The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Read online

  “Oh, yes, Lord Dionysus,” Kathy said. There was the same undertone in her voice, as if she were silently laughing at everything. She was, he told himself, an extremely unlikable young woman.

  The other girls agreed in a chorus. They were still studying the stiff body of Ed Symes. His stomach had made a little depression in the grass as he whirled, and he was now nicely bedded down for a real spin. Forrester rubbed his hands together.

  “Fine,” he said. “Now, all of you are going to be judges.”

  “Me, too?” Bette asked.

  Forrester nodded. “The head will be the determining factor. If our little Mr. Bottle’s head points to any one of you, that is the one I’ll choose first.”

  “See?” Bette said. “I told you it was his head.”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell before anybody said so,” Dorothy said. “And anyhow, I—”

  “Now, now, girls,” Forrester said, feeling momentarily like a Girl Scout troop leader. “Let’s listen to the rules, shall we? And then we can get down to playing the game.” He took a deep breath. “Isn’t this fun?”

  The girls giggled.

  “Good,” Forrester said. “If Mr. Bottle’s head ends up between two of you, then the other five girls will have to decide which girl the head’s nearer to. The two girls involved will remain absolutely quiet during the judging, and if the other five can’t come to a unanimous agreement, we’ll spin Mr. Bottle again. Understand?”

  “You mean if the head points at me, I get picked,” Bette said. “And if the head goes in between me and somebody else, all the other girls have to decide who gets picked.”

  It was a masterly summation.

  “Right,” Forrester said. “I’m going to give Mr. Bottle a spin. This one counts. We’ll have the second spin, and the rest of them, later.”

  “Gee!” Millicent whispered. “Isn’t this exciting?”

  Forrester ignored the comment. “And remember, I give you my word as a God that I will not interfere in any way with the workings of chance. Is that clearly understood?”

  The girls murmured agreement.

  “Now,” Forrester said, “all you girls get into a nice circle. I’ll stand outside.”

  The girls took a minute or two arranging themselves in a circle, arguing about who was going to sit next to whom, and whose very proximity was bound to bring bad luck. The argument gave Forrester a chance to check on Gerda again. She was whispering softly to Alvin, but they weren’t touching each other. Forrester turned up his hearing to get a better idea of what was going on.

  They had progressed, in the usual manner, from argument to life-history. Gerda was telling Alvin all about her past.

  “…but don’t misunderstand me, Alvin. It’s just that I was in love with a very fine young man. An Athenan, he was. A wonderful man, really wonderful. But he—he was killed in a subway accident some months ago.”

  “Gosh,” Alvin said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I—I have to tell you this, Alvin, so you’ll understand. I still love him. He was wonderful. And until I get over it, I simply can’t…”

  Feeling both ashamed of himself and pleased, as well as sorry for the poor girl, Forrester quit listening. The Gods had arranged his simulated death, which, of course, had been a necessity. His disappearance had to be explained somehow. But he didn’t like the idea of Gerda having to suffer so much.

  My God! Forrester thought. She still loves me!

  It was the first time he had ever heard her say so, flatly, right out in the open. He wanted to bound and leap and cavort—but he couldn’t. He had to go back to his seven beautiful girls.

  He had never felt less like it in his life.

  But at least, he consoled himself, Gerda was keeping Alvin at arm’s length. She was being faithful to his memory.

  Faithful—because she loved him.

  Grimly, he turned back to the girls. “Well, are we all ready now?”

  Kathy looked up at him brightly. “Lord Dionysus, it’s so dark I can’t even see for sure what’s going on. How can we do any judging, if we can’t see?”

  Forrester cursed Kathy for pointing out the flaw in his arrangements. Then, making a nice impartial job of it, he cursed himself for forgetting that what was perfectly visible to him was dark night to mortals.

  “We can clear that up,” he said quickly. “As a matter of fact, I was just getting around to it. We will now proceed to shed a little light on the subject—said subject being our old friend Mr. Bottle.”

