Paul’s car stopped by a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“We can find what you like to call the spaceship from here,” said Tarvish. “I’d sooner you didn’t see it. I think it would only confuse you.”
“We love you both,” said Vishta gently. “God bless you.”
“God!” Marcia exclaimed. “Don’t tell me people with a science like yours believe in God!”
Paul sighed. “I hope you don’t mind too much that I’m such a barbarian.”
“It’s your conditioning,” said Marcia. “But with them . . .!”
“And your conditioning, Marcia,” Tarvish observed, “has driven you the other way? Yes, I do believe in God in a way—if less devoutly than Paul, or at least than Paul being devout. Many do on our Earth; not all, but many. There was once a man, or possibly more than a man. We argue about that. His name was Hraz, and some call him the Oiled One.” Marcia smiled and Tarvish added, “It refers to a ceremony of honor. I am not quite a follower of Hraz, and yet when I pray—as I did, Paul, shortly before you found me—it is in words that Hraz taught us.”
“Which are?”
“We’ll say them together,” said Vishta. “It makes a good good-bye.”
And the lovers recited:
Lifegiver over us, there is blessing in the word that means you. We pray that in time we will live here under your rule as others now live with you there; but in the meantime feed our bodies, for we need that here and now. We are in debt to you for everything, but your love will not hold us accountable for this debt; and so we too should deal with others, holding no man to strict balances of account.
Do not let us meet temptations stronger than we can bear; but let us prevail and be free of evil.
Then they were gone, off down the beach.
Marcia sniffled away a tear. “It is not the prayer,” she protested indignantly. “But they were so nice . . .”
“Yes,” said the Paulist at Old St. Mary’s, “you may tell your fiancee to come in next Thursday at three to start her pre-marital instruction.”
“You’ll find her a tartar, Father,” Paul grinned.
“Atheism can be the most fanatical of religions. Thank Heaven my duty is only to inform, not to convert her. I’m glad you’re getting married, Paul. I don’t think anything inside or outside of you will denounce the flesh so violently again. Did the analysis help you?”
“Somehow I never got around to it. Things started happening.”
“Now this . . . ah . . . document,” the Paulist went on. “Really extraordinary. Lifegiver over us . . . Terribly free, of course, but still an unusually stimulating, fresh translation of the Pater Noster. I’ve shown it to Father Massini—he was on the Bishops’ Committee for the revised translation of the New Testament—and he was delighted. Where on earth did you get it?”
“Father, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“No?” asked the priest.
Review Copy
The only light in the room was the flame burning inside the pentacle.
The man who kept his face in the shadows said, “But why do you want to kill him?”
The customer said, “What’s that to you?”
“Let us put it this way,” the man said persuasively. “In order to establish the psychic rapport necessary for the success of our . . . experiment, I need a full knowledge of all the emotional factors involved. Only complete knowing can compel the Ab.” He hoped it sounded plausible.
The customer said, “Once he gave me a mortal wound. I need to kill him too.”
“And why this method? Why not something more direct?”
“I can’t cross the continent. I can’t leave New York. As soon I cross the river—I don’t know, it’s like breath going out of me . . .”
Compulsion neurosis, the man thought; form of agoraphobia. “But men have been murdered by mail?” he suggested.
“Not this one. He’s too smart. He writes mystery novels; you don’t think he’ll open unexpected parcels, eat chocolates from strangers—why is it always chocolates?—he’s too smart, the devil.”
“But surely it should be possible to—”
The customer sprang to his feet and his shadow wove wildly in the light from the pentacle. “I’m paying you; isn’t that enough? A body’d think you’re trying to talk me out of it.”
“Nonsense,” said the man in the shadows. Though it was true. He knew that he had powers and that he could make good money from their use. But he knew too how unpredictable they were, and he always experienced this momentary desire to talk the customer out of it. “But if you’d tell me your reason . . . ?” There was method to that insistence too. When sometimes things failed and the customer turned nasty, a bit of private knowledge could often keep him from demanding his money back.
The customer settled down again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you.” The light from the pentacle shone on his bared teeth and glistered off the drop of saliva at the corner of his mouth. “He reviewed my book. It was a clever review, a devilish review. It was so damnably wittily phrased that it became famous. Bennett Cerf and Harvey Breit quoted it in their columns. It was all anybody heard about the book. And it killed the book and killed me and he has to die.”
The man in shadow smiled unseen. One review out of hundreds, and in an out-of-town paper at that. But because it had been distinctively phrased, it was easy to make it a scapegoat, to blame its influence alone for the failure of a book that could never have succeeded. His customer was crazy as a bed-bug. But what did that matter to him, whose customers always were as mad as they were profitable?
“You realize,” he said, “that the blood must have fire?”
“I’ve learned a lot about him. I know his
