To your Scattered Bodies Go
by
Phillip Jose Farmer


"Jolting conception .. . brought off with tremendous skill' THE TIMES

"Fantasy, mystery and danger rear their immortal heads and are
masterfully combined with a truly riveting purpose into one of those
all too rare and valuable Books You Can't Put Down' TIME OUT

"Impressively imaginative and well researched' EVENING STANDARD

Titles by Philip Jose Farmer available in Panther Science Fiction

The Award-winning RIVER WORLD saga TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO THE

FABULOUS RIVERBOAT THE DARK DESIGN THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

RIVER WORLD AND OTHER STORIES THE STONE GOD AWAKENS TIME'S LAST GIFT

TRAITOR TO THE LIVING STRANGE RELATIONS DARK IS THE SUN JESUS ON MARS

Philip Jose Farmer shocked the world of Science Fiction in 1952 with
the publication of his novella The Lovers in Startling Stories.  It
told of the romance between a man and an alien parasitic insect which
had taken the form of a woman, and with this story Farmer introduced
real sex into a world of Science Fiction which needed this uplift.  The
Lovers won him a Hugo Award in 1953; his second Hugo came in 1968 for
the story Riders of the Purple Wage written for Harlan Ellison's famous
Dangerous Visions series; and his third came in 1972 for the first part
of the Riverworld Series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  Leslie Fiedler,
eminent critic and professor of English at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, has said that Farmer "..  . has an imagination capable
of being kindled by the irredeemable mystery of the universe and of the
soul, and in turn able to kindle the imagination of others readers who
for a couple of generations have been turning to science fiction to
keep wonder and ecstasy alive."

A PANTHER BOOK GRANADA London Toronto Sydney New York by Granada
Publishing Limited is 1974 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 J 0 586 03939 2
published in Great Britain by Rapp and Whiting Ltd 1973 Copyright (r)
Philip Josh Farmer 1971 Parts of this work, under the titles of "The
Day of the Great Shout' and "Riverworld', appeared in Galaxy Magazine
in 1965 and 1966.  Day of the Great Shout' (c) UPD Publishing
corporation 1965.  "Riverworld' (c) UPD Publishing Corporation 1966
Granada Publishing Limited Frogmore, St.  Albans, Hems AL2 2NF dad 'fib
Golden Square, London W1R 4AH 6 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY
10017, USA 866 York Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia 100 Skyway
Avenue, Rexdale, Ontario M9W 3A6, Canada 61 Beach Road, Auckland, New
Zealand Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer
Press) Ltd Bungay, Suffolk Set is Linotype Plantin This book is sold
subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lest, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Granada Publishing

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer

His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from
him.

He had cried out, "My God, I am a dead man!"  The door to the room had
opened, and he had seen a giant, black, one-humped camel outside and
had heard the tinkle of the bells on its harness as the hot desert wind
touched them.  Then a huge black face topped by a great black-turban
had appeared in the doorway.  The black eunuch had come in through the
door, moving like a cloud, with a gigantic scimitar in his hand. Death,
the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Society, had arrived at
last.

Blackness.  Nothingness.  He did not even know that his heart had given
out forever.  Nothingness.

Then his eyes opened.  His heart was beating strongly.  He was strong,
very strong!  All the pain of the gout in his feet, the agony in his
liver, the torture in his heart, all were gone.

It was so quiet he could hear the blood moving in his head.  He was
alone in a world of soundless ness

A bright light of equal intensity was everywhere.  He could see, yet he
did not understand what he was seeing.  What were these things above,
beside, below him?  Where was he?  He tried to sit up and felt, numbly,
a panic.  There was nothing to sit up upon because he was hanging in
nothingness.  The attempt sent him forward and over, very slowly, as if
he were in a bath of thin treacle.  A foot from his fingertips was a
rod of bright red metal.  The rod came from above, from infinity, and
went on down to infinity.  He tried to grasp it because it was the
nearest solid object, but something invisible was resisting him.  It
was as if lines of some force were pushing against him, repelling
him.

Slowly, he turned over in a somersault.  Then the resistance halted him
with his fingertips about six inches from the rod.  He straightened his
body out and moved forward a fraction of an inch.  At the same time,
his body began to rotate on its longitudinal axis.  He sucked in sir
with aloud sawing noise.  Though he knew no hold existed for him, he
could not help flailing his arms in panic to try to seize onto
something.

He was face 'down', (or was it up?) Whatever the direction, it was
opposite to that toward which he had been looking when he had awakened.
Not that this mattered.  "Above' him and "below' him the view was the
same.  He was suspended in space, kept from falling by an invisible and
unfelt cocoon.  Six feet "below' him was the body of a woman with a
very pale skin.  She was naked and completely hairless.  She seemed to
be asleep: Her eyes were closed, and her breasts rose and fell gently.
Her legs were together and straight out and her arms were by her side.
She turned slowly like a chicken on a spit.

The same force that was rotating her was also rotating him.  He spun
slowly away from her, saw other naked and hairless bodies, men, women,
and children, opposite him in silent spinning rows.  Above him was the
rotating naked and hairless body of a Negro.

He lowered his head so that he could see along his own body.  He was
naked and hairless, too.  His skin was smooth, and the muscles of his
belly were ridged, and his thighs were packed with strong young
muscles.  The veins that had stood out like blue mole-ridges were gone.
He no longer had the body of the enfeebled and sick sixty-nine-year-old
man who had been dying ply a moment ago.  And the hundred or so scars
were gone.

He realized then that there were no old men or women among the bodies
surrounding him.  All seemed to be about twenty-five years old, though
it was difficult to determine the exact age, since the hairless heads
and pubes made them seem older and younger at the same time.

He had boasted that he knew no fear.  Now fear ripped away the cry
forming in this throat.  His fear pressed down on him and squeezed the
new life from him He had been stunned at first because he was still
living.  Then his position in space and the arrangement of his new
environment had frozen his senses.  He was seeing and feeling through a
thick semi-opaque window.  After a few seconds something snapped inside
him.  He could almost hear it, as if a window had suddenly been
raised.

The world took a shape which he could grasp, though he could not
comprehend it.  Above him, on both sides, below him, as far as he could
see, bodies floated.  They were arranged in vertical and horizontal
rows.  The up-and-down ranks were separated by red rods, slender as
broomsticks, one of which was twelve inches from the feet of the
sleepers and the other twelve inches from their heads.  Each body was
spaced about six feet from the body above and below and on each side.

The rods came up from an abyss without bottom and soared into an abyss
without ceiling.  That grayness into which the rods and the bodies, up
and down, right and left, disappeared was neither the sky nor the
earth.  There was nothing in the distance except the lackluster of
infinity.

On one side was a dark man with Tuscan features.  On his other side was
an Asiatic Indian and beyond her a large Nordic looking man.  Not until
the third revolution was he able to determine what was so odd about the
man.  The right arm, from a point just below the elbow, was red.  It
seemed to lack the outer layer of skin.

A few seconds later, several rows away, he saw a male adult body
lacking the skin and all the muscles of the face.

There were other bodies that were not quite complete.  Fat away,
glimpsed un clearly was a skeleton and a jumble of organs inside it.

He continued turning and observing while his heart slammed against his
chest with terror.  By then he understood that he was in some colossal
chamber and that the metal rods were radiating some force that somehow
supported and revolved millions maybe billions of human beings.

Where was this place?  Certainly, it was not the city of Trieste of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1890.

It was like no hell or heaven of which he had ever heard or read, and
he had thought that he was acquainted with every theory of the
afterlife.

He had died.  Now he was alive.  He had scoffed all his life at a
life-after-death.  For once, he could not deny that he had been wrong.
But there was no one present to say, "I told you so, you damned
infidel!"  Of all the millions, he alone was awake.

As he turned at an estimated rate of one complete revolution per ten
seconds, he saw something else that caused him to gasp with amazement.
Five rows away was a body that seemed, at first glance, to be human.
But no member of Homo sapiens had three fingers and a thumb on each
hand and four toes on each foot nor a nose and thin black leathery lips
like a dog's.  Nor with many small knobs.  Nor ears with such strange
convolutions.

Terror faded away.  His heart quit beating so swiftly, though it did
not return to normal His brain unfroze.  He must get out of this
situation where he was as helpless as a hog on a turnspit.  He would
get to somebody who could tell him what he was doing here, how he had
come here, why he was here.

To decide was to act.

He drew up his legs and kicked and found that the action, the reaction,
rather, drove him forward a half-inch.  Again, he kicked and moved
against the resistance.  But, as he paused, he was slowly moved back
toward his original location.  And his legs and arms were gently pushed
toward their original rigid position.

In a frenzy, kicking his legs and moving his arms in a swimmer's
breaststroke, he managed to fight toward the rod.  The closer he got to
it, the stronger the web of force became.  He did trot give up.  If he
did, he would be back where he had been and without enough strength to
begin fighting again.  It was not his nature to give up until all his
strength had been expended.

He was breathing hoarsely, his body was coated with sweat, his arms and
legs moved as if in a thick jelly, and his progress was imperceptible.
Then, the fingertips of his left hand touched the rod.  It felt warm
and hard.

Suddenly, he knew which way was "down."  He fell.

The touch had broken the spell.  The webs of air around him snapped
soundlessly, and he was plunging.

He was close enough to the rod to seize it with one hand.  The sudden
checking of his fall brought his hip up against the rod with a painful
impact.  The skin of his hand burned as he slid down the rod, and then
his other hand clutched the rod, and he had stopped.  In front of him,
on the other side of the rod, the bodies had started to fall.  They
descended with the velocity of a falling body on Earth, and each
maintained its stretched-out position and the original distance between
the body above and below.  They even continued to revolve.

It was then that the puffs of air on his naked sweating back made him
twist around on the rod.  Behind him, in the vertical row of bodies
that he had just occupied, the sleepers were also falling.  One after
the other, as if methodically dropped through trapdoor spinning slowly,
they hurtled by him.  Their heads him by a few inches.  He was
fortunate not to have been knocked off the rod and sent plunging into
the abyss along with them.

In stately procession, they fell.  Body after body shooting down on
both sides of the rod, while the other rows of millions upon millions
slept on.

For a while, he stared.  Then he began counting bodies; he had always
been a devoted enumerator.  But when he had counted 3,001, he quit.
After that he gazed at the cataract of flesh.  How far up, how
immeasurably far up, were they stacked?  And how far down could they
fall?  Unwittingly, he had precipitated them when his touch had
disrupted the force emanating from the rod.

He could not climb up the rod, but he could climb down it.  He began to
let himself down, and then he looked upward and he forgot about the
bodies hurtling by him.  Somewhere overhead, a humming was overriding
the whooshing sound of the falling bodies.

A narrow craft, of some bright green substance and shad like a canoe,
was sinking between the column of the fallers and the neighboring
column of suspended.  The aerial canoe had no visible means of support,
he thought, and it was a measure of his terror that he did not even
think about his pun.  No visible means of support.  Like a magical
vessel out of The Thousand and One Nights.

A face appeared over the edge of the vessel.  The craft stopped, and
the humming noise ceased.  Another face was by the first.  Both had
long, dark, and straight hair.  Presently, the faces withdrew, the
humming was renewed, and the canoe again descended toward him.  When it
was about five feet above him it halted.  There was a single small
symbol on the green bow: a white spiral that exploded to the right. One
of the canoe's occupants spoke in a language with many vowels and a
distinct and frequently recurring glottal stop.  It sounded like
Polynesian.  Abruptly, the invisible cocoon around him reasserted
itself.  The falling bodies began to slow in their rate of descent and
then stopped.  The man on the rod felt the retaining force close in on
him and lift him up.  Though he clung desperately to the rod, his legs
were moved up and then away and his body followed it.  Soon he was
looking downward.  His hands were torn loose; he felt as if his grip on
life, On sanity, on the world, had also been torn away.  He began to
drift upward and to revolve.  He went by the aerial canoe and rose
above it.  The two men in the canoe were naked, dark-skinned as
Yemenite Arabs, and handsome.  Their features were Nordic, resembling
these of some Icelanders he had known.

One of them lifted a hand which held a pencil-sized metal object.  The
man sighted along it as if he were going to shoot something from it.

The man fisting in the air shouted with rage and hate and frustration
and flailed his arms to swim toward the machine.

"I'll kill!"  he screamed.  "Kill!  Kill!"  Oblivion came again.

God was standing over him as he lay on the grass by the waters and the
weeping willows.  He lay wide-eyed and as weak as a baby just born. God
was poking him in the ribs with the end of an iron cane.  God was a
tall man of middle age.  He had a long black forked beard, and He was
wearing the Sunday best of an English gentleman of the 53rd year of
Queen Victoria's reign.

"You're late," God said.  "Long past due for the payment of your debt,
you know."  "What debt?"  Richard Francis Burton said.  He passed his
fingertips over his ribs to make sure that all were still there.

"You owe me for the flesh," replied God, poking him again with the
cane.  "Not to mention the spirit.  You owe for the flesh and the
spirit, which are one and the same thing."  Burton struggled to get up
onto his feet.  Nobody, not every God, was going to punch Richard
Burton in the ribs and get army without a battle.

God, ignoring the futile efforts, pulled a large gold watch from His
vest pocket, unsnapped its heavy en scrolled gold lid, looked at the
hands, and said, "Long past due."  God held out His other hand, its
palm turned up.

"Pay up, sir.  Otherwise, I'll be forced to foreclose."

"Foreclose on what?  Darkness fell.  God began to dissolve into the
darkness.  It was then that Burton saw that God resembled himself.  He
had the came black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the dark
stabbing eyes, high cheekbones, heavy lips, and the thrust-out, reply
cleft chin.  The same long deep scars, witnesses of the Somali javelin
which pierced his jaws in that fight at Berbers, were on His cheeks.
His hands and feet were small, contrasting with His broad shoulders and
massive chest, and he had the long thick moustachios and the long
forked beard that had caused the Bedouin to name Burton "the Father of
Moustachios."  "You look like the Devil," Burton said, but God had
become just another shadow in the darkness.

Burton was still sleeping, but he was so close to the surface of
consciousness that he was aware that he had been dreaming.  Light was
replacing the night.

Then his eyes did open.  And he did not know where he was..  A blue sky
was above.  A gentle breeze flowed over his naked body His hairless
head and his back and legs and the palms of his hands wets against
grass.  He turned his head to the right end saw a plain covered with
very short, very green, very thick grass.  The plain sloped gently
upward for a mile.  Beyond the plain was a range of hills that started
out mildly, then became steeper and higher and very irregular in shape
as they climbed toward the mountains.  The hills seemed to run for
about two and a half miles.  All were covered with trees, some of which
blazed with starlets, azures, bright greens, flaming yellows, and deep
pinks.  The mountains beyond the hills rose suddenly, per
perpendicularly and unbelievably high.  They were black and
bluish-green, looking like a glassy igneous rock with huge splotches of
lichen covering at least a quarter of the surface.

Between him and the hills were many human bodies.  The closest one,
only a few feet away, was that of the white woman who had been below
him in that vertical row.

He wanted to rise up, but he was sluggish and numb.  All he could do
for the moment, and that required a strong effort, was to turn his head
to the left.  There were more naked bodies there on a plain that sloped
down to a river perhaps 10 yards away.  The river was about a mile
wide, and on its other side was another plain, probably about a mile
broad and sloping upward to foothills covered with more of the trees
and then the towering precipitous black and bluish-green mountains.
That was the east, he thought frozenly.  The sun had just risen over
the top of the mountain there.

Almost by the river's edge was a strange structure.  It was a gray
red-flecked granite and was shaped like a mushroom.  Its broad base
could not be more than five feet high, and the mushroom top had a
diameter of about fifty feet.

He managed to rise far enough to support himself on one elbow.

There were more mushroom-shaped granites along both sides, of the
river.

Everywhere on the plain were unclothed bald-headed human beings, spaced
about six feet apart.  Most were still on their backs and gazing into
the sky.  Others were beginning to stir, to look around, or even
sitting up.

He sat up also and felt his head and face with both hands.  They were
smooth.

His body, was not that wrinkled, ridged, bumpy, withered body of the
sixty-nine-year-old which had lain on his deathbed.  It was the
smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled body he had when he was
twenty-five years old.  The same body he had when he was floating
between those rods in that dream.  Dream?  It had seemed too vivid to
be a dream.  It was not a dream.

Around his wrist was a thin band of transparent material.  It was
connected to a six-inch-long strap of the same material.  The other end
was clenched about a metallic arc, the handle of a grayish metal
cylinder with a closed cover.

Idly, not concentrating because his mind was too sluggish, he lifted
the cylinder.  It weighed less than a pound, so it could not be of iron
even if it was hollow.  Its diameter was a foot and a half and it was
over two and a half feet tall.

Everyone had a similar object strapped to his wrist.

Unsteadily, his heart beginning to pick up speed as his senses became
unnumbered, he got to his feet.

Others were rising, too.  Many had faces which were slack or congealed
with an icy wonder.  Some looked fearful.  Their eyes were wide and
rolling; their chests rose and fell swiftly; their breaths hissed out.
Some were shaking as if an icy wind had swept over them, though the air
was pleasantly warm.

The strange thing, the really alien and frightening thing, was the
almost complete silence.  Nobody said a word; there was only the
hissing of breaths of those near him, a tiny slap as a man smacked
himself on his leg; a low whistling from a woman.

Their mouths hung open, as if they were about to say something.

They began moving about, looking into each other's faces, sometimes
reaching out to lightly touch another.  They shuffled their bare feet,
turned this way, turned back the other way, gazed at the hills, the
trees covered with the huge vividly colored blooms, the lichenous and
soaring mountains, the sparkling and green river, the mushroom-shaped
stones, the straps and the gray metallic containers.

Some felt their naked skulls and their faces.

Everybody was encased in a mindless motion and in silence.

Suddenly, a woman began moaning.  She sank to her knees, threw her head
and her shoulders back, and she howled.  At the same time, far down the
riverbank, somebody else howled.

It was as if these two cries were signals.  Or as if the two were
double keys to the human voice and had unlocked it.

The men and women and children began screaming or sobbing or tearing at
their faces with their nails or beating themselves on their breasts or
falling on their knees and lifting their hands in prayer or throwing
themselves down and trying to bury their faces in the grass as if,
ostrich-like, to avoid being seen, or rolling back and forth, barking
like dogs or howling like wolves.

The terror and the hysteria gripped Burton.  He wanted to go to his
knees and pray for salvation from judgment.  He wanted mercy.  He did
not want to see the blinding face of God appear over the mountains, a
face brighter than the sun.  He was not as brave and as guiltless as he
had thought.  Judgment would be so terrifying, so utterly final, that
he could not bear to think about it.

Once, he had had a fantasy about standing before God after he had died.
He had been little and naked and in the middle of a vast plain, like
this, but he had been all alone.  Then God, great as a mountain, had
strode toward him And he, Burton, had stood his ground and defied
God.

There was no God here, but he fled anyway.  He ran across the plain,
pushing men and women out of the way, running around some, leaping over
others as they rolled on the ground.  As he ran, he howled, "No!  No!
No!"  His arms windmilled to fend off unseen terrors.  The cylinder
strapped to his wrist whirled around and around.

When he was panting so that he could no longer howl, and his legs and
arms were hung with weights, and his lungs burned, and his heart
boomed, he threw himself down under the first of the trees.

After a while, he sat up and faced toward the plain.  The mob noise had
changed from screams and howls to a gigantic chattering.  The majority
were talking to each other, though it did not seem that anybody was
listening.  Burton could not hear any of the individual words.  Some
men and women were and kissing as if they had been acquainted is their
previous lives, and now were holding each other to reassure each other
of their identities and of their reality.

There were a number of children in the great crowd.  Not one was under
five years of age, however.  Like their elders, their heads were
hairless.  Half of them were weeping, rooted to one spot.  Others, also
crying out, were running back and forth, looking into the faces above
them, obviously seeking their parents.

He was beginning to breathe more easily.  He stood up and turned
around.  The tree under which he was standing was a red pine (sometimes
wrongly called a Norway pine) about two hundred feet tall.  Beside it
was a tree of a type he had never sees.  He doubted that it had existed
on Earth.  (He was sure that he was not on Earth, though he could not
have given any specific reasons at that moment.) It had a thick,
gnarled blackish trunk and many thick branches bearing triangular
six-feet-long leaves, green with scarlet facings.  It was about three
hundred feet high.  There were also trees that looked like white and
black oaks, firs, Western yew, and lodgepole pine.

Here and there were clumps of tall bamboo-like plants, and everywhere
that there were no trees or bamboo was a grass about three feet high.
There were no animals in sight.  No insects and no birds.  He looked
around for a stick or a club.  He did not have the slightest idea what
was on the agenda for humanity, but if it was left unsupervised or
uncontrolled it would soon be reverting to its normal state.  Once the
shock was over, the people would be looking out for themselves, and
that meant that some would be bullying others.

He found nothing useful as a weapon.  Then it occurred to him that the
metal cylinder could be used as a weapon.  He banged it against a tree.
Though it had little weight, it was extremely hard.

He raised the lid, which was hinged inside at one end.  The hollow
interior had six snap down rings of metal, three on each side and
spaced so that each could hold a deep cup or dish or, rectangular
container of gray metal.  All the containers were empty.  He closed the
lid. Doubtless he would find out in time the function of the cylinder
was.

Whatever else had happened, resurrection had not resulted in bodies of
fragile misty ectoplasm.  He was all bone and blood and flesh.

Though he still felt somewhat detached from reality, as if he had been
disengaged from the gears of the world, he was emerging from his
shock.

He was thirsty.  He would have to go down and drink from the river and
hope that it would not be poisoned.  At this thought, he grinned wryly,
and stroked his upper lip.  His finger felt disappointed.  That was a
curious reaction, he thought, and then he remembered that his thick
moustache was gone.  Oh, yes, he had hoped that the river water would
not be poisoned.  What a strange thought!  Why should the dead be
brought back to life only to be killed again?  But he stood for a long
while under the tree.  He hated to go back through that madly talking,
hysterically sobbing crowd to reach the river.  Here, away from the
mob, he was free from much of the terror and the panic and the shock
that covered them like a sea.  If he ventured back, he would be caught
up in their emotions again.

Presently, he saw a figure detach itself from the naked throng and walk
toward him.  He saw that it was not human.

It was then that Burton was sure that this Resurrection Day was not the
one which any religion had stated would occur.  Burton had not believed
in the God portrayed by the Christians, Moslems, Hindus, or any faith.
In fact, he was not sure that he believed in any Creator whatsoever. He
had believed in Richard Francis Burton and a few friends.  He was sure
that when he died, the world would cease to exist.

Waking up after death, in this valley by this river, he had been
powerless to defend himself against the doubts that existed is every
man exposed to as early religious conditioning and to as adult society
which preached its convictions at every chance.

Now, seeing the alien approach, he was sure that there was some other
explanation for this event than a supernatural one.  There was a
physical, a scientific, reason for his being here; he did not have to
resort to Judeo-Christian-Moslem myths for cause.

The creature, it, he it undoubtedly was a male was a biped about six
feet eight inches tall.  The pink-skinned body was very thin; there
were three fingers and a thumb on each hand and four very long and thin
toes on each foot.  There were two dark red spots below the male
nipples on the chest.  The face was semi-human Thick black eyebrows
swept down to the cheekbones and flared out to cover them with a
brownish down.  The sides of his nostrils were fringed with a thin
membrane about a sixteenth of an inch long.  The thick pad of cartilage
on the end of his nose was deeply cleft.  The lips were thin, leathery,
and black.  The ears were lobe-less and the convolutions within were
non-human.  His scrotum looked as if it contained many small testes.

He had seen this creature floating in the ranks a few rows away is that
nightmare place.

The creature stopped a few feet away, smiled, and revealed quite human
teeth.  He said, "I hope you speak English.  However, I can speak with
same fluency in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, or Hindustani."  Burton felt
a slight shock, as if a dog or an ape had spoken to him.

"You speak Midwestern American English," he replied.  "Quite well, too.
Although too precisely."  "I thank you; the creature said.  "I followed
you because you seemed the only person with enough sense to get away
from that chaos.  Perhaps you have some explanation for this what do
you call it?  .. . resurrection?"  "No more than you," Burton said. 
"In fact, I don't have any explanation for your existence, before or
after resurrection."  The thick eyebrows of the alien twitched, a
gesture which Burton was to find indicated surprise or puzzlement.

"No?  That is strange.  I would have sworn that not one of the six
billion of Earth's inhabitants had not heard of or seen me on TV."

"TV?"

The creature's brows twitched again.  "You don't know what TV..."  His
voice trailed, then he smiled again.  "Of course, how stupid of me! You
must have died before I came to Earth!

"When was that?"  The alien's eyebrows rose (equivalent to a human
frown as Burton would find), and he said slowly, "Let's see.  I believe
it was, in your chronology, A.D. 2002.  When did you die?"

"It must have been in A.D. 1890," Burton said.  The creature had
brought back his sense that all this was not real.  He ran his tongue
around his mouth; the back teeth he had lost when the Somali spear ran
through his cheeks were now replaced.  But he was still circumcised,
and the men on the riverbank most of whom had been crying out in the
Austrian-German, Italian, or the Slovenian of Trieste were also
circumcised.  Yet, in his time, most of the males in that area would
have been uncircumcised.

"At least," Burton added, "I remember nothing after October 20,
1890."

"Aab!"  the creature said.  "So, I left my native planet approximately
200 years before you died.  My planet?  It was a satellite of that star
you Terrestrials call Tau Ceti.  We placed ourselves in suspended
animation, and, when our ship approached your sun, we were
automatically thawed out, and ... but you do not know what I am talking
about?"

"Not quite.  Things are happening too fast.  I would like to get
details later.  What is your name?"

"Monat Grrautut.  Yours?"

"Richard Francis Burton at your service."  He bowed slightly and
smiled.  Despite the strangeness of the creature and some repulsive
physical aspects, Burton found himself warming to him.

"The late Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton," he added.  "Most
recently Her Majesty's Consul in the Austro-Hungarian port of
Trieste."

"Elizabeth?"

"I lived in the nineteenth century, not the sixteenth."

"A Queen Elizabeth reigned over Great Britain in the twentieth
century," Monat said.

He turned to look toward the riverbank.

"Why are they so afraid?  All the human beings I met were either sure
that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get
preferential treatment in the hereafter."

Burton grinned and said, "Those who denied the hereafter are sure
they're in Hell because they denied it.  Those who knew they would go
to Heaven are shocked, I would imagine, to find themselves naked.  You
see, most of the illustrations of our afterlives showed those in Hell
as naked and those in Heaven as being clothed.  So, if you're
resurrected bare-ass naked, you must be in Hell."

"You seem amused," Monat said.

"I wasn't so amused a few minutes ago," Burton said.  "And I'm shaken.
Very shaken.  But seeing you here makes me think that things are not
what people thought they would be.  They seldom are.  And God, if He's
going to make an appearance, does not seem to be in a hurry about it. I
think there's an explanation for this, but it won't match any of the
conjectures I knew on Earth."

"I doubt we're on Earth," Monat said.  He pointed upward with long slim
fingers which bore thick cartilage pads instead of nails.

He said, "If you look steadily there, with your eyes shielded, you can
see another celestial body near the sun.  It is not the moon."  Burton
cupped his hands over his eyes, the metal cylinder on his shoulder, and
stared at the point indicated.  He saw a faintly glowing body which
seemed to be an eighth of the size of a full moon.  When he put his
hands down, he said, "A star?"

Monat said, "I believe so.  I thought I saw several other very faint
bodies elsewhere in the sky, but I'm not sure.  We will know when night
comes."

"Where do you think we are?"

"I would not know."  Monat gestured at the sun.

"It is rising and so it will descend, and then night should come.  I
think that it would be best to prepare for the night.  And for other
events.  It is warm and getting warmer, but the night may be cold and
it might rain.  We should build a shelter of some sort.  And we should
also think about finding food.  Though I imagine that this device' he
indicated the cylinder "will feed us."

Burton said, "What makes you think that?"

"I looked inside mine.  It contains dishes and cups, all empty now, but
obviously made to be filled."  Burton felt less unreal.  The being the
Tau Cetan talked so pragmatically, so sensibly, that he provided an
anchor to which Burton could tie his senses before they drifted away
again.  And, despite the repulsive alien-ness of the creature; he
exuded a friendliness and an openness that warmed Burton.  Moreover,
any creature that came from a civilization which could span many
trillions of miles of interstellar space must have very valuable
knowledge and resources.

Others were beginning to separate themselves from the crowd.  A group
of about ten men and women walked slowly toward him.  Some were
talking, but others were silent and wide-eyed.  They did not seem to
have a definite goal in mind; they just floated along like a cloud
driven by a wind.  When they got near Burton and Monat, they stopped
walking.

A man trailing the group especially attracted Burton's scrutiny.  Monat
was obviously non-human, but this fellow was subhuman or pre-human.  He
stood about five feet tall.  He was squat and powerfully muscled.  His
head was thrust forward on a bowed and very thick neck.  The forehead
was low and slanting.  The skull was long and narrow.  Enormous
supraorbital ridges shadowed dark brown eyes.  The nose was a smear of
flesh with arching nostrils, and the bulging bones of his jaws pushed
his thin lips out.  He may have been covered with as much hair as an
ape at one time, but now, like everybody else, he was stripped of
hair.

The huge hands looked as if they could squeeze water from a stone.

He kept looking behind him as if he feared that someone was sneaking up
on him.  The human beings moved away from him when he approached
them.

But then another man walked up to him and said something to the
subhuman in English.  It was evident that the man did not expect to be
understood but that he was trying to be friendly.  His voice, however,
was almost hoarse.  The newcomer was a muscular youth about six feet
tall.  He had a face that looked handsome when he faced Burton but was
comically craggy in profile.  His eyes were green.

The subhuman jumped a little when he was addressed.  He peered at the
grinning youth from under the bars of bone.  Then he smiled, revealing
large thick teeth, and spoke in a language Burg did not recognize.  He
pointed to himself and said something that sounded like
Kaxzintuitruuabemss.  Later, Burton would find out that it was his name
and it meant Man-Who-Slew-The-Long-White-Tooth.

The others consisted of five men and four women.  Two of the men had
known each other in Earthlife, and one of them had been married to one
of the women.  All were Italians or Slovenes who had died in Trieste,
apparently about 1890, though he knew none of them.

"You there," Burton said, pointing to the man who had spoken in
English.  "Step forward.  What is your name?"  The man approached him
hesitantly.  He said, "You're English, right?"  The man spoke with an
American Midwest flatness.

Burton held out his hand and said, "Yaas.  Burton here."  The fellow
raised hairless eyebrows and said, "Burton?"  He leaned forward and
peered at Burton's face.  "It's hard to say ... it couldn't be...".

He straightened up.  "Name's Peter Frigate.  F-R-I-G-A-T-E."  He looked
around him and then said in a voice even more strained, "It's hard to
talk coherently.  Everybody's in such a state of shock, you know.  I
feel as if I'm coming apart.  But ... here we are... alive again young
again ... no hellfire ... not yet, anyway.  Born in 1918, died 2008 ...
because of what this extra-Terrestrial did ... don't hold it against
him ... only defending himself, you know."  Frigate's voice died away
to a whisper.  He grinned nervously at Monat.

Burton said, "You know this ... Monat Grrautut?"  "Not exactly,"
Frigate said.  "I saw enough of him on TV, of course, and heard enough
and read enough about him."  He held out his hand as if he expected it
to be rejected, smiled and they shook hands.

Frigate said, "I think it'd be a good idea if we banded together.  We
may need protection."  "Why?"  Burton said, though he knew well
enough.

"You know how rotten most humans are," Frigate said.  "Once people get
used to being resurrected, they'll be fighting for women and food and
anything that takes their fancy.  And I think we ought to be buddies
with this Neanderthal or whatever he is.  Anyway, he'll be a good man
in a fight."  Kazz, as he was named later on, seemed pathetically eager
to be accepted at the same time, he was suspicious of anyone who got
too close.

A woman walked by then, muttering over and over in German, "My God!
What have I done to offend Thee?"  A man, both fists clenched and
raised to shoulder height, was shouting in Yiddish, "My beard!  My
beard.

Another man was, pointing at his genitals and saying in Slovenian,
"They've made a Jew of me!  A Jew!  Do you think that .. .?  No, it
couldn't be!"  Burton grinned savagely and said, "It doesn't occur to
him that maybe they have made a Mohammedan out of him or an Australian
aborigine or an ancient Egyptian, all of whom practiced
circumcision."

"What did he say?"  asked Frigate.  Burton translated; Frigate
laughed.

A woman hurried by; she was making a pathetic attempt to cover her
breasts and her pubic regions with her hands.  She was muttering, "What
will they think, what will they think?"  And she disappeared behind the
trees.

A man and a woman passed them; they were talking loudly in Italian as
if they were separated by a broad highway.

"We can't be in Heaven ... I know, oh my God, I know!  ... There was
Giuseppe Zomzini and you know what a wicked man he was .. . he ought to
burn in hellfire!  I know, I know... he stole from the treasury, he
frequented whorehouses, he drank himself to death .. . yet .. . he's
here!  .. . I know, I know .."

Another woman was running and screaming in German, "Daddy!  Daddy!
Where are you?  It's your own darling Hilda!"

A man scowled at them and said repeatedly, in Hungarian, "I'm as good
as anyone and better than some.  To hell with them' A woman said, "I
wasted my whole life, my whole life.  I did everything for them, and
now..  '

A man, swinging the metal cylinder before him as if it were a censer,
called out, "Follow me to the mountains) Follow me!  I know the truth,
good people!  Follow me!  We'll be safe in the bosom of the Lord! Don't
believe this illusion around you; follow me!  I'll open your eyes!" 
Others spoke gibberish or were silent; their lips tight as if they
feared to utter what was within them.

"It'll take some time before they straighten out," Burton said.  He
felt that it would take a long time before the world became mundane for
him, too.

"They may never know the truth," Frigate said.

"What do you mean?"  "They didn't know the Truth capital T on Earth, so
why should they here?  What makes you think we're going to get a
revelation?"

Burton shrugged and said, "I don't.  But I do think we ought to
determine just what our environment is and how we can survive in it.
The fortune of a man who sits, sits also."  He pointed toward the
riverbank.  "See those stone mushrooms?  They seem to be spaced out at
intervals of a mile.  I wonder what their purpose is?"

Monat said, "If you had taken a close look at that one, you would have
seen that its surface contains about 700 round indentations.  These are
just the right size for the base of a cylinder to fit in.  In fact,
there is a cylinder in the center of the top surface.  I think that if
we examine that cylinder we may be able to determine their purpose.  I
suspect that it was placed there so we'd do just that."

A woman approached them.  She was of medium height, had a superb shape,
and a face that would have been beautiful if it had been framed by
hair.  Her eyes were large and dark.  She made no attempt to cover
herself with her hands.  Burton was not the least bit aroused looking
at her or any of the women.  He was too deeply numbed.

The woman spoke in a well-modulated voice and an Oxford accent.  "I beg
your pardon, gentlemen.  I couldn't help overhearing you.  You're the
only English voices I've heard since I woke up .. . here, wherever here
is.  I am an Englishwoman, and I am looking for protection.  I throw
myself on your mercy."  "Fortunately for you, Madame," Burton said,
"you come to the right men.  At least, speaking for myself, I can
assure you that you will get all the protection I can afford.  Though,
if I were like some of the English gentlemen I've known, you might not
have fared so well.  By the way, this gentleman is not English.  He's
Yankee."  It seemed strange to be speaking so formally this day of all
days, with all the wailing and shouting up and down the valley and
everybody birth-naked and as hairless as eels.

The woman held out her hand to Burton.  "I'm Mrs.  Hargreaves," she
said.

Burton took the hand, and, bowing kissed it lightly.  He felt foolish,
but, at the same time, the gesture strengthened his held on sanity.  If
the fortes of polite society could be preserved perhaps the 'rightness'
of things might also be restored.

"The late Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton," he said, grinning
slightly at the late.  "Perhaps you've heard of me?"  She snatched her
hand away and then extended it again.

"Yes, I've heard of you, Sir Richard'

Somebody said, "It can't be!"

Burton looked at Frigate, who had spoken in such a low tone.  "And why
not?"  he said.

"Richard Burton!"  Frigate said.  "Yes.  I wondered, but without any
hair?  .. ."  "Yeas?"  Burton drawled.

"Yaas' Frigate said.  "Just as the books said'

"What are you talking about?"  Frigate breathed in deeply and then
said, Never mind now, Mr.  Burton.  I'll explain later.  Just take it
that I'm very shaken up.  Not in my right mind.  You understand that,
of course."  He looked intently at Mrs.  Hargreaves, shook his head,
and said, "Is your name Alice?"

"Why, yes' she said, smiling and becoming beautiful, hair or no hair.
"How did you know?  Have I met you?  No, I don't think so."

"Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves?"

"Yes!"

"I have to go sit down," the American said.  He walked under the tree
and sat down with his back to the trunk.  His eyes looked a little
glazed.

"Aftershock," Burton said.

He could expect such erratic behavior and speech from the others for
some time.  He could expect a certain amount of non-rational behavior
from himself, too.  The important thing was to get shelter and food and
some plan for common defense.

Burton spoke in Italian and Slovenian to the others and they made the
introductions.  They did not protest when he suggested that they should
follow him down to the river's edge.

"I'm sure we're all thirsty," he said.  "And we should investigate that
stone mushroom."  They walked back to the plain behind them.  The
people were sitting on the grass or trilling about.  They passed one
couple arguing loudly and red-facedly.  Apparently, they had been
husband and wife and were continuing a life-long dispute.  Suddenly,
the man turned and walked away.  The wife looked unbelievingly at him
and then ran after him.  He thrust her away so violently that she fell
on the grass.  He quickly lost himself in the crowd, but the woman
wandered around, calling his name and threatening to make a scandal if
he did not come out hiding.

Burton thought briefly of his own wife, Isabel.  He had not seen her in
this crowd, though that did not mean that she was not in it.  But she
would have been looking for him.  She would not stop until she found
him.

He pushed through the crowd to the river's edge and then got down on
his knees and scooped up water with his hands.  It was cool and clear
and refreshing.  His stomach felt as if it were absolutely empty. After
he had satisfied his thirst, he became hungry.

"The waters of the River of Life," Burton said.  "The Styx?  Lethe? No,
not Lethe.  I remember everything about my Earthly existence."

"I wish I could forget mine," Frigate said.

Alice Hargreaves was kneeling by the edge and dipping water with one
hand while she leaned on the other arm.  Her figure was certainly
lovely, Burton thought.  He wondered if she would be blonde when her
hair grew out, if it grew out.  Perhaps Whoever had put them here
intended they should all be bald, forever, for some reason of Theirs.

They climbed upon the top of the nearest mushroom structure.  The
granite was a dense-grained gray flecked heavily with red.  On its flat
surface were seven hundred indentations, forming fifty concentric
circles.  The depression in the center held a metal cylinder.  A little
dark-skinned man with a big nose and receding chin was examining the
cylinder.  As they approached, he looked up and smiled.

"This one won't open," he said in German.  "Perhaps it will later.  I'm
sure it's there as an example of what to do with our own containers."
He introduced himself as Lev Ruach and switched to a heavily accented
English when Burton, Frigate, and Hargreaves gave their names.

"I was an atheist," he said, seeming to speak to himself more than to
them.  "Now, I don't know!  This place is as big a shock to an atheist,
you know, as to those devout believers who had pictured an afterlife
quite different from this.  Well, so I was wrong.  It wouldn't be the
first time."  He chuckled, and said to Monat, "I recognized you at
once.  It's a good thing for you that you were resurrected in a group
mainly consisting of people who died in the nineteenth century.
Otherwise, you'd be lynched."

"Why is that?"  Burton asked.

"He killed Earth," Frigate said.  "At least, I think he did."

"The scanner," Monat said dolefully, "was adjusted to kill only human
beings.  And it would not have exterminated all of mankind.  It would
have ceased operating after a predetermined number unfortunately, a
large number had lost their lives.  Believe me, my friends; I did not
want to do that.  You do not know what an agony it cost me to make the
decision to press the button.  But I had to protect my people.  You
forced my hand."

"It started when Monat was on a live show," Frigate said.  "Mount made
an unfortunate remark.  He said that his scientists had the knowledge
and ability to keep people from getting old.  Theoretically, using Tau
Cetan techniques, a man could live forever.  But the knowledge was not
used on his planet; it was forbidden.  The interviewer asked him if
these techniques could be applied to Terrestrials.  Monat replied that
there was no reason why not.  But rejuvenation was denied to his own
kind for a very good reason, and this also applied to Terrestrials.  By
then the government censor realized what was happening and cut off the
audio.  But it was too late."

"Later," Lev Ruach said, "the American government reported that Monat
had misunderstood the question, that his knowledge of English had led
him to make a misstatement.  But it was too late.  The people of
America, and of the world, demanded that: Monat reveal the secret of
eternal youth."

"Which I did not have," said Monat.  "Not a single one of out,
expedition had the knowledge.  In fact, very few people on my planet
had it: But it did no good to tell the people this.  They thought I was
lying.  There was a riot, and a mob stormed the guards around our ship
and broke into it.  I saw my friends torn to pieces while they tried to
reason with the mob.  Reason!  "But I did what I did, not for revenge,
but for a very differed motive.  I knew that, after we were killed, or
even if we weren't, the U.S. government would restore order.  And it
would have the ship in its possession.  It wouldn't be long before
Terrestrial scientists would know how to duplicate it.  Inevitably, the
Terrestrials would launch an invasion fleet against our world.  So, to
make sure that Earth would be set back many centuries; maybe thousands
of years, knowing that I must do the dreadful thing to save my own
world, I sent the signal to the scanner to orbit.  I would not have had
to do that if I could have gotten to the destruct button and blown up
the ship.  But I could not get to the control room.  So, I pressed the
scanner-activation button.  A short time later, the mob blew off the
door of the room in which I had taken refuge.  I remember nothing after
that."

Frigate said, "I was in a hospital in Western Samoa, dying of cancer,
wondering if I would be buried nest to Robert Louis Stevenson.  Not
much chance, I was thinking.  Still, I had translated the Iliad and the
Odyssey into Samoan .. . Then, the news came.  People all over the
world were falling dead.  The pattern of fatality was obvious.  The Tau
Cetan satellite was radiating something that dropped human beings in
their tracks.  The last I heard was that the U.S."  England, Russia,
China, France, and Israel were all sending up rockets to intercept it,
blow it up.  And the scanner was on a path which would take it over
Samoa within a few hours.  The excitement must have been too much for
me in my weakened condition.  I became unconscious.  That is all I
remember!

"The interceptors failed," Ruach said.  "The scanner blew them up
before they even got close."

Burton thought he had a lot to learn about post-1890, but now was not
the time to talk about it.  "I suggest we go up into the hills," he
said.  "We should learn what type of vegetation grows there and if it
can be useful.  Also, if there is any flint we can work into weapons.
This Old Stone Age fellow must be familiar with stone working.  He can
show us how."  They walked across the mile-broad plain and into the
hills.  On the way, several others joined their group.  One was a
little girl, about seven years old, with dark blue eyes and a beautiful
face.  She looked pathetically at Burton, who asked her in twelve
languages if any of her parents or relatives were nearby.  She replied
in a language none of them knew.  The linguists among them tried every
tongue at their disposal, most of the European speeches and many of the
African or Asiatic: Hebrew, Hindustani, Arabic, a Berber dialect,
Romany, Turkish, Persian, Latin, Greek, Pushtu.

Frigate, who knew a little Welsh and Gaelic, spoke to her.  Her eyes
widened, and then she frowned.  The words seemed to have a certain
familiarity or similarity to her speech, but they were not close enough
to be intelligible.

"For all we know," Frigate said, "she could be an ancient Gaul She
keeps using the word Gwenafra.  Could that be her name?"  "We'll teach
her English," Burton said.  "And we'll call her Gwenafra."  He picked
up the child in his arms and started to walk with her.  She burst into
tears, but she made no effort to free herself.  The weeping was a
release from what must have been almost unbearable tension and a joy at
finding a guardian.

Burton bent his neck to place his face against her body.  He did not
want the others to see the tears in his eyes.

Where the plain met the hills, as if a line had been drawn, the short
grass ceased and the thick, coarse Esparto-like grass, waist-high,
began.  Here, too, the towering pines, red pines and Lodgepole pines,
the oaks, the yew, the gnarled giants with scarlet and green leaves,
and the bamboo grew thickly.  The bamboo consisted of many varieties,
from slender stalks only a few feet high to plants over fifty feet
high.  Many of the trees were overgrown with the vines bearing huge
green, red, yellow, and blue flowers.