  The trick had been taught to him by Venus, but he’d never had a chance to practice it. This was his first real experience with it, and he could only hope that it went off as it was supposed to.

  He stepped into the middle of the circle, near Ed Symes’s stiff body and held his right hand above his head, thumb and forefinger spread an inch apart and the other three fingers folded into his palm.

  Then he concentrated.

  A long second ticked by, while Forrester tried to apply even more neural pressure. Then…

  A small ball of light appeared between his thumb and forefinger, a yellow, cold sphere of fire that shed its radiance over the whole group. Carefully, he withdrew his hand, not daring to breathe. The ball of yellow fire remained in position, hanging in mid-air.

  The muffled gasp from the circle of girls was, Forrester told himself, a definite tribute.

  “Now don’t worry about it, girls,” he said. “That light’s only visible to the eight of us. Nobody else can see it.”

  There was another little series of gasps.

  Forrester grinned. “Can everybody see each other?”

  A murmur of agreement.

  “Can everybody see Mr. Bottle here?”

  Another murmur.

  “In that case, let’s go.” He stepped outside the circle of girls, reached in again for Ed Symes’s foot, and set the gentleman spinning once more.

  Symes spun with a blinding speed, making a low, whistling noise. Forrester watched the body spin dizzily, just as anxious as the girls were to find out who the first winner was going to be. He thought of Millicent, who chewed gum and made it pop. He thought of Bette, the inveterate explainer and double-take expert. He tried to think of Dorothy and Jayne and Beverly and Judy, but the thought of Kathy, irritating and uncomfortable and too damned bright for her own good, got annoyingly in the way.

  He was rather glad he had promised not to use his powers on the spinning figure. He was not at all sure which one of the girls he would have picked for Number One.

  And he had, after all, given his word as a God. True, he wasn’t quite a God, only a demi-Deity. But he did feel that Dionysus might object to his name being used in vain. A promise, he told himself sternly and with some relief, was a promise.

  After some time, Mr. Ed (Bottle) Symes began to slow perceptibly. The whistling died as Symes began rotating about his abdominal axis at a more and more leisurely rate. Seconds passed. Symes faced Bette…Millicent…Kathy…Judy…Bette again…

  Forrester watched, fascinated.

  Finally, Symes came to a halt. All the elaborate instructions in case the Bottle ended up pointing between two girls had been, Forrester saw, totally unnecessary. Symes’s head was pointing at one girl, and one girl alone.

  She gave a little squeal of delight. The others began chorusing their congratulations at once, looking no more convincing than the runners-up in any beauty contest. Their smiles appeared to have been glued on loosely, and their voices lacked a certain something. Possibly it was sincerity.

  “All right, that’s it for now.” Forrester turned to the winner. “My congratulations,” he said, wondering just what he was supposed to say. Not finding any appropriate words, he turned back to the group of six losers. “The rest of you girls can do me a big favor. Go get a couple of the Myrmidons to protect you, hunt around for the nearest wine barrel and confiscate it for me. It’s been a thirsty day.”

  “Gee,” Jayne said. “Sure we will, Lord Dionysus.”

  “
Now take your time,” Forrester said, and the losers all giggled at once, like a trained chorus. Forrester grimaced. “Don’t come back till you find a barrel. Then we’ll play the game again.”

  In a disappointed fashion, the six of them trooped off into the darkness and vanished to mortal eyes. Forrester watched them go and then turned to the winner, feeling just a little uncertain.

  “Well, Kathy,” he started. “I—”

  She flung herself on him with the avid girlishness of a Bengal tiger. “I have dreamed of this night since I was but a child! At last I am in your arms! I love you! Take me! I am yours, all yours!”

  “That’s nice,” Forrester said, taken far aback by the girl’s sudden onslaught. His immediate impulse was to unwind Kathy and set her back on her own feet, some little distance away, after which he could start again on a more leisurely basis. After all, he told himself, people ought to spend more time getting to know each other.

  But he remembered, just in time, that he was Dionysus. He conquered his first impulse and put his arms around her. As he did so, he discovered that his face was being covered with kisses. Kathy was murmuring little indistinct terms of endearment into his ear every time she reached it en route from one side of his face to the other.

