILL EVEN-
TUALLY DISCOVER THERE IS NO MEANING.

THAT IS WHY YOU SPEND SO MUCH, LIVE FASTER
THAN YOU SHOULD.

May I go?

YES. GO AND DREAM NO MORE OF PROTEUS
MOTHER. YOU WILL DREAM NO MORE. NO
MORE ... NO ... MORE ...

It spat me into the room.

After every session with the machine, I was drained,
lifeless, some sea creature tossed up on the beach and
gasping its respiratory tract raw in a search for the medium
of life it was accustomed to. I tossed my fins now, made
smacking noises with my mouth, and wiped at my head,
which was clammy and cold. I made my way into the bed-
room and collapsed onto the mattress without pulling the
covers over me.

I tried to encourage pleasant dreams of Marcus Aure-
lius.

And of Harry. And of money.

But somewhere, quite far way, there was a voice calling
to me, a voice which was like chains dragged across a
stone floor, like yellowed paper cracking between my
fingers. It said, "You're the one they sent for. I know you
are. I hate you. .. ."

V

The next morning, there were rumors of military distur-
bances along the Russian-Chinese border, and news
dispatches from the scene said that Western Alliance
troops had met in brushfire contact with the Orientals and
that a joint report of American and Russian forces would
be filed with the U.N. to protest alleged presence of
Japanese technical advisors in the Chinese ranks.

The new Chinese horror weapon circling the tired plan-
et had been named Dragonfly by the press. Trust those
boys to be original. Or at least colorful. Or, perhaps, just
first.

I paid no attention to it. Thus it had been since my
childhood, one mini-war after another, one "incident" on
the heels of the last, pompous world leaders spouting even
more pompous declarations. A man is not constantly
aware of his hands. A bird must sometimes forget the sky
is there because it has become so familiar to him. Such it
is with disaster and war. You can forget as long as it does
not touch you, and you can live in better times. It takes a
certain peripheral vision deficiency, but that can be mas-
tered with but a small expenditure of time and energy.

I had oranges and tea for breakfast, which helped my
headache.

Outside, the city crews had finished cleaning up the
snow. The streets were bare, but the buildings and trees
were smothered with whiteness. Fences became delicate
laceworks. Trees and shrubs were conglomerations of ici-
cles welded together by a frost-fingered artist. A bitter
wind swept over everything, stirring the snow, whipping it
against the neat houses, the sides of hovercars, and up my
nose.

It was as if Nature, via the snowstorm, had tried to
reclaim what had once been hers but was now lost to her
forever.

Clouds, heavy and gray, betrayed the advent of yet
another storm. A low flock of birds streaked north, some
kind of geese or other. Their calls were long and cold.

I passed by the broken store window where the howler
had lain on its side the night before. It had been removed.
There were no police around.

I passed by a church which had burned sometime after
I had returned from the AC complex. Its black skeleton
seemed leeringly evil.

At AC, the hex signs were on the walls, the lights were
dimmed, the machines stood sentinel, and Child was
tranced.

"You're late," Morsfagen said. His fists were drawn
tightly together. I wondered if he had opened his hands
at all since he had stalked out of the room last night.

"You don't have to pay me for the first five minutes," I
said. I smiled the famous smile.

It didn't cheer him up much.

I slid into the chair opposite Child and looked him
over. I don't know what I expected to have changed.
Perhaps it seemed too much to believe that he could go to

bed at night and get up in the morning, still in that same
condition. It was as if some healing process had to be
underway. But, if anything, he looked more wrinkled and
decaying than before.

Harry was there. He had worked a third of the Times
crossword, in ink as he always does, so he must have been
there for some while. Like an old woman coming early to
mass. "You sure?" he asked me.

"Quite," I said. And I was immediately sorry for having
cut him so short. It was the atmosphere of the place,
so damned military. And it was Morsfagen. Like Herod—
trying to destroy the Child. I was the assassin sent out. And
whether my knife was an intellectual or a physical one
made no difference, really.

I was on edge for another reason; there was a certain
dinner guest this evening....

This time I parachuted through the emptiness of his
consciousness, no flailing, ready for the drop that awaited
me....

... Labyrinth ...

The walls were hung with cobwebs, and the floor was
strewn with dirt and bones. The walls were multi-fluted,
polished here, rugged here, but a uniform gray every-
where. Far down there, somewhere in the nova-like center
of the mind was the Id. It gave out the same, nearly
unbearable whine that all Ids do. And somewhere above, in
the blackness and the perfect quietude, was the area
where the conscious mind should have been. It was clear
that the mind of a super-genius was strangely unhuman.
Most minds think in disconnected pictures, flittering arrays
of scenes and snatches of the past, but Child's mind created
an entire world of its own, a realism within his mind, an
analogue that I could explore like the actual terrain of
some lost land.

There was a clacking of hooves, and from the source of
light at the end of the tunnel came the outline in smoke,
then the form in flesh of a Minotaur, nut-brown skin and
all textures of black hair, eyes gleaming, steam caught in
the large ovals of the nostrils.

"Get out!"

I mean no harm.

"Get out, Simeon."

There was a blue field of sparks crackling above his

head, and psychic energies shot thin sporadic flames from
his nostrils, the steam to hang there afterwards.

"Leave a monster his only privacy!"

I too am a monster.

"Look at your face, Monster. It is not wrinkled like a
dried fig; it is not old beyond its years with seeing; it is not
caked with the dust of unlived centuries. You pass for
human in your world. You pass. At least, you pass."

Child, listen to me. I am—

He charged and grasped at me with hoof-hands. I
fashioned a sword from my own fields of thought and
smashed him broadside on the head.

The sound rang in the stone corridors.

My arm reverberated with the force of the blow.

And he was gone, a vapor in the darkness, a phantom.

Holding the green glow of the weapon, I advanced
slowly down the twisting halls toward the inner part of
him, where his theories would bubble, where thoughts
would run in molten rivers. I came out, finally, on an
earthen shelf above a yawning pit. Far below, eternities
away, drifting and glowing, was a circular mass, and the
heat it threw into my face was great.

From here had come the Minotaur. From here came
everything.

I reached out and grasped for anything, a subcur-
rent, a cracked image, the shell of a daydream, and I
caught a Hate River ebbing and flowing. HATE, HATE,
HATE HATEHATEHATEHATE-HA-TE-HATEHATE
HATE . . . Somewhere in the middle of it, a two-headed
thing swam, cutting the foul waters with a viciously spined
neck. I caught the "T" in HATE and traced it along the
currents, searching. T leads ToThumb and a suckling
mouTh . . . and The sucking mouTh suddenly To a brown
nipple and a moTher's breasT . . . and again The T
dominaTed . . . and I allowed The river To carry me
ineviTably on Toward Theorem. . . .

Theory Through Tees ... Through Thousand Times
Tedious Tiring . . . Ten Times one Times Two To Sub-
OughT-seven in drepshler Tubes now being used . . .

The flood was too fast. I could see the theory, but I
could not divert it fast enough toward the ocean in the
distance where a waterspout whirled (taking the thoughts
to the little bit of conscious mind he possessed). The
thoughts that were now being spoken in dust whispers in a

room far away—the thoughts being recorded by serious
men with serious faces who listened, no doubt, quite
seriously.

Then the drug must have finally taken hold of him, or I
would have been swallowed alive by a mind construct and
destroyed in his cauldron of insanity. The two-headed
beast had swum near without drawing my notice. It
caught my eye, now, as it moved swiftly, its mouth
gaping, a giant cave that drooled. . . .

I lifted my sword as it raised its huge head above me to
strike. Then there was a sudden, jerky slip like an old
movie reel that has been spliced, and everything went into
slow motion. It was like an underwater ballet. At that
rate, it would have taken an hour for the beast's jaws to
reach me and snap me up, and I slew him as his red eyes
glistened and as a strange THRIDDLE THRIDDLE
came out of his throat. Or hers.

Turning back toward the river, I directed thoughts
toward the slow-moving waterspout until so much time
had passed that I thought I had better get out before I lost
my own character identity.

I turned away from the screaming Id pit.

I walked back the gray tunnel.

Cobwebs brushed my face.

But there were stairs leading upward this time....

VI

There were candles in her green eyes, reflections of
those on the table. The same flickering amber glinted from
her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder
glow with health. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental some-
thing-or-other was dazzling.

"I'd want nothing held back," she said over the remains
of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and
fleshy mutant strain. Bones and gravy contrasted with her
loveliness.

"Nothing," I assured her for the hundredth time.

We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her
flesh did not need any more glow than it had.

"All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the
FBI, and all the others who have used you."

"That could be a blunt book."

"Backing down?"

"Just making an observation."

"Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me,
sensationalism sells a book."

I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness
and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.

The tape changed. The colored lights playing on the
walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Schehera-
zade came on, and the walls took on color again, spat-
tered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting
with crimson along the baseboard.

She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that
bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She
stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above
the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain
thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls
off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against
the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean's agony
reached us.

I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood
next to her.

The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was
quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem
altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself
after one.

"I keep thinking of Dragonfly," she said, her eyes up
there where it might be.

Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the
purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.

"Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?" she asked. It
was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to
cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at
the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did
that. She went on without me. "There's all this beauty,
and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly
books, ugly news."

By then, I was functioning. "Perhaps, in reading about

the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem
more tame by contrast, more easily lived with."

Her lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two
separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.

"Truthfully now," she said, "what do you think of my
books? You say you've read them."

I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other
writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism
should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative
vibration they could take about their work. The last thing

I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. "Well
..."

"Truthfully," she said, signaling me that maybe she was
tougher than the other artists I knew.

"You mean ... the ugliness in them?"

"Yes. Exactly." She turned back to the ocean. "I tried
writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It's the
ugliness that sells." She shrugged her shoulders. Amber
hair danced. "One must eat, mustn't one?" Another shrug.
Another amber jitterbug.

I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.

With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines
and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own
rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me,
hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself
gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a
disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to
the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life
when I first knew what I was—and what I wasn't.

I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh,
resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.

I took my hand away, breathless and confused.

Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding
my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in
my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the
walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could
not guess what. They had hung here so long that I knew
their every detail. There was nothing new in them, not for
me.

What did I fear? What about her terrified me so much
that I could not bring myself to complete the advance I
had made, to draw fingers downwards from her shoulder,
to touch the thinly sheathed roundness of her breasts? Was
it only what the computerized psychiatrist in the den told

me it was—? Was it only that I feared making too many
contacts in the world and then discovering that I did not
belong? It seemed to me that it ran deeper than that,
though I could not find any other motivations that made as
much sense.

She had turned away from the window, and she looked
at me curiously. I suppose I looked like a caged animal,
prowling that room, sniffing the brilliant canvases for
solace and finding no solace.

I turned and looked at her. But when I tried to speak,
there was nothing to say. I thought, perhaps, in some way
I could never understand, she realized the nature of my
problem more completely than I did.

She crossed the room, her body doing wonderful things
to the clinging black fabric of her dress, and placed a soft
hand upon my lips. "It's getting late," she said.

She took her hand away.

"When do we start?" I asked.

"Tomorrow. And we tape all the interviews."

"Tomorrow, then," I said.

"Tomorrow, then."

And she was gone in a whirlwind of efficiency that left
me standing with my drink in my hand and my "goodbye"
in my mouth like a lump of used lard.

I went to bed to dream ...

. . . and I woke up needing comfort, a strange comfort
that I could find but one place:

IT IS FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, the metal
headshrinker said as it swallowed me and thrust its ethereal
fingers into the pudding of my brain.

I know.

RELAX AND TALK.

What should I say? Tell me what it is that I could—that
I should say to you.

START WITH A DREAM IF YOU'VE HAD ONE.

I always have one.

THEN START.

There are storm clouds in the sky: dark, thick, mysteri-
ous. There is no place where the sun shows. Below all this
piling grayness, beneath the scudding harbingers of rain,
there is a hill, a large and rounded hill formed by Nature
into a grotesque, gnarled lump, a blemish upon the face of
the earth. There are people ... people ,..

GO ON. The same old urging—go on, go on, go on. ...

There are people ... and there is a cross ... a wooden
cross....

FOCUS ON THE CROSS. WHAT DO YOU SEE
THERE?

Me.

YES?

Nailed. Blood. Much blood. White, festered wounds
dribbling rusty blood around the edges of little holes, neat
little holes like the cavities left when you rip the buttons
from the faces of rag dolls.... Rusty blood there ...

WHO IS IN THE CROWD?

Harry. I see Harry there. He's weeping.

WHY IS HE WEEPING?

For me.

WHO ELSE?

I'm thirsty.

WHO ELSE?

I'm thirsty. Very thirsty.

THEY WILL GIVE YOU WATER SOON. THEY
WILL SLAKE YOUR THIRST. NOW WHO ELSE IS
IN THE CROWD?

Morsfagen is casting dice for my cloak. And over there,
beyond him, is a pregnant woman who is . . .

GO ON, PLEASE.

Please this time?

GO ON.

I look at her belly ... and ... there ... is Child. He is
weeping too. But he is not weeping for the same reason
that Harry is. He isn't weeping for me. It's because he
wants up there where I am. He wants out of that woman's
womb and up on the cross, nailed and bleeding and thirsty
and dying. He wants it so bad that he writhes inside her in
fury, wanting out....

DO YOU KNOW WHY HE WANTS OUT?

For the same reason I am happy to be there.

YOU ENJOY BEING ON THE CROSS?

Yes.

WHY?

WHY?

I don't know.

DO YOU SEE ANYONE ELSE IN THE CROWD?

No! Oh, no! Oh, my God, my God, my God!

WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS THE MATTER?

No! You'll spoil it/me! I can't! Don't you see my
station, my purpose, my nature? It must be my purpose! I
haven't got another one, there isn't another one, this must
be it! Get away from me! No!

WHAT IS IT? WHO DO YOU SEE?

Melinda. Floating, naked. Floating toward the cross. No!
Stay away! You'll spoil my purpose!

STOP IT.

Help! Help me! Don't let her touch me! Forgod'ssake-
she'snaked ... naked ... nakednakednakednaked!

STOP DREAMING! WAKE! LISTEN TO ME; HOLD
YOURSELF TOGETHER AND LISTEN TO ME.

I—

QUIET. COMPOSE YOURSELF. I WILL INTER-
PRET YOUR DREAM. THOUGH I MUST SAY THAT
THIS THROWS A NEW LIGHT ON YOUR PSYCHE.

DO YOU SEE WHY YOU ARE THE ONE ON THE
CROSS? NO NEED FOR AN ANSWER, PURELY
RHETORICAL. YOU SEE YOURSELF AS CHRIST—
WHAT A NEW DEVELOPMENT!—MORE PRECISE-
LY, AS THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AS REP-
RESENTED BY THE SECOND COMING. THERE
ARE PARALLELS, OF COURSE, BETWEEN YOUR
CONDITION AND THE STORY OF THE CHRIST.
YOU COULD SAY THAT YOUR OWN BIRTH WAS A
VIRGIN BIRTH, FOR EXAMPLE. YOU WERE NOT
CONCEIVED BY FLESH IN FLESH AND THE SPILL-
ING OF SEED, BUT BY THE GENETIC ENGINEERS
AND THE COMPLEX CYBERNETIC ARTIFICIAL
WOMBS. AND THERE ARE YOUR SUPER-HUMAN
POWERS. PERHAPS THEY ARE NOT AS ALL-EN-
COMPASSING AS THOSE OF THE CHRIST MYTH,
BUT THEY ARE SUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO NUR-
TURE YOUR DELUSIONS.

YOU WERE NOT ABLE TO SEE A PURPOSE TO
YOUR LIFE, SO YOU CHOSE TO CAST YOURSELF
IN THE ROLE OF A SAVIOUR. IT SERVES A DOU-
BLE PURPOSE: FIRST, IT REINFORCES ALL YOUR
CHRISTIAN MORES, ALL THE THINGS THEY
THOUGHT YOU SHOULD BELIEVE AS YOU WERE
RAISED (THOUGH THEY WERE AS INTERESTED
IN SUPPLYING YOU WITH MORES THAT WOULD
KEEP YOU IN LINE AS MUCH AS THEY CARED

ABOUT YOUR HAVING A CHRISTIAN UPBRING-
ING); SECONDLY, IT GIVES A PURPOSE AND
MEANING NOT ONLY TO YOUR LIFE BUT TO THE
ENTIRE UNIVERSE WHICH SOMETIMES SEEMS
UNEXPLAINABLY CHAOTIC TO YOU—THE WARS
AND THE SUFFERING, THE REST OF IT.

/ am thirsty.

IN A MOMENT. I MUST FINISH WITH THIS FIRST.

YOU SEE MORSFAGEN CASTING DICE, FOR HE
DESPISED AND ONLY USES YOU FOR HIS OWN
ENDS. THE CLOAK SYMBOLIZES YOUR LIFE,
YOUR PURPOSE, YOUR INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY.
THERE SEEMS TO BE A HINT OF THE FUTURE IN
YOUR DREAM, A MOMENT OF CLAIRVOYANCE,
AND YOU SHOULD BEWARE THE MAN.

Go on.

YOU SEE CHILD AS A THREAT TO YOUR NEAT-
LY BUILT THEORY. HE IS ANOTHER VIRGIN
BIRTH, OF THE ORIGIN THAT YOU ARE OF. YOU
REALIZE THAT HE HAD BUILT THE SAME SEC-
OND-COMING THEORY TO EXPLAIN HIS OWN
PURPOSE IN THE WORLD. YOU UNDERSTAND
THAT SINCE HE HAS MET YOU, HIS LIFE PUR-
POSE HAS BEEN SHATTERED AND THAT HE IS
HUNTING FOR ANOTHER ANSWER. YOU DON'T
WANT TO HAVE TO DO THAT YOURSELF. YOU
DON'T WANT TO HUNT.

THE WOMAN, MELINDA, IS ALSO A THREAT TO
YOUR PURPOSE (OR, RATHER, TO THE FANTASY
PURPOSE YOU HAVE CREATED FOR YOURSELF).
CHRIST COULD NOT FALL PHYSICALLY IN LOVE
WITH A WOMAN. BUT YOU HAVE. ADMIT IT. THIS
IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE. LISTEN AND KNOW
THAT YOUR PURPOSE IS TO LOVE AND COMFORT
AND TO BE LOVED IN RETURN. OTHERWISE, YOU
FACE ONLY SCHIZOPHRENIA.

Could that be a purpose, though?