"Bamboo is the material for spear-shafts," Burton said, "pipes for
conducting water, containers, the basic stuff for building houses,
furniture, boats, charcoal even for making gunpowder.  And the young
stalks of some may be good for eating.  But we need stone for tools to
cut down and shape the wood' They climbed over hills whose height
increased as they neared the mountain.  After they had walked about two
miles as the crow flies, eight miles as the caterpillar crawls, they
were stopped by the mountain.  This rose in a sheer cliff-face of some
blue-black igneous rock on which grew huge patches of a blue-green
lichen.  There was no way of determining how high it was, but Burton
did not think that he was wrong in estimating it as at least 20,000
feet high.  As far as they could see up and down the valley, it
presented a solid front.

"Have you noticed the complete absence of animal life?"  Frigate
said.

"Not even an insect."  Burton exclaimed.  He strode to a pile of broken
rock and picked up a fist-sized chunk of greenish stone.  "Chert," he
said.  "If there's enough, we can make knives, spearheads, adzes, and
axes.  And with them build houses, boats, and many other things."

"Tools and weapons must be bound to wooden shafts," Frigate said. "What
do we use as binding material?  "Perhaps human skin," Burton said.

The others looked shocked.  Burton gave a strange chirruping laugh,
incongruous in so masculine-looking a man.  He said, "If we're forced
to kill in self-defense or lucky enough to stumble over a corpse some
assassin has been kind enough to prepare for us, we'd be fools not to
use what we need.  However, if any of you feel self-sacrificing enough
to offer your own epidermises for the good of the group, step forward!
We'll remember you in our wills."  "

Surely, you're joking," Alice Hargreaves said.  "I can't say I
particularly care for such talk."

Frigate said, "Hang around him, and you'll hear lots worse," but he did
not explain what he meant.

Burton examined the rock along the base of the mountain.  The
blue-black densely grained stone of the mountain itself was some kind
of basalt.  But there were pieces of chert scattered on the surface of
the earth or sticking out of the surface at the base.  These looked as
if they might have fallen down from a projection above, so it was
possible that the mountain was not a solid mass of basalt.  Using a
piece of chert, which had a thin edge, he scraped away a patch of the
lichenous growth.  The stone beneath it seemed to be a greenish
dolomite.  Apparently the pieces of chert had come from the dolomite,
though there was no evidence of decay or fracture of the vein.

The lichen could be Parmelia saxitilis, which also grew on old bones,
including skulls, and hence, according to The Doctrine of Signatures,
was a cure for epilepsy and a healing salve for wounds.

Hearing stone banging away on stone, he returned to the group.  All
were standing around the subhuman and the American, who were squatting
back to back and working on the chert.  Both had knocked out rough hand
axes  While the others watched, they produced six more.  Then each took
a large chert nodule and broke it into two with a hammerstone. Using
one piece of the nodule, they began to knock long thin flakes from the
outside rim of the nodule.  They rotated the nodule and banged away
until each had about a dozen blades.

They continued to work, one a type of man who had lived a hundred
thousand years or more before Christ, the other the refined end of
human evolution, a product of the highest civilization (technologically
speaking) of Earth, and, indeed, one of the last men on Earth if he was
to be believed.

Suddenly, Frigate howled, jumped up, and hopped around holding his left
thumb.  One of his strokes had missed its target.  Kazz grinned,
exposing huge teeth like tombstones.  He got up, too, and walked into
the grass with his curious rolling gait.  He returned a few minutes
later with six bamboo sticks with sharpened ends and several with
straight ends.  He sat down and worked on one stick until he had split
the end and inserted the triangular chipped-down point of an axe head
into the split end.  This he bound with some long grasses.

Within half an hour, the group was armed with hand axes spears with
bamboo hafts, daggers, and spears with wooden points and with stone
tips.

By then Frigate's hand had quit hurting so much and the bleeding had
stopped.  Burton asked him how he happened to be so proficient in stone
working.

"I was an amateur anthropologist," he said.  "A lot of people a lot
relatively speaking learned how to make tools and weapons from stone as
a hobby.  Some of us got pretty good at it, though I don't think any
modern ever got as skillful and as swift as a Neolithic specialist.
Those guys did it all their lives, you know.

"Also, I just happen to know a lot about working bamboo, too, so I can
be of some value to you."  They began walking back to the river.  They
paused a moment on top of a tall hill.  The sun was almost directly
overhead.  They could see for many miles along the river and also
across the river.  Although they were too far away to make out any
figures on the other side of the mile-wide stream, they could see the
mushroom-shaped structures there.  The terrain on the other side was
the same as that on theirs.  A toile-wide plain, perhaps two and a half
miles of foothills covered with trees.  Beyond, the straight-up face of
an insurmountable black and bluish-green mountain.

North sad south, the valley ran straight for about ten miles.  Then it
curved, and the river was lost to sight.

"Sunrise must come late and sunset early," Burton said.  "Well, we must
make the most of the bright hours: At that moment, everybody jumped and
many cried out.  A blue flame arose from the top of each stone
structure, soared up at least twenty feet, then disappeared.  A few
seconds later, a sound of distant thunder passed them.  The boom struck
the mountain behind them and echoed.

Burton scooped up the little girl in his arms and began to trot down
the hill.  Though they maintained a good pace, they were forced to walk
from time to time to regain their breaths.  Nevertheless, Burton felt
wonderful.  It had been so many years sum he could use his muscles so
profligately that he did not want to stop enjoying the sensation.  He
could scarcely believe that, only a short time ago, his right foot had
been swollen with gout, and 32 Ice.  heart had beaten wildly if he
climbed a few steps.

They came to the plain and continued trotting, for they could see that
there was much excitement around one of the structures.  Burton swore
at those in his way and pushed them aside.  He got black looks but no
one tried to push back.  Abruptly, he was in the space cleared around
the use.  And he saw what had attracted them.  He also smelled it.

Frigate, behind him, said, "Oh, my God and tried to retch on his empty
stomach.

Burton had seen too much in his lifetime to be easily affected by
grisly sights.  Moreover, he could take himself to one remove from
reality when things became too grim or too painful.  Sometimes, he made
the move, the sidestepping of things-as-they were, with an effort of
will.  Usually, if occurred automatically.  In this case the
displacement was done automatically.

The corpse lay on its side and half under the edge of the mushroom top.
Its skin was completely burned off, and the naked muscles were charred.
The nose and ears, fingers, toes, and the genitals had been burned
away or were only shapeless stubs.

Near it, on her knees, was a woman mumbling a prayer in Italian.  She
had huge black eyes, which would have been beautiful, if they had not
been reddened and puffy with tears.  She had a magnificent figure,
which would have caught all his attention under different
circumstances.

"What happened?"  he said.

The woman stopped praying and looked at him.  She got to her feet and
whispered, "Father Giuseppe was leaning against the rock; be said he
was hungry.  He said he didn't see much sense in being brought back to
life only to starve to death.  I said that we wouldn't die, how could
we?  We'd been raised from the dead, and we'd be provided for.  He said
maybe we were in hell.  We'd go hungry and naked forever.  I told him,
not to blaspheme, of all people he should be the last to blaspheme. But
he said that this was not what he'd been telling everybody for forty
years would happen and then ... and then...."

Burton waited a few seconds, and then said, "And then?"

"Father Giuseppe said that at least there wasn't any hellfire but that
that would be better than starving for eternity.  And then the flames
reached out and wrapped him inside them and there was a noise like a
bomb exploding, and he was dead, burned to death It was horrible,
horrible."

Burton moved north of the corpse to get the wind behind him, but even
here the stench was sickening.  It was not the odor as much as the idea
of death that upset him.  The first day of the Resurrection was only
half over and a man was dead.  Did this mean that the resurrected were
just as vulnerable to death as to Earthlife?  1f so, what sense was
there to it?  Frigate had quit trying to heave on an empty stomach. Pie
and shaking, he got to his feet and approached Burton.  He kept his
back turned to the dead man.

"Hadn't we better get rid of that?"  he said, jerking his thumb over
his shoulder.

"I suppose so," Burton said coolly.  "It's too bad his skin is ruined,
though."  He grinned at the American.  Frigate looked even more
shocked.

"Here," Burton said.  "Grab hold of his feet, I'll take the other end
We'll toss him into the river."  "The river?"  Frigate said.

"Yaws.  Unless you want to carry him into the hills and chop out a hole
for him there."

"I can't," Frigate said, and walked away.  Burton looked disgustedly
after him and then signaled to the subhuman.  Kazz grunted and shuffled
forward to the body with that peculiar walking-on-the-side-of-his-feet
gait.  He stooped over and, before Burton could get hold of the
blackened stumps of the feet, Kazz had lifted the body above his head,
walked a few steps to the edge of the river, and tossed the corpse into
the water.  It sank immediately and was moved by the current along the
shore.  Kazz decided that this was not good enough.  He waded out after
it up to his waist and stooped down, submerging himself gar a minute.
Evidently he was shoving the body out into the deeper part.

Alice Hargreaves had watched with horror.  Now she said "But that's the
water we'll be drinking!"

"The river looks big enough to purify itself," Burton said.  "At any
rate, we have more things to worry about than proper sanitation
procedures."  Burt turned when Monat touched his shoulder and said,
'look at that."

The water was boiling about where the body should be.  Abruptly a
silvery-white-finned back broke the surface.

"It looks as if your worry about the water being contaminated is in
vain," Burton said to Alice Hargreaves.  "The river has scavengers.  I
wonder .. . I wonder if it's safe to swim."

At least, the subhuman had gotten out without being attacked.  He was
standing before Burton, brushing the water off his hairless body, and
grinning with those huge teeth.  He was frighteningly ugly.  But he had
the knowledge of a primitive man, knowledge which had already been
handy in a world of primitive conditions.  And he would be a damned
good man to have at your back in a fight.  Short though he was, he was
immensely powerful.  Those heavy bones afforded a broad base for heavy
muscles.  It was evident that he had, for some reason, become attached
to Burton.  Burton liked to think the savage, with a savage's
instincts, "knew' that Burton was the man to follow if he would
survive.  Moreover, a subhuman or prehuman, being closer to the
animals, would also be more psychic.  So he would detect Burton's own
well-developed psychic powers and would feel an affinity to Burton,
even though he was Homo Sapiens.

Then Burton reminded himself that his reputation for psych ism had been
built up by himself and that he was half charlatan.  He had talked
about his powers so much, and had listened to his wife so much, that he
had come to believe in them himself.  But there were moments when he
remembered that his "powers' were at least half-fake.

Nevertheless, he was a capable hypnotist, and he did believe that his
eyes radiated a peculiar extra-sensory power, when he wished them to do
so.  It may have been this that attracted the half-man.

"The rock discharged a tremendous energy," Lev Roach said.  "It must
have been electrical.  But why?  I can't believe that the discharge was
purposeless."

Burton looked across the mushroom-shape of the rock.  The gray cylinder
in the center depression seemed to be undamaged by the discharge.  He
touched the stone.  It was no warmer than might have been expected from
its exposure to the sun.

Lev Roach said, "Don't touch it!  There might be another.."  and he
stopped when he saw his warning was too late.

"Another discharge?"  Burton said.  "I don't think so.  Not for some
time yet anyway.  That cylinder was left here so we could learn
something from it.

He put his hands on the top of the mushroom structure and jumped
forward.  He came up and onto the top with an ease that gladdened him.
It had been so many years since he had felt so young and so powerful.
Or so hungry.

A few in the crowd cried out to him to get down off the rock before the
blue flames came again.  Others looked as if they hoped that another
discharge would occur.  The majority were content to let him take the
risks.

Nothing happened, although he had not been too sure he would not be
incinerated.  The stone felt only pleasantly warm on his bare feet.

He walked over the depressions to the cylinder and put his fingers
under the rim of the cover.  It rose easily.  His heart beating with
excitement, he looked inside it.  He had expect the miracle, and there
it was.  The racks within held six containers, each of which was
full.

He signaled to his group to come up.  Kazz vaulted up easily.  Frigate,
who had recovered from his sickness, got onto the top with an athlete's
ease.  If the fellow did not have such a queasy stomach, he might be an
asset, Burton thought.  Frigate turned and pulled up Alice, who came
over the edge at the ends of his heads.

Why they crowded around him, their heads bent over the interior of the
cylinder, Burton said, "It's a veritable grain Look!  Steak, a thick
juicy steak!  Bread and butter!  Jam!  Salad!  And what's that?  A
package of cigarettes?  Yaas!  And a cigar!  And a cup of bourbon, very
good stuff by its odor!  Something... what is it?"

"Looks like sticks of gum," Frigate said.  "Unwrapped.  And that must
be a... what?......... A lighter for the smokes?"

"Food!"  a man shouted.  He was a large man not a member of what Burton
thought of as "his group."  He had followed them, and others were
scrambling up on the rock.  Burton reached down past the containers
into the cylinder and gripped the small silvery rectangular object on
the bottom.  Frigate had said this might be a lighter.  Button did not
know what a "lighter' was, but he suspected that it provided flame for
the cigarettes.  He kept the object in the palm of his hand and with
the other he closed the lid.  His mouth was watering, and his belly was
rumbling.  The others were just as eager as he their expressions showed
that they could not understand why he was not removing the food.

"The large man said, in a loud blustery Triestan Italian, "I'm hungry,
and I'll kill anybody who tries to stop me!  Open that!"  The others
said nothing, but it was evident that they expected Burton to take the
lead in the defense.

Instead, he said, "Open it yourself," and turned away.  The others
hesitated.  They had seen sad smelled the food.  Kazz was drooling. But
Burton said, "Look at that mob.  There'll be a fight here in a minute. 
I say, let them fight over their morsels.  Not that I'm avoiding a
battle, you understand," he added, looking fiercely at them. "But I'm
certain that we'll all have our own cylinders full of food by supper,
time.  These cylinders, call them grails, if you please, just need to
be left on the rock to be filled.  That is obvious, that's why this
grail was placed here."  He walked to the edge of the stone near the
water and got off, by then the top was jammed with people and more were
trying to get on.  The large man had seized a steak and bitten into it,
but someone had tried to snatch it away from him.  He yelled with fury
and, suddenly, rammed through those between him and the river.  He went
over the edge and into the water, emerging a moment later.  In the
meantime, men and women were screaming and striking each other over the
rest of the food and goods in the cylinder.

The man who had jumped into the river floated off on his back while he
ate the rest of the steak.  Burton watched him closely, half expecting
him to be seized by fish.  But he drifted on down the stream
undisturbed.

The rocks to the north and south, on both sides of the river, were
crowded with struggling humans.

Burton walked until he was free of the crowd and sat down.  His group
squatted by him or stood up and watched the writhing and noisy mass.
The grail stone looked like a toadstool engulfed in pale maggots.  Very
noisy maggots.  Some of them were now also red, because blood had been
spilled.

The most depressing aspect of the scene was the reaction of the
children.  The younger ones had stayed back from the rock, but they
knew that there was food in the grail.  They were crying from hunger
and from terror caused by the screaming and fighting of the adults on
the stone.  The little girl with Burton was dry-eyed, but she was
shaking.  She stood by Burton and put her arms around his neck.  He
patted her on the back and murmured encouraging words, which she could
not understand, but the tone of which helped to quiet her.

The sun was on its descent.  Within about two hours it would be hidden
by the towering western mountain, though a genuine dusk presumably
would not happen for many hours.  There was no way to determine how
long the day was here.  The temperature had gone up, but sitting in the
sun was not by any means unbearable, and the steady breeze helped cool
them off.

Kazz made signs indicating that he would like a fire and also pointed
at the tip of a bamboo spear.  No doubt he wanted to fire-harden the
tip.

Burton had inspected the metal object taken from the grail.  It was of
a hard silvery metal, rectangular, flat, about two inches long and
three-tenths across.  It had a small hole in one end and a slide on the
other.  Burton put his thumbnail against the projection at the end of
the slide and pushed.  The slide moved downward about two-sixteenths of
an inch, and a wire about one-tenth of an inch in diameter and a
half-inch long slid out of the hole in the end.  Even in the bright
sunlight, it glowed whitely.  He touched the tip of the wire to a blade
of grass; the blade shriveled up at once.  Applied to the tip of the
bamboo spear, it burned a tiny hole.  Burton pushed the slide back into
its original position, and the wire withdrew, like the hot head of a
brazen turtle, into the silvery shell.

Both Frigate and Roach wondered aloud at the power contained in the
tiny pack.  To make the wire rest hot required much voltage.  How many
charges would the battery or the radioactive pile that must be in it
give?  How could the lighter's power pack be renewed?  There were many
questions that could not be immediately answered or, perhaps, never.
The greatest was how they could have been brought back to life in
rejuvenated bodies.  Whoever had done it possessed a science that was
godlike.  But speculation about it, though it would give them something
to talk about, would solve nothing.

After a while, the crowd dispersed.  The cylinder was left on its side
on top of the grail stone  Several bodies were sprawled there, and a
number of men and women who got off the rock were hurt.  Burton went
through the crowd.  One woman's face had been clawed, especially around
her right eye: She was sobbing with no one to pay attention to her.
Another man was sitting on the ground and holding his groin, which had
been raked with sharp fingernails.

Of the four lying on top of the stone, three were unconscious.  These
recovered with water dashed into their faces from the river.  The
fourth, a short slender man, was dead.  Someone had twisted his head
until his neck had broken.

Burton looked up at the sun again and said, "I don't know exactly when
suppertime will occur.  I suggest we return not too long after the sun
goes down behind the mountain.  We will set our grails, or glory
buckets, or lunch pails or whatever you wish to call them, in these
depressions.  And then we'll wait.  In the meantime..

He could have tossed this body into the river, too, but he had thought
of a use, perhaps uses, for it.  He told the others what he wanted, and
they got the corpse down off the stone and started to carry it across
the plain.  Frigate and Galeazzi, a farmer importer of Trieste, took
the first turn.  Frigate had evidently not cared for the job, but when
Burton asked him if he would, he nodded.  He picked up the man's feet
and led with Galeazzi holding the dead man under the armpits.  Alice
walked behind Burton with the child's hand in hers.  Some in the crowd
looked curiously or called out commits or questions, but Burton ignored
them.  After half a mile, Kazz and Monat took over the corpse.  The
child did not seem to disturbed by the dead man.  She had been curious
about the first corpse, instead of being horrified by its burned
appearance.

"If she really is an ancient Gaul," Frigate said, "she may be used to
seeing charred bodies.  If I remember correctly, the Gauls burned
sacrifices alive in big wicker baskets at religious ceremonies.  I
don't remember what god or goddess the ceremonies were is honor of.  I
wish I had a library to refer to.  Do you think we'll ever have one
here?  I think I would go nuts if I didn't have books to read."

"That remains to be seen," Burton said.  "If we're not provided with a
library, we'll make our own.  If it's possible to do so."  He thought
that Frigate's question was a silly one, but then not everybody, was
quite in their right minds at this time.

At the foothills, two men, Rocco and Brontich, succeeded Kazz and
Monat.  Burton led them past the trees through the waist-high grass.
The saw-edged grass scraped their legs.  Burton cut off a stalk with
his knife and tested the stalk for toughness and flexibility.  Frigate
kept close to his elbow and seemed unable to stop chattering. Probably,
Burton thought, he talked to keep from thinking about the two deaths.

"If every one who has ever lived has been resurrected here, think of
the research to be done!  Think of the historical mysteries and
questions you could clear up!  You could talk to John Wilkes Booth and
find out if Secretary of War Stanton really was behind the Lincoln
assassination.  You might ferret out the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Find out if Joan of Arc actually did belong to a witch cult.  Talk to
Napoleon's Marshal Ney; see if he did escape the firing squad and
become a schoolteacher is America.  Get the true story on Pearl Harbor.
See the face of the Man in the Iron Mask, if there ever was such a
person.  Interview Lucrezia Borgia and those who knew her and determine
if she was the poisoning bitch most people think she was.  Learn the
identity of the assassin of the two little princes in the Tower.  Maybe
Richard III did kill them."

"And you, Richard Francis Burton, there are many questions about your
own life that your biographers would like to have answered.  Did you
really have a Persian love you were going to marry and for whom you
were going to renounce your true identity and become a native?  Did she
die before you could marry her, and did her death really embitter you,
and did you carry a torch for her the rest of your life?"  Burton
glared at him.  He had just met the man and here he was, asking the
most personal and prying questions.  Nothing excused this.

Frigate backed away, saying, "And ... and ... well, it'll all have to
wait, I can see that.  But did you know that your wife had extreme
unction administered to you shortly after you died and that you were
buried in a Catholic cemetery you, the infidel?"

Lev Ruach, whose eyes had been widening while Frigate was rattling on,
said.  "You're Burton, the explorer, and linguist?  The discoverer of
Lake Tanganyika?  The one who made a' pilgrimage to Mecca while
disguised as a Moslem?  The translator of The Thousand and One
Nights?"

"I have no desire to lie nor need to.  I am he."

Lev Ruach spat at Burt, but the wind carried it away.  "You son of a
bitch!"  he cried.  "You foul Nazi bastard!  I read about!  You were,
in many ways, an admirable person, I suppose!  But you were an
anti-Semite!"

Burton was startled.  He said, "My enemies spread that baseless and
vicious rumor.  But anybody acquainted with the facts and with me would
know better.  And.  now, I think you'd..."

"I suppose you didn't write The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam?"  Ruach
said, sneering.

"I did," Burton replied.  His face was red, and when he looked down, he
saw that his body was also flushed.  "And now, as I started to say
before you so boorishly interrupted me, I think you had better go.
Ordinarily, I would be at your throat by now.  A man who talks to me
like that has to defend his words with deeds.  But this is a strange
situation, and perhaps you are overwrought.  I do not know.  But if you
do not apologize now, or walk off, I am going to make another
corpse."

Ruach clenched his fists and glared at Burton; then he spun around and
stalked off.

"What is a Nazi?"  Burton said to Frigate.

The American explained as best he could.  Burton said, "I have much to
learn about what happened after I died.  That man is mistaken about me.
I'm no Nazi.  England, you say, became a second-class power?  Only
fifty years after my death?  I find that difficult to believe."

"Why would I lie to you?"  Frigate said.  "Don't feel bad about it.
Before the end of the twentieth century, she had risen again, and in a
most curious way, though it was too late..."  Listening to the Yankee,
Burton felt pride for his country.  Although England had treated him
more than shabbily during his lifetime, and although he had always
wanted to get out of the island whenever he had been on it, he would
defend it to the death.  And he had been devoted to the Queen.

Abruptly, he said, "If you guessed my identity, why didn't you say
something about it?"

"I wanted to be sure.  Besides, we've not had much time for social
intercourse," Frigate said.  "Or any other kind, either," he added,
looking sidewise at Alice Hargreaves' magnificent figure.

"I know about her, too," he said, "if she's the woman I think she
is."

"That's more than I do," Burton replied.  He stopped.  They had gone up
the slope of the first hill and were on its top.  They lowered the body
to the ground beneath a giant red pine.

Immediately, Kazz, chert knife in his hand, squatted down by charred
corpse.  He raised his head upward and uttered a few phrases in what
must have been a religious chant.  Then, more the others could object,
he had cut into the body and removed the liver.

Most of the group cried out in horror.  Burton grunted.  Monat
stared.

Kazz's big teeth bit into the bloody organ and tore off a large "Chunk.
His massively muscled and thickly boned jaws began chewing, and he
half-closed his eyes in ecstasy.  Burton stepped 'up to him and held
out his hand, intending to remonstrate.  Kazz grinned broadly and cut
off a piece and offered it.  He was very surprised at Burton's
refusal.

"A cannibal!"  Alice Hargreaves said.  "Oh, my God, a bloody, stinking
cannibal!  And this is the promised after-life!"

"He's no worse than our own ancestors," Burton said.  He had recovered
from the shock, and was even enjoying a little the reaction of the
others.  "In a land where there seems to be precious little food, his
action is eminently practical.  Well, our problem of burying a corpse
without proper digging tools is solved.  Furthermore, if we're wrong
about the grails being a source of food, we may be emulating Kazz
before long!"

"Never!"  Alice said.  "I'd die first!"

"That is exactly what you would do," Burton replied, coolly.  "I
suggest we retire and leave him to his meal.  It doesn't do anything
for my own appetite, and I find his table manners as abominable as
those of a Yankee frontiersman's.  Or a country prelate's," he added
for Alice's benefit.

They walked out of sight of Kazz and behind one of the great gnarled
trees.  Alice said, "I don't want him around He's an animal, an
abomination!  Why, I wouldn't feel safe for a second with him
around!"

"You asked me for protection," Burton said.  "I'll give it to you as
long as you are a member of this party.  But you'll also have to accept
my decisions.  One of which is that the ape man remains with us.  We
need his strength and his skills, which seem to be very appropriate for
this type of country.  We've become primitives; therefore, we can learn
from a primitive.  He stays."

Alice looked at the others with silent appeal.  Monat twitched his
eyebrows.  Frigate shrugged his shoulders and said, "Mrs.  Hargreaves,
if you can possibly do it, forget your mores, your conventions.  We're
not in a proper, upper-class Victorian heaven.  Or, indeed, in any sort
of heaven ever dreamed of.  You can't think and behave as you did on
Earth.  For one thing, you come from a society where women covered
themselves from neck to foot in heavy garments, and the sight of a
woman's knee was a stirring sexual event.  Yet, you seem to suffer no
embarrassment because you're nude.  You are as poised and dignified as
if you wore a nun's habit'

Alice said, "I don't like it.  But why should I be embarrassed?  Where
all are nude, none are nude.  It's the thing to do, in fact, the only
thing that can be done.  If some angel were to give me a complete
outfit, I wouldn't wear it.  I'd be out of style.  And my figure is
good.  If it weren't I might be suffering more."

The two men laughed, and Frigate said, "You're fabulous, Alice.
Absolutely.  I may call you Alice?  Mrs.  Hargreaves seems so formal
when you're nude."  She did not reply but walked away and disappeared
behind a large tree.

Burton said, "Something will have to be done about sanitation in the
near future.  Which means that somebody will have to decide the health
policies and have the power to make regulations and enforce them.  How
does one form legislative, judicial, and executive bodies from the
present state of anarchy?"

"To get to more immediate problems," Frigate said, "what do we do about
the dead man?"  He was only a little less pale than a moment ago when
Kazz had made his incisions with his chert knife.

Burton said, "I'm sure that human skin, properly tanned, or human gut,
properly treated, will be far superior to grass for making ropes or
bindings.  I intend to cut off some strips.  Do you want to help me?"
Only the wind rustling the leaves and the tops of the grass broke the
silence.  The sun beat down and brought out sweat, which dried rapidly
in the wind.  No bird cried, no insect buzzed.  And then the shrill
voice of the little girl shattered the quiet Alice's voice answered
her, and the little girl ran to her behind the tree.

"I'll try," the American said.  "But I don't know.  I've gone through
more than enough for one day."

"You 'do as you please then, Burton said.  "But anybody who helps me
gets first call on the use of the skin.  You may wish you could have
some in order to bind an axe head to a haft."

Frigate gulped audibly and then said, "I'll come."

Kazz was still squatting in the grass by the body, holding the bloody
liver with one hand and the bloody stone knife with the other.  Seeing
Burton, he grinned with stained lips and cut off a pieces of liver.
Burton shook his head.  The others, Galeazzi, Brontich, Maria Tucci,
Filipo Rocco, Rosa Nalini, Caterina Carpone, Fiorenza Fiorri, Babich,
and Gloats, had retreated from the grisly scene.  They were on the
other side of a thick pine and talking subduedly in Italian.

Burton squatted down by the body and applied the paint of Eke knife
beginning just above the right knee and continuing to the collarbone.
Frigate stood by him and stared.  He became even more pale, and his
trembling increased.  But he stood firm until two long strips had been
lifted from the body.

"Care to try your hand at it?"  Burton said.  He rolled the body over
on its side so that other, even longer, strips could be taken.  Frigate
took the bloody-tipped knife and set to work, his teeth gritted.

"Not so deep," Burton said and, a moment later, "Now you're not cutting
deeply enough.  Here, give me the knife: Watch!

"I had a neighbor who used to hang up his rabbits behind his garage and
cut their throats right after breaking their necks," Frigate said.  "I
watched once.  That was enough."

"You can't afford to be fastidious or weak-stomached," Burton said.
"You're living in the most primitive of conditions.  You have to be a
primitive to survive, like it or not'

Brontich, the tall skinny Slovene who had once been an innkeeper ten up
to them.  He said, "We just found another of big m-shaped stones. About
forty yards from here.  It was hidden behind some trees down in a
hollow."  Burma's first delight in hectoring Frigate had passed.  He
was beginning to feel story for the fellow.  He said, "Look, Peter, why
don't you go investigate the stone?  If there is one here, we can save
ourselves a trip back to the river."

He handed Frigate his grail.  "Put this in a hole on the stone,
remember exactly which hole you put it in.  Have the others do that,
too.  Make sure that they know where they put their grails.  Wouldn't
want to have any quarrels about that, you know."

Strangely, Frigate was reluctant to go.  He seemed to feel that he had
disgraced himself by his weakness.  He stood a there for a moment,
shifting his weight from one leg to another and sighing several times.
Then, as Burton continued to scrape away at the underside of the
skin-strips, he walked away.  He carried the two grails in one hand and
his stone axe head in the other.

Burton stopped working after the American was out of sight.  He had
been interested in finding out how to cut off strips, and he might
dissect the body's trunk to remove the entrails.  But he could do
nothing at this time about preserving the skin or guts.  It was
possible that the bark of the oak-like trees might contain tannin,
which could be used with other materials to convert human skin into
leather.  By the time that was done, however, these strips would have
rotted.  Still, he had not wasted his time.  The efficiency of the
stone knives was proven, and he had reinforced his weak memory of human
anatomy.  When they were juveniles in Pisa, Richard Burton and his
brother Edward had associated with the Italian medical students of the
university.  Both of the Burton youths had learned much from the
students and neither had abandoned their interest in anatomy.  Edward
became a surgeon, and Richard had attended a number of lectures and
public and private dissections in London.  But he had forgotten much of
what he had learned.

Abruptly, the sun went past the shoulder of the mountain.  A pale
shadow fell over him, and, within a few minutes, the entire valley was
in the dusk.  But the sky was a bright blue for a long time.  The
breeze continued to flow at the same rate.  The moisture-laden air
became a little cooler.  Burton and the Neanderthal left the body and
followed the sounds of the others' voices: These were by the grail
stone of which Brontich had spoken.  Burton wondered if there were
others near the base of the mountain, strung out at approximate
distances of a mile.  This one lacked the grail in the center
depression, however. Perhaps this meant that it was not ready to
operate.  He did not think so.  It could be assumed that Whoever had
made the grail stones had placed the grails in the center holes of
those on the river's edge because the resurrectees would be using these
first.  By the time they found the inland stones, they would know how
to use them.

The grails were set on the depressions of the outmost circle.  Their
owners stood or sat around, talking but with their minds on the grails.
All were wondering when or perhaps if the blue flames would come. Much
of their conversation was about how hungry they were.  The rest was
mainly surmise about how they had come here, Who had put them here,
where they were, and what was being planned for them.  A few spoke of
their lives on Earth.

Burton sat down beneath the wide-flung and densely leaved branches of
the gnarled black-trunked iron tree  He felt tired, as all, except
Razz, obviously did.  His empty belly and his stretched-out nerves kept
him from dozing off, although the quiet voices and the rustle of leaves
conduced to sleep.  The hollow in which the group waited was formed by
a level space at the junction of four hills and was surrounded by
trees.  Though it was darker than on top of the hills, it also seemed
to be a little warmer.  After a while, as the dusk and the chill
increased, Burton organized a firewood-collecting party.  Using the
knives and bandages, they cut down many mature bamboo pleats and
gathered piles of grass.  With the white-hot wire o the lighter, Burt
started a fire of leaves and grass.  These were green, and so the fire
was smoky and unsatisfactory until the bamboo was put on.

Suddenly, an explosion made them jump.  Some of the women screamed.
They had forgotten about watching the grail stone  Burton turned just
in time to see the blue flames soar up about twenty feet.  The heat
from the discharge could be felt by Brontich, who was about twenty feet
from it.

Then the noise was gone, and they stared at the grails.  Burton was the
first upon the stone again; most of them did not care to venture on the
stone too soon after the flames.  He lifted the lid of his grail,
looked within, and whooped with delight.  The others climbed up and
opened their own grails.  Within a minute, they were seated near the
fire eating rapidly, exclaiming with ecstasy, pointing out to each
other what they'd found, laughing, and joking.  Things were not so bad
after all.  Whoever was responsible for this was taking care of them.

There was food in plenty, even after fasting all day, or, as Frigate
put it, "probably fasting for half of-eternity."  He meant by this as
he explained to Monat, that there was no telling hove much time had
elapsed between AD 2008 and today.  This world wasn't built in a day,
and preparing humanity for resurrection take more than seven days. That
is, if all of this been brought about by scientific means, not by
supernatural.  Burton's grail had yielded a four-inch cube of steak; a
small ball of dark bread; butter; potatoes and gravy; lettuce with
salad dressing of an unfamiliar but delicious taste.  In addition,
there was a five-ounce cup containing an excellent bourbon and another
small cup with four ice cubes in it.

There was more, all the better because unexpected.  A small briar pipe,
A sack of pipe tobacco.  Three cigars.  A plastic package with ten
cigarettes.

"Unfiltered!"  Frigate said.

There was also one small brown cigarette which Burton and Frigate
smelled and said, at the same time, "Marihuana!"

Alice, holding up a small metallic scissors and a black comb, said,
"Evidently we're going to get our hair back.  Otherwise, there'd be no
need for these.  I'm so glad!  But do ... They really expect me to use
this?"  She held out a tube of bright red lipstick.

"Or me?"  Frigate said, also looking at a similar tube.

"They're eminently practical," Monat said, turning over a packet of
what was obviously toilet paper.  Then he pulled out sphere of green
soap.

Burton's steak was very tender, although he would have preferred it
rare.  On the other hand, Frigate complained because it was not cooked
enough.

"Evidently, these grails do not contain menus tailored for the
individual owner," Frigate said.  "Which may be why we men also get
lipstick and the women got pipes.  It's a mass production.

"Two miracles in one day," Burton said.  "That is, if they are such.  I
prefer a rational explanation and intend to get it.  I don't think
anyone can, as yet, tell me how we were resurrected.  But perhaps you
twentieth-centurians have a reasonable theory for the seemingly magical
appearance of these articles in a previously empty container?"

"If you compare the exterior and interior of the grail," Monat said,
'you will observe an approximate five-centimeter difference in depth.
The false bottom must conceal a molar circuitry, which is able to
convert energy to matter.  The energy obviously comes during the
discharge from the rocks.  In addition to the converter, the grail must
hold molar templates?  .. molds?  .. which form the matter into various
combinations of and compounds."

"I'm safe in my speculations, for we had a similar converter on my
active planet.  But nothing as miniature as this, I assure you."

"Same on Earth," Frigate said.  "They were making iron out of pure
energy before A.D. 2002, but it was a very cumbersome and expensive
process with an almost microscopic yield."

"Good," Burton said.  "All this has cost us nothing.  So far... He fell
silent for a while, thinking of the dream he had when awakening.

"Pay up," God had said.  "You owe for the flesh."

"What had that meant?  On Earth, at Trieste, in 1890, he had been
dying, in his wife's arms and asking for .. . what?  Chloroform?
Something.  He could not remember.  Then, oblivion.  And he had
awakened in that nightmare place and had seen things that were not on
Earth nor, as far as he knew, on this planet.  But that experience had
been no dream.

They finished eating and replaced the containers in the racks within
the grails.  Since there was no water nearby, they would have to wait
until morning to wash the containers.  Frigate and Kazz, however, had
made several buckets out of sections of the giant bamboo.  The American
volunteered to walk back to the river, if some of them would go with
him, and fill the sections with water.  Burton wondered why the fellow
volunteered.  Then, looking at Alice, he knew why.  Frigate must be
hoping to find some congenial female companionship.  Evidently he took
it for granted that Alice Hargreaves preferred Burton.  And the other
women, Tucci, Malini, Capone, and Fiorri, had made their choices of,
respectively, Galleazzi, Brontich, Rocco, and Giunta.  Babich had
wandered off, possibly for the same reason that Frigate had for wishing
to leave.

Monat and Kazz went with Frigate.  The sky was suddenly crowded-with
gigantic sparks and great luminous gas clouds.  The glitter of
jam-packed stars, some so large they seemed to be broken-off pieces of
Earth's moon, and the shine of the clouds, awed them and made them feel
pitifully microscopic and ill-made.

Burton lay on his back on a pile of tree leaves and puffed on a cigar.
It was excellent, and in the London of his day would have cost at least
a shilling.  He did not feel so minute and unworthy now.  The stars
were inanimate matter, and he was alive.  No star could ever know the
delicious taste of an expensive cigar.  Nor could it know the ecstasy
of holding a warm well-curved woman next to it.

On the other side of the fire, half or wholly lost in the grasses and
the shadows, were the Triestans.  The liquor had uninhibited them,
though part of their sense of freedom may have come from joy at being
alive and young again.  They giggled and laughed and rolled back and
forth in the grass and made loud noises while kissing.  And then,
couple by couple, they retreated into the darkness.  Or at least, made
no more loud noises.

The little girl had fallen asleep by Alice.  The firelight flickered
over Alice's handsome aristocratic face and bald head and on the
magnificent body and long legs.  Burton suddenly knew that all of him
had been resurrected.  He definitely was not the old man who, during
the last sixteen years of his life, had paid so heavily for the many
fevers and sicknesses that had squeezed him dry in the tropics.  Now he
was young again, healthy, and possessed by the old clamoring demon.

Yet he had given his promise to protect her.  He could make no move,
say no word which she could interpret as seductive.

Well, she was not the only woman in the world.  As a matter of fact, he
had the whole world of women, if not at his disposal, at least
available to be asked.  That is, he did if everybody who had died on
Earth was on this planet.  She would be only one among many billions
(possibly thirty-six billion, if Frigate's estimate was correct).  But
there was, of course, no such evidence that this was the case.

The hell of it was that Alice might as well be the only one in the
world, at this moment, anyway.  He could not get up and walk off into
the darkness looking for another woman, because that would leave her
and the child unprotected.  She certainly would not feel safe with
Monat and Kazz, nor could he blame her.  They were so terrifyingly
ugly.  Nor could he entrust her to Frigate if Frigate returned tonight,
which Burton doubted because the fellow was an unknown quantity.

Burton suddenly laughed loudly at his situation.  He had decided that
he might as well stick it out for tonight.  This thought set him
laughing again, and he did not stop until Alice asked him if he was all
right.

"More right than you will ever know," he said, turning his back to her.
He reached into his grail and extracted the last item.  This was a
small flat stick of chicle-like substance.  Frigate, before leaving,
had remarked that their unknown benefactors must be American.
Otherwise, they would not have thought of providing chewing gum.

After stubbing out his cigar on the ground, Burton popped the stick
into his mouth.  He said, "This has a strange but rather delicious
taste.  Have you tried yours?"

"I am tempted, but I imagine I'd look like a cow chewing her cud."

"Forget about being a lady," Burton said.  "Do you think that beings
with the power to resurrect you would have vulgar tastes?"

Alice smiled slightly, said, "I really wouldn't know," and placed the
stick in her mouth.  For a moment, they chewed idly, looking across the
fire at each other.  She was unable to look him full in the eyes for
more than a few seconds at a time.

Burton said, "Frigate mentioned that he knew you.  Of you, rather. Just
who are you, if you will pardon my unseemly curiosity?"

"There are no secrets among the dead," she replied lightly.  "Or among
the ex-dead, either."  She had bees born Alice Pleasance Liddell on
April 25, 1852.  (Burton was thirty then.) She was the direct
descendant of King Edward III and his son, John of Gaunt.  Her father
was dean of Christ Church College of Oxford and co-author of a famous
Greek-English lexicon.  (Liddell and Scott!  Burton thought.) She had
had a happy childhood, an excellent education, and had met many famous
people of her times: Gladstone, Mattheca Arnold, the Prince of Wales,
who was placed under her father's care while he was at Oxford.  Her
husband had been Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, and she had loved him very
much.  He had been a "country gentleman," liked to hunt, fish, play
cricket, raise trees, and read French literature.  She had three sons,
all captains, two of whom died in the Great War of 1914-1918.  (This
was the second time that day that Burton had heard of the Great War.)
She talked on and on as if drink had loosened her tongue.  Or as if she
wanted to place a barrier of conversation between her and Burton.

She talked of Dinah, the tabby kitten she had loved when she was a
child, the great trees of her husband's arboretum, how her father, when
working on his lexicon, would always sneeze at twelve o'clock in the
afternoon, no one knew why... at the age of eighty, she was given an
honorary Doctor of Letters by the American university, Columbia,
because of the vital part she had played in the genesis of Mr.
Dodgson's famous book.  (She neglected to mention the title and Burton,
though a voracious reader, did not recall any works by a Mr.
Dodgson.)

"That was a golden afternoon indeed," she said, "despite the official
meteorological report.  On July 4, 1862, I was ten .. . my sisters and
I were wearing black shoes, white openwork socks, white cotton dresses,
and hats with large brims."  Her eyes were wide, and she shook now and
then as if she were struggling inside herself, and she began to talk
even faster.

"Mr.  Dodgson and Mr.  Duckworth carried the picnic baskets .. we set
off in our boat from Folly Bridge up the Isis, upstream for a change.
Mr.  Duckworth rowed stroke; the drops fell off his paddle like tears
of glass on the smooth mirror of the Isis, and..."

Burton heard the last words as if they had been roared at him.
Astonished, he gazed at Alice, whose lips seemed to be moving as if she
were conversing at a normal speech level.  Her eyes were now fixed on
him, but they seemed to be boring through him into a space and a time
beyond.  Her hands were half-raised as if she were surprised at
something and could not eve them.

Every sound was magnified.  He could hear the breathing of the little
girl, the pounding of her heart and Alice's, the gurgle of the workings
of Alice's intestines and of the breeze as it slipped across the
branches of the trees.  From far away, a cry came.

He rose and listened.  What was happening?  Why the heightening of
senses?  Why could he hear their hearts but not his?  He was also aware
of the shape and texture of the grass under his feet.  Almost, he could
feel the individual molecules of the air as they bumped into his
body.

Alice, too, had risen.  She said, "What is happening?"  and her voice
fell against him like a heavy gust of wind.

He did not reply, for he was staring at her.  Now, it seemed to him, he
could really see her body for the first time.  And he could see her,
too.  The entire Alice.

Alice came toward him with her arms held out, her eyes half-shut her
mouth moist.  She swayed, and she crooned, "Richard!  Richard!"  Then
she stopped; her eyes widened.  He stepped toward her, his arms out.
She cried, "No!"  and turned and ran into the darkness among the
trees.

For a second, he stood still.  It did not seem possible that she, whom
he loved as he had never loved anybody, could not love him back.

She must be teasing him.  That was it.  He ran after her, and called
her name over and over.

It must have been hours later when the rain fell against them.  Either
the effect of the drug had worn off or the cold water helped dispel it,
for both seemed to emerge from the ecstasy and the dreamlike State at
the same time.  She looked up at him as lightning lit their features,
and she screamed and pushed him violently.

He fell on the grass, but reached out a hand and grabbed her ankle as
she scrambled away from him on all fours.

"What's the matter with you?"  he shouted.

Alice quit struggling.  She sat down, hid her face against her knees,
and her body shook with sobs.  Burton rose and placed his hands under
her chin and forced her to look upward.  Lightning hit nearby again and
showed him her tortured face.  "You promised to protect me!"  she cried
out.

"You didn't act as if you wanted to be protected," he said.  "I didn't
promise to protect you against a natural human impulse."

"Impulse!"  she said.

"Impulse!  My God, I've never done anything like this in my life!  I've
always been good!  I was a virgin when I married, and I stayed faithful
to my husband all my life!  And now ... a total stranger!  Just like
that!  I don't know what got into me!"

"Then I've been a failure," Burton said, and laughed.  But he was
beginning to feel regret and sorrow.  If only it had been her own will,
her own wish, then he would not now be having the slightest bite of
conscience.  But that gum had contained some powerful drug, and it had
made them behave as lovers whose passion knew no limits.  She had
certainly cooperated as enthusiastically as any experienced woman in a
Turkish harem.

