Philip Jose Farmer - The God Business 1954

IT WAS THE first time that the U.S. Marines had ever been routed with water pistols.

The screen flickered. Another scene replaced the first. But the afterimage had burned itself on my mind.

A distorted sun that had no business in a mid-Illinois sky made the scene bright for the long-range cameras. A regiment of Marines, helmeted, wearing full packs, toting rifles with bayonets and automatic weapons, were stumbling backward in full retreat before a horde of naked men and women.

The nudists, laughing and capering, were aiming toy cowboy-sixshooters and Captain Orbit rayguns. These sprayed streams of liquid from tiny muzzles, streams that arched over desperately upraised guns and squirted off the faces under the helmets.

Then, the tough veterans were throwing their weapons down and running away. Or else standing foolishly, blinking, running their tongues over wet lips. And the victors were taking the victims by the hand and leading them away behind their own uneven lines.

Why didn't the Marines shoot? Simple. Their cartridges refused to explode.

Flamethrowers, burpguns, recoilless cannon? They might as well have been shillelaghs.

The screen went white. Lights flashed on. Major Alice Lewis, WHAM, put down her baton.

"Well, gentlemen, any questions? None? Mr. Temper, perhaps you'd like to tell us why you expect to succeed where so many others have failed. Mr. Temper, gentlemen, will give us the bald facts."

I rose. My face was flushed; my palms, sticky. I'd have been wiser to laugh at the major's nasty crack about my lack of hair, but a quarter century hadn't killed my self-consciousness over the eggish-ness of my head. When I was twenty, I came down with a near-fatal fever the doctors couldn't identify. When I rose from bed, I was a shorn lamb, and I'd stayed fleeced. Furthermore, I was allergic to toupees. So it was a trifle embarrassing to get up before an audience just after the beautiful Major Lewis had made a pun at the expense of my shining pate.

I walked to the table where she stood, pert and, dammit, pretty. Not until I got there did I see that the hand holding the stick was shaking. I decided to ignore her belligerent attitude. After all, the two of us were going to be together on our mission, and she couldn't help it any more than I. Moreover, she had reason to be nervous. These were trying times for everybody, and especially for the military.

I faced a roomful of civilians and officers, all V.I.P. or loud brass. Through the window at the back, I could see a segment of snow-covered Galesburg, Illinois. The declining sun was perfectly normal. People were moving about as if it were customary for fifty thousand soldiers to be camped between them and the valley of the Illinois, where strange creatures roamed through the fantastically luxuriant vegetation.

I paused to fight down the wave of reluctance which invariably inundated me when I had to speak in public. For some reason, my upper plate always went into a tap dance at such crucial moments.

"Ladie-s-s and gentlemen, I's-s-saw S-s-susie on the's-s-sea-shore yes-s-sterday." You know what I mean. Even if you're describing the plight of the war orphans in Azerbaijan, you watch your listeners smile and cover their lower faces, and you feel like a fool.

I shouldn't have taken so long to summon my nerve, for the major spoke again. Her lip curled. It was a very pretty lip, but I didn't think even a nonpermanent wave improved its appearance at the moment.

"Mr. Temper believes he has the key to our problem. Perhaps he does. I must warn you, however, that his story combines such unrelated and unlikely events as the escape of a bull from the stockyards, the drunken caperings of a college professor who was noted for his dedicated sobriety, to say nothing of the disappearance of said professor of classical literature and two of his students on the same night."

I waited until the laughter died down. When I spoke, I said nothing about two other improbably connected facts. I did not mention the bottle I had purchased in an Irish tavern and shipped to the professor two years before. Nor did I say what I thought one of the camera shots taken by an Army balloon over the city of Onaback meant. This photograph had shown a huge red brick statue of a bull astride the football field of Traybell University.

"Gentlemen," I said, "before I say much about myself, I'll tell you why the Food and Drug Administration is sending a lone agent into an area where, so far, the combined might of the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marines have failed."

Red faces blossomed like flowers in springtime.

"The F.D.A. necessarily takes a part in the affaire a l'Onaback. As you know, the Illinois River, from Chillicothe to Havana, now runs with beer."

Nobody laughed. They'd long ago quit being amused by that. As for me, I loathed any alcoholic drink or drug. With good reason.

"I should modify that. The Illinois has an odor of hops, but those of our volunteers who have drunk from the river where the stuff begins to thin out don't react to it as they would to a regular alcoholic drink. They report a euphoria, plus an almost total lack of inhibition, which lasts even after all alcohol is oxidized from their bloodstream. And the stuff acts like a stimulant, not a depressant. There is no hangover. To add to our mystification, our scientists can't find any unknown substance in the water to analyze.

"However, you all know this, just as you know why the F.D.A. is involved. The main reason I'm being sent in, aside from the fact that I was born and raised in Onaback, is that my superiors, including the President of the United States, have been impressed with my theory about the identity of the man responsible for this whole fantastic mess.

"Besides," I added with a not entirely unmalicious glance at Major Lewis, "they believe that, since I first thought of psychologically conditioning an agent against the lure of the river-water, I should be the agent sent in.

"After this situation had come to the notice of the ED.A. authorities, I was assigned to the case. Since so many Federal Agents had disappeared in Onabagian territory, I decided to do some checking from the outside. I went to the Congressional Library and began reading the Onaback Morning Star and Evening Journal backwards, from the day the Library quit receiving copies of them. Not until I came across the January 13 issues of two years ago, did I find anything significant."

I stopped. Now that I had to put my reasonings in spoken words before these hardheaded bigshots, I could weigh their reception. Zero. Nevertheless, I plunged ahead. I did have an ace-in-the-hole. Or, to be more exact, a monkey-in-a-cage.

"Gentlemen, the January 13 issues related, among other things, the disappearance on the previous night of Dr. Boswell Durham of Traybell University, along with two of his students in his survey course on classical literature. The reports were conflicting, but most of them agreed on the following. One, that during the day of the 13th, a male student, Andrew Polivinosel, made some slighting remark about classical literature. Dr. Durham, a man noted for his mildness and forbearance, called Polivinosel an ass. Polivinosel, a huge football player, rose and said he'd toss Durham out of the building by the seat of his pants. Yet, if we are to believe the witnesses, the timid, spindly, and middle-aged Durham took the husky Polivinosel by one hand and literally threw him out of the door and down the hall.

"Whereupon, Peggy Rourke, an extremely comely co-ed and Polivinosel's 'steady,' persuaded him not to attack the professor. The athlete, however, didn't seem to need much persuasion. Dazed, he made no protest when Miss Rourke led him away.

"The other students in the class reported that there had been friction between the two and that the athlete bugged Dr. Durham in class. Durham now had an excellent opportunity for getting Polivinosel kicked out of school, even though Polivinosel was Little All-American. The professor didn't, however, report the matter to the Dean of Men. He was heard to mutter that Polivinosel was an ass and that this was a fact anyone could plainly see. One student said he thought he detected liquor on the professor's breath, but believed he must have been mistaken, since it was campus tradition that the good doctor never even touched Cokes. His wife, it seems, had a great deal to do with that. She was an ardent temperance worker, a latter-day disciple of Frances Willard.

"This may seem irrelevant, gentlemen, but I assure you it isn't. Consider two other students' testimony. Both swore they saw the neck of a bottle sticking from the professor's overcoat pocket as it hung in his office. It was uncapped. And, though it was freezing outside, the professor, a man famed for his aversion to cold, had both windows open. Perhaps to dispel the fumes from the bottle.

"After the fight, Peggy Rourke was asked by Dr. Durham to come into his office. An hour later, Miss Rourke burst out with her face red and her eyes full of tears. She told her roommate that the professor had acted like a madman. That he had told her he had loved her since the day she'd walked into his classroom. That he had known he was too old and ugly even to think of eloping with her. But, now that 'things' had changed, he wanted to run away with her. She told him she had always been fond of him, but she was by no stretch of the imagination in love with him. Whereupon, he had promised that by that same evening he would be a changed man, and that she would find him irresistible.

"Despite all this, everything seemed to be smooth that evening when Polivinosel brought Peggy Rourke to the Sophomore Frolic. Durham, a chaperon, greeted them as if nothing had happened. His wife did not seem to sense anything wrong. That in itself was strange, for Mrs. Durham was one of those faculty wives who has one end of the campus grapevine grown permanently into her ear. Moreover, a highly nervous woman, she was not one to conceal her emotions. Nor was she subdued by the doctor. He was the butt of many a joke behind his back because he was so obviously henpecked. Mrs. Durham often made a monkey of him and led him around like a bull with a ring in his nose. Yet that night..."

Major Lewis cleared her throat. "Mr. Temper, streamline the details, will you please? These gentlemen are very busy, and they'd like the bald facts. The bald facts, mind you."

I continued, "The bare facts are these. Late that night, shortly after the ball broke up, a hysterical Mrs. Durham called the police and said her husband was out of his mind. Never a word that he might be drinking. Such a thing to her was unthinkable. He wouldn't dare..."

Major Lewis cleared her throat again. I shot her a look of annoyance. Apparently, she failed to realize that some of the details were necessary.

"One of the policemen who answered her call reported later that the professor was staggering around in the snow, dressed only in his pants with a bottle sticking out of his hip pocket, shooting red paint at everybody with a spray gun. Another officer contradicted him. He said the doctor did all the damage with a bucket of paint and a brush.

"Whatever he used, he covered his own house and some of his neighbors' houses from roof to base. When the police appeared, he plastered their car with the paint and blinded them. While they were trying to clear their eyes, he walked off. A half-hour later, he streaked the girls' dorm with red paint and scared a number of the occupants into hysteria. He entered the building, pushed past the scandalized housemother, raced up and down the halls, threw paint over anybody who showed his head, seemingly from a bottomless can, and then, failing to find Peggy Rourke, disappeared.

"I might add that all this time he was laughing like a madman and announcing loudly to all and sundry that tonight he was painting the town red.

"Miss Rourke had gone with Polivinosel and some of his fraternity brothers and dates to a restaurant. Later, the couple dropped the others off at their homes and then proceeded, theoretically, to the girls' dormitory. Neither got there. Nor were they or the professor seen again during the two years that elapsed between that incident and the time the Onaback papers quit publishing. The popular theory was that the love-crazed professor had killed and buried them and then fled to parts unknown. But I choose, on good evidence, to believe otherwise."

Hurriedly, for I could see they were getting restless, I told them of the bull that had appeared from nowhere at the foot of Main Street. The stockyards later reported that none of their bulls was missing. Nevertheless, too many people saw the bull for the account to be denied. Not only that, they all testified that the last they saw of it, it was swimming across the Illinois River with a naked woman on its back. She was waving a bottle in her hand. It, and the woman, then plunged into the forest on the bluffs and disappeared.

At this there was an uproar. A Coast Guard Commander said "Are you trying to tell me that Zeus and Europa have come to life, Mr. Temper?"

There was no use in continuing. These men didn't believe unless they saw with their own eyes. I decided it was time to let them see.

I waved my hand. My assistants pushed in a large cage on wheels. Within it crouched a very large ape, wearing a little straw hat, a sour expression, and a pair of pink nylon panties. A hole cut in the bottom of the latter allowed her long tail to stick through. Strictly speaking, I suppose, she couldn't be classified as an ape. Apes have no tails.

An anthropologist would have seen at once that this wasn't a monkey, either. It was true that she did have a prognathous muzzle, long hair that covered her whole body, long arms, and a tail. But no monkey ever had such a smooth, high brow, or such a big hooked nose, or legs so long in proportion to her trunk.

When the cage had come to rest beside the platform, I said, "Gentlemen, if everything I've said seemed irrevelant, I'm sure that the next few minutes will convince you I have not been barking up the wrong tree."

I turned to the cage, caught myself almost making a bow, and said, "Mrs. Durham, will you please tell these gentlemen what happened to you?"

Then I waited, in full expectation of the talk, torrential and disconnected but illuminating, that had overwhelmed me the previous evening after my buddies had captured her on the edge of the area. I was very proud, because I'd made a discovery that would shock and rock these gentlemen from their heads of bone to their heels of leather and show them that one little agent from the F.D.A. had done what the whole armed forces had not. Then they wouldn't snicker and refer to me as Out-of-Temper by Frothing-at-the-Mouth.

I waited...

And I waited...

And Mrs. Durham refused to say a word. Not one, though I all but got down on my knees and pleaded with her. I tried to explain to her what giant forces were in balance and that she held the fate of the world in the hollow of her pink hairless palm. She would not open her mouth. Somebody had injured her dignity, and she would do nothing but sulk and turn her back on all of us and wave her tail above her pink panties.

She was the most exasperating female I'd ever known. No wonder that her husband made a monkey of her.

Triumph had become fiasco. Nor did it convince the big shots when I played the recording of my last night's conversation with her. They still thought I had less brains than hair, and they showed it when they replied to my request for questions with silence. Major Alice Lewis smiled scornfully.

Well, it made no difference in my mission. I was under orders they hadn't power to countermand.

At 7:30 that evening, I was outside the area with a group of officers and my boss. Though the moon was just coming up, its light was bright enough to read by. About ten yards from us, the whiteness of snow and cold ended, and the green and warmth began.

General Lewis, Major Lewis' father, said, "We'll give you two days to contact Durham, Mr. Temper. Wednesday, 1400, we attack. Marines, equipped with bows and arrows and airguns, and wearing oxygen masks, will be loaded into gliders with pressurized cabins. These will be released from their tow-planes at high altitude. They will land upon U. S. Route 24 just south of the city limits, where there are now two large meadows. They will march up South Adams Street until they come to the downtown district. By then, I hope, you will have located and eliminated the source of this trouble."

For "eliminated," read "assassinated." By his expression, he thought I couldn't do it. General Lewis disliked me, not only because I was a civilian with authority, backed by the President himself, but because the conditions of my assignment with his daughter were unorthodox, to say the least. Alice Lewis was not only a major and a woman -- she was a mightily attractive one and young for her rank.

She stood there, shivering, in her bra and panties, while I was stripped down to my own shorts. Once we were safely in the woods, we would take off the rest of our clothes. When in Rome...