IT IS THE OLDEST PURPOSE. WASH YOURSELF
CLEAN OF FALSE PURPOSES. ALLOW ME TO ES-
TABLISH A SERIES OF PERSONALITY TAPES TO
REINFORCE YOUR FALTERING SENSE OF REALI-
TY AND TO SUBDUE THIS CHRIST SYNDROME.
THE REASON YOU LIVE IS TO LOVE. SO IT IS
WITH MOST HUMAN BEINGS. DON'T SEARCH

FOR A LARGE PURPOSE, FOR MORE COMPLEX
MEANINGS, FOR THE WHY OF THE WORLD OR
THE REASON IN HATE AND WAR. BE SATISFIED
THAT YOU KNOW YOURSELF. IT IS A WISE MAN
WHO KNOWS HIMSELF.

WE WILL PROCEED WITH THE HEALING
NOW....

VII

The following morning, as I stepped out of the elevator
near the top of the AC complex, Harry intercepted me
before I had taken more than four steps toward the room
where Child waited for another session. His round face
was drawn, pale, and lined with heavy creases that had
not been there before. He looked as if he had not slept all
night. A cursory examination of his rumpled clothes and
withered shirt collar was proof of that. He grasped my arm,
digging his fingers in until it hurt, and steered me across the
corridor to an unused office, pushed me inside, followed,
and closed the door behind us.

"Cloak and dagger?" I asked. It was amusing to see him
engaged in some melodramatic play like this. Yet also
terrifying. If Harry Kelly thought there was a need for
caution, there most assuredly was. Normally, he had the
greatest respect and confidence in due process, even in these
days. Many considered him a Polyanna. Now Polyanna was
scared, and nothing short of an ogre could have managed
that.

"Look, Sim, lay off the arrogance with Morsfagen. Say
yes sir and no sir and thank you sir, and help me get his
temper down. No smart cracks and no more antagonism.
I haven't ever asked you much, but I ask this. Listen, son,
it might mean everything we've worked for if you can't
keep yourself in check."

"I can't stand the man," I said.

"Neither can I."

"What's happening?"

"The situation is worse than any public communications
are reporting it. The Chinese and their Japanese advisors
have set up a command post on the Russian side of the
Amur River. Only maybe a hundred yards' worth of inva-
sion, but they refuse to move backwards on request. On
the Chinese side, troops have been massing for four days.
A special spurline was laid down, and troop trains are
running in on the hour from the main tracks that pass east
of Nunkiang, through the Khingan Mountains."

I took it all in. I'd never been much on geography, and
I must have looked rather blank, for he flapped his arms
in despair and started on me again.

"On the other side of the border there, the Russian
towns Zavitaya, Belogorsk, Svobodnyy, and Shimanovsk
lie in a straight line, each within striking distance of the
other. Zavitaya contains a missile complex trained on
several Chinese population centers. Belogorsk is the site of
an extension of the Khabarovsk laboratories, dealing with
the problem of lasers. It's the place where the news has
been coming from lately—about the possibility of the
equivalent of a death-ray. The entire area has become, in
the last ten years, a strategic one. If the Chinese can
sweep it, they can isolate that arm of the Soviet Union.
Toward this end, portable nuke facilities have been moved
in on the Amur, pointed toward Zavitaya."

"War," I said. "But we've had it before. And we've
been expecting it now for fourteen years or more. Why
does this mean I have to brown-nose Morsfagen?"

"I received an interesting telephone call from a judge
who was a friend in law school, back in the age of the
dinosaur. He reported that Morsfagen has been asking
around about the possibility of impounding you—just like
they tried years ago."

"We already won that case."

"That was in peacetime. What Morsfagen wants to
know is whether the looming war will make a difference."

"Law is law," I said.

"But in time of national crisis, it can be suspended.
And the word that the general got, my friend tells me, is
that he can pull it off. It will be nasty, dirty, replete with
complications—but possible. He'd much rather work with
you the way it now stands. But if you drive him to the wall
or anger him more than his limit of tolerance, he might

decide that its worth a risk to his career. He might try it."

I didn't feel well. I wanted to sit down, but that would
have been a sign of weakness. I knew Harry was just
barely holding up now. There wasn't any use to make it
worse for him. "What's your considered opinion?" I asked.

"The same. Only I think it's more possible for him to
succeed than even his own advisors told him."

I nodded. "We'll play it cool, Harry. We'll play it so
cool that there will be icicles hanging from the walls. Let's
go."

He breathed a sigh of relief and followed me out of the
empty office, down the hall, through the door, and into
the hex-walled room.

"You're late," Morsfagen said, consulting his watch and
scowling at me as he waited for the thrust of my tongue.
Maybe he had decided one more witty remark on my part
would be the weight to push him to action.

I didn't give him the chance. "Sorry," I said. "I got held
up in traffic."

He looked genuinely perplexed, opened his mouth to
say something, closed it, and ground his teeth together. It
was almost as if he would have preferred being insulted to
being treated civilly.

I had come to AC only for the money this time, not to
demonstrate my super-humanness, my Christlike talents.
The therapy the mechanical psychiatrist had given me had
worked deep and had taken root. But with a few more
paychecks in my pocket, Melinda and I could be vaga-
bonds for an eternity, running from the ugliness, the filth,
war, and the people who made it. I thought of the future
in the context of the two of us, though I could not yet
know how she felt, whether her interest in me matched
mine in her. But from a life of pessimism, I had suddenly
become optimistic, and I refused to consider any but the
brightest of possible futures.

Child was tranced. His mouth sagged slightly, and his
twisted teeth could be seen beyond. His hands trembled
against the arms of his chair, even though he was asleep.
They administered the drugs while I watched, then stepped
back to allow the freaks to converse in the way only we
could understand.

I parachuted from the room, down into the labyrinth,
not trusting to stairs that might have been there yesterday
and not today....

Hooves clacked on rock, the sound like splinters of flying
glass.

There was an outline like a child's scrawl, not nearly so
definite and real as the day before. Whether he was losing
power to refute my presence or merely planning some de-
ception to put me off my guard, I did not know.

There was the vague odor of musk, all the textures of
dark hair that fell like night mists, but all of them merely
hazy crayon lines.

"Get out!"

I mean you no harm at all.

"And I wish not to harm you, Simeon. Get out."

Yesterday, as you well remember, I fashioned a sword
from the very air itself. Do not forget that. Do not
underestimate me, though I am in your regions.

"I beg of you to leave. You're in danger here."

From what?

"I cannot say. It is in the knowing that the danger lies."

That is not good enough.

"It is all I can say."

I swung the sword, and he dissipated into an eerie blue
vapor that clung to the walls until the wind whistled in to
blow it away. It curled along the stone, slithered back to
the pit, and was gone.

Two hours into the session, as I was sprawled on the
dirt shelf above the pit, grasping at thoughts and diverting
them toward the waterspout, a "G" drifted out, and with
another level of my mind, I plucked at it and traced it. G
to Grass . . . which is dark Green and bendinG over the
hills ... toppinG and hills to see GGGGG ... G ... G
. . . GodGodGodGodGodGod like a whirlwind moaninG
and babblinG over the Glens, cominG, cominG, twistinG
relentlessly onward toward me ... G ... G ...

I reached out to take a strong hold on the thought pro-
gression, partially because it might lead to something of in-
terest and partially because it was such an odd, intense, and
seemingly fractured train of images. Suddenly, the earthen
shelf under me gave way, plunging me down toward the
flaming pit which sent climbing streams of magma after
me.

Wind lifted me toward the river before I could plunge
into that cauldron of teeming madnesses.

I flew as if I were a kite.

The river swept me toward the ocean.

The water there was choppy and hot—and at places
steam rose in spirals like smoke snakes.

At places, ice floated, dying.

I fought for the surface, desperately trying to stay on
top of the turbulent currents, giving up thought direction
and fighting only for the integrity of my own mind. Then I
was suddenly up and splashing through the pillar of foamy
water that roared into the black, heavy sky; like a bullet
out of a rifle, whining, spinning, was I. Splashing, sputter-
ing, I showered out of the mind of Child.

The room was dark. The hex signs glowed on the walls,
partially illuminating the serious faces of the generals and
the technicians. They were all grimacing, like gargoyle
masks.

"He threw me out," I said in the quiet which stretched
to the breaking point.

Everyone stared at me with what was obviously a bad
case of doubt. I wished I had been more conciliatory in
the days past, so that this incident would not appear so
suspicious.

"He just threw me out of his mind," I said. It was the
first time it had ever happened to me. I explained that.
They listened. Somewhere, I was certain, Child was laugh-
ing. ...

VIII

Rumors of war.

The Chinese had slaughtered the skeleton staffs manning
the last two Western Alliance embassies in Asia. One was
in what had once been called Korea, the other on the home
islands of Japan. The Japanese denied any responsibility for
the massacre on their own soil. The story was that citizens
of Japan and Chinese ancestry had forced their way past
the police detailed to protect the Western delegates, had run
wild in an orgy of destruction. The Japanese press pointed
out that the West, perhaps, should have been expecting this

for years, their own silly trade practices—from which
China had always been excluded—drawing the wrath of a
poverty-stricken people who felt cast aside from the main
commerce of the world. Other reports, from eyewitnesses
in Japan, said that the Japanese police did not resist the
mob at all and actually seemed to be directing its blood-
thirsty attack on the foreign consulate offices.

The Tri-D screen showed headless bodies for the benefit
of those with shallow imaginations. In the streets of
Tokyo, masses marched, holding those heads speared on
the ends of sharpened aluminum poles. Dead eyes of our
countrymen looked back at us from the other side of the
screen....

The Pentagon, the same morning, announced the dis-
covery of the Bensor Beam, which was capable of shorting
out all synapses in the nervous system of the human body,
leaving the brain imprisoned in a mindless hulk. Named
after its creator, a Dr. Harold Bensor, the beam was
already being referred to (by Pentagon officials and their
cronies in the War Bureau of Moscow) as "the turning
point in the cold war." I knew the idea had come from
Child; I recognized it the way one recognizes a bad dream
that someone has made into a movie. But the censors had
learned from the mistakes they had made with me in the
past; the public would never hear of Child.

I wondered, for the briefest of moments, what sort
of inhuman fiend this Bensor must be to want his name
attached to such an inglorious device. Then I lost my
facade of superiority when I considered that the weapon
might just as likely have been called the Simeon Kelly
Beam, for I had been the middleman who had brought it
into existence. I was more responsible than anyone, even
Child, for whatever might be done with this damn thing.

Pictures on the screen showed two Chinese prisoners on
whom the weapon had been used. Spastic, they flopped
about on the gray floor of their cell, eyes sightless, ears
unhearing, bodies pulled by strings that none of us could
really understand.

I turned it off.

I pushed my unfinished breakfast away from me, and
got my coat from the closet. I was to meet Melinda at her
apartment for another session with the tapes, and I did not
want to miss that. Besides, seeing her might somehow
purge the strain of guilt running through me.

AM the interviews were at her apartment, for she had a
ton of equipment there and preferred not to have to move
it. That evening, we were going to the theater—and that
was no business meeting at all. In fact, even the interviews
had become more than business.

I was trying to heed the mechanical psychiatrist's advice,
trying to reach out and accept human warmth. And, in
small ways, in kisses and touches and a few words, she
was returning that effort of mine. To me, so thirsty
for companionship after a long drought, it seemed even
more heady and fine than it really was.

The sky was gray again and whispered snow. It was
a regular oldtime winter, a Christmas-card sort of winter,
sparkling and white and bitterly cold. Somewhere, far
above, floated Dragonfly.

"Did the FBI mistreat you at any other time?" she
asked.

The black microphone dangled above us like a bloated
spider. Behind the couch where we sat, reels hissed in the
recorder, like voices commenting on the anecdotes I told.

"It wasn't the FBI so often as the doctors who treated
me not as a human being, but as something to be pricked,
punched, and jabbed. I remember once when—"

"Keep remembering," she said. She reached behind the
couch and stopped the recorder, laid the microphone
down. "That's enough for one day. If it gets moving too
fast, you lose the color. You try to tell too much, and the
details are blurred. It happens with everyone."

"I guess so," I said.

She was wearing a peasant blouse with a scalloped
neckline, an alluring garment which I found myself staring
at. And that, in itself, was a shock. It did not seem
disgusting, as it once would have. In fact, the fullness, the
perfect roundness of her breasts seemed deeply exciting.
Perhaps my mechanical psychiatrist had been correct. Per-
haps this was a purpose, a legitimate need.

She saw the direction of my gaze. Perhaps that was
what produced the following. Perhaps she had been await-
ing a sign, and this was the one she saw and chose to
travel by. She moved across to the couch, beside me,
leaned upwards, and made a bow of her mouth, her
tongue flicking along those lips, anxious and inquiring.

What is your mood, the tongue seemed to say. How do
you feel? Is this the time? Why don't you do something?

I obeyed the wishes of the tongue. I found it with my
lips and with my own tongue, drew her closer with both
arms and felt her breasts against my chest And was not
disgusted.

In time, I had touched the flesh of her legs, felt the
warmth of her thighs through her skirt. Then I scooped
her breasts free of the peasant blouse and tested them
with teeth and lips. An hour passed in a minute and had
the joy of a century encapsulated in it

When I left, a hundred yearsa minute later, she stood
clean and brown before me, a dark, supple woman
divested of all but the glow of her body's youth. We kissed
and said nothing more—for there was nothing more to be
said. Not really. Even if I could have forced words out of
my dry throat

Outside, I stood in the drive a long while, oblivious of
snow and wind, of stares from passing pedestrians, of the
need to get to the AC complex and confront Child again.
For the first time in my life, I had been with a woman.
And she had been a goddess, a good place to start. I didn't
feel tainted or used or sinful. I felt better, in fact, than I
had ever felt in my life. In time, I managed to think enough
to get to the car, climb inside, and close the door. I sat for
maybe five minutes before I started it.

My body seemed to burn where she had touched me.
Flames played along my lips. All the way to AC ...

I was in love: no question. I had not even attempted
to esp her thoughts ever since we had met, and that was
unusual. I was affording her the same privilege that Harry
received, but before she had done half as much for me as
he had, before I really knew whether she would accept me
or demolish me. I imagine I had been afraid, at first that
she would love me—and later that she would not.

How foolish I had been at the party, weeks ago, when
she had been pointed out to me and when, later, she
seemed to take interest in me, looking my way, smiling,
doing all the things a woman can do. I had bolted. I had
left the party even before anyone asked for parlor tricks,
and I had hidden in my house, pretending I had not been
interested in her. Foolish. I was so much older then—but
I am younger than that now.

A band of peace criers had gathered before a precinct

house, for some unfathomable reason. They had stoned
the windows. A phalanx of coppers was charging down
the steps as I went by.

At a red light two blocks on, a stream of young mili-
tants burst from an alleyway to the right, half a block
down a side street. They were chanting something, though
I could not make out what it was. Behind them, a howler
roared into view, its cupola roof narcodart gun cutting
down the young people as they cursed the government, the
enemy government, and anyone else who came to mind.
Before the light turned, I saw the howler roll over a
young girl, snapping her back like kindling. That was not
standard procedure, by any means. And before I could
chalk it up to an accident, the driver of the armored
vehicle rammed a boy no older than seventeen, crushed
him against the steel pole of an arc lamp, and moved on.

I went through the light to avoid the uproar.

I had to detour around the elevated highway ramp I
had intended to use, for there were several hundred peo-
ple on it, setting up roadblocks in a display of civil
disobedience. I noticed that for the first time there were
adults with the peace criers. In fact, it seemed that there
were more adults than young people.

I took the next ramp, went up, and struck for AC at
my top speed. In the time since I had heard the morning
news, what could have happened to open the adult ranks
like this? My heart beat too fast, and I felt a gnawing
urgency to do something, anything. But what?

The only thing I could do was esp Child, find new
weapons, make our side stronger so that, if there was a
war, we would win and at least a semblance of normality
would return in which Melinda and I could carve our own
niche and be alone.

I suppose such an attitude was not noble. But war itself
leaves no room for nobility. Only the clever survive. And
not always do they survive intact

By the time I reached the government building, I had
made my decisions. I loved Melinda. I feared Child. He
could throw me out—and perhaps he could swallow me
up. There was something behind his repeated warnings to
leave his thoughts alone. Something to do with the G
association I had chanced upon the day before—
something to do with God. I could not sacrifice myself in
that strong, mutated subconscious. Yet I could not permit

the war and its destruction to touch my life, to end the
first warm relationship I had ever had with a woman. Life
was only now worthy of living. I could not permit the
Chinese to snatch it away from me. So I would go in his
mind this last time, rip loose everything that I found and
send it up. Then I would get out, collect my cash, and
beat a hasty retreat. I would tell them first thing when I
got there: after this, the job is ended, go in peace.

As with most plans, nothing went that way.

They were waiting for me when I got there. Morsfagen
was the center of a flurry of dispatches. Messengers boys
came and departed, carrying sheafs of paper. He signed
and checked and rejected, and somehow managed to keep
track of what was going on with Child at the same time.
Harry fidgeted nervously with his hands, tearing at his
fingers as if they were detachable. There were bags under
his eyes; the old tic had reappeared in his left cheek; his
hair was uncombed.

I esped out to see what was troubling him, breaking the
rule which I had established of my own accord. I violated
him.

On the surface of his mind, it floated in horrid detail.
The thought symbol his psyche had given it was a bloated
body floating in a pool of blood. Beneath the image, I
read it: WAR. The rumors were not just rumors any
longer. Brushfire stuff had gotten hotter, though the details
seemed vague in his mind. A black, rotting corpse, floating
in clotted pools of blood ...

Extremely shaken, I sat down at the table and looked
across at Morsfagen. There were tiny beads of perspira-
tion on his chin and forehead. His big hands were full of
communiques, and they seemed to shiver just the slightest
bit.

Damn them! Damn them all!

"The details?" I asked.

"Alliance troops attacked the Chinese division which
had crossed the Amur River, drove them back into
Chinese territory. Forty-seven Chinese killed. Four Japa-
nese. Seven Alliance troops: two American, one British,
and the rest Russian. An hour later, Zavitaya ceased to
exist. No radio in or but. The nuke missile site there does
not respond to calls. Belogorsk reports a tremor and a
play of odd lights in the sky. Seismographs say it was a
pocket-bomb, a very low-yield nuke. The troops at the

border no longer report back. The Asians have moved
into Russian territory with a vengeance. No confirmation
yet. But you can bet on it."

"I'll help," I said.

"You're damn right you will." His face was not pretty.

"Is he ready?"

Morsfagen looked at Child. "Tranced," he said. "We
were waiting for you before administering the Cinnamide.
What have you come up with overnight? What do you
think about yesterday?"

I shrugged. "Nothing more than what I've already said.
He threw me out because I was reading some thought
stream he did not want me to see. It was easy for him,
because I never expected it. I was still underrating his
potential. I won't do that again."