  Forrester swallowed hard, tightened his grip and planted his lips firmly on Kathy’s. A blaze of startling heat shot through him.

  In a small corner at the back of his mind, a scroll unrolled. On it was written what Vulcan had told him about his mental attitude changing after Investiture. When he had been plain William Forrester, an attack like the one Kathy was making on him had pretty much chilled him for a while. But now he found himself definitely rising to the occasion.

  There was a passion to her kiss that he had never felt before, a rising tide of flame that threatened to char him. The movement of her mouth on his sent new fires burning throughout his body, and as her hands moved on him he was awakened to a new world, a world of consuming desires.

  He wished his own clothing away, and fumbled for a second at the two fastenings that held Kathy’s chiton in place. Then it was gone and there was nothing between them. They met, flesh to flesh, in a fiery embrace that grew as he forced her down and she responded eagerly, wildly, to his every motion. His lips traveled over her; her entire body was drowning him once and for all in an unbelievable red haze, unlike anything he had ever before experienced…a great wave of passion that went on and on, rising to a peak he had never dreamed of until his body shivered with the sensations, and he pressed on, rising still higher in an ecstasy beyond measure.…

  His last spasm of tension turned out the God-light.

  * * * *

  She lay in his arms on the grass, holding him almost as tightly as he held her. He felt exhausted, but he knew perfectly well that he wasn’t. A God was a God, after all, and Kathy was only the hors d’oeuvres of a seven-course dinner.

  “You’re wonderful,” Kathy said in a soft whisper at his ear. “Absolutely wonderful. More wonderful than I could ever dream. I—”

  She was interrupted by a strange, harsh voice that bellowed from somewhere nearby.

  “All right, bitch!” it said. “Get the hell up from there! And you too, buster!”

  Forrester jerked his head up in astonishment and froze. Kathy looked up, fright written all over her face.

  The man standing over them in the darkness looked like a prize-fighter, one who had taken a number of beatings, but always given better than he had received. His arms were akimbo, his feet planted as firmly as if he were a particularly stubborn brand of tree. He glared down at them, his face expressive of anger, hatred—and, Forrester thought dully, a complete lack of respect for his God.

  The man barked: “You heard what I said! On your feet, buster! If I have to kick your teeth in, I want to do it when you’re standing up!”

  Forrester’s jaw dropped. Then, as the initial shock left him, anger boiled in to take its place. He toyed with the idea of blasting this mortal who showed such disrespect to a God. He sprang to his feet, ready to move, and then stopped.

  Maybe the man was crazy. Maybe he was just some poor soul who wasn’t responsible for his own actions. It would be merciful, Forrester thought, to find out first, and blast the intruder afterward.

  He looked around. Twenty yards away, the encircling Myrmidons still stood, their backs to the scene, as if nothing at all were going on.

  Forrester blinked. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”

  The man barked a laugh. “None of your business.” He turned to Kathy, who had devoted the previous few seconds to getting her chiton on again. Hurriedly, Forrester wished back his own costume. Kathy got up, staring straight back at the intruder. Fear was gone from her face, and a kind of calmness that Forrester had never seen before possessed her now.

  “So!” the intruder bellowed. “The minute my back is turned, off you go! By the Stars and Galaxy, I—I don’t know what to call you! You’re worse than your predecessor! Can’t turn anything down! You—”

  “Now wait!” Forrester bellowed in his most Godlike voice. “Just hold still there! Do you know who you’re talking to? How dare you—”

  And Kathy interrupted him. Forrester stood mute as she stripped the stranger with a voice like scalding acid. “Listen, you,” she said, pointing a finger at the man. “Who do you think you are—my husband?”

  “By the Stars—” the stranger began.

  “Don’t bother trying to scare me with your big mouth,” Kathy went on imperturbably. “You don’t mean a thing to me and you can’t order me around. What’s more, you know it. You’re not my husband, you big thug—and you’re never going to be. I’ll sleep with whomever I please, and whenever I please, and wherever I please, and that’s the way things are going to be. After all, lard-head, it’s my job, isn’t it? Got any questions?”