Marines with bows and arrows and BB guns -- no wonder the military was miserable. But, once inside the Area controlled by my former professor and his Brew, firearms simply refused to work. And the Brew did work, making addicts of all who tasted it.

All but me.

I was the only one who had thought to have myself conditioned against it.

Dr. Duerf asked me a few questions while someone strapped a three-gallon tank of distilled water to my back. The doctor was the Columbia psychiatrist who had conditioned me against the Brew.

Suddenly, in the midst of a casual remark, he grabbed the back of my head. A glass seemed to appear from nowhere in his fist. He tried to force its contents past my lips. I took just one sniff and knocked the glass from his grip and struck him with the other fist.

He danced back, holding the side of his face. "How do you feel now?" he asked.

"I'm all right," I said, "but I thought for a moment I'd choke. I wanted to kill you for trying to do that to me."

"I had to give you a final test. You passed it with a big A. You're thoroughly conditioned against the Brew."

The two Lewises said nothing. They were irked because I, a civilian, had thought of this method of combating the allure of the Brew. The thousand Marines, scheduled to follow me in two days, would have to wear oxygen masks to save them from temptation. As for my companion, she had been hastily put under hypnosis by Duerf, but he didn't know how successfully. Fortunately, her mission would not take as long as mine. She was supposed to go to the source of the Brew and bring back a sample. If, however, I needed help, I was to call on her. Also, though it was unstated, I was to keep her from succumbing to the Brew.

We shook hands all around, and we walked away. Warm air fell over us like a curtain. One moment, we were shivering; the next, sweating. That was bad. It meant we'd be drinking more water than we had provided ourselves with.

I looked around in the bright moonlight. Two years had changed the Illinois-scape. There were many more trees than there had been, trees of a type you didn't expect to see this far north. Whoever was responsible for the change had had many seeds and sprouts shipped in, in preparation for the warmer climate. I knew, for I had checked in Chicago on various shipments and had found that a man by the name of Smith -- Smith! -- had, two weeks after Durham's disappearance, begun ordering from tropical countries.

The packages had gone to an Onaback house and had ended up in the soil hereabouts. Durham must have realized that this river-valley area couldn't support its customary 300,000 people, once the railroads and trucks quit shipping in cans of food and fresh milk and provisions. The countryside would have been stripped by the hungry hordes.

But when you looked around at the fruit trees, bananas, cherries, apples, pears, oranges, and others, most of them out of season and flourishing in soils thought unfavorable for their growth -- when you noted the blackberry, blueberry, gooseberry, and raspberry bushes, the melons and potatoes and tomatoes on the ground -- all large enough to have won county-fair first prizes in any pre-Brew age -- then you realized there was no lack of food. All you had to do was pick it and eat.

"It looks to me," whispered Alice Lewis, "like the Garden of Eden."

"Stop talking treason, Alice!" I snapped.

She iced me with a look. "Don't be silly. And don't call me Alice. I'm a major in the Marines."

"Pardon," I said. "But we'd better drop the rank. The natives might wonder. What's more, we'd better shed these clothes before we run into somebody."

She wanted to object, but she had her orders. Even though we were to be together at least thirty-six hours, and would be mother-naked all that time, she insisted we go into the bushes to peel. I didn't argue.

I stepped behind a tree and took off my shorts. At the same time, I smelled cigar smoke. I slipped off the webbing holding the tank to my back and walked out onto the narrow trail. I got a hell of a shock.

A monster leaned against a tree, his short legs crossed, a big Havana sticking from the side of his carnivorous mouth, his thumbs tucked in an imaginary vest.

I shouldn't have been frightened. I should have been amused. This creature had stepped right out of a very famous comic strip. He stood seven feet high, had a bright green hide and yellow-brown plates running down his chest and belly. His legs were very short; his trunk, long. His face was half-man, half alligator. He had two enormous bumps on top of his head and big dish-sized eyes. The same half-kindly, half-stupid, and arrogant look was upon his face. He was complete, even to having four fingers instead of five.

My shock came not only from the unexpectedness of his appearance. There is a big difference between something seen on paper and that seen in the flesh. This thing was cute and humorous and lovable in the strip. Transformed into living color and substance, it was monstrous.

"Don't get scared," said the apparition. "I grow on you after a while."

"Who are you?" I asked.

At that moment, Alice stepped out from behind a tree. She gasped, and she grabbed my arm.

He waved his cigar. "I'm the Allegory on the Banks of the Illinois. Welcome, strangers, to the domain of the Great Mahrud."

I didn't know what he meant by those last few words. And it took a minute to figure out that his title was a pun derived from the aforesaid cartoonist and from Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop.

"Albert Allegory is the full name," he said. "That is, in this metamorph. Other forms, other names, you know. And you two, I suppose, are outsiders who wish to live along the Illinois, drink from the Brew, and worship the Bull."

He held out his hand with the two inside fingers clenched and the thumb and outside finger extended.

"This is the sign that every true believer makes when he meets another," he said. "Remember it, and you'll be saved much trouble."

"How do you know I'm from the outside?" I asked. I didn't try to lie. He didn't seem to be bent on hurting us.

He laughed, and his vast mouth megaphoned the sound. Alice, no longer the cocky WHAM officer, gripped my hand hard.

He said, "I'm sort of a demigod, you might say. When Mahrud, bull be his name, became a god, he wrote a letter to me -- using the U. S. mails of course -- and invited me to come here and demigod for him. I'd never cared too much for the world as it was so I slipped in past the Army cordon and took over the duties that Mahrud, bull be his name, gave me."

I, too, had received a letter from my former professor. It had arrived before the trouble developed, and I had not understood his invitation to come live with him and be his demigod. I'd thought he'd slipped a gear or two.

For lack of anything pertinent to say, I asked, "What are your duties?"

He waved his cigar again. "My job, which is anything but onerous, is to meet outsiders and caution them to keep their eyes open. They are to remember that not everything is what it seems, and they are to look beyond the surface of the deed for the symbol."

He puffed on his cigar and then said, "I have a question for you. I don't want you to answer it now, but I want you to think about it and give me an answer later." He blew smoke again. "My question is this -- where do you want to go now?"

He didn't offer to expand his question. He said, "So long," and strolled off down a side-path, his short legs seeming to move almost independently of his elongated saurian torso. I stared for a moment, still shaking from the encounter. Then I returned to the tree behind which I'd left my water-tank and strapped it back on.

We walked away fast. Alice was so subdued that she did not seem conscious of our nudity. After a while, she said, "Something like that frightens me. How could a man assume a form like that?"

"We'll find out," I said with more optimism than I felt. "I think we'd better be prepared for just about anything."

"Perhaps the story Mrs. Durham told you back at Base was true."

I nodded. The Professor's wife had said that, shortly before the Area was sealed off, she had gone to the bluffs across the river, where she knew her husband was. Even though he had announced himself a god by then, she was not afraid of him.

Mrs. Durham had taken two lawyers along, just in case. She was highly incoherent about what happened across the river. But some strange force, apparently operated by Dr. Durham, had turned her into a large tailed ape, causing her to flee. The two lawyers, metamorphosed into skunks, had also beaten a retreat.

Considering these strange events, Alice said, "What I can't understand is how Durham could do these things. Where's his power? What sort of gadget does he have?"

Hot as it was, my skin developed gooseflesh. I could scarcely tell her that I was almost certainly responsible for this entire situation. I felt guilty enough without actually telling the truth. Moreover, if Ihad told her what I believed to be the truth, she'd havek nown I was crazy. Nevertheless, that was the way it was, and that was why I had volunteered for this assignment. I'd started it; I had to finish it.

"I'm thirsty," she said. "What about a drink, Pops? We may not get a chance at another for a long time."

"Damn it," I said as I slipped off the tank, "don't call me Pops! My name is Daniel Temper, and I'm not so old that I could be..."

I stopped. I was old enough to be her father. In the Kentucky mountains, at any rate.

Knowing what I was thinking, she smiled and held out the little cup she had taken from the clip on the tank's side. I growled, "A man's only as old as he feels, and I don't feel over thirty."

At that moment I caught the flicker of moonlight on a form coming down the path. "Duck!" I said to Alice.

She just had time to dive into the grass. As for me, the tank got in my way, so I decided to stay there and brazen things out.

When I saw what was coming down the path, I wished I had taken off the tank. Weren't thereany human beings in this Godforsaken land? First it was the Allegory. Now it was the Ass.

He said, "Hello, brother," and before I could think of a good comeback, he threw his strange head back and loosed tremendous laughter that was half ha-ha! and half hee-haw!

I didn't think it was funny. I was far too tense to pretend amusement. Moreover, his breath stank of Brew. I was half-sick before I could back up to escape it.

He was tall and covered with short blond hair, unlike most asses, and he stood upon two manlike legs that ended in broad hoofs. He had two long hairy ears, but, otherwise, he was as human as anybody else you might meet in the woods -- or on the street. And his name, as he wasn't backward in telling me, was Polivinosel.

He said, "Why are you carrying that tank?"

"I've been smuggling the Brew to the outside."

His grin revealed long yellow horselike teeth. "Bootlegging, eh? But what do they pay you with? Moneys no good to a worshiper of the All-Bull."

He held up his right hand. The thumb and two middle fingers were bent. The index finger and little finger were held straight out. I didn't respond immediately, and he looked hard. I imitated his gesture, and he relaxed a little.

"I'm bootlegging for the love of it," I said. "And also to spread the gospel."

Where that last phrase came from, I had no notion. Perhaps from the reference to "worshiper" and the vaguely religious-looking sign that Polivinosel had made.

He reached out a big hairy hand and turned the spigot on my tank. Before I could move, he had poured out enough to fill his cupped palm. He raised his hand to his lips and slurped loudly. He blew the liquid out so it sprayed all over me. "Whee-oo! That's water!"

"Of course," I said. "After I get rid of my load of Brew, I fill the tank with ordinary water. If I'm caught by the border patrol, I tell them I'm smuggling pure water into our area."

Polivinosel went hoo-hah-hah and slapped his thigh so hard, it sounded like an axe biting into a tree.

"That's not all," I said. "I even have an agreement with some of the higher officers. They allow me to slip through if I bring them back some Brew."

He winked and brayed and slapped his thigh again. "Corruption, eh, brother? Even brass will rust. I tell you, it won't be long until the Brew of the Bull spreads everywhere."

Again he made that sign, and I did so almost at the same time.

He said, "I'll walk with you a mile or so. My worshipers -- the local Cult of the Ass -- are holding a fertility ceremony down the path a way. Care to join us?"

I shuddered. "No, thank you," I said fervently.

I had witnessed one of those orgies through a pair of fieldglasses one night. The huge bonfire had been about two hundred yards inside the forbidden boundary. Against its hellish flame, I could see the white and capering bodies of absolutely uninhibited men and women. It was a long time before I could get that scene out of my mind. I used to dream about it.

When I declined the invitation, Polivinosel brayed again and slapped me on the back, or where my back would have been if my tank hadn't been in the way. As it was, I fell on my hands and knees in a patch of tall grass. I was furious. I not only resented his too-high spirits, I was afraid he had bent the thin-walled tank and sprung a leak in its seams.

But that wasn't the main reason I didn't get up at once. I couldn't move because I was staring into Alice's big blue eyes.

Polivinosel gave a loud whoop and leaped through the air and landed beside me. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his big ugly mule-eared face into Alice's and bellowed, "How now, white cow! How high browse thou?"

He grabbed Alice by the waist and lifted her up high, getting up himself at the same time. There he held her in the moonlight and turned her around and over and over, as if she were a strange-looking bug he had caught crawling in the weeds.

She squealed and gasped, "Damn you, you big jackass, take your filthy paws off me!"

"I'm Polivinosel, the local god of fertility!" he brayed. "It's my duty -- and privilege -- to inspect your qualifications. Tell me, daughter, have you prayed recently for a son or daughter? Are your crops coming along? How are your cabbages growing? What about your onions and your parsnips? Are your hens laying enough eggs?"

Instead of being frightened, Alice got angry. "All right, Your Asininity, would you please let me down? And quit looking at me with those big lecherous eyes. If you want what I think you do, hurry along to your own orgy. Your worshipers are waiting for you."

He opened his hands so she fell to the ground. Fortunately, she was quick and lithe and landed on her feet. She started to walk away, but he reached out and grabbed her by the wrist.

"You're going the wrong way, my pretty little daughter. The infidels are patrolling the border only a few hundred yards away.

You wouldn't want to get caught. Then you'd not be able to drink the divine Brew anymore. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

"I'll take care of myself, thank you," she said huskily. "Just leave me alone. It's getting so a girl can't take a snooze by herself in the grass without some minor deity or other wanting to wrestle!"

Alice was picking up the local lingo fast.

"Well, now, daughter, you can't blame us godlings for that. Not when you're built like a goddess yourself."

He gave that titanic bray that should have knocked us down, then grabbed both of us by the wrists and dragged us along the path.

"Come along, little ones. I'll introduce you around. And we'll all have a ball at the Feast of the Ass." Again, the loud offensive bray. I could see why Durham had metamorphosed this fellow into his present form.

That thought brought me up short. The question was,how had he done it? I didn't believe in supernatural powers, of course. If there were any, they weren't possessed by man. And anything that went on in this physical universe had to obey physical laws.

Take Polivinosel's ears and hoofs. I had a good chance to study them more closely as I walked with him. His ears may have been changed, like Bottoms, into a donkey's, but whoever had done it had not had an accurate picture in his mind. They were essentially human ears, elongated and covered over with tiny hairs.

As for the legs, they were human, not equine. It was true he had no feet. But his pale, shiny hoofs, though cast into a good likeness of a horse's, were evidently made of the same stuff as toenails. And there was still the faintest outline and curve of five toes.

It was evident that some biological sculptor had had to rechisel and then regrow the basic human form.

I looked at Alice to see what she thought of him. She was magnificent in her anger. As Polivinosel had been uncouth enough to mention, she had a superb figure. She was the sort of girl who is always president of her college sorority, queen of the Senior Prom, and engaged to a Senators son. The type I had never had a chance with when I was working my way through Traybell University.