"Certain?"

"As certain as I can be."

"How is that?"

"Very."

"Let's begin, then."

"Some things have to be done first," I said. "Wake him
from the trance. Tell him I have not been here yet. Tell
him I've disappeared and that, until I'm found, you'll have
to go on without me. Tell him you'll be interrogating him
while he's drugged and that he better come across if he
knows what's good for him. Ham it up a little. But make
it sound convincing. After he is tranced and drugged
again, I'll go in secretly. Maybe he won't even know that
I'm there."

A black, bloated body (Melinda) floating...

Damn them to Hell!

Morsfagen attended to removing the mutant from the
room and going through the procedure I had suggested.

"Are you sure of yourself, Sim?" Harry asked. He
sounded as if he wanted me to quit. But we both knew
that was impossible. Only Child could develop the ultimate
weapon, a weapon that would make war obsolete. I had to
go in there until he formulated it—possibly urge him into
it if he was unwilling. But there was no backing down—
not with the world and Melinda hanging on everything
that transpired in this room.

They brought Child back in ten minutes. He was
tranced and be was drugged.

The world was heavy on my shoulders and Death was
walking with me...

...and ...

... like a cat with cotton feet, I went quietly, quietly,
quietly. . . .

Like a ghost in an old house, I went without form.

Like the breezes of spring, I walked softly.

There was no echo of my steps, and the labyrinth was
wanner than usual. The walls were actually unpleasantly
hot to the touch, a strange change from the clinging cold
that had infested the place. I rounded a bend and saw the
Minotaur sitting on his haunches, unaware of my presence.
He was reading a leather-bound Bible, completely absorbed
in whatever the verses had to tell him.

Slowly, so as to disturb nothing, I passed. He never
looked up.

Pasiphae, here is your unholy child.

Minos, your labyrinth is ugly. It needs a paint job and
some common comforts.

Theseus, keep your weapons girdled to your hip, for
there will be no killing of a sad and unpretentious Mino-
taur.

The pit was a tangerine color, pulsating with mind-heat
which coursed upwards, washed the rim, flowed down the
stone corridors, evicting the leeching cold. The center of
the pit was a fierce white dot.

I reached out and grabbed the nearest thought. It was a
weapon. But it was nothing that could cure the world's ills,
no ultimate dragon as I sought.

A formula to cause ratlike mutations in unborn babies ...

A beam that could dehydrate living tissue, make a living
body into a dry, dead corpse in seconds . . .

There were many of the G association thoughts, several
different progressions of them which led toward one dis-
tant point whose nature I could not quite ascertain ...

. . . an inordinately large number of G thoughts. I was
interested in exploring their source and their destiny, but
they did not seem to be what I needed.

Then I found it. A stray thought, the ultimate weapon.

F . . . Field . . . Force Field capable of stopping all
entry by anything, including air, permitting neither bombs
nor bacteria passage . . . Field. . . .

I latched onto it and gently nudged it toward the main

stream, toward the waterspout. The ultimate weapon—the
weapon to make weapons obsolete.

I thought I was being subtle, but I was underestimating
Child. There was a clacking of hooves behind me.

"Get out!"

No. You don't understand.

"It's you who doesn't understand!"

He pounced. I stepped quickly aside, struck at him, and
sent him flailing over the brink, into the pit. . . .

Far out at sea, the Force Field Theory was shot up the
waterspout. Soon it would be spoken in a dark room,
taped, transferred to paper, and sent by special messenger
to those who might put it into practice.

Sighing, I turned to go. But with a low, animal grum-
ble, the walls of the labyrinth began to sway and the floor
to shake and buck.

From somewhere down in the pit, there was a scream,
a deafening ululation which spread throughout the caverns,
echoing and re-echoing. Clutching the edge of the pit, the
Minotaur was pulling himself onto the earthen ledge. I
could see that it was not the Minotaur who screamed, but
I could not see anyone else.

What is it? I asked above the noise.

His eyes were wild. He opened his mouth, and I watched
horrified as snakes came slithering forth.

I kicked him. He fell back into the pit, all the way to
the churning bottom this time.

When I turned back to the caverns, the ceiling caved in
before me, dirt and stones spilling over my shoes. And
there was no longer an exit. I wasn't going to get out!

I turned to the sea and saw the waterspout dying,
withering. There was no hope in that direction, either. No
hope! And the situation was so ironic, like Jesus finally
sealed into his tomb. But I had given up that delusion,
hadn't I?

What, for crissakes, is going on? I yelled above the
constant screaming from the pit. Then it occurred to me
that I might find the nature of the disaster by latching on
to a stray thought. I reached out into the turbulent river
and found all of them starting the same way:

G ... G ... GGGGGGGGGG . . . leadingG to Grass
rollinG over the hills . . . to G . . . G . . . GGG God God
God like a tornado whirlinG across the Glen, relentless,
relentless ... GGG GGod GGod ... GODGODGOD ...

random ... what purpose? ... trap Him like the wind to
find His purpose, find my purpose . . . GGGGGGG. . . .

I realized the nature of it then. Child's purpose in life
had been shattered when he met me—just as mine had
been shattered when I encountered him. He could no
longer pretend to himself that he was the Second Coming,
the virgin birth. But he had no mechanical psychiatrist to
treat him and could find no woman to love or who would
love him. He was so restricted in his physical existence
that he had to turn to theory and intellectual search to
find an answer.

GODGODGODGOD ... trapped in a cavern to tell
answers . . . GGG . . .

I followed the thoughts to their end; I was swept along
with them against my will. I never should have listened in
the first place. It was the ultimate theory, and he had
proven it beyond a doubt.. ..

He had tried to contact God.

He had found the whereabouts of the Supreme Being,
the plane of existence upon which He lived.

He asked what meaning there could be to life and to
the chaotic world in which man lived. And he was an-
swered; he solved his problem.

He asked what was at the center of creation. And he
found out.

And now I was trapped down there.

There were three of us.

Child, Simeon, and God.

And we were all three quite insane.

TWO

Humanity
Restored...

I

Trapped within the convoluted miasma of Child's mind,
I eventually lost all consideration of what was real and
what was not. Here, in the fascinating chiaroscuro ruins of
his subconscious mind, the shattered mental analogues
were every bit as concrete as the world I had known
outside of Child. The stones were textured by the weather
as they were in the world beyond; the trees had as many
leaves of as many different shades of green as any I had
seen before; the wind was not a constant, but changed
from bitter cold to almost suffocating warmth, and was
moderate more often than not. There were birds and a
wide variety of land-bound animals, which, though subtly
different or wildly mutated from their "real" parallels,
were always believable, detailed and rich with color and
habits. At first, I catalogued the differences, the fine points
of distinction between the real world and this analogue of
Child's interior, but that only made me melancholy, unsat-
isfied, and soon had me acting like a manic-depressive. I
realized that, if this were to be my home for the remain-
der of my days, I would have to forget the other world I
had known. And for my own peace of mind, I would also
have to forget that when Child died, we all died, trapped
here inside him. It was bizarre, but it was my new reality
and required my swift adaptation.

So I adapted.

At first, there had been a time of madness. When I
recovered my wits, I did not know how much time had
passed, and I could not remember much of what I had

done. I remembered running along canyons of stone which
shimmered and changed colors around me, thrust up, dis-
solved, formed new projections, a living rock that sang
mournful dirges and sometime burst into long, wailing
screams that made me fall and cover my ears and scream
in sympathy. There were visions of mottled skies that were
sometimes all shades of yellow, sometimes all shades of
red, sometimes an ugly whirl of black and brown. I had
climbed in cold places and had followed descending trails
into warm ones. I had been on strange seas with waters
thick like syrup, and in lakes where the surface reeked of
brandy. I had seen dark shapes, like huge spiders, dancing
along endless webs of sticky white thread, and I had seen
maggots crawling in the walls, disappearing in the stone
when I came close enough to examine them. At times, a
force of monumental strength passed me, a whirling mad-
ness of surging energy, which was He, which was God, the
maddest of the three of us. And then I was sane, lying on
the floors of a wide tunnel, stretched full length, as if I
had fallen while running from something that terrified me.
I sat up, looked around me, knew that it was so, that I
was trapped here, and decided there was nothing to do
but make the most of it.

Besides, I nurtured a grain of hope. Perhaps the mind
of the wizened boy, this Child, would regain its sanity.
Perhaps, then, there would be a way out, a way to return
to my own body. They would keep me alive, back there in
AC, feed me through my veins, keep my body processes
functioning, hoping for my return just as I was. If Child
returned to normal, I could go upwards through the now-
blocked conscious mind and return to my own flesh. Free.
With even the smallest minim of such hope, it was better to
maintain my sanity instead of losing it again and being able
to return to my own body as a madman.

And, too, there was the possibility that, with my mind
intact, I could search out this nightmare landscape and
find some chink in the cold stone that kept me from
leaving. I could explore for days on end, having nothing
better to do, and perhaps discover the passage out. I knew
the chances were small. Child's mental analogue was im-
mense, as big as an entire world. It would require years
and years just to investigate each corner of it. And a mind
destroyed, a mind seeking total refuge from reality, would
hardly leave any breach of its seal against the world, no

matter how small that breach and no matter in what
distant corner it existed.

But I had hope. It was all I had, and it was warmly
nourished.

II

Sane and determined, I set out on foot to know the
place where I now found myself. There was no need to
provision for the journey, no matter what its length, for I
no longer held the needs of flesh. There was no such thing
as hunger, only a vague memory of what thirst had once
been. I couldn't know pain, nor pleasure—except on an
emotional, mental level. Though the world seemed physi-
cally as tangible as the real one, I moved through it like a
spirit, autonomous. I could have formed food and drink
from the air—as I had formed that sword to fight off the
Minotaur, for I still contained the same level of psychic
energy. But it would have been a charade with but a single
purpose: to make this world less alien and more like the
one I had left. And I had decided that I could only survive
by forgetting that other reality and accepting this one
fully.

There was no need to rest as I walked, for my analogue
body did not tire. I could run, letting the wind whip my
hair, for hours on end, without feeling a sore muscle, the
tugging fingers of gravity.

I came out of the caves onto a ledge no more than two
feet wide that wound out of sight along the side of an
immense gray mountain studded with shrubs and gnarled,
weathered trees whose extensive roots tangled through
the rocks like tentacles. Above, mists obscured the skies,
thick roiling masses of gray clouds that moved fast from
horizon to horizon. Fingers of the fog came down now
and then, slithered along the mountainside, touched the
trees and wrapped my legs so that I could not even see
my feet

I walked upward along the trail, deeper into the
darkness that lingered there. At places, the trail disap-
peared, and I had to climb across to where it started
again. I feared nothing, for I could not be hurt. As long as
Child lived and as long as I was trapped within him, I was
invulnerable.

Days or perhaps weeks later, I had gained the summit
of the great mountain. It was constructed of four pinna-
cles, each as tall as a man, which formed, between them,
a nest large enough to stand in. I nestled there, hunched
over, and looked out across the world that was his tor-
tured mind.

The mists hung all about me and shrouded the path I
had walked up on. It was cold and wet and left glistening
droplets on my skin. I went naked, though, for cold could
not harm me and was not a discomfort. It was merely a
quantity now, much like light or darkness. I accepted it and
watched the dew bead on the hairs on my arms and legs,
like pearls in the shimmering gloom.

I looked out from the peak in all directions. At times,
the curtains of gray would part, present a flash of some
strange scenery. It was as if all parts of the world were
equally near at hand from this summit—but a mile at
most. I saw green fields and a silver river cutting through
them like the winding body of a python. I saw a cold
white plain where there was snow and where slabs of ice
jutted upwards like broken teeth. I saw what seemed to be
stretches of impenetrable jungle, black flowers blooming
on the dark green foliage. I saw endless miles of sand, burnt
white beneath a relentless sun, columns of the dried earth
stirred upwards into the sky and winding erratically across
the barren landscape. There was a land of broken ebony
mountains where sunlight was reflected from polished
Stygian surfaces and came back brown.

It was clear that I would have to explore all these places
if I were ever to find the way out—if there happened to be
a way out. I rose from the earth and left the four stone
pillars, began the trek down the mountainside once more.

I was a third of the way down when the dark-winged
creatures descended through the fog, swept by me, cutting
the air with a sharp and unpleasant whine. I looked down
where they had disappeared through the lowest layers of
the mist. As I watched, they reappeared, rising gracefully

toward me. There was a smooth coating of black down
over their large, batlike bodies, giving them a warm,
smooth, gentle look. Set in each of their faces were two
wide eyes, deep brown things which looked back at me
with an almost unbearable melancholy.

They settled onto the trail before me, their wings curling
in on themselves, rolling into closed scrolls on their backs.
Distorted, many-fingered hands reached on tiny arms from
the point where their shoulders and wings connected: use-
less arms.

"Where do you go?" the largest creature asked me.

"To all the lands," I said.

"They are wide. And many."

"I have time."

"That is true."

"Where do you come from?" I asked. I knew they were
creatures fashioned by Child's mind, just as he peopled all
the landscapes with animals of eerie forms. I was intrigued
by their seeming intelligence.

"We are from—from the place where he is trapped."

"Where Child is trapped?" I asked,

"Yes," the smaller one said.

"Why doesn't Child come himself? Why must he take
the form of birds?"

"He is trapped. He wants out, but there is no way but
except through the dumb animals of his landscapes. He
can reach into us and make us more than we once were
and thus monitor this land through others' eyes."

"Can you take me to where Child is trapped?" I asked.

"We don't know."

"He can tell you."

"He doesn't know either," the smaller one said.

"Yet both of you are Child," I said. "In essence, you
are your master." The wind buffeted us, but we did not
mind it

"I suppose," the larger bird said. "But there's really very
little we can do about it. We can help him as he wishes. But
he can only impart his general intelligence and psychic
power to us. He cannot fully acquire us and speak through
us in the direct manner he might wish."

The smaller bird stepped forward and bent conspiratori-
ally. "You are aware, of course, that he is mad. And being
mad, he has become separated from total control of this

inner world of his. It remains, and he keeps it functioning.
But he does not share the harmony of it any longer."

"I understand," I said. "But why did you come to me?"

"We live in the mountains," the larger one said. "While
you were here, it was our duty to speak with you about
your journey."

"Speak," I said. It was raining slightly, a warm rain.

"We don't know what to say," the large bird said. "We
have his general urgency in mind. We understand that he
wishes us to say something to you concerning your idea to
travel. But we cannot say exactly what he feels about it.
We think, ourselves, that he wants you to continue, that
he wants us to urge you on. Perhaps he feels that you will
find the place where he dwells and will liberate him."

"Possibly," I said.

"We know the place is dark. It is cold and there are
things crawling on a blue floor, crawling all around him so
that he does not have a moment's peace. That is the sum
of our impression."

"I will watch for it," I said. "Now, I must be going."

Without a word, they leaped over the chasm, fell
through the mists until their wings buoyed them up, then
soared, beyond me, and were gone, making chattering
noises like dice rattled on a felt table.

I went down, past the entrance to the inside of the
mountain out of which I had come earlier. I walked for
another day and reached the tree-shrouded floor of the
valley, where the air smelled of pine and of flowers.
Waiting for me there was a creature much like a wolf,
with a hugely swollen head and a mouth full of long teeth.
Eyes like chips of iron, gray and unperturbed.

"I'll guide you through the valley," it said, scratching
paws in the earth. "I know it, and I can give you a look at
every hole there is."

"Fine," I said.

"First, you must change yourself. Assume my form so
that we can go more easily."

I had forgotten that the gossamer body analogue which
I had assumed for my journey through Child's mental
landscape was not the only shell I could use to contain my
psychic energy. There was nothing essential about a hu-
manoid form, for that psychic energy could take any form
that I wished. Gently, I released the surface tension of the
current, permitted my human body to shimmer and dissi-

pate. I flowed, settled, grew lower and sleeker until I was
a double for the wolf that waited for me.

I snuffled, scratched at the earth with razored claws and
saw the dirt runnel before me. In this new body, I had a
sense of power which I had never experienced before, a
new perspective on the world about me. It seemed as if, I
had been born to lycanthropy.

"Let's go," I said.

The wolf turned and loped away between the thick
trees, his big paws scattering dry, brown pine needles
which carpeted the forest floor. They rained over me as I
hurried to follow his example.

As I ran, my breath steamed in the cold air, and my
massive lungs heaved within my chest at the strenuous pace
we set.

The ground flashed under me. Flimsy brush parted
before me and closed, quivering, behind. To either side,
small animals ran, chittering and whimpering with their
fear. It was a completely structured reality, and it had
made me the king of beasts in this part of the woods. I
felt a burgeoning excitement at my omnipotence and my
superiority over these lesser creatures. And while I sa-
vored this heady attitude, I never once realized the danger
that was reaching cold fingers around me.

I enjoyed the muscular rhythm I had never known
either as a man or spirit, closed the gap on the wolf,
reached it by the time we broke through the pines into a
grassy field. We ran side by side, easy, smoothly, sure of
ourselves.

The journey had begun in earnest

III

We prowled the depths of the woods, sniffing through
the underbrush for the scent of Child, the odor of his
mental essence. There were times when I forgot every-

thing but my powerful shoulders, my claws and my teeth,
the keen powers of my black nostrils.

We rooted through the dark cavelets along the valley
walls which opened on the floor of the forest, seeking
into their darkest recesses, where our eyes refused to be
totally blinded. We overturned old, rotting lop in the
woods, seeking burrows through which the entrance to
Child's prison might be found. We padded through the
foaming cascade of a waterfall which issued from the valley
rim a thousand feet above, searching the subterranean
chambers beyond that wet curtain, finding nothing. If there
was a place with a blue floor where Child lay encircled by
undescribed creatures of a malignant nature, it was no-
where within this valley. Neither was there a doorway into
the conscious mind, no exit from this place where I found
myself trapped. The journey was not to have a swift con-
clusion.

For some reason, I was glad for the extension. There
was a strong reluctance to part with the form I had taken,
to return to the world and be, again, a man.

It was snowing outside as the wolf led me across the
last expanse of open fields before the impenetrable wall of
mist which separated this part of the analogue world from
the next. Big white flakes clung to our coats and frosted us,
kicked up in clouds as we pranced forward toward the
distant veil of fog.

We were sidetracked by the scampering of a covey of
quail-like animals off to our left. My lupine friend broke
into a wild, breathtaking run, teeth bared ferociously, lips
drawn back, slobber falling from his wide mouth.

I followed, feeling the wind and snow and scenting the
flesh of small creatures.

I saw him leap: muscles taut. I saw him land: a spring's
coils jammed together.