You needn't feel the least bit contrite or self-reproachful," he said
gently.  "You were possessed.  Blame the drug."

"I did it!"  she said.  "I .. . I!  I wanted to!  Oh, what a vile low
whore I am!"  "I don't remember offering you any money."  He did not
mean to be heartless.  He wanted to make her so angry that she would
forget her self-abasement.  And he succeeded.  She jumped up and
attacked his chest and face with her nails.  She called him names that
a high-bred and gentle lady of Victoria's day should never have
known.

Burton caught her wrists to prevent further damage and held her while
she spewed more filth at him.  Finally, when she had fallen silent and
had begun weeping again, he led her toward the camp site.  The fire was
wet ashes.  He scraped off the top layer and dropped a handful of
grass, which had been protected from the rain by the tree, onto the
embers.  By its light, he saw the little girl sleeping huddled between
Kazz and Monat udder a pile of grass beneath the iron tree  He returned
to Alice, who was sitting under another tree.

"Stay away," she said.  "I never want to see you again!  You have
dishonored me, dirtied me!  And after you gave your word to protect
me!"

"You can freeze if you wish," he said.  "I was merely going to suggest
that we huddle together to keep warm.  But, if you wish discomfort, so
be it.  I'll tell you again that what we did was generated by the drug.
No, not generated.  Drugs don't generate desires or actions; they
merely allow them to be released.  Our normal inhibitions were
dissolved, and neither one of us can blame ourself or the other.

"However, I'd be a liar if I said I didn't enjoy it, and you'd be a
liar if you claimed you didn't.  So, why gash yourself with the knives
of conscience?"

"I'm not a beast like you!  I'm a good Christian God-fearing virtuous
woman!"

"No doubt," Burton said dryly.  "However, let me stress again one
thing.  I doubt if you would have done what you did if you had not
wished in your heart to do so.  The drug suppressed your inhibitions,
but it certainly did not put in your mind the idea of what to do.  The
idea was already there.  Any actions that resulted from taking the drug
came from you, from what you wanted to do."

"I know that!"  she screamed.  "Do you think I'm some stupid simple
serving girls I have a brain!  I know what I did and why!  It's just
that I never dreamed that I could be such ... such a person!  But I
must have been!  Must be!"

Burton tried to console her, to show her that everyone had certain
unwished-for elements in their nature.  He pointed out that the dogma
of original sin surely covered this; she was human; therefore, she had
dark desires in her.  And so forth.  The more he tried to make her feel
better, the worse she felt Then, shivering with cold, and tired of the
useless arguments, he gave up.  He crawled in between Monat and Razz
and took the little girl in his arms.  The warmth of the three bodies
and the cover of the grass pile and the feel of the naked bodies
soothed him.  He went to sleep with Alice's weeping coming to him
faintly through the grass cover.

When he awoke, he was in the gray light of the false dawn, which the
Arabs called the wolfs tail.  Monat, Kazz, and the child were still
sleeping.  He scratched for a while at the itchy spots caused by the,
rough-edged grass and then crawled out.  The fire was out; water drops
hung from the leaves of the trees end the tips of the grass blades.  He
shivered with the cold.  But he did not feel tired nor have any ill
effects from the drug, as he had expected.  He found a pile of
comparatively dry bamboo under some grass beneath a tree.  He rebuilt
the fire with this and in a short time was comfortable.  Then he saw
the bamboo containers, and he drank water from one.  Alice was sitting
up in a mound of grass and staring sullenly at him.  Her skin was
ridged with goosebumps.

"Come and get warm!"  he said.

She crawled out, stood up, walked over to the bamboo bucket, beat down,
scooped up water, and splashed it over her face.  Then she squatted
down by the fire, warming her hands over a small flame.  If everybody
is naked, how quickly even the most modest lose their modesty, he
thought.

A moment later, Burton heard the rustle of grass to the east.  A naked
head, Peter Frigate's, appeared.  He strode from the grass, and was
followed by the naked head of a woman.  Emerging from the grass, she
revealed a wet but beautiful body.  Her eyes were large and a dark
green, and her lips were a little too thick for beauty.  But her other
features were exquisite.

Frigate was smiling broadly.  He turned and pulled her into the warmth
of the fire with his hand.

"You look like the cat who ate the canary," Burton said.  "What
happened to your hand?"  Peter Frigate looked at the knuckles of his
right hand.  They were swelled, and there were scratches on the back of
the hand.

"I got into a fight," he said.  He pointed a finger at the woman, who
was squatting near Alice and warming herself.  "It was a madhouse down
by the river last night.  That gum must contain a drug of some sort.
You wouldn't believe what people were doing.  Or would you?  After all,
you're Richard Francis Burton.  Anyway, all women, including the ugly
ones, were occupied, one way or another.  I 'got scared at what was
going on and than I got mad.  I hit two men with my grail, knocked them
out They were attacking a ten-year-old girl.  I may have killed them; I
hope I did.  I tried to get the girl to come with me, but she ran away
into the night."

"I decided to come back here.  I was beginning to react pretty badly
from what I'd done to those two men even if they deserved it.  The drug
was responsible; it must have released a lifetime of rage and
frustration.  So I started back here and then I came across two more
men, only these were attacking a woman this one.  I think she wasn't
resisting the idea of intercourse so much as she was their idea of
simultaneous attack, if you know what I mean.  Anyway, she was
screaming, or trying to, and struggling, and they had just started to
hit her.  So I hit them with my fist and kicked them and then banged
away on them with my grail: Then I took the woman, her name's Loghu, by
the way, that's all I know about her since I can't understand a word of
her language, and she went with me."  He grinned again.  "But we never
got there."  He quit grinning, and shuddered.

Then we woke up with the rain and lightning and thunder coming down
like the wrath of God.  I thought that maybe, don't laugh, that it was
judgment Day, that God had given us free rein for a day so He could let
us judge ourselves.  And now we were going to be cast into the pit." He
laughed tightly and said, "I've been an agnostic since I was fourteen
years old, and I died one at the age of ninety, although I was thinking
about calling in a priest then.  But the little child that's scared of
the Old Father God and Hellfire and Damnation, he's still down there,
even in the old man.  Or in the young man raised from the dead."

"What happened?"  Burton said.  "Did the world end in a crack of
thunder and a stroke of lightning?  You're still here, I see, and
you've not renounced the delights of sin in the person of this
woman."

"We found a grail stone near the mountains.  About a mile west of here.
We got lost, wandered-around, cold, wet, jumping every time the
lightning struck nearby.  Then we found the grail stone  It was jammed
with people, but they were exceptionally friendly, end there were so
many bodies it was very warm, even if some rain did leak down through
the grass.  We finally went to sleep, long after the rain quit.  When I
woke up, I searched through the grass until I found Loghu.  She got
lost during the night, somehow.  She seemed pleased to see me, though,
add I like her.  There's an affinity between us.  Maybe I'll find out
why when she learns to speak English.  I tried that and French and
German and tags of Russian, Lithuanian, Gaelic, all the Scandinavian
tongues, including Finnish, classical Nahuatl, Arabic, Hebrew, Onondaga
Iroquois, Objibway, Italian, Spanish, Latin, modern and Homeric Greek,
and a dozen others.  Result: a blank look."

"You must be quite a linguist," Burton said.

"I'm not fluent in any of those," Frigate said.  "I can read most of
them but can speak only everyday phrases.  Unlike you, I am not master
of thirty-nine languages including pornography."

"The fellow seemed to know much about himself, Burton thought.  He
would find out just how much at a later time.

"I'll be frank with you, Peter," Burton said.  "Your account of your
aggressiveness amazed me.  I had not thought you capable of attacking
and beating that many men.  Your queasiness..."

"It was the gum, of course.  It opened the door of the cage."  Frigate
squatted down by Loghu and rubbed his shoulder against hers.  She
looked at him out of slightly slanted eyes.  The woman would be
beautiful once her hair grew out.

Frigate continued, "I'm so timorous and queasy because I am afraid of
the anger, the desire to do violence, that lies not too deeply within
me.  I fear violence because I am violent.  I fear what will happen if
I am not afraid.  Hell, I've known that for forty years.  Much good the
knowledge has done me!"  He looked at Alice and said, "Good morning!"
Alice replied cheerily enough, and she even smiled at Loghu when she
was introduced.  She would look at Burton, and she would answer his
direct questions.  But she would not chat with him or give him anything
but a stern face.

Monat, Kazz, and the little girl, all yawning, came to the preside.
Burton prowled around the edges of the camp and found that the
Triestans were gone.  Some had left their grails behind.  He cursed
them for their carelessness and thought about leaving the grails in the
grass to teach them a lesson.  But he eventually placed the cylinders
in depressions on the grail stone

If their owners did not return, they would go hungry unless someone
shared their food with them.  In the meant time the food in their
grails would have to be untouched.  He would be unable to open them.
They had discovered yesterday that only the owner of a grail could open
it.  Experimentation with a long stick had determined also that the
owner had to touch the grail with his fingers or some part of his body
before the lid would open.  It was Frigate's theory that a mechanism in
the grail was keyed to the peculiar configuration of skin voltage of
the owner.

Or perhaps the grail contained a very sensitive detector of the
individual's brain waves.

The sky had become bright by then.  The sun was still an the other side
of the 20,000-foot high eastern mountain.  Approximately a half-hour
later, the grail rock spurted blue flame with a roll of thunder.
Thunder from the stones along the river echoed against the mountain.

The grails yielded bacon and eggs, ham, toast, butter, jam, milk, a
quarter of a cantaloupe, cigarettes, and a cupful of dark brown
crystals which Frigate said was instant coffee.  He drank the milk in
one cup, rinsed it out in water in a bamboo container filled the cup
with water, and set it by the fire.  When the water was boiling, he put
a teaspoonful of the crystals into the water and stirred it.  The
coffee was delicious, and there were enough crystals to provide six
cups.  Then Alice put the crystals into the water before heating it
over the fire and found that it was not necessary to use the fire.  The
wafer boiled within three seconds after the crystals were placed into
the cold water.

After eating, they washed out the containers and replaced them in the
grails.  Burton strapped his grail onto his wrist.  He intended to
explore, and he certainly was not going to leave the grail on the
stone.  Though it could do no one but himself any good, vicious people
might take it just for the pleasure of seeing him starve.

Burton started his language lessons with the little girl and Kazz, and
Frigate got Loghu to sit in on them.  Frigate suggested that a
universal language should be adopted because of the many many languages
and dialects, perhaps fifty to sixty thousand, that mankind had used in
his several million years of existence and which he was using along the
river.  That is, provided that all of mankind had been resurrected.
After all, all he knew about was the few square miles he had seen.  But
it would be a good idea to start propagating Esperanto, the synthetic
language invented by the Polish oculist, Doctor Zamenhof, in 1887.  Its
grammar was very simple and absolutely regular, and its sound
combinations, though not as easy for everybody to pronounce as claimed,
were still relatively easy.  And the basis o1 the vocabulary was Latin
with many words from English and German and other West European
languages.

"I had heard about it before I died," Burton said.  "But I never saw
any samples of it.  Perhaps it may become useful.  But, in the
meantime, I'll teach these two English.!"

"But most of the people here speak Italian or Slovenian!"  Frigate
said.

"That may be true, though we haven't any survey as yet.  However, I
don't intend to stay here, you can be sure of that."

"I could have predicted that," Frigate muttered.  "You always did get
restless; you had to move on."

Burton glared at Frigate and then started the lessons.  For about
fifteen minutes, he drilled them in the identification and
pronunciation of nineteen nouns and a few verbs: fire, bamboo, gruel,
man, woman, girl, hand, feet, eye, teeth, eat, walk, run, talk, dagger,
I, you, they, us.  He intended that he should learn as much from them
as they from him.  In time, he would be able to speak their tongues,
whatever they were.

The sun cleared the top of the eastern range.  The air became warmer,
and they let the fire die.  They were well into the second dayof
resurrection.  And they knew almost nothing about this world or what
their eventual fate was supposed to be or Who was determining their
fate.

Lev Ruach stuck his big-nosed face through the grass and said, "May I
join you?"  Burton nodded, and Frigate said, "Sure, why not?"  Ruach
stepped out of the grass.  A short pale-skinned woman with great brown
eyes and lovely delicate features followed him.  Ruach introduced her
as Tanya Kauwitz.  He had met her last night, and they had stayed
together, since they had a number of things in common.  She was of
Russian-Jewish descent, was born in 1958 in the Bronx, New York City,
had become an English schoolteacher, married a businessman who made a
million and dropped dead when she was forty-five, leaving her free to
marry a wonderful man with whom she had been in love for fifteen years.
Six months later, she was dead of cancer.  Tanya, not Lev, gave this
information and in one sentence.

"It was hell down on the plains list night," Lev said.  "Tanya and I
had to run for our lives into the woods.  So I decided that I would
find you and ask if we could stay with you.  I apologize for my hasty
remarks of yesterday, Mr.  Burton.  I think that my observations were
valid, but the attitudes I was speaking of should be considered in the
context of your other attitudes!"

"We'll go into that some other time," Burton said.  "At the time I
wrote that book, I was suffering from the vile and malicious lies of
the money lenders of Damascus, and they..."

"Certainly, Mr.  Burton," Ruach said.  "As-you say, later.  I just
wanted to make the point that I consider you to be a very capable and
strong person, and I would like to join your group.  We're in a state
of anarchy, if you can call anarchy a state, and many of us need
protection."

Burton did not like to be interrupted.  He scowled and said, "Please
permit me to explain myself.  I .."

"Frigate stood up and said, "here come the others.  Wonder where
they've been?"  Only four of the original nine had come back, however.
Maria Tucci explained that they had wandered away together after
chewing the gum, and eventually ended up by one of the big bonfires on
the plains.  Then many things had happened; there had been fights and
attacks by men on women, men on men, women on men, women on women, and
even attacks on children.  The group had split up in the chaos, she had
met the other three only an hour ago while she was searching in the
hills for the grail stone

Lev added some details.  The results of chewing the narcotic gum had
been tragic, amusing, or gratifying, depending, apparently, upon
individual reaction.  The gum had had an aphrodisiac effect upon many,
but it also had many other effects.  Consider the husband and wife, who
had died in Opcina, a suburb of Trieste, in 1899.  They had been
resurrected within six feet of each other.  They had wept with joy at
being reunited when so many couples had not been.  They thanked God for
their good luck, though they also had made some loud comments that this
world was not what they had been promised.  But they had had fifty
years of married bliss and now looked forward to being together for
eternity.

Only a few minutes after both had chewed the gum, the man strangled his
wife, heaved her body into the river, picked up another woman in his
arms, and run off into the darkness of the woods with her.

Another man had leaped upon a grail stone and delivered a speech that
lasted all night, even through the rain.  To the few who could hear,
and the even fewer who listened, he had demonstrated the principles of
a perfect society and how these could be carried out in practice.  By
dawn, he was so hoarse he could only croak a few words.  On Earth, he
had seldom bothered to vote.

A man and a woman, outraged at the public display of carnality, had
forcefully tried to separate couples.  The results bruises, bloody
noses, split lips, and two concussions, all theirs, Some men and women
had spent the night on their knees praying and confessing their sins.

Some children had been badly beaten, raped, or murdered, or all three.
But not everybody had succumbed to the madness.  A number of adults had
protected the children, or tried to.

Ruach described the despair and disgust of a Croat Moslem and an
Austrian Jew because their grails contained pork.  A Hindu screamed
obscenities because his grail offered him meat.

A fourth man, crying out that they were in the hands of devils, had
hurled his cigarettes into the river.

Several had said to him, "Why didn't you give us the cigarettes if you
didn't want them?"

"Tobacco is the invention of the devil; it was the weed created by
Satan in the Garden of Eden!"

A man said, "At least you could have shared the cigarettes with us.  It
wouldn't hurt you."

"I would like to throw all the evil stuff into the river!"  he had
shouted.

"You're an insufferable bigot and crazy to boot," another had replied,
and struck him in the mouth.  Before the tobacco-hater could get up off
the ground, he was hit and kicked by four others.

Later, the tobacco-hater had staggered up and, weeping with rage,
cried, "What have I done to deserve this, O Lord, my God!  I have
always been a good man.  I gave thousands of Pounds to charities, I
worshipped in Thy temple three times a week, I waged a lifelong war
against sin and corruption, I ..

"I know you!"  a woman had shouted.  She was a tall blue-eyed 62 girl
with a handsome face and well-curved figure.  "I know you!  Sir Robert
Smithson!"

He had stopped talking and had blinked at her.  "I don't know you!"

"You wouldn't!  But you should!  I'm one of the thousands of girls who
had to work sixteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, so you
could live in your big house on the hill and dress in fine clothes and
so your horses and dogs could eat far better than I could!  I was one
of your factory girls!  My father slaved for you, my mother slaved for
you, my brothers and sisters, those who weren't too sick or who didn't
die because of too little or too bad food, dirty beds, drafty windows,
and rat bites, slaved for you.  My father lost a hand in one of your
machines, and you kicked him out without a penny.  My mother died of
the white plague.  I was coughing out my life, too, my fine baronet,
while you stuffed yourself with rich foods and sat in easy chairs and
dozed off in your big expensive church pew and gave thousands to feed
the poor unfortunates in Asia and to send missionaries to convert the
poor heathens in Africa.  I coughed out my lungs, and I had to go
a-whoring to make enough money to feed my kid sisters and brothers. And
I caught syphilis, you bloody pious bastard, because you wanted to
wring out every drop of sweat and blood I had and those poor devils
like me had!  I died in prison because you told the police they should
deal harshly with prostitution.  You .. . you .. .!"

Smithson had gone red at first, then pale.  Then he had drawn himself
up straight, scowling at the woman, and said, "You whores always have
somebody to blame for your unbridled lusts, your evil ways.  God knows
that I followed His ways."  He had turned and had walked off, but the
woman ran after him and swung her grail at him.  It came around
swiftly; somebody shouted; he spun and ducked.  The grail almost grazed
the top of his head.

Smithson ran past the woman before she could recover and quickly lost
himself in the crowd.  Unfortunately, Ruach said, very few understood
what was going on because they couldn't speak English.

"Sir Robert Smithson," Burton said "If I remember correctly, he owned
cotton mills and steel works in Manchester.  He was noted for his
philanthropies and his good works among the heathens.  Died in 1870 or
thereabouts at the age of eighty."

"And probably convinced that he would be rewarded in Heaven," Lev Ruach
said.  "Of course, it would never have occurred to him that he was a
murderer many times over."

"If he hadn't exploited the poor, someone else would have done so."

"That is an excuse used by many throughout men's history," Lev said
"Besides, there were industrialists in your country who saw to it that
wages and conditions in their factories were improved.  Robert Owen was
one, I believe."

"I don't see much sense in arguing about what went on in the past,"
Frigate said.  "I think we should do something about our present
situation."

Burton stood up.  "You're right, Yank!  We need roofs over our heads,
tools, God knows what else!  But first, I think we should take a look
at the cities of the plains and see what the citizens are doing there."
At that moment, Alice came through the trees on the hill above them.
Frigate saw her first.  He burst out laughing.  "The latest in ladies'
wear!"  She had cut lengths of the grass with her scissors and plaited
them into a two-piece garment.  One was a sort of poncho which covered
her breasts and the other a skirt which fell to her calves.

The effect was strange, though one that she should have expected.  When
she was naked, the hairless head still did not detract too much from
her femaleness and her beauty.  But with the green, bulky, and
shapeless garments, her face suddenly became masculine and ugly.

The other women crowded around her and examined the weaving of the
grass lengths and the grass belt that secured the skirt.

"It's very itchy, very uncomfortable," Alice said.  "But it's decent.
That's all I can say for it'

"Apparently you did not mean what you said about your unconcern with
nudity in a land where all are nude," Burton said.

Alice stared coolly and said, "I expect that everybody will be wearing
these.  Every decent man and woman, that is."  "I supposed that Mrs.
Grundy would rear her ugly head here," Burton replied.

"It was a shock to be among so many naked people," Frigate said.  "Even
though nudity on the beach and in the private home became commonplace
in the late '80's.  But it didn't take long for everyone to get used to
it.  Everyone except the hopelessly neurotic, I suppose."

Burton swung around and spoke to the other women.  "What about you
ladies?  Are you going to wear these ugly and scratchy haycocks because
one of your sex suddenly decides that she has private parts again?  Can
something that has bean so public become private?"  Loghu, Tanya, and
Alice did not understand him because he spoke in Italian.  He repeated
in English for the benefit of the last two.

Alice flushed and said, "What I wear is my business.  If anybody else
cares to go naked when I'm decently covered, well .. .!"  Loghu had not
understood a word, but she understood what was going on.  She laughed
and turned away.  The other women seemed to be trying to guess what
each one intended to do.  The ugliness and the uncomfortable-ness of
the clothing were not the issues.

"While you females are trying to make up your minds," Burton said, "it
would be nice if you would take a bamboo pail and go with us to the
river.  We can bathe, fill the pails with water, find out the situation
in the plains, and then return here.  We may be able to build several
houses or temporary shelters before nightfall."  They started down the
hills, pushing through the grass and carrying their grails, chert
weapons, bamboo spears and buckets.  They had not gone far before they
encountered a number of people.  Apparently, many plains dwellers had
decided to move out.  Not only that, some had also found chert and had
made tools and weapons.  These had learned the technique of working
with stone from somebody, possibly from other primitives in the area.
So far, Burton had seen only two specimens of non-Homo sapiens, and
these were with him.  But wherever the techniques had been learned,
they had been put to good use.  They passed two half-completed bamboo
huts.  These were round, one-roomed, and would have conical roofs
thatched with the huge triangular leaves from the iron trees and with
the long hill grass.  One man, using a chert adze and axe, was building
a short-legged bamboo bed.

Except for a number erecting rather crude huts or lean-tos without
stone tools at the edge of the plains, and for a number swimming in the
river, the plain was deserted.  The bodies from last night's madness
had been removed.  So far, no one had put on a grass skirt, and many
stared at Alice or even laughed and made raucous comments.  Alice
turned red, but she made no move to get rid of her clothes.  The sun
was getting hot, however, and she was scratching under her breast
garment and under her skirt.  It was a measure of the intensity of the
irritation that the, raised by strict Victorian upper-class standards,
would scratch in public.

However, when they got to the river, they saw a dozen heaps, of stuff
that turned out to be grass dresses.  These had been left on the edge
of the river by the men and women now laughing, splashing, and swimming
in the river.

It was certainly a contrast to the beaches he knew.  These were the
same people who had accepted the bathing machines, the suits that
covered them from ankle to neck, and all the other modest devices, as
absolutely moral and vital to the continuation of the proper society
theirs.  Yet, only one day after finding themselves here, they were
swimming in the nude.  And enjoying it.

Part of the acceptance of their unclothed state came from the shock of
the resurrection.  In addition, there was not much they could do about
it that first day.  And there had been a leavening of the civilized
with savage peoples, or tropical civilized peoples, who were not
particularly shocked by nudity.

He called out to a woman who was standing to her waist in the water.
She had a coarsely pretty face and sparkling blue eyes.

"That is the woman who attacked Sir Robert Smithson," Lev Ruach said.
"I believe her name is Wilfreda Allport."

Burton looked at her curiously and with appreciation of her splendid
bust.  He called out, "How's the water?"

"Very nice!"  she said, smiling.

He un-strapped his grail, put down the container, which held his chert
knife and hand axe and waded in with his cake of green soap.  The water
felt as if it was about ten degrees below his body temperature.  He
soaped himself while he struck up a conversation with Wilfreda.  If she
still harbored any resentment about Smithson, she did not show it.  Her
accent was heavily North Country, Perhaps Cumberland.

Burton said to her, "I heard about your little to-do with the late
great hypocrite, the baronet.  You should be happy now, though.  You're
healthy and young and beautiful again, and you don't have to toil for
your bread.  Also, you can do for love what you had to do for money."
There was no use beating around the bush with a factory girl Not that
she had any.

Wilfreda gave him a stare as cool as any he had received from Alice
Hargreaves.  She said, "Now, haven't you the ruddy nerve?  English,
aren't you?  I can't place your accent, London, I'd say, with a touch
of something foreign."

"You're close," he said, laughing.  "I'm Richard Burton, by the way.
How would you like to join our group?  We've banded together for
protection; we're going to build some houses this afternoon.  We've got
a grail stone all to ourselves up in the hills' Wilfreda looked at the
Tau Cetan and the Neanderthal "They're part of your mob, now?  I heard
about 'em; they say the monster's a man from the stars, come along in
A.D. 2000, they do say."

"He won't hurt you," Burton said.  "Neither will the subhuman.  What do
you say?"  "I'm only a woman," she said.  "What do I have to offer?"
"All a woman has to offer," Burton said, grinning.

Surprisingly, she burst out laughing.  She touched his chest and said,
"Now ain't you the clever one?  What's the matter, you can't get no
girl of your own?"

"I had one and lost her," Burton said.  That was not entirely true.  He
was not sure what Alice intended to do.  He could not understand why
she continued to stay with his group if she was so horrified' and
disgusted.  Perhaps it was because she preferred the evil she knew to
the evil she did not know.  At the moment, he himself felt only disgust
at her stupidity, but he did not want her to go.  That love he had
experienced last night may have been caused by the drug, but he still
felt a residue of it.  Then why was he asking this woman to join them?
Perhaps it was to make Alice jealous.  Perhaps it was to have a woman
to fall back upon if Alice refused him tonight.  Perhaps ... he did not
know why.

Alice stood upon the bank, her toes almost touching the water.  The
bank was, at this point, only an inch above the water.  The short grass
continued from the plain to form a solid mat that grew down on the
river bed.  Burton could feel the grass under his feet as far as he
could wade.  He threw his soap onto the bank and swam out for about
forty feet and dived down.  Here the current suddenly became stronger
and the depth much greater.  He swam down, his eyes open, until the
light failed and his ears hurt.  He continued on down and then his
fingers touched bottom.  There was grass there, too.

When he swam back to where the water was up no his waist he saw that
Alice had shed her clothes.  She was in closer to the shore, but
squatting so that the water was up to her neck.  She' was soaping her
head and face.

He called to Frigate, "Why don't you come in?"

"I'm guarding the grails," Frigate said.

"Very good!"  Burton swore under his breath.  He should have thought of
that and appointed somebody as a guard.  He wasn't in actuality a good
leader, he tended to let things go to pot, to permit them to
disintegrate.  Admit it.  On Earth he had been the head of many
expeditions, none of which had been distinguished by efficiency or
strong management.  Yet, during the Crimean War, when he was head of
Beatson's Irregulars, training the wild Turkish cavalry, the
Bashi-Bazouks, he had done quite well, far better than most.  So he
should not be reprimanding himself... Lev Ruach climbed out of the
water and ran his hands over his skinny body to take off the drops.
Burton got out, too, and sat down beside him.  Alice turned her back on
him, whether on purpose or not he had no way of knowing, of course.

"It's not just being young again that delights me," Lev said in his
heavily accented English.  "It's having this leg back."  He tapped his
right knee.

"I lost it in a traffic accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was
fifty years old."  He laughed and said; "There was an irony to the
situation that some' might call fate.  I had been captured by Arabs two
years before when I was looking for minerals in the desert, in the
state of Israel, you understand..."

"You mean Palestine?"  Burton said.  '

"The Jews founded an independent state in 1948," Lev said.  "You
wouldn't know about that, of course.  I'll tell you all about it some
time.  Anyway, I was captured and tortured by Arab guerrillas.  I won't
go into the details; it makes me sick to recall it.  But I escaped that
night, though not before bashing in the heads of two with a rock and
shooting two more with a rifle.  The others fled, and I got away.  I
was lucky.  An army patrol picked me up.  However, two years later,
when I was in the States, driving down the Turnpike, a truck, a big
semi, I'll describe that later, too, cut in front of me and jackknifed
and I crashed into it.  I was badly hurt, and my right leg was
amputated below the knee.  But the point of this story is that the
truck driver had been born in Syria.  So, you see the Arabs were out to
get me, and they did; though they did not kill me.  That job was done
by our friend from Tau Ceti.  Though I can't say he did anything to
humanity except hurry up its doom."

"What do you mean by that?"  Burton said.

"There were millions dying from famine, even the States were on a
strictly rationed diet, and pollution of our water, land, and air was
killing other millions.  The scientists said that half of Earth's
oxygen supply would be cut off in ten years because the phytoplankton
of the oceans they furnished half the world's oxygen, you know were
dying.  The oceans were polluted."

"The oceans?"

"You don't believe it?  Well, you died in 1890, so you find it hard to
credit.  But some people were predicting in 1968 exactly what did
happen in 2008.  I believed them, I was a biochemist.  But most of the
population, especially those who counted, the masses and the
politicians, refused to believe until it was too late.  Measures were
taken as the situation got worse, but they were always too weak and too
late and fought against by groups that stood to lose money, if
effective measures were taken.  But it's a long sad story, and if we're
to build houses, we'd best start immediately after lunch."

Alice came out of the river and ran her hands over her body.  The sun
and the breeze dried her off quickly.  She picked up her grass clothes
but did not put them back on.  Wilfreda asked her about them.  Alice
replied that they made her itch too much, but she would keep them to
wear at night if it got cold.  Alice was polite to Wilfreda but
obviously aloof.  She had overheard much of the conversation and-so
knew that Wilfreda had been a factory girl who had become a whore and
then had died of syphilis.  Or at least Wilfreda thought that the
disease-had killed her.  She did not remember dying.  Undoubtedly, as
she had said cheerily, she had lost her mind first.

Alice, hearing this, moved even further away.  Burton grinned,
wondering what she would do if she knew that he had suffered from the
same disease, caught from a slave girl in Cairo when he had been
disguised as a Moslem during his trip to Mecca in 1853.  He had been
"cured' and his mind had not been physically affected; though his
mental suffering had been intense.  But the point was that resurrection
had given everybody a fresh young and un diseased body, and what a
person had been on Earth should not influence another's attitude toward
them.

Should not was not, however, would not.

He could not really blame Alice Hargreaves.  She was the product of her
society like all women, she was what men had made her and she had
strength of character and flexibility of mind to lift herself above
some of the prejudices of her time and her class.  She had adapted to
the nudity well enough, and she was not openly hostile or contemptuous
of the girl.  She had performed an act with Burton that went against a
lifetime of overt and covert indoctrination.  And that was on the night
of the first day of her life after death, when she should have been on
her knees singing hosannas because she had "sinned' and promising that
she would never "sin' again as long as she was not put in hellfire.

As they walked across the plain, he thought about her, turning his head
now and then to look back at her.  That hairless head made her face
look so much older but the hairless ness made her look so childlike
below the navel.  They all bore this contradiction, old man, or woman
above the neck, young child below the bellybutton.

He dropped back until he was by her side.  This put him behind Frigate
and Loghu.  The view of Loghu would yield some profit even if his
attempt to talk to Alice resulted in nothing.  Loghu had a beautifully
rounded posterior; her buttocks were like two eggs.  And she swayed as
enchantingly as Alice.

He spoke in a low voice, "If last night distressed you so much why do
you stay with me?"  Her beautiful face became twisted and ugly.

"I am not staying with you!  I am staying with the group!  Moreover,
I've been thinking about last night, though it pains me to do so.  I
must be fair.  It was the narcotic in that hideous gum that made both
of us behave the .. . way we did.  At least, I know it was responsible
for my behavior.  And I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt."

"Then there's no hope of repetition?"

"How can you ask that!  Certainly not!  How dare you?"

"I did not force you," he said.  "As I have pointed out, you did what
you would do if you were not restrained by your inhibitions.  Those
inhibitions are good things under certain circumstances, such as being
the lawful wedded wife of a man you love in the England of Earth.  But
Earth no longer exists, not as we knew it.  Neither does England.
Neither does English society.  And if all of mankind has been
resurrected and is scattered along this river, you still may never see
your husband again.  You are no longer married.  Remember ... till
death do us part.

You have died, and, therefore, parted.  Moreover, there is no giving
into marriage in heaven."

"You are a blasphemer, Mr.  Burton.  I read about you in the
newspapers, and I read some of your books about Africa and India and
that one about the Mormons in the States.  I also heard stories, most
of which I found hard to believe, they made you out to be so wicked.
Reginald was very indignant when he read your Kasidah.  He said he'd
have no such foul atheistic literature in his house, and he threw all
your books into the furnace."

"If I'm so wicked, and you feel you're a fallen woman, why don't you
leave?"

"Must I repeat everything?  The next group might have even worse men in
it.  And, as you have been so kind to point out, you did not force me.
Anyway, I'm sure that you have some kind of heart beneath that cynical
and mocking air.  I saw you weeping when you were carrying Gwenafra and
she was crying."

"You have found me out," he said, grinning.  "Very well.  So be it.  I
will be chivalrous; I will not attempt to seduce you or to molest you
in any way.  But the next time you see me chewing the gum, you would do
well to hide.  Meanwhile, I give my word of honor; you have nothing to
fear from me as long as I am not under the influence of the gum."

Her eyes widened, and she stopped.  "You plan to use it again?"

"Why not?  It apparently turned some people into violent beasts, but it
had no such effect on me.  I feel no craving for it, so I doubt it's
habit-forming.  I used to smoke a pipe of opium now and then, you know,
and I did not become addicted to it, so I don't suppose I have a
psychological weakness for drugs."  "I understood that you were very
often deep in your cups, Mister Burton.  You and that nauseating
creature, Mr.  Swinburne..."  She stopped talking.  A man had called
out to her, and, though she did not understand Italian, she understood
his obscene gesture.  She blushed all over but walked briskly on.

Burton glared at the man, He was a well-built browns youth with a big
nose, a weak chin, and close set eyes; His skinned speech was that of
the criminal class of the city of Bologna, where Burton had spent much
time while investigating Etruscan relics and graves: Behind him were
ten men, most of them as unprepossessing and as wicked-looking as their
leader, and five women.  It- was evident that the men wanted to add
more women to the group.  It was also evident that they would like to
get their hands on the stone weapons of Burton's group.  They were
armed only with their grails or with bamboo sticks.

Burton spoke sharply, and his people closed up.  Kazz did not
understand his words, but he sensed at once what was happening.  He
dropped back to form the rear guard with Burton.  His brutish
appearance and the hand axe in his huge fist choked the Bolognese
somewhat.  They followed the group, making loud comments and threats,
but they did not get much closer.  Why they reached the hills, however,
the leader of the gang shouted a command, and it attacked.

The youth with the close-set eyes, yelling, swinging his grail at the
end of the strap ran at Burton.  Burton gauged the swing of the
cylinder and then launched his bamboo spear just as the grail was
arcing outward.  The stone tip went into the man's solar plexus, and he
fell on his side with the spear sticking in him.  The subhuman struck a
swinging grail with a stick, which was knocked out of his hand.  He
leaped inward and brought the edge of the hand axe against the top of
the head of his attacker, and that man went down with a bloody skull.

Little Lev Ruach threw his grail into the chest of a man and ran up and
jumped on him.  His feet drove into the face of the man, who was
getting up again.  The man went backward; Ruach bounded up and gashed
the man's shoulder with his chert knife.  The man, screaming, got to
his feet and raced away.

Frigate did better than Burton had expected him to, since he had turned
pale and begun shaking when the gang had first challenged them.  His
grail was strapped to his left wrist while his right held a hand axe He
charged into the group, was hit on the shoulder with a grail, the
impact of which was lessened when he partially blocked it with his
grail, and he fell on his side.  A man lifted a bamboo stick with both
hands to bring it down on Frigate, but he rolled away, bringing his
grail up and blocking the stick as it came down.  Then he was up, his
head butting into the man and carrying him back.  Both went down,
Frigate on top, and his stone axe struck the man twice on the temple.

Alice had thrown her grail into the face of a man and then stabbed at
him with the fire-sharpened end of her bamboo spear.  Loghu ran around
to the side of the man and hit him across the head with her stick so
hard that he dropped to his knees.  The fight was over in sixty
seconds.  The other men fled with their women behind them Burton turned
the screaming leader onto his back and pulled his spear out of the pit
of his stomach.  The tip had not gone in more than half an inch.

The man got to his feet and, clutching the streaming wound, staggered
off across the plains.  Two of the gang were unconscious but would
probably survive.  The man Frigate had attacked was dead.

The American had turned from pale to red and then back to pale.  But he
did not look contrite or sickened.  If his expression held anything, it
was elation.  And relief.

He said, "That was the first man I've ever killed!  The first!"

"I doubt that it'll be the last," Burton said.  "Unless you're killed
first."

Ruach, looking at the corpse, said, "A dead man looks just as dead here
as on Earth.  I wonder where those who are killed in the afterlife
go?"

"If we live long enough, we might find out.  You two women gave a very
fine account of yourselves."

Alice said, "I did what had to be done," and walked away.  She was pale
and shaking.  Loghu, on the other hand, seemed exhilarated.

They got to the grail stone about a half-hour before noon.  Things had
changed.  Their quiet little hollow contained about sixty people, many
of whom were working on pieces of chert.  One man was holding a bloody
eye into which a chip of stone had flown.  Several more were bleeding
from the face or holding smashed fingers.

Burton was upset but he could do nothing about it.  The only hope for
regaining the quiet retreat was that the lack of water would drive the
intruders away.  That hope went quickly.  A woman told him that there
was a small cataract about a mile and a half to the west.  It fell from
the top of the mountain down the tip of an arrowhead-shaped canyon and
into a large hole, which it had only half-filled.  Eventually, it
should spill out and take a course through the hills and spread out on
the plain.  Unless, of course, stone from the mountain base was brought
down to make a channel for the stream.

"Or we make water pipes out of the big bamboo," Frigate said.

They put their grails on the rock, each carefully noting the exact
location of his, and they waited.  He intended to move on after the
grails were filled.  A location halfway between the cataract and the
grail stone would be advantageous, and they might not be so crowded.

The blue flames roared out above the stone just as the sun reached its
zenith.  This time, the grails yielded an antipasto salad, Italian
black bread with melted garlic butter, spaghetti and meatballs, a
cupful of dry red wine, grapes, more coffee crystals, ten cigarettes, a
marihuana stick, a cigar, more toilet paper and a cake of soap, and
four chocolate creams.  Some people complained that they did not like
Italian food, but no one refused to eat.

The group, smoking their cigarettes, walked along the base of the
mountain to the cataract.  This was at the end of the triangular
canyon, where a number of men and women had set up 'camp around the
hole.  The water was icy cold.  After washing out their containers,
drying them, and refilling the buckets, they went back in the direction
of the grail stone  After a half mile, they chose a hill covered by
pines except for the apes, on which a great iron tree grew.  There was
plenty of bamboo of all sizes growing around them.  Under the direction
of Kazz and of Frigate, who had spent a few years in Malaysia, they cut
down bamboo and built their buts.  These were round buildings with a
single door and a window in the rear and a conical thatched roof.  They
worked swiftly and did not try for nicety, so that by dinnertime
everything except the roofs was finished.  Frigate and Monat were
picked to stay behind as guards while the others took the grails to the
stone.  Here they found about 300 people constructing lean-tos and
buts.  Burton had expected this.  Most people would not want to walk a
half mile every day three times a day for their meals.  They would
prefer to cluster around the grail stones  The buts here were arranged
haphazardly and closer than necessary.  There was still the problem of
getting fresh water, which was why he was surprised that there were so
many here.  But he was informed by a pretty Slovene that a source of
water had been found close by only this afternoon.  A spring ran froth
a cave almost in a straight line up from the rock.  Burton
investigated.  Water had broken out from a cave and was trickling down
the face of the cliff into a basin about fifty feet wide sad eight
deep.

He wondered if this was an afterthought on the part of whoever created
this place.  He returned just as the blue flames thundered.

Kazz suddenly stopped to relieve himself.  He did not bother to turn
away; Loghu giggled; Tanya turned red; the Italian women were used to
seeing men leaning against buildings whenever the fancy took them;
Wilfreda was used to anything; Alice, surprisingly, ignored him as if
he were a dog.  And that might explain her attitude.  To her, Kazz was
not human and so could not be expected to act as humans were expected
to act.

There was no reason to reprimand Kazz for this just now, especially
when Kazz did not understand his language.  But he would have to use
sign language the next time Kazz proceeded to relieve himself while
they were sitting around and eating.

Everybody had to learn certain limits, and anything that upset others
while they were eating should be forbidden.  And that, he thought,
included quarreling during mealtimes.  To be fair, he would have to
admit that he had participated in more than his share of dinner
disputes in his lifetime.

He patted Kazz on top of the bread loaf-shaped skull as he passed him.
Kazz looked at him and Burton shook his head, figuring that Kazz would
find out why when he learned to speak English.  But he forgot his
intention, and he stopped and rubbed the top of his own head.  Yes,
there was a very fine fuzz there.

He felt his face, which was as smooth as ever.  But his armpits were
fuzzy.  The pubic area was, however, smooth.  That might be a slower
growth than scalp hair, though.  He told the others, and they inspected
themselves and each other.  It was true.  Their hair was returning, at
least, on their heads and their armpits.  Razz was the exception.  His
hair was growing out all over him except on his face.

The discovery made them jubilant.  Laughing, joking, they walked along
the base of the mountain in the shadow.  They turned east then and
waded through the grass of four hills more coming up the slope of the
hill they were beginning to think of as home.  Halfway up it, they
stopped, silent.  Frigate and Monat had not returned their calls.

After telling them to spread out and to proceed slowly, Burton led them
up the hill.  The buts were deserted, and several of the little buts
had been kicked or trampled.  He felt a chill, as if a cold-wind had
blown on him.  The silence, the damaged huts, the complete absence of
the two, was foreboding.

A minute later, they heard a halloo and turned to look down the hill.
The skin-heads of Monat and Frigate appeared in the gasses and then
they were coming up the hill.  Monat looked grave, but the American was
grinning.  His face was bruised over the cheek, and the knuckles of
both hands were torn and bloody.

"We just got back from chasing off four men and three women who wanted
to take over our buts," he said.  "I told them they could build their
own, and that you'd be back right away and beat hell out of them if
they didn't take off.  They understood the all right, they spoke
English.  They had been resurrected at the grail stone a mile north of
ours along the river.  Most of the people there were Triestans of your
time, but about ten, all together, were Chicagoans who'd died about
1985.  The distribution of the dead sure is funny, isn't it?  There's a
random choice operating along here, I'd say.

"Anyway, I told them what Mark Twain said the devil said.

You Chicagoans think you're the best people here whereas the truth is
you're just the most numerous.  That didn't go over very well, they
seemed to think that I should be buddy-buddies with them because I was
an American.  One of the women offered herself to me if I'd change
sides and take their part in appropriating the huts.  She was the one
who was living with two of the men.  I said no.  They said they'd take
the huts anyway, and over my dead body if they had to.

"But they talked more brave than they were.  Monat scared them just by
looking at them.  And we did have the stone weapons and spears.  Still,
their leader was whipping them up into rushing us, when I took a good
hard look at one of them.

"His head was bald so he didn't have that thick straight black hair,
and he was about thirty-five when I first knew him, and he wore thick
shell-rimmed glasses then, and I hadn't seen him for fifty-four years.
But I stepped up closer, and I looked into his face, which was grinning
just like I remembered it, like the proverbial skunk, and I said, "Lem?
Lem Sharkko!  It is Lem Sharkko, isn't it?"

"His eyes opened then, and he grinned even more, and he took my hand,
my hand, after all he'd done to me, and he cried out " if we were
long-lost brothers, "It is, it is!  It's Pete Frigate!  My God, Pete
Frigate!"

"I was almost glad to see him and for the same reason he said he was
glad to see me.  But then I told myself, "This is the crooked publisher
that cheated you out of $4,000 when you were just getting started as a
writer and ruined your career for years.  This is the slimy schlock
dealer who cheated you and at least four other writers out of a lot of
money and then declared bankruptcy and skipped.  And then he inherited
a lot of money from an uncle and lived very well indeed, thus proving
that crime did pay.  This is the man you have not forgotten, not only
because of what he did to you and others but because of so many other
crooked publishers you ran into later on."

Burton grinned and said, "I once said that priests, politicians, and
publishers would never get past the gates of heaven.  But I was wrong,
that is, if this is heaven."

"Yeah, I know," Frigate said.  "I've never forgotten that you said
that.  Anyway, I put down my natural joy at seeing a familiar face
again, and I said, "Sharkko .. ."

"With a name like that, he got you to trust him?"  Alice said.