Polivinosel suddenly stopped and roared, "Look, you, what's your name?"

"Daniel Temper," I said.

"Daniel Temper? D.T.? Ah,hah, hoo, hah, hah ! Listen, Old D.T., throw that tank away. It burdens you down, and you look like an ass, a veritable beast of burden, with it on your back. And I won't have anybody going around imitating me, see? Hoohah-heehaw ! Get it?"

He punched me in the ribs with a big thumb as hard as horn. It was all I could do to keep from swinging at him. I never hated a man -- or deity -- so much. Durham had failed if he had thought to punish him. Polivinosel seemed to be proud of his transformation and had, if I understood him correctly, profited enough by his experience to start a cult. Of course, he wasn't the first to make a religion of his infirmity.

"How will I be able to bootleg the Brew out?" I asked.

"Who cares?" he said. "Your piddling little operations won't help the spread of the divine Drink much. Leave that up to the rivers of the world and to Mahrud, bull be his name."

He made that peculiar sign again.

I couldn't argue with him. He'd have torn the tank off my back. Slowly, I unstrapped it. He helped me by grabbing it and throwing it off into the darkness of the woods.

Immediately, I became so thirsty, I could hardly stand it.

"You don't want that filthy stuff!" Polivinosel brayed. "Come with me to the Place of the Ass! I have a nice little temple there -- nothing fancy, understand, like the Flower Palace of Mahrud, may he be all bull -- but it will do. And we do have a good time."

All this while, he was ogling Alice shamelessly and projecting more than his thoughts. Like all the degenerates in this area, he had absolutely no inhibitions. If I had had a gun, I think I would have shot him then and there. That is, if the cartridges could have exploded.

"Look here," I said, abandoning caution in my anger. "We're going where we damn well please." I grabbed the girl's wrist. More wrist-grabbing going on lately. "Come on, Alice, let's leave this glorified donkey."

Polivinosel loomed in our way. The slightly Mongolian tilt of his eyes made him look more Missouri-mulish than ever. Big and mean and powerful, with the accent on mean.

"Don't think for a minute," he bellowed, "that you're going to get me mad enough to harm you so you can go tell your prayerman to report me to Mahrud! You can't tempt me into wrath! That would be a mortal sin, mortals!"

Shouting about my not being able to disturb his Olympian aloofness, he put his arm around my neck and with the other hand reached into my mouth and yanked out my upper plate.

"You and your mushmouthing annoy me!" he cried.

He released his choking grip around my neck and threw the plate into the shadows of the forest. I rushed toward the bush where I thought I'd seen the white teeth land. I got down on my hands and knees and groped frantically around, but I couldn't find them.

Alice's scream brought me upward. Too fast, for I bumped my head hard against a branch. Despite the pain, I turned back to see what was the trouble and charged through the brush. And I banged my shins hard against some object and fell flat on my face, knocking my breath out.

When I rose, I saw I'd tripped over my own watertank. I didn't stop to thank whatever gods might be for my good fortune. Instead, I picked the tank up and, running up to them, brought it crashing down against the back of his head. Soundlessly, he crumpled. I threw the container to one side and went to Alice.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Yes-s," she said, sobbing, and put her head on my shoulder.

I judged she was more frightened and mad than hurt. I patted her shoulder -- she had beautifully smooth skin -- and stroked her long black hair. But she wouldn't quit weeping.

"That filthy creep! First he ruins my sister, and now he tries to do the same to me."

"Huh?"

She raised her head to look at me. Look down at me, rather -- she was an inch or two taller.

"Peggy was my half-sister, daughter by my fathers first marriage. Her mother married a Colonel Rourke. But we were always close."

I wanted to hear more, but the immediate situation demanded my attention.

I turned Polivinosel over. His heart was still beating. Blood flowed from the gash in the back of his scalp, not the clear ichor you expect from a god's veins.

"Type O," said Alice. "Same as it was before. And don't worry about him. He deserves to die. He's a big stupid jerk of a Don Juan who got my sister in trouble and wouldn't..."

She stopped and gasped. I followed her stricken gaze and water had spilled into the dirt. And again I felt that sudden wrench of thirst. It was purely mental, of course, but that knowledge didn't make me less dry.

She put her hand to her throat and croaked, "All of a sudden, I'm thirsty."

"There's nothing we can do about it unless we find a source of uncontaminated water," I said. "And the longer we stand around talking about it, the thirstier we'll get."

The tank was empty. Stopping to check this sad fact, I saw light flash on something beneath a bush. I retrieved my upper plate. With my back toward Alice, I inserted the teeth and, feeling a little more assured, told her we'd better start walking on.

We did, but she still had the water problem on her mind. "Surely, there are wells and creeks that aren't infected. Only the river is filled with the Brew, isn't it?"

"If I were sure of that I'd not have taken the water tank," I was unkind enough to point out.

She opened her mouth to reply. But just then we heard voices down the path and saw the flare of approaching torches. Quickly, we stepped into the brush and hid.

The newcomers were singing. Their song owed its music to The Battle Hymn of the Republic , but the words were Latin. It was wretched Latin, for their accent paid allegiance to the beat of the original English meter. It didn't bother them at all. I doubt if many even knew what they were singing.

"Orientis partibus Adventavit Asinus, Pulcher et Fortissimus, Sarcinis aptissimus. Orientis partibus Adventavit... Eeeeek!"

They had rounded the trails bend and discovered their god, bleeding and unconscious.

Alice whispered, "Let's get out of here. If that mob catches us, they'll tear us apart."

I wanted to watch, to learn from their behavior how we should act when among the natives. I told her so, and she nodded. Despite our antagonism, I had to admit that she was intelligent and brave. If she was a little nervous, she had good reason to be.

These people didn't act at all as I'd thought they would. Instead of wailing and weeping, they stood away from him, huddled together, not quite sure what to do. I didn't see at first what caused their attitude. Then I realized from their expressions and whispers that they were afraid to interfere in the affairs of a demigod -- even one as demi as Polivinosel.

The thing that italicized their indecision was their youthfulness. There wasn't a man or woman in the group who looked over twenty-five, and all were of superb physique.

Something made a loud cracking noise down the path behind us. Alice and I jumped, as did the whole group. They took off like a bunch of scared rabbits. I felt like joining them, but I stayed. I did, however, pray that this wouldn't be another nerve-rocking monster.

It was merely a naked native, a tall lean one with a long thin nose, who looked as if he ought to be teaching in some college. The effect was intensified by the fact that he had his nose in a book. As I've said, the moonlight was strong enough for reading, but I hadn't really expected anyone to take advantage of it.

His scholarly appearance was somewhat marred by the dead squirrel, large as a collie, which hung around his neck and over his shoulders. He had been hunting, I suppose, though I'd never heard of hunting squirrels in the dark. Moreover, he carried no weapons.

All of this, except for the squirrel's size, was surprising. I'd seen camera shots of the great beasts taken along the Area's edge.

I watched him closely to see what he'd do when he saw Polivinosel. He disappointed me. When he came to the prostrate form, he did not hesitate or give any sign that he had seen the god except to lift his feet over the outstretched legs. His nose remained dipped in the book.

I took Alice's hand. "Come on. We're following him."

We walked behind the reader for perhaps a half-mile. When I thought it was safe to stop him, I called out to him. He halted and put his squirrel on the ground and waited for me.

I asked him if he had noticed Polivinosel lying on the path.

Puzzled, he shook his head.

"I saw you step over him," I said.

"I stepped over nothing," he insisted. "The path was perfectly clear." He peered closely at me. "I can see you're a newcomer. Perhaps you've had your first taste of the Brew. Sometimes, at first, it gives strange sensations and visions. Takes a little time to get adjusted to it, you know."

I said nothing about that, but I did argue with him about Polivinosel. Not until I mentioned the name, however, did he look enlightened. He smiled in a superior manner and looked down his long nose.

"Ah, my good man, you mustn't believe everything you hear, you know. Just because the majority, who have always been ignorami and simpletons, choose to explain the new phenomena in terms of ancient superstition is no reason for an intelligent man such as yourself to put any credence in them.

I suggest you discard anything you hear -- with the exception of what I tell you, of course -- and use the rational powers that you were lucky enough to be born with and to develop in some university, providing, that is, you didn't go to some institution which is merely a training ground for members of the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Odd Fellows, Knights of Columbus, Shriners, or the Lions, Moose, Elk, and other curious beasts. I scarcely -- "

"But I saw Polivinosel!" I said, exasperated. "And if you hadn't lifted your feet, you'd have fallen over him!"

Again, he gave a superior smile. "Tut, tut! Self-hypnotism, mass delusion, something of that sort. Perhaps you are a victim of suggestion. Believe me, there are many unsettling things in this valley. You mustn't allow yourself to be bamboozled by the first charlatan who comes along and has an easy -- if fantastic -- explanation for all this."

"What's yours?" I challenged.

"Dr. Durham invented some sort of machine that generates the unknown chemical with which he is now infecting the Illinois River. And eventually, we hope, the waters of the world.

One of its properties is a destruction of many of the sociologically and psychologically conditioned reflexes which some term inhibitions, mores, or neuroses. And a very good thing, too. It also happens to be a universal antibiotic and tonic -- such a combination! -- besides a number of other things, not all of which I approve.

"However, he has, I must admit, done away with such societal and politico-economic structurologies and agents as factories, shops, doctors, hospitals, schools -- which have hitherto devoted most of their time and energy to turning out half-educated morons -- bureaucracies, automobiles, churches, movies, advertising, distilleries, soap operas, armies, prostitutes, and innumerable other institutions until recently considered indispensable.

"Unfortunately, the rationalizing instinct in man is very hard to down, as is the power-drive. So you have charlatans posing as prophets and setting up all sorts of new churches and attracting the multitudes in all their moronic simplicity and pathetic eagerness to grasp at some explanation for the unknown."

I wanted to believe him, but I knew that the Professor had neither ability nor money enough to build such a machine.

"What is the peasants' explanation for the Brew?" I asked.

"They have none except that it comes from the Bottle," said the Rational Man. "They swear that Durham derives his powers from this Bottle, which, by description, is nothing more than a common everyday beer bottle. Some declare, however, that it bears, in stiacciato, the image of a bull."

Guilt brought sweat out on my forehead. So, it had been my gift! And I'd thought I was playing a harmless little hoax on my likable but daffy old Classical-Lit prof!

"That story is probably derived from his name," I said hastily. "After all, his students used to call him 'Bull.' It wasn't only the fact that his name was Durham. His wife led him around with a ring in his nose, and -- "

"In which case, he fooled his students," said the Rational Man. "For he was, beneath that mild and meek exterior, a prize bull, a veritable stallion, a lusty old goat. As you may or may not know, he has any number of nymphs stabled in his so-called Flower Palace, not to mention beautiful Peggy Rourke, now known as the -- "

Alice gasped. "Then she is living! And with Durham!"

He raised his eyebrows. "Well that depends upon whether or not you listen to these charlatans. Some of them would have it that she has become transfigured in some mystical-muddled manner -- multiplied, they call it -- and is each and every one of those nymphs in Mahrud's seraglio, yet is in some way none of them and exists in essence only."

He shook his head and said, "Oh, the rationalizing species that must invent gods and dogmas!"

"Who's Mahrud?" I asked.

"Why, Durham spelled backward, of course. Don't you know that there is a tendency in every religion to avoid pronouncing the True Name?

However, I believe that those fakers, the Scrambled Men, invented the name, mainly because they couldn't say it right. They insisted the predeity name be distinguished from the Real One.

It caught on fast, probably because it sounded so Oriental and, therefore, in the minds of these peons, mystical."

I was getting so much data all at once that I was more mixed up than ever.

"Haven't you ever seen Mahrud?" I asked.

"No, and I never shall. Those so-called gods just don't exist, any more than the Allegory or the Ass. Nobody with a rational mind could believe in them. Unfortunately, the Brew, despite its many admirable qualities, does have a strong tendency to make one illogical, irrational, and susceptible to suggestion."

He tapped his high forehead and said, "But I accept all the good things and reject the others. I'm quite happy."

Shortly after this, we came out on a country road I recognized.

The Rational Man said, "We'll be coming soon to my house. Would you two care to stop? We'll have this squirrel to eat and lots of Brew from the well in the backyard. Some of my friends will be there, and we'll have a nice intellectual talk before the orgy starts. You'll find them congenial -- they're all atheists or agnostics."

I shuddered at the idea of being asked to drink the hated Liquor. "Sorry," I said. "We must be going. But tell me, as a matter of curiosity, how you caught that squirrel. You're not carrying any weapon."

"Can't," he replied, waving his book.

"Can't? Why not?"

"No, not can't. K-a-n-t. Kant. You see, the Brew has had this extraordinary effect on stimulating certain animals' growth. More than that, it has, I'm sure, affected their cerebral systems. They seem much more intelligent than before.

A combination of increase in size of brain and change in organization of neurons, probably. Whatever the effect, the change has been most remarkable in rodents. A good thing, too. Wonderful source of meat, you know.

"Anyway," he continued, as he saw my increasing impatience, "I've found that one doesn't need a gun, which no longer explodes in this area, anyway, nor a bow and arrow. All one has to do is locate an area abundant in squirrels and sit down and read aloud.

While one is both enjoying and educating oneself, the squirrel, attracted by one's monotonous voice, descends slowly from his tree and draws nearer.

"One pays no attention to him -- one reads on. The beast sits close to one, slowly waving its bushy tail, its big black eyes fixed on one. After a while, one rises, closes the book, and picks up the squirrel, which is by now completely stupefied and never comes out of its state, not even when one takes it home and cuts it throat.

"I've found by experiment that one gets the best results by reading The Critique of Pure Reason . Absolutely stuns them. However, rabbits, for some reason, are more easily seduced by my reading Henry Millers Tropic of Capricorn.

In the French translation, of course. Friend of mine says that the best book for the birds is Hubbard's Dianetics, but one ought to take pride in one's tools, you know. I've always caught my pheasants and geese with Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

We came to his estate and said good-by to him. Stepping up our pace, we walked for several miles past the many farmhouses along the gravel road. Some of these had burned down, but their occupants had simply moved into the barn. Or, if that had gone up in flames, had erected a lean-to.

