Deus Irae

Three

During the war many toxic drugs had been developed, and afterward, these drugs—a vast variety of kinds—lay about amid the general chaos and could be found here and there like everything else. And Peter Sands took particular interest in these drugs, because some—a few, anyhow—of them, although developed originally as weapons against the enemy, to impede, disorient, and altogether befuddle his faculties, had a certain positive value.

At least so he believed. If one was careful, one could concoct a potion, several drugs taken in conjunction; one became disoriented, but a certain expansion or heightened lucidity also occurred. Green little methamphets, shiny red ‘zines, white flat discs of code segmented sometimes into halves, sometimes when stronger into four parts, tiny yellow elves… he had gathered an inventory which he carefully kept hidden. No one but himself knew of this trove which he hoarded… and, while collecting and hoarding, he experimented.

He believed that the so-called hallucinations caused by some of these drugs (with emphasis, he continually reminded himself, on the word “some”) were not hallucinations at all, but perceptions of other zones of reality. Some of them were frightening; some appeared lovely.

Oddly, he poked and tinkered with the former; perhaps a long Puritan background had made him—he conjectured—masochistic; anyhow, it was into the realm of terror that he liked to venture very slightly… he did not wish either to go too far or to stay too long, but he wished for a fair glimpse.

It reminded him of his dad, who, one day before the war at an amusement park, had tried out a shock machine; you put in a dime, seized two handles, and gradually moved them apart. The farther apart, the greater the electric current; one learned just how much he could stand, how far apart he could bear to pry the two handles. Watching his sweating, red-faced father, Peter Sands had felt admiration, had seen his dad’s grip on the handles become tighter, more vigorous, the greater the gap became. And yet it was obviously a powerful—too powerful, ultimately—antagonist which his father strove against; finally his father had, with a grunt of pain, let go entirely.

But how admirable his dad had been, and of course he was showing off to Pete, who, at eight years old, thought his dad was great indeed. Himself, he had for one fraction of a second touched the handles—and leaped away in fright; he could not endure an instant of the shock. He was, indeed, not like his dad… at least in his own estimation.

So now he had his leftover ter-wep pills. Which he mixed, alchemist-wise, in proportions of a guarded variety and quantity. And always he made sure that another person was present, so that a standard phenothiazine could be given orally, if he passed too far in, out, down, whatever direction the drugs carried one.

“I’m nuts,” he had said to Lurine Rae, once, in candid admission. And yet he kept on; he inspected the offerings of each peddler who passed through Charlottesville… inspected and often bought. He owned vast pharmacopoeias and could tell, usually at a glance, what a given pill, tablet, or spansule consisted of, no matter how arcane; he recognized the hallmark of every prewar ethical house: in this his wisdom was complete.

“Then,” Lurine had said, “stop.”

But he didn’t want to, because he was seeking something. Not just diddling himself but searching—the goal was there, but obscured by a membrane; and he strove, via the medication, to lift the membrane, the curtain—this was how he depicted it to himself, a rationalization, perhaps, but why else do this? Because often he did suffer fear and disorientation, sometimes depression and even, but rarely, murderous polymorphic rage.

Punishment? No, he had often thought and replied. He did not seek to injure himself, to impair his faculties, to develop liver or kidney toxicity; he read brochures, carefully watched for side effects… and certainly he did not want to turn berserk and injure another; pale, pretty Lurine, for example. But—

“We can see Carleton Lufteufel with our unaided senses,” he explained to Lurine. “But I believe—” There was another order of reality and the unaided eyes did not penetrate this; if you took ultraviolet and infrared rays as an example…

Lurine, curled up in a chair opposite him, smoking an Algerian briar pipe with a prewar utterly dried-out Dutch cavendish mixture in it, said, “Instead of taking pills, build instruments that register its presence. Whatever it is you’re after. Read it off a dial. That’s safer.” Always she was afraid that he would enter a drug-induced state and not return; after all, the medications were not medications: they were neurological and metabolic enzymes, poorly understood even by their makers… their effects varied from person to person.