"He told me it was a Czech name that meant trustworthy.  Like
everything else he told me, it was a lie.  Anyway, I had just about
convinced myself that Monat and I should let them take over.  We'd
retire and then we'd run them out when you came back from the grail
stone  That was the smart thing to do.  But when I recognized Sharkko,
I got so mad!  I said, grinning, "Gee, it's really great to see your
face after all these years.  Especially here where there are no cops or
courts!  " "And I hit him right in the nose!  He went over flat on his
back, with his nose spouting blood.  Monat and I rushed the others, and
I kicked one, and then another hit me on the cheek with his grail.  I
was knocked silly, but Monat knocked one out with the butt of his spear
and cracked the ribs of another; he's skinny but he's awful fast, and
what he doesn't know about self-defense or offense!

Sharkko got up then and I hit with my other fist but only a glancing
blow along his jaw.  It hurt my fist more than it hurt his jaw.  He
spun around and took off, and I went after him.  The others took off,
too, with Monat beating them on the tail with his spear.  I chased
Sharkko up the next hill and caught him on the downslope and punched
him but good!  He crawled away, begging for mercy, which I gave him
with a kick in the rear that rolled him howling all the way down the
hill."

Frigate was still shaking with reaction, but he was pleased.

"I was afraid I was going to torn chicken there for a while," he said.
"After all, all that had been so long ago and in another world, and
maybe we're here to forgive our enemies and some of our friends and be
forgiven.  But on the other hand, I thought, maybe we're here so we can
give, a little back of what we had to take on Earth.  What about it,
Lev?  Wouldn't you like a chance to turn Hitler over a fire?  Very
slowly over a fire?"

"I don't think you could compare a crooked publisher to Hitler," Ruach
said.  "No, I wouldn't want to turn him over a fire.  I might want to
starve him to death, or feed him just enough to keep him alive.  But I
wouldn't do that.  What good would it do?  Would it make him, change
his mind about anything, would he then believe that Jews were human
beings?  No, I would do nothing to him if he were in my power except
kill him so he couldn't hurt others.  But I'm not so sure that killing
him would mean he'd stay dead.  Not here."

"You're a real Christian," Frigate said, grinning.

"I thought you were my friend!"  Ruach said.

This was the second time that Burton had heard the name Hitler.  He
intended to find out all about him, but at the moment everybody would
have to put off talking to finish the roofs on the huts.  They all
pitched in, cutting off more grass with the little scissors they had
found in their grails, or climbing the iron trees and tearing off the
huge triangular green and scarlet-laced leaves.  The roofs left much to
be desired.  Burton meant to search around for a professional thatcher
and learn the proper techniques.  The beds would have to be, for the
time being, piles of grass on top of which were piles of the softer
iron tree leaves.  The blankets would be another pile of the same
leaves.

"Thank God, or Whoever, that there is no insect life," Burton said.

He lifted the gray metal cup, which still held two ounces of the best
scotch he had ever tasted.

"Here's to Whoever.  If he had raised us just to live on an exact
duplicate of Earth, we'd be sharing our beds with ten thousand kinds of
biting, scratching, stinging, scraping, tickling, bloodsucking vermin."
They drank, and then they sat around the fire for a while and smoked
and talked.  The shadow darkened, the sky lost its blue, and the
gigantic stars and great sheets, which had been dimly seen ghosts just
before dusk, blossomed out.  The sky was indeed a blaze of glory.

"Like a Sime illustration," Frigate said.

Burton did not know what a Sime was.  Half of the conversation with the
non-nineteenth centurians consisted of them explaining their references
and he explaining his.

Burton rose and went over to the other side of the fire and squatted by
Alice.  She had just returned from putting the little girl, Gwenafra,
to bed in a hut.

Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, "I just had half a
piece.  Would you care for the other half?"  She looked at him without
expression and said, "No, thanks."

"There are eight huts," he said.  "There isn't any doubt about who is
sharing which but with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me "I don't
thick there's any doubt about that," she said.

"Then you're sleeping with Gwenafra?"  She kept her face turned away
from him.  He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back
to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.

"You can move on, Sir Richard," she said.  Her lip was curled.  "Lord
grab me, I don't like being second choice.  You could of asked 'er
where nobody could of seen you.  I got some pride, too."  He was silent
for a minute.  His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a
sharp-pointed insult.  But she was right.  He had been too contemptuous
of her.  Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as
a human being.  Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that
had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about
that.  Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too
many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business.
Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that
she was sincere.

He stood up and said, "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

"Are you in love with her?"  Wilfreda said, looking up at him.

"I've only told one woman that I ever loved her," he said.

"Your wife?"

"No.  The girl died before I could marry her."

"And how long was you married?"

"Twenty-nine years, though it's none of your business."

"Lord grab me!  All that time, and you never once told her you loved
her!"

"It wasn't necessary," he said, and walked away.  The hut he chose was
occupied by Monat and Kazz.  Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning
on his elbow and smoking a marihuana stick.  Monat preferred that to
tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco.  However, he
got little effect from it.  On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave
him fleeting but vividly colored visions.

Burton decided to save the rest of his dream gum as he called it.  He
lit up a cigarette, knowing that marihuana would probably make his rage
and frustration even darker.  He asked Monat questions about his home,
Ghuurrkh.  He was intensely interested, but the marihuana betrayed him,
and he drifted away while the Cetan's voice became fainter and
fainter.

"... cover your eyes, boys!"  Gilchrist said in his broad Scots
speech.

Richard looked at Edward; Edward grinned and put hands over his eyes,
but he was surely peeking through the spaces between his fingers.
Richard placed his own hands over his eyes and continued to stand on
tiptoe.  Although he and his brother were standing on boxes, they still
had to stretch to see over the heads of the adults in front of them.

The woman's head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had
fallen over her face.  He wished he could see her expression as she
stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.

"Don't peek now, boys!"  Gilchrist said again.

There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced
downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some
screams and moans, and the head fell down.  The neck spurted out blood
and would never stop.  It kept spurting and spurting while the sun
gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was
at least fifty yards from her, the blood struck him in the hands and
seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and
blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty.  He screamed...
"Wake up, Dick!"  Monat was saying.  He was shaking Burton by the
shoulder.  "Wake up!  You must have been having a nightmare!"

Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up.  He rubbed his hands and then
felt his face.  Both were wet.  But with perspiration, not with
blood.

"I was dreaming," he said.  "I was just six years old and in the city
of Tours.  In France, where we were living then.  My tutor, John
Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a
woman who had poisoned her family.  It was a treat, Gilchrist said.  I
was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to
watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down.
But I did; I had to.  I remember getting a little sick at my stomach
but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me.  I seemed to
have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the
whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal.  Or I was
unreal so I wasn't really horrified."

Monat had lit another marihuana.  Its fight was enough so that Burton
could see him shaking his head.  "Flow savage!  You mean that you not
only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off!  In public!  And
you allowed children to see it!"

"They were a little more humane in England," Burton said.  ""They hung
the criminals!"

"At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they
were spilling the blood of their criminals," Monat said.  "The blood
was on their hands.  But apparently this aspect did not occur to
anyone.  Not consciously, anyway.  So now, after how many years
sixty-three?  you smoke some marihuana and you relive an incident which
you had always believed did not harm you.  But, this time, you recoil
with horror.  You screamed like a frightened child.  You reacted as you
should have reacted when you were a child.  I would say that the
marihuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the
horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years."

"Perhaps," Burton said.  He stopped.  There was thunder and lightning
in the distance.  A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the
patter of drops on the roof.  It had rained about this time last night,
about three in the morning, he would guess.  And this second night, it
was raining about the same time.  The downpour became heavy, but the
roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it.
Some water did, however, come under the lick wall, which was uphill. It
spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and
leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick.  Burton talked
with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later.
Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened.  Burton tried to get back
to sleep but could not.  He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid
that he might slip back into the nightmare.  After a while, he left the
but and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen.  He smelled the
tobacco before he got to the doorway.  The tip of her cigarette glowed
in the dark.  She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass
and leaves.

"Hello," she said.  "I was hoping you would come."

"It's the instinct to own property," Burton said.

"I doubt that it's an instinct in man' Frigate said.  Some people in
the '60's - 1960's, that is tried to demonstrate that man had an
instinct which they called the territorial imperative But.."

"I like that phrase: It has a fine ring to it," Burton said.

"I knew you'd like it," Frigate said.  "But Ardrey and others tried to
prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land
as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape.  And the instinct
to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape.  Which
explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local,
capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth.  But the other school of
thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these
are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies
dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder,
to crime, and so forth.  Change the culture, and the killer ape is
missing.  Missing because he was never there, like the little man on
the stairs.  The killer was the society, and society bred the new
killers out of every batch of babies.  But there were some societies;
composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not
breed killers.  And they were proof that man was not descended from a
killer ape.  Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but
he did not carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried
the genes for a heavy supraorbital ridge of hairy skin or thick bones
or a skull with only 650 cubic centimeters capacity."

"That is all very interesting," Burton said.  "We'll go into the theory
more deeply at another time.  Let me point out to you, however, that
almost every member of resurrected humanity comes from a culture which
encouraged war and murder and crime and rape and robbery and madness.
It is these people among whom we are living and with whom we have to
deal.  There may be a new generation some day.  I don't know.  It's too
early to say, since we've only been here for seven days.  But, like it
or not, we are in a world populated by beings who quite oft act as if
they were killer apes."

"In the meantime, let's get back to our model."  They were sitting on
bamboo stools before Burton's hut.  On a little bamboo table in front
of them was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo.  It had a
double hull across the top of which was a platform with a low railing
is the center.  It had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft
rig, a balloon jib sail, and a slightly raised bridge with a wheel.
Burton and Frigate had used chert knives and the edge of the scissors
to carve the model of the catamaran.

Burton had decided to name the boat, when it was built, The Hadji.  It
would be going on a pilgrimage, though its goal was not Mecca.  He
intended to sail it up The River as far as it would go.  (By now, the
river had become The River.) The two had been talking about the
territorial imperative because of some anticipated difficulties in
getting the boat built.  By now the people in this area were somewhat
settled.  They had staked out their property and constructed their
dwellings or were still working on them.  These ranged all the way from
lean-tos to relatively grandiose buildings that would be made of bamboo
logs and stone, have four rooms, and be two stories high.  Most of them
were near the grail stones along The River and at the base of the
mountain.  Burton's survey, completed two days before, resulted in an
estimate of about 260 to 261 people per square mile.  For every square
mile of flat plain on each side of The River, there were approximately
2.4 square miles of hills.  But the hills were so high and irregular
that their actual inhabitable area was about nine square miles.  In the
three areas that he had studied, he found that about one-third had
built their dwellings close to the Riverside grail stone and one third
around the inland grail stones  Two hundred and sixty-one persons per
square mile seemed like a heavy population, but the hills were so
heavily wooded and convoluted in topography that a small group living
there could feel isolated.  And the plain was seldom crowded except at
mealtimes, because the plains people were in the woods or fishing along
the edge of The River.  Many were working on dugouts or bamboo boats
with the idea of fishing in the middle of The River.  Or, like Burton,
of going exploring.

The stands of bamboo had disappeared, although it was evident that they
would be quickly replaced.  The bamboo had a phenomenal growth.  Burton
estimated that a fifty-foot high plant could grow from start to finish
in ten days.

His gang had worked hard and cut down all they thought they would need
for the boat.  But they wanted to keep thieves away, so they used more
wood to erect a high fence.  This was being finished the same day that
the model was completed.  The trouble was that they would have to build
the boat on the plain.  It could never be gotten through the woods and
down the various hills if it were built on this site.

"Yeah, but if we move out and set up a new base, we'll run into
opposition," Frigate had said.  "There isn't a square inch of the
high-grass border that isn't claimed.  As it is, you have to trespass
to get to the plain.  So far, nobody has tried to be hard-nosed about
their property rights, but this can change any day.  And if you build
the ship a little back from the high-grass border, you can get it out
of the woods okay and between the huts.  But you'd have to set up a
guard night and day; otherwise your stuff will be stolen.  Or
destroyed.  You know these barbarians."  He was referring to the huts
wrecked while their owners were away and to the fouling of the pools
below the cataract and the spring.  He was also referring to the highly
unsanitary habits of many of the locals.  These would not use the
little outhouses put up by various people for the public.

"We'll erect new houses and a boatyard as close to the border as we can
get," Burton said.  "Then we'll chop down any tree that gets in our way
and we'll ram our way past anybody who refuses us right-of-way."  It
was Alice who went down to some people who had huts on the border
between the plain and the hills and talked than into making a trade. 
She did not tell anybody what she intended.  She had known of three
couples who were unhappy with their location because of lack of
privacy.  These made an agreement and moved into the huts of Burton's
gang on the Twelfth Day after Resurrection, on a Thursday.  By a
generally agreed upon convention, Sunday, the first, was Resurrection
Day.  Ruach said he would prefer that the first day be called Saturday,
or even better, just First Day.  But he was in an area predominately
Gentile or ex-Gentile (but once a Gentile always a Gentile) so he would
go along with the others.  Ruach had a bamboo stick on which he kept
count of the days by notching it each morning.  The stick was driven
into the ground before his hut.

Transferring the lumber far the boat took four days of heavy work.  By
then, the Italian couples decided that they had had enough of working
their fingers to the bone.  After all, why get on a boat and go some
place else when every place was probably just like this?  They had
obviously been raised from the dead so they could enjoy themselves.
Otherwise, why the liquor, the cigarettes, the marihuana, the dream gum
and the nudity?  They left without ill feelings on the part of anybody;
in fact, they were given a going-away party.  The next day, the
twentieth of Year 1, A.R."  two events occurred, one of which solved
one puzzle and the other of which added one, though it was not very
important.

The group went across the plain to the grail stone at dawn.  They found
two new people near the grail stone both of them sleeping.  They were
easily aroused, but they seemed alarmed and confused.  One was a tall
brown-skinned man who spoke an unknown language.  The other was a tall,
handsome, well-muscled man with gray eyes and black hair.  His speech
was unintelligible until Burton suddenly understood that he was
speaking English.  It was the Cumberland dialect of the English spoken
during the reign of King Edward I, sometimes called Longshanks.  Once
Burton and Frigate had mastered the sounds and made certain
transpositions, they were able to carry on a halting conversation with
him.  Frigate had an extensive reading vocabulary of Early Middle
English, but he had never encountered many of the words or certain
grammatical usages.

John de Greystock was born in the manor of Greystoke in the Cumberland
country.  He had accompanied Edward I into France when the king invaded
Gascony.  There he had distinguished himself in arms, if he was to be
believed.  Later, he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Graystoke and
then again went to the wars in Gascony.  He was in the retinue of
Bishop Anthony Bcc, Patriarch of Jerusalem.  In the 28th and 29th years
of Edward's reign, he fought against the Scots.  He died in 1305,
without children, but he settled his manor and barony on his cousin,
Ralph, son of Lord Grimthorpe in Yorkshire.

He had been resurrected somewhere along The River among a people about
ninety percent early fourteenth-century English and Scottish and ten
percent ancient Sybarites.  The peoples across The River were a mixture
of Mongols of the time of Kubla Khan and some dark people the identity
of which Greystoke did not know.  His description fitted North American
Indians, The nineteenth day after Resurrection, the savages across The
River had attacked.  Apparently they did so for no other reason than
they wanted a good fight, which they got.  The weapons were mostly
sticks and grails, because there was little stone in the area.  John de
Greystock put ten Mongols out of commission with his grail and then was
hit on the head with a rock and stabbed with the fire-hardened tip of a
bamboo spear.  He awoke, naked, with only his grail or a grail by this
grail stone

The other man told his story with signs and pantomime.  He had been
fishing when his hook was taken by something so powerful- that it
pulled him into the water.  Coming back up, he had struck his head on
the bottom of the boat and drowned.

The question of what happened to those who were killed in the afterlife
was answered.  Why they were not raised in the same area as in which
they died was another question.

The second event was the failure of the grails to deliver the noonday
meal.  Instead, crammed inside the cylinders were six cloths.  These
were of various sizes and of many different colors, hues, and patterns.
Four were obviously designed to be worn as kilts.  They could be
fastened around the body with magnetic tabs inside the cloth.  Two were
of thinner almost transparent material and obviously made as
brassieres, though they could be, used for other purposes.  Though the
cloth was soft and absorbent, it stood up under the roughest treatment
and could not be cut by the sharpest chert or bamboo knife.

Mankind gave a collective whoop of delight on finding these "towels."
Though men and women had by then become accustomed, or at least
resigned, to nudity, the more aesthetic and the less adaptable had
found the universal spectacle of human genitalia un beautiful or even
repulsive.  Now, they had kilts and even bras and turbans.  The latter
were used to cover up their heads while their hair was growing back in.
Later, turbans became a customary headgear.

Hair was returning everywhere except on the face.

Burton was bitter about this.  He had always taken pride in his long
moustachios and forked beard; he claimed that their absence made him
feel more naked than the lack of trousers.

Wilfreda had laughed and said, "I'm glad they're gone.  I've always
hated hair on men's faces.  Kissing a man with a beard was like
sticking my face in a bunch of broken bedsprings."

Sixty days had passed.  The boat had been pushed across the plain on
big bamboo rollers.  The day of the launching had arrived.  The Hadji
was about-forty feet long and essentially consisted of two sharp-pr
owed bamboo hulls fastened together with a platform, a bowsprit with a
balloon sail and a single mast, fore-and-aft rigged, with sails of
woven bamboo fibers.  It was steered by a great oar of pine, since a
rudder and steering wheel were not practicable.  Their only material
for ropes at this time was the grass, though it would not be long
before leather ropes would be made from the tanned skin and entrails of
some of the larger river fish  A dugout fashioned by Kazz from a pine
log was tied down to the foredeck.

Before they could get it into the water, Kazz made some difficulties.
By now, he could speak a very broken and limited English and some oaths
in Arabic, Baluchi, Swahili, and Italian, all learned from Burton.

"Must need ... wac ha call it?  ... wallah!  ... what it word?  ...
kill somebody before place boat on river ... you know ... mer da .. .
need word, Burton-naq .. . you give, Burton-naq .. . word ... word kill
man so god, Kabburqanaqruebemss water god ... no sink boat get angry
... drown us ... eat us."

"Sacrifice?"  Burton said.

"Many bloody thanks, Burton-naq.  Sacrifice!  Cut throat .. . put on
boat ... rub it on wood ... then water god not mad at us..."

"We don't do that," Burton said.

Kazz argued but finally agreed to get on the boat.  His face was long,
and he looked very nervous.  Burton, to ease him, told him that this
was not Earth.  It was a different world, as he could see at a quick
glance around him and especially at the stars.  The gods did not live
in this valley.  Kazz listened and smiled, but he still looked as if he
expected to see the hideous green-bearded face and bulging fishy eyes
of Kabburqanaqruebemss rising from the depths.

The plain was crowded around the boat that morning.  Everybody was
there for many miles around, since anything out of the usual was
entertainment.  They shouted and laughed or joked.  Though some of the
comments were derisive, all were in good humor.  Before the boat was
rolled off the bank into The Rivet, Burton stood up on its "bridge," a
slightly raised platform, and held up his hand for silence.  The
crowd's chatter died away, and he spoke in Italian.

"Fellow lazari, friends, dwellers in the valley of the Promised Land!
We leave you in a few minutes..."

"If the boat doesn't capsize!"  Frigate muttered.

"..  . to go up The River, against the wind and the current.  We take
the difficult route because the difficult always yields the greatest
reward, if you believe what the moralists on Earth told us, and you
know now how much to believe them!"  Laughter.  With scowls here and
there from die-hard religionists

"On Earth, as some of you may know, I once led an expedition into
deepest and darkest Africa to find the headwaters of the Nile.  I did
not find them, though I came close, and I was cheated out of the
rewards by a man who owed everything to me, a Mister John Harming
Speke.  If I should encounter him on my journey upriver, I will know
how to deal with him..."

"Good God!"  Frigate said.  "Would you have him kill himself again with
remorse and shame?"

"..  . but the point is that this River may be one far far greater than
any Nile, which as you may or may not know, was the longest river on
Earth, despite the erroneous claims of Americans for their Amazon and
Missouri-Mississippi completes.  Some of you have asked why we should
set out for a goal that lies we know not how far away or that might not
even exist.  I will tell you that we are setting sail because the
Unknown exists end we would make it the Known.  That's all!  And here,
contrary to our sad and frustrating experience on Earth, money is not
required to outfit us or to keep us going.  King Cash is dead, and good
riddance to him!  Nor do we have to fill out hundreds of petitions and
forms and beg audiences of influential people and minor bureaucrats to
get permission to pass up The River.  There are no national borders..

"..  . as yet' Frigate said.

"... nor passports required nor officials to bribe.  We just build a
boat without having to obtain a license, and we sail off without a
by-your leave from any muck-a-muck, high, middle, or low.

We are free for the first time in man's history.  Free!  And so we bid
you adieu, for I will not say goodbye.."

"..  . you never would," Frigate muttered.

"..  . because we may be back a thousand years or so from now!  So I
say adieu, the crew says adieu, we thank you for your help in building
the boat and for your help in launching us.  I hereby hand over my
position as Her British Majesty's Consul at Trieste to whomever wishes
to accept it and declare myself to be a free citizen of the world of
The River!  I will pay tribute to none, owe fealty to none; to myself
only will I be true!"

"Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect
applause."

"He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made
laws," Frigate chanted.

Burton glanced at the American but did not stop his speech.  Frigate
was quoting lines from Burton's poem, The Kasidah of Haji Abdu AlYazdi.
It was not the first time that he had quoted from Burton's prose or
poetry.  And though Burton sometimes found the American to be
irritating, he could not become too angry at a man who had admired him
enough to memorize his words.

A few minutes later, when the boat was pushed into the River by some
men and women, and the crowd was cheering, Frigate quoted him again. He
looked at the thousands of handsome youths by the waters, their skins
bronzed by the sun, their kilts and bras and turbans wind-moved and
colorful, and he said,

"Ah!  gay the day with shine of sun, and bright the breeze, and blithe
the throng "Met an the River-bank to play, when I was young, when I was
young."

The boat slid out, and its prow was turned by the wind and the current
downstream, but Burton shouted orders, and the sails were pulled up,
and he turned the great handle of the paddle so that the nose swung
around and then they were beating to windward.  The Hadji rose and fell
in the waves, the water hissing as it was cut by the twin prows.  The
sun was bright and warm, the breeze cooled them off, they felt happy
but also a little anxious as the familiar banks and faces faded away.
They had no maps nor travelers' tales to guide them; the world would be
created with every mile forward.

That evening, as they made their first beaching, an incident occurred
that puzzled Burton.  Kazz had just stepped ashore among a group of
curious people, when he became very excited.  He began to jabber in his
native tongue and tried to seize a man standing near.  The man fled and
was quickly lost in the crowd.

When asked by Burton what he was doing, Kazz said, "He not got ... uh
whacha call it?  ... it ..."  and he pointed at his forehead.  Then he
traced several unfamiliar symbols in the air.  Burton meant to pursue
the matter, but Alice, suddenly wailing, ran up to a man.  Evidently,
she had thought he was a son who had been killed in World War 1. There
was some confusion.  Alice admitted that she had made a mistake.  By
then, other business came up.  Kazz did not mention the matter again,
and Burton forgot about it.  But he was to remember.

Exactly 415 days later, they had passed 24,900 grail rocks on the-right
bank of The River.  Tacking, running against wind and current,
averaging sixty miles a day, stopping during by day to charge their
grails and at night to sleep, sometimes stopping all day so they could
stretch their legs and talk to others besides the crew, they had
journeyed 24,900 miles.  On Earth, that distance would have been about
once around the equator.  If the Mississippi-Missouri, Nile, Congo,
Amazon, Yangtze, Volga, Amur, Hwang, Lena, and Zambezi had been put end
to end to make one great river, it still would not have been as long as
that stretch of The River they had passed.  Yet the River went on and
on, making great bends, winding back and forth.  Everywhere were the
plains along the stream, the tree-covered hills behind, and, towering,
impassable, unbroken, the mountain range.

Occasionally, the plains narrowed, and the hills advanced to The
River-edge.  Sometimes, The River widened and became a lake, three
miles, five miles, six miles across.  Now and then, the line of the
mountains curved in toward each other, and the boat shot through
canyons where the narrow passage forced the current to boil through and
the sky was a blue thread far far above and the black walls pressed in
on them And; always, there was humankind.  Day and night, men, women,
and children thronged the banks of The River and in the hills were
more.

By then, the sailors recognized a pattern.  Humanity had been
resurrected along The River in a rough chronological and national
sequence.  The boat had passed by the area that held Slovenes,
Italians, and Austrians who had died in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, had passed by Hungarians, Norwegians, Finns,
Greeks, Albanians, and Irish.  Occasionally, they put in at areas which
held peoples from other times and places.  One was a twenty-mile
stretch containing Australian aborigines who had never seen a European
while on Earth.  Another hundred-mile length was populated by
Tocharians (Loghu's people).  These had lived around the time of Christ
in what later became Chinese Turkestan.  They represented the eastern
most extension of Indo-European speakers in ancient times; their
culture had flourished for a while, then died before the encroachment
of the desert and invasions of barbarians.

Through admittedly hasty and uncertain surveys, Burton had determined
that each area was, in general, comprised of about 60 per cent of a
particular nationality and century, 30 percent of some other people,
usually from a different time, and 10 per cent from any time and
place.

All men had awakened from death circumcised.  All women had been
resurrected as virgins.  For most women, Burton commented, this state
had not lasted beyond the first night on this planet.

So far, they had neither seen nor heard of a pregnant woman.  Whoever
had placed them here must have sterilized them, and with good reason.
If mankind could reproduce, the Rivervalley would be jammed solid with
bodies within a century.

At first, there had seemed to be no animal life but man.  Now it was
known that several species of worms emerged from the soil at night. And
The River contained at least a hundred species of fish, ranging from
creatures six inches long to the sperm whale-sized fish, the river
dragon which lived on the bottom of The River a thousand feet down. 
Frigate said that the animals were there for a good purpose. The fish
scavenged to keep The River waters clean.  Some types of worm ate waste
matter and corpses.  Other types served the normal function of
earthworms.

Gwenafra was a little taller.  All the children were growing up. Within
twelve years, there would not be an infant or adolescent within the
valley, if conditions everywhere conformed to what the voyagers had so
far seen.

Burton, thinking of this, said to Alice, "This Reverend Dodgson friend
of yours, the fellow who loved only little girls.  He'll be in a
frustrating situation then, won't he?"

"Dodgson was no pervert," Frigate said.  "But what about those whose
only sexual objects are children?  What will they do when there are no
more children?  And what will those who got their kicks by mistreating
or torturing animals do?  You know, I've regretted the absence of
animals.  I love cats and dogs, bears, elephants, most animals.  Not
monkeys, they're too much like humans.  But I'm glad they're not here.
They can't be abused now.  All the poor helpless animals who were in
pain or going hungry or thirsty because of some thoughtless or vicious
human being.  Not now."

He patted Gwenafra's blonde hair, which was almost six inches long.

"I felt much the same about the helpless and abused little ones,
too."

"What kind of a world is it that doesn't have children," Alice said.
"For that matter, what kind without animals?  If they can't be
mistreated or abused any more, they can't be petted and loved."

"One thing balances out another in this world," Burton said.  "You
can't have love without hate, kindness without malice, peace without
war.  In any event, we don't have a choice in the matter.  The
invisible Lords of this world have decreed that we do not have animals
and that women no longer bear children.  So be it."

The morning of the 416th day of their journey was like every morning.
The sun had risen above the top of the range on their left.  The wind
from Up River was an estimated fifteen miles per hour, as always.  The
warmth rose steadily with the sun and would reach the estimated 85
degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 2 in the afternoon.  The catamaran
The Hadji, tacked back and forth.  Burton stood on the "bridge' with
both hands on the long thick pine tiller on his right, while the wind
and the sun beat on his darkly tanned skin.  He wore a scarlet and
black checked kilt reaching almost to his knees and a necklace made of
the convoluted shiny-black vertebrae of the horn fish  This was a
six-foot long fish with a six-inch long horn that projected
unicorn-like from its forehead.  The horn fish lived about a hundred
feet below the surface and was brought in on a line with difficulty.
But its vertebrae made beautiful necklaces, its skin, properly tanned,
made sandals and armor and shields or could be worked into tough
pliable ropes and belts.  Its flesh was delicious.  But the horn was
the most valuable item.  It tipped spears or arrows or went into a wood
handle to make a stiletto.

On a stand near him, encased in the transparent bladder of a fish, was
a bow.  It was made of the curved bones protruding from the sides of
the mouth of the whale-sized dragon fish  When the ends of each had
been cut so that one fitted into the other, a double recurved bow was
the result.  Fitted with a string from the gut of the dragon fish this
made a bow that only a very powerful man could fully draw.  Burton had
run across one forty days ago and offered its owner forty cigarettes,
ten cigars, and thirty ounces of whiskey for it.  The offer was turned
down.  So Burton and Kazz came back late that night and stole the bow.
Or, rather, made a trade, since Burton felt compelled to leave his yew
bow in exchange.

Since then, he had rationalized that he had every right to steal the
bow.  The owner had boasted that he had murdered a man to get the bow.
So taking it from him was taking it from a thief and a killer.
Nevertheless, Burton suffered from thrusts of conscience when he
thought about it, which was not often.

Burton took The Hadji back and forth across the narrowing channel.  For
about five miles, The River had widened out to a three and a half mile
broad lake, and now it was forming into a narrow channel less than half
a mile across.  The channel curved and disappeared between the walls of
a canyon.

There the boat would creep along because it would be bucking an
accelerated current and the space allowed for tacking was so limited.
But he had been through similar straits many times and so was not
apprehensive about this.  Still, every time it happened, he could not
help thinking of the boat as being reborn.  It passed from a lake, a
womb, through a tight opening and out into another lake.  It was a
bursting of waters in many ways, and there was always the chance of a
fabulous adventure, of a revelation, on the other side.

The catamaran turned away from a grail stone only twenty yards off.
There were many people on the right-side plain, which was only half a
mile across here.  They shouted at tie boat or waved or shook their
fists or shouted obscenities, unheard but understood by Burton because
of so many experiences.  But they did not seem hostile; it was just
that strangers were always greeted by the locals in a varied manner.
The locals here were a short, dark-skinned, dark-haired, thin-bodied
people.  They spoke a language that Roach said was probably proto
Hamite-Semitic.  They had lived on Earth somewhere in North Africa or
Mesopotamia when those countries had been much more fertile.  They wore
the towels as kilts but the women went bare-breasted and used the
"bras' as neck scarfs or turbans.  They occupied the right bank for
sixty grail stones that is, sixty miles.  The people before them had
been strung out for eighty grail stones and had, been tenth-century
A.D. Ceylonese with a minority of pre-Colombian Mayans.

"The mixing bowl of Time," Frigate called the distribution of humanity.
"The greatest anthropological and social experiment ever."  His
statements were not too far-fetched.  It did look as if the various
peoples had been mixed up so that they might learn something from each
other.  In some cases, the alien groups had managed to create various
social lubricants and lived in relative amity.  In other cases, there
was a slaughter of one side by the other, or a mutual
near-extermination, or slavery, of the defeated.

For some time, after the resurrection, anarchy had been the usual rule.
People had "milled around' and formed little groups for defense in very
small areas.  Then the natural leaders and power seekers had come to
the front, and the natural followers had lined up behind the leaders of
their choice or the leaders' choice, in many cases.

One of the several political systems that had resulted was that of
"grail slavery."  A dominant group in an area held the weaker
prisoners.  They gave the slave enough to eat because the grail of a
dead slave became useless.  But they took the cigarettes, the cigars,
the marihuana, the dream gum the liquor, and the tastier food.

At least thirty times, The Hadji had started to put into a grail stone
and had come close to being seized by grail slavers.  But Burton and
the others were on the alert for signs of slave states.  Neighboring
states often warned them.  Twenty times, boats had put out to intercept
them instead of trying to lure them ashore, and the Hadji had narrowly
escaped being run down or boarded.  Five times, Burton had been forced
to turn back and sail downstream.  His catamaran had always outrun the
pursuers, who were reluctant to chase him outside their borders.  Then
the Hadji had sneaked back at night and sailed past the slavers.

A number of times, The Hadji had been unable to put into shore because
the slave states occupied both banks for very long stretches.  Then the
crew went on half-rations, or, if they were lucky, caught enough fish
to fill their bellies.

The proto-Hamite-Semites of this area had been friendly enough after
they were assured that the crew of The Hadji had no evil intentions. An
eighteenth-century Muscovite had warned them that there were slave
states on the other side of the channel.  He did not know too much
about them because of the precipitous mountains.  A few boats had
sailed through the channel and almost none had returned.  Those that
did brought news of evil men on the other side.

So the Hadji was loaded with bamboo shoots, dried fish, and supplies
saved over a period of two weeks from the grails.

There was still about half an hour before the strait would be entered.
Burton kept half his mind on his sailing and half on the crew.  They
were sprawled on the foredeck, taking in the sun or else sitting with
their backs against the roofed coaming which they called the
"fo'c'sle'

John de Greystock was affixing the thin carved bones of a horn fish to
the butt of an arrow.  The bones served quite well as feathers in a
world where birds did not exist.  Greystock, or Lord Greystoke, as
Frigate insisted on calling him for some private self-amusing reason,
was a good man in a fight or when hard work was needed.  He was an
interesting, if almost unbelievably vulgar, talker, full of anecdotes
of the campaigns in Gascony and on the border, of his conquests of
women, of gossip about Edward Longshanks, and of course, of information
about his times.  But he was also very hard-headed and narrow-minded in
many things from the viewpoint of a later age and not overly clean.  He
claimed to have been very devout in Earthlife, and he probably told the
truth, otherwise, he would not have been honored by being attached to
the retinue of the Patriarch of Jerusalem.  But, now that his faith had
been discredited, he hated priests.  And he was apt to drive any he met
into a fury with his scorn, hoping that they would attack him.  Some
did, and he came close to killing them.  Burton had cautiously
reprimanded him for this (you did not speak harshly to de Greystock
unless you wished to fight to the death with him), pointing out that
when they were guests in a strange land, and immensely outnumbered by
their hosts, they should act as guests.  De Greystock admitted that
Burton was right, but he could not keep from baiting every priest he
met.  Fortunately, they were not often in areas where there were
Christian priests.  Moreover, there were very few of these who admitted
that they had been such.

Beside him, talking earnestly, was his current woman, born Mary
Rutherford in 1637, died Lady Warwickshire in 1674.  She was English
but of an age 300 years later than his, so there were many differences
in their attitudes and actions.  Burton did not give them much longer
to stay together.

Kazz was sprawled out on the deck with his head in the lap of Fatima, a
Turkish woman whom the Neanderthal had met forty days ago during a
lunch stop.  Fatima, as Frigate had said, seemed to be "hung up on
hair."  That was his explanation for the obsession of the
seventeenth-century wife of a baker of Ankara for Kazz.  She found
everything about him stimulating but it was the hairiness that sent her
into ecstasies.  Everybody was pleased about this, most of all Kazz. He
had not seen a single female of his own species during their long trip,
though he had heard about some.  Most women shied away from him because
of his hairy and brutish appearance.  He had had no permanent female
companionship until he met Fatima.

Little Lev Ruach was leaning against the forward bulkhead of the
fo'c'sle, where he was making a slingshot from the leather of a horn
fish  A bag by his side contained about thirty stones picked up during
the last twenty days.  By his side, talking swiftly, incessantly
exposing her long white teeth, was Esther Rodriguez.  She had replaced
Tanya, who had been henpecking Lev before the Hadji set off.  Tanya was
a very attractive and petite woman but she seemed unable to keep from
"remodeling' her men; Lev found out that she had "remodeled' her father
and uncle and two brothers and two husbands.  She tried to do the same
for, or to, Lev, usually in a loud voice so that other males in the
neighborhood could benefit by her advice.  One day, just as The Hadji
was about to sail, Lev had jumped aboard, turned, and said, "Goodbye,
Tanya.  I can't stand any more reforming from The Bigmouth from the
Bronx.  Find somebody else; somebody that's perfect."  Tanya had
gasped, turned white, and then started screaming at Lev.  She still was
screaming, judging by her mouth, long after The Hadji had sailed out of
earshot.  The others laughed and congratulated Lev, but he only smiled
sadly.  Two weeks later, in an area predominantly ancient Libyan, he
met Esther, a fifteenth-century Sephardic Jewess.

"Why don't you try your luck with a Gentile?"  Frigate had said.

Lev had shrugged his narrow shoulders.  "I have.  But sooner or later
you get into a big fight, and they lose their temper and call you a
goddam kike.  The same thing also happens with my Jewish women, but
from them I can take it."

"Listen, friend," the American said.  "There are billions of Gentiles
along this river who've never heard of a Jew.  They can't be
prejudiced.  Try one of them."

"I'll stick to the evil I know."

"You mean you're stuck to it," Frigate said.

Burton sometimes wondered why Ruach stayed with the boat.  He had never
made any more references to The Yew, The Gypsy, and El Islam, though he
often questioned Burton about other aspects of his past.  He was
friendly enough but had a certain indefinable reserve.  Though small,
he was a good man in a fight and he had been invaluable in teaching
Burton judo, karate, and jukado.  His sadness, which hung about him
like a thin mist even when he was laughing, or making love, according
to Tanya, came from mental scars.  These resulted from his terrible
experiences in concentration camps in Germany and Russia, or so he
claimed.  Tanya had said that Lev was born sad; he inherited all the
genes of sorrow from the time when his ancestors sat down by the
willows of Babylon.

Monat was another case of sadness, though he could come out of it fully
at times.  The Tau Cetan kept looking for one of his own kind, for one
of the thirty males and females who had bees torn apart by the lynch
mob.  He did not give himself much chance.  Thirty in an estimated
thirty-five to thirty-six billion strung out along a river that could
be ten million miles long made it improbable that he would ever see
even one.  But there was hope.

Alice Hargreaves was sitting forward of the fo'c'sle, only the top of
her head in his view, and looking at the people on the banks whenever
the boat got close enough for her to make out individual faces.  She
was searching for her husband, Reginald, and also for her three sons
and for her mother and father and her sisters and brothers.  For any
dear familiar face.  The implications were that she would leave the
boat as soon as this happened.  Burton had not commented on this.  But
he felt a pain in his chest when he thought of it.  He wished that she
would leave and yet he did not wish it.  To get her out of sight would
eventually be to get her out of his mind.  It was inevitable.  But he
did not want the inevitable.  He felt for her as he had for his Persian
love, and to lose her, too, would be to suffer the same long-lived
torture.

Yet he had never said a word about how he felt to her.  He talked to
her, jested with her, showed her a concern that he found galling
because she did not return it, and, in the end, got her to relax when
with him.  That is, she would relax if there were others around.  When
they were alone, she tightened up.

She had never used the dream gum since that first night.  He had used
it for a third time and then hoarded his share and traded it for other
items.  The last time he had chewed it, with the hope of an unusually
ecstatic lovemaking with Wilfreda, he had been plunged back into the
horrible sickness of the "little irons," the sickness that had almost
killed him during his expedition to Lake Tanganyika.  Speke had been in
the nightmare, and he had killed Speke.  Speke had died in a hunting
"accident' which everybody had thought was a suicide even if they had
not said so.  Speke, tormented by remorse because he had betrayed
Burton, had shot himself.  But in the nightmare, he had strangled Speke
when Speke bent over to ask him how he was.  Then, just as the vision
faded, he had kissed Speke's dead lips.

Well, he had known that he had loved Speke at the same time that he
hated him, justifiably hated him.  But the knowledge of his love had
been very fleeting and infrequent and it had not affected him.  During
the dream gum nightmare, he had felt so horrified at the realization
that love lay far beneath his hate that he had screamed.  He awakened
to find Wilfreda shaking him, demanding to know what had happened.
Wilfreda had smoked opium or drunk it in her beer when on Earth, but
here, after one session with dream gum she had been afraid to chew any
more.  Her horror came from seeing again the death of a younger sister
from tuberculosis and, at the same time, reliving her first experience
as a whore.

"It's a strange psychedelic," Ruach had told Burton.  He had explained
what the word meant.  The discussion about that had gone on for a long
time.  "It seems to bring up traumatic incidents in a mixture of
reality and symbolism.  Not always.  Sometimes it's an aphrodisiac.
Sometimes, as they said, it takes you on a beautiful trip.  But I would
guess that dream gum has been provided us for therapeutic, if not
cathartic, reasons.  It's up to us to find out just how to use it."

"Why don't you chew it more often?"  Frigate had said.

"For the same reason that some people refused to go into psychotherapy
or quit before they were through; I'm afraid."

"Yeah, me, too," Frigate said.  "But some day, when we stop off some
place for a long time, I'm going to chew a suck every night, so help
me.  Even if it scares hell out of me.  Of course, that's easy to say
now."  Peter Jairus Frigate had been born only twenty-eight years after
Burton had died; yet the world between them was wide.  They saw so many
things so differently; they would have argued violently if Frigate was
able to argue violently.  Not on matters of discipline in the group or
in running the boat.  But on so many matters of looking at the world.

Yet, in many ways, Frigate was much like Burton, and it may have been
this that had caused him to be so fascinated by Burton on Earth.
Frigate had picked up in 1938 a soft-cover book by Fairfax Downey
titled Burton: Arabian Nights' Adventurer.  The front page illustration
was of Burton at the age of fifty, The savage fate; the high brow and
prominent supraorbital ridges, the heavy black brows, the straight but
harsh nose, the great scar on his cheek, the thick "sensual' lips, the
heavy down drooping moustache, the heavy forked beard, the essential
brooding ness and aggressiveness of the face, had caused him to buy the
book.

"I'd never heard of you before, Dick," Frigate said.  "But I read the
book at once and was fascinated.  There was something about you, aside
from the obvious daring-do of your life, your swordsmanship, mastery of
many languages, disguises as a native doctor, native merchantman, as a
pilgrim to Mecca, the first European to get out of the sacred city of
Harar alive, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika and near-discoverer of the
source of the Nile, co-founder of the Royal Anthropological Society,
inventor of the term ESP, translator of the Arabian Nights, student of
the sexual practices of the East, and so forth... "Aside from all this,
fascinating enough in itself, you had a special affinity for me.  I
went to the public library Peoria was a small city but had many books
on you and about you, donated by some admirer of yours who'd passed on
and I read these.  Then I started to collect first editions by you and
about you.  I became a fiction writer eventually, but I planned to
write a huge definitive biography of you, travel everywhere you had
been, take photographs and notes of these places, found a society to
collect funds for the preservation of your tomb..."

This was the first time Frigate had mentioned his tomb.  Burton,
startled, said, "Where?"  Then, "Oh, of course!  Mortlake!  I'd
forgotten!  Was the tomb really in the form of an Arab tent, as Isabel
and I had planned?"

"Sure.  But the cemetery was swallowed up in a slum, the tomb was
defaced by vandals, there were weeds up to your focus and talk of
moving the bodies to a more remote section of England, though by then
it was hard to find a really remote section."

"And did you found your society and preserve my tomb?"  Burton said.

He had gotten used to the idea by then of having been dead, but to talk
with someone who had seen his tomb made his skin chill for a moment.

Frigate took a deep breath.  Apologetically, he said, "No.  By the time
I was in a position to do that, I would have felt guilty spending time
and money on the dead.  The world was in too much of a mess.  The
living needed all the attention they could get.  Pollution, poverty,
oppression, and so forth.  These were the important things."

"And that giant definitive biography?"

Again, Frigate spoke apologetically.  "When I first read about you, I
thought I was the only one deeply interested in you or even aware of
you.  But there was an upsurge of interest in you in the '60's.  Quite
a few books were written about you and even one about your wife."

"Isabel?  Someone wrote a book about her?  Why?"

Frigate had grinned.  "She was a pretty interesting woman.  Very
aggravating, I'll admit, pitifully superstitious and schizophrenic and
self-fooling.  Very few would ever forgive her for burning your
manuscripts and your journals..."

"What?"  Burton had roared.  "Burn .. .?"

Frigate nodded and said, "What your doctor, Grenfell Baker, described
as "the ruthless holocaust that followed his lamented death."  She
burned your translation of The Perfumed Garden, claiming you would not
have wanted to publish it unless you needed the money for it, and you
didn't need it, of course, because you were now dead."  Burton was
speechless for one of the few times in his life.

Frigate looked out of the corner of his eyes at Burton, and grinned. He
seemed to be enjoying Burton's distress.