"Photographs from Army balloons have shown that a good many houses in the city have burned down," I said. "Not only that, the grass is literally growing in the streets again. I've been wondering where the burned-out people were living, but this shows how they manage. They live like savages."

"Well, why not?" asked Alice. "They don't seem to have to work very hard to live in abundance. I've noticed we haven't been bitten by mosquitoes, so noxious insects must have been exterminated. Sanitation shouldn't bother them -- the Brew kills all diseases, if we're to believe that squirrel-reader.

They don't have much refuse in the way of tin cans, paper, and so on to get rid of. They all seem very happy and hospitable. We've had to turn down constant invitations to stop and eat and drink some Brew. And even," she added with a malicious smile, "to participate in orgies afterward.

That seems to be quite a respectable word now. I noticed that beautiful blonde back at the last farm tried to drag you off the road. You'll have to admit that that couldn't have happened Outside."

"Maybe I am bald," I snarled, "but I'm not so damned repulsive that no good-looking girl could fall in love with me. I wish I had a photo of Bernadette to show you. Bernadette and I were just on the verge of getting engaged. She's only thirty and -- "

"Has she got all her teeth?"

"Yes, she has," I retorted. "She didn't get hit in the mouth by a mortar fragment and then lose the rest of her upper teeth through an infection, with no antibiotics available because enemy fire kept her in a foxhole for five days."

I was so mad I was shaking.

Alice answered softly, "Dan, I'm sorry I said that. I didn't know."

"Not only that," I plunged on, ignoring her apology. "What have you got against me besides my teeth and hair and the fact that I thought of this conditioning idea and my superiors -- including the President -- thought enough of my abilities to send me into this area without ten thousand Marines paving the way for me?

As far as that goes, why were you sent with me? Was it because your father happens to be a general and wanted to grab some glory for you and him by association with me? If that isn't militaristic parasitism, what is? And furthermore..."

I raved on, and every time she opened her mouth, I roared her down. I didn't realize how loud I was until I saw a man and a woman standing in the road ahead of us, watching intently. I shut up at once, but the damage was done.

As soon as we were opposite them, the man said, "Newcomer, you're awfully grumpy." He held out a bottle to me. "Here, drink. It's good for what ails you. We don't have any harsh words in Mahrudland."

I said, "No, thanks," and tried to go around them, but the woman, a brunette who resembled a cross between the two Russells, Jane and Lillian, grabbed me around my neck and said, "Aw, come on, skinhead, I think you're cute. Have a drink and come along with us.

We're going to a fertility ceremony at Jonesy's farm. Polivinosel himself'll be there. He's deigning to mix with us mortals for tonight. And you can make love with me and ensure a good crop. I'm one of Poli's nymphs, you know."

"Sorry," I said. "I've got to go."

I felt something wet and warm flooding over my scalp. For a second, I couldn't guess what it was. But when I smelled the hop-like Brew, I knew! And I responded with all the violence and horror the stuff inspired in me. Before the man could continue pouring the liquid over my head, I tore the woman's grip loose and threw her straight into the face of her companion. Both went down.

Before they could rise, I grabbed Alice's hand and fled with her down the road.

After we had run about a quarter of a mile, I had to slow to a walk. My heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest, and my head was expanding to fill the dome of the sky. Even my setting-up exercises hadn't fitted me for this.

However, I didn't feel so bad when I saw that Alice, young and fit as she was, was panting just as hard.

"They're not chasing us," I said. "Do you know, we've penetrated this area so easily, I wonder how far a column of Marines could have gone if they'd come in tonight. Maybe it would have been better to try an attack this way."

"We've tried four already," said Alice. "Two by day, two by night. The first three marched in and never came back, and you saw what happened to the last."

We walked along in silence for a while. Then I said, "Look, Alice, I blew my top a while ago, and we almost got into trouble. So why don't we agree to let bygones be bygones and start out on a nice fresh foot?"

"Nothing doing! I will refrain from quarreling, but there'll be none of this buddy-buddy stuff. Maybe, if we drank this Brew, I might get to liking you. But I doubt if even that could do it."

I said nothing, determined to keep my mouth shut if it killed me.

Encouraged by my silence -- or engaged -- she said, "Perhaps we might end up by drinking the Brew. Our water is gone, and if you're as thirsty as I am, you're on fire. We'll be at least fourteen hours without water, maybe twenty.

And we'll be walking all the time. What happens when we just have to have water and there's nothing but the river to drink from? It won't be as if the stuff was poison.

"As a matter of fact, we know we'll probably be very happy.

And that's the worst of it. That X substance, or Brew, or whatever you want to call it, is the most insidious drug ever invented. Its addicts not only seem to be permanently happy, they benefit in so many other ways from it."

I couldn't keep silent any longer. "That's dangerous talk!"

"Not at all, Mister Temper. Merely the facts."

"I don't like it!"

"What are you so vehement about?"

"Why?" I asked, my voice a little harder. "There's no reason why I should be ashamed. My parents were hopheads.

My father died in the state hospital. My mother was cured, but she burned to death when the restaurant she was cooking in caught fire.

Both are buried in the old Meltonville cemetery just outside Onaback. When I was younger, I used to visit their graves at night and howl at the skies because an unjust God had allowed them to die in such a vile and beastly fashion. I..."

Her voice was small but firm and cool. "I'm sorry,Dan , that that happened to you. But you're getting a little melodramatic aren't you?"

I subsided at once. "You're right. It's just that you seem to needle me so I want to -- "

"Bare your naked soul? No, thanks, Dan. It's bad enough to have to bare our bodies. I don't want to make you sore, but there's not much comparison between the old narcotics and this Brew."

"There's no degeneration of the body of the Brewdrinker? How do youknow there isn't? Has this been going on long enough to tell? And if everybody's so healthy and harmless and happy, why did Polivinosel try to rape you?"

"I'm certainly not trying to defend that Jackass," she said. "But, Dan, can't you catch the difference in the psychic atmosphere around here? There seem to be no barriers between men and women doing what they want with each other.

Nor are they jealous of each other. Didn't you deduce, from what that Russell-type woman said, that Polivinosel had his choice of women and nobody objected? He probably took it for granted that I'd want to roll in the grass with him."

"All right, all right," I said. "But it's disgusting, and I can't understand why Durham made him a god of fertility when he seems to have hated him so."

"What do you know about Durham?" she countered.

I told her that Durham had been a short, bald, and paunchy little man with a face like an Irish leprechaun, with a wife who henpecked him till the holes showed, with a poet's soul, with a penchant for quoting Greek and Latin classics, with a delight in making puns, and with an unsuppressed desire to get his book of essays, The Golden Age, published.

"Would you say he had a vindictive mind?" she asked.

"No, he was very meek and forbearing. Why?"

"Well, my half-sister Peggy wrote that her steady, Polivinosel, hated Durham because he had to take his course to get a credit in the Humanities. Not only that, it was evident that Durham was sweet on Peggy.

So, Polivinosel upset the doctor every time he got a chance. In fact, she mentioned that in her last letter to me just before she disappeared. And when I read in the papers that Durham was suspected of having murdered them, I wondered if he hadn't been harboring his hate for a long time."

"Not the doc," I protested. "He might get mad, but not for long."

"There you are," she said triumphantly. "He changed Polivinosel into a jackass, and then he got soft-hearted and forgave him. Why not? He had Peggy."

"But why wasn't Polivinosel changed back to a man then?"

"All I know is that he was majoring in Agriculture, and, if I'm to believe Peggy's letters, he was a Casanova."

"No wonder you were a little sarcastic when I gave my lecture," I said. "You knew more about those two than I did. But that doesn't excuse your reference to my baldness and false teeth."

She turned away. "I don't know why I said that. All I do know is that I hated you because you were a civilian and were being given such authority and entrusted with such an important mission."

I wanted to ask her if she'd changed her mind. Also I was sure that wasn't all there was to it, but I didn't press the point. I went on to tell her all I knew about Durham. The only thing I kept back was the most important. I had to sound her out before I mentioned that.

"Then the way you see it," she said, "is that everything that's been happening here fits this Doctor Boswell Durham's description of the hypothetical Golden Age?"

"Yes," I said. "He often used to lecture to us on what an opportunity the ancient gods lost. He said that if they'd taken the trouble to look at their mortal subjects, they'd have seen how to do away with disease, poverty, unhappiness, and war.

But he maintained the ancient gods were really men who had somehow or other gotten superhuman powers and didn't know how to use them because they weren't versed in philosophy, ethics, or science.

"He used to say he could do better, and he would then proceed to give us his lecture entitled How to Be a God and Like It . It used to make us laugh, because you couldn't imagine anyone less divine than Durham."

"I know that," she said. "Peggy wrote me about it. She said that was what irked Polivinosel so. He didn't understand that the doctor was just projecting his dream world into classroom terms. Probably he dreamed of such a place so he could escape from his wife's nagging. Poor little fellow."

"Poor little fellow, my foot!" I snorted. "He's done just what he said he wanted to do, hasn't he? How many others can say the same, especially on such a scale?"

"No one," she admitted. "But tell me, what was Durham's main thesis in The Golden Age ?"

"He maintained that history showed that the so-called common man, Mr. Everyman, is a guy who wants to be left alone and is quite pleased if only his mundane life runs fairly smoothly.

His ideal is an existence with no diseases, plenty of food and amusement and sex and affection, no worry about paying bills, just enough work to keep from getting bored with all play and someone to do his thinking for him. Most adults want a god of some sort to run things for them while they do just what they please."

"Why," exclaimed Alice, "he isn't any better than Hitler or Stalin!"

"Not at all," I said. "He could bring about Eden as we can see by looking around us. And he didn't believe in any particular ideology or in using force. He..."

I stopped, mouth open. I'd been defending the Professor!

Alice giggled. "Did you change your mind?"

"No," I said. "Not at all. Because the Professor, like my dictator, must have changedhis mind. He is using force. Look at Polivinosel."

"He's no example. He always was an ass, and he still is. And how do we know he doesn't like being one?"

I had no chance to reply. The eastern horizon was lit up by a great flash of fire. A second or two later, the sound of the explosion reached us.

We were both shocked. We had come to accept the idea that such chemical reactions just didn't take place in this valley.

Alice clutched my hand and said sharply. "Do you think the attack has started ahead of schedule? Or is that one we weren't told about?"

"I don't think so. Why would an attack be launched around here? Let's go and see what's up."

"You know, I'd have thought that was lightning, except that -- well, it was just the opposite of lightning."

"The negative, you mean?" I asked her.

She nodded. "The streak was -- black."

"I've seen lightning streaks that branched out like trees," I said. "But this is the first tree that I ever..." I stopped and murmured. "No, that's crazy. I'll wait until I get there before I make any more comments."

We left the gravel road and turned right onto a paved highway. I recognized it as the state route that ran past the airfield and into Meltonville, about a mile and a half away. Another explosion lit up the eastern sky, but this time we saw it was much closer than we had first thought.

We hurried forward, tense, ready to take to the woods if danger threatened. We had traveled about half a mile when I stopped so suddenly that Alice bumped into me. She whispered, "What is it?"

"I don't remember that creekbed ever being there," I replied slowly. "In fact, Iknow it wasn't there. I took a lot of hikes along here when I was a Boy Scout."

And there it was. It came up from the east, from Onaback's general direction, and cut southwest, away from the river.

It slashed through the state highway, leaving a thirty-foot gap in the road. Somebody had dragged two long tree trunks across the cut and laid planks between them to form a rough bridge.

We crossed it and walked on down the highway, but another explosion to our left told us we were off the trail. This one, very close, came from the edge of a large meadow that I remembered had once been a parking lot for a trucking company.

Alice sniffed and said, "Smell that burning vegetation?"

"Yes." I pointed to the far side of the creek where the moon shone on the bank. "Look at those."

Those were the partly burned and shattered stalks and branches of plants about the size of pine trees. They were scattered about forty feet apart. Some lay against the bank; some were stretched along the bottom of the creekbed.

What did it mean? The only way to find out was to investigate. So, as we came abruptly to the creeks end, which was surrounded by a ring of about a hundred people, we tried to elbow through to see what was so interesting.

We never made it, for at that moment a woman screamed, "He put in too much Brew!"

A man bellowed, "Run for your lives!"

The night around us was suddenly gleaming with bodies and clamorous with cries. Everybody was running and pushing everybody else to make room.

Nevertheless, in spite of their reckless haste, they were laughing as if it was all a big joke. It was a strange mixture of panic and disdain for the panic.

I grabbed Alice's hand and started running with them. A man came abreast of us and I shouted. "What's the danger?"

He was a fantastic figure, the first person I had seen with any clothing on. He wore a red fez with a tassel and a wide green sash wound around his waist.

A scimitar was stuck through it at such an angle it looked like a ducktail-shaped rudder. The illusion was furthered by the speed at which he was traveling.

When he heard my shout, he gave me a wild look that contributed to the weirdness of his garb and shouted something.

"Huh?"

Again he yelled at me and sped on.

"What'd he say?" I panted at Alice. "I'll swear he said 'Horatio Hornblower.'"

"Sounded more like 'Yorassiffencornblows,'"she replied.

That was when we found out why the crowd was running like mad. A lion the size of a mountain roared behind us -- a blast knocked us flat on our faces -- a wave of hot air succeeded the shock -- a hail of rocks and clods of dirt pelted us. I yelped as I was hit in the back of one leg.

For a moment, I could have sworn my leg was broken.

Alice screamed and grabbed me around the neck. "Save me!"

I'd have liked to, but who was going to save me?

Abruptly, the rocks quit falling, and the yells stopped. Silence, except for the drawing of thankful breaths. Then, giggles and yelps of pure delight and calls back and forth and white bodies were shining in the moonlight as they rose like ghosts from the grass.

Fear among these uninhibited people could not last long. They were already joshing each other about the way they'd run and then were walking back to the cause of their flight.