“I don’t want to see a reading on a dial,” he answered. “It’s not a record I want; it’s an—” He gestured. “An experience.”

Lurine sighed. “Let it come to you, then. Sit and wait.”

“I can’t wait,” he said. “Because it won’t come this side of the grave.” That enemy which the New Church, the SOWs, craved: their solution. Although at the same time the SOWers liked to think of themselves, the survivors of the war, as the Chosen, the elite whom the God of Wrath had spared.

He saw in their logic the basic fault. If the God of Wrath was evil, as the SOWers maintained, he would spare not the good but the most evil. Hence, by their own logic, they were the wicked of the world; like Carleton Lufteufel himself, they were alive because they were too wicked to be offered the healing balm of death.

Such lunatic logic bored him. So he turned back to the display of pills on the table before him, in his little living room.

“Okay,” Lurine said. “What is there that you’re seeking? You must have some idea, at least as to its worth… or you wouldn’t be always buying those little placebos for all that silver the peddlers charge. I’m very unhappy; maybe tonight I’ll join you.” Today she had told Father Handy that she intended to join the Christian Church, but she had not told either Pete Sands or Dr. Abernathy. As usual, she was having it both ways… an instinct kept her from making the terminal move.

Pete, his forehead wrinkling, said slowly, “I saw once what’s called der Todesstachel. At least that’s what your buddy Father Handy and that inc Tibor would call it; they like those German theological terms.”

“What’s ein Todesstachel?” she asked. She had never heard the word before, but she knew that Tod meant death.

Pete said somberly, “The sting of death. But listen. ‘Sting,’ as when a bug or a nettle stings you… that’s the modern usage. It now means being touched by a poison-filled stinger, as with a bee. But it didn’t always mean that. In the old days, as for example when the King James scholars wrote the phrase ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ they meant it in the old sense. Which is—” He hesitated. “Like being stung by a remark. Do you get it? Stung, for instance, into rage, hurt by a remark. It meant to be pierced by a dartlike point. In dueling, for instance, they stung each other; we would say ‘pricked,’ now. So Paul didn’t mean that death stung the way a scorpion stings, with a tail and a sac of poison, an irritant; he meant a piercing.” Paul had meant what he himself, Pete Sands, had once, under the influence of drugs, experienced.

He had been fighting; the drugs had set off a polymorphic, circus-movement destructiveness and he had strode about smashing things, and, since it was Lurine’s small apartment, he had smashed her possessions and then, incredibly, had, when she tried to stop him, kicked and hit her. And when he did so, he felt the sting—the sting in its older sense: the deep piercing of his body by a sharp-pointed metal gaff, a barbed spear such as fishermen use to secure heavy fish, once netted.

In all his life he had never experienced anything so real. He had, as the gaff entered his side, doubled up in utter pain, and Lurine, who had been ducking and dodging, had halted at once in concern for him.

The gaff—the metal barbed hook itself—came at the bottom end of a long pole, a spear, which ascended from Earth to heaven, and he had, in that awful instant as he tolled doubled up in agony, glimpsed the Persons at the top end of the spear, those who held the pole that bridged the two worlds. Three figures with warm but impassive eyes. They had not twisted the gaff within him; They had simply held it there until, in his pain, he had begun by slow and gradual degrees to become awake. That was the purpose of this sting: to wake him from his sleep, the sleep of all mankind, from which everyone would one day, in the twinkling of an eye, as Paul had said, be roused. “Behold,” Paul had said, “I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but shall be changed, in the twinkling of an eye.” But oh, the pain. Did it take this much to awaken him? Must everyone suffer like this? Would the gaff pierce him again sometime? He dreaded it, and yet he recognized that the three figures, the Trinity, were right; this had to be done; he had to be roused! And yet—

He now got out a book, opened it, and read aloud to, Lurine, who liked to be read to if it wasn’t too long and declamatory. He read a small, simple poem, without telling her the author.

Closing the book, he asked, “What do you think of that?”

“ ‘Sokay.”