The air reverberated with the dying squeal of his prey.

In that instant, as the agony of death pierced the air
and the pride of a successful hunt shook me, I was more
wolf than man, and the danger began to grow more
imminent.

I stepped next to him and snuffled at his catch, watched
him rend the flesh. Blood fountained up as an artery was
struck, spurted crimson across his dark snout, stained his
teeth, dotted the snow around us. It steamed in the cold
air, this blood, and it had a smell uniquely its own.

I howled.

We tore at the animal together, and he kept his eyes on
me for a long while, cold gray eyes that did not disclose
the thoughts behind them. When we were done, our noses
red and the snow around us sodden, I did not feel disgust-
ed, but rather invigorated.

We turned back to our original pursuit and gained the
shifting walls of mists through which I would have to
pass.

"I want to return," I growled.

"So?" His breath reeked.

"May I return?"

"For what purpose?"

"To join your pack."

"That is most unwise. That is foolish, and you know it,
and you must journey. Be gone."

Then he turned and loped away, head hunched between
his rugged shoulders, eating up yards in a single bounding
leap.

Looking up at the even gray of the sky, I felt a hollow
longing within me, and I pawed the snow away from the
earth, dug the ground into a crosshatch of runnels. I
wiped my bloodied snout in the snow and lapped the
stained whiteness. I wanted to remain here forever, with-
out regard to my true heritage and nature, to bound after
the disappearing wolf and follow him to his pack. In the
night hours, there would be deep dens in hidden caves to
sleep in warmth and to climb upon some sleek and lovely
female with gray eyes and a shiny black snout. During the
daylight hours, there would be prowling in the fields and
in the sparsely treed grounds before the thickness of the
forests themselves. There would be blood and camarad-
erie, running together, killing together, defying the leaden
skies with my fellows....

Yet there was some nagging reason why I should go
beyond the mists to the next segment of this landscape,
though I could not remember what it was. I stepped
through the mists, tensed, but found no danger, only cool
wetness. I growled deep in my throat and broke through
to the other side.

The journey continued.

In the new section of the subconscious universe, there
was a taste of Ireland: stony ground, rolling hills so low
that one could be seen beyond the other, the smell of the

sea, flat areas of land marshy with the backwash of the
tidelands. Waiting for me by a column of limestone that
stood like a proscenium pillar without benefit of its stage,
was a centaur. His head was ringed with golden curls
which fell to his shoulders and framed a face of striking
masculinity: broad forehead above deep black eyes that
spoke of perserverance and a strong will, high aristocratic
cheekbones, a proud Roman nose, a blocky chin. His
shoulders were brawny, his arms rippling with muscles
that seemed to possess a will and intent of their own. From
the middle of his flat belly on down, he was a black
stallion of formidable proportions, the lines of a thorough-
bred in his long legs.

"My name is Kasostrous, and you may call me Kas," he
said.

"Call me Simeon," I growled, my voice a tangled hiss of
barely understandable guttural syllables.

"You must now acquire the form of the centaur," Kas
said, leaving the limestone thrust and ambling toward me.
His hooves clacked on the stony ground, sent sparks up
once or twice. His long, flashing length of tail whipped in
the breeze, tossed from side to side with lazy power.

"I like wolfhood," I said, pawing the ground, my nails
whispering on the dew-damp rock. I continued to stroke,
sharpening them for later kills.

"You like it too well," Kas said. "That is the trouble."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, staring up at
him with my flint eyes, hoping to strike terror in him. I
failed.

"You have fallen into the danger of identifying too
closely with the analogue you permit your psychic energy
to assume. Though such energy is malleable, the surface
tension can grow stronger with time, sap the will to return
to any other analogue, any other shape. Too long a time
as a wolf, and you will find yourself trapped not only in
the form, but in the character of the creature."

"Nonsense." But the word was said without conviction
and in such a guttural rumble that it only reinforced what
Kas said.

"You disprove your own words."

"I'm an esper," I said.

"So?"

"I understand these things."

"You do not grasp the difference of this subconscious

universe," he said. "There is a certain thing about it which
will trap you—you especially, given your past and your
mental condition."

I pawed the earth. "Help me grasp it," I said at last,
doubtful. I did not want to have to believe what he was
saying. I only wanted to be free to run and tear flesh and
mount the sleek females in the dark shadows of the dens.

"Child's mental landscape is peopled only with creatures
from legends and mythology. He read extensively in those
areas from the moment he could understand language,
and he viewed hundreds of senso-tapes on the subject. It
interested him, because he thought he might find a pur-
pose even stronger than the one which was connected with
the Christian mythos: the Second Coming which he be-
lieved was himself."

"But this wolf does not take the form of a mythological
creature," I argued with my wolf-mouth.

"There is a Tibetan legend which tells of monks trans-
formed to wolves. They were men who loved luxury and
betrayed the true intentions of their religion. They in-
dulged in women and in drink, in jewels and in food, and
all that was pretty and satisfying to the senses. Their god
came to them after they had defiled mere children in a
brothel contaminated with all manners of evil. In the
disguise of demons, their god offered them immortality for
their souls. It was a test to see if they were completely
depraved, or whether there was still some minim of decen-
cy within them. But all nine of the monks eagerly grasped
the straw of endless life at the sacrifice of nirvana, of
eternal life on another plane. And so he gave them im-
mortality and crushed their souls. But he gave them immor-
tality as wolves, as vicious reeking creatures hated and
feared by all, creatures who could no longer know a
woman's form but must run in dank dens, creatures unable
to make or appreciate the taste of wine or of a succulently
prepared roast."

"And you want me now to be a centaur."

"Yes. The oftener you change, the less chance you have
to be absorbed by any one particular mythical prototype.
And you, seeking some purpose beyond your human one,
are ripe for such an end as threatens you now."

"I can withstand the pressure."

"You can't," Kas said. He shook golden curls but of his
eyes. "You especially. All your life, just like Child, you

have relied heavily upon a mythological ill-logic to justify
your existence."

"Christian mythos," I corrected, wondering why I was
still trying to defend it.

"These are of the same level of value as the Christian
one. One will snare you as easily as the other. In all of
them, you will find the same simplicity and attractive lack
of complication as you found in Christianity's legends.
And you will never leave this place."

I thought, for the first time, of Melinda. I had been
forcing her and everything else out of my mind, refusing
to acknowledge her no-nonsense interviews in that other
world, her quick wit, and her supple and willing body.
Now they all rose and crowded into my consciousness at
the same moment, almost overwhelming me.

In time, as we stood there on the rolling earth under
the flat sky, listening to the sea, Kas said, "Will you?"

"What?"

"Change?"

"I guess... guess so."

"Soon, then."

I hesitated.

"Soon."

And I changed.

Together, we started off across the hilly land, galloping
under the steel blue of looming thunderhead clouds. My
own golden hair streamed behind me. My tail rode
straight out behind, fluttering in the fingers of the sea-
tinged air.

If anything, this was better than the form of a wolf,
carried more of a sense of freedom and delight.

Child was not to be found here, either. We searched
everywhere, including the flat white beach where the surf
curled. We trotted through the shushing foam of the sea,
kicking up shells and sending crabs in frantic flight. We left
our hoofprints in the sucking mud of the moors, in the rich
black earth of the grasslands, in the sand by the ocean.
Sure-footed, we climbed the few small peaks and surveyed
this sector of the world, looked for caves and came back
down again. In time, when it was apparent there was no
blue-floored room and no exit to Child's conscious mind,
we reached the curtain of mist to another climate, another
segment of the fractured reality that constituted Child's
mind.

I was forced to say goodbye to Kas the centaur, though
I longed to stay here and enjoy the horseman form a
while longer. He lectured me about disassociating from
my centaur form upon leaving this plane, and I listened
and made my promises.

In the next landscape, I returned to my human ana-
logue, though shedding the horseman form was painful and
filled me with a sad need to feel my hooves striking stone.
There was no life here to imitate, so I did not have to
worry about becoming inextricably meshed with a myth
figure. This was the land of the broken black mountains
which jagged up in slabs as big as houses, some even
larger than that, like a world of broken crockery and
shattered bottles. The sunlight was discolored by the re-
fracting stone and became a depressing brown. The air
was flat, as if it had been bottled for a long while, and no
breeze moved in it. There were no sounds, no movements.
The sky was an even, ugly yellow, like dark mustard, and
not a single cloud marked its expanse.

I walked forward.

The onyx rocks were smooth and cold against my bare
feet.

As I scrabbled up the terrain, my fingers squeaked on
the shiny surfaces. Those sounds seemed unendurably long
in the ghostly silence. I did not like this place at all,
wanted out of it as fast as I could move to the next veil of
mist. But it was here that I found Child, found the place
where he was trapped in his own madness....

IV

As I made my way over the ebony land, I reached a
chasm in the shattered rocks, perhaps a thousand yards
long and three yards wide at the top, narrowing to two
feet at the bottom. Down there, some three hundred feet
below, a soft blue light glowed. It seemed to be the gentle
blue of shallow water, but even this slight color branded

my eyes in contrast to the sameness of the terrain I had
been struggling across for some minutes.

I called down, listened to the flat echo, but received no
answer. If this was the place where Child waited, bound
by his own insanity, circled by unnamed demons, he was
unable to speak.

I swung over the jagged edge, looked to the bottom,
then grew wings like those I had seen on the batlike
creatures of the mountain. I descended gently, pulled the
wings in and absorbed them as the way grew too narrow
to glide. I dropped the last few feet onto the blue floor,
found it was made of ice.

To the right, the rock wall cut off three feet above the
ice, and the passage this created seemed to go on for some
distance. Lying on my stomach, I slid along the shimmering
ice; I was cold but not uncomfortable, exhilarated by the
freshness of the air here. A hundred feet further on, the
ceiling of black rock thrust suddenly upward, and I found
myself in a full-sized cavern where I could stand.

On my feet again, I crossed the barren room to the far
side where the ice-encrusted rock seemed to warp down-
ward. There, I discovered steps roughly chiseled in the ice.
I went down them, cautiously, eventually came out in a
shadowy chamber with another blue floor, though this one
was not empty: Child sat in the center of it in an ana-
logue version of his real body.

And...

And: the things crawled around him, circling in mind-
lessness, yet with a certain uncompromising evil that terri-
fied me even though I knew they could not do me any
physical harm. They were much like scorpions though
somewhat longer than a man's arm, with flared, knife-
edged carapaces shielding their backs, and twenty spindly
legs on either side. Their stinging tails forked at the end,
each of the two prongs tipped with a trio of wicked spurs
as long as my little finger and tapered to needle points.
They did riot look at me, nor did their sensory cilia, burst-
ing like whiskers around their beaked mouths, in any way
indicate that they realized my presence.

Their legs hissed on the ice, and their constant parade
had worn shallow grooves in the cold floor.

There were different numbers of them at different mo-
ments. Now there might be as few as a dozen describing
the wide circle—now a hundred of them, magically crys-

tallizing out of the crisp air—now thirty, now a dozen,
now two dozen. No matter how hard I looked, I could not
catch one of them appearing or disappearing, though their
numbers fluctuated with every passing second. I had the
feeling that I was in a funhouse where there was a compli-
cated array of trick mirrors and that there was actually but
one of these creatures whose presence was magnified to one
degree or another by ingenious, mirrored pyrotechnics.

"Child?" I called.

The withered dwarf paid no attention to me, but stared
with morbid fascination at the nightmarish scorpion
guards which kept him ringed in and obedient.

Since I had first been trapped in this subconscious
reality, I had not spared the time or the energy to consid-
er the reason and psychology behind many of the mental
analogues that constituted this inner universe. I had mere-
ly accepted and tried to deal with them, to search through
them for a way out, a way to freedom and my own body.
Now, as I watched the grisly parade before me, I began to
wonder what this collection of monsters was representa-
tive of. Why was Child's core of energy and intelligence
trapped in this place, bound to this single minim of his
entire subconscious universe? What were these scorpions
that surrounded him and maintained their constant, evil
vigil?

I examined them more closely and discovered that they
did not have that surface sheen of reality that the centaur
and the wolf had possessed. They shifted, as if they were
liquid, and fragments of thought associations whirled in-
side of them. It took only a moment to discover their true
nature.

Consider the human mind: three main parts to it: the
ego, the superego, and the id. The first is what we are and
what we have reached through the ordeals of life; the
second is what we think we are and what we attempt to
delude others into considering us as; the third is all the
things we want to be and do but which—either because of
public condemnation or a conflict with our own superegos
and guilt—we never dare consider. In the id, there are the
dark facets of our human soul, pieces of racial heritage
and other parts uniquely ours: blood lust and the desire to
rend flesh; sexual longings of grotesque sorts and on gro-
tesque scales; the urge to cannibalism, the hunger for the
taste of human meat We repress the id and most of us do

not even realize that it stirs within us like a worm in the
apple, so complete is our veil of civilization.

These scorpion-tailed monstrosities were Child's id lusts,
his ugly needs which he, like everyone, had always kept
repressed. It was impossible to say how they had gotten
free, how they had encircled him like this, but I ventured
a guess or two as I watched them clack horny mandibles
and lift rattling, bony legs. Perhaps, when he had consid-
ered himself the Second Coming, he had been unable
to pretend the id lusts did not exist. Perhaps, finally, in
order to continue thinking of himself as a deity, he had to
rip the id from the other parts of his mind, tear it free of
the ego and the superego. And now those lusts were
attempting to integrate themselves with his mind, to estab-
lish contact with the ethereal fragments of his thought
processes, where they belonged. Or perhaps the id had
been broken loose of the rest of his mind when he had
tipped into insanity. Either way, they had found him
again, and they had spell-bound him with their evil. He
held them off with his psychic energy, still unable to toler-
ate their being a part of him. (Did he still nurture the
Second-Coming fantasy—or perhaps some equal legend
from another mythology?)

"Child?" I asked again.

Again: no answer.

If I could free him, if only for a moment, could contact
him and jar him into a moment of sanity, perhaps I could
get him to open a way into his conscious mind, a path to
lead me out of his body. But as long as the scorpions were
there, as long as he was transfixed by the sight of these
lusts he had forgotten, I could not reach him.

For the third time since I had first entered his mind
that day so long ago, I fashioned a sword from the air, a
shimmering blue luminosity with a curving blade and a
hilt of dazzling light. Stepping forward, I hacked at the
first of the scorpions in my way, halved it. It vanished. I
turned to a second of them, tore it through, then swung
furiously, wading through the spinning members of the
huge creatures, destroying them as fast as the magic mir-
rors brought them to my attention.

Their sound was a screeching cacophony, and their
mandibles punctuated the wailing fury with a drumbeat of
irregular snapping, thrumming clacks against the ice floor.

I do not know how long the battle lasted. It seemed

that perhaps days passed, though there was no sunrise and
sunset down there—and I did not tire in my analogue
body, did not need to stop for food and drink. I was the
irresistible force, wading into the legs and tails and shining
carapaces. In time, the numbers of the scorpions began to
grow smaller, and at last the air refused to disgorge more
of them. I knew they were not gone forever, because they
were nothing more than psychic energy, and that could
never be truly destroyed. But by then, I would not care if
they encircled him.

Child still sat on the ice, staring where the scorpions
had marched but where there was now nothing but scored
ice. Approaching his analogue cautiously, I touched him,
hunkered before him.

"Child?"

Quiet.

"Child? Speak to me?"

He looked at me. He blinked his eyes. And then chaos
broke loose as his insanity boiled through the surface
tension of the analogue and swept over me!

I was swept up, up, on a tide of human flesh, of torn
arms and legs, of bleeding mouths, broken teeth, shattered
bones, burning flesh, splintered eyeballs. Monsters rose in
the swell and came toward me, lumbering ogres and swim-
ming reptilian horrors. The arms and mouths in the ocean
of human parts attacked me, grasped me and tried to pull
me down, bit me and chewed at my unreal psychic flesh.

I felt myself losing hold of my own equilibrium. In a
moment, I would spiral over the edge, into madness for
the second time. I had recovered only recently, and I
knew a second plunge to the bottom of that well would be
the last I would ever make. I would fall back into gibber-
ing incoherency, and I would remain there forever. Twice
mad is once too often, and the shores of detached logic
would never be available to me again.

The nearest ogre reached for me, with his seven-
fingered hands, each finger tipped with the fanged mouth
of a yellow-eyed snake.

I rolled across the rippling floor of human parts, kicking
pieces of bodies up as I went.

The snake fingers missed by inches.

A flurry of mutilated corpses clutched me and pulled
me under the surface of the sea.

I fought to air again, through nightmare conglomer-
ations of dead men and women,

"CHILD!" I screamed.

Another ogre thundered down on me.

In the last moment before I could be grasped and dis-
membered, I did the only thing that would save me. Giving
myself over to the basest of my id lusts, radiating blood-
hunger and sexual need of the vilest sort, I repelled the
ogres and the dragons, forced back the tide of human
bodies that tore at me. In seconds, I was back on the blue
ice floor where again the analogue of Child sat, tranced.

I circled him. Now I was in the form of one of the
great scorpion beasts, mandibles chattering, forked sting-
ing tail raised above my back, ready to attack.

His psychic energy formed a wall against me, but I
danced on, broached that wall with my own mind, and
leaped upon him, thrashing with him on the floor. This
time, rather than argue with him, rather than plead with
him, I devoured his psychic energy, destroyed him, ab-
sorbed him, and dissipated his shattered mind throughout
my own.

Child no longer existed. I had killed him. But now I was
in total control of his body. I left that place, made it
dissolve around me. I made the mountain appear, and I
climbed it, entered the caves through which I had first
come down into Child's subconscious mind. In moments, I
had freed myself, and was looking out at the world
through Child's eyes, encased, again, in real flesh....

THREE

The Incomplete
Creation...

I

I found myself in Child's body, lying in a hospital bed
with the barred sides raised to provide the illusion of a
prison. The room was a private one, somewhere far up in
the tower of Artificial Creation, no doubt. There was no
light but that from a small blue bulb plugged directly into
a floor socket. In that eerie glow, I could see that there
was no nurse in attendance. How long had Child lain like
this, dazed, almost comatose, unable to speak or see or
hear anything of the real world as his madness kept him
sealed in the analogue of his subconscious? Days or
weeks? Perhaps even years?

Somewhat frantic at that last thought, I pushed up,
weak and dizzy. My frail, bony arms felt as if they would
crack, but they got me to the edge of the bed just the
same. My short legs dangled a foot from the tiles after I
got the barred slats down, and that measly twelve inches
looked more like two or three miles. I built my courage,
dropped, felt skinny legs buckle. I crashed forward on my
face and lay there for a while, collecting my wits.