I stopped a woman, a beautiful buxom wench of twenty-five -- all the adult female Brew addicts, I later found, were pretty and well-shaped and looked youthful -- and I said, "What happened?"

"Ah, the fool Scrambler put too much Brew in the hole," she replied, smiling. "Anybody could see what'd happen. But he wouldn't listen to us, and his own buddies are as scrambled as he is, thanks to Mahrud."

When she uttered that name, she made that sign. These people, no matter how lightly and irreverently they behaved in other matters, were always respectful toward their god Mahrud.

I was confused. "He? Who?" I said, inelegantly.

"Hehaw ?" she brayed and my body turned cold as I thought she was referring to Polivinosel. But she was merely mocking the form of my question. "The Scrambled Men, of course, Baldy."

Looking keenly at me in a single sweep that began at my feet and ended at the top of my head, she added, "If it weren't for that, I'd think you hadn't tasted the Brew yet."

I didn't know what she meant by that. I looked upward, because she had pointed in that direction. But I couldn't see anything except the clear sky and the huge distorted moon.

I didn't want to continue my questioning and expose myself as such a newcomer. I left the woman and, with Alice, followed the crowd back.

Their destination was the end of the creek, a newly blasted hole which showed me in a glance how the dry bed had so suddenly come into existence. Somebody has carved it out with a series of the tremendous blasts we'd heard.

A man brushed by me. His legs pumped energetically, his body was bent forward, and one arm was crooked behind his back. His right hand clutched the matted hair on his chest.

Jammed sideways on his head was one of those plumed cocked hats you see the big brass of men's lodges wear during parades. A belt around his otherwise naked waist supported a sheathed sword.

High-heeled cowboy boots completed his garb. He frowned deeply and carried, in the hand behind his back, a large map.

"Uh -- Admiral," I called out.

He paid no attention but plowed ahead.

"General!"

Still he wouldn't turn his head.

"Boss. Chief. Hey, you!"

He looked up. "Winkled tupponies?" he queried.

"Huh?"

Alice said, "Close your mouth before your plate falls out, and come along."

We got to the excavations edge before the crowd became too thick to penetrate. It was about thirty feet across and sloped steeply down to the center, which was about twenty feet deep.

Exactly in the middle reared an enormous, blackened, and burning plant. Talk about Jack and your beanstalk.

This was a cornstalk, ears, leaves, and all, and it was at least fifty feet high. It leaned perilously and would, if touched with a finger, fall flaming to the ground. Right on top of us, too, if it happened to be toppling our way. Its roots were as exposed as the plumbing of a half-demolished tenement.

The dirt had been flung away from the roots and piled up around the hole to complete the craterlike appearance of the excavation. It looked as if a meteor had plowed into the ground.

That's what I thought at first glance. Then I saw from the way the dirt scattered that the meteor must have come up from below.

There was no time to think through the full implication of what I saw, for the huge cornstalk began its long-delayed fall. I was busy, along with everybody else, in running away.

After it had fallen with a great crash, and after a number of the oddly dressed men had hitched it up to a ten-horse team and dragged it away to one side, I returned with Alice. This time I went down into the crater.

The soil was hard and dry under my feet. Something had sucked all the water out and had done it fast, too, for the dirt in the adjoining meadow was moist from a recent shower.

Despite the heat contained in the hole, the Scrambled Men swarmed in and began working with shovels and picks upon the western wall. Their leader, the man with the admirals hat, stood in their middle and held the map before him with both hands, while he frowned blackly at it.

Every once in a while he'd summon a subordinate with a lordly gesture, point out something on the map, and then designate a spot for him to use his shovel.

"Olderen croakish richbags"he commanded.

"Eniatipac nom, iuo, iuo," chanted the subordinate.

But the digging turned up nothing they were looking for. And the people standing on the lip of the crater -- like the big city crowds that watch steam-shovel excavating -- hooted and howled and shouted unheeded advice at the Scrambled Men.

They passed bottles of Brew back and forth and had a good time, though I thought some of their helpful hints to the workers were definitely in bad taste.

Suddenly, the semi-Napoleon snorted with rage and threw his hands up so the map fluttered through the air.

"Shimsham the rodtammed shipshuts!" he howled.

"Rerheuf niem, lohwaj!" his men shouted.

"Frammistab the wormbattened frigatebarns!"

The result of all this was that everybody quit digging except for one man. He was dressed in a plug hat and two dozen slave bracelets. He dropped a seed of some sort within a six-foot-deep hole cut almost horizontally into the bank.

He filled this with dirt, tamped it, then drove a thin wire down through the soil.

Another man, wearing harlequin spectacles in which the glass had been knocked out, and a spiked Prussian officer's helmet from the First World War, withdrew the wire and poured a cascade of Brew from a huge vase. The thirsty soil gulped it eagerly.

There was silence as the Scrambled Men and the spectators intently watched the ceremony. Suddenly a woman on the excavations edge shouted, "He's putting in too much again! Stop the fool!"

The Napoleon looked up fiercely and reprimanded, "Fornicoot the onus squeered."

Immediately, the ground rumbled, the earth shook, the crust quivered. Something was about to pop, and it was going to pop loud!

"Run for the hills! This time he's really done it!"

I didn't know what he'd done, but it didn't seem a time to be standing around asking questions.

We ran up the slope and out onto the meadow and across it.

When we were halfway to the road, I overcame the contagious panic long enough to risk a glance over my shoulder. And I saw it.

You've heard of explosions flowering? Well, this was the first time I had ever seen the reverse -- a colossal sunflower exploding, energized and accelerated fantastically in its growth by an overdose of that incredible stimulant, the Brew.

It attained the size of a Sequoia within a split-second, its stalk and head blasting the earth in a hurry to get out. It was reaching high into the sky and burning, because of the tremendous energy poured out in its growth.

And then, its lower parts having been denied a grip because its foundations had been thrust aside, it was toppling, toppling, a flaming tower of destruction.

Alice and I got out of the way. But we barely made it and, for a second, I was sure that that titanic blazing hulk would smash us like beetles beneath a hard leather heel.

It went whoosh! And then karoomp! And we fell forward, stunned, unable to move. Or so we thought. The next instant we both leaped from our paralysis, bare rumps blistered.

Alice screamed. "Oh, God, Dan! It hurts!"

I knew that, for I had been burned too in that region. I think our expedition would have come to a bad end right then and there, for we needed immediate medical attention and would have had to go back to HQ to get it. These primitives had evidently forgotten all knowledge of up-to-date healing.

True enough -- but they had forgotten because they no longer needed the knowledge. Attracted by our pitiful plight, two men, before I could object, had thrown the contents of two buckets over our backs.

I yelped with terror, but I had no place to run except back into the fire. Even the Brew was better than that. And I didn't get any in or even near my mouth.

Nevertheless, I was going to protest angrily at this horse-play while we were in such agony. But before I could say anything, I no longer felt pain.

I couldn't see what was happening to me, but I could see Alices reaction. Her back was toward me, and she had quit whimpering.

Beneath the moist film of Brew, the blisters had fallen off, and a new healthy pink shone through.

Alice was so overcome, she even forgot her feud with me long enough to put her head on my chest and weep, "Oh, Dan, Dan, isn't it wonderful?"

I didn't want to give this evil drug too much credit.

After all, like any narcotic, it had its beneficial effects if used correctly, but it could be horribly vicious if mishandled.

I said, "Come on, we have to go back," and I took her hand and led her to the new crater. I felt Imust solve the puzzle of the Scrambled Men. And I thought of the credit I'd get for suggesting a new method of warfare -- dropping bombcases filled with Brew and seeds from balloons.

And what about cannon shooting shells whose propulsive power would also be seed and Brew? Only -- how would you clean the cannon out afterward? You'd have to have a tree surgeon attached to every artillery team.

Of course, you could use the rocket principle for your missiles. Only -- wouldn't a Brobdingnagian pansy or cornstalk trailing out behind create an awful drag and a suddenly added weight? Wouldn't you have to train botanists to be aerodynamicists, or vice versa, and... ?

I rejected the whole idea. The brass at HQ would never believe me.

The Scrambled Men worked quickly and efficiently and with all the added vigor Brew-drinking gave. Inside of fifteen minutes, they had put out the fire and had then pulled the smoldering trunk out of the way. They at once began digging into the slopes and bottom of the excavation.

I watched them. They seemed to be obeying the orders of the man in the admiral's hat, and were continually conferring with him and their fellow workers.

But not a single one could understand what the other was saying. All effective communication was done by facial expressions and gestures. Yet none would admit that to any of the others.

Well, I thought, this was scarcely a novelty, though I had never seen it carried out on such a thorough scale. And what -- or who -- was responsible?

Again, wearily this time, I asked a spectator what was going on. These people seemed to be incapable of making a serious statement, but there was always the chance that I'd find somebody who was an exception.

"I'll tell you, stranger. These men are living evidences of the fact that it doesn't pay to corrupt religion for your own purposes."

He drank from a flask he carried on a chain around his neck and then offered me a slug. He looked surprised at my refusal but took no offense.

"These were the leaders of the community just before Mahrud manifested himself as the Real Bull. You know -- preachers, big and little businessmen, newspaper editors, gamblers, lawyers, bankers, union business agents, doctors, book reviewers, college professors."

"The men who are supposed to know how to cure your diseases social, economic, financial, administrative, psychological, spiritual, and so on, into the deep dark night. They knew the Right Word, comprehend? The Word that'd set Things straight, understand?"

"The only trouble was that after the Brew began to flow freely, nobody who'd drunk from the Holy Bottle would pay any attention to these pillars of the community. They tried hard for a long time."

"Then, seeing which way the tide was inevitably foaming, they decided that maybe they'd better get in on a good thing. After all, if everybody was doing it, it must be the correct thing to do."

"So, after drinking enough Brew to give them courage, but not enough to change them into ordinary fun-loving but Mahrud-fearing citizens, they announced they were the prophets of a new religion."

"And from then on, according to their advertisements, none but them was fit to run the worship of the Big Bull. Of course, Sheed the Weather Prophet and Polivinosel and the Allegory ignored them, and so were denounced as false gods."

"Makes you laugh, doesn't it? But that's the way it goes. And that's the way it went until Mahrud -- bibulous be his people forever -- got mad. He announced, through Sheed, that these pillars of the community were just dummy-prophets, fakes. As punishment, he was going to give them a gift, as he had earlier done to the Dozen Diapered Darlings.

"So he said, in effect, 'You've been telling the people that you, and only you, have possession of the Real Bull, the Right Word. Well, you'll have it. Only it'll be the Word that nobody but you can understand, and to every other man it'll be a strange tongue. Now -- scram!' "

"But after he'd watched these poor characters stumbling around trying to talk to each other and the people and getting madder than the hops in the Brew or else sadder than the morning-after, Mahrud felt sorry. So he said, 'Look, I'll give you a chance. I've hidden the key to your troubles somewhere in this valley.

Search for it. If you find it, you'll be cured. And everybody will understand you, understand?' "

"So he gave them a map -- all of them, mind you -- but this half-dressed Napoleon here grabbed the map, and he kept it by virtue of being the most un-understandable of the bunch. And, ever since, he's been directing the search for the key that'll unscramble them."

"That's why they're doing all this blasting and digging?" I asked, dazed.

"Yes, they're following the map," he said, laughing.

I thanked him and walked up behind the man with the admiral's hat and sword. I looked over his shoulder. The map was covered with long squiggly lines and many shorter branches. These, I supposed, were the lines he was following in his creekbed-making.

He looked around at me. "Symfrantic gangleboys?"

"You said it," I choked, and then I had to turn and walk away. "That map is a chart of the human nervous system," I gasped to Alice. "And he's following one of the branches of the vagus nerve."

"The wandering nerve," murmured Alice. "Or is it the wondering nerve? But what could all this mean?"

As we began our climb from the pit, I said, "I think we're seeing the birth-pangs of a new mythology. One of the demigods is based upon a famous comic strip character.

Another is formed in the image of a pun on the translation of his name -- though his new form does correspond to his lustful, asinine character. And we see that the chief deity bases his worship -- and at least one of his epiphanies -- on his mortal nickname. All this makes me wonder upon what foundations the old-time pantheons and myths were built.

Were they also orginally based on such incongruous and unlikely features?"

"Daniel Temper!" Alice snapped. "You talk as if you believed the old pagan gods once existed and as if this Mahrud actually is a god!"

"Before I came here, I'd have laughed at any such theory," I said. "How do you explain what you've seen?"

We climbed up in silence. At the edge, I turned for one more glimpse of the Scrambled Men, the object lesson designed by Mahrud. They were digging just as busily as ever paying no attention to the ribald comments of the spectators.

The funny thing about this, I thought, was that these unscrambled men had not yet caught on to the fact that the Scrambled Men were more than a wacky sect, that they were symbols of what the spectators must themselves do if they wished to travel beyond their own present carefree and happy but unprogressive state.

As plainly as the ears on the head of the Ass-God, the plight of these frantically digging sons of Babel said to everybody, "Look within yourselves to find the key."

That advice was probably uttered by the first philosopher among the cavemen.

I caught the glint of something metallic almost buried in the dirt of the slope. I went back and picked it up. It was a long-handled silver screwdriver.

If I hadn't known my old teacher so well, I don't think I ever would have understood its presence. But I'd been bombarded in his classes with his bizarre methods of putting things over.

So I knew that I held in my hand another of his serious jokes -- a utensil designed to take its place in the roster of myths springing up within this Valley Olympus.

You had the legend of Pandoras Box, of Philemon and Baucis' Pitcher, Medusa's Face, Odin's Pledged Eye. Why not the Silver Screwdriver?

I explained to Alice. "Remember the gag about the boy who was born with a golden screw in his navel? How all his life he wondered what it was for? How ashamed he was because he was different from anybody else and had to keep it hidden?

Remember how he finally found a psychiatrist who told him to go home and dream of the fairy queen? And how Queen Titania slid down on a moonbeam and gave him a silver screwdriver?

And how, when he'd unscrewed the golden screw from his navel, he felt so happy about being normal and being able to marry without making his bride laugh at him?