He said, “Sappho. Translated by Landor. Probably from one word, from a ‘fragment.’ But it reminds one of Gretchen am Spinnrade—in the first part of Goethe’s Faust.” And he thought, Meine Ruh ist hin. Mein Herz ist schwer. My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. Amazing, so much alike. Did Goethe know? The Sappho poem was better, being shorter. And it, at least as done by Landor, was in English, and he, unlike the SOWer Father Handy, did not delight in strange tongues; in fact he dreaded them. Too many ter-weps had come for example from Germany; he could not forget that.

“Who was Sappho?” Lurine asked.

Presently he said, “The finest poet the world ever knew. Even in fragments. You can have Pindar; he was third-rate.” Again he inspected the display of pills; what to take, what combination? To strive by means of these to reach that other land which he knew existed, beyond the gate of death perhaps.

“Tell me,” Lurine said, smoking away on her cheap Algerian briar pipe—it was all she had been able to purchase from a peddler; the U.K. rose briars were too dear—and watching him acutely, “What it was like that time you took those methamphetamines and saw the Devil.”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“It sounds like,” he said, “you know. Forked tail, cloven hoof, horns.”

But she was serious. “It wasn’t. Tell me again.”

He did not like to remember his vision of the Antagonist, what Martin Luther had called “our ancient foe on earth.” So he got a glass of water, carefully selected several assorted pills, and swallowed them.

“Horizontal eyes,” Lurine said. “You told me that. And without pupils. Just slots.”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“And he was above the horizon. And unmoving. He’d always been there, you said. Was he blind?”

“No. He perceived me, for instance. In fact all of us, all life. He waits.” They are wrong, the Servants of Wrath, Pete thought; upon death we can be delivered over to the Antagonist: it will—may—not be a release at all, only the start. “You see,” he said, “he was so placed that he viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze, like a laser beam, traveled on without end, forever. It had no focus point, such as a lens creates.”

“What did you take just now?”

“Narkazine.”

“Nark has to do with sleep. Zine is a stimulant, though. Does it stimulate you to sleep?”

“It dulls the frontal lobe and permits the thalamus free activity. So—” He quickly swallowed two tiny gray pills. “I take these to hold back the thalamus.” Brain metabolism, the vasodilation and constriction, was his hobby; he knew the map of the human brain and what a little-too-slight supply of blood to this or that portion could do—that it could forever turn a kindly, warm, perceptive man into a narrow, rigid, suspicious, brooding quasi-paranoid. So he was so careful; he wanted primarily to affect the hormonal secretions of his adrenal-class glands without too much vasoconstriction. And the amphetamines were vasoconstrictors and hence dangerous; they could permanently damage the personality on a physiological basis.

All this the great ethical houses had discovered and duly made available, ter-wep-wise, to the Pentagon in the ‘60s and ‘70s—and had seen used in the ‘80s.

But on the other hand, the methamphetamines inhibited the secretion of adrenalin, and this, for some personalities, was vital; schizophrenia had at last, like cancer, been unmasked; cancer consisted of a virus and schizophrenia had turned out to be an overproduction of serotonin which the brain could not handle; hence the hallucinations—true hallucinations, although the dividing line between hallucination and authentic vision had become thin indeed.

“I don’t understand you,” Lurine said. “You take those goddamn pills and then you see something just awful—Satan himself. Or that hook you talk about, that gaff that penetrated your side. And yet you go back. And you’re not just bored; it’s not that.” Puzzled, she regarded him.

Pete said, “I have to know. That’s all. To experience, to know, is to be. I want to be.”

“You are,” she pointed out, practically.

“Listen,” Pete said. “God—the authentic God, He of the Bible, Whom we worship, not that Carleton Lufteufel—is searching for us; the Bible is a chronicle of God’s search for man. Not man’s search for God. Do you understand? And I want to go as far toward Him, to meet Him, as I can.”

“How did man and God get separated?” Like a child, she listened attentively, awaiting the true tale.