Was this what it was like for Child, this inability to
cope with the inadequacies of his own body, this helpless-
ness and dependence? No wonder his own search for a
purpose and identity had been so much more thorough
and extensive than my own.

I got on hands and knees and gripped the edge of the
bed for support, gained my feet again. The door was but a
dozen steps away. I toddled toward it, collapsed against it,

holding on to the knob to keep from taking another
serious fall.

Opening the door was a major chore, compounded by
the fact that I wanted to do it quietly. I didn't want
anyone to know that I was awake now and moving
around. First, I wanted to find out a few things, attempt
to discover how long I had been trapped in Child's mind.
And if I could somehow locate my own body—for, surely,
they were keeping it somewhere close at hand, in another
dark hospital room—and re-enter it before they were
aware I had returned, I would be in a better position to
take care of myself. I didn't trust Morsfagen or any other
super-patriot professional soldier. The more ignorant I
was about what had transpired since I had gone mad
within Child, the further removed I was from my own
body and, therefore, autonomy, the more power they
would hold over me, the more they could demand and
perpetrate.

The door finally opened and gave a view of an empty
corridor that was painted a flat, unreflective blue. I
stepped out of the room, closed the door, and hung by the
wall, breathing heavily and trying to ignore the pain in the
sunken chest of the mutant body which I inhabited.

I didn't care if I destroyed Child's body during this
trek, for I had already destroyed Child himself by absorb-
ing his psychic energy back there in that blue-floored room
beneath the broken, ebony plain. He would never own his
body again. I could feel his intellect, devoid of any person-
ality now, within my own mind, magnifying my intelligence
and perceptions. But that was the only minim of Child's
real self that would ever survive.

Pushing away from the wall, I started down the cor-
ridor. I could not expect it to remain empty for long, and
I would gain nothing by being seen here, before I had
learned anything of my situation. I weaved from wall to
wall, barely managing to keep my feet. And when the tall,
uniformed man appeared at the head of the stairwell and
shouted in surprise, I collapsed on my face....

When I woke, I was in the same hospital room, in the
same bed, with the metal slats raised around the sides to
keep me from falling out. There were differences, though.
There was plenty of light, and there was a nurse, a
buxom, gray-haired matron with a bland, pleasant face
and a concerned look plastered all over it. There was a

guard by the door, on the inside, his holster unsnapped.
Why I should be considered that much of a threat when I
could hardly even walk, I did not know. Morsfagen and a
white-smocked physician stood by the right side of my
bed, looking down at me. The physician exhibited concern
and professional interest. Morsfagen had a look of hatred
and sheer animal cunning.

"Welcome back," he said.

"I'm thirsty," I croaked, realizing for the first time how
parched my throat was.

The nurse brought me water, which I gulped eagerly.
The chips of ice rattled against my teeth, stung my gums.
But it was all quite good, better than expensive wine.

"No more water, no more anything until some questions
are answered," the general said.

"Yes," I replied.

"What has happened to Simeon Kelly?"

For a moment, I was surprised. Then I realized that
they had no way of knowing this wasn't Child who had
awakened. It meant that there were other things they
could not know, things which would give me the upper
hand.

"I am Kelly," I said.

"No games," he snapped.

"This isn't."

He looked at me closely. "Maybe you had better ex-
plain."

So I told him about Child's investigation into the nature
of God. He did not seem moved by the discovery that the
universe held no purpose, that God is insane and always
has been. Perhaps he did not believe me. I rather think
that was the case with the doctor and the nurse and the
guard by the door. But there was a crisp, cold gaze there
that said Morsfagen did believe—and not only that he
believed, but that he had come to the same conclusions
himself some time ago, though he had simply lacked the
proof that Child had managed to obtain. There was no
room for God in Morsfagen's life, I realized. He had
always operated outside a belief in heaven and hell and
retribution for sin.

I carefully avoided mentioning that I had absorbed
Child's energy, that he would never regain his body. If
they thought that all could soon be returned to normal,

they would be more eager to see me back in my own
flesh, wherever it was kept.

When I was done, I asked: "How much time has
passed?"

"A month," he said.

It was startling, yet it could have been worse. I had
steeled myself to accept the word "years," and this was a
blessing by comparison. A lot could have happened in a
month. But Melinda might still be free, might still be
waiting. Harry would be alive. My house would not have
been sold to creditors. Yes, there was still time to regain
normality.

"I want my own body," I said. That was the first step to
that normality.

"Perhaps," Morsfagen said.

I looked around at the others to see whether they
understood the cruelty in that tease. None of them seemed
to pay any attention. Perhaps part of their jobs included
paying no attention to such things.

"What is this—perhaps?" I asked.

Child's voice box made the words seem sinister when
they were actually spoken in fear.

"Perhaps," he said, his face impassive, "it would be
better for all of us if no one outside of this room ever
discovered that you have regained sanity and are ready to
return to your own body. It would be less trouble to get
you doing work for us. We would not have to pay you
anything. All in all, perhaps it would be a wise idea."

The nurse paid no attention. But her pleasant face
mirrored her tacit agreement with Morsfagen.

The doctor took my pulse, listened at my chest with a
stethoscope, checked my eyes and ears, ignoring what
transpired around him.

The guard, by the door, had Morsfagen's impassive
look.

I was alone.

Except for Child's intellect, which had expanded my
own. There was a cunning about me now that I had not
possessed before. Morsfagen would think he knew me:
fast on the cutting remarks, but low on cleverness. But
that had changed, and I was now every bit as devious as
he.

"One problem," I said.

"What's that?"

"I've told you that it took me this full month to shake
loose of my own madness and to free myself from Child's
insanity. I nearly lost my mind again trying to find a way
through his subconscious landscape. You scanning all this
so far?" He indicated that he was by saying nothing.
"Now, if I'm trapped in this frame, welded so closely to
his mind, I'm going to succumb to his insanity again—and
this time it will be permanent. I couldn't stand the ordeal
of recovery again." In that whispered, deathlike rattle of
Child's, the words took on even more sincerity than I had
tried to give them.

Morsfagen looked doubtful. It was almost as if he could
sense the change in me, sense the expanded awareness and
cunning. But he could not take the chance that I was not
telling him the truth, and he knew that I had won. He was
going to have to console himself with the fact that at least
he now had me in full mind for future use; if he tried to
play for full stakes and keep me locked in Child's body, he
might very well wind up with nothing. And military
careers are not built on blunders.

"Bring him along," he ordered the doctor. "We'll let
him have his body back." He smiled at me, but it was not
a pleasant smile. "But you'd better cooperate, Kelly. It's
time of war now, and that rules out your brand of
frivolity."

"I understand perfectly," I said, not without a touch of
sarcasm.

"I'm sure you do."

And he left the room.

Minutes later, they wheeled me into the corridor to
keep my rendezvous with my own coma-ridden flesh. . . .

All the while, I gloried in the thought that I was swiftly
getting the upper hand and that before they realized what
had happened, I would be in my former position of
dominance. There were two minds' worth of energy within
me, plus the complex intellect of Child now amplifying my
own. They were mere men, I told myself, and they stood
no chance at all.

I did not realize that I was making the same mistake
that I had made twice before. In the old days, I had
convinced myself that I was a god of sorts, the Second
Coming, and my life had been disastrous because of that
fantasy. In Child's subconscious, I had eagerly sought to
be transformed into the mythic images of Tibetan wolves,

into something transcending humanity, and that might
have cost me my mind and my eventual recovery. And
now, as I was wheeled down the corridor, I again looked at
myself as more than a man, as a minor god soon to prove
his power. Because I had never allowed myself to associ-
ate with "mere men," I did not understand them, or
myself. And my latest delusions of grandeur were bound
to lead to ultimate disaster....
And did...

II

My legs were cramped, and even a slight bit of move-
ment made my shoulders ache, for the staff had not been
exercising my body with the proper degree of enthusiasm
during the month it had been vacant. I felt weak, and my
stomach was a hard knot. Having been fed intravenously
for some four weeks, the stomach had shrunk and felt like
a clenched fist in there, squeezing my guts. Otherwise:
fine. And since it was such a delight to be housed in my
own flesh once again, I was willing to overlook the little
aches and pains of readjustment to life. I didn't complain,
and I tried not even to grimace.

Morsfagen seemed disappointed by that.

They wheeled Child's carcass out of the room. It would
continue to live, though it would never exhibit intelligence
again. It was a husk, nothing more. I still had not told
them, for I was still not free of the AC complex and out
of their immediate reach. Morsfagen would not take kind-
ly to such a trick, and I didn't want to be around whenev-
er he discovered it.

I showered, washed away the weeks of sickbed smell.
The hot water seemed to loosen my cramped muscles, and
dressing was only half the ordeal I had expected. When I
slipped into my jacket and checked my reflection in the
mirror, Morsfagen said, "Your shyster is waiting down-
stairs."

I held back the witty reply designed to demolish him,
for I knew that was exactly what he wanted. He was
searching for some reason to slap me down, either with
his fists or with a preventive detention arrest. Why we had
hit it off so miserably from the start, and why our hatred
for each other was now twice what it had been, I didn't
know. True, we were altogether different types, but the
antagonism we felt for each other was deeper and more
unremitting than a mere clash of personalities.

"Thank you," I said, leaving him with nothing to at-
tack. I walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway
into the corridor before he replied.

"You're welcome."

I turned and looked at him and saw that he was smiling,
that same cold smile of hatred which I had grown used to
by then. He had said "you're welcome," but not with any
seriousness—which meant that he understood me and knew
that I understood him too.

"We'll contact you day after tomorrow," he said.
"There's a lot of work to do. But, after what you've been
through, you deserve a little rest."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome."

Again. And grinning this time too...

I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank
of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-four-
inch guard as company. We didn't say much of anything
to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of
any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack
of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an un-
educated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither ex-
actly superior, but both separated by a mammoth com-
munications gap.

Down...

Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when
the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly
vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.
He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated
smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child's body. He
hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and
he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to
conceal.

I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved
this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most

of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe
it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as
self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world
inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love
was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less
involved so that if you're hurt later, the anguish doesn't
show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now
unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.

We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank
and went down to the underground garage, where the
attendant brought Harry's hovercar, accepted a tip, and
stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling
building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight
had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first
time, out of the range of those microphones which infest
any government building.

"You'll tell me about it now," he said, his eyes flicking
from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to
where I sat against the far door. "They wouldn't let me up
to see you but once a week, you know."

"You'd only have been looking at flesh and blood," I
said. "All this time, I've been inside of Child, locked down
there in his mind."

"As I figured," he said. "But those"—he jerked his
thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted—
"those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don't trust."

"They didn't exercise my body properly. And they
didn't take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.
Otherwise, I'm fine."

He snorted. "So tell me,"

"You first. I've spent a month in that place, and I don't
have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.
When I went in, war had all but been declared. The
Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border,
maybe nuked a town...."

He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us
for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and
the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling
between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed
almost empty of traffic.

"War was declared two days later," he said.

"And we won?"

"Partly."

I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occu-

pied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw
now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled
some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained
coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the
dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark
glances, though they offered no pursuit.

"Partly?" I asked.

As we flitted across the city, he summed up the de-
velopments of the month-long war:

The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was
nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered
wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of
the moderately large population, there were six hundred
survivors.

Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed
into the service of the People's Army of China—a euphe-
mism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictator-
ship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks
had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimano-
vsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the
Soviet Union.

In this time, the Western Alliance had been making
preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese,
who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to
make it apparent that they considered the West with
scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every
Western Alliance nation, and the world organization re-
plied by trade sanctions against China. These too were
laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle
for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threat-
ened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and
beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the
electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from
Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching
midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the
strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a
major conflagration until our side was immune to attack
behind its shield generators and victory was assured the
West.

Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were
still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops
into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they
pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.
They made false promises that this was all the land they

Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with
warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteri-
ological war, for their population was so much greater
than ours that it could not help but outlast us.

The Alliance, furious, bided time.

Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on For-
mosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing
craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China,
the back door was entered and the house secured by the
enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic
airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese
and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.
But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans
the rising sun, harbored in the islands.

The following day, with even the peace criers united
behind the government, the crash force working to erect
electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the
Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched
molecules in place and the generators backed with a
second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war
on China and Japan.

We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major
industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions
in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped
out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared
for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.
But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained in-
tact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles
upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not
one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for
obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying cap-
tured territory, gone to the construction of "clean"
bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in
the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of
molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large
dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and
not decreased by that expansion.

In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of
the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the
countryside, people died, but even many of these were
saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property
damage, at this point, was zero.

The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a
final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.

The Japanese had already surrendered in order to pro-
tect what little unmolested lands the home islands still
contained.

The Chinese command center was discovered at last,
destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and
end. Or so everyone thought....

"Thought?" I asked.

"We have ambitious men for our military leaders,"
Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.

"Go on."

"We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed
military service laws," he said.

"How so?"

"Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid
professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Al-
liance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like
to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization
—and because combat and planning for combat excites
them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war,
and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all
this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing
death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold
war where guns were never fired. And before that, there
were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even
exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to
prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of
men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit,
they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and
peace."

I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night
seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious
need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth,
the seeking together and the final closeness. It was such an
intense desire that I grew dizzy with it.

"So?" I managed to ask.

"So, they didn't want to stop. They were moving, living
their dreams, and loving it. They were on the edge of the
thing they'd all fantasized about—conquering the world.
They could incorporate every nation into the Alliance, and
then it would be over. All the plans and subplans, plots
and counterplots and counter-counterplots came together
in a marvelous mosaic, and they just couldn't resist. China
was occupied, but the artillery was turned, next, on South
America."

"They're neutral!"

"Mostly," he agreed. "But the Alliance generals were
bothered by South America's autonomy, especially sines
Brazil had been making that space effort of theirs pay or!
with the mineral ships from Titan. The continent fell in
slightly less than a week—yesterday, to be exact. They
were either badly prepared militarily, or had oriented their
armies toward the exploration of space. They've come
under the banner of the Alliance—angrily, reluctantly, but
under it."

"And all the countries already in the Alliance—they all
went along with this?"

"Not all. But in Russia, the military had taken control
of the government years before. France and Italy
knuckled under to the popular sentiment of their people,
of the common man. Spain is a military nation to start
with—no problem there."

"But Britain and the U.S. wouldn't stand for it!" It
sounded false.

"Britain did refuse, said she wouldn't supply her own
men for the Alliance endeavor. But she gave tacit approv-
al by continuing trade and diplomatic relationships with
all her allies. She's too small to really buck them, and she
could only maintain her military's integrity, nothing more.
Canada did the same, though Quebec declared indepen-
dence and won it—or at least had the last time I heard—
and joined the militant ranks of the other Alliance na-
tions. As for us, the U.S., we were in it from the moment
the Soviet generals made the suggestion. The peace criers
were right all along: a volunteer army can become a
secondary government and can threaten the elected one if
the time is ripe. The coup came two mornings after the
Soviet proposal when it became obvious that the elected
government was not going to agree to a world-wide cam-
paign. We are now ruled by a police-army coalition, by a
council of eighteen generals and admirals, and the war—
meantime—goes on."

"Who now?"

"Australia," he said. "She has become self-sufficient,
which the Alliance military advisors never have appreci-
ated. Sydney was obliterated this afternoon and an ultima-
tum was delivered to the Australian government shortly
thereafter."

Neither of us spoke for a while.

The snow continued to fall, faster than ever.

"Dictatorship then?" I asked.

"They won't call it that."

"Nazism?"

"It's a mistake to apply the terms of other eras. The
same sense of chauvinism is there, and a roiling muck of
nationalistic fantasies. You can bet the Alliance factions
will break down in a monumental squabble once this war
is over. The Russians against us, a real Armageddon. They
have the taste of blood, and the old hates have been
resurrected on all sides."

"And nothing can be done?"

He didn't answer me, aware that it was an unanswer-
able question. He just drove and looked morose and con-
tributed to my flagging spirits.

This was the age of instant history. More could happen
in a week than happened in a year in the previous centu-
ry. Everything moved, relentlessly, determinedly, and we
were all caught up by it, swept along, either to be
drowned in the swell or carried to a foreign shore on the
wave crests.

I had a feeling I was going to be one of those to drown.
I was valuable to the war machinery. And even when the
war was over, I could serve the junta with my esp, help to
oppress those at home who would not appreciate the
beauty of a military nation. And I didn't know whether I
could do that, for I might be one of those rebelling
myself. All my life I had been floundering from one
emotional disaster to another, drawing in and in and in
upon myself. And then I had met Melinda, had been
treated by my Porter-Rainey Solid-State headshrinker, and
had opened myself to the world for the first time, had
tasted pure freedom and enjoyed it. The loss of my sanity
within Child's mind and the long attempt to get free of
him had interrupted my enjoyment of that new-found
peace. And now that I was back, now that Melinda and a
pleasant future lay within my grasp, the world was in the
hands of the madmen who threatened to tear it apart.

But I couldn't drown. I had to ride those wave crests,
had to survive to keep Melinda surviving. Damn them and
their bombs and their war lusts!

As we drove, I felt my rage grow, swell, encompass my
entire mind. And I realized that it would not be good
enough to ride those crests. At most, the two of us would

come out alive, washed ashore after the apocalypse, with
each other. But our world would be destroyed and useless,
and we would have no freedom, then, at all. Life would
be a constant battle for survival in a society thrown back
to barbarism. No, what I was going to have to do was
forget about riding the crests of the waves—and find some
way to direct the tides of the entire damn ocean of our
future!

"Not that I don't find your company perfectly marvel-
ous," I told Harry, "but could you take me to Melinda's
place instead of yours?"

He hesitated before he said it, but he said it just the
same. "She isn't at her place, Sim. She's been arrested.
She's a political prisoner."

It took long seconds for the words to sink in. When
they did, my rage became godly wrath, and I began to
seek someone upon whom to vent it. I was not afraid for
her safety. I basked in the certainty of my power. I still
did not see that I was bound up in the same flawed
philosophy that had brought me to ruin so many times
before....

III

I stood by the window of Harry's den, holding a glass
of brandy which I had not yet tasted. Beyond the win-
dow: a copse of trees, snow-covered grass, white-bearded
hedgerows. The stark, wintry vista matched my thoughts,
as I considered what Harry had told me on the way over.
Melinda had become engaged in writing pamphlets for
some revolutionary group and had been under surveil-
lance. Upon the magazine publication of the first part of
her biography of my life—the childhood years in the AC
complex—she had been arrested for questioning in con-
nection with the death of a copper and the destruction of
a howler some two weeks before. Whether there had been

any questioning or not, no one would know; she was still
under arrest.