  Her job?

  Forrester began to wonder just what he had managed to walk into now. But that was a detail. The important thing was that his Godhood had been grossly, unbelievably insulted—and at a damned inconvenient time, too!

  He stepped between Kathy and the intruder, his eyes flashing fire. “Do you know who I am? Do you know that—”

  “Of course he knows,” Kathy put in abruptly. “And if you don’t want to get hurt, I’d advise you to stay out of this little quarrel.”

  Forrester turned and stared at her.

  What the everlasting bloody hell was going on?

  But there wasn’t any time to think. The intruder put his face up near Forrester’s and glared at him. “Sure I know who you are, buster,” he said. “You’re a wise guy. You’re a Johnny-come-lately. And I know what I ought to do with you, too—take you apart, limb by limb!”

  That did it. Forrester, seeing several shades of red, decided that no God could possibly object if this ugly blasphemer were blasted off the face of the Earth. He raised a hand.

  And Kathy grabbed it. “Don’t!” she said in a frightened tone.

  The intruder grinned wolfishly at him. “Pay no attention to Little Miss Sacktime over there, Forrester. You go right ahead and try it! All I need is an excuse to vaporize you. Just one tiny little excuse—and I’ll do the job so damn quick, your head won’t even have time to start swimming.” He set himself. “Go on. Let’s see your stuff, Forrester.”

  Forrester’s arm came down, without his being aware of it. There was only room in his mind for one thought.

  The intruder had called him Forrester.

  Where had he gotten the name?

  And, for that matter, how had he seen the two of them in the darkness?

  While the questions were still spinning in Forrester’s mind, Kathy threw herself forward between him and the stranger. “Ares!” she screamed. “You stupid, jealous idiot! Get some sense into that battle-scarred brain of yours! Are you completely crazy?”

  “Now you listen to me—” the stranger began.

  “Listen, nothing! If you want to pick a fight, do it with me—I can fig
ht back! But if you lay a hand on Forrester, we’ll never find another—”

  The stranger reached out casually and clamped one huge paw over her mouth. “Shut up,” he said, almost quietly. He glanced at Forrester and went on, in the same tone: “Don’t give away everything you’ve got, chum.”

  A second passed and then he took the hand away. Kathy said nothing at all for a moment, and then she nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “You’re right. We shouldn’t be losing our tempers just now. But I didn’t start—”

  “Didn’t you?” the stranger said.

  Kathy shrugged. “Well, never mind it now.” She turned to Forrester. “You know who we are now, don’t you?”

  Forrester nodded very slowly. How else could the man have come through the cordon of Myrmidons and seen them in the darkness? How else would he have dared to face up to Dionysus—confident that he could beat him? And how else could all this argument have gone on without anyone hearing it?

  For that matter, why else would the argument have begun—unless the stranger and Kathy were—

  “Sure,” he said, as if he had known it all along. “You’re Mars and Venus.”

  He could feel cold death approaching.

  CHAPTER TEN

  William Forrester sat, quite alone, in the room which had been given him on Mount Olympus. He stared out of the window, a little smaller than the window in Venus’ rooms, at the Grecian plain far below, without actually seeing. There was no vertigo this time; small matters like that couldn’t bother him.

  The whole room was rather a small one, as Gods’ rooms went, but it had the same varicolored shifting walls, the same furniture that appeared when you approached it. Forrester was beginning to get used to it now, and he didn’t know if it was going to do him any good.

  He peered down, trying to discern the patrolling Myrmidons around the base and lower slopes of the mountain, placed there to discourage overeager climbers from trying to reach the home of the Gods. Of course he couldn’t see them, and after a while he lost interest again. Matters were too serious to allow time for that kind of game.

  The Autumn Bacchanal was over, a thing of the past, on the way to the distortion of legend. Forrester’s greatest triumph had ended—in his greatest fiasco.