Pete said cryptically, “A quarrel so old that the story is garbled. Somehow God set man up where He could reach man daily, regularly; they were in direct touch, the way you and I are now. But something happened and somehow they wound up like Leibnitz’s windowless monads, near each other but unable to perceive anything outside; only able to scrutinize their own beings. A sort of schizophrenia evidently set in, on the part of one of them or both; autism-separation. And then man—”

“Man was driven out. Physically away.”

Pete said, “Evidently man did something, or anyhow God thought he had. We don’t know precisely what it was. He was corrupted, anyhow, through nature or some natural substance; something made by God and part of His creation. So man sank out of direct contact and down to the level of mere creation. And we have to make our way back.”

“And you do it through those pills.”

He said, simply, “It’s all I know. I don’t have natural visions. I want to take the journey back until I stand face to face with Him as man once did—did, and elected not to. Beyond doubt, some thing or some one tempted him away and into doing something else. Man voluntarily gave up that relationship because he thought he had found something better.” Half to himself he added, “So we wound up with Carleton Lufteufel and the gob and the ter-weps.”

“I like the idea of being tempted,” Lurine said; she relit her pipe, it having gone out. “Everyone does. Those pills tempt you; you’re still doing it. Men—people like you—have prairie-dog blood; they’re insanely curious. Make a funny noise and out you pop from your burrow to witness whatever’s taking place. Just in case.” She pondered. “A wonder. That’s what you crave and he—the first of us in the Garden—craved. What before the war they called a ‘spectacular.’ It’s the big tent syndrome.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know why you want to be at ringside? So you can be with them.”

“Who?”

“The big boys. Hubris. Vainglory. Man saw God and he said to himself, Gee whiz, how come He gets to be God and I’m stuck with—”

“And I’m doing this now.”

Lurine said, “Learn to be what Christ called ‘meek.’ I bet you don’t know what that means. Remember those supermarkets before the war; when someone pushed a cart into line ahead of you, and you accepted it—that’s your faulty idea of ‘meek.’ Actually meek means ‘tamed,’ as in a tamed animal.”

Startled, he said, “Really?”

“Then it got to mean humble, or even merciful, or long-suffering, or even bad things like weak and soft. But originally it meant to lose the quality of violence. In the Bible it means specifically to be free from resentment regarding injuries done to you.” She laughed with delight. “You stupid fool,” she said, then. “You prattle but you don’t know a thing, really.”

He said stiffly, “Hanging around that pedant Father Handy has hardly made you meek. In any of the senses of the word.”

At that, Lurine laughed until she choked. “Oh god.” She breathed. “We can have a ferocious argument, now: Which of us is the meeker? Hell, I’m a lot meeker than you!” She rocked with amusement.

He ignored her. Because of the stew of pills which he had taken; they had begun to work on him.

He saw a figure, suddenly, with laughing eyes, whom he supposed to be Jesus. It had to be. The man, with white-thatched hair, wore a toga and Greek greaves. He was young, with brawny shoulders, and he grinned in a gentle, happy way as he stood clutching to his chest an enormous and heavy clasp-bound book. Except for the classic greaves, he might—from the wild cut of his hair—have been Saxon.

Jesus Christ! Pete thought.

The white-haired brawny youth—my god, he was built like a blacksmith!—unbuckled the book and opened it to display two wide pages. Pete saw writing in a foreign language, held forward for him to read:

KAI THEOS EIN HO LOGOS

Pete couldn’t make it out, nor the jumble of other words which, although neatly inscribed, swam before him in this vision, snatches meaningless to him, such as koimeitheisometha … keoiesis … titheimi… he just could not even tell if it was a genuine language or not: communication or the nonsense phantoms of a dream.

The flaxen-haired youth shut the great book which he held and then, abruptly, was gone. It was like, his coming and going, an old wartime laser hologram, but without sound.

“You shouldn’t listen to that anyhow,” a voice said within Pete’s head, as if his own thought processes had passed from his control. “All that mumbo-jumbo was to impress you. Did he tell you his name, that man? No, he did not.”