"Burning The Perfumed Garden wasn't so bad, though bad enough.  But to
burn both sets of your journals, the private ones in which, supposedly,
you let loose all your deepest thoughts and most bunting hates, and
even the public ones, the diary of daily events, well, I never forgave
her!  Neither did a lot of people.  That was a great loss; only one of
your notebooks, a small one, escaped, and that was burned during the
bombing of London in World War IL' He paused and said, "Is it true that
you converted to the Catholic Church on your deathbed, as your wife
claimed?"

"I may have," Burton said.  "Isabel had been after me for years to
convert, though she never dared urge me directly.  When I was so sick
there, at the last, I may have told her I would do so in order to make
her happy.  She was so grief-stricken, so distressed, so afraid my soul
would burn in Hell."

"Then you did love her?"  Frigate had said.

"I Would have done the same for a dog," Burton replied.

"For somebody who can be so upset tingly frank and direct you can be
very ambiguous at times."  This conversation had taken place about two
months after First Day, A.R. 1. The result had been something like that
which Doctor Johnson would have felt on encountering another Boswell.

This had been the second stage of their curious relationship.  Frigate
became closer but at the same time, more of an annoyance.  The American
had always been restrained in his comments on Burton's attitudes,
undoubtedly because he did not want to anger him.  Frigate made a very
conscious effort not to anger anybody.  But he also made unconscious
efforts to antagonize them.  His hostilities came out in many subtle,
and some not so subtle, actions and words.  Burton did not like this.
He was direct, not at all afraid of anger.  Perhaps, as Frigate pointed
out, he was too eager for hostile confrontations.

One evening, as they were sitting around a fire under a grail stone
Frigate had spoken about Karachi.  This village, which later became the
capital of Pakistan, the nation created in 1947, had only 2,000
population in Burton's time.  By 1970, its population was approximately
2,000,000.  That led to Frigate's asking, rather indirectly, about the
report Burton had made to his general, Sir Robert Napier, on houses of
male prostitution in Karachi.  The report was supposed to be kept in
the secret files of the East India Army, but it was found by one of the
many enemies of Burton.  Though the report was never mentioned
publicly, it had been used against him throughout his life.  Burton had
disguised himself as a native in order to get into the house and make
observations that no European would have been allowed to make.  He had
been proud that he had escaped detection, and he had taken the unsavory
job because he was the only one who could do it and because his beloved
leader, Napier, had asked him to.

Burton had replied to Frigate's questions somewhat surlily.  Alice had
angered him earlier that day she seemed to be able to do so very easily
lately and he was thinking of a way to anger her.  Now he seized upon
the opportunity given him by Frigate.  He launched into an uninhibited
account of what went on in the Karachi houses.  Ruach finally got up
and walked away.  Frigate looked as if he were sick, but he stayed.
Wilfreda laughed until she rolled on the ground.  Kazz and Monat kept
stolid expressions.  Gwenafra was sleeping on the boat, so Burton did
not have to take her into account.  Loghu seemed to be fascinated but
also slightly-repulsed.

Alice, his main target, turned pale and then, later, red.  Finally, she
rose and said, "Really, Mr.  Burton, I had thought you were low before.
But to brag of this ... this ... you are utterly contemptible,
degenerate, and repulsive.  Not that I believe a word of what you've
been telling me.  I can't believe that anybody would behave as you
claim you did and then boast about it.  You are living up to your
reputation as a man who likes to shock others no matter what damage it
does to his own reputation."  She had walked off into the darkness.

Frigate had said, "Sometime, maybe, you will tell me how much of that
is true.  I used to think as she did.  But when I got older, more
evidence about you was turned up, and one biographer made a
psychoanalysis of you based on your own writing and various documentary
sources."

"And the conclusions?"  Burton said mockingly.

"Later, Dick," Frigate said.  "Ruffian Dick," he added, and he, too,
left.

Now, standing at the tiller, watching the sun beat down on the group,
listening to the hissing of water cut by the two sharp prows, and the
creaking of rigging, he wondered what lay ahead on the other side of
the canyon-like channel.  Not the end of The River, surely.  That would
probably go on forever.  But the end of the group might be near.  They
had been cooped up too long together.  Too many days had been spent on
the narrow deck with too little to do except talk or help sail the
ship.  They were rubbing each other raw and had been doing it for a
long time.  Even Wilfreda had been quiet and unresponsive lately.  Not
that he had been too stimulating.  Frankly, he was tired of her.  He
did not hate her or wish her any ill.  He was just tired of her, and
the fact that he could have her and not have Alice Hargreaves made him
even more tired of her.

Lev Ruach was staying away from him or speaking as little as possible,
and Lev was arguing even more with Esther about his dietary habits and
his daydreaming and why didn't he ever talk to her?

Frigate was mad at him about something.  But Frigate would never come
out and say anything, the coward, until he was driven into a corner and
tormented into a mindless rage.  Loghu was angry and scornful of
Frigate because he was as sullen with her as with the others.  Loghu
was also angry with him, Burton, because he had turned her down when
they had been alone gathering bamboo in the hills several weeks ago. He
had told her no, adding that he had no moral scruples, against making
love to her, but that he would not betray Frigate or any other member
of the crew.  Loghu said that it was not that she did not love Frigate;
it was just that she needed a change now and then.  Just as Frigate
did.

Alice had said that she was about to give up hope of ever seeing
anybody she knew again.  They must have passed an estimated 44,370,000
people, at least, and not once had she seen anybody she had known on
Earth.  She had seen some that she had mistaken for old acquaintances.
And she admitted that she had only seen a small percentage of the
44,370,000 at close range or even at far range.  But that did not
matter.  She was getting abysmally depressed and weary of sitting on
this cramped foredeck all day with her only exercise handling the
tiller or the rigging or opening and closing her lips with
conversation, most of it inane.

Burton did not want to admit it, but he was afraid that she might
leave.  She might just get off at the next stop, walk off onto the
shore with her grail and few belongings, and say goodbye.  See you in a
hundred years or so.  Perhaps.  The chief thing keeping her on the boat
so far had been Gwenafra.  She was raising the little ancient Briton as
a Victorian-lady-cum-post-Resurrection-mores-child.  This was a most
curious mixture, but not any more curious than anything else along The
River.

Burton himself was weary of the eternal voyaging on the little vessel.
He wanted to find some hospitable area and settle down there to rest,
then to study, to engage in local activities, to get his land legs
back, and allow the drive to get out and away to build up again.  But
he wanted to do it with Alice as his hut mate

"The fortune of the man who sits also sits," he muttered.  He would
have to take action with Alice; he had been a gentleman long enough. He
would woo her; he would take her by storm He had been an aggressive
lover when a young man, then he had gotten used to being the loved, not
the lover, after he got married.  And his old habit patterns, old
neural circuits, were still with him.  He was an old person in a new
body.

The Hadji entered the dark and turbulent channel.  The blue-black rock
walls rose on both sides and the boat went down a curve and the broad
lake behind was lost.  Everybody was busy then, jumping to handle the
sails as Burton took The Hadji back and forth in the quarter-mile wide
stream, and against a current that raised high waves.  The boat rose
and dipped sharply and heeled far over when they changed course
abruptly.  It often came within a few feet of the canyon walls, where
the waves slapped massively against the rock.  But he had been sailing
the boat so long that he had become a part of it, and his crew had
worked with him so long that they could anticipate his orders, though
they never acted ahead of them.

The passage took about thirty minutes.  It caused anxiety in some no
doubt of Frigate and Ruach being worried but it also exhilarated all of
them.  The boredom and the sullenness were, temporarily, at least,
gone.

The Hadji came out into the sunshine of another lake.  This was about
four miles wide and stretched northward as far as they could see.  The
mountains abruptly fell away; the plains on both sides resumed the
usual mile width.

There were fifty or so craft in view, ranging from pine dugouts to
two-masted bamboo boats.  Most of them seemed to be engaged in fishing.
To the left, a mile away, was the ubiquitous grail stone and along the
shore were dark figures.  Behind them, on the plain and hills, were
bamboo-huts in the usual style of what Frigate called Neo-Polynesian
or, sometimes, Post-Mortem Riparian Architecture.

On the right, about half a mile from the exit of the canyon, was a
large log fort.  Before it were ten massive log docks with a variety of
large and small boats.  A few minutes after The Hadji appeared, drums
began beating.  These could be hollow logs or drums made with tanned
fishskin or human skin.  There was already a crowd in front of the
fort, but a large number swarmed out of it and from a collection of
huts behind it.  They piled into the boats, and these cast off.

On the left bank, the dark figures were launching dugouts, canoes, and
single-malted boats.

It looked as if both shores were sending boats out in a competition to
seize The Hadji first.  Burton took the boat back and forth as
required, cutting in between the other boats several times.  The men on
the right were closer; they were white and well armed but they made no
effort to use their bows.  A man standing in the prow of war canoe with
thirty paddlers shouted at them, in German, to surrender.

"You will not be harmed!"

"We come in peace!"  Frigate bawled at him.

"He knows that!"  Burton said.  "It's evident that we few aren't going
to attack them!"  Drums were beating on both sides of The River now. It
sounded as if the lake shores were alive with drums.  And the shores
were certainly alive with men, all armed.  Other boats were being put
out to intercept them.  Behind them, the boats that had first gone out
were pursuing but losing distance.

Burton hesitated.  Should he bring The Hadji on around and go back
through the channel and then return at night?  It would be a dangerous
maneuver, because the 20,000-foot high walls would block out the light
from the blazing stars and gas sheets.  They would be almost blind.

And this craft did seem to be faster than anything the enemy had.  So
far, that is.  Far in the distance, tall sails were coming swiftly
toward him.  Still, they had the wind and current behind them, and if
he avoided them, could they outstrip him when they, too, had to tack?
All the vessels he had seen so far had been loaded with men, thus
slowing them down.  Even a boat that had the same potentialities as The
Hadji would not keep up with her if she were loaded with warriors.

He decided to keep on running UpRiver.

Ten minutes later, as he was running close-hauled, another large war
canoe cut across his path.  This held sixteen paddlers on each side and
supported a small deck in the bow and the stern.  Two men stood on each
deck beside a catapult mounted on a wooden pedestal.  The two in the
bow placed a round object which sputtered smoke in the pocket of the
catapult.  One pulled the catch, and the arm of the machine banged
against the crossbeam.  The canoe shuddered, and there was a slight
halt in the deep rhythmic grunting of the paddlers.  The smoking object
flew in a high arc until it was about twenty feet in front of The Hadji
and tea feet above the water.  It exploded with a loud noise and much
black smoke, quickly cleared away by the breeze.

Some of the women screamed, and a man shouted.  He thought, there is
sulfur in this area.  Otherwise, they would not have been able to make
gunpowder.  He called to Loghu and Esther Rodriguez to take over at the
tiller.  Both women were pale, but they seemed calm enough, although
neither woman had ever experienced a bomb.

Gwenafra had been put inside the fo'c'sle.  Alice had a yew bow in her
hand and a quiver of arrows strapped to her back.  Her pale skin
contrasted shockingly with the red lipstick and the green
eyelid-makeup.  But she had been through at least ten running battles
on the water, and her nerves were as steady as the chalk cliffs of
Dover.  Moreover, she was the best archer of the lot.  Burton was a
superb marksman with a firearm but he lacked practice with the bow.
Kazz could draw the river dragon horn bow even deeper than Burton, but
his marksmanship was abominable.  Frigate claimed it would never be
very good; like most preliterates, he lacked a development of the sense
of perspective.

The catapult men did not fit another bomb to the machine, Evidently;
the bomb had been a warning to stop.  Burton intended to stop for
nothing.  Their pursuers could have shot them full of arrows several
times.  That they had refrained meant that they wanted The Hadji crew
alive.

The canoe, water boiling from its prow, paddles flashing in the sun,
paddlers grunting in unison, passed closely to the stern of The Hadji.
The two men on the foredeck leaped outward, and the canoe rocked.  One
man splashed into the water, his fingertips striking the edge of the
deck.  The other landed on his knees on the edge.  He gripped a bamboo
knife between his teeth; his belt held two sheaths, one with a small
stone axe and the other with a horn fish stiletto.  For a second, as he
tried to grab onto the wet planking and pull himself up, he stared
upward into Burton's eyes.  His hair was a rich yellow, his eyes were a
pale blue, and his face was classically handsome.  His intention was
probably to wound one or two of the crew and then to dive off, maybe
with a woman in his arms.  While he kept The Hadji crew busy, his
fellows would sail up and engage The Hadji and pour aboard, and that
would be that.

He did not have much chance of carrying out his plan, probably knew it,
and did not care.  Most men still feared death because the fear was in
the cells of their bodies, and they reacted instinctively.  A few had
overcome their fear, and others had never really felt it.

Burton stepped up and banged the man on the side of the head with his
axe.  The man's mouth opened; the bamboo knife fell out; he collapsed
face down on the deck.  Burton picked up the knife, untied the man's
belt, and shoved him off into the water with his foot.  At that, a roar
came from the men in the war canoe which was turning around.  Burton
saw that the shore was coming up fast, and he gave orders to tack.  The
vessel swung around, and the boom swung by.  Then they were beating
across The River, with a dozen boats speeding toward them.  Three were
four-man dugouts, four were big war canoes and five were two-masted
schooners.  The latter held a number of catapults and many men on the
decks.

Halfway across the River, Burton ordered The Hadji swung around again.
The maneuver allowed the sail ships to get much closer, but he had
calculated for that.  Now, sailing close-hauled again, The Hadji cut
water between the two schooners.  They were so close that he could
clearly see the features of all aboard both craft.  They were mostly
Caucasian, though they ranged from very dark to Nordic pale.  The
captain of the boat on the portside shouted in German at Burton,
demanding that he surrender.

"We will not harm you -if you give up, but we will torture you if you
continue to fight!"  He spoke German with an accent that sounded
Hungarian.

For reply, Burton and Alice shot arrows.  Alice's shaft missed the
captain but hit the helmsman, and he staggered back and fell over the
railing.  The craft immediately veered.  The captain sprang to the
wheel, and Burton's second shaft went through the back of his knee.

Both schooners struck slantingly with a great crash and shot off with
much tearing up of timbers, men screaming and falling onto the decks or
falling overboard.  Even if the boats did not sink, they would be out
of action.

But just before they hit, their archers had put a dozen flaming arrows
into the bamboo sails of The Hadji.  The shafts car tied dry grass,
which had been soaked with turpentine made from pine resin, and these,
fanned by the wind, spread the flames quickly.

Burton took the tiller back from the women and shouted orders.  The
crew dipped fired-clay vessels and their open grails into The River and
then threw the water on the, flames.  Loghu, who could climb like a
monkey, went up the mast with a rope around her shoulder.  She let the
rope down and pulled up the containers of water.

This permitted the other schooners and several canoes to draw close.
One on a course which would put it directly in the path of The Hadji.
Burton swung the boat around again, but it was sluggish because of
Loghu's weight on the mast.  It wheeled around, the boom swung wildly
as the men failed to keep control of its ropes, and more arrows struck
the sail and spread more fire.  Several arrows thanked into the deck.
For a moment, Burton thought that the enemy had changed his mind and
was trying to down them.  But the arrows were just misdirected.

Again, The Hadji sliced between two schooners.  The captains and the
crew of both were grinning.  Perhaps they had been bored for a long
tine and were enjoying the pursuit.  Even so, the crews ducked behind
the railings, leaving the officers, helmsmen, and the archers to
receive the fire from The Hadji.  There was a strumming, and dark
streaks with red heads and blue tails went halfway through the sails in
two dozen places, a number drove into the mast or the boom, a dozen
hissed into the water, one shot by Burton a few inches from his head.

Alice, Ruach, Kazz, de Greystock, Wilfreda, and he had shot while
Esther handled the tiller.  Loghu was frozen halfway up the mast,
waiting until the arrow fire quit.  The five arrows found three targets
of flesh, a captain, a helmsman, and a sailor who stuck his head up at
the wrong time for him.

Esther screamed, and Burton spun.  The war canoe had come out from
behind the schooner and was a few feet in front of The Hadji's bow.
There was no way to avoid a collision.  The two men on the platform
were diving off the side, and the paddlers were standing up or trying
to stand up so they could get overboard.  Then the Hadji smashed into
its port near the bow, cracking it open, turning it over, and spilling
its crew into The River.  Those on the Hadji were thrown forward, and
de Greystock went into the water.  Burton slid on his face and chest
and knees, burning off the skin.

Esther had been torn from the tiller and rolled across the deck until
she thumped against the edge of the fo'c'sle coaming.  She lay there
without moving.

Burton looked upward.  The sail was blazing away beyond hope of being
saved.  Loghu was gone, so she must have been hurled off at the moment
of impact.  Then, getting up, he saw her and de Greystock swimming back
to The Hadji.  The water around them was boiling with the splashing of
the dispossessed canoe men many of whom, judging by their cries, could
not swim.  Burton called to the men to help the two aboard while he
inspected the damage.  Both prows of the very thin twin hulls had been
smashed open by the crash.  Water was pouring inside.  And the smoke
from the burning sail and mast was curling around them, causing Alice
and Gwenafra to cough.

Another war canoe was approaching swiftly from the north; the two
schooners were sailing close-hauled toward them.

They could fight and draw some blood from their enemies, who would be
holding themselves back to keep from killing them or they could swim
for it.  Either way, they would be captured.  Loghu and de Greystock
were pulled aboard.  Frigate reported that Esther could not be brought
back to consciousness.  Ruach felt her pulse and opened her eyes and
then walked back to Burton.

"She's not dead, but she's totally out' Burton said, "You women know
what will happen to you.  It's up to you, of course, but I suggest you
swim down as deeply as you can and draw in a good breath of water.
You'll wake up tomorrow, good as new."

Gwenafra had come out from the fo'c'sle.  She wrapped her arms round
his waist and looked up, dry-eyed but scared.  He hugged her with one
arm and then said, "Alice!  Take her with you!"

"Where?"  Alice said.  She looked at the canoe and back at him.  She
coughed again as more smoke wrapped around her and then she moved
forward, upwind.

"When you go down."  He gestured at The River."

"I can't do that," she said.

"You wouldn't want those men to get her, too.  She's only a little girl
but they'll not stop for that'

Alice looked as if her face was going to crumple and wash away with
tears.  But she did not weep.  She said, "Very well.  It's no sin now,
killing yourself.  I just hope..."

He said, "Yes."  He did not drawl the word; there was no time to drawl
anything out.  The canoe was within forty feet of them.

"The next place might be just as bad or worse than this one," Alice
said.  "And Gwenafra will wake up all alone.  You know that the chances
of us being resurrected at the same place are slight."

"That can't be helped," he said.

She clamped her lips, then opened them and said, "I'll fight until the
last moment.  Then.."

"It may be too late," he said.  He picked up his bow and drew an arrow
from his quiver.  De Greystock had lost his bow, so he took Kazz's. The
Neanderthal placed a stone in a sling and began whirling it.  Lev
picked up his sling and chose a stone for its pocket.  Monat used
Esther's bow, since he had lost his, also.

The captain of the canoe shouted in German, "Lay down your arms!  You
won't be harmed!"  He fell off the platform onto a paddler a second
later as Alice's arrow went through his chest.  Another arrow, probably
de Greystock's, spun the second man off the platform and into the
water.  A stone hit a paddler in the shoulder, and he collapsed with a
cry.  Another stone struck glancingly off another paddler's head, and
he lost his paddle.

The canoe kept on coming.  The two men on the aft platform urged the
crew to continue driving toward The Hadji.  Then they fell with arrows
in them.  Burton looked behind him.  The two schooners were letting
their sails drop now.  Evidently they would slide on up to The Hadji
where the sailors would throw their grappling hooks into it.  But if
they got too close, the flames might spread to them.

The canoe rammed into The Hadji with fourteen of the original
complement dead or too wounded to fight.  Just before the canoe's prow
hit, the survivors dropped their paddles and raised small round leather
shields.  Even so, two arrows went through two shields and into the
arms of the men holding them.  That still left twenty men against six
men, five women, and a child.  But one was a five-foot high hairy man
with tremendous strength and a big stone axe.  Kazz jumped into the air
just before the canoe rammed the starboard hull and came down in it a
second after it had halted.  His axe crushed two skulls and then drove
through the bottom of the canoe.  Water poured in, and de Greystock,
shouting something in his Cumberland Middle English, leaped down beside
Kazz.  He held a stiletto in one hand and a big oak club with flint
spikes in the other.

The others on The Hadji continued to shoot their arrows.  Suddenly,
Kazz and de Greystock were scrambling back onto the catamaran and the
canoe was sinking with its dead, dying, and its scared survivors.  A
number drowned; the others either swam away or tried to get aboard The
Hadji.  These fell back with their fingers chopped off or stamped
flat.

Something struck on the deck near him and then something else coiled
around him.  Burton spun and slashed at the leather rope, which had
settled around his neck.  He leaped to one side to avoid another,
yanked savagely at a third rope, and pulled the man on the other end
over the railing.  The man, screaming, pitched out and struck the deck
of The Hadji with his shoulder.  Burton smashed in his face with his
axe.

By now men were dropping from the decks of both schooners and ropes
were falling everywhere.  The smoke and the flames added to the
confusion, though they may have helped The Hadji's crew more than the
boarders.

Burton shouted at Alice to get Gwenafra and jump into The River.  He
could not find her and then had to parry the thrust of a big black with
a spear.  The man seemed to have forgotten any orders to capture
Burton; he looked as if he meant to kill.  Burton knocked the short
spear aside and whirled, lashing out as he went by with the axe and
smashed its edge against the black's neck.  Burton continued to whirl,
felt a sharp pain in his ribs, another in his shoulder, but knocked two
men down and then was in the water.  He fell between the schooner and
The Hadji, went down, released the axe, and pulled the stiletto from
its sheath.  When he came up, he was looking up at a tall, raw boned,
redheaded man who was lifting the screaming Gwenafra above him with
both hands.  The man pitched her far out into the water.

Burton dived again and coming up saw Gwenafra's face only a few feet
before him.  It was gray, and her eyes were dull.  Then he saw the
blood darkening the water around her.  She disappeared before he could
get to her.  He dived down after her, caught her and pulled her back
up.  A horn fish tip was stuck into her back.

He let her body go.  He did not know why the man had killed her when he
could have easily taken her prisoner.  Perhaps Alice had stabbed her
and the man had figured that she was as good as dead and so had tossed
her over the side to the fishes.

A body shot out of the smoke, followed by another.  One man was dead
with a broken neck; the other was alive.  Burton wrapped his arm around
the man's neck and stabbed him at the juncture of jaw and ear.  The man
quit struggling and slipped down into the depths.

Frigate leaped out from the smoke, his face and shoulders bloody.  He
hit the water at a slant and dived deep.  Burton swam toward him to
help him.  There was no use even trying to get back on the craft.  It
was solid with struggling bodies, and other canoes and dugouts were
closing in.

Frigate's head rose out of the water.  His skin was white where the
blood was not pumping out over it.  Burton swam to him and said, "Did
the women get away?"

Frigate shook his head and then said, "Watch out!"  Burton upended to
dive down.  Something hit his legs; he kept on going down, but he could
not carry out his intention of breathing in the water.  He would fight
until they had to kill him.

On coming up, he saw that the water was alive with men who had jumped
in after him and Frigate.  The American, half-conscious, was being
towed to a canoe.  Three men closed in on Burton, and he stabbed two
and then a man in a dugout reached down with a club and banged him on
the head.

They were led ashore near a large building behind a wall of pine logs.
Burton's head throbbed with pain at every step.  The gashes in his
shoulder and ribs hurt, but they had quit bleeding.  The fortress was
built of pine logs, had an overhanging second story, and many
sentinels.  The captives were marched through an entrance that could be
closed with a huge log gate.  They marched across sixty feet of
grass-covered yard and through another large gateway into a hall about
fifty feet long and thirty wide.  Except for Frigate, who was too weak,
they stood before a large round table of oak.  They blinked in the dark
and cool interior before they could clearly see the two men at the
table.

Guards with spears, clubs, and stone axes were everywhere.  A wooden
staircase at one end of the hall led up to a runway with high railings.
Women looked over the railings at them.

One of the men at the table was short and muscular.  He had a hairy
body, black curly hair, a nose like a falcon's, and brown eyes as
fierce as a falcon's.  The second man was taller, had blond hair, eyes
the exact color of which was difficult to tell in the dusky light but
were probably blue, and a broad Teutonic face.  A paunch and the
beginnings of jowls told of the food and liquor he had taken from the
grails of slaves.

Frigate had sat down on the grass, but he was pulled up to his feet
when the blond gave a signal.  Frigate looked at the blond and said,
"You look like Hermann Goring when he was young."  Then he dropped to
his knees, screaming with pain from the impact of a spear butt over his
kidneys.

The blond spoke in an English with a heavy German accent.  "No more of
that unless I order it.  Let them talk."  He scrutinized them for
several minutes, then said, "Yes, I am Hermann Goring."

"Who is Goring?"  Burton said.

"Your friend can tell you later," the German said.  "If there is a
later for you.  I am not angry about the splendid fight you put up.  I
admire men who can fight well.  I can always use more spears,
especially since you killed so many.  I offer you a choice.  You men,
that is.  Join me and live well with all the food, liquor, tobacco; and
women you can possibly want, or work for me as my slaves."

"For us," the other man said in English.  "You forget, Hermann, dat I
have gust as muck to say about disc as you."  Goring smiled, chuckled,
and said, "Of course I was only using the royal I, you might..  say.
Very well, we.  If you swear to serve us, and it will be far better for
you if you do, you will swear loyalty to me, Hermann Goring and to the
one-time king of ancient Rome, Tullius Hostilius."  Burton looked
closely at the man.  Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient
Rome?  Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by the other
Italic tribes, the Sabines, Aequi, and Volsci?  Who, in turn, were
being pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful
Etruscans?  Was this really Tullius Hostilius, warlike successor to the
peaceful Numa Pompilius?  There was nothing to distinguish him from a
thousand men whom Burton had seen on the streets of Siena.  Yet, if he
was what he claimed to be, he could be a treasure trove, historically
and linguistically speaking.  He would, since he was probably Etruscan
himself, know that language, in addition to pre-Classical Latin, and
Sabine, and perhaps Campanian Greek.  He might even have been
acquainted with Romulus, supposed founder of Roma.  What stories that
man could tell!

"Well?"  Goring said.

"What do we have to do if we join you?"  Burton said.

"First, I .. . we .. . have to make sure that you are the caliber of
man we want.  In other words, a man who will unhesitatingly and
immediately do anything that we order.  We will give you a little
test."  He gave an order and a minute later, a group of men was brought
forward.  All were gaunt, and all were crippled.

"They were injured while quarrying stone or building our walls," Goring
said.  "Except for two caught while trying to escape.  They will have
to pay the penalty.  All will be killed because they are now useless.
So, you should not hesitate about killing them to show your
determination to serve us."  He added, "Besides, they are all Jews. Why
worry about them?"  Campbell, the redhead who had thrown Gwenafra into
the River, held out to Burton a large club studded with chert blades. 
Two guards seized a slave and forced him to his knees.

He was a large blond with blue eyes and a Grecian profile; he glared at
Goring and then spat at him.

Goring laughed.  "He has all the arrogance of his race.  I could reduce
him to a quivering screaming mass begging for death if I wanted to. But
I do not really care for torture.  My compatriot would like to give him
a taste of the fire, but I am essentially a humanitarian."

"I will kill in defense of my life or in defense of those who need
protection," Burton said.  "But I am not a murderer."

"Killing this Jew would be an act in defense of your life," Goring
replied.  "If you do not, you will die anyway.  Only it will take you a
long time."

"I will not," Burton said.

Goring sighed.  "You English!  Well, I would rather have you on my
side.  But if you don't want to do the rational thing, so be it.  What
about you?"  he said to Frigate.

Frigate, who was still in agony, said, "Your ashes ended in a trash
heap in Dachau because of what you did and what you were.  Are you
going to repeat the same criminal acts on this world?"  Goring laughed
and said, "I know what happened to me.  Enough of my Jewish slaves have
told me."  He pointed at Monat.  "What kind of a freak is that?" Burton
explained.  Goring looked grave, then said, "I couldn't trust him.  He
goes into the slave camp.  You, there, ape man  What do you say?"

Kazz, to Burton's surprise, stepped forward.  "I kill for you.  I don't
want to be slave."  He took the club while the guards held their spears
poised to run him through if he had other ideas for using it.  He
glared at them from under his shelving brows, then raised the club.
There was a crack, and the slave pitched forward on the dirt.  Kazz
returned the club to Campbell and stepped aside.  He did not look at
Burton.

Goring said, "All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will
be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away.  The
escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery.  My
distinguished colleague will personally handle the club.  He likes that
sort of thing."

He pointed at Alice.  "That one.  I'll take her."  Tullius stood up.
"No, no.  I like her.  You take de oilers; Hermann.  I giw you hot' off
dem.  But sye, I want her wery muck.  Sye look like, what you say,
aristocrat.  A .. . queen?"  Burton roared, snatched a club from
Campbell's hand, and leaped upon the table.  Goring fell backward, the
tip of the club narrowly missing his nose.  At the same time, the Roman
thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder.  Burton kept
hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius'
hand.

The slaves, shouting, threw themselves upon the guards.  Frigate jerked
a spear loose and brought the butt of it against Kazz's head.  Kazz
crumpled.  Monat kicked a guard in the groin and picked up his spear.

Burton did not remember anything after that.  He awoke several hours
before dusk.  His head hurt worse than before.  His ribs and both
shoulders were stiff with pain.  He was lying on grass in a pine log
enclosure with a diameter of about fifty yards.  Fifteen feet above the
grass, circling the interior of the wall, was a wooden walk on which
armed guards paced.

He groaned when he sat up.  Frigate, squatting near him, said, "I was
afraid you'd never come out of it' "Where are the women?"  Burton
said.

Frigate began to weep.

Burton shook his head and said, "Quit blubbering.  Where are they?"

"Where the hell do you think they are?"  Frigate said.  "Oh, my God!"

"Don't think about the women.  There's nothing you can do for them. Not
now, anyway.  Why wasn't I killed after I attacked Goring?"

Frigate wiped away the tears and said, "Beats me.  Maybe they're saving
you, and me, for the fire.  As an example.  I wish they had killed
us."

"What, so recently gained paradise and wish so soon to lose it?" 
Burton said.  He began to laugh but quit because pains speared his
head.

Burton talked to Robert Spruce, an Englishman born in 1945 in
Kensington.  Spruce said that it was less than a month since Goring and
Tullius had seized power.  For the time being, they were leaving their
neighbors in peace.  Eventually, of course, they would try to conquer
the adjacent territories, including the Onondaga Indians across the
River.  So far, no slave had escaped to spread word about Goring's
intentions.

"But the people on the borders can see for themselves that the walls
are being built by slaves," Burton said.

Spruce grinned wryly and said, "Goring has spread the word that these
are all Jews.  That he is only interested in enslaving Jews.  So, what
do they care?  As you can see for yourself, that is not true.  Half of
the slaves are Gentile."  At dusk, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, de
Greystoke, and Monat were taken from she stockade and marched down to a
grail rock  There were about two hundred slaves there, guarded by about
seventy Goringites.  Their grails were placed on the rock, and they
waited.  After the blue flames roared, the grails were taken down. Each
slave opened his, and guards removed the tobacco, liquor, and half of
the food.

Frigate had gashes in his head and in his shoulder, which needed sewing
up, though the bleeding had stopped.  His color had much improved,
though his back and kidneys pained him.

"So now we're slaves," Frigate said.  "Dick, you thought quite a lot of
the institution of slavery.  What do you think of it now?"

"That was Oriental slavery," Burton said.  "In this type of slavery,
there's no chance for a slave to gain his freedom.  Nor is there any
personal feeling, except hatred, between slave and owner.  In the
Orient, the situation was different.  Of course, like any human
institution, it had its abuses."

"You're a stubborn man," Frigate said.  "Have you noticed that at least
half the slaves are Jews?  Late twentieth-century Israeli, most of
them.  That girl over there told me that Goring managed to start
grail-slavery by stirring up anti-Semitism in this area.  Of course, it
had to exist before it could be aroused.  Then, after he had gotten
into power with Tullius' aid, he enslaved many of his former
supporters."  He continued, "The hell of it is, Goring is not,
relatively speaking, a genuine anti-Semite.  He personally intervened
with Himmler and others to save Jews.  But he is something even worse
than a genuine Jew-hater.  He is an opportunist.  Anti-Semitism was a
tidal wave in Germany; to get any place, you had to ride the wave.  So,
Goring rode there, just as he rode here.  An anti-Semite such as
Goebbels or Frank believed in the principles they professed.  Perverted
and hateful principles, true, but still principles.  Whereas big fat
happy-go-lucky Goring did not really care one way or the other about
the Jews.  He just wanted to use them."

"All very well," Burton said, "but what has that got to do with me? 
Oh, I see!  That look!  You are getting ready to lecture me."

"Dick, I admire you as I have admired few men.  I love you as one man
loves another.  I am as happy and delighted to have had the singular
good luck to fall in with you as, say, Plutarch would be if he had met
Alcibiades or Theseus.  But I am not blind.  I know your faults, which
are many, and I regret them."

"Just which one is it this time?"  "That book.  The Jew, The Gypsy, and
El Islam.  How could you have written it?  A hate document full of
bloody-minded nonsense, folk tales, and superstitions!  Ritual murders,
indeed!"

"I was still angry because of the injustices I had suffered at
Damascus.  To be expelled from the consulate because of the lies of my
enemies, among whom..."  "That doesn't excuse your writing lies about a
whole group," Frigate said.

"Lies!  I wrote the truth!"

"You may have thought they were truths.  But I come from an age which
definitely knows that they were not.  In fact, no one in his right mind
in your time would have believed that crap!"

"The facts are," Burton said, "that the Jewish moneylenders in Damascus
were charging the poor a thousand percent interest on their loans.  The
facts are that they were inflicting this monstrous usury not only on
the Moslem and Christian populace but also on their own people.  The
facts are, that when my enemies in England accused me of anti-Semitism,
many Jews in Damascus came to my defense.  It is a fact that I
protested to the Turks when they sold the synagogue of the Damascan
Jews to the Greek Orthodox bishop so he could turn it into a church It
is a fact that I went out and drummed up eighteen Moslems to testify in
behalf of the Jews.  It is a fact that I protected the Christian
missionaries from the Druzes.  It is a fact that I warned the Druzes
that that fat and oily Turkish swine, Rashid Pasha, was trying to
incite them to revolt so he could massacre them.  It is a fact that
when I was recalled from my consular post, because of the lies of the
Christian missionaries and priests, of Rashid Pasha, and of the Jewish
usurers, thousands of Christians, Moslems, and Jews rallied to my aid,
though it was too late then.

"It is also a fact that I don't have to answer to you or to any man for
my actions!"

How like Frigate to bring up such an irrelevant subject at such an
inappropriate time.  Perhaps he was trying to keep from blaming himself
by turning his fear and anger on Burton.  Or perhaps he really felt
that his hero had failed him.

Lev Ruach had been sitting with his head between his hands.

He raised his head and said, hollowly, "Welcome to the concentration
camp, Burton!  This is your first taste of it.  It's an old tale to me,
one I was tired of hearing from the beginning.  I was in a Nazi camp,
and I escaped.  I was in a Russian camp, and I escaped.  In Israel, I
was captured by Arabs, and I escaped.

"So, now, perhaps I can escape again.  But to what?  To another camp?
There seems to be no end to them.  Man is forever building them and
putting the perennial prisoner, the Jew, or what have you, in them.
Even here, where we have a fresh start, where all religions, all
prejudices, should have been shattered on the anvil of resurrection,
little is changed."

"Shut your mouth," a man near Ruach said.  He had red hair so curly it
was almost kinky, blue eyes, and a face that might have been handsome
if it had not been for his broken nose.  He was six feet tall and had a
wrestler's body.

"Dov Targoff here," he said in a crisp Oxford accent.  "Late commander
in the Israeli Navy.  Pay no attention to this man.  He's one of the
old-time Jews, a pessimist, and a whiner.  He'd rather wail against the
wall than stand up and fight like a man."

Ruach choked, then said, "You arrogant Sabra!  I fought; I killed!  And
I am not a whiner!  What are you doing now, you brave warrior?  Aren't
you a slave as much as the rest of us?"

"It's the old story," a woman said.  She was tall and dark-haired and
probably would have been a beauty if she had not been so gaunt.  "The
old story.  We fight among ourselves while our enemies conquer.  Just
as we fought when Titus besieged Jerusalem and we killed more of our
own people than we did the Romans.  Just as..."  The two men turned
against her, and all three argued loudly until a guard began beating
them with a stick.

Later, through swollen lips, Targoff said, "I can't take much of this,
much longer.  Soon ... well, that guard is mine to kill."

"You have a plan?"  Frigate said, eagerly, but Targoff would not
answer.

Shortly before dawn, the slaves were awakened and marched to the grail
rock  Again, they were given a modicum of food.  After eating, they
were split up into groups and marched off to their differing
assignments.  Burton and Frigate were taken to the northern border.
They were put to work with a thousand other slaves, and they toiled
naked all day in the sun.  Their only rest was when they took their
grails to the rock at noon and were fed.

Goring meant to build a wall between the mountain and The River; he
also intended to erect a second wall, which would run for the full
ten-mile length of the lakeshore and a third wall at the southern
end.

Burton and the others had to dig a deep trench and then pile the dirt
taken from the hole into a wall.  This was hard work, for they had only
stone hoes with which to hack at the ground.  Since the roots of the
grass formed a thickly tangled complex of very tough material, they
could be cut only with repeated blows.  The dirt and roots were scraped
up on wooden shovels and tossed onto large bamboo sleds.  These were
dragged by teams onto the top of the wall, where the dirt was shoveled
off to make the wall even higher and thicker.

At night, the slaves were herded back into the stockade.  Here, most of
them fell asleep almost at once.  But Targoff, the redheaded Israeli,
squatted by Burton.

"The grapevine gives a little juice now and then," he said.  "I heard
about the fight you and your crew made.  I also heard about your
refusal to join Goring and his swine."

"What do you hear about my infamous book?"  Burton said.

Targoff smiled and said, "I never heard of it until Ruach brought it to
my attention.  Your actions speak for themselves.  Besides, Ruach is
very sensitive about such things.  Not that you can really blame him
after what he went through.  But I do not think that you would behave
as you did if you were what he said you are.  I think you're a good
man, the type we need.  So..."

Days and nights of hard work and short rations followed.  Burton
learned through the grapevine about the women.  Wilfreda and Fatima
were in Campbell's apartment.  Loghu was with Tullius.  Alice had been
kept by Goring for a week, then had been turned over to a lieutenant, a
Manfred Von Kreyscharft.  Rumor was that Goring had complained of her
coldness and had wanted to give her to his bodyguards to do with as
they pleased.  But Von Kreyscharft had asked for her.

Burton was in agony.  He could not endure the mental images of her with
Goring and Von Kreyscharft.  He had to stop these beasts or at least
die trying.  Late that night, he crawled from the big hut he occupied
with twenty-five men into Targoff's hut and woke him up.

"You said you knew that I must be on your side," he whispered.  "When
are you going to take me into your confidence?  I might as well warn
you now that, if you don't do so at once, I intend to foment a break
among my own group and anybody else who will join us."

"Roach has told me more about you," Targoff said.  "I didn't
understand, really, what he was talking about.  Could a Jew trust
anyone who wrote such a book?  Or could such a man be trusted not to
turn on them after the common enemy has been defeated?"

Burton opened his mouth to speak angrily, then closed it.  For a
moment, he was silent.  When he spoke, he did so calmly.  "In the first
place, my actions on Earth speak louder than any of my printed words. I
was the friend and protector of many Jews; I had many Jewish
friends."

"That last statement is always a preface to an attack on the Jews,"
Targoff said.

"Perhaps.  However, even if what Roach claims were true, the Richard
Burton you see before you in this valley is not the Burton who lived on
Earth.  I think every man has been changed somewhat by his experience
here.  If he hasn't, he is incapable of change.  He would be better off
dead.

"During the four hundred and seventy-six days that I have lived on this
River, I have learned much.  I am not incapable of changing my mind.  I
listened to Roach and Frigate.  I argued frequently and passionately
with them.  And though I did not want to admit it at the time, I
thought much about what they said."

"Jew-hate is something bred into the child," Targoff said.  "It becomes
part of the nerve.  No act of will can get rid of it, unless it is not
very deeply embedded or the will is extraordinarily strong.  The bell
rings, and Pavlov's dog salivates.  Mention the word Jew, and the
nervous system storms the citadel of the mind of the Gentile Just as
the word Arab storms mine.  But I have a realistic basis for hating all
Arabs."

"I have pled enough," Burton said.  "You will either accept me or
reject me.  In either case, you know what I will do."

"I accept," Targoff said.  "If you can change your mind, I can change
mine.  I've worked with you, eaten bread with you.  I like to think I'm
a good judge of character.  Tell me, if you were planning this, what
would you do?"  Targoff listened carefully.  At the end of Burton's
explanation, Targoff nodded.  "Much like my plan.  Now..."

The next day, shortly after breakfast, several guards came for Burton
and Frigate.  Targoff looked hard at Burton, who knew what Targoff was
thinking.  Nothing could be done except to march off to Goring's
"palace."  He was seated in a big wooden chair and smoking a pipe.  He
asked them to sit down and offered them cigars and wine.

"Every once in a while," he said, "I like to relax and talk with
somebody besides my colleagues, who are not overly bright.  I like
especially to talk with somebody who lived after I died.  And to men
who were famous in their time.  I've few of either type, so far."

"Many of your Israeli prisoners lived after you," Frigate said.

"Ah, the Jews!"  Goring airily waved his pipe.  "That is the trouble.
They know me too well.  They are sullen when I try to talk to them, and
too many have tried to kill me for me to feel comfortable around them.
Not that I have anything against them.  I don't particularly like Jews,
but I had many Jewish friends..  Burton reddened.

Goring, after sucking on his pipe, continued, Der Fuhrer was a great
man, but he had some idiocies.  One of them was his attitude toward
Jews.  Myself, I cared less.  But the Germany of my time was
anti-Jewish, and a man must go with the Zeitgeist if he wants to get
any place in life.  Enough of that.  Even here, a man cannot get away
from them."  He chattered on for a while, then asked Frigate many
questions concerning the fate of his, contemporaries and the history of
post-war Germany.

"If you Americans had had any political sense, you would have declared
war on Russia as soon as we surrendered.  We would have fought with you
against the Bolshevik, and we would have crushed them."  Frigate did
not reply.  Goring then told several "funny," very obscene stories.  He
asked Burton to tell him about the strange experience he had had before
being resurrected in the valley.

Burton was surprised.  Had Goring learned about this from Kazz or was
there an informer among the slaves?  He told in full detail everything
that had happened between the time he opened his eyes to find himself
in the place of floating bodies to the instant when the man in the
aerial canoe pointed the metal tube at him.

"The extra-Terrestrial, Monat, has a theory that some beings, call them
Whoever or X have been observing mankind since he ceased to be an ape.
For at least two million years.  These super-beings have, in some
manner, recorded every cell of every human being that ever lived from
the moment of conception, probably, to the moment of death.  This seems
a staggering concept, but it is no more staggering than the
resurrection of all humanity and the reshaping of this planet into one
Rivervalley.  The recordings may have been made when the recorders were
living.  Or it may be that these super-beings detected vibrations from
the past, just as we on Earth saw the light of stars, as they had been
a thousand years before..

"Monat, however, inclines to the former theory.  He does not believe in
time travel even in a limited sense.

"Monat believes that the X's stored these recordings.  How, he does not
know.  But this planet was then reshaped for us.  It is obviously one
great Riverworld.  During our journey up River, we've talked to dozens
whose descriptions leave no doubt that they come from widely scattered
parts, from all over.  One was from far up in the northern hemisphere;
another, far down in the southern.  All the descriptions fall together
to make a picture of a world that has been reworked into one zigzagging
Rivervalley.

"The people we talked to were killed or died by accident here and were
resurrected again in the areas we happened to be traveling through.
Monat says that we resurrectees are still being recorded.  And when one
of us dies again, the up-to-the-minute recordings are being placed
somewhere maybe under, the surface of this planet and played into
energy-matter converters.  The bodies were reproduced as they were at
the moment of death and then the rejuvenating devices restored the
sleeping bodies.  Probably in that same chamber in which I awoke. After
this, the bodies, young and whole again, were recorded and then
destroyed.  And the recordings were played out again, this time through
devices under the ground.  Once more, energy-matter converters,
probably using the heat of this planet's molten core as energy,
reproduced us above the ground, near the grail stones  I do not know
why they are not resurrected a second time in the same spot where they
died.  But then I don't know why all our hairs were shaven off or why
men's facial hairs don't grow or why men were circumcised and women
made virgins again.  Or why we were resurrected.  For what purpose?
Whoever put us here has not shown up to tell us why."