The magazine article had not merely been a biography,
but had contained scorchingly anti-military, anti-AC anec-
dotes which neither of us had decided, before my en-
tombment in Child's mind, whether we should risk using
or not. She had risked it.

"When is the trial?" I asked him now. We had post-
poned further discussion until we were warm and com-
fortable in his den—at his insistence.

"A date has been docketed before the Military Court of
Emergency. Next September."

"Seven and a half months!" I turned from the window,
furious, slopping brandy over my wrist.

"When the act is labeled treason, there are laws that
permit it."

"What's her bail?" I asked.

"There is none."

"Is none?"

"What I said."

"But the law allows—"

He held up his pudgy hand to stop me. He looked
terrible, as if telling me this was worse on him than on
me. "This is no longer a republic, remember. It is a
military state where men like the junta councilmen decide
what laws there shall be. For sedition, they now say, there
is no bail, and the rule of preventive detention has been
extended indefinitely."

"Fight them!" I bellowed. "You fought them for me
when——"

"It's different now," he interrupted. "You still don't
grasp the situation. I worked the law on them before to get
you free. But now they are the law and they can change it
to counter one. It's like dancing on quicksand."

I took a chair, and again I was afraid, just a little, down
deep where it hardly showed. This was beginning to feel
like the inner world of Child's mind, where everything was
solid and tangible, but where nothing could be trusted,
where solidity could disappear, where liquid could become
solid ground beneath the feet.

"She's not the only one," he said, as if mass suffering
made her individual plight less important. It only made it
more important.

"Let me have the phone," I said, reaching for it.

"Who?"

"Morsfagen."

"This might be a mistake."

"If the sonofabitch wants my esp, wants my work, then
he is just going to have to see that she gets out of the
Tombs!"

I found the number in Harry's private directory of
unlisted phones, dialed it, and waited while a soldier called
a noncom to the phone—while the noncom went and got
a major who stuttered—and while the major finally went
and summoned Morsfagen.

"What is it?" he asked. Cold. Deadly. Forceful. The
sound of the well-trained bill collector.

"There's a girl being kept in the Tombs, charged with
sedition, for god knows what reason. She——"

"Melinda Thauser," he said, cutting me short. He
seemed to enjoy that. Like putting thumbscrews on me.

"I see you're up on things all around. Well, catch this,
then. I want her released, and I want all charges dropped
against her."

"That's beyond my control," he said—he did.

"It better not be."

"It is."

"It better not be, because you've just lost yourself an
esper if it is."

"Services that can be commandeered in time of war—
like an esper's services—are never lost," he said. Color
him infuriatingly calm, cool, and collected. I wanted to
kick his damned teeth in. He probably would still have
smiled at me with that smile.

"Services cannot be commandeered unless the crafts-
man can be found," I said.

"Is this a threat to withhold services from the govern-
ment in a time of national crisis?" he asked, smiling
through every word. Snapping turtle mouth there, looking
for one of my incautious fingers.

"Look," I said, trying another tack, "suppose we let the
charges ride for the time being. Suppose the only thing
that you concede is the bail. A low bail, but she'll still
stand trial."

"Out of my control," he said again. But the tone of his
voice said that nothing was ever out of his control.

"Like hell!"

"I'm not on the junta, you know."

"Look, Morsfagen, suppose she also destroys the damn
book. Now it's the book she's in trouble for, isn't it? The
first part of it?"

"With or without the book," he said, "the trouble re-
mains for us. The danger does not lie within the printed
page, but within the mind of the man setting words to
paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn't any
use discussing it. I haven't any say about it. Besides, I've
seen her picture, and I'm certain you can wait seven
months for that kind of stuff." Voice of the obscene tele-
phone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his
throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang
up.

"I know why you're in the military now," I said, my
voice deceptively neutral.

"Why is that?" he asked, walking into it.

"When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must at
least be a little consolation." And I hung up on the creep.

"That was definitely a mistake," my mentor said.

I picked my coat up and worked into it. "Maybe."

"No maybe about it. Where are you going now?"

"Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I'll get a
message to you so you'll know where I'm at. Wait. Scratch
that. I've got a key to Melinda's apartment. If it's still
unoccupied, I'll stay there. They'll check hotels right
away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I'm not as
potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don't
need my esp. But I rather think they'll come crawling
after a while; it's the only way I can help her."

"You love her?" he asked.

I nodded. I couldn't really say it. Maybe it was still a
hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was
just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.
Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.

"Then hurry," he said. "You might not have much
time."

I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his
two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through
the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one
side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up
and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion
mechanism, but I didn't hit anyone.

Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda's arrest was her own
actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in

my side to hold me should I ever return from the no-
man's-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect in-
surance policy, they must have thought, against my temper
and foolishness.

I parked the car on my patio and entered the house
through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and
folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox
into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all
in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one
government could not much affect its value. I took two
game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range
downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and
put everything in the car.

As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside
the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic
Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of
the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into
sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.

IV

I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching
vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a
crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what
they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular
patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were
sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not
wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the
woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the de-
velopment, and knew the hovercar would never hold up
on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work
on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew
through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor
of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.
And if I went back, there was only my house to take
refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road

down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it
was working against me.

The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the
damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no
more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades
setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to
rock my own hovercar.

Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house
arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt
that I would work for them, and there was no chance that
I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda
Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last
vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded
me into the howler and took me quietly away.

But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it
that easy for them.

Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous
and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the
time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot"
and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.

Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler,
I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my
craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost
my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took
hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.

The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the
blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation
was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot
forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung
three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate
dandelion fluff—which turned abruptly into a lump of lead
and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.

I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air
cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back
against full stop so that none of the power could be used
to drive the craft forward or backward—it all went
straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped
the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.

The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I
hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a
hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have
been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the
story would have ended much differently indeed.

The last thirty feet, the building column of air under

the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of
contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too
much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into
the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the
grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded
me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the
blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet
above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise some-
where below, but it could not be that serious if the car
still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceler-
ation, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.

Taking the car out next to the curling waves that
foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the
cliff to see what was transpiring there—and was just in
time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush
to follow me.

Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to
ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev
four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra
compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim
to add extra boost if the time should come when they are
needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot
embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on
foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But
ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundred-
foot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge
howler fell like a mountain.

In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed
and force that the blades at full and the compressed air
jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could
see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the
armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.

The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only
have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades
smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like
cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a
decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety
glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see
what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes
off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted
to.

Down...

And down...

Sand exploded  upward  as  the howler reached the
beach.

But the thing wasn't slowed.

It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound,
with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in
upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped
toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty
miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way
thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.

At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo
section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some
hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and
flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of
ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who
had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere,
burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.
They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific
impact of the crash.

Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched
by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and
gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming
down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would
have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had
had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.

The howler's descent, however, had been a good object
lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.

I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the
city, where I knew I could regain the highway before
long.

In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for
me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers
of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true
that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the
gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wield-
ing the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape re-
sponsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of
us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we con-
stantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?
Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to
recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses
behind.

As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with
myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with them—
and yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to

work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself,
time to make my anger into something more formidable
than emotion.

I was superman, and it was time to act like one.

Or so I thought and so it seemed to be....

V

In the large apartment complexes such as the one in
which Melinda maintained her home, there is every conve-
nience of modern living that one could wish for—all
under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are
special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and
beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hover-
cars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restau-
rants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and
car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal
prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved
chemical stimulants.

To connect all these facilities and to make them all
accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-block-
square structure (and when you consider that with eighty
floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720
square blocks, you can easily envision how distant some
points of the complex can be from others), there is a
maze of express elevators, slow elevators, descending and
ascending escalators, horizontal pedways with belts mov-
ing at a variety of speeds, and stairs—though very few of
the last. Near any of the main shopping plazas within the
structure, one needs only to stand close to any wall to
hear the thrumming arteries of transportation moving
ceaselessly, efficiently, like blood behind the plastic and
the plaster.

It is possible to live in one such complex without ever
finding the need to leave for wider spaces. If the urge to
divorce oneself from civilization and its mad pace be-
comes too urgent, there are the underground parks with

false sunlight and real trees and four floors of convoluted
paths and bubbling, fresh brooks. There are butterflies and
small animals and birds. If one happens to be a sports
aficionado, there are arenas where various games are
played out weekly. Some housewives who seek no career
beyond that of running their home may be married in the
complex church, return from a honeymoon, and perhaps
live the next ten years in eighty floors, each nine square
blocks. Husbands who work at stores within the complex
and not at professions that take them into other parts of
the city, may spend an equal length of time without ever
seeing the real sky and the real world except through their
windows—which usually exhibit other apartment com-
plexes built nearby.

And no one seems to mind.

In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing,
as something all of us should desire.

For instance:

Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent
within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors
are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central
scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on
illegal activity against the residents would find that it is
utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic
identicard full of computer nodes which activate the auto-
matically locked doors. And only residents are carefully
screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since
everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern,
blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic
readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within
and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the
outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets,
and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is
quietly attractive.

Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem
outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped
fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then,
some of the European and Asian countries had still not
seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the
mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside,
the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung
cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortu-
nate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact

mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The
same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on
and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate
filtration systems, and this selling point was never over-
looked.

Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable
in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the
mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller
stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes,
buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of
thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and
pass the savings on to the residents.

A community sense of togetherness, the realtors insist,
has all but died in the regular life style, in the cities and
the suburbs. There, they say with great sincerity, there is a
dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself attitude. In the great
complexes, this is not so. There is a camaraderie, a sense
of group achievement, a community pride and identity
that makes life more like it used to be: "Back When." No
man need be an island, but a part of a great continent.

Trumpets. Drums. End of the ad.

Why don't I live in one, then? Why build a house by the
sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are
lots of reasons.

For instance:

Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary
evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a
man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able
to do according to his standing as a member in the human
community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with
a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever
man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in
the end, you have criminals making the free-enterprise
system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So
you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to
live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those
liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of
rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the
unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find
loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is
destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the
unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile
anyway—or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the
list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on

competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves
"city government" and steal legally. And with their sur-
veillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and
escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resi-
dent, which grow thicker with data each year, the apart-
ment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it
from their residents.

Pollution? Well, maybe I'll die of lung cancer sooner
than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the
sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone pro-
duced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and
cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.

Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes,
and perhaps that's because the companies really want to
give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But
there is something frightening, to me at least, about depend-
ing on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink,
your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and
your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my
father image, by the time I was halfway through adoles-
cence. I don't yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by
some team of accountants and cost-projecting computers.

A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life
much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I
don't want to have to be friends with anyone merely
because I happen to live near them. I don't enjoy the high
school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the
brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking
companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw
an example of that community togetherness which banded
the "innocent" citizens of that complex .across the street
into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neigh-
bors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community
togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and
destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and
really harmless.

Thanks but no thanks.

I'll take my sea.

And my pine trees.

And even my damned polluted air.

Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if
it had even been searched—a strange fact if they truly
had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I
got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her

place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shriveled
stomach was somewhat back to normal size.

After that, I turned on the television and was instantly
glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had
driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had
brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been
so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a
television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wide-
angle tube.

On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking
busy as they attended complex machinery. They found
signs of traitorous activities—signs which they had planted
since my escape. They had uncovered a "secret room" and
such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of anti-
Alliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have
written with—they pointed out—the aid of Melinda Thaus-
er, who had already been taken into custody. There were
even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I
was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.

But there was another warrant as well.

The second one was for murder.

They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished
howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the
men who had been riding in the back of it. They had
fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were
laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken wind-
screen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According
to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff
road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I
was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig
had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant
of them.

I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to
make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me,
but he talked around it without letting the home audience
in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.

KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline
the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for
alliteration.

I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my
head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough,
any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quar-
ters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones with-
out me.

Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking
was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister
rattle of gunfire.

I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now
surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden
disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the
streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed,
sirens would warn me, and such a building as this
provided a great many hiding places.

Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down
into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in
front of the building across the street, and uniformed
coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken
hive. From the fourth floor of that building, a number of
men opened fire with small arms, pitifully insufficient
against such organized and deadly police.

What followed was a bloody, desperate battle which car-
ried no reason nor purpose to it, so far as I could see.
Obviously, the people on the fourth floor were considered
enemies of the state, for there was also an army car down
there, with what appeared to be high brass directing the
operation. But why tear gas was not used, why bullets were
chosen instead, I could not understand.

I watched, terrified and fascinated.

In the end, as those on the fourth floor surrendered,
tossing guns and ammunition down to the street, the most
chilling scene of all occurred. Searchlights now illuminated
the rooms beyond the shattered fourth-floor windows,
showed the men and women there, dejected and defeated.
Almost simultaneously, the inside doors to the building's
corridors burst open, and uniformed coppers stepped into
the rooms. They carried what appeared to be machine
pistols, and they used them expertly, slaughtering the
thirty or so human beings who had already surrendered. A
tall, willowy blonde twirled gracefully and fell across the
windowsill. Her long fingers scrabbled at the wooden
frame, while her mouth went slack and her face contorted
hideously with the knowledge of impending death. Anoth-
er eruption of gunfire behind her sent her lunging through
the window, tearing her arms on projections of broken
glass. She tumbled sixty feet to the street, turning lazily, her
waist-long yellow hair sprayed around her like a halo ...

At last I turned away from the window.

What I had just seen was a sample of that "community

camaraderie" the real estate agents spoke of. The neigh-
bors of those dead men and women had turned them in,
surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries
should exist in their building.

The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.

The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living,
breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.

And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell
where they could get to her at any moment....

VI

At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap
and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and
slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy
coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escala-
tors, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west
wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a
moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and
walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my
chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to
look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I
passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second
glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was
working.

Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the
squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.
This was the administrative wing, containing offices and
files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window
slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for
dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the
interrogation chambers. The place had been designed,
originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly,
through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it
was converted into something quite less than progressive by
those reactionaries who branded change as part of any
enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal

of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought
punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frus-
tration and boredom and rage were the companions of
those locked within these walls.

And Melinda was there now.

There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of
them empty and locked. At the four corners of the inter-
section, there were piles of snow which had not yet been
removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the cir-
cular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the
scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had
walked through some unknown magic.

I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets,
though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I
would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn't think I could
use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands,
they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying
Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he
doesn't feel so bad about meeting the end.

Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward
the main entrance of the building.

The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to
the last of the three howlers, and got in.

I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the side-
walk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding
and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors
into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I
walked across it, went down the main corridor to the
elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors
opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my
first challenge.

"Yeah?" he asked, looking up from the magazine of
undressed girls and overdressed fiction.

I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing
through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the frag-
ments of scenery from his past and from the future he
imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had
been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do
it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as
well as to my victim. But I found the worst of his
thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him
and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I
chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister—a whip
and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those

symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his con-
scious mind with such force that they became reality for
him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and
fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which
had welled up from the center of him.

Then I got out of there.

He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it,
gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision
which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped for-
ward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him
across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and
stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his
jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I
stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the
jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.

And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file,
found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.
Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys
to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower
levels. I went down.

When the elevator doors opened again, there was an-
other guard waiting, though this one was more alert than
the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come
with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular
traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a
clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun
with the reactions of a trained fighter.

I pried open his mind and found his id.

I wallowed in it.

I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a
gruesome, mad match that even he would never have
known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unreal-
ized, unknown desire to—as an adolescent boy—rise up in
the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in
their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled
screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy's
hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the
thin light which streamed through the bedroom window
from the iron street lamp beyond. . . .

When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol
and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on
the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into
unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with
one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he

woke, and he would probably not even remember what
had given him his fit. But knowing that didn't make me
feel any more heroic.

When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys
from the desk and went after Melinda.

She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on,
and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she
was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and
swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw
it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before
closing it and taking a much needed breath.

"If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,"
I said, nodding at the propaganda.

She threw it down. "That drivel is really fascinating,"
she said. "The guy who writes it is either the biggest con
man in existence or he believes it himself—in which case
he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question."

"Aren't you glad to see me?" I asked. "Aren't you going
to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?"

"You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one
person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison
baggies do make me look like more than one woman."
She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. "You're here. I never
expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt
if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies
here...."

I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from
under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there
before leaving her apartment. "Do me the honor of a
striptease?" I asked.

She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my
back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and
dressed in the clothes I had brought.

I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was
yelling "Fool" at top volume.

As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on
her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly
away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed
her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was
in her eyes: tears.

"Hey," I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot
cope with tears. "Hey." Really stupid.

"Let's go," she said.

"Something wrong?"

"I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if
even you were whether you would care enough to come
for me."

"But of course—"

"Shush," she said, stopping the tears. "We haven't time
for this, have we?"

We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past
the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other
by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through
which we could see the occupants. None of them, howev-
er, seemed to care much about us.

We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and
second unconscious guards. When the second elevator
opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked
briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and
breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at
any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I
took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps—

—just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen
and four young and dedicated men with guns in their
hands!

"Good evening," he said, bowing to us.

The four men with guns did not bow.

"I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't ex-
pect to see your cool broken like that." But whether or
not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was
split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.

"Who is he?" Melinda asked.

"Morsfagen."

"The title too, please," he said. But he was not just
being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath
the surface delight.

"General Morsfagen," I told her.

"And you're under arrest, of course," he said.

The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow
less wary than they had been at first. It would have been
possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of
them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed,
and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped
around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might
have bought it but good before they realized what was
happening.

Might have.

But nothing is certain.

Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory
of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of
the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.
I didn't want more blood on my hands.

I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem
was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I
could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them
before one of those four boys panicked and put a few
rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.

What had happened to the god?

What was this? Mere men overpowering me and out-
thinking me, me a god?

"This way, please," Morsfagen said.

We followed him.

VII

Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed sol-
diers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of
the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of
the slit windows of the administration building where I
might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze
of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through
the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with
their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to
crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had
walked up the front steps and through the lobby as brazen
as a man could be. But even that had been planned for,
and a watch had been kept from one of the apparently
empty howlers parked before the Tombs entrance. They
had watched me go in, had identified me, had let me get
the girl, had let me bring her out, and then had nailed us.
Perhaps Morsfagen let it go on that long so that he could
level charges of jailbreak against both of us on top of
what the government already had drummed up. But I half
thought that he wanted to humiliate me as much as
anything. And he had.

They put us in a howler, took us through snowy streets
to the AC complex. They took Melinda away to a sepa-
rate preventive detention apartment and placed me in an-
other, where there were no sharp instruments or windows.