Turning, Pete made out the bobbing, floating image of a small clay pot, a modest object, fired but without glaze; merely hardened. A utilitarian object, from the soil of the ground. It was lecturing him against being awed—which he had been—and he appreciated it. “I’ll tell you my name,” the pot said. “I’m Oh Ho.” To himself, Pete thought, Chinese. “I’m from the earth and not superior to mortals,” the pot Oh Ho continued, in a conversational way. “I’m not above identifying myself. Always beware of manifestations too lofty to identify themselves. You are Peter Sands; I am Oh Ho. What you saw, that figure holding that large ancient volume, that was an entity of the noosphere, from the Seas of Knowledge, who come down here all the way from Sumerian times. As Therapeutae they assisted the Greek healer Asclepiades; as spirits or plasmic lifeforms of wisdom they called themselves ‘Thoth’ to the Egyptians, and when they built—they are excellent artificers—they were ‘Ptath’ to the Egyptians and ‘Hephaestus’ to the Greeks. They actually have no names at all, being a composite mind. But I have a name, just as you have. Oh Ho. Can you remember that? It’s a simple name.”

“Sure,” Pete said. “Oh Ho, a Chinese name.” The pot wavered; it was shimmering away. “Oh Ho,” it repeated., “Ho Oh. Oh, Oh, Oh. Ho On. Think of Ho On, Peter Sands, someday when you are talking with Dr. Abernathy. The little clay pot which came from the earth and can, like you, be smashed to bits and return to the earth, which lives only as long as your kind does.”

“ ‘Ho On,’ “ Pete echoed dutifully.

“That which is benign will identify itself by name,” Ho On said, invisible now; it was only a voice, a thinking, mentational entity which had possessed Pete’s mind. “That which won’t is not. We are alike, you and I, equals in a certain real way, made from the same stuff. Peter Sands. I have told you who I am; and from old, Iknew you.”

What a silly name, he thought: Ho On. A silly name for a transitory, breakable pot. Well, he liked it anyhow; it had, as it said, treated him as an equal. And somehow that seemed more important than any vast transcendent significance which the weighty foreign words in the huge book might contain. Words he could not fathom anyhow; they were beyond him. He, like the clay pot Ho On, was too limited. But that was Jesus Christ I saw, he realized. I know it was Him. It looked like Him.

“Anything else you wish to know before I leave?” Ho On’s thoughts came to him, within his head.

Pete Sands said, “Tell me the most important thing that, under any circumstance, could be told. But that’s true.”

Ho On thought, “St. Sophia is going to be reborn. She wasn’t acceptable before.”

He blinked. Who was St. Sophia? It was like telling him that St. Vitus was going to dance again… it was a joke. Keen disappointment filled him. It had simply ended up with something silly, like its name. And now he felt it leave… on that meager, if meaningless, note.

And then the drugs wore off. And he now no longer saw or heard; again he surveyed his living room, his familiar microtapes and projector, his tape-spools, and littered plastic desk; he saw Lurine smoking her pipe, he smelled the cavendish tobacco… his head felt swollen andhe got up unsteadily, knowing that only an instant in real time had passed, and for Lurine nothing had occurred. Nothing had changed. And she was right. This was not an event; Christ had not manifested Himself. What had occurred was that which Pete Sands had hoped for: an augmentation of his own faculties of perception.

“Jesus,” he said aloud.

“What’s the matter?” Lurine asked.

“I saw Him,” he informed her. “He exists. To save us. He’s always there, always will be, has always been.” He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a small quantity, perhaps two thirds of a shot, of bourbon from the precious prewar bottle.

When he returned to the living room Lurine was reading a badly printed magazine, a mimeographed newsletter circulated from town to town here in the Mountain States area. “You merely sit,” he said, incredulous.

“What am I supposed to do? Clap?”

“But it’s important.”

“You saw it; I didn’t.” She continued reading the newsletter; it came from Provo, Utah.

“But He’s there for you, too,” Pete said.

“Good.” She nodded absently.

He seated himself, feeling weak and nauseated; side-effects from the pills. There was silence and then Lurine spoke again, still absently.

“The SOWs are sending the inc, Tibor McMasters, on a Pilg. To find the God of Wrath and capture his essence for their murch.”

