“And we are waiting here, for the Slain and Risen One,” Tenant Jones added, looking at Altamont intently. “It is impossible that He will not, sooner or later, deduce the existence of this community. If He has not done so already.”
“Well, sir,” the Toon Leader changed the subject abruptly, “enough of this talk about the past. If I understand rightly, it is the future in which you gentlemen are interested.” He pushed back the cuff of his hunting shirt and looked at an old and worn wrist watch. “Eleven-hundred; we’ll have lunch shortly. This afternoon, you will meet the other people of the Toon, and this evening, at eighteen-hundred, we’ll have a mess together outdoors. Then, when we have everybody together, we can talk over your offer to help us, and decide what it is that you can give us that we can use.”
“You spoke, a while ago, of what you could do for us, in return,” Altamont said. “There’s one thing you can do, no further away than tomorrow, if you’re willing.”
“And that is—?”
“In Pittsburgh, somewhere, there is an underground crypt, full of books. Not bound and printed books; spools of microfilm. You know what that is?”
The others shook their heads. Altamont continued:
“They are spools on which strips are wound, on which pictures have been taken of books, page by page. We can make other, larger pictures from them, big enough to be read—”
“Oh, photographs, which you enlarge. I understand that. You mean, you can make many copies of them?”
“That’s right. And you shall have copies, as soon as we can take the originals back to Fort Ridgeway, where we have equipment for enlarging them. But while we have information which will help us to find the crypt where the books are, we will need help in getting it open.”
“Of course! This is wonderful. Copies of The Books!” the Reader exclaimed. “We thought we had the only one left in the world!”
“Not just The Books, Stamford; other books,” the Toon Leader told him. “The books which are mentioned in The Books. But of course we will help you. You have a map to show where they are?”
“Not a map; just some information. But we can work out the location of the crypt.”
“A ritual,” Stamford Rawson said happily. “Of course.”
They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with the Toon Leader and the Reader and five or six of the leaders of the community. The food was plentiful, but Altamont found himself wishing that the first book they found in the Carnegie Library crypt would be a cook book.
In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated. The latter attached himself to the Tenant, the Reader, and an old woman, Irene Klein, who was almost a hundred years old and was the repository and arbiter of most of the community’s oral legends. Altamont, on the other hand, started, with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the miller, to inspect the gunshop and grist mill. Joined by half a dozen more of the village craftsmen, they visited the forge and foundry, the sawmill, the wagon shop. Altamont looked at the flume, a rough structure of logs lined with sheet aluminum, and at the nitriary, a shed-roofed pit in which potassium nitrate was extracted from the community’s animal refuse. Then, loading his guides into the helicopter, they took off for a visit to the powder mill on the island and a trip up the river.
They were a badly scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing disastrous seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear, and by the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed aviation enthusiasts. The trip upriver was an even bigger success; the high point came when Altamont set his controls for “Hover,” pointed out a snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to fire one of the machine guns at it. The lead balls of their own black-powder rifles would have plunked into the waterlogged wood without visible effect; the copper-jacketed machine-gun bullets ripped it to splinters. They returned for a final visit to the distillery awed by what they had seen.
“Monty, I don’t know what the devil to make of this crowd,” Loudons said, that evening, after the feast, when they had entered the helicopter and prepared to retire. “We’ve run into some weird communities—that lot down in Old Mexico who live in the church and claim they have a divine mission to redeem the world by prayer, fasting and flagellation, or those yogis in Los Angeles—”
“Or the Blackout Boys in Detroit,” Altamont added.
“That’s understandable,” Loudons said, “after what their ancestors went through in the Last War. But this crowd, here! The descendants of an old United States Army infantry platoon, with a fully developed religion centered on a slain and resurrected god—Normally, it would take thousands of years for a slain-god religion to develop, and then only from the field-fertility magic of primitive agriculturists. Well, you saw these people’s fields from the air. Some of the members of that old platoon were men who knew the latest methods of scientific farming; they didn’t need naive fairy tales about the planting and germination of seed.”
“Sure this religion isn’t just a variant of Christianity?”
“Absolutely not. In the first place, these Sacred Books can’t be the Bible—you heard Tenant Jones say that they mentioned firearms that used cartridges. That means that they can’t be older than 1860 at the very earliest. And in the second place, this slain god wasn’t crucified or put to death by any form of execution; he perished, together with his enemy, in combat, and both god and devil were later resurrected. The Enemy is supposed to be the master
