To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Welcome to Riverworld. It is not like our world - or any world that can be imagined by anyone but Philip Jose Farmer. It is huge and mysterious. It has a central river, rimmed by mountains, with a hidden source and an unknown end. Reborn there is every last soul who ever lived on Earth-from prehistoric apemen to moon-dwelling future civilizations. Reborn there is Sir Richard Francis Burton, translator of The Arabian Nights, explorer, brawler, scholar, womanizer-adventurer. His quest to discover the end of the river, the meaning of the world's existence - and lovely Alice Hargreaves (the real-life model for Alice in Wonderland) form a science fiction adventure that is already recognized as a classic.

Titles by Philip Jose Farmer available in Panther Science Fiction

The Award-winning RIVERWORLD saga

TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT

THE DARK DESIGN

THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

RIVERWORLD 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."

1

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 soundlessness.

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 unclearly, 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 wan 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.

2

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 enscrolled 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 carne 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.

3

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, perperpendicularly, 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 snapdown 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 riverwater 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.

4

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."

5

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.

6

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 handaxes. 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 axehead into the split end. This he bound with some long grasses.

Within half an hour, the group was armed with handaxes, 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 psychism 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 grailstone 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, fiat, 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 grailstone. 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 lunchpails, 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!"

7

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 apeman 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 axehead 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 axehead 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 grailstone 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 grailstones 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 irontree. 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 grailstone. 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.

8

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 bad 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 irontree. 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 wan 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 arid 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.

9

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 grailstone 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 grailstone. 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, modem 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 grailstone.

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 grailrock 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 day -of 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 grailstone.

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 grailstone 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 steelworks 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."

10

"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 irontrees 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 handaxe, 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 grailstone 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 undiseased 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 hairlessness 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.

11

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 rearguard with Burton. His brutish appearance and the handaxe 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 handaxe 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 handaxe. 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 grailstone 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 waterpipes 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 grailstone 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 grailstone. After a half mile, they chose a hill covered by pines except for the apes, on which a great irontree 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 grailstones. 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 breadloaf-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 bad 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 tom 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 grailstone 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 grailstone. 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.

12

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 irontrees 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 irontree 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 dreamgum, 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 grailstones 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 grailstone and one third around the inland grailstones. 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 dreamgum, 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 grailstone at dawn. They found two new people near the grailstone, 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 Bec, 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 grailstone.

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 unbeautiful 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."

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

by

Phillip Jose Farmer

Book 1 of the Riverworld Series

Contents