"General Morsfagen will see you tomorrow," the guard
told me as he left.

"Can't wait," I said.

The door closed, the lock snapped, and quiet de-
scended.

I flopped onto the bed and listened to the springs
whine, and I thought about what a stupid, fumbling idiot I
had been, even with Child's intellect integrated with my
own. I had gone back to the house to pack, even when I
should have realized that they would be coming for me.
That had ended in the deaths of an entire howler crew,
smashed and burning on my beach. Then I had gone to
the prison after Melinda, with my brilliant plan of bold-
ness, though I should have known that they would have
been expecting the unexpected. Perhaps part of the plan
was based on Child's cleverness—but another part was
based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my
personality like the back of his hand—or better.

Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.
The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial ab-
sorption of the psychic energies of the most complete
genius—and still a failure. Still charging around with delu-
sions that invariably trip you up.

Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the
mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assump-
tion that I was some holy character, some bright and
shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basi-
cally, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only
suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into
things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or fright-
ened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against
hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity
would impinge upon a god.

Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept
the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was
esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit
of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my
self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and
intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first Cro-
Magnons underestimated the Neanderthals for a while.

For a while ...

I stood up, suddenly less angry than I had been, and
more determined. Okay, so I was not a god. I was not
omniscient and omnipotent and superior to the military. I
could not excuse past stupidity, but I could improve
my outlook until I was able to be something which they
could not cope with. The reason Morsfagen and other
men could trip me up was simple to see: they were less
powerful men, but they were fully developed, capable, and
sure and confident. And I was fractured and unsteady and
filled with doubts beneath the sheen of smugness. It was
time to get to know myself, understand what I was and
what I could expect to accomplish. After countless circuits
of the main room of the apartment, I sat down on the bed
again and relaxed. And that night, I came to know myself
better than I ever had in my life.

I turned esp fingers back among the streaming thoughts
of my own conscious mind. It was something I had never
attempted before, though it now seemed the most natural
exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I
knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.
But, of course, like every man, I hadn't the faintest damn
idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping
in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own
thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what
I might find.

In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego
and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less
rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were
things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I
took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my
basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made
from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.

In that one long night, I finally understood the nature
of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged
men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was
not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some
even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life
on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying
quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could
ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had
misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No
man. Society.

Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling

less than its separate parts. In governments and institu-
tions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and
enforce decision, were those elected by the society that
supported them—and because each member of society is
different, because some median must be reached through
the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelli-
gent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else
does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary
and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one
else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect
their people, simply because they are in the majority. We
get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted
to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they
make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust
the intellectual and do not rely upon his wisdom. They
fear the reactionary and the blind because such people
threaten progress (a commodity the middle has been told
to embrace all its life). They repress the intellectuals and
the reactionaries and embrace their own people. But be-
cause they are mediocre, their own people are not served
well, and corruption flourishes. Where each individual of
society may be capable of governing his own sphere, the
agglomerate government is incapable of governing any-
thing except through intimidation and pure luck.

It may have been something that most people understand
early in life, but it was a revelation to me. To win the
games of existence, one must not attempt to fight by
society's rules, because in most cases, one is fighting indi-
viduals, and not society. To win, one must attack the
game on individual terms—not against a stereotype, not
against a societal image, but against the other man, the
single adversary.

The way to deal with Morsfagen was not as a tendril of
the military plant, but as a man. His weaknesses did not
lie in his adherence to the consensus—the consensus was
too huge ever to be weak at all—but with himself, in his
own human psyche.

Still, my problem was not solved. If I was not god, not
the superior creature I had thought I was, how could I act
at all? How could I function as an ordinary man? From
birth, I had come to think of myself as something special,
something sacred and superhuman. The attempt, now, to
operate as just another man, would run against the grain
of a lifetime of smug theory and self-delusion.

   And then, quite suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It
came like the nick of a razor in the morning, making me
jerk with more surprise than it deserved. I should have
understood what had to be done some time ago. I had to,
finally, become the supreme being, the god, that I had
always thought I was!

I began pacing the room again. My feet swished on the
thick carpet. A clock ticked in the wall. Otherwise: heavy
silence.

Be God ...

God lay inside Child's mutant body, insane as He had
always been, trapped as Child and I had been for that
month. And though I did not want His madman's person-
ality, I could make a great deal of use of His psychic
energy. It was there to be tapped, the power that had
made worlds, had generated galaxies and universes, that
had established the infinitely fine balance of the cosmic
scale. I could delve back into Child's twisted body and find
the core of God's being, absorb Him and dissipate Him
throughout my own mind, as I had Child. God would be
part of me, a deeply threaded part without His own
identity. I would, indeed, for all purposes, be God.

I could not sleep for the rest of that night. I wanted to
see Morsfagen, wanted to try to work him as a human
being long enough to have him get me to Child. Then,
once he had done that, I would not have to deal with him
on a man-to-man basis. I would be above that.

I was frightened that night, seeing hulking creatures in
every shadow. In God's mind, down in that colossal id and
ego, what would things be like? Would I be able to handle
them, or would I be swamped and driven down, con-
sumed? I forced the latter possibility from my mind and
thought more positively. But the fear remained. It was not
unlike the fear a child feels the first time he enters a great
cathedral and sees the towering, somewhat menacing
figures of the saints carved in great pillars of marble.

Morsfagen came at nine o'clock, smiling. "I thought
you'd like to hear today's schedule," he said.

I said nothing, playing the role I had decided on.

"We start with a press release about the gun battle you
had with the police last night. Did you know that you
were seriously injured in that, perhaps fatally injured?"

He wanted some response that he could slap me down
for, but I didn't give him the satisfaction. I accepted.

"Later in the day, we'll release some film of that shoot-
out," he said. "We've already staged it. Looks very real
with lots of blood. We found a fairly good double for your
part, and we kept him mostly in the shadows so that it's
hard to tell, really, who he is."

I said nothing.

He shuffled the papers in his hand, went on. "According
to the reports, three officers will have died under your
guns. We've made up life histories for them, all very
touching. Two of them had large families and one had a
brother who was a priest We've put together composite
photographs of various real officers to release to the press.
Later tonight, word will be flashed to an outraged nation
that you have died on the operating table. Even though
you slaughtered the howler crew and three other police-
men, we were trying to save you, see? Now, the first
order of business today is for you to come along and help
us film the operating room sequences. A double won't
work in bright lights. I hope you can die convincingly, or
at least pretend to look dead while you're lying there.
Otherwise, you'll have to be drugged for it.

He stopped, watching me. It was time for my part, and
my lines were crystal clear to me. "Look, how about a
bargain," I said. I sounded fairly desperate.

He smiled. He was eating this up. Morsfagen's weakness
was not in his rigid acceptance of military codes and
consensus views, but in his need for power over other
human beings, his delight at being on top of another man.
I was giving him exactly what he wanted.

Maybe he would just hang himself with it.

"I fail to see," he said, "just what you have to bargain
with." He motioned around at the windowless walls.

"Something you don't know," I said. "Something that, if
you knew, would help you a great deal."

He frowned, smiled again. "And what would you want
for this valuable piece of information?"

"My freedom. Melinda's freedom. We'd stay in the city.
I'd do whatever you want."

"Oh, I hardly believe you would," he said.

"Look, Morsfagen, I'm not kidding you. I have some-
thing to tell you that could make a very big difference to
the Alliance. I am not lying, and you must believe that."

"I'd love to hear it," he said, dragging this out to relish

every moment of my groveling. "But you must choose
some other reward besides your freedom."

"Let the girl and me live here together. At least don't
keep us in separate apartments."

He smiled, seemed to consider it. "All right. She is some
nice piece, I'll tell you. That ought to be a big enough
reward. Now tell me what this secret is?"

I started to speak, then stopped abruptly, just as I had
planned, examining him with a great deal of suspicion. I
must have looked pathetic, hunched there on the edge of
the bed, unshaven, trying to bargain for petty favors that
would come without question to a free man. It was the
image I wanted him to have of me. "How do I know I can
trust you?" I asked. "How do I know you'll keep your
promise?"

He laughed sharply, deeply. "You don't."

"But that's not right!" I said. There was just the edge of
a whine in my voice. I was a broken man, yes I was. I was
just so many pieces for him to break further into dust.

"Fairness doesn't apply here," he said. "You'll just have
to trust me. Or forget it all."

I hesitated. "I have nothing to lose, I guess," I said. "So
I'll tell you." I hesitated again. Then I spoke: "I lied to
you when I saw it was dangerous for me to go back into
Child's mind. I just said that to get back into my own body
and to get out of the AC complex. I can go back into him
any time that I want, and I can bring a great deal of
valuable data out to you."

He burst into loud, almost uncontrolled laughter, his
face growing red. He slapped his sides with his hands,
almost dropping the sheaf of papers, and finally the laugh-
ter turned into a choking cough. When he looked up at
me again, he said, "I thought that much all along. I hadn't
yet decided to risk sending you back, 'cause you're too
valuable to lose. In a police state, an esper has more
duties hunting the enemy at home than abroad. Now I can
take the risk and clean out that freak's mind too. I thank
you for your kind assistance in this decision." He nodded
sarcastically.

  "When will the girl be brought to me?" I asked, though
I knew the answer already.

"You trusted me," he said. "I appreciate that. It shows
that we will be getting along better than anticipated."

"I hope so."

"But there is one thing I think you should learn, for your
own good," he said. He waited until there was no alterna-
tive but for me to ask him what that lesson was.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Trust no one," he said. "The girl will remain in a
separate apartment."

I made a lunge for him, and the guard beside him
slapped me across the face with the butt of a rifle. It was
a deal more than I had bargained for. My jaws snapped
together, banging my teeth painfully into my gums. I saw
stars, multicolored one with a thousand points each, and
crashed back onto the bed.

I tasted blood, spat it on the sheets. It was curiously
bright there, glistening.

"Have you learned the lesson?" he asked.

"You lied," I said.

"I guess you've learned the lesson, then."

"That all military men are emasculated power freaks
who can't make it with a woman but dig beating up on
other men with guns."

"Keep it up," he warned.

"Sexless bastard!" I hissed.

"Larry," he called to the young soldier. The boy
stepped forward, holding his rifle ready. Morsfagen mo-
tioned to me, quite the cavalier, and conveyed the necessi-
ty of what must be done.

Larry took two more paces, stepped in front of me,
drew the rifle over his head—all of this happening so
slowly, so measuredly that it seemed like a ballet—and
brought the square butt down on my left shoulder so hard
that I felt tissue separating.

I did not see the pretty stars at all this time, only a
velvety and total darkness....

When I woke up, it was to the acrid odor of smelling
salts which I rebelled against, gagging and pushing back
from the stuff. But aside from that quite natural rejection,
I offered no opposition. For the moment, Morsfagen was
convinced he knew me. He suspected nothing and thought
my anger was genuine.

I followed docilely to the corridor, the elevator, and the
filming studios, where I played dead for them. Quite
convincingly, he told me. They even let me bleed a little
for them....

By late afternoon, the films had been made. There was
a team waiting to rush the product to the city's main
broadcasting facilities, where it would be shown for the
edification and entertainment of the consensus citizenry
sitting safe at home this night.

From there, we went to Child's room, where nothing
had changed: lights dim, bedclothes rumpled, the mutant
husk still lying there in the smell of sickness, antiseptics,
and starch.

"Are you ready?" Morsfagen asked.

I'm not only ready, but anxious! I thought. But I did
not say anything. It seemed the time to be petulant,
snippy, moody. And he seemed to relish my performance.

The lights were dimmed, the recorders started, Child
raised a little in his bed, and I was at last within reach of
the godhood I had been seeking all my life....

FOUR

Man As God...

I

I touched the sheen of His mental surface, drew back
from the cold, humming tune of ultimate power.

In the darkness of the empty conscious mind, I hovered
over the bending amber shell, slid along its eternal curve
toward the horizon which always danced just beyond my
grasp. In time, I found the weak spot on that amber
smoothness, saw the moving shadows of things beneath, of
things in the id and ego below. I pried at that weak spot,
slit it open, sailed through and into God's mind....

Imagine:

Imagine the largest mirror in the universe, a million
light-years from edge to beveled edge (no matter who the
artisans were who created such a marvel, it is only the
mirror itself which engages us). On such a great glass,
there would be literally countless millions of visions, bits
and pieces of colorful landscapes and peoples, events and
futures and pasts and even moments of sundry present-
tunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star
(again, we care not of the men who forged that instru-
ment, but only of its actions) brought to bear on the very
center of that fantastic mirror. And then imagine the
flying shards of silvered glass clattering down, down, down
into the bottom of Existence, to the end of Time, and
there to lie in pools of pitch blackness with their wild re-
flections frozen in them.

This was the mental landscape inside of Child this time,
far different from what it had been. It was a mind of
superhuman dimensions, fractured into near uselessness,

the mind of God, the Being who had made the Earth, the
galaxy, the universe, and each of us in it, the god who had
forged the first DNA and RNA and begun the craziest
dream ever. And yet it was the most disorganized place I
had ever seen—disorganized and brilliant at the same
moment, wilder, stranger, more fearful than any mind I
had seen in all my years of head-tripping.

I settled through glazes of amber ...

... through ice spicule clouds the color of freshly spilled
blood...

. . . through a fine blue fog and finally down into the
smashed visions of this mad universe...

For a while I hung there, feet of my analogue body
inches above a glittering shard of stars. Then I touched
bare toes on galaxies and walked across the ruined skies to
another fragment, this a jungle scene with strange birds
and stranger ambulatory plants. I seemed to settle down
into the jungle, to become a part of it, though the moment
I wished to go on I ceased this empathy and rose until I
stood above it, looking down on it—and looking out on
the millions of other scenes awaiting me on the flat black
table of nothingness.

I set out, searching for the core of God, for the shat-
tered glass that held Him.

He could not be far.

Wasn't God everywhere?

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was
as thick as water reeds with boles as large around as two
men could link their arms. The leaves were high overhead
and did not allow even a minim of sunshine through.

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was
carpeted with an explosion of ripe colors, where clouds of
spores rose and swept by me as their season came, where
seeds stuck to my analogue body from the sappy tendrils
of man-sized milkweed plants.

I saw a red sky with a blue sun, and the land was
parched and empty beneath both.

Twice as I wandered, I felt His onrushing presence, the
huge power of His disabled mind. I reached out, grasping
blindly for Him, but He was gone in the instant, leaving
me groping and frustrated.

Several times, the sky itself came screaming down,
compressing the air beneath it until my analogue body
threatened to explode. The sky shattered around me, was

resurrected as flocks of blue-white birds, and rose again
to hang high over everything.

The earth rose and fell like a beating breast, the vibra-
tions of the heart muscle coursing through me.

There were creatures with many eyes, others with more
legs than I could count.

Dead birds fell from the sky by the tens of thousands,
became lizards when they struck the earth, climbed the
rocks about me, grew wings, and entered the clouds again.

There were places where the trees wailed and broke
open with ugly sores, bled as if they were made of flesh.
The dripping blood became crimson pebbles where the
tree touched the earth.

I stalked through this chaos, searching.

At last, I came upon Him where He was desperately
trying to coalesce into an analogue form with which He
could contact me. He was a smoky, bluish pillar of psychic
energy, roiling, tumbling, spitting sparks of many colors,
at last jelling into the shape of a man: Buddha.

"It is a wise man who knows how to compromise,"
Buddha said, rubbing His large bare belly and smiling
down at me. He towered twenty feet into the air.

"I will not compromise," I said.

"The seven lives——"

I pushed on. "I will not compromise." I extended fingers
of my own psychic energy, and felt out the core of God,
seeking for the pattern to its structure.

The figure shifted, became an image of Jesus Christ.
"Truly, I say unto you, a man who recognizes his own
mortality is a happier man. A man who comes to live with
his weakness with all humility is a man destined for my
kingdom."

I grasped Jesus' neck with psychic hands and throttled
Him.

He exploded, whirled into a column of energy, a furi-
ous, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but
could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to har-
ness and control it, and His mechanism had long ago
deteriorated beyond the point of effectiveness. God was a
hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipu-
latory system: a car without wheels.

I reached with my own mental tendrils, and oblivious to
the halfhearted and misdirected weapons He brought to
bear against me, also oblivious of His pitiful pleading, I

threaded him. He wanted to maintain His power, even
though He was insane, and I could not make Him under-
stand that it was time for a new God.

He wriggled and twisted in a vain attempt to pull free
of me.

As I encircled Him, I knew that God had been insane
long before Child had ever approached Him, had been a
raving and incoherent mass of energy for—perhaps—
millennia. All mankind's faiths had failed to understand
the basic reason for chaos, for blind violence and hatred.
We had attributed all the bad things of this world to
"divine tests" of man's will and courage. But all of that
was a theological falsehood, for the force energizing the
universe was madness, not reason; insanity and not mer-
cy. The madness had reached even the smallest particle of
His being, aged like wine into the purest elements of
horror.

Here died Jesus.

And Mohammed.

Here died Buddha and Yahweh.

But it was not all a loss.

For here, at last, I was born in my new image, to
replace half a thousand false gods.

Burn the old altars and prepare new ones. Council your
children with different commandments and slaughter the
freshest of your lambs so that I may taste their blood in
the morning dew.

I bled His energy away just as I might have tapped a
dynamo or a battery, distributed it through my own psy-
chic power until He was no longer a separate entity but
merely another area of my own mind, as Child now was,
another rising bank of power cells to draw upon for the
creation of miracles. Not a shred of His personality or
self-awareness remained; for all purposes, He had died—
or had been transubstantiated, which was all the same
now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the
magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, con-
densed, purified, and made ready for use. For my use. It
was now, after all, my power.

I had killed God, quite simply, just as I had killed Child
some days before.

I felt no remorse.

Does one feel remorse when one shoots down a maniac

who is wielding a gun in a crowded department store?

Man as God. I retained the mortal form and the mortal
outlook, with the emotions and the prejudices of men. I did
not think that would be a weakness, but that it might
actually make me a more benevolent and stable deity
than the previous owner of my power had been. Man as
God...

I vaporized the glittering metal analogues held in the
fragments of mirror to my right. They disappeared with-
out sound or light. I spread my hands, as in addressing the
multitudes, and eliminated all the other pieces of that
"cosmic mirror.

There was total darkness drawing down about me like
an oiled curtain.

I made light.

With the light, I fashioned stairs leading upward into
further regions of darkness.

I walked out of there, erasing the stairs behind me.

Outside, the world awaited me, unknowing but soon to
learn....