"The thing is," Frigate said, "the thing is, we are not the same people
we were on Earth.  I died.  Burton died.  You died, Hermann Goring.
Everybody died.  And we cannot be brought back to life!"

Goring sucked on his pipe noisily, stared at Frigate, and then said,
"Why not?  I am living again.  Do you deny that?"  "Yes!  I do deny
that in a sense.  You are living.  But you are not the Hermann Goring
who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January
12, 1893.  You are not the Hermann Goring whose godfather was Dr.
Hermann Eppenstein; a Jew converted to Christianity.  You are not the
Goring who succeeded Von Richthofen after his death and continued to
lead his fliers against the Allies even after the war ended.  You are
not the Reichsmarschal of Hitler's Germany nor the refugee arrested by
Lieutenant Jerome N. Shapiro.  Eppenstein and Shapiro, hah!  And you
are not the Hermann Goring who took his life by swallowing potassium
cyanide during his trial for his crimes against humanity!"

Goring tamped his pipe with tobacco and said; mildly, "You certainly
know much about me.  I should be flattered, I suppose.  At least, I was
not forgotten."

"Generally, you were," Frigate said.  "You did have a long-lived
reputation as a sinister clown, a failure, and a toady."  Burton was
surprised.  He had not known that the fellow would stand up to someone
who had power of life and death over him or who had treated him so
painfully.  But then perhaps Frigate hoped to be killed.

It was probable that he was banking on Goring's curiosity.

Goring said, "Explain your statement.  Not about my reputation.  Every
man of importance expects to be reviled and misunderstood by the
brainless masses.  Explain why I am not the same man."

Frigate smiled slightly and said, "You are the product, the hybrid, of
a recording and an energy-matter converter.  You were made with all the
memories of the dead man Hermann Goring and with every cell of his body
a duplicate.  You have everything he had.  So you think you are Goring.
But you are not!  You are a duplication, and that is all!  The original
Herman Goring is nothing but molecules that have been absorbed into the
soil and the air and so into plants and back into the flesh of beasts
and men and out again as excrement, und so wieter!

"But you, here before me, are not the original, any more than the
recording on a disc or a tape is the original voice, the vibrations
issuing from the mouth of a man and detected and converted by an
electronic device and then replayed."  Burton understood the reference,
since he had seen an Edison phonograph in Paris in 1888.  He felt
outraged, actually violated, at Frigate's assertions.

Goring's wide-open eyes and reddening face indicated that he, too, felt
threatened down to the core of his being.

After stuttering, Goring said, "And why would these beings go to all
this trouble just to make duplicates?"

Frigate shrugged and said, "I don't know."  Goring heaved up from his
chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Frigate.

"You lie!"  he screamed in German.  "You lie, scheisshund!"

Frigate quivered as if he expected to be struck over the kidneys again,
but he said, "I must be right.  Of course, you don't have to believe
what I say.  I can't prove anything.  And I understand exactly how you
feel.  I know that I am Peter Jairus Frigate, born 1918, died A.D.
2008.  But I also must believe, because logic tells me so, that I am
only, really, a being who has the memories of that Frigate who will
never rise from the dead.  In a sense, I am the son of that Frigate who
can never exist again.  Not flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, but
mind of his mind.  I am not the man who was born of a woman on that
lost world of Earth.  I am the by blow of science and a machine.
Unless..."

Goring said, "Yes?  Unless what?"

"Unless there is some entity attached to the human body, an entity
which is the human being.  I mean, it contains all that makes the
individual what he is, and when the body is destroyed, this entity
still exists.  So that, if the body were to be made again, this entity,
storing the essence of the individual, could be attached again to the
body.  And it would record every thing that the body recorded: And so
the original individual would live again.  He would not be just a
duplicate."

Burton said, "For God's sake, Pete!  Are you proposing the soul?"

Frigate nodded and said, "Something analagous to the soul Something
that the primitives dimly apprehended and called a soul."  Goring
laughed uproariously.  Burton would have laughed, but he did not care
to give Goring any support, moral or intellectual.

When Goring had quit laughing, he said, "Even here, in a world which is
clearly the result of science, the super naturalists won't quit trying.
Well, enough of that.  To more practical and immediate matters.  Tell
me, have you changed your mind?  Are you ready to join me?"

Burton glared and said, "I would not be under the orders of a man who
rapes women; moreover, I respect the Israelis.  I would rather be a
slave with them than free with you."  Goring scowled and said, harshly,
"Very well.  I thought as much.  But I had hoped ... well, I have been
having trouble with the Roman.  If he gets his way, you will see how
merciful I have been to you slaves.  You do not know him.  Only my
intervention has saved one of you being tortured to death every night
for his amusement."  At noon, the two returned to their work in the
hills.  Neither got a chance to speak to Targoff or any of the slaves,
since their duties happened not to bring them into contact.  They did
not dare make an open attempt to talk to him, because that would have
meant a severe beating.

After they returned to the stockade in the evening, Burton told the
others what had happened.

"More than likely Targoff will not believe my story.  He'll think we're
spies.  Even if he's not certain, he can't afford to take chances.  So
there'll be trouble.  It's too bad that this had to happen.  The escape
plan will have to be cancelled for tonight' Nothing untoward took place
at first.  The Israelis walked away from Burton and Frigate when they
tried to talk to them.  The stars came out, and the stockade was
flooded with a light almost as bright as a full moon of Earth.

The prisoners stayed inside their barracks, but they talked is low
voices with their heads together.  Despite their deep tiredness, they
could not sleep.  The guards must have sensed the tension, even though
they could not see or hear the men in the huts.  They walked back and
forth on the walks, stood together talking, and peered down into the
enclosure by the light of the night sky and the flames of the resin
torches.

"Targoff will do nothing until it rains," Burton said.  He gave orders.
Frigate was to stand first watch; Robert Spruce, the second; Burton,
third.  Burton lay down on his pile of leaves and, ignoring the
murmuring of voices and the moving around of bodies, fell asleep.

It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when Spruce touched him.  He
rose quickly to, his feet, yawned, and stretched.  The others were all
awake.  Within a few minutes, the first of the clouds formed.  In ten
minutes, the stars were blotted out.  Thunder grumbled way up in the
mountains, and the first lightning flash forked the sky.

Lightning struck near.  Burton saw by its flash that the guards were
huddled under the roofs sticking out from the base of the watch houses
at each corner of the stockade.  They were covered with towels against
the chill and the rain.

Burton crawled from his barracks to the next.  Targoff was standing
inside the entrance.

Burton stood up and said, "Does the plan still hold?"

"You know better than that," Targoff said.  A bolt of lightning showed
his angry face.  "You Judas!"  He stepped forward, and a dozen men
followed him.  Burton did not wait; he attacked.  But, as he rushed
forward, he heard a strange sound.  He paused to look' out through the
door.  Another flash revealed a guard sprawled face down in the grass
beneath a walk.

Targoff had put his fists down when Burton turned his back on him.  He
said, "What's going on, Burton?"

"Wait," the Englishman replied.  He had no more idea than the Israeli
did about what was happening, but anything unexpected could be to his
advantage.

Lightning illuminated the squat figure of Kazz on the wooden walk.  He
was swinging a huge stone axe against a group of guards who were in the
angle formed by the meeting of the two walls.  Another flash.  The
guards were sprawled out on the walk.  Darkness.  At the next blaze of
light, another was down; the remaining two were running away down the
walk in different directions.

Another bolt very near the wall showed that, finally, the other guards
were aware of what was happening.  They ran down the walk, shouting and
waving their spears.

Kazz, ignoring them, slid a long bamboo ladder down into the enclosure
and then he threw a bundle of spears after it.  By the next flash, he
could be seen advancing toward the nearest guards.

Burton snatched a spear and almost ran up the ladder.  The others,
including the Israeli, were behind him.  The fight was bloody and
brief.  With the guards on the walk either stabbed or hurled to their
deaths, only those in the watch houses remained.  The ladder was
carried to the other end of the stockade and placed against the gate.
In two minutes, men had climbed to the outside, dropped down, and
opened the gate.  For the first time, Burton found the chance to talk
to Kazz.

"I thought you had sold us out."

"No.  Not me, Kazz," Kazz said reproachfully.  "You know I love you,
Burton-naq.  You're my friend, my chief.  I pretend to join your
enemies because that's playing it smart.  I surprise you don't do the
same.  You're no dummy."

"Certainly, you aren't," Burton said.  "But I couldn't bring myself to
kill those slaves."  Lightning revealed Kazz shrugging.  He said, "That
don't bother me.  I don't know them.  Besides, you hear Goring.  He say
they die anyway."

"It's a good thing you chose tonight to rescue us," Burton said.  He
did not tell Kazz why since he did not want to confuse him.  Moreover,
there were more important things to do.

"Tonight's a good night for this," Kazz said.  "Big battle going on.
Tullius and Goring get very drunk and quarrel.  They fight; their men
fight.  While they kill each other, invaders come.  Those brown men
across The River .. . what you call them?  ... Onondaga's, that's them.
Their boats come just before rain come.  They make raid to steal
slaves, too.  Or maybe just for the hell of it.  So, I think, now's
good time to start my plan, get Burton-naq free."

As suddenly as it had come, the rain ceased.  Burton could hear shouts
and screams from far off, toward The River.  Drums were beating pup and
down The Riverbanks.  He said to Targoff, "We can either try to escape,
and probably do so easily, or we can attack."

"I intend to wipe out the beasts who enslaved us," Targoff said. "There
are other stockades nearby.  I've sent men to open their gates. The
rest are too far away to reach quickly; they're strung out at half-mile
intervals: By then, the blockhouse in which the off-duty guards lived
had been stormed.  The slaves armed themselves and then started toward
the noise of the conflict.  Burton's group was on the right flank. 
They had not gone half a mile before they came upon corpses and
wounded, a mixture of Onondaga's and whites.

Despite the heavy rain, a fire had broken out.  By its increasing
light, they saw that the flames came from the long house  Outlined in
the glare were struggling figures.  The escapees advanced across the
plain.  Suddenly, one side broke and ran toward them with the victors,
whooping and screaming jubilantly, after them.

"There's Goring," Frigate said.  "His fat isn't going to help him get
away, that's for sure."  He pointed, and Burton could see the German
desperately pumping his legs but falling behind the others.

"I don't want the Indians to have the honor of killing him," Burton
said.  "We owe it to Alice to get him."  Campbell's long-legged figure
was ahead of them all, and it was toward him that Burton threw his
spear.  To the Scot, the missile must have seemed to come out of the
darkness from nowhere.  Too late, he tried to dodge.  The flint head
buried itself in the flesh between his left shoulder and chest, and he
fell on his side.  He tried to get up a moment afterward, but he was
knocked back down by Burton.

Campbell's eyes rolled; blood trickled from his mouth.  He pointed at
another wound, a deep gash in his side just below the ribs.  "You your
woman ... Wilfreda ... did that," he gasped.  "But I killed her, the
bitch..."

Burton wanted to ask him where Alice was, but Kazz, screaming phrases
in his native tongue, brought his club down on the Scot's head.  Burton
picked up his spear and ran after Kazz.  "Don't kill Goring!"  he
shouted.  "Leave him to me!"

Kazz did not hear him; he was busy fighting with two Onondaga's. Burton
saw Alice as she ran by him.  He reached out and grabbed her and spun
her around.  She screamed and started to struggle.  Burton shouted at
her; suddenly, recognizing him, she collapsed into his arms and began
weeping.  Burton would have tried to comfort her, but he was afraid
that Goring would escape him.  He pushed her away and ran toward the
German and threw his spear.  It grazed Goring's head, and he screamed
and stopped running and began to look for the weapon but Burton was on
him.  Both fell to the ground and rolled over and over, each trying to
strangle the other.

Something struck Burton on the back of his head.  Stunned, he released
his grip.  Goring pushed him down on the ground and dived toward the
spear.  Seizing it, he rose and stepped toward the prostrate Burton.
Burton tried to get to his feet, but his knees seemed to be made of
putty and everything was whirling.  Goring suddenly staggered as Alice
tackled his legs from behind, and he fell forward.  Burton made another
effort, found he could at least stagger, and sprawled over Goring.
Again, they rolled over and over with Goring squeezing on Burton's
throat.  Then a shaft slid over Burton's shoulder, burning his skin,
and its stone tip drove into Goring's throat.

Burton stood up, pulled the spear out, and plunged it into the man's
fat belly.  Goring tried to sit up, but he fell back and died.  Alice
slumped to the ground and wept.

Dawn saw the end of the battle.  By then, the slaves had broken out of
every stockade.  The warriors of Goring and Tullius were ground between
the two forces, Onondaga and slaves, like husks between millstones. The
Indians, who had probably raided only to loot and get more slaves and
their grails, retreated.  They climbed aboard their dugouts and canoes
and paddled across the lake.  Nobody felt like chasing them.

The days that followed were busy ones.  A rough census indicated that
at least half of the 20,000 inhabitants of Goring's little kingdom had
been killed, severely wounded, abducted by the Onondaga, or had fled.
The Roman Tullius Hostilius had apparently escaped.  The survivors
chose a provisional government.  Targoff, Burton, Spruce, Ruach, and
two others formed an executive committee with considerable, but
temporary, powers.  John de Greystock had disappeared.  He had been
seen during the beginning of the battle and then he had just dropped
out of sight.

Alice Hargreaves moved into Burton's hut without either saying a word
about the why or wherefore.

Later, she said, "Frigate tells me that if this entire planet is
constructed like the areas we've seen, and there's no reason to believe
it isn't, then The River must be at least 20,000,000 miles long.  It's
incredible, but so is our resurrection, everything about this world.
Also, there may be thirty-five to thirty-seven billion people living
along The River.  What chance would I have of ever finding my Earthly
husband?  Moreover, I love you.  Yes, I know I didn't act as if I loved
you.  But something has changed in me.  Perhaps it's all I've been
through that is responsible.  I don't thing I could have loved you on
Earth.  I might have been fascinated, but I would also have been
repelled, perhaps frightened.  I couldn't have made you a good wife
there.  Here, I can.  Rather, I'll make you a good mate, since there
doesn't seem to be any authority or religious institutions that could
marry us.  That in itself shows how I've changed.  That I could be
calmly living with a man I'm not married to .. .!  Well, there you
are."

"We're no longer living in the Victorian age," Burton said.  "What
would you call this present age... the Melange era?  The Mixed Age?
Eventually, it will be The River Culture, The Riparian World, rather,
many River cultures."

"Providing it lasts," Alice said.  "It started suddenly; it may end
just as swiftly and unexpectedly."

Certainly, Burton thought, the green River and the grassy plain and the
forested hills and the unscalable mountains did not seem like
Shakespeare's insubstantial vision.  They were solid, real, as real as
the men walking toward him now, Frigate, Monat, Kazz, and Ruach.  He
stepped out of the but and greeted them.

Kazz began talking.  "A long time ago, before I speak English good, I
see something.  I try to tell you then, but you don't understand me.  I
see a man who don't have this on his forehead."  He pointed, at the
center of his own forehead and then at that of the others.

"I know," Kazz continued, "you can't see it.  Pete and Monat can't
either.  Nobody else can.  But I see it on everybody's forehead. Except
on that man I try to catch long time ago.  Then, one day, I see a woman
don't have it, but I don't say nothing to you.  Now, I see a third
person who don't have it'

"He means," Monat said, "that he is able to perceive certain symbols or
characters on the forehead of each and every one of us.  He can see
these only in bright sunlight and at a certain angle.  But everyone
he's ever seen has had these symbols except for the three he's
mentioned."

"He must be able to see a little further into the spectrum than we,"
Frigate said.  "Obviously, Whoever stamped us with the sign of the
beast or whatever you want to call it, did not know about the special
ability of Kazz's species.  Which shows that They are not omniscient'

"Obviously," Burton said.  "Nor infallible.  Otherwise, I would never
have awakened in that place before being resurrected.  So, who is this
person who does not have these symbols on his skin?"  He spoke calmly,
but his heart beat swiftly.  If Kazz was right, he might have detected
an agent of the beings who had brought the entire human species to life
again.  Would They be gods in disguise?

"Robert Spruce!"  Frigate said.

"Before we jump to any conclusions," Monat said, "don't forget that the
omission may have been an accident'

"We'll find out," Burton said ominously.

"But why the symbols?  Why should we be marked?"

"Probably for identification or numbering purposes," Monat said.  "Who
knows, except Those who put us here."

"Let's go face Spruce," Button said.

"We have to catch him first," Frigate replied.  "Kazz made the mistake
of mentioning to Spruce that he knew about the symbols.  He did so at
breakfast this morning.  I wasn't there, but those who were said Spruce
turned pale.  A few minutes later, he excused himself, and he hasn't
been seen since.  We've sent search parties out up and down The River,
across The River, and also into the hills."

"His flight is an admission of guilt," Burton said.  He was angry.  Was
man a kind of cattle branded for some sinister purpose?  That
afternoon, the drums announced that Spruce had been caught.  Three
hours later, he was standing before the council table in the newly
built meeting hall.  Behind the table sat the Council.  The doors were
closed, for the Councilmen felt that this was something that could be
conducted more efficiently without a crowd.  However, Monat, Kazz, and
Frigate were also present.

"I may as well tell you now," Burton said, "that we have decided to go
to any lengths to get the truth from you.  It is against the principles
of every one at this table to use torture.  We despise and loathe those
who resort to torture.  But we feel that this is one issue where
principles must be abandoned!

"Principles must never be abandoned," Spruce said evenly.  "The end
never justifies the means.  Even if clinging to them means defeat,
death, and remaining in ignorance."

"There's too much at stake," Targoff said.  "I, who have been the
'victim of unprincipled men; Ruach, who has been tortured several
times; the others, we all agree.  We'll use fire and the knife on you
if we must.  It is necessary that we find out the truth.  Now, tell me,
are you one of Those responsible for this resurrection?"

"You will be no better than Goring and his kind if you torture me,"
Spruce said.  His voice was beginning to break.  "In fact, you will be
far worse off, for you are forcing yourselves to be like him in order
to gain something that may not even exist.  Or, if it does, may not be
worth the price."

"Tell us the truth," Targoff said.  "Don't lie.  We know that you must
be an agent; perhaps one of Those directly responsible!

"There is a fire blazing in that stone over there," Burton said.  "If
you don't start talking at once, you will ... well, the roasting you
get will be the least of your pain.  I am an authority on Chinese and
Arabic methods of torture.  I assure you that they had some very
refined means for extracting the truth.  And I have no qualms about
putting my knowledge into practice."

Spruce pale and sweating, said, "You may be denying your eternal life
if you do this.  It will at least set you far back on your journey,
delay the final goal."

"What is that?"  Burton replied.

Spruce ignored him.  "We can't stand pain," he muttered.  "We're too
sensitive."

"Are you going to talk?"  Targoff said.

"Even the idea of self-destruction is painful and to be avoided except
when absolutely necessary," Spruce mumbled.  "Despite the fact that I
know I shall live again."

"Put him over the fire," Targoff said to the two men who held Spruce.

Monat spoke up.  "Just one moment.  Spruce, the science of my people
was much more advanced than that of Earth's.  So I am more qualified to
make an educated guess.  Perhaps we could spare you the pain of the
fire, and the pain of betraying your purpose, if you were merely to
affirm what I have to say.  That way, you wouldn't be making a positive
betrayal."

Spruce said, "I'm listening."  "It's my theory that you are a
Terrestrial.  You belong to an age chronologically far past A.D. 2008.
You must be the descendant of the few who survived my death scanner.
Judging by the technology and power required to reconstruct the surface
of this planet into one vast Rivervalley, your time must be much later
than the twenty-first century.  Just guessing, the fiftieth Century

A.D.?"

Spruce looked at the fire, then said, "Add two thousand more'

"If this planet is about the size of Earth, it can hold only so many
people.  Where are the others, the still-born, the children who died
before they were five, the imbeciles and idiots, and those who lived
after the twentieth century?"

"They are elsewhere," Spruce said.  He glanced at the fire again, and
his lips tightened.

"My own people," Monat said, "had a theory that they would eventually
be able to see into their past.  I won't go into the details, but it
was possible that past events could be visually detected and then
recorded.  Time travel, of course, was sheer fantasy.  But what if your
culture was able to do what we only theorized about?  What if you
recorded every single human being that had ever lived?  Located this
planet and constructed this Rivervalley?  Somewhere, maybe under the
very surface of this planet, used energy-matter conversion, say from
the heat of this planet's molten core, and the recordings to re-create
the bodies of the dead in the tanks?  Used biological techniques to
rejuvenate the bodies and to restore limbs, eyes, and so on and also to
correct any physical defects?"

"Then," Monat continued, "you made more recordings of the newly created
bodies and stored them in some vast memory-tank?  Later, you destroyed
the bodies in the tanks?  Re-created them again through means of the
conductive metal, which is also used to charge the grails?  These could
be buried beneath the ground.  The resurrection then occurs without
recourse to supernatural means.

"The big question is, why?"

"If you had it in your power to do all this, would you not think it was
your ethical duty?"  Spruce asked.

"Yes, but I would resurrect only those worth resurrecting."

"And what if others did not accept your criteria?"  Spruce said.  "Do
you really think you are wise enough and good enough to judge?  Would
you place yourself on a level with God?  No, all must be given a second
chance, no matter how bestial or selfish or petty or stupid.  Then, it
will be up to them..."  He fell silent, as if he had regretted his
outburst and meant to say no more.

"Besides," Monat said, "you would want to make a study of humanity as
it existed in the past.  You would want to record all the languages
that man ever spoke, his mores, his philosophies, biographies.  To do
this, you need agents, posing as resurrectees, to mingle with the
Riverpeople and to take notes, to observe, to study.  How long will
this study take?  One thousand years?  Two?  Ten?  A million?  "And
what about the eventual disposition of us?  Are we to stay here
forever?"

"You will stay here as long as it takes for you to be rehabilitated,"
Spruce shouted.  "Then .."  He closed his mouth, glared, then opened it
to say, "Continued contact with you makes even the toughest of us take
on your characteristics.  We have to go through a rehabilitation
ourselves.  Already, I feel unclean.."

"Put him over the fire," Targoff said.  "We'll get the entire truth."

"No, you won't!"  Spruce cried "I should have done this long ago!  Who
knows what.."

He fell to the ground, and his skin changed to a gray-blue color.
Doctor Steinborg, a Councilman, examined him, but it was apparent to
all that he was dead.

Targoff said, "Better take him away now, doctor.  Dissect him.  We'll
wait here for your report."

"With stone knives, no chemicals, no microscopes, what kind of a report
can you expect?"  Steinborg said.  "But I'll do my best."  The body was
carried off.

Burton said, "I'm glad he didn't force us to admit we were bluffing. If
he had kept his mouth shut, he could have defeated us."

"Then you really weren't going to torture him?"  Frigate said.  "I was
hoping you didn't mean your threat.  If you had, I was going to walk
out then and there and never see any of you again."

"Of course we didn't mean it," Ruach said.  "Spruce would have been
right.  We'd have been no better than Goring.  But we could have tried
other means.  Hypnotism for instance.  Burton, Monat, and Steinborg
were experts in that field."

"The trouble is, we still don't know if we did get the truth," Targoff
said.  "Actually, he may have been lying.  Monat supplied some guesses,
and, if these were wrong, Spruce could have led us astray by agreeing
with Monat.  I'd say we can't be at all sure."  They agreed on one
thing.  Their chances of detecting another agent through the absence of
symbols on the forehead would be gone.  Now that They whoever They were
knew about the visibility of the characters to Kazz's species, They
would take the proper measures to prevent detection.

Steinborg returned three hours later.  "There is nothing to distinguish
him from any other member of Homo sapiens.  Except this one little
device."  He held up a black shiny ball about the size of a match
head

"I located this on the surface of the forebrain.  It was attached to
some nerves by wires so thin that I could see them only at a certain
angle, when they caught the light.  It's my opinion that Spruce killed
himself by means of this device and that he did so by literally
thinking himself dead.  Somehow, this little ball translated a wish for
death into the deed.  Perhaps, it reacted to the thought by releasing a
poison which I do not have facilities for analyzing."  He concluded his
report and passed the ball around to the others.

Thirty days later, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, and Kazz were returning from
a trip UpRiver.  It was just before dawn.

The cold heavy mists that piled up to six or seven feet above The River
in the latter part of the night swirled around them.  They could not
see in any direction further than a strong man might make a standing
broad jump.  But Burton, standing in the prow of the bamboo hulled
single-masted boat, knew they were close to the western shore.  Near
the relatively shallow depths the current ran more slowly, and they had
just steered to port from the middle of The River.

If his calculations were correct, they should be close to the ruins of
Goering's hall.  At any moment, he expected to see a strip of denser
darkness appear out of the dark waters, the banks of that land he now
called home.  Home, for Burton, had always been a place from which to
sally forth, a resting-place, a temporary fortress in which to write a
book about his last expedition, a lair in which to heal fresh hurts, a
conning tower from which he looked out for new lands to explore.

Thus, only two weeks after the death of Spruce, Burton had felt the
need to get to some place other than the one in which he now was.  He
heard a rumor that copper had been discovered on the western shore
about a hundred miles UpRiver.  This was a length of shore of not more
than twelve miles, inhabited by fifth century B.C. Sarmatians and
thirteenth-century A.D. Frisians.

Burton did not really think the story was true but it gave him an
excuse to travel.  Ignoring Alice's pleas to take her with him, he had
set off.

Now, a month later and after some adventures, not all unpleasant, they
were almost home.  The story had not been entirely unfounded.  There
was copper but only in minute amounts.  So the four had gotten into
their boat for the easy trip down current, their sail pushed by the
never ceasing wind.  They journeyed during the daytime and beached the
boat during mealtimes wherever there were friendly people who did not
mind strangers using their grail stones  At night they either slept
among the friendlies or, if in hostile waters, sailed by in the
darkness.  The last leg of their trip was made after the sun went down.
Before getting home they had to pass a section of the valley where
slave-hungry eighteenth-century Mohawks lived on one side and equally
greedy Carthaginians of the third century B.C. on the other.  Having
slipped through under cover of the fog, they were almost home.

Abruptly, Burton said, "There's the bank.  Pete, lower the mast!  Kazz,
Lev, back oars!  Jump to it!"  A few minutes later, they had landed and
had pulled the lightweight craft completely out of the water and upon
the gently sloping shore.  Now that they were out of the mists, they
could see the sky paling above the eastern mountains.

Dead reckoning come alive!"  Burton said.  "We're ten paces beyond the
grail stone near the ruins!"  He scanned the bamboo huts along the
plain and the buildings evident in the long grasses and under the giant
trees of the hills.

Not a single person was to be seen.  The valley was asleep.

He said, "Don't you think it's strange that no one's up yet?  Or that
we've not been challenged by the sentinels?"  Frigate pointed toward
the lookout tower to their right.

Burton swore and said "They're asleep, by God, or deserted their post'
but he knew as he spoke that this was no case of dereliction of duty.
Though he had said nothing to the others about it, the moment he had
stepped ashore, he had been sure something was very wrong.  He began
running across the plain toward the but in which he and Alice lived.

Alice was sleeping on the bamboo-and-grass bed on the right side of the
building.  Only her head was visible, for she was curled up under a
blanket of towels fastened to each other by the magnetic clasps. Burton
threw the blanket back, got down on his knees by the low bed, and
raised her to a sitting position.  Her head lolled forward, and her
arms hung limply.  But she had a healthy color and breathed normally.

Burton called her name three times.  She slept on.  He slapped both her
cheeks sharply; red splotches sprang up on them.  Her eyelids
fluttered, then she went back to sleep.

By then Frigate and Ruach appeared.  "We've looked into some of the
other huts," Frigate said.  "They're all asleep.  I tried to wake a
couple of them, but they're out for the count.

"What's wrong?"  Burton said, "Who do you think has the power or the
need to do this?

"Spruce!"

"Spruce and his kind, Whoever They are!"

"Why?"  Frigate sounded frightened.

"They were looking for me!  They must have come in under the fog,
somehow put this whole area to sleep!"

"A sleep-gas would do it easily enough," Ruach said.  "Although people
who have powers such as Theirs could have devices we've never dreamed
of."

"They were looking for me!"  Burton shouted.

"Which means, if true, that They may be back tonight," Frigate said.
"But why would They be searching for you?"

Ruach replied for Burton.  "Because he, as far as we know, was the only
man to awaken in the pre-resurrection phase.  Why he did is a mystery.
But it's evident something went wrong.  It may also be a mystery to
Them.  I'd be inclined to think They've been discussing this and
finally decided to come here.  Maybe to kidnap Burton for observation
or some more sinister purpose."

"Possibly.  They wanted to erase from my memory all that I'd seen in
that chamber of floating bodies," Burton said.  "Such a thing should
not be beyond Their science."

"But you've told that story to many," Frigate said.  "They couldn't
possibly track down all those people and remove the memory of your
story from their minds."

"Would that be necessary?  How many believe my tale?  Sometimes I doubt
it myself."

Ruach said, "Speculation is fruitless.  What do we do now?"  Alice
shrieked, "Richard!"  and they turned to see her sitting up and staring
at them.

For a few minutes, they could not get her to understand what had
happened.  Finally she said, "So that's why the fog covered the land,
too!  I thought it was strange, but of course I had no way of knowing
what was really happening."  Burton said, "Get your grails.  Put
anything you want to take along in your sack.  We're leaving as of now.
I want to get away before the others awake."

Alice's already large eyes became even wider.  "Where are we going?"

"Anywhere from here.  I don't like to run away but I can't stand up and
fight people like that.  Not if They know where I am.  I'll tell you,
however, what I plan to do.  I intend to find the end of The River.  It
must have an inlet and an outlet, and there must be a way for a man to
get through to the source.  If there's any way at all, I'll find it you
can bet your soul on that!"

"Meanwhile, They'll be looking for me elsewhere I hope.  The fact that
They didn't find me here makes me think that They have no means for
instantly locating a person.  They may have branded us like cattle' he
indicated the invisible symbols on his forehead "but even cattle have
mavericks.  And we're cattle with brains."  He turned to the others.
"You're more than welcome to come along with me.  In fact, I'd be
honored."

"I'll get Monat," Kazz said.  "He wouldn't want to be left behind."

Burton grimaced and said, "Good old Monat!  I hate to do this to him,
but there's no helping it.  He can't come along.  He's too
distinguishable.  Their agents would have no trouble at all in locating
anybody who looked like him.  I'm sorry, but he can't'

Tears stood in Kazz's eyes, then ran down his bulging cheekbones.  In a
choked voice, he said, "Burton-naq, I can't go either.  I look too
different, too."

Burton felt tears wet his own eyes.  He said, "We'll take that chance.
After all, there must be plenty of your type around.  We've seen at
least thirty or more during our travels."

"No females so far, Burton-naq," Kazz said mournfully.  Then he smiled.
"Maybe we find one when we go along The River."  As quickly, he lost
his grin.  "No, damn it, I don't go!  I can't hurt Monat too much.  Him
and me, others think we ugly and spry looking.  So we become good
friends.  He's not my naq, but he's next to it I stay."  He stepped up
to Burton, hugged him in a grip that forced Burton's breath out in a
great whoosh, released him, shook hands with the others, making them
wince, then turned and shuffled off.

Ruach, holding his paralyzed hand, said.  "You're off on a fool's
errand, Burton.  Do you realize that you could sail on this River for a
thousand years and still be a million miles or more from the end?  I'm
staying.  My people need me.  Besides, Spruce made it clear that we
should be striving for a spiritual perfection, not fighting Those who
gave us a chance to do so."  Burton's teeth flashed whitely in his dark
face.  He swung his grail as if it were a weapon.

"I didn't ask to be put here any more than I asked to be born on Earth,
I don't intend to kowtow to another's dictates I mean to find The
River's end.  And if I don't, I will at least have had fun and learned
much on the way!"  By then, people were beginning to stumble out of
their huts as they yawned and rubbed heavy eyes.  Ruach paid no
attention to them; he watched the craft as it set sail close-hauled to
the wind, cutting across and up The River.  Burton was handling the
rudder; he turned once and waved the grail so that the sun bounced off
it in many shining spears.

Ruach thought that Burton was really happy that he had been forced to
make this decision.  Now he could evade the deadly responsibilities
that would come with governing this little state and could do what he
wanted.  He could set out on the greatest of all his adventures.

"I suppose it's for the best," Ruach muttered to himself.  "A man may
find salvation on the road, if he wants to, just as well as he may at
home.  It's up to him.  Meanwhile, I, like Voltaire's character what
was his name?  Earthly things are beginning to slip away from me will
cultivate my own little garden."  He paused to look somewhat longingly
after Burton.

"Who knows?  He may some day run into Voltaire."  He sighed, then
smiled.

"On the other hand, Voltaire may some day drop in on me!"

"I hate you, Hermann Goring!"  The voice sprang out and then flashed
away as if it were a gear tooth meshed with the cog of another man's
dream and rotated into and then out of his dream.

Riding the crest of the hypnotic state, Richard Francis Burton knew he
was dreaming.  But he was helpless to do anything about it.

The first dream returned.

Events were fuzzy and encapsulated.  A lightning streak of himself in
the un measurable chamber of floating bodies; another flash of the
nameless Custodians finding him and putting him back to sleep; then a
jerky synopsis of the dream he had had just before the true
Resurrection on the banks of The River.

God a beautiful old man in the clothes of a mid-Victorian gentleman of
means and breeding was poking him in the ribs with an iron cane and
telling him that he owed for the flesh.

"What?  What flesh?"  Burton said, dimly aware that he was muttering in
his sleep.  He could not hear his words in the dream.

"Pay up!"  God said.  His face melted, then was recast into Burton's
own features.

God had not answered in the first dream five years before.  He spoke
now, "Make your Resurrection worth my while, you fool!  I have gone to
great expense and even greater pains to give you, and all those other
miserable and worthless wretches, a second chance."

"Second chance at what?"  Burton said.  He felt frightened at what God
might answer.  He was much relieved when God the All-Father only now
did Burton see that one eye of Jahweh-Odin was gone and out of the
empty socket glared the flames of hell did not reply.  He was gone no,
not gone but metamorphosed into a high gray tower, cylindrical and
soaring out of gray mists with the roar of the sea coming up through
the mists.

"The Grail!"  He saw again the man who had told him of the Big Grail.
This man had heard it from another man, who had heard of it from a
woman, who had heard it from ... and so forth.  The Big Grail was one
of the legends told by the billions who lived along The River this
River that coiled like a serpent around this planet from pole to pole,
issued from the unreachable and plunged into the inaccessible.

A man, or a subhuman, had managed to climb through the mountains to the
North Pole.  And he had seen the Big Grail, the Dark Tower, and the
Misty Castle just before he had stumbled.  Or he was pushed.  He had
fallen headlong and bellowing into the cold seas beneath the mists and
died.  And then the man, or subhuman, had awakened again along The
River.  Death was not forever here, although it had lost nothing of its
sting.

He had told of his vision.  And the story had traveled along the valley
of The River faster than a boat could sail.

Thus, Richard Francis Burton, the eternal pilgrim and wanderer, had
longed to storm the ramparts of the Big Grail.  He would unveil the
secret of resurrection and of this planet, since he was convinced that
the beings who had reshaped this world had also built that tower.

"Die, Hermann Goring!  Die, and leave me in peace!"  a man shouted in
German.

Burton opened his eyes.  He could see nothing except the pale sheen of
the multitudinous stars through the open window across the room of the
hut.

His vision bent to the shape of the black things inside, and he saw
Peter Frigate and Loghu sleeping on their mats by the opposite wall. He
turned his head to see the white, blanket-sized towel under which Alice
slept.  The whiteness of her face was turned toward him, and the black
cloud of her hair spilled out on the ground by her mat.

That same evening, the single-roasted boat on which he and the other
three had been sailing down The River had put into a friendly shore.
The little state of Sevieria was inhabited largely by sixteenth-century
Englishmen, although its chief was an American who had lived in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  John Sevier, founder of
the "lost state' of Franklin, which had later become Tennessee, had
welcomed Burton and his party.

Sevier and his people did not believe in slavery and would not detain
any guest longer than he desired.  After permitting them to charge
their grails and so feed themselves, Sevier had invited them to a
party.  It was the celebration of Resurrection Day; afterward, he had
them conducted to the guest hostelry.

Burton was always a light sleeper, and now he was an uneasy one.  The
others began breathing deeply or snoring long before he had succumbed
to weariness.  After an interminable dream, he had wakened on hearing
the voice that had interlocked with his dreams.

Hermann Goring, Burton thought.  He had killed Goring, but Goring must
be alive again somewhere along The River.  Was the man now groaning and
shouting in the neighboring hut one who had also suffered because of
Goring, either on earth or in the Rivervalley?  Burton threw off the
black towel and rose swiftly but noiselessly.  He secured a kilt with
magnetic tabs, fastened a belt of human skin around his waist, and made
sure the human-leather scabbard held the flint poignard.  Carrying an
assegai, a short length of hardwood tipped with a flint point, he left
the hut.

The moonless sky cast a light as bright as the full moon of Earth.  It
was aflame with huge many-colored stars and pale sheets of cosmic
gas.

The hostelries were set back a mile and a half from The River and
placed on one of the second row of hills that edged the Riverplain.
There were seven of the one-room, leaf-thatch-roofed, bamboo buildings.
At a distance, under the enormous branches of the iron trees or under
the giant pines or oaks, were other huts.  A half-mile away, on top of
a high hill, was a large circular stockade, colloquially termed the
"Roundhouse."  The officials of Sevieria slept there.

High towers of bamboo were placed every half-mile along The River
shore.  Torches flamed all night long on platforms from which sentinels
kept a lookout for invaders.

After scrutinizing the shadows under the trees, Burton walked a few
steps to the but from which the groans and shouts had come.

He pushed the grass curtain aside.  The starlight fell through the open
window on the face of the sleeper.  Burton hissed in surprise.  The
light revealed the blondish hair and the broad features of a youth he
recognized.

Burton moved slowly on bare feet.  The sleeper groaned and threw one
arm over his face and half-turned.  Burton stopped, then resumed his
stealthy progress.  He placed the assegai on the ground, drew his
dagger, and gently thrust the point against the hollow of the youth's
throat.  The arm flopped over; the eyes opened and stared into
Burton's.  Burton clamped his hand over the man's open mouth.

"Hermann Goring!  Don't move or try to yell!  I'll kill you!"  Goring's
light-blue eyes looked dark in the shadows, but the paleness of his
terror shone out.  He quivered and started to sit up, then sank back as
the flint dug into his skin.

"How long have you been here?"  Burton said.

"Who...?"  Goring said in English, then his eyes opened even wider.
"Richard Burton?  Am I dreaming?  Is that you?"  Burton could smell the
dream gum on Goring's breath and the sweat-soaked mat on which he lay.
The German was much thinner than the last time he had seen him.

Goring said, "I don't know how long I've been here.  What time is
it?"

"About an hour until dawn, I'd say.  It's the day after Resurrection
Celebration."

"Then I've been here three days.  Could I have a drink of water?  My
throat's dry as a sarcophagus."

"No wonder.  You're a living sarcophagus if you're addicted to dream
gum  Burton stood up, gesturing with the assegai at a fired-clay pot on
a little bamboo table nearby.  "You can drink if you want to. But don't
try anything."

Goring rose slowly and staggered to the table.  "I'm too weak to give
you a fight even if I wanted to."  He drank noisily from the pot and
then picked up an apple from the table.  He took a bite, and then said,
"What're you doing here?  I thought I was rid of you."

"You answer my question first," Burton said, "and be quick about it.
You pose a problem that I don't like, you know."

Goring started chewing, stopped, stared, then said, "Why should I?  I
don't have any authority here, and I couldn't do anything to you if I
did.  I'm just a guest here.  Damned decent people, these; they haven't
bothered me at all except to ask if I'm all right now and then.  Though
I don't know how long they'll let me stay without earning my keep."

"You haven't left the hut?"  Burton said.  "Then who charged your grail
for you?  How'd you get so much dream gum  Goring smiled slyly.  "I had
a big collection from the last place I stayed; somewhere about a
thousand miles up The River."

"Doubtless taken forcibly from some poor slaves," Burton said.  "But if
you were doing so well there, why did you leave?"  Goring began to
weep.  Tears ran down his face, and over his collarbones and down his
chest, and his shoulders shook.

"I .. . I had to get out.  I wasn't any good to the others.  I was
losing my hold over them spending too much time drinking, stroking
marihuana, and chewing dream gum  They said I was too soft myself. They
would have killed me or made me a slave.  So I sneaked out one night
took the boat.  I got away all right and kept going until I put into
here.  I traded part of my supply to Sevier for two weeks' sanctuary." 
Burton stared curiously at Goring.

"You knew what would happen if you took too much gum," he said.
"Nightmares, hallucinations, delusions.  Total mental and physical
deterioration.  You must have seen it happen to others."

"I was a morphine addict on Earth!"  Goring cried.  "I struggled with
it, and I won out for a long time.  Then, when things began to go badly
for the Third Reich and even worse for myself when Hitler began picking
on me, I started taking drugs again!"  He paused, then continued, "But
here, when I woke up to a new life, in a young body, when it looked as
if I had an eternity of life and youth ahead of me, when there was no
stern God in Heaven or Devil in Hell to stop me, I thought I could do
exactly as I pleased and get away with it.  I would become even greater
than the Fuehrer!  That little country in which you first found me was
to be only the beginning!  I could see my empire stretching for
thousands of miles up and down The River, on both sides of the valley.
I would have been the ruler of ten times the subjects that Hitler ever
dreamed of!"  He began weeping again, then paused to take another drink
of water, then put a piece of the dream gum in his mouth.  He chewed,
his face becoming more relaxed and blissful with each second.

Goring said, "I kept having nightmares of you plunging the spear into
my belly.  When I woke up, my belly would hurt as if a flint had gone
into my guts.  So I'd take gum to remove the hurt and the humiliation.
At first, the gum helped.  I was great.  I was master of the world,
Hitler, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, all rolled
into one.  I was chief again of Von Richthofen's Red Death Squadron;
those were happy days, the happiest of my life in many ways.  But the
euphoria soon gave way to hideousness.  I plunged into hell; I saw
myself accusing myself and behind the accuser a million others.  Not
myself but the victims of that great and glorious hero, that obscene
madman Hitler, whom I worshipped so.  And in whose name I committed so
many-crimes."

"You admit you were a criminal?"  Burton said.  "That's a story
different than the one you used to give me.  Then you said you were
justified in all you did, and you were betrayed by the..."  He stopped,
realizing that he had been sidetracked from his original purpose. "That
you should be haunted with the specter of a conscience is rather
incredible.  But perhaps that explains what has puzzled the puritans
why liquor, tobacco, marihuana, and dream gum were offered in the
grails along with food.  At least, dream gum seems to be a gift
booby-trapped with danger to those who abuse it."  He stepped closer to
Goring: The German's eyes were half-closed, and his jaw hung open.

"You know my identity.  I am traveling under a pseudonym, with good
reason.  You remember Spruce, one of your slaves?  After you were
killed, he was revealed, quite by accident, as one of those who somehow
resurrected all the dead of humanity.  Those we call the Ethicals, for
lack of a better term.  Goring, are you listening?"  Goring nodded.

"Spruce killed himself before we could get out of him all we wanted to
know.  Later, some of his compatriots came to our area and temporarily
put everybody to sleep probably with a gas intending to take me away to
wherever Their headquarters are.  But They missed me.  I was off on a
trading trip up The River.  When I returned, I realized They were after
me, and I've been running ever since.  Goring, do you hear me?"  Burton
slapped him savagely on his cheek.  Goring said, "Ach!"  and jumped
back and held the side of his face.  His eyes were open, and he was
grimacing.

"I heard you!"  he snarled.  "It just didn't seem worthwhile to answer
back.  Nothing seemed worthwhile, nothing except floating away, far
from..."

"Shut up and-listen!"  Burton said.  "The Ethicals have men everywhere
looking for me.  I can't afford to have you alive, do you realize that?
I can't trust you.  Even if you were a friend, you couldn't be trusted.
You're a gummer'

Goring giggled, stepped up to Burton and tried to put his arms around
Burton's neck.  Burton pushed him back so hard that he staggered up
against the table and only kept from falling by clutching its edges.

