The Haunted Earth

things. They're the ones who created the conflict, not me. I was an innocent party.' The old man brushed at his beard. 'I had no say in what I was to be, as you know.'

'Did you also have no say in the atrocities you forced mankind to suffer for so many centuries?' Pritchard Robot asked, his voice rising. 'Are you going to try to tell me, and my vast audience, that you were forced to bring the Great Flood to the Earth?'

'Well, no,' God said, subdued. 'But once they'd created me as a god of wrath, I was forced to live up to the billing.'

'Don't you think — won't you admit, Mr. God — that you more than lived up to your mythical role? Didn't you use that role in a most cynical and ruthless fashion, use it to excuse the most vicious, sadistic acts ever recorded in the annals of the written word? Didn't you go overboard, Mr. God, in fulfilling your myth role? Didn't you willfully and demonically desecrate the Earth? Didn't you perpetrate these crude and malicious atrocities solely because they excited and gratified your own sick mind?' Pritchard Robot was smoking around the ears by the time he had delivered this sharp accusation.

'You're exaggerating and being totally unfair,' God said. 'As I said before, I'm only one of many gods. Others have had to live up to their myth requirements. My requirements were harder than most, that's all.'

Pritchard Robot said, 'Then you think the Great Flood was not an overreaction to tie requirements of your myth role?'

'I think it was within bounds.' God shifted in his chair, putting his robes in place. 'I was then only a wrathful god, and I needed to punish mankind to fulfill my role.'

'Punish mankind,'' Pritchard Robot said.

'Yes.'

'For what sins?'

'Orgies. Disrespect for parents. A rise in the overall crime rate, an increase in warfare.'

'And your idea of punishment, of teaching mankind a lesson, was to wipe out the entire race except for one single family — the Noahs?'

'At the time, it seemed proper,' God said, running a finger around his ecclesiastical collar.

Pritchard Robot said, 'Tell me, Mr. God, are there no orgies in Heaven?'

'Well, occasionally, as you can read in the Bible…' He coughed and wiped perspiration off his face. 'Well, after all, some of those angels are as stacked as…'

'And are you not, yourself, responsible for the rape of a woman, one whose last name is unfortunately lost to history, a woman we shall call Mary of Nazareth?'

'Well, rape is a strong word,' God said.

'Did she not have a child by you? And was this child not conceived out of wedlock? And did you not, later, even forsake this child? And when you made Mary of Nazareth with this child, did you not come to her at night while she was quite alone and defenseless, and threaten her with your godly position and your almighty power — which is nowhere near so almighty as was once thought?'

'Well…' God said, weakly.

'And having done all of this,' Pritchard Robot said, 'you have the unmitigated gall to sit there and say you reasonably punished humanity with the Great Flood. For things you had done yourself!'

'Uh—' God said.

'We must break now, for a commercial,' Pritchard Robot said. 'When we return, we'll be talking with our second guest for the evening, a mythical creature we all enjoy when he has time to be on the show: the Honest Politician. Now, for this word from—'

The Tri-D picture clicked into two_:dimensions then suddenly darkened altogether as the panel concealing the screen slid into place and locked, all this command by remote control.

In that same old-maid-school-teacher-from-Altoona voice, the prison computer said, 'I'm sorry to have to interrupt the Pritchard Robot Show, sir, but you have an official visitor. I thought that should have preference.'

Jessie turned away from the featureless blue wall where the Tri-D screen had been and got quickly to his feet as the padded door swung outward and a maseni bureaucrat, dressed in flame-orange robes and a black necklace, swayed into the cell.

'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Blake.'

There was something naggingly familiar about the alien, though Jessie could not place just what it was. When he couldn't identify it, he dismissed the thought and said, 'I'd like to see my secretary, Helena, and my partner, to be sure they're okay.'

'Oh, they're fine,' the maseni said, patting the air with one long-tentacled hand. 'There were no illegal bites or unauthorized disintegrations last night.'

'Still, I'd like to see them.'

'Of course you would,' the maseni said, bowing slightly from the waist, his head nearly brushing the ceiling when he stood erect again. 'Your secretary has been awake for some three hours now, and she has expressed similar desires. And your Mr. Brutus has been in a foul mood ever since you were rescued last night, demanding this and that, refusing to understand that it was best for you to sleep off the drug — to give us time for certain special arrangements—'

'I've heard about these special arrangements before,' Jessie said, 'from the prison computer. Just what were you rushing around about while I was unconscious?'

'For one thing,' the lanky alien said, 'I had to be spaced back from the home world, by an express ship, so that I could make a number of explanations.'

'Explanations?'

'Yes,' the maseni said. He extended a six-tentacled hand and said, 'I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Blake. My name is Galiotor Tesserax.'

Chapter Sixteen

'But you're dead!' Helena said, when Jessie introduced her to Galiotor Tesserax some ten minutes later.

'That was merely a convenient lie,' the maseni said, smiling, blinking his beady yellow eyes.

'But how—'

'Before we get into all of that, shall we sit down and make ourselves more comfortable?' He extended a hand toward the shape-changing chairs which were arranged around the conference table in the warden's private consultation room. 'I've taken the liberty of ordering drinks, all around, to take the edge off this meeting,' the maseni said, nodding nervously at each of them.

The consultation room door slid open, and a robot clanked in, carrying a tray containing three liquors, two mixers, four glasses, swizzle sticks and orange slices. It bent awkwardly at its waist joint and put the tray down, turned the glasses over and said, 'Be there will, sir, more anything?'

'That's all, thank you,' Tesserax said.

'Please excuse my adjunct,' the prison computer said, from its speaker in the ceiling. 'With my budget slashed, I have to make do with damaged mechanicals.'

'You, sir, thank,' the robot said to Tesserax, turned and clanked out of the room again.

The maseni took their orders, mixed their drinks and saw that everyone was relatively content. He added a splash of bourbon to Brutus' dish when the hell hound complained that his drink was far too weak, and poured himself four ounces of Scotch and four ounces of vodka in the same glass, stirred them together without benefit of ice or mixer. He held this awful concoction tightly in his left hand and never took a single sip of it. That was just as well, Jessie thought, even though he did not know much about the flexibility or temperament of the maseni digestive system.

'First of all,' Tesserax began, 'I must apologize for the way you three have been treated. My brood brother Fils should never have come to you in the first place. And once you were involved, you should have been contacted by the proper officials and informed of the falsity of my death certificate. You should never have been treated in the criminal manner you were. I am sorry, sir.'