II

When I returned to my own body, carrying the power
with me, the first thing I saw was Child's mutant shell
convulsed with a series of hideous spasms that made it
look much like the flickering, shape-changing image in a
funhouse mirror. It sat straight up in bed, quivering like
the shaft of an arrow. Its eyes were wide for the first
time, the pulsing veins visible in the whites. Its slitted
mouth worked furiously, though no words issued from it,
no sounds at all. It scrabbled at its chest with two bony
hands, clawed at its horrible face so viciously and persis-
tently that blood seeped from the long red welts it carved
in the flesh there.

The doctor attending the mutant grabbed it and at-

tempted to force it backward onto the mattress, where
restraining straps could be applied. But it heaved the
white-smocked figure aside as if the man were so much
paper, in an exhibition of strength that no one could have
expected from such an emaciated body, from such skinny
arms and powerless hands.

A dry rasping-hacking sound emanated from the crea-
ture's throat, but no words formed. It could have been
tissue ripping under some unimaginable inward pressure
rather than a conscious exercise of vocal cords.

"What's going on here?" Morsfagen demanded, rising
from his chair with that slow, powerful, and somehow
contemptible grace of his, cutting air like a sail.

The soldier named Larry came across the room, looking
confused but determined. He dropped his rifle, and
reached for the mutant. The creature snapped at him,
sunk teeth into his wrist, and made blood fountain up
brightly. The soldier screamed, struck at the mutant's
face, smashed the jawbone. The mouth relaxed, released
him, but the mutant was still awake, still struggled to gain
control of itself and of the situation it found itself in.

"You did this!" Morsfagen roared, turning on me, point-
ing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.

"No," I said quietly.

"You'll pay! Damn you, you'll see the woman raped for
this, you'll see her humiliated!"

I could not even summon up the slightest bit of disgust
for him. I looked with the eyes of the man I had been, but
with the judgment of a god, and I could do no more than
pity him. In a way, I resented my benevolence. I had
longed for the power to strike back with thunder and with
lightning. But now that the time had come, I found him
deserving of scorn and pity more than wrathful venge-
ance.

"What is wrong with him?" he asked, shoving his broad
face square into mine.

I knew exactly what was happening with Child's husk,
though the rest of them could never possibly strike upon
the truth. When I had left that shell, I had momentarily
forgotten something which I should have remembered.
There was still one portion of Child's mind down there in
the black waste of his body: the id. All those scorpion
analogues which I had dispersed in the ice-floored subter-
ranean cavern so long ago were now risen up and in

command of the mutant flesh. Normally the most directly
impotent of the mind's factions, it now reigned without
control, without opposition. But the id alone was not a
functioning consciousness and could never hope to control
the body: the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome was a
complete impossibility, something that could only exist in
fiction. The mutant husk would die now, days after its
mental expiration, with the scorpion-clawed id seeking con-
trol to gratify its sex lusts and its blood longings.

"Everyone grab him at once!" Morsfagen directed,
leading the others in on the bed.

The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to side of
the bed. Finally, it grasped the rails and clambered against
them, flung itself over the side. It crashed onto the floor
with a sickening crunch of flimsy bones, biting at the air,
spitting blood across the tiles, clawing and weakly kicking
at anyone who tried to bend to it, or to give it assistance
in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a
friend, and it acted accordingly.

Then it succumbed.

Quietly, like a sigh.

Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood
marking the space around it, it seemed more like a squashed
insect than the ex-home of a human creature.

They stared at the corpse for a long while, transfixed,
perhaps, by its inhumanness. Then Morsfagen turned to
look at me with the malevolence I had once despised.

"You killed him," he said matter-of-factly, beyond ha-
tred now. He turned to the soldier named Larry. "Arrest
him. Get that bastard out of my sight!"

Larry lifted his gun, grinning. He enjoyed using it too
much. As he advanced on me like a homicidal maniac, I
began to think that even the mindless shell of the mutant
had been more human that this boy. Behind those eyes,
there was something a little less than a man.

"Stop where you are," I said.

But he did not, of course.

I reached out for him, touched him, took him. His face
went utterly blank, and he ceased his advance.

"What the hell—" Morsfagen began.

With other esp fingers, I touched the minds of everyone
in that room and delivered them into a state of sleep
which was not quite sleep, closer to death but not quite
death. There, they would be far out of my way so that I

might concentrate on the work ahead. Cautiously, I en-
tered their minds with an ability I had never had before:
neither in scope nor in power. I spread out their lives,
their neuroses and psychoses, and I carefully untangled the
knots that had warped each man and woman's psyche
over the years. When they woke, they would be emotion-
ally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears
and worries would no longer plague them, and their per-
sonalities (which had been structured all their lives to
nurture the needs which were produced by those fears and
worries) would be drastically reshaped. But for the better,
surely—for the better. I was God, and I could not make
mistakes.

Otherwise, why would you worship me?

I departed from the minds in the room, though I did
not summon anyone back to consciousness. I did not need
their help to command the tides and to grow storms in the
heavens—nor for the much broader changes I wished to
bring about in the world.

I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth,
enjoying every moment of my godhood—perhaps too
well....

III

And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of
the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleed-
ing mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs
of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls,
though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I
flew over seas and continents without benefit of a body—
without even an analogue form—to contain my psychic
energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though
I did not change any water into wine or raise any men
from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things....

The first order of business, so far as I was concerned,
was to reach downward through the floors of the great

structure and locate that place where I had been born,
where plastic womb had contained me and where wired
uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no
longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the
bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.

I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of
the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and
steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy in-
sulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of
other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just
yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.

Oedipal?

Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry
my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Cer-
tainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was
easily overlooked.

I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia
of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, fila-
ments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.
Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust
upward from the floors. There were blocks of data process-
ing computers, memory banks and calculating components
which handled everything from temperature regulation
to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.
Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the
floor there were programming keyboards for the men and
women who maintained the delicacy of the computers'
decisions.

In every great chamber, the center of attention was the
womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank
whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.
Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut,
there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass
wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive
plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting
conditions back to the computers. There were electrode
nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so
minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly
tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells
not yet remotely shaped like human beings.

Mother...

The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of
hidden works felt more than heard ...

There were more than eighty technicians and medical

attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineer-
ing equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my
godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.
Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I
directed them out of that place, upward through the
building to regions of safety.

I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me
the like of which I had never experienced before. It was
not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which
made it so different. For the first time, I understood my
godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was
possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.
I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a
man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.
But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.
I realized that my vengeance would always have to be
directed against ideas and things and constructions borne
of those ideas rather than against men; all men were piti-
able in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of
that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity
deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.

For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this sense
of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense
of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experi-
enced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in
their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most
fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and
the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with
the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and
computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down
and got on with the job at hand.

I raised my figurative ax over my mother's symbolic
head and savored the destruction I was about to
wreak....

Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I
had given up that vision of God. I was another sort
altogether.

I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back
the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits
and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves
gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent
the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of
mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine
agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.

Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the pro-
gramming keyboards loose of their connections and
smashed them repeatedly into the floor.

The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell
them what to do with themselves.

Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equip-
ment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory
banks, seeking answers that could not be found.

There was but one answer, and that answer was God,
and that God was me....
I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs,
The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright,
and bloodless flesh.

I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark
chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells,
squashed them.

I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back
toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing
left but powder and fumes.

It must have looked singularly strange in that place:
invisible hands making havoc in the center of that techno-
logical wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling
down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke
rising everywhere.... It must have looked as if Nature
had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and
pretentious project as this last folly of man's.
In essence, that was exactly what had happened.
Mother was dead.
And she was disfigured.
I had never had a father.

I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted
plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors,
returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the
same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others
remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no
resistance.

In a few moments, I had made all the necessary deci-
sions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided
everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a
super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and
faster as the godly power within me became further inte-
grated with my own mind. And I knew there were no
flaws in my plans.
A god is not plagued with doubt.

I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought
out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land
toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to
build the new world. I found the members of the junta,
one by one, and altered their minds. I rooted deeply,
found their personality problems and removed them. I
gave them the best psychotherapy man had ever imagined,
and left them without a desire to rule.

Then; in each man's mind, I planted the desire for a
return to elective government, and left them as their own
counter-revolutionaries.

Next, I began a methodical search of the corners of the
world; I radiated a growing, toughening web of power
that sought out the minds of every leader in every nation,
down through the lowest bureaucratic posts. I cleared
those minds of power-hunger, of sexual frustration turned
into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power
of god in his hands, and I left them better men.

Not satisfied yet, I struck downward and located - all
the men with the potential of leadership, even though they
were not yet in positions to guide the destinies of their
fellow citizens. I cleaned house in every psyche, helped all
of them to learn to cope with existence and with their
own place in the scheme of things.

And still my power grew. Or, perhaps, the more I used
it, the better my manipulatory mechanisms became.

Next, I found the stockpiles of nuclear weapons hidden
in all corners of the globe. I turned the fissionable materi-
al into lead by making Time flow a million times faster
around the vicinity of the weapons. In the biochemical
warfare laboratories, I destroyed all the mutant strains of
death that scientists had generated. I opened the minds of
those same scientists and cleansed them, made them reject
the need to create death in order to feel worthy and
powerful.

And the day wore on.

And evening came.

Still, I toiled.

It was somewhere beyond midnight when I finished
reshaping the world and returned to my body in the AC
complex. With all that I had done, I still felt energetic.
None of my vitality had been sapped; it even seemed to
have been magnified. The power I wielded was now more
complex and enormous than I could ever have imagined.

I stretched my esp out and lingered along the surface of
the moon, looking firsthand at the craters with eyes I
constructed from the cold vacuum of space.

Stars winked close at hand, warm and yet freezing,
pricks of light, yet mammoth stars.

I sped outward to them.

I touched red giants and white dwarfs, plummeted
through the center of a sun, listening to the songs of
exploding hydrogen, to the creation of matter, and to its
instant destruction—or, rather, to its instant conversion
into light and heat.

Energy...

I seemed to gain energy from every source I approached.
My own light was brighter than that from any star, and
was controlled far more intricately, making it more deadly
and more important than countless suns in mindless erup-
tion.

I passed outward beyond the galaxy.

I reached the end of the universe, sped through impene-
trable walls of pearl gray, kept on going through dimen-
sions until I reached another plane of creation.

And then I came back, skipping from galaxy to galaxy—
then from star to star—then from planet to planet, finally
back into the room where my mortal shell sat stupidly.

I rose up from the chair and left that room after
turning Morsfagen and the others loose. I walked down
the corridor and found Melinda's rooms, opened the door
without touching it, and walked inside. I could have come
to her with my mind, but I wanted the personal touch of
flesh on flesh for this last and ultimate step of the plan.

"You're free," I said as she turned from her window
and looked at me, grinning her beautiful grin.

She started toward me....

And then I was to learn just how lonesome and awful
the role of a god can be. I was about to meet with my
first near-disaster since I had claimed the power....

IV

We were strangers.

We had made love and been in love, had shared secrets
and dreams. I had risked my life for her, and she had
done the same for me, though in a different manner.
And yet, I did not know her. She seemed like a crippled
doll, speaking with the voice of some hidden puppet-master
who was a terrible craftsman and who was even worse
at writing dialogue for his wooden creatures to perform
on stage.

Everything she said seemed witless and stupid and—
perhaps most unforgivably of all—utterly boring. I could
not understand how such, a woman could ever have inter-
ested me, even for the brief moments of lovemaking.
Surely I had never been so anxious for the feel and taste
of flesh that I had wooed and taken this creature in my
arms! That seemed, now, like nothing more than animal-
loving—bestiality.

In my arms, she was a pet

And nothing more.

Yet I knew what she had once been, and I understood
that she could again be important to me. I was certain, all
at once, that all that was required was a change of her
personality, a growing up. I put her into the same sus-
pended animation I had used with others, delved into her
mind with my omnipotence and straightened out the
quirks there, brought her swiftly to her full human poten-
tial.

I woke her.

And I sorrowed.

Her full human potential was not enough.

She was strikingly beautiful, filled with a sensuality that
made my loins stir, that would make any man sit up and
take full notice of her. She was the essence of femininity,
full-breasted, round-hipped, and long-legged, with honey

hair and wide eyes, Ml lips and quick pink tongue. But
she was no more than that to me. Even a beautiful
woman who outshines all other females is of no interest if
her mind seems as sawdust and her words strike you as
the rambling proclamations of an idiot.

And so she seemed to me: an idiot, a thing, a moving
construct of flesh. But not a woman I loved.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. It pained me even to be forced to
speak. Couldn't she understand me, without verbaliza-
tions? Couldn't she eke out even a hint of my thoughts
without my having to spell them out for her in clean, crisp
words and phrases?

"Something is," she said.

"Nothing."

"You're so distant. I can't tell if you're really there or
not."

Oh, God, oh, God, I moaned to myself. But there was
no use in that. It didn't help to pray to myself.

"It's as if," she said, "it's not you inside there. Maybe
Child has taken over. Maybe just a little part of nun has."

"No," I said.

"But if Child had taken you over, he would make you
say that to satisfy me, wouldn't he?"

I said nothing.

"So maybe that's it."

"No."

I was very weary, very old.

"Something, anyway," she said.

"Yes. Something."

"I haven't asked you how you got here? How did you
shake the cops?" She was smiling through all of this, though
her face belied her true feelings beyond those brightly
flashing teeth.

I did not answer her. I merely looked at her with a
deep and melancholy sense of loss. And with a fear of the
future that was to be mine from this day forth.

I saw, now, why God had eventually lost all touch with
reality, had stepped across the thin red line into utter
madness. He had begun as a super-intelligent creature able
to set the precarious movements of the universe in perfect
harmony, able to structure the balance of all creation. But
as time had passed, He grew introverted because of His
lack of company. There was no one worthy of Him, equal

to Him, and He had stagnated with this lack of personal
conflict and motivations.

The same would happen to me in time. It might require
millennia, but it would happen all the same. Some day, I
would whirl across the universe from one dark point to
the other, insane, and babbling, my manipulatory mechan-
isms unable to harness the great psychic energy inside of
me.

"I think I'm afraid of you," she said.

"I'm afraid of me too," I said.

"What's happened?" she asked.

But there was no sense telling her. There was no way to
convey the absolute emptiness of the eternity that stretched
before me. I had wanted a woman all my life, wanted
to be loved and to return that affection tenfold. And now
that I had finally shaken off all the false notions which had
kept me from having a love—the false notions had come
true and I was right back where I had started from.

And there seemed no hope at all. It seemed I had lost
her.

V

But I had not lost her.

Even as I resigned myself to the future that all gods
must face, I realized how the problem could be resolved. I
had not been thinking with the omniscience of a god, and
now that I suddenly began to apply myself as fully as I
could, an answer loomed immediately in sight. I should
have realized that to God there are no insoluble problems.

Why, then, had the previous God gone mad? Why
hadn't He done what I was about to do to solve His
loneliness? I thought I knew the answer to that one. He
had not considered this utter loneliness to be a debit;
perhaps He had not realized, as His existence had grown
more petty and introverted, that what He needed was
someone with whom to converse, exchange viewpoints and

outlooks and mental visions. And by the time He had
understood, it was too late: He was crazy.

What I had in mind was singularly simple. I took her by
the shoulders and drew her next to me, reached into her
mind with all the force of my esp.

She tried to fight.

It was no good.

I held her, and I funneled into her half the booming
godly energy which I had contained, until the two of us
were gods, each one half a god compared to the one deity
before.

Her mind burst with psychedelic visions.

I fought down the rejection her own personality threw
up, and helped her integrate the white power of godhood
into her own being. We stood there for a very long while,
locked physically and mentally as the changes came to her
as they had come to me.

And we parted.

She took my hand, tenderly.

We did not speak.

There was no need for speech.

Together, we left that room and that building and went
forth to take command of the world. The altar candles
would be lighted, the prayers of the multitudes begun, and
the sacrificial lambs led to the butchering block.

We passed many years on a perfect earth, racing from it
to the corners of the universe. We saw all the places that
had existed in the shattered mirror of God's mental ana-
logue that time so long ago when I had confronted Him
inside Child's mutant husk.

There were worlds where trees grew ugly sores and bled
on the ground.

There were worlds where the sky shattered around us,
was resurrected a hundred times every hour.

We saw walking plants that had built civilization
within the darkness of an alien jungle.

We saw stones that spoke and stars that felt real pain.

For ten thousand years, we roamed the corners of
existence, learning what sort of kingdom we had inherited.

And one day, Melinda said, "I'm bored. I've seen it
all."

"I agree," I agreed.

"Let's revive religion," she said. "Let's at least let the
people know we exist. We can come to them in burning

bushes and in talking doves, and at least that will be
amusing."

"Sounds fine," I said.

And though we had ended the rivalries of religions, we
went down to the earth and revived them. We brought
forth temples and synagogues, churches and altars, and
garish robes and bejeweled priests. We created hierarchies
of worthless prelates, and we spoke our words to the
masses through the mouths of men of less value than most
other men.

And for a time, that was fine, rather like camp culture.
But soon the novelty of it wore off—like camp culture too.

"I'm bored," she said.

"Me too."

"But what is left?" she asked.

"We could stir things up a bit," I said.

"Stir things?"

"A war or two. Some killings. We could take sides. You
could command the Southern Hemisphere, and I the
North. And the winner—yes, I've got it! The winner will
be permitted to expend enough energy to create a new
race of beings on some far-flung world!"

"Marvelous!" she said, clasping her perfect hands across
the full, rounded breasts I had come to know so well.

We had long ago learned that the energy required to
create a race of beings or to form a new planet was too
much of a drain on us. We required five centuries of
recuperation from such a task, and recuperation meant
boredom—which we could not afford.

It was a grand prize, then.

And the wars began. They still rage, for she is a
formidable opponent, though I do believe I will eventually
whip her Hemisphere with a contingent of laser-weaponed
soldiers I have been concealing in a state of suspended
animation beneath the North Pole. They are members of
the Canadian army, well-trained and deadly. She does not
know of them.

We have a fine time.

We play our games, battling for the grand prize, both
of us already imagining what interesting and grotesque
race we could create if permitted the use of the power.

We have a fine time.

On earth, men die, thrown at each other by our machi-
nations. Some fleeting moments, when I am waiting for

her to make her move, I consider my origins: made of
men. I consider my life and Harry Kelly and Morsfagen
and the lot of them. And then I consider what I am
doing, and the old darkness in my soul returns. But not
for long, of course. I am no fool. Morsfagen is dead. The
society we knew has fallen to newer ones. Harry is long
ago gone. I barely remember what he looked like. So we
play our games and forget our doubts. Gods can have no
doubts, as I said once before.

We play our games.

We have a fine time.