“What in god’s name is a ‘murch’?” SOW jargon; he did not ever understand.

“Church mural.” She glanced up. “They speculate he’ll have to travel well over a thousand miles; it’s Los Angeles, I believe.”

“You think I care?” he said furiously.

“I think,” she said, laying aside the newsletter, then, and frowning thoughtfully, “that you ought to go along on the Pilg and then about fifty miles from here cut a leg off that cow that pulls Tiber’s cart. Or short out his metabattery.” She sounded perfectly, composedly serious.

“Why?”

“So he can’t bring back the essence. For the mural.”

“It couldn’t matter less to me if—”

He broke off. Because someone had come to the door of his meager abode; he heard footsteps, then his dog Tom Swift And His Electric Magic Carpet barking. The bell clingled. Rising, he strode to the door.

Dr. Abernathy, his superior, the priest of the Charlottesville Combined Christian Church, stood there in his black cassock. “Is this too late to call on you?” Dr. Abernathy said, his round, small, bunlike face gracious in its formal concern not to be a bother.

“Come in.” Pete held the door wide. “You know Miss Rae, Doctor.”

“The Lord be with you,” Dr. Abernathy said to her, nodding.

Immediately, correctly, she answered, “And with thy spirit.” She rose. “Good evening, Doctor.”

“I heard,” Dr. Abernathy said, “that you are considering entering our church, taking confirmation and then the greater sacraments.”

“Well,” Lurine said, “I was—you know. Dissatisfied. I mean, who wants to worship the former Chairman of the ERDA?”

Dr. Abernathy passed into the tiny kitchen, and put the tea kettle on, to boil water for coffee. “You would be welcome,” he said to her.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Lurine said.

“But to be confirmed you would need half a year of intensive religious instruction. On many topics: the sacraments, the rituals, the basic tenets of the Church. What we believe and also why. I hold adult-instruction classes two afternoons a week.” He added, with a trace of embarrassment, “I have at present one adult receiving instruction. You could catch up very quickly; you have a bright, fertile mind. Meanwhile, you could attend services… however, you could not come to the rail, could not take Holy Communion; you realize that.”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“Have you been baptized?”

“I—” She hesitated. “Frankly, I don’t know.”

“We would baptize you with the special service for those who may have been baptized before. With water. Anything else—such as rose petals, as they used to do it before the war in Los Angeles—that does not count. By the way—I hear that Tibor is about to set forth on a Pilg. It’s no secret, of course; my hearing of it verifies that. The Eltern of the Servants of Wrath, the rumor-mill says, have provided him with maps and photos and data, so that he can find Lufteufel. All I hope is that his cow holds out.” Returning to the living room, he said to Pete Sands, “How about a little poker? Three does not seem to me enough, but we can play for genuine old copper cents. And no crazy games such as spit-in-the-ocean and baseball, just seven-card stud and straight and draw.”

“Okay,” Pete said, nodding. “But let’s allow one wild card, dealer’s choice, since there’re only three of us.”

“Fine,” Dr. Abernathy said, as Pete walked off to get the deck and the box of chips. He drew a comfortable chair up to the table for Lurine Rae and then one for himself and at last one for Pete.

“And no chattering during the game,” Pete said to Lurine.

They were dealing a hand of five-card draw, jacks or better to open, when the cow-drawn cart of Tibor McMasters, battery-lamp sweeping ahead of it, pulled up at the door and tinkled its hopeful bell.

Studying his hand, Dr. Abernathy said thoughtfully in a preoccupied and abstracted way, “Um, I—uh—fold. So I’ll go.” He rose, to go to the door: to answer the presence of the well-known inc SOW artist.

On his cart, Tibor McMasters surveyed the progress of the poker game, and the conversation had that unique equal quality: everyone said as much as everyone else, although each player had his idiosyncratic mumble; and none of it, Tibor realized, meant anything—it was merely a noise, a banter, as their collective attention kept fixed on the play itself.

So only later, when a pause came, could he talk with Dr. Abernathy.

“Doctor.” His voice, in his ears, sounded squeaky.

“Yes?” Abernathy said, counting his blue chips.