"This is very amusing," Goring said.  "The day I got here, a man asked
me if I'd seen you.  He described you in detail and gave your name.  I
told him I knew you well too well, and that I hoped I'd never see you
again, not unless I had you in my power, that is.  He said I should
notify him if I saw you again.  He'd make it worth my while."  Burton
wasted no time.  He strode up to Goring and seized him with both hands.
They were small and delicate, but Goring winced with pain.

He said, "What're you going to do, kill me again?"

"Not if you tell me the name of the man who asked you about me.
Otherwise..."

"Go ahead and kill me!"  Goring said.  "So what?  I'll wake up
somewhere else, thousands of miles from here, far out of your reach."
Burton pointed at a bamboo box in a corner of the hut.  Guessing that
it held Goring's supply of gum, he said, "And you'd also wake up
without that!  Where else could you get so much on such short
notice?"

"Damn you!"  Goring shouted, and tried to tear himself loose to get to
the box.

"Tell me his name!"  Burton said.  "Or I'll take the gum and throw it
in The River!"

"Agneau.  Roger Agneau.  He sleeps in a but just outside the
Roundhouse."

"I'll deal with you later," Burton said, and chopped Goring on the side
of the neck with the edge of his palm.

He turned, and he saw a man crouching outside the entrance to the hut.
The man straightened up and was off.  Burton ran out after him; in a
minute both were in the tall pines and oaks of the hills.  His quarry
disappeared in the waist-high grass.

Burton slowed to a trot, caught sight of a patch of white starlight on
bare skin and was after the fellow.  He hoped that the Ethical would
not kill himself at once, because he had a plan for extracting
information if he could knock him out at once.  It involved hypnosis,
but he would have to catch the Ethical first.  It was possible that the
man had some sort of wireless imbedded in his body and was even now in
communication with his compatriots wherever They were.  If so, They
would come in Their flying machines, and he would be lost.

He stopped.  He had lost his quarry and the only thing to do now was to
lose Alice and the others and run.  Perhaps this time they should take
to the mountains and hide there for a while.

But first he would go to Agneau's hut.  There was little chance that
Agneau would be there, but it was certainly worth the effort to make
sure.

Burton arrived within sight of the but just in time to glimpse the back
of a man entering it.  Burton circled to come up from the side where
the darkness of the hills and the trees scattered along the plain gave
him some concealment.  Crouching, he ran until he was at the door to
the hut.

He heard a loud cry some distance behind him and whirled to see Goring
staggering toward him.  He was crying out in German to Agneau, warning
him that Burton was just outside.  In one hand he held a long spear
which he brandished at the Englishman.

Burton turned and hurled himself against the flimsy bamboo-slat door.
His shoulder drove into it and broke it from its wooden hinges.  The
door flew inward and struck Agneau, who had been standing just behind
it.  Burton; the door, and Agneau fell to the floor with Agneau under
the door.

Burton rolled off the door, got up, and jumped again with both bare
feet on the wood.  Agneau screamed and then became silent.  Burton
heaved the door to one side to find his quarry unconscious and bleeding
from the nose.  Good!  Now if the noise didn't bring the watch and if
he could deal quickly enough with Goring, he could carry out his
plan.

He looked up just in time to see the starlight on the long black object
hurtling at him.

He threw himself to one side, and the spear plunged into the dirt floor
with a thump.  Its shaft vibrated like a rattlesnake preparing to
strike.

Burton stepped into the doorway, estimated Goring's distance, and
charged.  His assegai plunged into the belly of the German.  Goring
threw his hands up in the air, screamed, and fell on his side.  Burton
hoisted Agneau's limp body on his shoulder and carried him out of the
hut.

By then there were shouts from the Roundhouse.  Torches were flaring
up; the sentinel on the nearest watchtower was bellowing.  Goring was
sitting on the ground, bent over, clutching the shaft close to the
wound.

He looked gape-mouthed at Burton and said, "You did it again!  You..."
He fell over on his face, the death rattle in his throat.

Agneau returned to a frenzied consciousness.  He twisted himself out of
Burton's grip and fell to the ground.  Unlike Goring, he made no noise.
He had as much reason to be silent as Burton more perhaps.  Burton was
so surprised that he was left standing with the fellow's loin-towel
clutched in his hand.  Burton started to throw it down but felt
something stiff and square within the lining of the towel.  He
transferred the cloth to his left hand, yanked the assegai from the
corpse, and ran after Agneau.

The Ethical had launched one of the bamboo canoes beached along the
shore.  He paddled furiously out into the starlit waters, glancing
frequently behind him.  Burton raised the assegai behind his shoulder
and hurled it.  It was a short, thick-shafted weapon, designed for
infighting and not as a javelin.  But it flew straight and came down at
the end of its trajectory in Agneau's back.  The Ethical fell forward
and at an angle and tipped the narrow craft over.  The canoe turned
upside down.  Agneau did not reappear.

Burton swore.  He had wanted to capture Agneau alive, but he was damned
if he would permit the Ethical to escape.  There was a chance that
Agneau had not contacted other Ethicals yet.

He turned back toward the guest huts.  Drums were beating up and down
along the shore, and people with burning torches were hastening toward
the Roundhouse.  Burton stopped a woman and asked if he could borrow
her torch a moment.  She handed it to him but spouted questions at him.
He answered that he thought the Choctaws across the River were making a
raid.  She hurried off toward the assembly before the stockade.

Burton drove the pointed end of the torch into the soft dirt of the
bank and examined the towel he had snatched from Agneau.  On the
inside, just above the hard square in the lining, was a seam sealed
with two thin magnetic strips, easily opened.  He took the object out
of the lining and looked at it by the torchlight.

For a long time he squatted by the shifting light, unable to stop
looking or to subdue an almost paralyzing astonishment.  A photograph,
in this world of no cameras, was unheard-of.  But a photograph of him
was even more incredible, as was the fact that the picture had not been
taken on this world!  It had to have been taken on Earth, that Earth
lost now in the welter of stars somewhere in the blazing sky and in God
only knew how many thousands of years of time.

Impossibility piled on impossibility!  But it was taken at a time and
at a place when he knew for certain that no camera had fixed upon him
and preserved his image.  His mustachios had been removed but the
re-toucher had not bothered to opaque the background nor his clothing.
There he was, caught miraculously from the waist up and imprisoned in a
flat piece of some material.  Flat!  When he turned the square, he saw
his profile come into view.  If he held it almost at right angles to
the eye, he could get a three-quarters profile-view of himself.

"In 1848," he muttered to himself.  "When I was a twenty-seven-year old
subaltern in the East Indian Army.  And those are the Blue Mountains of
Goa.  This must have been taken when I was convalescing there.  But, my
God, how?  By whom?  And how would the Ethicals manage to have it in
their possession now?"

Agneau had evidently carried this photo as a mnemonic in his quest for
Burton.  Probably every one of the hunters had one just like it,
concealed in his towel.  Up and down The River They were looking for
him; there might be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Them.  Who
knew how many agents They had available or how desperately They wanted
him or why They wanted him?  After replacing the photo in the towel, he
turned to go back to the hut.  And at that moment, his gaze turned
toward the top of the mountains those unscalable heights that bounded
The Rivervalley on both sides.

He saw something flicker against a bright sheet of cosmic gas.  It
appeared for only the blink of an eyelid, then was gone.

A few seconds later, it came out of nothing, was revealed as a dark
hemispherical object, and then disappeared again.

A second flying craft showed itself briefly, reappeared at a lower
elevation, and then was gone like the first.

The Ethicals would take him away, and the people of Sevieria would
wonder what had made them fall asleep for an hour or so.

He did not have time to return to the but and wake up the others.  If
he waited a moment longer, he would be trapped.

He turned and ran into The River and began swimming toward the other
shore, a mile and a half away.  But he had gone no more than forty
yards when he felt the presence of some huge bulk above.  He turned on
his back to stare upward.  There was only the soft glare of the stars
above.  Then, out of the air, fifty feet above him, a disk with a
diameter of about sixty feet cut out a section of the sky.  It
disappeared almost immediately, came into sight again only twenty feet
above him.

So They had some means of seeing at a distance in the night and had
spotted him in his flight.

"You jackals!"  he shouted at them.  "You'll not get me anyway!  He
upended and dived and swam straight downward.  The water became colder,
and his eardrums began to hurt.  Although his eyes were open, he could
see nothing.  Suddenly, he was pushed by a wall of water, and he knew
that the pressure came from displacement by a large object.

The craft had plunged down after him.

There was only one way out.  They would have his dead body, but that
would be all.  He could escape Them again, be alive somewhere on The
River to outwit Them again and strike back at Them.

He opened his mouth and breathed in deeply through both his nose and
his mouth.

The water choked him.  Only by a strong effort of will did he keep from
closing his lips and trying to fight back against the death around him.
He knew with his mind that he would live again, but the cells of his
body did not know it.  They were striving for life at this very moment,
not in the rationalized future.  And they forced from his water-choked
throat a cry of despair.

"Yaaaaaaaah!"  The cry raised him off the grass as if he had bounced up
off a trampoline.  Unlike the first time he had been resurrected, he
was not weak and bewildered.  He knew what to expect.  He would wake on
the grassy banks of The River near a grail stone  But he was not
prepared for these giants battling around him.

His first thought was to find a weapon.  There was nothing at hand
except the grail that always appeared with a resurrectee and the pile
of towels of various sizes, colors, and thicknesses.  He took one step,
seized the handle of the grail, and waited.  If he had to, he would use
the grail as a club, It was light, but it was practically
indestructible and very hard.  However, the monsters around him looked
as if they could take a battering all day and not feel a thing.

Most of them were at least eight feet tall, some were surely over nine;
their massively muscled shoulders were over three feet broad.  Their
bodies were human, or nearly so, and their white skins were covered
with long reddish or brownish hairs.  They were not as hairy as a
chimpanzee but more so than any man he had ever seen, and he had known
some remarkably hirsute human beings.

But the faces gave them an un-human and frightening aspect, especially
since all were snarling with battle-rage.  Below a low forehead was a
bloom of bone that ran without indentation above the eyes and then
continued around to form O's.  Though the eyes were as large as his,
they looked small compared to the broad face in which they were set.
The cheekbones billowed out and then curved sharply inward.  The
tremendous noses gave the giants the appearance of proboscis monkeys.

At another time, Burton might have been amused by them.  Not now.  The
roars that tore out of their more-than-gorilla sized chests were deep
as a lion's, and the huge teeth would have made a Kodiak bear think
twice before attacking.  Their fists, large as his head, held clubs as
thick and as long as wagon poles or stone axes.  They swung their
weapons at each other, and when they struck flesh, bones broke with
cracks as loud as wood splitting.  Sometimes, the clubs broke, too.

Burton had a moment in which to look around.  The light was weak.  The
sun had only half-risen above the peaks across The River.  The air was
far colder than any he had felt on this planet except during his
defeated attempts to climb to the top of the perpendicular ranges.

Then one of the victors of a combat looked around for another enemy and
saw him.

His eyes widened.  For a second, he looked as startled as Burton had
when he had first opened his eyes.  Perhaps he had never seen such a
creature as Burton before, any more than Burton had seen one like him.
If so, he did not take long to get over his surprise.  He bellowed,
jumped over the mangled body of his foe, and ran toward Burton, raising
an axe that could have felled an elephant.

Burton also ran, his grail in one hand.  If he were to lose that, he
might as well die now.  Without it, he would starve or have to eke out
on fish and bamboo sprouts.

He almost made it.  An opening appeared before him, and he sped between
two titans, their arms around each other and each straining to throw
over the other; and another who was backing away before the rain of
blows delivered by the club of a fourth.  Just as he was almost
through, the two wrestlers toppled over on him.

He was going swiftly enough that he was not caught directly under them,
but the flailing arm of one struck his left heel.  So hard was the
blow, it smashed his foot against the ground and stopped him instantly.
He fell forward and began to scream.  His foot must have been broken,
and he had torn muscles throughout his leg.

Nevertheless, he tried to rise and to hobble on to The River.  Once in
it, he could swim away, if he did not faint from the agony.  He took
two hops on his right foot, only to be seized from behind.

He flew up into the air, whirling around, and was caught before he
began his descent.

The titan was holding him with one hand at arm's length, the enormous
and powerful fist clutched around Burton's chest.  Burton could hardly
breathe; his ribs threatened to cave in.

Despite all this, he had not dropped his grail.  Now he struck it
against the giant's shoulder.

Lightly, as if brushing off a fly, the giant tapped the metal container
with his axe, and the grail was torn from Burton's grip the behemoth
gunned and bent his arm to bring Burton in closer.  Burton weighed one
hundred and eighty pounds, but the arm did not quiver under the
strain.

For a moment, Burton looked directly into the pale blue eyes sunk in
the bony circles.  The nose was lined with many broken veins.  The lips
protruded because of the bulging prognathous jaws beneath not, as he
had first thought, because the lips were so thick.

Then the titan bellowed and lifted Burton up above his head.  Burton
hammered the huge arm with his fists, knowing that it was in vain but
unwilling to submit like a caught rabbit.  Even as he did so, he noted,
though not with the full attention of his mind, several things about
the scene.

The sun had been just rising above the mountain peaks when he had first
awakened.  Although the time passed since he had jumped to his feet was
only a few minutes, the sun should have cleared the peaks.  It had not;
it hung at exactly the same height as when he had first seen it.

Moreover, the upward slant of the valley permitted a view for at least
four miles.  The grail stone by him was the last one.  Beyond it was
only the plain and The River.

This was the end of the line or the beginning of The River.

There was no time nor desire for him to appreciate what these meant. He
merely noted them during the passage between pain, rage, and terror.
Then, as the giant prepared to bring his axe around to splinter
Burton's skull, the giant stiffened and shrieked.  To Burton, it was
like being next to a locomotive whistle.  The grip loosened, and Burton
fell to the ground.  For a moment, he passed out from the pain in his
foot.

When he regained consciousness, he had to grind his teeth to keep from
yelling again.  He groaned and sat up, though not without a race of
fire up his leg that made the feeble daylight grow almost black.  The
battle was roaring all around him, but he was in a little corner of
inactivity.  By him lay the tree-trunk thick corpse of the titan who
had been about to kill him.  The back of his skull, which looked
massive enough to resist a battering ram, was caved in.

Around the elephantine corpse crawled another casualty, on all fours.
Seeing him, Burton forgot his pain for a moment.  The horribly injured
man was Hermann Goring.

Both of them had been resurrected at the same spot.  There was no time
to think about the implications of the coincidence.  His pain began to
come back.  Moreover, Goring started to talk.

Not that he looked as if he had much talk left in him or much time left
to do it in.  Blood covered him.  His right eye was gone.  The corner
of his mouth was ripped back to his ear.  One of his hands was smashed
flat.  A rib was sticking through the skin.  How he had managed to stay
alive, let alone crawl, was beyond Burton's understanding.

"You ... you!"  Goring said hoarsely in German, and he collapsed.  A
fountain poured out of his mouth and over Burton's legs; his eyes
glazed.

Burton wondered if he would ever know what he had intended to say.  Not
that it really mattered.  He had more vital things to think about.

About ten yards from him, two titans were standing with their backs to
him.  Both were breathing hard, apparently resting for a moment before
they jumped back into the fight.  Then one spoke to the other.

There was no doubt about it.  The giant was not just uttering cries. He
was using a language.

Burton did not understand it, but he knew it was speech.  He did not
need the modulated, distinctly syllabic reply of the other to confirm
his recognition.

So these were not some type of prehistoric ape but a species of
subhuman men.  They must have been unknown to the twentieth-century
science of Earth, since his friend, Frigate, had described to him all
the fossils known in A.D. 2008.

He lay down with his back against the fallen giant's Gothic ribs and
brushed some of the long reddish sweaty hairs from his face.  He fought
nausea and the agony of his foot and the torn muscles of his leg.  If
he made too much noise, he might attract those two, and they would
finish the job.  But what if they did?  With his wounds, in a land of
such monsters, what chance did he have of surviving?  Worse than his
agony of foot, almost, was the thought that, on his first trip on what
he called The Suicide Express, he had reached his goal.

He had only an estimated one chance in ten million of arriving at this
area, and he might never have made it if he had drowned himself ten
thousand times.  Yet he had had a fantastically good fortune.  It might
never occur again.  And he was to lose it and very soon.

The sun was moving half-revealed along the tops of the mountains across
The River.  This was the place that he had speculated would exist; he
had come here first shot.  Now, as his eyesight failed and the pain
lessened, he knew that he was dying.  The sickness was born from more
than the shattered bones in his foot.  He must be bleeding inside.

He tried to rise once more.  He would stand, if only on one foot, and
shake his fist at the mocking fates and curse them.  He would die with
a curse on his lips.

The red wing of dawn was lightly touching his eyes.

He rose to his feet, knowing that his wounds would be healed and he
would be whole again, but not quite believing it.  Near him was a grail
and a pile of six nearly folded towels of various sizes, colors, and
thicknesses.

Twelve feet away, another man, also naked, was rising from the short
bright-green grass.  Burton's skin grew cold.  The blondish hair, broad
face, and light-blue eyes were those of Hermann Goring.

The German looked as surprised as Burton.  He spoke slowly, as if
coming out of a deep sleep.  "There's something very wrong here."

"Something foul indeed," Burton replied.  He knew no more of the
pattern of resurrection along The River than any other man.  He had
never seen a resurrection, but he had had them described to him by
those who had.  At dawn, just after the sun topped the un-climbable
mountains, a shimmering appeared in the air beside a grail stone  In
the flicker of a bird's wing, the distortion solidified, and a naked
man or woman or child appeared from nowhere on the grass by the bank.
Always the indispensable grail and the towels were by the "lazarus."
Along a conceivably tea to twenty million-mile long Rivervalley in
which an estimated thirty-five to thirty-six billion lived, a million
could die per day.  It was true that there were no diseases (other than
mental) but, though statistics were lacking, a million were probably
killed every twenty-four hours by the myriads of wars between the one
million or so little states, by crimes of passion, by suicides, by
executions of criminals, and by accidents.  There was a steady and
numerous traffic of those undergoing the "little resurrection," as it
was called.

But Burton had never heard of two dying in the same place and at the
same time being resurrected together.  The process of selection of area
for the new life was random or so he had always thought.

One such occurrence could conceivably take place, although the
probabilities were one in twenty million.  But two such, one
immediately after the other, was a miracle.

Burton did not believe in miracles.  Nothing happened that could not be
explained by physical principles if you knew all the facts.  " He did
not know them, so he would not worry about the "coincidence' at the
moment.  The solution to another problem was more demanding.  That was,
what was he to do about Goring?  The man knew him and could identify
him to any Ethicals searching for him.

Burton looked quickly around him and saw a number of men and women
approaching in a seemingly friendly manner.  There was time for a few
words with the German.

"Goring, I can kill you or myself.  But I don't want to do either at
the moment, anyway.  You know why you're dangerous to me.  I shouldn't
take a chance with you, you treacherous hyena.  But there's something
different about you, something I can't put my fingers on.  But..."

Goring, who was notorious for his resilience, seemed to be coming out
of his shock.  He grinned slyly and said, "I do have you over the
barrel, don't I?"  Seeing Burton's snarl, he hastily put up one hand
and said, "But I swear to you I won't reveal your identity to anyone!
Or do anything to hurt you!  Maybe we're not friends, but we at least
know each other, and we're in a land of strangers.  It's good to have
one familiar face by your side.  I know, I've suffered too long from
loneliness, from desolation of the spirit.  I thought I'd go mad.
That's partly the reason I took to the dream gum  Believe me, I won't
betray you."  Burton did not believe him.  He did think, however, that
he could trust him for a while.  Goring would want a potential ally, at
least until he took the measure of the people in this area and knew
what he could or could not do..  Besides, Goring might have changed for
the better.

No, Burton said to himself.  No.  There you go again.  Verbal cynic
though you are, you've always been too forgiving, too ready to overlook
injury to yourself and to give your injurer another chance.  Don't be a
fool again, Burton.

Three days later, he was still uncertain about Goring.

Burton had taken the identity of Abdul ibn Harun, a nineteenth-century
citizen of Cairo, Egypt.  He had several reasons for adopting the
guise.  One was that he spoke excellent Arabic, knew the Cairo dialect
of that period, and had an excuse to cover his head with a towel
wrapped as a turban.  He hoped this would help disguise his appearance.
Goring did not say a word to anybody to contradict the camouflage.
Burton was fairly sure of this because he and Goring spent most of
their time together.  They were quartered in the same but until they
adjusted to the local customs and went through their period of
probation.  Part of this was intensive military training.  Burton had
been one of the greatest swordsmen of the nineteenth century and also
knew every inflection of fighting with weapons or with hands.  After a
display of his ability in a series of tests, he was welcomed as a
recruit.  In fact, he was promised that he would be an instructor when
he learned the language well enough.

Goring got the respect of the locals almost as swiftly.  Whatever his
other faults, he did not lack courage.  He was strong and proficient
with arms, jovial, likeable when it suited his purpose, and was not far
behind Burton in gaining fluency in the language.  He was quick to gain
and to use authority, as befitted the ex-Reichmarschal of Hitler's
Germany.

This "section of the western shore was populated largely by speakers of
a language totally unknown even to Burton, a master linguist both on
Earth and on the Riverplanet.  When he had learned enough to ask
questions, he deduced that they must have lived somewhere in Central
Europe during the Early Bronze Age.  They had some curious customs, one
of which was copulation in public.  This was interesting enough to
Burton, who had co-founded the Royal Anthropological Society in London
in 1863 and who had seen strange things during his explorations on
Earth.  He did not participate, but neither was he horrified.

A custom he did adopt joyfully was that of stained whiskers.  The males
resented the fact that their face hair had been permanently removed by
the Resurrectors, just as their prepuces had been cut off.  They could
do nothing about the latter outrage, but they could correct the former
to a degree.  They smeared their upper lips and chins with a dark
liquid made from finely ground charcoal, fish glue, oak tannin, and
several other ingredients.  The more dedicated used the dye as a tattoo
and underwent a painful and long-drawn-out pricking with a sharp bamboo
needle.

Now Burton was doubly disguised, yet he-had put himself at the mercy of
the man who might betray him at the first opportunity.  He wanted to
attract an Ethical but did not want the Ethical to be certain of his
identity.  Burton wanted to make sure that he could get away in time
before being scooped up in the net.  It was a dangerous game, like
walking a tightrope over a pit of hungry wolves, but he wanted to play
it.  He would run only when it became absolutely necessary.  The rest
of the time, he would be the hunted hunting the hunter.

Yet the vision of the Dark Tower, or the Big Grail, was always on the
horizon of every thought.  Why play cat and mouse when he might be able
to storm the very ramparts of the castle within which he presumed the
Ethicals had headquarters?  Or, if stormed was not the correct
description, steal into the tower, effect entrance as a mouse does into
a house or a castle.  While the cats were looking elsewhere, the mouse
would be sneaking into the Tower, and there the mouse might turn into a
tiger.

At this thought, he laughed, getting curious stares from his two hut
mates Goring and the seventeenth-century Englishman, John Collop. His
laugh was half-ridicule of himself at the tiger image.  What made him
think that he, one man, could do anything to hurt the Planet-Shapers,
Resurrectors of billions of dead, Feeders and Maintainers of those
summoned back to life?  He twisted his hands and knew that within them,
and within the brain that guided them, could be the downfall of the
Ethicals.  What this fearful thing was that he harbored within himself,
he did not know.  But They feared him.  If he could only find out
why... His laugh was only partly self-ridicule. The other half of him
believed that he was a tiger among men.  As a man thinks, so is he, he
muttered.

Goring said, "You have a very peculiar laugh, my friend.  Somewhat
feminine for such a masculine man.  It's like ... like a thrown rock
skipping over a lake of ice.  Or like a jackal."

"I have something of the jackal and hyena in me," Burton replied.  "So
my detractors maintained and they were right.  But I am more than
that."  He rose from his bed and began to exercise to work the
sleep-rust from his muscles.  In a few minutes, he would go with the
others to a grail stone by the Riverbank and charge his grail.
Afterward, there would be an hour of policing the area.  Then drill,
followed by instruction in the spear the club, the sling, the
obsidian-edged sword, the bow and arrow, the flint axe, and in fighting
with bare hands and feet.  An hour for rest and talk and lunch.  Then
an hour in a language class.  A two-hour work stint in helping build
the ramparts that marked the boundaries of this little state.  A
half-hour rest, then the obligatory mile run to build stamina.  Dinner
from the grails, and the evening off except for those who had guard
duty or other tasks.

Such a schedule and such activities were being duplicated in tiny
states up and down The River's length.  Almost everywhere, mankind was
at war or preparing for it.  The citizens must keep in shape and know
how to fight to the best of their ability.  The exercises also kept the
citizens occupied.  No matter how monotonous the martial life, it was
better than sitting around wondering what to do for amusement.  Freedom
from worry about food, rent, bills, and the gnat like chores and duties
that had kept Earthmen busy and fretful was not all a blessing.  There
was the great battle against ennui, and the leaders of each state were
occupied trying to think up ways to keep their people busy.

It should have been paradise in Rivervalley, but it was war, war, war.
Other things aside, however, war was, in this place, good (according to
some)!  It gave savor to life and erased boredom.  Man's greediness,
and aggressiveness had its worthwhile side.

After dinner, every man and woman was free to do what he wished, as
long as he broke no local laws.  He could barter the cigarettes and
liquor provided by his grail or the fish he'd caught in The River for a
better bow and arrows; shields; bowls and cups; tables and chairs;
bamboo flutes; clay trumpets; human or fishskin drums; rare stones
(which really-were rare); necklaces made of the beautifully articulated
and colored bones of the deep-River fish, or jade or of carved wood;
obsidian mirrors; sandals and shoes; charcoal drawings; the rare and
expensive bamboo paper; ink and fish bone pens; hats made from the long
tough-fibered hill-grass; bull-roarers; little-wagons on which to ride
down the hillsides; harps made from wood with 'strings fashioned from
the gut of the dragon fish rings of oak for fingers and toes; clay
statuettes; and other devices, useful or ornamental.

Later, of course, there was the love-making Burton and his hut mates
were denied, for the time being.  Only when they had been accepted as
full citizens would they be allowed to move into separate houses and
live with a woman.

John Collop was a short slight youth with long yellow hair, a narrow
but pleasant face, and large blue eyes with very long, up curving black
eyelashes.  In his first conversation with Burton, he had said, after
introducing himself, "I was delivered from the darkness of my mother's
womb whose else?  into the light of God of Earth in 1625.  Far too
quickly, I descended again into the womb of Mother Nature, confident in
the hope of resurrection and not disappointed, as you see.  Though I
must confess that this afterlife is not that which the parsons led me
to expect.  But then, how should they know the truth, poor blind devils
leading the blind!"  It was not long before Collop told him that he was
a member of the Church of the Second Chance.

Burton's eyebrows rose.  He had encountered this new religion at many
places along The River.  Burton, though an infidel, made it his
business to investigate thoroughly every religion.  Know a man's faith,
and you knew at least half the man.  Know his wife, and you knew the
other half.

The Church had a few simple tenets, some based on fact, most on surmise
and hope and wish.  In this they differed from no religions born on
Earth.  But the Second Chancers had one advantage over any Terrestrial
religion.  They had no difficulty in proving that dead men could be
raised not only once but often.

"And why has mankind been given a Second Chance?"  Collop said in his
low, earnest voice.  "Does he deserve it?  No.  With few exceptions,
men are a mean, miserable, petty, vicious, narrow-minded, exceedingly
egotistic, generally disputing, and disgusting lot.  Watching them, the
gods or God should vomit.  But in this divine spew is a clot of
compassion, if you will pardon me for using such imagery.  Man, however
base, has a silver wire of the divine in him.  It is no idle phrase
that man was made in God's image, There is something worth saving in
the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be
fashioned.

"Whoever has given us this new opportunity to save our souls knows this
truth.  We have been placed here in this Rivervalley on this alien
planet under alien skies to work out our salvation.  What our time
limit is, I do not know nor do the leaders of my Church even speculate.
Perhaps it is forever, or it may be only a hundred years or a thousand.
 But we must make use of whatever time we do have, my friend."

Burton said, "Weren't you sacrificed on the altar of Odin by Norse who
clung to the old religion, even if this world isn't the Valhalla they
were promised by their priests?  Don't you think you wasted your time
and breath by preaching to them?  They believe in the same old gods,
the only difference in their theology now being some adjustments
they've made to conditions here.  Just as you have clung to your old
faith."

"The Norse have no explanations for their new surroundings," Collop
said, "but I do.  I have a reasonable explanation, one which the Norse
will eventually come to accept, to believe in as fervently as I do.
They killed me, but some more persuasive member of the Church will come
along and talk to them before they stretch him out in the wooden lap of
their wooden idol and stab him in the heart.  If he does not talk them
out of him, the next missionary will.

"It was true, on Earth, that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the
church.  It is even truer here.  If you kill a man to shut his mouth,
he pops up some place elsewhere along The River.  And a man who has
been martyred a hundred thousand miles away comes along to replace the
previous martyr.  The Church will win out in the end.  They men will
cease these useless, hate generating wars and begin the real business,
the only worthwhile business, that of gaining salvation."  "What you
say about the martyrs is true about anyone with an idea," Burton said.
"A wicked man who's killed also pops up to commit his evil
elsewhere."

"Good will prevail; the truth always wins out," Collop said.

"I don't know how restricted your mobility was on Earth or how long
your life," Burton said, "but both must have been very limited to make
you so blind.  I know better."

Collop said, "The Church is not founded on faith alone.  It has
something very factual, very substantial, on which to base its
teachings.  Tell me, my friend, Abdul, have you ever heard of anybody
being resurrected dead?"

"A paradox!"  Burton cried.  "What do you mean resurrected dead?"
"There are at least three authenticated cases and four more of which
the Church has heard but has not been able to validate.  These are men
and women who were killed at one place on The River and translated to
another.  Strangely, their bodies were recreated, but they were without
the spark of life.  Now, why was this?"

"I can't imagine!"  Burton said.  "You tell me.  I listen, for you
speak as one with authority."  He could imagine, since he had heard the
same story elsewhere.  But he wanted to learn if Collop's story
thatched the others.  It was the same, even to the names of the dead
lazari.  The story was that these men and women had been identified by
those who had known them well on Earth.  They were all saintly or
near-saintly people; in fact, one of them had been canonized on Earth.
The theory was that they had attained that state of sanctity, which
made it no longer necessary to go through the "purgatory' of the
Riverplanet.  Their souls had gone on to .. . someplace ... and left
the excess baggage of their physical bodies behind.

Soon, so the Church said, more would reach this state.  And their
bodies would be left behind.  Eventually, given enough time, the
Rivervalley would become depopulated.  All would have shed themselves
of their visciousnesses and hates and would have become illuminated
with the love of mankind and of God.  Even the most depraved, those who
seemed to be utterly lost, would be able to abandon their physical
beings.  All that was needed to attain this grace was love.

Burton sighed, laughed loudly, and said, "Plus ca change, plus dear la
meme chose.  Another fairy tale to give men hope.  The old religions
have been discredited although some refuse to face even that fact so
new ones must be invented."

"It makes sense," Collop said.  "Do you have a better explanation of
why we're here?"  "Perhaps.  I can make up fairy tales, too."  As a
matter of fact, Burton did have an explanation.  However, he could not
tell it to Collop.  Spruce had told Burton something of the identity,
history, and purpose of his group, the Ethicals.  Much of what he had
said agreed with Collop's theology.

Spruce had killed himself before he had explained about the "soul."
Presumably, the "soul' had to be part of the total organization of
resurrection.  Otherwise, when the body had attained "salvation," and
no longer lived, there would be nothing to carry on the essential part
of a man.  Since the post-Terrestrial life could be explained in
physical terms, the "soul' must also be a physical entity, not to be
dismissed with the term "supernatural' as it had been on Earth.

There was much that Burton did not know.  But he had had a glimpse into
the workings of this Riverplanet that no other human being possessed.

With the little knowledge he did have, he planned to lever his way into
more, to pry open the lid, and crawl inside the sanctum.  To do so, he
would attain the Dark Tower.  The only way to get there swiftly was to
take The Suicide- Express.  First, he must be discovered by an Ethical.
Then he must overpower the Ethical, render him unable to kill himself,
and somehow extricate more information from him.

Meanwhile, he continued to play the role of Abdul ibn Harun, translated
and transplanted Egyptian physician of the nineteenth century, now a
citizen of Bargawhwdzys.  As such, he decided to join the Church of the
Second Chance.  He announced to Collop his disillusionment in Mahomet
and his teachings, and so became Collop's first convert its this
area.

"Then you must swear not to take arms against any man nor to defend
yourself physically, my dear friend," Collop said.

Burton, outraged, said that he would allow no man to strike at him and
go unharmed.

"Tis not unnatural," Collop said gently.  "Contrary to habit, yes.  But
a than may become something other than he has been, something better if
he has the strength of will and the desire."  Burton rapped out a
violent no and stalked away.  Collop shook his head sadly, but he
continued to be as friendly as ever.  Not without a sense of humor, he
sometimes addressed Burton as his "five-minute convert," not meaning
the time it took to bring him into the fold but the time it took Burton
to leave the fold.

At this time, Collop got his second convert, Goring.  The German had
had nothing but sneers and jibes for Collop.  Then he began chewing
dream gum again, and the nightmares started.

For two nights he kept Collop and Burton awake with his groanings his
tossings, his screams.  On the evening of the third day, he asked
Collop if he would accept him into the Church.  However he had to make
a confession.  Collop must understand what sort of person he had been,
both on Earth and on this planet.

Collop heard out the mixture of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.
Then he said, "Friend, I care not what you may have been.  Only what
you are and what you will be.  I listened only because confession is
good for the soul I can see that you are deeply troubled, that you have
suffered sorrow and grief for what you have done, yet take some
pleasure in what you once were, a mighty figure among men.  Much of
what you told me I do not comprehend, because I know not much about
your era.  Nor does it matter.  Only today and tomorrow need to be our
concern, each day will take care of itself."

It seemed to Burton not that Collop did not care what Goring had been
but that he did not believe his story of Earthly glory and infamy.
There were so many phonies that genuine heroes, or villains, had been
depreciated.

Thus, Burton had met three Jesus Christs, two Abrahams, four King
Richard the Lion Hearts six Attilas, a dozen Judases (only one of whom
could speak Aramaic), a George Washington, two Lord Byrons, three Jesse
James's, any number of Napoleons, a General Custer (who spoke with a
heavy Yorkshire accent), a Finn Mac Cool (who did not know ancient
Irish), a Tchaka (who spoke the wrong Zulu dialect), and a number of
others who might or might not have been what they claimed to be.

Whatever a man had been on Earth, he had to reestablish himself here.
This was not easy, because conditions were radically altered.  The
greats and the import ants of Terra were constantly being humiliated in
their claims and denied a chance to prove their identities.

To Collop, the humiliation was a blessing.  First, humiliation, then
humility, he would have said.  And then comes humanity as a matter of
course.

Goring had been trapped in the Great Design as Burton termed it because
it was his nature to overindulge, especially with drugs.  Knowing that
the dream gum was uprooting the dark things in his personal abyss, was
spewing them up into the light, that he was being torn apart,
fragmented, he still continued to chew as much as he could get.  For a
while, temporarily made healthful again with a new resurrection, he had
been able to deny the call of the drug.  But a few weeks after his
arrival is this area, he had succumbed, and now the night was ripped
apart with his shrieks of "Hermann Goring I hate you!"

"If this continues," Burton said to Collop, "he will go mad or he will
kill himself again, or force someone to kill him, so that he can get
away from himself.  But the suicide will be useless, and it's all to do
over again.  Tell me truly now, is this hell?"

"Purgatory, rather," Collop said.  "Purgatory is hell with hope."

Two months passed.  Burton marked the days off on a pine stick notched
with a flint knife.  This was the fourteenth day of the seven month of
5 A.R."  the fifth year After the Resurrection.  Burton tried to keep a
calendar, for he was, among many other things; a chronicler.  But it
was difficult.  Time did not mean much, on The River.  The planet had a
polar axis that was always at ninety degrees to the ecliptic.  There
was no change of seasons, and the stars seemed to jostle each other and
made identification of individual luminaries or of constellations
impossible.  So many and so bright were they that even the noonday sun
at its zenith could not entirely dim the greatest of them.  Like ghosts
reluctant to retreat before daylight, they hovered in the burning
air.

Nevertheless, man needs time as a fish needs water.  If he does not
have it, he will invent it; so to Burton, it was July 14, 5 A.R.

But Collop, like many, reckoned time as having continued from the year
of his Terrestrial death.  To him, it was A.D. 1667.  He did not
believe that his sweet Jesus had become sour.  Rather, this River was
the River Jordan; this valley, the vale beyond the shadow of death.  He
admitted that the afterlife was not that which he had expected.  Yet it
was evidence of the all-encompassing love of God for His creation.  He
had given all men, altogether undeserving of such a gift, another
chance.  If this world was not the New Jerusalem, it was a place
prepared for its building.  Here the bricks, which were the love of
God, and the mortar, love for man, must be fashioned in this kiln and
this mill: the planet of The River of The Valley.

Burton pooh-pooh ed the concept, but he could not help loving the
little man.  Collop was genuine; he was not stoking the furnace of his
sweetness with leaves from a book or pages from a theology.  He did not
operate under forced draft.  He burned with a flame that fed on his own
being, and this being was love.  Love even for the unlovable, the
rarest and most difficult species of love.

He told Burton something of his Terrestrial life.  He had been a
doctor, a farmer, a liberal with unshakable faith in his religion, yet
full of questions about his faith and the society of his time.  He had
written a plea for religious tolerance which had aroused both praise
and damnation is his time.  And he had been a poet, well-known for a
short time, then forgotten.

Lord, let the faithless see Miracles ceased, revive in me.  The leper
cleansed, blind healed, dead raised by Thee

"My lines may have died, but their truth has not," he said to Burton.
He waved his hand to indicate the hilts, The River, the mountains, the
people.  "As you may see if you open your eyes and do not persist in
this stubborn myth of yours that this is the handiwork of men like
us."

He continued, "Or grant your premise.  It still remains that these
Ethicals are but doing the work of Their Creator!

"I like better those other lines of yours," Burton said.

Dull soul aspire; Thou art not the Earth.  Mourn higher!  Heaven gave
the spark; to it return the fire."

Collop was pleased, not knowing that Burton was thinking of the lines
in a different sense than that intended by the poet.

"Return the fire."  That meant somehow getting into the Dark Tower,
discovering the secrets of the Ethicals, and turning Their devices
against Them.  He did not feel gratitude because They had given him an
earned life.  He was outraged that They should do this without his
leave.  If They wanted his thanks, why did They not tell him why They
had given him another chance?  What reason did They have for keeping
Their motives in the dark?  He would find out why.  The spark They had
restored in him would turn into a raging fire to barn Them.

He cursed the fate that had propelled him to a place so near the source
of The River, hence so close to the Tower, and in a few minutes had
carried him away again, back to some place is the middle of The River,
millions of miles away from his goal.

Yet, if he had been there once, he could get there again.  Not by
taking a boat, since the journey would consume at least forty years and
probably more.  He could also count on being captured and enslaved a
thousand times over.  And if he were killed along the way, he might
find himself raised again far from his goal and have to start all over
again.

On the other hand, given the seemingly random selection of
resurrection, he might find himself once more near The River's mouth.
It was this that determined him to board The Suicide Express once more.
However, even though he knew that his death would be only temporary, he
found it difficult to take the necessary step.  His mind told him that
death was the only ticket, but his body rebelled.  The cells' fierce
insistence on survival overcame his will.

For a while, he rationalized that he was interested in studying the
customs and languages of the prehistorics among whom he was living.
Then honesty triumphed, and he knew he was only looking for excuses to
put off the Grim Moment.  Despite this, he did not act.

Burton, Collop, and Goring were moved out of their bachelor barracks to
take up the normal life of citizens: Each took up residence in a hut,
and within a week had found a woman to live with him.  Collop's Church
did not require celibacy.  A member could take an oath of chastity if
he wished to.  But the Church reasoned that men and women had been
resurrected in bodies that retained the full sex of the original.  (Or,
if lacking on Earth, supplied here.) It was evident that the Makers of
Resurrection had meant for sex to be used.  It was well known, though
still denied by some, that sex had other functions than reproduction.
So go ahead, youths, roll in the grass.

Another result of the inexorable logic of the Church (which, by the
way, decried reason as being untrustworthy) was that any form of love
was allowed, as long as it was voluntary and did not involve cruelty or
force.  Exploitation of children was forbidden.  This was a problem
that, given time, would cease to exist.  In a few years all children
would be adults.

Collop refused to have a hut mate solely to relieve his sexual
tensions. He insisted on a woman whom he loved.  Burton jibed at him
for this, saying that it was a prerequisite easily therefore cheaply
fulfilled. Collop loved all humanity; hence, he should theoretically
take the first woman who would say yes to him.

"As a matter of fact, my friend," Collop said, "that is exactly what
happened."

"It's only a coincidence that she's beautiful, passionate, and
intelligent?"  Burton said.

"Though I strive to be more than human, rather, to become a complete
human, I am all-too-human," Collop replied.  He smiled.  "Would you
have me deliberately martyr myself by choosing an ugly shrew?"

"I'd think you more of a fool than I do even now," Burton said.  "As
for me, all I require in a woman is beauty and affection.  I don't care
a whit about her brains.  And I prefer blondes.  There's a chord within
me that responds to the fingers of a golden-haired woman."

Goring took into his but a Valkyrie, a tall, great-busted, wide
shouldered, eighteenth-century Swede.  Burton wondered if she was a
surrogate for Goring's first wife, the sister-in-law of the Swedish
explorer Count Von Rosen.  Goring admitted that she not only looked
like his Karin, but even had a voice similar to hers.  He seemed to be
very happy with her and she with him.

Then, one night, during the invariable early-morning rain, Burton was
ripped from a deep sleep.  He thought he had heard a scream, but all he
could hear when he became fully awake was the explosion of thunder and
the crack of nearby lightning.  He closed his eyes, only to be jerked
upright again.  A woman had screamed in a nearby hut.

He jumped up, shoved aside the bamboo-slat door, and stuck his head
outside.  The cold rain hit him in the face.  All was dark except for
the mountains in the west, lit up by flashes of lightning.  Then a bolt
struck so close that he was deafened and dazzled.  However, he did
catch a glimpse of two ghostly white figures just outside Goring's hut.
The German had his hands locked around the throat of his woman, who was
holding onto his wrists and trying to push him away.

Burton ran out, slipped on the wet grass, and fell.  Just as he arose,
another flash showed the woman on her knees, bending backward, and
Goring's distorted face above her.  At the same time, Collop, wrapping
a towel around his waist, came out of s his hut.  Burton got to his
feet and, still silent, ran again.  But Goring was gone.  Burton knelt
by Kayla, felt her heart, and could detect no beat.  Another glare of
lightning showed him her face, mouth hanging open, eyes bulging.

He rose and shouted, "Goring!  Where are you'?"  Something struck the
back of his head.  He fell on his face.

Stunned, he managed to get to his hands and knees, only to be knocked
flat again by another heavy blow.  Half-conscious, he nevertheless
rolled over on his back and raised his legs and hands to defend
himself.  Lightning revealed Goring standing above him with a club in
one hand.  His face was a madman's.

Darkness sliced off the lightning.  Something white and blurred-leaped
upon Goring out of the darkness.  The two pale bodies went down onto
the grass beside Burton and rolled over and over.  They screeched like
tomcats, and another flash of lightning showed them clawing at each
other.

Burton staggered to his feet and lurched toward them but was knocked
down by Collop's body, hurled by Goring.  Again Burton got up.  Collop
bounded to his feet and charged Goring.  There was a loud crack, and
Collop crumpled.  Burton tried to run toward Goring.  His legs refused
to answer his demands; they took him off at an angle, away from his
point of attack.  Then another blast of light and noise showed Goring,
as if caught in a photograph, suspended in the act of swinging the club
at Burton.

Burton felt his arm go numb as it received the impact of the club.  Now
not only his legs but also his left arm disobeyed him.  Nevertheless he
balled his right hand and tried to swing at Goring.  There was another
crack; his ribs felt as if they had become unhinged and were driven
inward into his lung.  His breath was knocked out of him, and once
again he was on the cold wet grass.