Remember, he then forgot all his vain speculations upon the purpose of that golden screw? And how, very happy, he got up from his chair to reach for a cigarette? And his derriere, deprived of its former fastening, dropped off?"

"You don't mean it?" she breathed.

"But I do! How do we know the tale of the Golden Apples or the Golden Fleece didn't have their origin in jokes and that they later acquired a symbolic significance?"

She had no answer to that, any more than anybody did.

"Aren't you going to give it to the Scrambled Men?" she asked. "It'd save them all this blasting and digging. And they could settle down and quit talking gibberish."

"I imagine they've stumbled over it a hundred times before and kicked it to one side, refusing to recognize its meaning."

"Yes, but what does it mean?"

Exasperatedly, I said, "It's another clue to the fact that they ought to look within themselves, that they ought to consider the nature of their punishment and the lesson to be derived from it."

We walked away. The whole incident had left me plunged in gloom. I seemed to be getting deeper and deeper into a murk furnished by a being who, in the far dim background, mocked me. Was it mere coincidence that we'd been met by the Allegory, that he'd given us his vaguely ominous advice?

I didn't have much time to think, for we came to the side road which led to the State Hospital. I could look down it and see the white stones of the cemetery outside the high wire fence. I must have stood there longer than I thought, because Alice said, "What's the matter?"

"The State Hospital cemetery is just inside the fence. The Meltonville cemetery is on the other side. My father is buried in the state grounds; my mother lies in the villages cemetery. They are separated in death, as they were in life."

"Dan," she said softly, "we ought to get a few hours' sleep before we go on. We've walked a long way. Why don't we visit your parents' graves and then sleep there? Would you like that?"

"Very much. Thank you for the thought, Alice." The words came hard. "You're a pretty wonderful person."

"Not so much. It's merely the decent thing to do."

She would have to say that just when I was beginning to feel a little warmer toward her.

We went down the road. A big red-haired man walked toward us. He was all eyes for Alice, so much so that I expected the same sort of trouble we'd had with Polivinosel.

But when he looked at me, he stopped, grinned, and burst into loud howls of laughter. As he passed me, I smelled his breath. It was loaded with the Brew.

"What's the matter with him ?"

"I don't know," said Alice, looking at me. "Wait a minute! Of course! Polivinosel and the others must have known all the time that you were an Outsider!"

"Why?"

"Because you're bald! Have we seen any bald men? No! That's why this fellow laughed!"

"If that's so, I'm marked! All Polivinosel has to do is have his worshipers look for a skinhead."

"Oh, it's not that bad," she said. "You have to remember that Outsiders are constantly coming in, and that any number of ex-soldiers are in the process of changing. You could pass for one of those." She grabbed my hand. "Oh well, come along, let's get some sleep. Then we can think about it."

We came to the cemetery entrance. The shrubbery on either side of the stone arch had grown higher than rny head. The iron gate in the arch was wide open and covered with rust.

Inside, however, I did not see the expected desolate and wild expanse of tall weeds. They were kept trimmed by the goats and sheep that stood around like silvery statues in the moonlight.

I gave a cry and ran forward.

My mother's grave gaped like a big brown mouth. There was black water at the bottom, and her coffin was tilted on end. Evidently, it had been taken out and then slid carelessly back in. Its lid was open. It was empty.

Behind me, Alice said, "Easy, Dan. There's no cause for looking so alarmed."

"So this is your splendid people, Alice, the gods and nymphs of the New Golden Age. Grave-robbers! Ghouls!"

"I don't think so. They'd have no need or desire for money and jewels. Let's look around. There must be some other explanation."

We looked. We found Weepenwilly.

He was sitting with his back against a tombstone. He was so large and dark and quiet that he seemed to be cast out of bronze, a part of the monument itself.

He looked like Rodin's Thinker -- a Thinker wearing a derby hat and white loincloth. But there was something alive about him and, when he raised his head, we saw tears glistening in the moonlight.

"Could you tell me," I asked excitedly, "why all these graves are dug up?"

"Bless you, my bhoy," he said in a slight brogue. "Sure, now, and have you a loved one buried here?"

"My mother," I said.

His tears flowed faster. "Faith, bhoy, and is it so? Then you'll be happy when I tell you the glorious news. Me own dear wife was buried here, you know."

I didn't see anything about that to make me happy, but I kept quiet and waited.

"Yes, me bhoy -- you'll pardon my calling you that, won't you? After all, I was a veteran o' the Spanish-American War, and I outrank you by quite a few years.

In fact, if it hadn't been for the blessed ascent o' Mahrud -- may he stub his divine toe and fall on his glorious face, bless him -- I would now be dead of old age and me bones resting in the boat along with me wife's, and so -- "

"What boat?" I interrupted.

"What boat ? Where have you been? Ah, yes, you're new." He pointed his finger at his head, to indicate my baldness, I suppose.

"Faith, bhoy, you must hurry to Onaback in the morning and see the boatload o' bones leave. Twill be big doings then, you can count on that, with lots o' Brew and barbecued beef and pork and enough love-making to last you for a week."

After repeated questioning, I learned that Mahrud had had the remains of the dead in all the graveyards of the Area dug up and transported to Onaback.

The next day, a boat carrying the bones would cross the Illinois and deposit the load upon the eastern shore. What would happen after that, not even the minor gods knew -- or else would not tell -- but everybody was sure that Mahrud intended to bring the dead back to life.

And everybody was thronging into the city to witness such an event.

That news made me feel better. If there were to be many people on the roads and in the city itself, then it would be easy to stay lost in the crowds.

The man with the derby said, "As sure as they call me Weepenwilly, children, the All-Bull is going too far. He'll try to raise the dead, and he won't be able to do it. And then where will the peoples faith in him be? Where willI be?"

He sobbed, "I'll be out o' work again, me position lost -- me that served the Old God faithfully until I saw He was losing ground and that Mahrud was the up-and-coming deity nowadays.

A God such as they had in the ancient days in Erin when gods was gods and men was giants. But now Mahrud -- bull be his name, curse him -- will lose face, and he'll never get it back.

Then I'll be that most miserable o' all things, a prophet without honor. What's worse, I was just about to be promoted to a hemi-semi-demigod -- I've been coming up fast all on account o' me faithful and hard work and keeping me mouth shut -- when this big promotional stunt has to enter the All-Bull's head. Why can't he leave well enough alone?"

At last, I got out of him that he wasn't so much afraid Mahrud would fail as he was that he might succeed.

"If Mahrud does clothe the old bones with new flesh, me ever-loving wife will be out looking for me, and me life won't be worth a pre-Brew nickel. She'll never forget nor forgive that 'twas me who pushed her down those steps ten years ago and broke her stringy neck.

Twill make no difference to her that she'll come back better than ever, with a lovely new figure and a pretty face instead o' that hatchet. Not her, the black-hearted, stone-livered wrath o' God!

"Sure, and I've had an unhappy life ever since the day I opened me innocent blue eyes -- untainted except for the old original sin, but Mahrud says that's no dogma o' his -- and first saw the light o' day.

Unhappy I've been, and unhappy I'll live. I can't even taste the sweet sting o' death -- because, as sure as the sun rises in the east, as sure as Durham became a bull and swam the Illinois with the lovely Peggy on his back and made her his bride upon the high bluffs -- I can't even die because me everloving wife would search out me bones and ship them to Mahrud and be standing there facing me when I arose."

I was getting weary of listening to this flow of hyperbole, interminable as the Illinois itself. I said, "Thank you, Mr. Weepen-willy, and good night. We've got a long trip ahead of us."

"Sure, me bhoy, and that's not me given name. Tis a nickname given me by the bhoys down at the town hall because..."

I heard no more. I went back to my mother's grave and lay down by it. I couldn't get to sleep, because Alice and Weepenwilly were talking. Then, just as I'd managed almost to drop off, Alice sat down by me. She insisted on retelling me the story Weepenwilly had just told her.

I'd seen his white loincloth, hadn't I? Well, if Weepenwilly had stood up, I'd have perceived the three-cornered fold of it.

And I'd have seen its remarkable resemblance to early infant apparel. That resemblance was not coincidental, for Weepenwilly was one of the Dozen Diapered Darlings.

Moreover, if he had stood up, I'd have noticed the yellow glow that emanated from his posterior, the nimbus so much like a firefly's in color and position.

It seemed that, shortly after the Brew began taking full effect, when the people of Onaback had turned their backs to the outside world, numerous self-styled prophets had tried to take advantage of the new religion.

Each had presented his own variation of an as-yet-misunderstood creed. Among them had been twelve politicians who had long been bleeding the city's treasury dry.

Because it was some time before the Bottle's contents began affecting the nature of things noticeably, they had not been aware at first of what was happening.

The wheels of industry slowed by degrees. Grass and trees subtly encroached upon pavement. People gradually lost interest in the cares of life. Inhibitions were imperceptibly dissolved.

Enmities and bitternesses and diseases faded. The terrors, burdens, and boredoms of life burned away as magically as the morning mist under the rising sun.

A time came when people quit flying to Chicago for business or pleasure. When nobody went to the library to take out books. When the typographers and reporters of the daily newspapers failed to show up for work. W

hen the Earthgripper Diesel Company and Myron Malkers Distillery -- biggest on earth of their kind, both of them -- blew the final whistle. When people everywhere seemed to realize that all had been wrong with the world, but that it was going to be fine and dandy in the future.

About then, the mail-carriers quit. Frantic telegrams and letters were sent to Washington and the state capital -- though from other towns, because the local operators had quit.

This was when the Food and Drug Administration, and the Internal Revenue Bureau, and the F.B.I. sent agents into Onaback to investigate. These agents did not come back and others were sent in, only to succumb to the Brew.

The Brew had not yet reached its full potency, when Durham had just revealed himself, through the prophet Sheed, as Mahrud. There was still some opposition, and the most vigorous came from the twelve politicians.

They organized a meeting in the courthouse square and urged the people to follow them in an attack on Mahrud. First they would march on Traybell University, where Sheed lived in the Meteorological Building.

"Then," said one of the twelve, shaking his fist at the long thin line of Brew geysering from the Bottle up on the hills, "we'll lynch this mad scientist who calls himself Mahrud, this lunatic we know is a crazy university professor and a reader of poetry and philosophy.

Friends, citizens, Americans, if this Mahrud is indeed a god, as Sheed, another mad scientist claims, let him strike me with lightning! My friends and I dare him to!"

The dozen were standing on a platform in the courthouse yard. They could look down Main Street and across the river to the hills. They faced the east defiantly. No bellowings came, no lightnings. But in the next instant, the dozen were forced to flee ignominiously, never again to defy the All-Bull.

Alice giggled. "They were struck by an affliction which was not as devastating as lightning nor as spectacular. But it was far more demoralizing. Mahrud wished on them a disability which required them to wear diapers for much the same reason babies have to.

Of course, this convinced the Dozen Diapered Darlings. But that brassy-nerved bunch of ex-ward-heelers switched right around and said they'd known all along that Mahrud was the Real Bull. They'd called the meeting so they could make a dramatic announcement of their change of heart.

Now he'd given them a monopoly on divine relevation. If anybody wanted to get in touch with him, let them step up and pay on the line. They still hadn't realized that money was no good anymore.

"They even had the shortsightedness and the crust to pray to Mahrud for a special sign to prove their prophethood. And the All-Bull did send them signs of their sanctity. He gave them permanent halos, blazing yellow lights."

Sitting up and hugging her knees, Alice rocked back and forth with laughter. "Of course, the Dozen should have been ecstatically happy. But they weren't.

For Mahrud had slyly misplaced their halos, locating them in a place where, if the Darlings wished to demonstrate their marks of sainthood, they would be forced to stand up.

"And, would you believe it, this thick-headed Dozen refuses to admit that Mahrud has afflicted them. Instead, they brag continually about their halos' location, and they attempt to get everybody else to wear diapers. They say a towel around the middle is as much a sign of a true believer in Mahrud as a turban or fez is that of a believer in Allah.

"Naturally, their real reason is that they don't want to be conspicuous. Not that they mind being outstanding. It's just that they don't want people to be reminded of their disability or their original sin."

Tears ran from her eyes. She choked with laughter.

I failed to see anything funny about it, and I told her so.

"You don't get it, Temper," she said. "This condition is curable. All the Darlings have to do is pray to Mahrud to be relieved of it, and they will be. But their pride won't let them. They insist it's a benefit and a sign of the Bull's favor. They suffer, yes, but they like to suffer.

Just as Weepenwilly likes to sit on his wife's tombstone -- as if that'd keep her under the ground -- and wail about his misfortune. He and his kind wouldn't give up their punishment for the world -- literally!"

She began laughing loudly again. I sat up and grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close to smell her breath. There was no hint of the Brew, so she hadn't been drinking from Weepenwilly's bottle. She was suffering from hysteria, plain and simple.

The normal procedure for bringing a woman back to normality is to slap her resoundingly upon the cheek. But in this case Alice turned the tables by slapping me first -- resoundingly. The effect was the same. She quit laughing and glared at me.

I held my stinging cheek. "What was that for?"

"For trying to take advantage of me," she said.

I was so angry and taken aback that I could only stutter, "Why, I -- why, I -- "

"Just keep your hands to yourself," she snapped. "Don't mistake my sympathy for love. Or think, because these Brew-bums have no inhibitions or discrimination, that I've also succumbed."

I turned my back on her and closed my eyes. But the longer I lay there, and the more I thought of her misinterpretation, the madder I became. Finally, boiling within, I sat up and said tightly, "Alice!"

She must not have been sleeping either. She raised up at once and stared at me, her eyes big. "What -- what is it?"

"I forgot to give you this." I let her have it across the side of her face. Then, without waiting to see the effect of my blow, I lay down and turned my back again. For a minute, I'll admit, my spine was cold and tense, waiting for the nails to rake down my naked skin.

But nothing like that happened. First, there was the sort of silence that breathes. Then, instead of the attack, came a racking breath, followed by sobs, which sloped off into snifflings and the wiping of tears.

I stood it as long as I could. Then I sat up again and said, "All right, so maybe I shouldn't have hit you. But you had no business taking it for granted that I was trying to make love to you.

