Fear That Man

to ignore their existence in your training because they were things beyond His powers — the results of men usurping His rights.”

“A thousand years,” Breadloaf muttered.

“How could you stand it?” Gnossos asked, turning from the Shield. “How could you sit there, knowing?”

“Sometimes, after I had left here and gone into the streets and smelled the fresh air, I thought I could never come back. But when I thought of how much worse it would be if He ever escaped…”

“Of course,” Gnossos said sympathetically. “For a thousand years, men have grown gradually saner, have broken communications with their barbaric past. It’s all because He’s been trapped in your warped dimension tank and can’t influence anything. Isn’t that it?”

Breadloaf sighed. He was able to make fists of his hands now, and he sat exercising them. “That’s it exactly. My father thought he could enslave the Prisoner and make Him work for the family. We knew who He was. He wasted no time in telling us that, in demanding to be set free. But we could not master Him. It became clear that we could never let Him out. At first, of course, it was for the family’s safety. He could, and would, wipe out every Breadloaf. Then, after a few hundred years, when we saw what the empire was becoming, how much better it seemed, how much saner were the councils of man, we realized that much of the ugliness of life had been God’s doing. We had even stronger reasons for keeping Him locked up. If He were ever released”—Breadloaf wriggled an arm at last—“war would come again. Famine as we have never known it. Pestilence. Disease. We have but one choice: keep Him contained.”

“Correction, please. You have no choice but to release Him!”

The voice drew their attention to the door. A man stood there — a Christian judging from his beard. There were a dozen others standing behind him, dirty, unshaven, dressed in the rags of self-denial. One of them was the sign-carrier Gnossos had argued with in the streets what seemed like an eternity ago. He was smiling now, sans sign. He stepped into the room. “Isn’t it strange whom God should choose as His liberators?”

“How did they—” Breadloaf began, struggling against his stiff body.

“I told them!” Sam shouted. The series of hypnotic orders flashed through his memory now. What God had ordered him to do was a burning clarity. He recited the posthypnotic commands that had followed their landing on Hope: “Find a temple and tell the Christians that God is being held prisoner by the Breadloaf family in the Breadloaf Building; I will give you flames upon your tongue as a sign to convince them. In a Sell-All Hardwaremat, purchase these chemicals and pieces of equipment: ester of glycerin, nitric acid, a watch, a spool of number twenty-six copper wire, and a small construction detonator. Next prepare a bomb of glyceryl tinitrate. Next, break into the Breadloaf Building, plant the bomb by force pump A3A45 in the basement. Next, render Alexander Breadloaf III helpless via drug darts.” He had told the Christians then. They were here on his word.

“It isn’t your fault,” Gnossos said.

Then the echo of an explosion rumbled through the floors of the building, shook the walls. The Christians were destroying the machinery that maintained the Shield. They were planting new bombs to do what Sam’s first one didn’t have a chance to do.

A second explosion rocked the floor even more violently…

And the Shield blinked…

… was gone…

Breadloaf screamed a piercing scream, a thing that he had only half finished with when the black bird with the forty million eyes and the claws of brass swept from the vacant spot in the wall, swooped out on the cold winds and descended on him. The room had expanded, it seemed, to the size of a dozen galaxies. The room was erupting on the way to becoming the macrocosm itself. Yet all of it was filled with them and this thing from beyond their dimension so that it seemed, in another and confounding way, that the chamber had shrunk to the size of a small closet.

There was no up or down.

The stars had lost their glitter and consumed themselves.

With a tongue of sequined pebbles, the darkness ate the light.

Sam was tumbling around within and yet without God, smashing against the pinions of the tremendous feathers, caught alternately in winds as cold as ice and as hot as volcano hearts. On and off, as he fought the crushing expanses of blackness that clutched at him with a million oiled talons, he saw Alexander Breadloaf. He saw him first without skin — peeled and bloody. Next he saw him blackened and a thing of ash. The ashes became other dark birds that bored into the belly of the omnipotent black bird and revitalized it with their frenzy. He saw lightning flashing from Breadloaf’s charred nostrils and worms eating the man’s black tongue. He saw him undergo all the punishments of all imagined hells. And he feared greatly the moment when God would turn on the rest of them, come with claws and with fangs to eat out their livers with His silver-plated teeth.

Feathers sprouted from Breadloaf, black feathers that were oily and bent. With His beak, the thing that was God plucked the feathers from the man, leaving gaping holes that seeped yellow…

There was no warmth; neither was there cold.

Everywhere was fear.

Then, abruptly and without announcement, there were words in his mind. They were Hurkos’ familiar tones: Listen. Listen to me. I can see Him. I can see God!

I can see Him too! Sam thought-screamed.

No. I mean, I can see Him with my psionic powers. There is nothing to Him! He’s so damned small!

Clarify yourself! This was from Gnossos.

He is puny. He is not large and forceful. The room is not expanding. Breadloaf is not being charred or eaten by worms. God is trying to frighten Breadloaf to death. Fear and illusions are the only weapons He has left. He has lost His greatest powers. Perhaps from centuries of confinement and the last surge of energy needed to create Sam. He is drained.

But all this, Sam thought.

A damn fake! I’ll send you the true picture. I’m looking, directly through His illusions and delusions. I can see. I’ll broadcast.

In an eye blink, the room was normal. Breadloaf was uncharred. But he was dead. His eyes were blank, fish-belly things. His hand clutched his chest above his heart. The tiny transmitter in his heart would be yelling for the medics. He would be reached in time — here in the city — to be given a new heart before brain damage occurred. He would live again.

“Where?” Gnossos asked.

Then they saw it. It was poised on the rim of the Shield itself. It was a small, pink, formless thing. It had not refrained from transferring itself simply because it was too big. It had sent Sam first for the simple reason that Sam would be more effective than it would have been. For a moment the dreams surged back, but Hurkos used his own, greater powers to fight them away. Then the Mue raised a chair, smashed it into the pink slug. Again, again, and again. He mashed with a fury that Sam would not have guessed him to possess.

And Hurkos killed God.

XI

Breadloaf came through the door of the saloon, stopped a moment to search them out, then smiled as he sighted them. Only seven hours had passed since he had died, but he looked healthy and cheerful. More cheerful, in fact, than they had ever seen him look. He made his way through the crowd, nodding to friends, stopping now and again to shake hands with those who were oblivious to his recent adventure. Finally he reached their table, sat down. “I passed the church on the way. The Christians are moving out of their homes in the basements, bundles on their backs. In a way, it’s a shame. Their lives have amounted to nothing.”

“They can take the shots now,” Hurkos said. He was relaxed for the first time in a long, long while. He had gotten his revenge, more revenge than any man could hope for. Sam had wondered, at first, if Hurkos could be deranged, for he had, after all, killed. But he had not killed a man. Therein lay the key. What he had killed was a rung lower than Man, really, therefore an animal. “They can live