“You heard about the Pilg I’ve got to go on.”

“Yep.”

Tibor said, aware and thinking out his words, knowing intensely the meaning of them, “Sir, if I became a convert to Christianity, I wouldn’t have to go.”

At once Dr. Abernathy glanced up and said, scrutinizing him, “Are you really that much afraid?” Everyone else, Peter Sands and the girl, Lurine Rae, also stared at Tibor; he felt their motionless gaze.

“Yes,” Tibor said.

“Often,” Dr. Abernathy said, and took a fresh deck and began to riffle and vigorously shuffle the cards, “fear or dread is based on a sense of guilt, not experienced directly.”

Tibor said nothing. He waited with the intention of lasting it out, however unpleasant and protracted it might be. Priests, after all, were generally odd, intense people, especially the Christian ones.

“You do not,” Dr. Abernathy stated, “in your Servants of Wrath Church, have either public or private confession.”

“No, Doctor. But—”

“I will not try to argue or compete,” Dr. Abernathy said in a harsh, absolutely firm tone. “You are employed by Father Handy and it is bis business if he wants to send you.”

“And yours,” Lurine added, “if you want to quit or go. Why not just quit?”

“And go,” Tibor said, “into a vacuum.”

“Always,” Dr. Abernathy continued, “the Christian Church is ready to accept anyone. Regardless of their spiritual condition; it asks nothing of them except their willingness. I would, however, suspect that what I can offer you—I acting as a mouthpiece of God, not as a man—is the opportunity for you to shirk your spiritual duty… or, put more precisely, the opportunity to acknowledge to yourself and to confess to me your deep desire to shirk your spiritual duty.”

“To a false church?” Lurine Rae protested, her dark red eyebrows raised in astonishment. To Tibor she said, “They have a club; they’re all members. It’s what’s called ‘professional ethics.’ “ She laughed.

“Why not make an appointment with me?” Dr. Abernathy asked Tibor. “I can accept your confession without your joining the Christian Church; it is not tied in, as the ancients put it.”

With utmost caution, his mind very, very rapid in its work, Tibor answered, “I—can’t think of anything to confess.”

“You will,” Lurine assured him. “He’ll assist you. Even further.”

Neither Dr. Abernathy nor Pete Sands said anything, and yet they seemed in some mysterious sense, perhaps by their mere passivity, to acknowledge what the woman said to be true. The father confessor knew his trade; like a good lawyer or doctor of medicine, Tibor reflected, he could draw his client out. Lead him and inform him. Find what was deep inside, hidden—not plant anything, but rather harvest it.

“Let me think this over,” Tibor said. He felt entirely hesitant now. His intentions, his decision to do this as a solution to his horror at the idea of the soon-coming Pilg, seemed swamped with the second guesses of severe and fundamental doubt. What had seemed a good idea had been, to his disbelief, returned as unacceptable by the man who stood to benefit most—at least most after Tibor McMasters, who stood at the head of the line… for obvious reasons: reasons palpable to everyone in the room.

Confession? He felt no burden of guilt, no sting of death; he felt instead perplexed and afraid; that was all. Admittedly, he feared to a morbid and obsessive degree the proposed—in fact ordered—Pilg. But why did guilt have to come into it? The Gothic convolutions of this, the older church… and yet he had to admit that it somehow seemed appropriate, this interpretation of Dr. Abernathy’s. Perhaps merely the unexpectedness of it alone had overwhelmed him; possibly that accounted for it.

Since he had nothing to say, the girl friend of Pete Sands naturally spoke up. “Confession,” Lurine said meditatively, “is strange. You in no way feel free in the sense that you can sin again with license. Actually, you feel—” She gestured, as if they all really understood her—which Tibor did not. However, he nodded solemnly, as if he did. And took the opportunity—were they not discussing giddy, interesting subjects such as sin?—to scrutinize for the millionth time her sharply amplified breasts; she wore a shrunk-by-many-washings white cotton shirt and no bra, and in the shaded light of the living room her nipples cast a far, huge shadow on the far wall, each one in the process becoming enlarged to the size of a flashlight battery.