Look, I know I'm repulsive to you, but that's all the more reason why I wouldn't be making a pass at you. I have some pride. And you don't exactly drive me out of my mind with passion, you know. What makes you think you're any Helen of Troy or Cleopatra?"

There I went. I was always trying to smooth things over, and every time I ended by roughing them up. Now she was mad and she showed it by getting up and walking off. I caught her as she reached the cemetery gate.

"Where do you think you're going?" I asked.

"Down to the foot of Main Street, Onaback, Illinois, and I'm bottling a sample of the Brew there. Then I'm reporting to my father as soon as possible."

"You little fool, you can't do that. You're supposed to stick with me."

She tossed her long black hair. "My orders don't say I have to. If, in my opinion, your presence becomes a danger to my mission, I may leave you. And I think you're a definite danger -- if not to my mission, at least to me!"

I grabbed her wrist and whirled her around. "You're acting like a little girl, not like a major in the U.S. Marines. What's the matter with you?"

She tried to jerk her wrist loose. That made me madder, but when her fist struck me, I saw red. I wasn't so blinded that I couldn't find her cheek again with the flat of my hand.

Then she was on me with a hold that would have broken my arm if I hadn't applied the counterhold. Then I had her down on her side with both her arms caught behind her back.

This was where a good little man was better than a good big girl.

"All right," I gritted, "what is it?"

She wouldn't reply. She twisted frantically, though she knew she couldn't get loose and groaned with frustration.

"Is it the same thing that's wrong with me?"

She quit struggling and said, very softly. "Yes, that's it."

I released her arms. She rolled over on her back, but she didn't try to get up. "You mean," I said, still not able to believe it, "that you're in love with me, just as I am with you?"

She nodded again. I kissed her with all the pent-up desire that I'd been taking out on her in physical combat a moment ago.

I said, "I still can't believe it. It was only natural for me to fall in love with you, even if you did act as if you hated my guts. But why did you fall in love with me? Or, if you can't answer that, why did you ride me?"

"You won't like this," she said. "I could tell you what a psychologist would say. We're both college graduates, professional people, interested in the arts and so on. That wouldn't take in the differences, or course. But what does that matter? It happened.

"I didn't want it to. I fought against it. And I used the reverse of the old Jamesian principle that, if you pretend to be something or to like something, you will be that something. I tried to act as if I loathed you."

"Why?" I demanded. She turned her head away, but I took her chin and forced her face to me. "Let's have it."

"You know I was nasty about your being bald. Well, I didn't really dislike that. Just the opposite -- I loved it. And that was the whole trouble. I analyzed my own case and decided I loved you because I had an Electra complex. I -- "

"You mean," I said, my voice rising, "that because I was bald like your father and somewhat older than you, you fell for me?"

"Well, no, not really. I mean that's what I told myself so I'd get over it. That helped me to pretend to hate you so that I might end up doing so."

Flabbergasted was no word for the way I felt. If I hadn't been lying on the ground, I'd have been floored. Alice Lewis was one of those products of modern times, so psychology-conscious that she tended to regard an uninhibited affection of parent and child as a sign that both ought to rush to the nearest psychoanalyst.

"I'm in a terrible fix," said Alice. "I don't know if you fulfill my father-image or if I'm genuinely in love with you. I think I am, yet..."

She put her hand up to stroke my naked scalp. Knowing what I did, I resented the caress. I started to jerk my head away, but she clamped her hand on it and exclaimed, "Dan, your scalp's fuzzy!"

I said, "Huh?" and ran my own palm over my head. She was right. A very light down covered my baldness.

"So," I said, delighted and shocked at the same time, "that's what the nymph meant when she pointed at my head and said that if it weren't for that, she'd think I hadn't tasted the Brew yet! The Brew that fellow poured on my head -- that's what did it!"

I jumped up and shouted, "Hooray!"

And scarcely had the echoes died down than there was an answering call, one that made my blood chill. This was a loud braying laugh from far off, a bellowing hee-haw!

"Polivinosel!" I said. I grabbed Alices hand, and we fled down the road. Nor did we stop until we had descended the hill that runs down into U.S. Route 24. There, puffing and panting from the half-mile run and thirstier than ever, we walked toward the city of Onaback, another half-mile away.

I looked back from time to time, but I saw no sign of the Ass. There was no guarantee he wasn't on our trail, however. He could have been lost in the great mass of people we'd encountered.

These carried baskets and bottles and torches and were, as I found out from conversation with a man, latecomers going to view the departure of the bone-boat from the foot of Main Street.

"Rumor says that Mahrud -- may his name be bull -- will raise the dead at the foot of the hill the Fountain of the Bottle spurts from. Whether that's so or not, we'll all have fun. Barbecue, Brew, and bundling make the world go round."

I couldn't argue with that statement. They certainly were the principal amusements of the natives.

During our progress down Adams Street, I learned much about the valley's setup. My informant was very talkative, as were all his fellow Brew-drinkers. He told me that the theocracy began on the lowest plane with his kind, Joe Doe.

Then there were the prayer-men. These received the petitions of the populace, sorted them out, and passed on those that needed attention to prophets like the Forecaster Sheed, who screened them.

Then these in turn were relayed to demigods like Polivinosel, Albert Allegory, and a dozen others I had not heard of before then. They reported directly to Mahrud or Peggy.

Mahrud handled godhood like big business. He had delegated various departments to his vice-presidents such as the Ass, who handled fertility, and Sheed, who was probably the happiest forecaster who'd ever lived.

Once a professor of physics at Traybell and the city's meteorologist, Sheed was now the only weatherman whose prophecies were one hundred percent correct. There was a good reason for that. He made the weather.

All this was very interesting, but my mind wasn't as intent on the information as it should have been. For one thing, I kept looking back to see if Polivinosel was following us.

For another, I worried about Alice's attitude toward me. Now that I had hair, would she stop loving me? Was it a -- now I was doing it -- fixation that attracted her to me, or was it a genuine affection?

If my situation hadn't been so tense, I'd have laughed at myself. Who would have thought that some day I might not leap with joy at the possibility of once again having a full head of hair and a beautiful girl in love with me?

The next moment, I did leap. It was not from joy, however. Somebody behind me had given a loud braying laugh. There was no mistaking the Ass's hee-haw. I whirled and saw, blazing golden in both the light of the moon and the torches, the figure of Polivinosel galloping toward us.

There were people in the way, but they ran to get out of his path, yelling as they did so. His hoofs rang on the pavement even above their cries. Then he was on us and bellowing, "What now, little man? What now?"

Just as he reached us, I fell flat on my face. He was going so fast, he couldn't stop. His hoofs didn't help him keep his balance either, nor did Alice when she shoved him.

Over he went, carrying with him bottles and baskets of fruit and corn and little cages of chickens. Women shrieked, baskets flew, glass broke, chickens squawked and shot out of sprung doors -- Polivinosel was buried in the whole mess.

Alice and I burst through the crowd, turned a corner and raced down to Washington Street, which ran parallel to Adams. There was a much smaller parade of pilgrims here, but it was better than nothing.

We ducked among these while, a block away, the giant throat of the Ass called again and again, "Little man, what now? What now, little man?"

I could have sworn he was galloping toward us. Then his voice, mighty as it was, became smaller, and the fast cloppety-clop died away.

Panting, Alice and I walked down Washington. We saw that the three bridges across the Illinois had been destroyed. A native told us that Mahrud had wrecked them with lightning one stormy night.

"Not that he needed to worry about crossing to the other side," he said, swiftly making the sign of the bull. "All of what used to be East Onaback is now sacred to the owner of the Bottle."

His attitude verified what I had noticed already. These people, though uninhibited by the Brew in other respects, retained enough awe to give the higher gods plenty of privacy. Whatever the priests relayed to them was enough to keep them happy.

When we came to the foot of Main Street, which ran right into the Illinois, we looked for a place to rest. Both of us were bone-weary. It was almost dawn. We had to have some sleep, if we wanted to be at all efficient for our coming work.

First, though, we had to watch the Fountain. This was a thin arc of the Brew which rose from the Bottle, set on the top of the bluffs across the river from Onaback, and ended in the middle of the waters.

The descending moon played a rainbow of wavering and bright colors along it. How that trick was done, I didn't know, but it was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

I studied it and concluded that some force was being exerted linearly to keep the winds from scattering it into fine spray. And I saw how easy it would be to locate the Bottle.

Follow the fountain to its source, a mile and a half away. Then destroy it, so the power of the Bull would be gone. After that, sit back and watch the Marines glide in and begin the conquest of Onaback.

It was as simple as that.

We looked around some more and found a place on the riverside park to lie down. Alice, snuggled in my arms, said, "Dan, I'm awfully thirsty. Are you?"

I admitted that I was, but that we'd have to stand it. Then I said, "Alice, after you get your sample, are you going to hike right back to H.Q.?"

"No," she said, kissing my chest, "I'm not. I'm sticking with you. After all, I want to see if your hair turns out curly or straight. And don't tell me!"

"I won't. But you're going to get awfully thirsty before this assignment is over."

Secretly, I was pleased. If she wanted to be with me, then my returning hair wasn't putting a roadblock in the course of true love. Maybe it was the real thing, not just something laid by a trauma and hatched by a complex. Maybe...

There I was in the tavern in the little town of Croncruachshin. I'd just fulfilled my mother's deathbed wish that I visit her mother, who was living when I stepped aboard the plane for Ireland and died the day I set foot on the green sod.

After the funeral, I'd stopped in Bill O'basean's for a bite, and Bill, who was wearing horns like a Texas steer's, picked the bottle off the shelf where he kept his other curios, and bellowed, "Danny Temper, look at the bull on the side o' that piece of glass!

Know what that means? 'Tis the bottle that Goibniu, the smith o' the gods, fashioned. 'Twill run forever with magical brew for him that knows the words, for him that has a god hidden within himself.

"What happened to the owner?" I said, and he answered, "Sure and bejasus, all the Old Ones -- Erse and Greek and Dutch and Rooshian and Chinee and Indian -- found they was crowdin' each other, so they had a trooce and left Airth and went elsewhere.

Only Pan stayed here for a few centuries, and he flew away on the wings o' light when the New Ones came. He didn't die as the big mouths claim.

"And then, in the eighteenth century, the New Ones, who'd become Old Ones now, thought that, begorry, they'd better be leavin' too, now that they was crowdin' each other and makin a mess o' things.

But the Bottle o' Goibniu has been lyin' around here collectin dust and stories and here ye are, my bhoy, for ten American dollars, and what do ye intend doin with it?"

So I said, "I'll wrap it up and send it on to my old professor as a joke. It'll tickle him when I tell him it's for sure the genuine everflowing bottle o' Goibniu."

And Bill O'basean winked and said, "And him a teetotaller. What'll his wife, the old hag and wicked witch, say to that?"

And I said, "Wouldn't it be funny if the old prof thought this really was Goibniu's bottle?"

And Bill, who had now become the Rational Man, looked severely at me and said to the squirrel crouched on his shoulder, "O Nuciferous One, what this simpleton don't know nohow! Hasn't he intellect enough, begorry, to see that the bottle was destined from its making for Boswell Durham?

'Bos,' which is Latin for the bovine species, and 'well,' a combination of the Anglo-Saxon 'wiella,' meaning fountain or well-spring 'wiellan' or 'wellen? meaning to pour forth, and the Anglo-Saxon adverb 'well' meaning worthily or abundantly, and the adjective, meaning healthy.

Boswell -- the fountaining, abundantly healthy bovine. And of course, Durham. Everybody knows that that is sign and symbol for a bull."

"And he was born under Taurus too," I said.

And then the bartender, who was bald Alice by now -- bald alas! -- handed me the Bottle. "Here, have a drink on the house." And then I was on the steeply sloping rooftop and sliding fast toward the edge. "Drink, drink, drink!" screamed Alice. "Or you're lost, lost, lost!"

But I wouldn't do it, and I awoke moaning, with the sun in my eyes and Alice shaking me and saying, "Dan, Dan, what's the matter?"

I told her about my dream and how it was mixed up with things that had actually happened. I told her how I had bought this bottle from O'basean and sent it to the Professor as a hoax.

But she didn't pay much attention because, like me, she had one thing uppermost in the cells of both body and mind. Thirst. Thirst was a living lizard that, with a hot rough skin, forced its swelling body down our throats and pulsed there, sucking moisture from us with every breath.

She licked her dry, cracked lips and then, glancing wistfully toward the river, where bathers shouted and plunged with joy, asked, "I don't suppose it'd hurt me if I sat in it, do you?"

"Be careful," I said, my words rattling like pebbles in a dried gourd. I ached to join her, but I couldn't even get near the water. I was having trouble enough combatting the panic that came with the odor of the Brew blowing from the river on the morning breeze.

While she waded out until the water was hip-deep and cupped it in her hands and poured it over her breasts, I examined my surroundings in the daylight. To my left was a warehouse and a wharf.

Tied alongside the latter was an old coal barge that had been painted bright green. A number of men and women, ignoring the festivities, were busy carrying bags and long mummy-shaped bundles from the warehouse to the boat.

These were the bones that had been dug up recently. If my information was correct, they'd be ferried across to the other side after the ceremonies.

That was fine. I intended to go over with them. As soon as Alice came back out of the water, I'd unfold my plans to her and if she thought she could go through with it, we'd...

A big grinning head emerged from the water just behind Alice. It belonged to one of those jokers on every beach who grabs you from behind and pulls you under. I opened my mouth to yell a warning, but it was too late. I don't suppose I'd have been heard above the crowd's noise, anyway.

After sputtering and blowing the water out, she stood there with the most ecstatic expression, then bent over and began drinking great mouthfuls. That was enough for me.

I was dying within, because she was now on the enemy's side, and I'd wanted so badly to do something for her that I hurt. But I had to get going before she saw me and yelled, "Come on in, Dan, the beer's fine!"

I trotted through the crowd, moaning to myself at losing her, until I came to the far end of the warehouse, where she couldn't possibly see me enter. There, under the cool cavernous roof, I paused until I saw a lunch-basket sitting by a pile of rags.