Something fell by his side.  Despite his agony, he reached out for it.
The club was in his hand; Goring must have dropped it.  Shuddering with
each painful breath, he got to one knee.  Where was the madman?  Two
shadows danced and blurred, merged and half-separated.  The hut!  His
eyes were crossed.  He wondered if he had a concussion of the brain,
then forgot it as he saw Goring dimly in the illumination of a distant
streak of lightning.  Two Gorings, rather.  One seemed to accompany the
other; the one on the left had his feet on the ground; the right one
was treading on air.

Both had their hands held high up into the rain, as if they were trying
to wash them.  And when the taro turned and came toward him, he
understood that that was what they were trying to do.  They were
shouting in German (with a single voice); Take the blood off my hands!
Oh, God, wash it off!"

Burton stumbled toward Goring, his club held high..  Burton meant to
knock him out, but Goring suddenly turned and ran away.  Burton
followed him as best he could, down the hill, up another one, and then
out onto the flat plain.  The rains stopped, the thunder and lightning
died, and within five minutes the clouds, as always, had cleared away.
The starlight gleamed on Goring's white skin.

Like a phantom he flitted ahead of his pursuer, seemingly bent upon
getting to The River.  Burton kept after him, although he wondered why
he was doing so.  His legs had regained most of their strength, and his
vision was no longer double.  Presently, he found Goring.  He was
squatting by The River and staring intently at the star-fractured
waves.

Burton said, "Are you all right now?"  Goring was startled.  He began
to rise, then changed his mind.  Groaning, he put his head down on his
knees.

"I knew what I was doing, but I didn't know why," he said dully. "Karla
was telling me she was moving out in the morning, said she couldn't
sleep with all the noise I made with my nightmares.  And I was acting
strangely.  I begged her to stay; I told her I loved her very much. 
I'd die if she deserted me.  She said she was fond of me, had been,
rather, but she didn't love me.  Suddenly, it seemed that if I wanted
to keep her, I'd have to hill her.  She ran screaming out of the hut. 
You know the rest."

"I intended to kill you," Burton said.  "But I can see you're no more
responsible thaw a madman.  The people here won't accept that excuse,
though.  You know what they'll do to you; hang you upside down by your
ankles and let you hang until you die."

Goring cried, "I don't understand it!  What's happening to me?  Those
nightmares!  Believe me, Burton, if I've sinned, I've paid!  But I
can't stop paying!  My nights are hell, and soon my days will become
hell, too!  Then I'll have only one way to get peace!  I'll kill
myself!  But it won't do any good!  I'll wake up then hell again!"

"Stay away from the dream gum Burton said.  "You'll have to sweat it
out.  You can do it.  You told me you overcame the morphine habit on
Earth."

Goring stood up and faced Burton.  That's just it!  I haven't touched
the gum since I came to this place!"

Burton said, "What?  But I'll swear...!"

"You assumed I was using the stuff because of the way I was acting! 
No, I have not had a bit of the gum!  But it doesn't make any
difference!"

Despite his loathing of Goring, Burton felt pity.  He said, "You've
opened the Pandora of yourself, and it looks as if you'll not be able
to shut the lid.  I don't know how this is going to end, but I wouldn't
want to be in your mind.  Not that you don't deserve this."

Goring said, in a quiet and determined voice, "I'll defeat them."

"You mean you'll conquer yourself," Burton said.  He turned to go but
halted for a last word.  "What are you going to do?"

Goring gestured -at The River.  "Drown myself.  I'll get a fresh start.
Maybe I'll be better equipped the next place.  And I certainly don't
want to be trussed up like a chicken in a butcher shop window."

"Au revoir, then," Burton said.  "And good luck."

"Thank you.  You know you're not a bad sort.  Just one word of
advice."

"What's that?"  "You'd better stay away from the dream gum yourself. 
So far, you've been lucky.  But one of these days, it'll take hold of
you as it did me.  Your devils won't be mine, but they'll be just as
monstrous and terrifying to you."

"Nonsense I I've nothing to hide from myself!"  Burton laughed loudly.
"I've chewed enough of the stuff to know."  He walked away, but he was
thinking of the warning.  He had used the gum twenty-two times.  Each
time had made him swear never to touch the gum again.

On the way back to the hills, he looked behind him.  The dim white
figure of Goring was slowly sinking into the black-and silver waters of
The River.  Burton saluted, since he was not one to resist the dramatic
gesture.  Afterward, he forgot Goring.  The pain in the back of his
head, temporarily subdued, came back sharper than before.  His knees
turned to water and, only a few yards from his hut; he had to sit
down.

He must have become unconscious then, or half-conscious since he had no
memory of being dragged along on the grass.  When his wits cleared, he
found himself lying on a bamboo bed inside a hut.

It was dark with the only illumination the starlight filtering is
through the tree branches outside the square of window.  He turned his
head and saw the shadowy and pale-white bulk of a man squatting by him.
The man was holding a thin metal object before his eyes, the gleaming
end of which was pointed at Burton.

As soon as Burton turned his head, the man put the device down.  He
spoke in English.

"It's taken me a long time to find you, Richard Burton."  Burton groped
around on the floor for a weapon with his left hand, which was hidden
from the man's view.  His fingers touched nothing but dirt.  He said,
"Now you've found me, you damn Ethical, what do you intend doing with
me?"

The man shifted slightly and he chuckled.  "Nothing."  He paused, then
said, "I am not one of Them."  He laughed again when Burton gasped.
"That's not quite true.  I am with Them, but I am not of Them."  He
picked up the device, which he had been aiming at Burton.

"This tells me that you have a fractured skull and a concussion of the
brain: You must be very tough, because you should be dead, judging from
the extent of the injury.  But you may pull out of it, if you take it
easy.  Unfortunately, you don't have time to convalesce.  The Others
know you're in this area, give or take thirty miles.  In a day or so,
They'll have you pinpointed."

Burton tried to sit up and found that his bones had become soft as
taffy in sunlight, and a bayonet was prying open the back of his skull.
Groaning, he lay back down.

"Who are you and what's your business?"  "I can't tell you my name.  If
much more likely when They catch you, They'll thread out your memory
and run it off backward to the time you woke up in the pre-resurrection
bubble.  They won't find out what made you wake before your time.  But
They will know about this conversation.  They'll even be able to see
me.  But only as you see me, a pale shadow with no features.  They'll
hear my voice too, but They won't recognize it.  I'm using a
transmuter.

"They will, however, be horrified.  What they have slowly and
reluctantly been suspecting will all of a sudden be revealed as the
truth.  They have a traitor in Their midst'

"I wish I knew what you were talking about," Burton said.

The man said, "I'll tell you this much.  You have been told a monstrous
lie about the purpose of the Resurrection.  What Spruce told you, and
what that Ethical creation, the Church of the Second Chance, teaches
are lies!  All lies!  The truth is that you human beings have been
given life again only to participate in a scientific experiment.  The
Ethicals a misnomer if there ever was one have reshaped this planet
into one Rivervalley, built the grail stones and brought all of you
back from the dead for one purpose.  To record your history and
customs.  And, as a secondary matter, to observe your reactions to
Resurrection and to the mixing of different peoples of different eras.
That is all it is: a scientific project.  And when you have served your
purpose, back into the dust you go!"

"This story about giving all of you another chance at eternal life and
salvation because it is Their ethical duty lies!  Actually, my people
do not believe that you are worth saving.  They do not think you have
"souls"!"  Burton was silent for a while.  The fellow was certainly
sincere.  Or, if not sincere, he was very emotionally involved, since
he was breathing so heavily.

Finally, Burton spoke.  "I can't see anybody going to all this expense
and labor just to run a scientific experiment, or to make historical
recordings."

"Time hangs heavy on the hands of immortals.  You would be surprised
what we do to make eternity interesting.  Furthermore, given all time,
we can take our time, and we do not let even the most staggering
projects dismay us.  After the last Terrestrial died, the job of
setting up the Resurrection took several thousands of years, even
though the final phase took only one day."

Burton said, "And you?  What are you doing?  And why are you doing
whatever you're doing?"  "I am the only true Ethical in the whole
monstrous race!  I do not like toying around with you as if you were
puppets; or mere objects to be observed, animals in a laboratory! 
After all, primitive and vicious though you be, you are sentients!  You
are, in a sense, as .. . as..."

The shadowy speaker waved a shadowy hand as if trying to grasp a word
out of the darkness.  He continued, "I'll have to use your term for
yourselves.  You're as human as we.  Just as the subhumans who first
used language were as human as you.  And you are our forefathers.  For
all I know, I may be your direct descendant.  My whole people could be
descended from you."

"I doubt it," Burton said "I had no children that I know anyway."  He
had many questions, and he began to ask them.

But the man was dying no attention.  He was holding the device to his
forehead.  Suddenly he withdrew it and interrupted Burton in the middle
of a sentence.  "I've been .. . you don't have a word for it... let's
say ... listening.  They've detected my .. . wa than ... I think you'd
call it an aura.  They don't know whose wa than just that it's an
Ethical's.  But They'll be zeroing in within the next five minutes.  I
have to go."  The pale figure stood up.  "You have to go, too."

"Where are you taking me?"  Burton said.

"I'm not.  You must die; They must find only your corpse.  I can't take
you with me; it's impossible.  But if you die here, They'll lose you
again.  And we'll meet again.  Then .. ."

"Wait!"  Burton said.  "I don't understand.  Why can't They locate me?
They built the Resurrection machinery.  Don't They know where my
particular resurrect or is?"  The man chuckled again.  "No.  Their only
recordings of men on Earth were visual, not audible.  And the location
of the resurrectees in the pre-resurrection bubble was random, since
They had planned to scatter you humans along The River in a rough
chronological sequence but with a certain amount of mixing.  They
intended to get down to the individual basis later.  Of course, They
had no notion then that I would be opposing Them.  Or that I would
select certain of Their subjects to aid me in defeating the Plan.  So
They do not know where you, or the others, will next pop up.

"Now, you may be wondering why I can't set your resurrect or so that
you'll be translated near your goal, the headwaters.  The fact is that
I did set yours so that the first time you died, you'd be at the very
first grail stone  But you didn't make it; so I presume the Titanthrops
killed you.  That was unfortunate, since I no longer dare to go near
the bubble until I have an excuse.  It is forbidden for any but those
authorized to enter the pre-resurrection bubble.  They are suspicious;
They suspect tampering.  So it is up to you, and to chance, to get back
to the north polar region.

"As for the others, I never had an opportunity to set their
resurrectors.  They have to go by the laws of probabilities, too. Which
are about twenty million to one."

"Others?"  Burton said.  "Others?  But why did you choose us?"

"You have the right aura.  So did the others.  Believe me I know what
I'm doing; I chose well."

"But you intimated that you woke me up ahead of time .. . is the
pre-resurrection bubble, for a purpose.  What did it accomplish?"

"It was the only thing that would convince you that the Resurrection
was not a supernatural event.  And it started you sniffing on the track
of the Ethicals.  Am I right?  Of course, I am.  Here!"  He handed
Burton a tiny capsule.  "Swallow this.  You will be dead instantly and
out of Their reach for a while.  And your brain cells will be so
ruptured They'll not be able to read them.  Hurry!  I must go!"

"What if I don't take it?"  Burton said.  "What if I allow Them to
capture me now?"

"You don't have the aura for it," the man said.

Burton almost decided not to take the capsule.  Why should he allow
this arrogant fellow to order him around?  Then he considered that he
should not bite off his nose to spite his face.  As it was, he had the
choice of playing along with this unknown man or of falling into the
hands of the Others.

"All right," he said, "But why don't you kill me?  Why make me do the
job?"

The man laughed and said, "There are certain rules in this game, rules
that I don't have time to explain.  But you are intelligent, you'll
figure out most of them for yourself.  One is that we are Ethicals.  We
can give life, but we can't directly take life.  It is not unthinkable
for us or beyond our ability.  Just very difficult."  Abruptly, the man
was gone.  Burton did not hesitate.  He swallowed the capsule.  There
was a blinding flash... And light was full in his eyes, from the
just-risen sun.  He had time for one quick look around, saw his grail,
his pile of neatly folded towels and Hermann Goring.

Then Burton and the German were seized by small dark men with large
heads and bandy legs.  These carried spears and flint headed axes. They
wore towels but only as capes secured around their thick short necks. 
Strips of leather, undoubtedly human skin, ran across their
disproportionately large foreheads and around their heads to bind their
long, coarse black hair.  They looked semi Mongolian and spoke a tongue
unknown to him An empty grail was placed upside down over his head; his
hands were tied behind him with a leather thong.  Blind and helpless,
stone tipped spears digging into his back, he was urged across the
plain.  Somewhere near, drums thundered, and female voices wailed a
chant.

He had walked three hundred paces when he was halted.  The drums quit
beating, and the women stopped their singsong.  He could hear nothing
except for the blood beating in his ears.  What the hell was going on?
Was he part of a religious ceremony which required that the victim be
blinded?  Why not?  There had been many cultures on Earth, which did
not want the ritually slain to view those who shed his blood.  The dead
man's ghost might want to take revenge on his killers.

But these people must know by now that there were no such things as
ghosts.  Or did they regard lazari as just that, as ghosts that could
be dispatched back to their land of origin by simply killing them
again?  Goring!  He, too, had been translated here.  At the same grail
stone  The first time could have been coincidence, although the
probabilities against it were high.  But three times in succession? No,
it was .. .

The first blow drove the side of the grail against his head, made him
half-unconscious, sent a vast ringing through him, sparks of light
before his eyes, and knocked him to his knees.  He never felt the
second blow, and so awoke once more in another place... And with him
was Hermann Goring.

"You and I must be twin souls," Goring said.  "We seem to be yoked
together by Whoever is responsible for all this!"

"The ox and the ass plow together," Burton said, leaving it to the
German to decide which he was.  Then the two were busy introducing
themselves, or attempting to do so, to the people among whom they had
arrived.  These, as he later found out, were Sumerians of the Old or
Classical period; that is, they had lived in Mesopotamia between 2500
and 2300 B.C. The men shaved their heads (no easy custom with flint
razors), and the women were bare to the waist.  They had a tendency to
short squat bodies, pop-eyes, and (to Burton) ugly faces.

But if the index of beauty was not high among them, the pre Columbian
Samoans who made up 30 percent of the population were more than
attractive.  And, of course, there was the ubiquitous 10 percent of
people from anywhere-everyplace, twentieth-centurians being the most
numerous.  This was understandable, since the total number of these
constituted a fourth of humanity.  Burton had no scientific statistical
data, of course, but his travels had convinced him that the
twentieth-centurians had been deliberately scattered along The River in
a proportion to the other peoples even greater than was to be expected.
This was another facet of the Riverworld setup, which he did not
understand.  What did the Ethicals intend to gain by this
dissemination?  There were too many questions.  He needed time to
think, and he could not get it if he spent himself with one trip after
another on The Suicide Express.  This area, unlike most of the others
he would visit, offered some peace and quiet for analysis.  So he would
stay here for a while.

And then there was Hermann Goring.  Burton wanted to observe his
strange form of pilgrim's progress.  One of the many things that he had
not been able to ask the Mysterious Stranger (Burton tended to think in
capitals) was about the dream gum Where did it fit into the picture?
Another part of the Great Experiment?

Unfortunately, Goring did not last long.

The first night, he began screaming.  He burst out of his hut and ran
toward The River, stopping now and then to strike out at the air or to
grapple with invisible beings and to roll back and forth on the grass.
Burton followed him as far as The River.  Here Goring prepared to
launch himself out into the water, probably to drown himself.  But he
froze for a moment, began shuddering, and then toppled over, stiff as a
statue.  His eyes were open, but they saw nothing outside him.  All
vision was turned inward.  What horrors he was witnessing could not be
determined, since he was unable to speak.

His lips writhed soundlessly, and did not stop during the ten days that
he lived.  Burton's efforts to feed him were useless.  His jaws were
locked.  He shrank before Burton's eyes, the flesh evaporating, the
skin falling in and the bones beneath resolving into the skeleton.  One
morning, he went into convulsions, then sat up and screamed.  A moment
later he was dead.

Curious, Burton did an autopsy on him with the flint knives and
obsidian saws available.  Goring's distended bladder had burst and
poured urine into his body.

Burton proceeded to pull Goring's teeth out before burying him.  Teeth
were trade items, since they could be strung on a fish gut or a tendon
to make much-desired necklaces.  Goring's scalp also came off.  The
Sumerians had picked up the custom of taking scalps from their enemies,
the seventeenth-century Shawnee across The River.  They had added the
civilized embellishment of sewing scalps together to make capes,
skirts, and even curtains.  A scalp was not worth as much as teeth in
the trade mart, but it was worth something.

It was while digging a grave by a large boulder at the foot of the
mountains that Burton had an illuminating flash of memory.  He had
stopped working to take a drink of water when he happened to look at
Goring.  The completely stripped head and the features, peaceful as if
sleeping, opened a trapdoor in his mind.

When he had awakened in that colossal chamber and found himself
floating in a row of bodies, he had seen this face.  It had belonged to
a body in the row next to his.  Goring, like all the other sleepers,
had had his head shaved.  Burton had only noted him in passing during
the short time before the Warders had detected him.  Later, after the
mass Resurrection, when he had met Goring, he had not seen the
similarity between the sleeper and this man who had a full head of
blondish hair.

But he knew now that this man had occupied a space close to his.

Was it possible that their two resurrectors, so physically close to
each other, had become locked in phase?  If so, whenever his death and.
Goring's took place at the same approximate time, then the two would be
raised again by the same grail stone  Goring's jest that they were twin
souls might not be so far off the mark.

Burton resumed digging, swearing at the same time because he had so
many questions and so few answers.  If he had another chancy to get his
hands on an Ethical, he would drag the answers out of him, no matter
what methods he had to use.

The next three months, Burton was busy adjusting himself to the strange
society in this area.  He found himself fascinated by the new language
that was being formed out of the clash between Sumerian and Samoan.
Since the former were the most numerous, their tongue dominated.  But
here, as elsewhere, the major language suffered a Pyrrhic victory.
Result of the fusion was a pidgin, a speech with greatly reduced
flexion and simplified syntax.  Grammatical gender went overboard;
words were syncopated; tense and aspect, of verbs were cut to a simple
present, which was used also for the future.  Adverbs of time indicated
the past.  Subtleties were replaced by expressions that both Sumerian
and Samoan could understand, even if they seemed at first to be awkward
and naive.  And many Samoan words, in somewhat changed phonology, drove
out Sumerian words.

This rise of pidgins was taking place everywhere up and down the
Rivervalley.  Burton reflected that if the Ethicals had intended to
record all human tongues, They had best hurry.  The old ones were dying
out, transmuting rather.  But for all he knew, They had already
completed the job.  Their recorders, so necessary for accomplishing the
physical translation, might also be taking down all speech.

In the meantime, in the evenings, when he had a chance to be alone, he
smoked the cigars so generously offered by the grails and tried to
analyze the situation.  Whom could he believe, the Ethicals or the
Renegade, the Mysterious Stranger?  Or were both lying?  Why did the
Mysterious Stranger need him to throw a monkey wrench into Their cosmic
machinery?  What could Burton, mere human being, trapped in this
valley, so limited by his ignorance, do to help the Judas?  One thing
was certain.  If the Stranger did not need him, he would not have
concerned himself with Burton.  He wanted to get Burton into that Tower
at the north pole.

Why?  It took Burton two weeks before he thought of the only reason
that could be.

The stranger had said that he, like the other Ethicals, would not
directly take human life.  But he had no scruples about doing so
vicariously, as witness his giving the poison to Burton.  So, if he
wanted Burton in the Tower, he needed Burton to kill for him.  He would
turn the tiger loose among his own people, open the window to the hired
assassin.

An assassin wants pay.  What did the Stranger offer as pay?  Burton
sucked the cigar smoke into his lungs, exhaled and then downed a shot
of bourbon.  Very well.  The Stranger would try to use him.  But let
him beware.  Burton would also use the Stranger.

At the end of three months, Burton decided that he had done enough
thinking.  It was time to get out He was swimming in The River at the
moment and, following the impulse, he swam to its middle.  He dived
down as far as he could force himself before the not-to-be denied will
of his body to survive drove him to claw upward for the dear air.  He
did not make it.  The scavenging fishes would eat his body and his
bones would fall to the mud at the bottom of the 1,000-foot deep River.
So much the better.  He did not want his body to fall into the hands of
the Ethicals.  If what the Stranger had said was true, They might be
able to unthread from his mind all he had seen and heard if They got to
him before the brain cells were damaged.

He did not think They had succeeded.  During the next seven years, as
far as he knew, he escaped detection of the Ethicals.  If the Renegade
knew where he was, he did not let Burton know.  Burton doubted that
anyone did; he himself could not ascertain in what part of the
Riverplanet he was, how far or how near the Tower headquarters.  But he
was going, going, going, always on the move.  And one day he knew that
he must have broken a record of some sort.  Death had become second
nature to him.

If his count was correct, he had made 777 trips on The suicide
Express.

Sometimes Burton thought of himself as a planetary grasshopper,
launching himself out into the darkness of death, landing, nibbling a
little at the grass, with one eye cocked for the shadow that betrayed
the down swoop of the shrike the Ethicals.  In this vast meadow of
humanity, he had sampled many blades, tasted briefly, and then had gone
on.

Other times he thought of himself as a net scooping up specimens here
and there in the huge sea of mankind.  He got a few big fish and many
sardines, although there was as much, if not more, to be learned from
the small fish as from the large ones.

He did not like the metaphor of the net, however, because it reminded
him that there was a much larger net out for him.

Whatever metaphors or similes he used, he was a man who got around a
lot, to use a twentieth-century Americanism.  So much so that he
several times came across the legend of Burton the Gypsy, or, in one
English-speaking area, Richard the Rover, and, in another, the Loping
Lazarus.  This worried him somewhat, since the Ethicals might get a
clue to his method of evasion and be able to take measures to trap him.
Or They might even guess at his basic goal and set up guards near the
headwaters.

At the end of seven years, through much observation of they day stars
and through many conversations, he had formed a picture of the course
of The River..

It was not an amphisbaena, a snake with two heads, headwaters at the
north pole and mouth at the south pole.  It was a Midgard Serpent, with
the tail at the north pole, the body coiled around and around the
planet and the tail in the serpent's mouth.  The River's source stemmed
from the north polar sea, " zigzagged back and forth across one
hemisphere, circled the south pole and then zigzagged across the face
of the other hemisphere, back and forth, ever working upward until the
mouth opened into the hypothetical polar sea.

Nor was the large body of water so hypothetical.  If the story of the
Titanthrop, the subhuman who claimed to have seen the Misty Tower, was
true, the Tower rose out of the fog-shrouded sea.  Burton had heard the
tale only at second-hand.  But he had seen the Titanthrops near the
beginning of The River on his fast "jump," and it seemed reasonable
that one might actually have crossed the mountains and gotten close
enough to get a glimpse of the polar sea.  Where one man had gone,
another could follow.

And how did The River flow uphill?  Its rate of speed seemed to remain
constant even where it should have slowed or refused to go further.
From this he postulated localized gravitational fields that urged the
mighty stream onward until it had regained an area where natural
gravity would take over.  Somewhere, perhaps buried under The River
itself, were devices that did this work.  Their fields must be very
restricted, since the pull of the earth did not vary on human beings in
these areas to any detectable degree.

There were too many questions.  He must go on until he got to the place
or to the beings Who could answer them.  And seven years after his
first death, he reached the desired area.

It was on his 777th "jump."  He was convinced seven was a lucky number
for him.  Burton, despite the scoffings of his twentieth-century
friends, believed steadfastly in most of the superstitions he had
nourished on Earth.  He often laughed at the superstitions of others,
but he knew that some numbers held good fortune for him, that silver
placed on his eyes would rejuvenate his body when it was tired and
would help his second sight, the perception that warned him ahead of
time of evil situations.  True, there seemed to be no silver on this
mineral poor world, but if there were, he could use it to advantage.

All that first day, he stayed at the edge of The River.  He paid little
attention to those who tried to talk to him, giving them a brief smile.
Unlike people in most of the areas he had seen, these were not hostile.
The sun moved along the eastern peaks, seemingly just clearing their
tops.  The flaming ball slid across the valley, lower than he had ever
seen it before, except when he had landed among the grotesquely nosed
Titanthrops.  The sun flooded the valley for a while with light and
warmth, and then began its circling just above the western mountains. 
The valley became shadowed, and the air became colder than it had been
any other place, except, of course, on that fast jump.  The sun
continued to circle until it was again at the point where Burton had
first seen it on opening his eyes.

Weary from his twenty-four hour vigil, but happy, he turned to look for
living quarters.  He knew now that he was in the arctic area, but he
was not at a point just below the headwaters.  This time, he was at the
other end, the mouth.

As he turned, he heard a voice, familiar but unidentifiable.  (He had
heard so many.)

"Dull soul aspire; Thou art not the Earth.  Mount higher!  Heaven gave
the spark; to return the fire."

"John Collop!  "Abdul ibn Harun!  And they say there are no miracles!
What has happened to you since last I saw you?"

"I died the same night you did," Burton said.  "And several times
since.  There are many evil men in this world."

"Tis only natural.  There were many on Earth.  Yet I dare say their
number has been cut down, for the Church has been able to do much good
work, praise God.  Especially in this area.  But come with me, friend.
I'll introduce you to my hut mate  A lovely woman, faithful in a world
that still seems to put little value on marital fidelity or, indeed, in
virtue of any sort.  She was born in the twentieth century A.D. and
taught English most of her life.  Verily, I sometimes think she loves
me not so much for myself as for what.  I can teach her of the speech,
of my time."

He gave a curious nervous laugh, by which Burton knew he was joking.
They crossed the plains toward the foothills where fires were burning
on small stone platforms before each hat.  Most of the men and women
had fastened towels around them to form parkas, which shielded them
from the chill of the shadows.

"A gloomy and shivering place," Burton said.  "Why would anybody want
to live here?"

"Most of these people be Finns or Swedes of the late twentieth century.
They are used to the midnight sun.  However, you should be happy you're
here.  I remember your burning curiosity about the Polar Regions and
your speculations anent.  There have been others like you who have gone
on down The River to seek their Ultima Thule, or if you will pardon me
for so terming it, the fool's gold at the end of the rainbow. But all
have either failed to return or have come back, daunted by the
forbidding obstacles."

"Which are what?"  Burton said, grabbing Collop's arm.

"Friend, you're hurting me.  Item, the grail stones cease, so that
there is nothing wherewith they may recharge their grails with food. 
Item, the plains of the valley suddenly terminate, and The River
pursues its course between the mountains themselves, through a chasm of
icy shadows.  Item, what lies beyond, I do not know, for no man has
come back to tell me.  But I fear they've met the end of all who commit
the sin of hubris."  "How far away is this plunge of no return?"  "As
the River winds, about 25,000 miles.  You may get there with diligent
sailing in a year or more.  The Almighty Father alone knows how far you
must then go before you arrive at the very end of The River.  Belike
you'd starve before then, because you'd have to take provisions on your
boat after leaving the final grail stone

"There's one way to find out," Burton said.

"Nothing will stop you then, Richard Burton?"  Collop said.  "You will
not give up this fruitless chase after the physical when you should be
hot on the track of the metaphysical?"

Burton seized Collop by the arm again.  "You said Burton?"  "Yes, I
did.  Your friend Goring told me some time ago that that was your true
name.  He also told me other things about you."

"Goring is here?"  "Collop nodded and said, "He has been here for about
two years now.  He lives a mile from here.  We can see him tomorrow.
You will be pleased at the change in him, I know.  He has conquered the
dissolution begun by the dream gum shaped the fragments of himself into
a new, and a far better, man.  In fact, he is now the leader of the
Church of the Second Chance in this area.

"While you, my friend, have been questing after some irrelevant grail
outside you, he has found the Holy Grail inside himself.  He almost
perished from madness, nearly fell back into the evil ways of his
Terrestrial life.  But through the grace of God and his true desire to
show himself worthy of being given another opportunity at life, he
well, you may see for yourself tomorrow.  And I pray you will profit
from his example."

Collop elaborated.  Goring had died almost as many times as Burton,
usually by suicide.  Unable to stand the nightmares and the
self-loathing, he had time and again purchased a brief and useless
surcease.  Only to be faced with himself the next day.  But on arriving
at this area, and seeking help from Collop, the man he had once
murdered, he had won.

"I am astonished," Burton said.  "And I'm happy for Goring.  But I have
other goals.  I would like your promise that you'll tell no one my true
identity.  Allow me to be Abdul ibn Harun."

Collop said that he would keep silent, although he was disappointed
that Burton would not be able to see Goring again and judge for himself
what faith and love could do for even the seemingly hopeless and
depraved.  He took Burton to his hut and introduced him to his wife, a
short, delicately boned brunette.  She was very gracious and friendly
and insisted on going with the two men while they visited the local
boss, the valkotukkainen.  (This word was regional slang for the
white-haired boy or big shot.) Ville Ahonen was a huge quiet-spoken man
who listened patiently to Burton.  Burton revealed only half of his
plan, saying that he wanted to build a boat so he could travel to the
end of The River.  He did not mention wanting to take it further.  But
Ahonen had evidently met others like him.

He smiled knowingly and replied that Burton could build a craft.
However, the people hereabouts were conservationists.  They did not
believe in despoiling the land of its trees.  Oak and pine were to be
left untouched, but bamboo was available.  Even this material would
have to be purchased with cigarettes and liquor, which would take him
some time to accumulate from his grail.

Burton thanked him and left.  Later, he went to bed in a hut near
Collop's, but he could not get to sleep.

Shortly before the inevitable rains came, he decided to leave the hut.
He would go up into the mountains, take refuge under a ledge until the
rains ceased, the clouds dissipated, and the eternal (but weak) sun
reasserted itself.  Now that he was so near to his goal, he did not
want to be surprised by Them.  And it seemed likely that the Ethicals
would concentrate agents here.  For all he knew, Collop's wife could be
one of Them.

Before he had walked half a mile, rain struck him and lightning smashed
nearby into the ground.  By the dazzling flash, he saw something
flicker into existence just ahead and about twenty feet above him.

He whirled and ran toward a grove of trees, hoping that They had not
seen him and that he could hide there.  If he was unobserved, then he
could get up into the mountains.  And when They had put everybody to
sleep here, They would find him gone again..

"You gave us a long hard chase, Burton," a man said in English.  Burton
opened his eyes.  The transition to this place was so unexpected that
he was dazed.  But only for a second.  He was sitting in a chair of
some very soft buoyant material.  The room was a perfect sphere; the
walls were a very pale green and were semitransparent.  He could see
other spherical chambers on all sides, in front, behind, above and,
when he bent over, below.  Again he was confused, since the other rooms
did not just impinge upon the boundaries of his sphere.  They
intersected.  Sections of the other rooms came into his room, but then
become so colorless and clear that he could barely detect them.

On the wall at the opposite end of his room was an oval of darker
green.  It curved to follow the wall.  There was a ghostly forest
portrayed in the oval.  A phantom fawn trotted across the picture. From
it came the odor of pine and dogwood.

Across the bubble from him sat twelve in chairs like his.  Six were
men; six women.  All were very good-looking.  Except for two, all had
black or dark brown hair and deeply tanned skins.  Three had slight
epicanthic folds; one man's hair was so curly it was almost kinky.

One woman had long wavy yellow hair bound into a psyche knot.  A man
had red hair, red as the fur of a fox.  He was handsome, his features
were irregular, his nose large and curved, and his eyes were dark
green.

All were dressed in silvery or purple blouses with short flaring
sleeves and ruffled collars, slender luminescent belts, kilts, and
sandals.  Both men and women had painted fingernails and toenails,
lipstick, earrings, and eye makeup.

Above the head of each, almost touching the hair, spun a many-colored
globe about a foot across.  These whirled and gashed and changed color,
running through every hue in the spectrum.  From time to time, the
globes thrust out long hexagonal arms of green, of blue, of black, or
of gleaming white.  Then the arms would collapse, only to be succeeded
by other hexagons.

Burton looked down.  He was clad only in a black towel secured at his
waist.

"I'll forestall your first question by telling you we won't give you
any information on where you are."  The speaker was the red-haired man.
He grinned at Burton, showing un-humanly white teeth.

"Very well," Burton said.  "What questions will you answer, Whoever you
are?  For instance, how did you find me?"

"My name is Loga," the red-haired man said.  "We found you through a
combination of detective work and luck.  It was a complicated
procedure, but I'll simplify it for you.  We had a number of agents
looking for you, a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six
billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven
candidates that live along The River."

Candidates?  Burton thought.  Candidates for what?  For eternal life?
Had Spruce told the truth about the purpose behind the Resurrection?

Loga said, "We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide.  Even
when you were detected in areas so widely separated that you could not
possibly have gotten to them except through resurrection, we did not
suspect.  We thought that you had been killed and then translated.  The
years went by.  We had no idea where you were.  There were other things
for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we
called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River.
Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower.  Later we found out how.
Your friends Goring and Collop were very helpful, although they did not
know they were talking to Ethicals, of course!

"Who notified you that I was near The River's end?"  Burton said.

Lop smiled and said, "There's no need for you to know.  However, we
would have caught you anyway.  You see, every space in the restoration
bubble the place where you unaccountably awakened during the
pre-resurrection phase has an automatic counter.  They were installed
for statistical and research purposes.  We like to keep records of
what's going on.  For instance, any candidate who has a higher than
average number of deaths sooner or later is a subject for study.
Usually later, since we're short-handed.

"It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at
some of the higher frequency resurrections.  Yours had the highest
count.  You may be congratulated on this, I suppose."

"There were others, as well?"

"They're not being pursued, if that's what you mean.  And, relatively
speaking, they're not many.  We had no idea that it was you who had
racked up this staggering number.  Your space in the PR bubble was
empty when we looked at it during our Statistical investigation.  The
two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber
identified you by your photograph.

"We set the resurrect or so that the next time your body was to be
re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to
this place."

"Suppose I hadn't died again?"  Burton said.

"You were destined to die!  You planned on trying to enter the polar
sea via The River's mouth, right?!  That is impossible.  The last
hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel.  Any boat
would be torn to pieces.  Like others who have dared the journey, you
would have died."

Burton said, "My photograph the one I took from Agneau.  That was
obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in
India.  How was that gotten?"

"Research, Mr.  Burton," Loga said, still smiling.

Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face.  He did not
seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to
Loga and strike him.  But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to
sit in the same room with him without safeguards.  They would as soon
have given a rabid hyena its freedom.

Did you ever find out what made me awaken before my time?"  he asked.
"Or what made those others gain consciousness, too?"  Loga gave a
start.  Several of the men and women gasped.

Loga rallied first.  He said, "We've made a thorough examination of
your body.  You have no idea how thorough.  We have also screened every
component of your ... psycho morph I think you could call it.  Or aura,
whichever word you prefer."

He 'gestured at the sphere above his head.  "We found no clues
whatsoever."

Burton threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.

"So you bastards don't know everything!"

Loga smiled tightly.  "No.  We never will.  Only One is Omnipotent' He
touched his forehead, lips, heart, and genitals with the three longest
fingers of his right hand.  The others did the same.

"However, I'll tell you that you frightened us -if that'll make you
feel any better.  You still do.  You see, we are fairly sure that you
may be one of the men of whom we were warned."

"Warned against?  By whom?"

"By, a .. . sort of giant computer, a living one.  And by its
operator."  Again, he made the curious sign with his fingers.

"That's all I care to tell you even though you won't remember a thing
that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley."
Burton's mind was clouded with anger, but not so much that he missed
the "down here."  Did that mean that the resurrection machinery and the
hideout of the Ethicals were below the surface of the Riverworld?

Loga continued, "The data indicates you may have the potentiality to
wreck our plans.  Why you should or hoes you might, we do not know. But
we respect our source of information, how highly you can't imagine."

"If you believe that," Burton said, "why don't you just put me in cold
storage?  Suspend me between those two bars.  Leave me floating in
space, turning around and around forever, like a roast on a spit, until
your plans are completed?"  Loge said, "We couldn't do that!  That act
alone would ruin everything!  How would you attain your salvation?
Besides, that would mean an unforgivable violence on our part!  It's
unthinkable!

"You were being violent when you forced me to run and hide from you,"
Burton said.  "You are being violent now by holding me here against my
will.  And you will violate me when you destroy my memory of this
little tete-a-tete with you."

Loge almost wrung his hands.  If he was the Mysterious Stranger, the
renegade Ethical, he was a great actor.

In a grieved tone, Loga said, "That is only partly true.  We had to
take certain measures to protect ourselves.  If the man had been anyone
but you, we would have left you strictly alone.  It is true we violated
our own code of ethics by making you run from us and by examining you.
That had to be, however.  And, believe me, we are paying for this in
mental agony."

"You could make up for some of it by telling me why I, why all the
human beings that ever lived, have been resurrected.  And how you did
it."

Loga talked, with occasional interruptions from some of the others. The
yellow-haired woman broke in most often, and after a while Burton
deduced from her attitude and Loga's that she was either his wife or
she held a high position.

Another man interrupted at times.  When he did, there was a
concentration and respect from the others that led Burton to believe he
was the head of this group.  Once he turned his head so that the light
sparkled off one eye.  Burton stared, because he had not noticed before
that the left eye was a jewel.

Burton thought that it probably was a device, which gave him a sense,
or senses, of perception denied the others.  From then on, Burton felt
uncomfortable whenever the faceted and gleaming eye was turned on him.
What did that many-angled prism see?  At the end of the explanation,
Burton did not know much more than he had before.  The Ethicals could
see back into the past with a sort of chronoscope; with this they had
been able to record whatever physical beings they wished to.  Using
these records as models, they had then performed the resurrection with
energy-matter converters.

"What," Burton said, "would happen if you're-created two bodies of an
individual at the same time?"  Loge smiled wryly and said that the
experiment had been performed.  Only one body had life.

Burton smiled like a cat that has just eaten a mouse.  He said, "I
think you're lying to me.  Or telling me half-truths.  There is a
fallacy in all this.  If human beings can attain such a rarefiedly high
ethical state that they "go on," why are you Ethicals, supposedly
superior beings, still here?  Why haven't you, too, "gone on'?

The faces of all but Loga and the jewel-eyed man became rigid.  Loge
laughed and said, "Very shrewd.  An excellent point.  I can only answer
that some of us do go on.  But more is demanded of us, ethically
speaking, than of you resurrectees."  "I still think you're lying,"
Burton said.  "However, there's nothing I can do about it."  He grinned
and said, "Not just now, anyway."

"If you persist in that attitude, you will never Go On," Loga said.
"But we felt that we owed it to you to explain what we are doing as
best we could.  When we catch those others who have been tampered with,
we'll do the same for them."

"There's a Judas among you," Burton said, enjoying the effect of his
words.

But the jewel-eyed man said, "Why don't you tell him the truth, Loga?
It'll wipe off that sickening smirk and put him in his proper place."

Loga hesitated, then said, "Very well, Thanabur.  Burton, you will have
to be very careful from now on.  You must not commit suicide and you
must fight as hard to stay alive as you did on Earth, when you thought
you had only one life.  There is a limit to the number of times a man
may be resurrected.  After a certain amount it varies and there's no
way to predict the individual allotment the psycho morph seems unable
to reattach itself to the body.  Every death weakens the attraction
between body and psycho morph  Eventually, the psycho morph comes to
the point of no return.  It becomes a well, to use an unscientific term
a "lost soul:" It wanders bodiless through the universe; we can detect
these unattached psycho morphs without instruments, unlike those of the
how shall I put it?  the "saved," which disappear entirely from our
ken.

"So you see, you must give up this form o travel by death.  This is why
continued suicide by those poor unfortunates who cannot face life is,
if not the unforgivable sin, the irrevocable."  The jewel-eyed man
said, "The traitor, the filthy unknown who claims to be aiding you, was
actually using you for his own purposes.  He did not tell you that you
were expending your chance for eternal life by carrying out his and
your designs.  He, or she, whoever the traitor is, is evil.  Evil,
evil!  "Therefore, you must be careful from now on.  You may have a
residue of a dozen or so deaths left to you.  Or your next death may be
your last!  '

Burton stood up and shouted, "You don't want me to get to the end of
The River?  Why?"  "Why?"

Loga said, "Au revoir.  Forgive us for this violence."  Burton did not
see any of the twelve persons point an instrument at him.  But
consciousness sprang from him as swiftly as an arrow from the bow, and
he awoke .. .

The first person to greet him was Peter Frigate.  Frigate lost his
customary reserve; he wept.  Burton cried a little himself and had
difficulty for a while in answering Frigate's piled-one-on-the-other
questions.  First, Burton had to find out what Frigate, Loghu, and
Alice had done after he had disappeared.  Frigate replied that the
three had looked for him, then had sailed back up The River to Theleme.
- "Where have you been?"  Frigate said.

"From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in
it," Burton said.  "However, unlike Satan, I found at least several
perfect and upright men, fearing God and eschewing evil.  Damn few,
though.  Most men and women are still the selfish, ignorant,
superstitious, self-blinding, hypocritical, cowardly wretches they were
on Earth.  And in most, the old red-eyed killer ape struggles with its
keeper, society, and would break out and bloody its hands."

Frigate chattered away as the two walked toward the huge stockade a
mile away, the council building which housed the administration of the
state of Theleme.  Burton half-listened.  He was shaking and his heart
was beating hard, but not because of his home-coming.

He remembered!  Contrary to what Loge had promised, he remembered both
his wakening in the pre-resurrection bubble, so many years ago, and the
inquisition with the twelve Ethicals.

There was only one explanation.  One of the twelve must have prevented
the blocking of his memory and done so without the others knowing it.

One of the twelve was the Mysterious Stranger, the Renegade.

Which one?  At present, there was no way of determining.  But some day
he would find out.  Meanwhile, he had a friend in court, a man who
might be using Burton for his own ends.  And the time would come when
Burton would use him.

There were the other human beings with whom the Stranger had also
tampered.  Perhaps he would find them; together they would assault the
Tower.

Odysseus had his Athena.  Usually Odysseus had had to get out of
perilous situations through his own wits and courage.

But every now and then, when the goddess had been able, she had given
Odysseus a helping hand.

Odysseus had his Athena; Burton, his Mysterious Stranger.

Frigate said, "What do you plan on doing, Dick?"

"I'm going to build a boat and sail up The River.  All the way!  Want
to come along?"

POSTSCRIPT

This ends Volume I of the Riverworld series.  Volume II will tell how
Samuel Clemens looked for iron in the mineral-poor valley, found it,
and built his great paddle-wheeled Riverboat, the NOT FOR HIRE.

The next Fat Bastard release will be next Saturday 17th March 2001.
Unfortunately those who promised to let me have back my copies of both
Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs and Captain Corellis' Mandolin,
let me down.  I am promised that Capt Corelli will be back before Nick
Cage takes him into a wider audience so look out for him.  "Silence'
though may well have gone the way of my full set of Donaldsons'
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Hellers' Catch 22 and others
Shouldn't lend them out at least not till I've made a backup!  Next
week should be another 'double header' two of Ross McDonalds "Lew
Archer' books.

Some experimentation last week revealed that I now cannot post anything
bigger than about 100 lines through my usual ISP and their server.  I
managed to get The Green Mile out through another account.  Whether
this is as a result of the activities of "Harlan' and his truly
delightful solicitor is something I am hopefully not paranoid enough to
worry too much about.  I don't have the luxury of broadband (or even
free calls) and am neither rich enough nor technically adept enough to
set up foreign accounts or servers, so I have decided to attempt to
post only once a week.  If that doesnt get through I will release that
weeks publications by simply passing the book onto a few selected ftp
archives, and letting 'natural propagation' take place.  If you are an
archive and you want to help (or you would rather I didn't) let me
know.  Otherwise, comments (and requests) welcome at my e-mail address
below.  (I may not respond very quickly though, apologies in advance!)
Algernon.

A Fat Bastard production.  Scanned with Omnipage Pro 10.  Completed and
Posted 10th March 2001.  Proofed (in US English!) in Word 97.  Some
formatting may be altered slightly.  If you find any other errors,
either let me know at algernon_fatbstard@hotmail.com or update the
version no and repost.  Not to be reposted without the Fat Bastard
"Logo' below.

FAT BASTARD PRODUCTIONS 2001 Quality as well as Quantity.  Good Books,
Properly Scanned, Carefully Proofed, Simply Formatted, Available to
all!  For personal use only.  Not to be sold or used for personal
profit.