“You feel,” Pete Sands declared, “your evil thoughts and deeds articulated. They take form and assume shapes. And are less fearsome because they become just words, suddenly. Just the Logos. And,” he added, “the Logos is good.” He smiled, then, at Tibor, and now all at once the powerful thrust of Christian meaning struck at Tiber’s mind. He in return felt soothed; he felt the healing rather than the philosophical quality of the older church: its doctrines admittedly made no sense, but neither did very much else in the world. Especially since the war.

Once more the three persons at the table, like a mundane and bisexual trinity, resumed their game. The discussion on the vital topic which he had come here for—vital at least to him—had terminated.

But then Dr. Abernathy said abruptly, lifting his eyes from the hand he held, “I could all of a sudden have three adults in my religious-instruction class. You, Miss Rae here, and the rather odd fellow currently attending, whom I know you all have met at one time or another, Walter Blassingame. Practically a renaissance of the primordial faith.” His expression and tone held no evidence of his feelings—perhaps as a direct result of the game spread across the surface of the table.

Aloud, Tibor said, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott.” By speaking in German he spoke to himself; as far as he knew, anyhow. But, to his amazement, Dr. Abernathy nodded, obviously understanding.

“The language,” Lurine Rae said acidly, “of Krupp und Sohnen. Of I. G. Farben and A. G. Chemie. Of the Lufteufel family all the way back to Adam Lufteufel—or, more accurately, Cain Lufteufel.”

Dr. Abernathy said to her, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott is not the language of the German military establishment nor the industrial cartels. It’s the Klagengeschrei of the human being, the human cry for help.” He explained to her and Peter Sands, “It means ‘God save me.’ “

“Or ‘God have mercy on me,’ “ Tibor said.

“Erbarmen,” Dr. Abernathy said, “means ‘to have mercy,’ except in that one phrase; it is an idiom. The suffering is not from God; therefore God is not asked to be merciful; He is asked to rescue you.” He all at once, then, threw down his cards. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in my office, Tibor. I’ll see you privately, explain a little about the act of confession, and then we’ll go into the chapel where the Reserve Sacrament is; you will of course be unable to genuflect, but He will not hold that against you. A legless man cannot kneel.”

“All right, Doctor,” Tibor agreed. And felt better, strangely, even at this point. As if something had been lifted from the sagging grasp of his combined manual extensors, a load which overstrained the metabattery and made the ominous black smoke rise from the transformer, gear box, and bank of selenoids of his cart.

And up to now he had not even known of its existence.

“My three queens,” Dr. Abernathy informed Pete Sands, “beat your two pairs. Sorry.” He collected the meager pot; Tibor saw that the minister’s little pile of chips was growing: he had been steadily winning.

“Can I play?” Tibor inquired.

The players glanced at one another in a mild way, as if barely conscious of his presence, let alone his request.

“Takes a dollar—in silver bits—to buy in,” Pete said. He tossed one chip to an empty spot on the table. “That represents the dollar you owe the banker. Have you a dollar? And I don’t mean in scrip.”

The priest said mildly, “Show Tibor how you back up your talk, Pete. Show him your arsenal.”

“This is how people can tell I’m never bluffing,” Pete said. He dug down deep into his pocket and brought out a roll of dimes, so marked.

“Wow,” Tibor said.

“I’ve never lost at blackjack,” Pete said. “I just double my bets.” He undid one end of the roll of dunes to show Tibor that within the brown paper actual silver coins existed: genuine money, from the old, old days.

“You sure you want to play?” Lurine Rae said, raising her eyebrow and eyeing Tibor. “Knowing this?”

He had, in his pocket, the one-third initial advance from the SOWers for the proposed murch. He had not spent a bit of it—just in case at some dreadful future hour of reckoning it had to be returned. Now, however, he took out six silver quarters, displayed them in the grip of his right manual-extensor’s claws. And so, as he rolled his cart closer to the table, Pete Sands counted out the red and blue chips which his dollar and a half bought. It had now become a four-person—and hence a better—game.