I scooped it up, untied one of the bags, put the basket inside, and hoisted the bag over my shoulder. I stepped, unchallenged, into the line of workers going out to the barge. As if I belonged there, I briskly carried my burden over the gangplank.

But instead of depositing it where everybody else was, I walked around the mountain of bags. Out of view on the riverside, I took the basket out and dumped the bones inside the bag over the railing into the river. I took one peek around my hiding place. Alice was nowhere to be seen.

Satisfied she would not be able to find me, and glad that I'd not disclosed my plans to her last night, I took the basket and crawled backward into the bag.

Once there, I succumbed to the three things that had been fighting within me -- grief, hunger, and thirst. Tears ran as I thought of Alice. At the same time, I greedily devoured, in rapid succession, an orange, a leg and breast of chicken, a half-loaf of fresh bread, and two great plums.

The fruit helped my thirst somewhat, but there was only one thing that could fully ease that terrible ache in my throat -- water. Moreover, the bag was close and very hot.

The sun beat down on it and, though I kept my face as close to the open end as I dared, I suffered. But as long as I kept sweating and could draw some fresh air now and then, I knew I'd be all right. I wasn't going to give up when I'd gotten this far.

I crouched within the thick leather bag like -- I couldn't help thinking -- an embryo within its sac. I was sweating so much that I felt as if I were floating in amniotic fluid. The outside noises came through dimly; every once in a while I'd hear a big shout.

When the workers quit the barge, I stuck my head out long enough to grab some air and look at the sun. It seemed to be about eleven o'clock, although the sun, like the moon, was so distorted that I couldn't be sure.

Our scientists had said the peculiar warmth of the valley and the elongation of the sun and moon were due to some "wave-focusing force field" hanging just below the stratosphere. This had no more meaning than calling it a sorcerer's spell, but it had satisfied the general public and the military.

About noon, the ceremonies began. I ate the last two plums in the basket, but I didn't dare open the bottle at its bottom. Though it felt like a wine-container, I didn't want to chance the possibility that the Brew might be mixed in it.

From time to time, I heard, intermingled with band music, snatches of chants. Then, suddenly, the band quit playing and there was a mighty shout of, "Mahrud is Bull -- Bull is all -- and Sheed is the prophet!"

The band began playing the Semiramis overture. When it was almost through, the barge trembled with an unmistakable motion. I had not heard any tug, nor did I think there was one. After all I'd seen, the idea of a boat moving by itself was just another miracle.

The overture ended in a crash of chords. Somebody yelled, "Three cheers for Albert Allegory!" and the crowd responded.

The noises died I could hear, faintly, the slapping of the waves against the side of the barge. For a few minutes, that was all. Then heavy footsteps sounded close by. I ducked back within the bag and lay still. The steps came very near and stopped.

The rumbling unhuman voice of The Allegory said, "Looks as if somebody forgot to tie up this bag."

Another voice said, "Oh, Al, leave it. What's the difference?"

I would have blessed the unknown voice except for one thing -- it sounded so much like Alices.

I'd thought that was a shock, but a big green four-fingered hand appeared in the opening of the bag's mouth and seized the cords, intending to draw them close and tie them up. At the same time, the tag, which was strung on the cord, became fixed in my vision long enough for me to read the name.

Mrs. Daniel Temper.

I had thrown my mother's bones into the river!

For some reason, this affected me more than the fact that I was now tied into a close and suffocating sack, with no knife to cut my way out.

The voice of The Allegory, strange in its saurian mouth-structure, boomed out. "Well, Peggy, was your sister quite happy when you left her?"

"Alice'll be perfectly happy as soon as she finds this Dan Temper," said the voice, which I now realized was Peggy Rourke's.

"After we'd kissed, as sisters should who haven't seen each other for three years, I explained everything that had happened to me. She started to tell me of her adventures, but I told her I knew most of them.

She just couldn't believe that we'd been keeping tabs on her and her lover ever since they crossed the border."

"Too bad we lost track of him after Polivinosel chased them down Adams Street," said Allegory. "And if we'd been one minute earlier, we'd have caught him, too. Oh, well, we know he'll try to destroy the Bottle -- or steal it. He'll be caught there."

"If he does get to the Bottle," said Peggy, "he'll be the first man to do so. That F.B.I. agent only got as far as the foot of the hill, remember."

"If anybody can do it," chuckled Allegory, "Dan H. Temper can. Or so says Mahrud, who should know him well enough."

"Won't Temper be surprised when he finds out that his every move since he entered Mahrudland has been not only a reality, but a symbol of reality? And that we've been leading him by the nose through the allegorical maze?"

Allegory laughed with all the force of a bull-alligator's roar.

"I wonder if Mahrud isn't asking too much of him by demanding that he read into his adventures a meaning outside of themselves? For instance, could he see that he entered this valley as a baby enters the world, bald and toothless?

Or that he met and conquered the ass that is in all of us? But that, in order to do so, he had to lose his outer strength and visible burden -- the water-tank?

And then operate upon his own strength with no source of external strength to fall back on? Or that, in the Scrambled Men, he met the living punishment of human self-importance in religion?"

Peggy said, "He'll die when he finds out that the real Polivinosel was down South and that you were masquerading as him."

"Well," rumbled Allegory, "I hope Temper can see that Mahrud kept Polivinosel in his asinine form as an object lesson to everybody that, if Polivinosel could become a god, then anybody could. If he can't, he's not very smart."

I was thinking that I had, strangely enough, thought that very thing about the Ass. And then the cork in the bottle in the basket decided to pop, and the contents -- Brew -- gushed out over my side.

I froze, afraid that the two would hear it. But they went on talking as if they hadn't noticed. It was no wonder -- the Allegory's voice thundered on.

"He met Love, Youth, and Beauty -- which are nowhere to be found in abundance except in this valley -- in the form of Alice Lewis. And she, like all three of those qualities, was not won easily, nor without a change in the wooer.

She rejected him, lured him, teased him, almost drove him crazy. She wanted him, yet she didn't. And he had to conquer some of his faults -- such as shame of his baldness and toothlessness -- before he could win her, only to find out his imagined faults were, in her eyes, virtues."

"Do you think he'll know the answer to the question you, in your metamorphosis, asked him?" Peggy said.

"I don't know. I wish I'd first taken the form of the Sphinx and asked him her questions, so he'd have had a clue to what was expected of him.

He'd have known, of course, that the answer to the Sphinx is that man himself is the answer to all the old questions. Then he might have seen what I was driving at when I asked him where Man -- Modern Man -- was going."

"And when he finds the answer to that, then he too will be a god."

"If!" said Allegory. "If! Mahrud says that Dan Temper is quite a few cuts above the average man of this valley. He is the reformer, the idealist who won't be happy unless he's tilting his lance against some windmill.

In his case, he'll not only have to defeat the windmills within himself -- his neuroses and traumas -- he'll have to reach deep within himself and pull up the drowned god in the abyss of himself by the hair. If he doesn't, he'll die."

"Oh, no, not that!" gasped Peggy. "I didn't know Mahrud meant that! "

"Yes," thundered the Allegory, "he does! He says that Temper will have to find himself or die. Temper himself would want it that way.

He'd not be satisfied with being one of the happy-go-lucky, let-the-gods-do-it Brew-bums who loaf beneath this uninhibited sun. He'll either be first in this new Rome, or else he'll die."

The conversation was interesting, to say the least, but I lost track of the next few sentences because the bottle had not quit gushing.

It was spurting a gentle but steady stream against my side.

And, I suddenly realized that the bag would fill and the bottles contents would run out the mouth of the bag and reveal my presence.

Frantically, I stuck my finger in the bottle's neck and succeeded in checking the flow.

"So," said Allegory, "he fled to the cemetery, where he met Weepenwilly. Weepenwilly who mourns eternally yet would resent the dead being brought back. Who refuses to take his cold and numbed posterior from the gravestone of his so-called beloved.

That man was the living symbol of himself, Daniel Temper, who grieved himself into baldness at an early age, though he blamed his mysterious sickness and fever for it. Yet who, deep down, didn't want his mother back, because she'd been nothing but trouble to him."

The pressure in the bottle suddenly increased and expelled my finger. The Brew in it burst over me despite my efforts to plug it up again, gushing out at such a rate that the bag would fill faster than its narrow mouth could let it out. I was facing two dangers -- being discovered and being drowned.

As if my troubles weren't enough, somebody's heavy foot descended on me and went away. A voice succeeded it. I recognized it, even after all these years. It was that of Doctor Boswell Durham, the god now known as Mahrud. But it had a basso quality and richness it had not possessed in his predeity days.

"All right, Dan Temper, the masquerade is over!"

Frozen with terror, I kept silent and motionless.

"I've sloughed off the form of the Allegory and taken my own."

Durham went on. "That was really I talking all the time. I was the Allegory you refused to recognize. Myself -- your old teacher. But then you always did refuse to see any of the allegories I pointed out to you.

"How's this one, Danny? Listen! You crawled aboard Charon's ferry -- this coal barge -- and into the sack which contained your mother's bones. Not only that, but as a further unconscious symbol of your rejection of the promise of life for your mother, you threw her bones overboard.

Didn't you notice her name on the tag? Why not? Subconsciously on purpose?

"Well, Dan my boy, you're right back where you started -- in your mother's womb where, I suspect you've always wanted to be. How do I know so much? Brace yourself for a real shock. I was Doctor Duerf, the psychologist who conditioned you. Run that name backward and remember how I love a pun or an anagram."

I found all this hard to believe. The Professor had always been kindly, gentle, and humorous. I would have thought he was pulling my leg if it hadn't been for one thing! that was the Brew, which was about to drown me. I really thought he was carrying his joke too far.

I told him so, as best I could in my muffled voice.

He yelled back, "Life is real -- life is earnest! You've always said so, Dan. Let's see now if you meant it. All right, you're a baby due to be born. Are you going to stay in this sac, and die, or are you going to burst out from the primal waters into life?

"Let's put it another way, Dan. I'm the midwife, but my hands are tied. I can't assist in the accouchment directly.

I have to coach you via long distance, symbolically, so to speak. I can tell you what to do to some extent, but you, being an unborn infant, may have to guess at the meaning of some of my words."

I wanted to cry out a demand that he quit clowning around and let me out. But I didn't. I had my pride.

Huskily, weakly, I said, "What do you want me to do?"

"Answer the questions I, as Allegory and Ass, asked you. Then you'll be able to free yourself. And rest assured, Dan, that I'm not opening the bag for you."

What was it he had said? My mind groped frantically; the rising tide of the Brew made thinking difficult. I wanted to scream and tear at the leather with my naked hands. But if I did that, I'd go under and never come up again.

I clenched my fists, forced my mind to slow down, to go back over what Allegory and Polivinosel had said.

What was it? What was it?

The Allegory had said, "Where do you want to go now?"

And Polivinosel, while chasing me down Adams Street -- Adam's Street? -- had called out, "Little man, what now?"

The answer to the Sphinx's question was:

Man.

Allegory and Ass had proposed their questions in the true scientific manner so that they contained their own answer.

That answer was that man wasmore than man.

In the next second, with that realization acting like a powerful motor within me, I snapped the conditioned reflex as if it were a wishbone.

I drank deeply of the Brew, both to quench my thirst and to strip myself of the rest of my predeity inhibitions. I commanded the bottle to stop fountaining. And with an explosion that sent Brew and leather fragments flying over the barge, I rose from the bag.

Mahrud was standing there, smiling. I recognized him as my old prof, even though he was now six and a half feet tall, had a thatch of long black hair, and had pushed his features a little here and there to make himself handsome.

Peggy stood beside him. She looked like her sister, Alice, except that she was red-haired. She was beautiful, but I've always preferred brunettes -- specifically, Alice.

"Understand everything now?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "including the fact that much of this symbolism was thought up on the spur of the moment to make it sound impressive. Also, that it wouldn't have mattered if Ihad drowned, for you'd have brought me back to life."

"Yes, but you'd never have become a god. Nor would you have succeeded me."

"What do you mean?" I asked blankly.

"Peggy and I deliberately led you and Alice toward this denouement so we could have somebody to carry on our work here. We're a little bored with what we've done, but we realize that we can't just leave.

So I've picked you as a good successor. You're conscientious, you're an idealist, and you've discovered your potentialities. You'll probably do better than I have at this suspension of 'natural' laws. You'll make a better world than I could. After all, Danny, my godling, I'm the Old Bull, you know, the one for having fun.

"Peggy and I want to go on a sort of Grand Tour to visit the former gods of Earth, who are scattered all over the Galaxy. They're all young gods, you know, by comparison with the age of the Universe. You might say they've just got out of school -- this Earth -- and are visiting the centers of genuine culture to acquire polish."

"What about me?"

"You're a god now, Danny. You make your own decisions. Meanwhile, Peggy and I have places to go."

He smiled one of those long slow smiles he used to give us students when he was about to quote a favorite line of his.

" '...listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door. Let's go.' "

Peggy and he did go. Like thistles, swept away on the howling winds of space, they were gone.

And after they had vanished, I was left staring at the river and the hills and the sky and the city, where the assembled faithful watched, awestruck. It was mine, all mine.

Including one black-haired figure -- andw hat a figure -- that stood on the wharf and waved at me.

Do you think I stood poised in deep reverie and pondered on my duty to mankind or the shape of teleology now that I was personally turning it out on my metaphysical potters wheel?

Not I. I leaped into the air and completed sixteen entrechats of pure joy before I landed. Then I walked across the water -- on the water -- to Alice.

The next day, I sat upon the top of a hill overlooking the valley. As the giant troop-carrying gliders soared in, I seized them with psychokinesis, or what-have you, and dunked them one by one in the river.

And as the Marines threw away their arms and swam toward shore, I plucked away their oxygen masks and there after forgot about them, unless they seemed to be having trouble swimming. Then I was kind enough to pick them up and deposit them on shore.

I do think it was rather nice of me. After all, I wasn't in too good a mood. That whole night and morning, my legs and my upper gums had been very sore. They were making me somewhat irritable, despite liberal potions of Brew.

But there was a good reason.

I had growing pains, and I was teething.