All this the great ethical houses had discovered and duly made available, ter-wep-wise, to the Pentagon in the ‘60s and ‘70s—and had seen used in the ‘80s.

But on the other hand, the methamphetamines inhibited the secretion of adrenalin, and this, for some personalities, was vital; schizophrenia had at last, like cancer, been unmasked; cancer consisted of a virus and schizophrenia had turned out to be an overproduction of serotonin which the brain could not handle; hence the hallucinations—true hallucinations, although the dividing line between hallucination and authentic vision had become thin indeed.

“I don’t understand you,” Lurine said. “You take those goddamn pills and then you see something just awful—Satan himself. Or that hook you talk about, that gaff that penetrated your side. And yet you go back. And you’re not just bored; it’s not that.” Puzzled, she regarded him.

Pete said, “I have to know. That’s all. To experience, to know, is to be. I want to be.”

“You are,” she pointed out, practically.

“Listen,” Pete said. “God—the authentic God, He of the Bible, Whom we worship, not that Carleton Lufteufel—is searching for us; the Bible is a chronicle of God’s search for man. Not man’s search for God. Do you understand? And I want to go as far toward Him, to meet Him, as I can.”

“How did man and God get separated?” Like a child, she listened attentively, awaiting the true tale.

Pete said cryptically, “A quarrel so old that the story is garbled. Somehow God set man up where He could reach man daily, regularly; they were in direct touch, the way you and I are now. But something happened and somehow they wound up like Leibnitz’s windowless monads, near each other but unable to perceive anything outside; only able to scrutinize their own beings. A sort of schizophrenia evidently set in, on the part of one of them or both; autism-separation. And then man—”

“Man was driven out. Physically away.”

Pete said, “Evidently man did something, or anyhow God thought he had. We don’t know precisely what it was. He was corrupted, anyhow, through nature or some natural substance; something made by God and part of His creation. So man sank out of direct contact and down to the level of mere creation. And we have to make our way back.”

“And you do it through those pills.”

He said, simply, “It’s all I know. I don’t have natural visions. I want to take the journey back until I stand face to face with Him as man once did—did, and elected not to. Beyond doubt, some thing or some one tempted him away and into doing something else. Man voluntarily gave up that relationship because he thought he had found something better.” Half to himself he added, “So we wound up with Carleton Lufteufel and the gob and the ter-weps.”

“I like the idea of being tempted,” Lurine said; she relit her pipe, it having gone out. “Everyone does. Those pills tempt you; you’re still doing it. Men—people like you—have prairie-dog blood; they’re insanely curious. Make a funny noise and out you pop from your burrow to witness whatever’s taking place. Just in case.” She pondered. “A wonder. That’s what you crave and he—the first of us in the Garden—craved. What before the war they called a ‘spectacular.’ It’s the big tent syndrome.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know why you want to be at ringside? So you can be with them.”

“Who?”

“The big boys. Hubris. Vainglory. Man saw God and he said to himself, Gee whiz, how come He gets to be God and I’m stuck with—”

“And I’m doing this now.”

Lurine said, “Learn to be what Christ called ‘meek.’ I bet you don’t know what that means. Remember those supermarkets before the war; when someone pushed a cart into line ahead of you, and you accepted it—that’s your faulty idea of ‘meek.’ Actually meek means ‘tamed,’ as in a tamed animal.”

Startled, he said, “Really?”

“Then it got to mean humble, or even merciful, or long-suffering, or even bad things like weak and soft. But originally it meant to lose the quality of violence. In the Bible it means specifically to be free from resentment regarding injuries done to you.” She laughed with delight. “You stupid fool,” she said, then. “You prattle but you don’t know a thing, really.”

He said stiffly, “Hanging around that pedant Father Handy has hardly made you meek. In any of the senses of the word.”

At that, Lurine laughed until she choked. “Oh god.” She breathed. “We can have a ferocious argument, now: Which of us is the meeker? Hell, I’m a lot meeker than you!” She rocked with amusement.

He ignored her. Because of the stew of pills which he had taken; they had begun to work on him.

He saw a figure, suddenly, with laughing eyes, whom he supposed to be Jesus. It had to be. The man, with white-thatched hair, wore a toga and Greek greaves. He was young, with brawny shoulders, and he grinned in a gentle, happy way as he stood clutching to his chest an enormous and heavy clasp-bound book. Except for the classic greaves, he might—from the wild cut of his hair—have been Saxon.

Jesus Christ! Pete thought.

The white-haired brawny youth—my god, he was built like a blacksmith!—unbuckled the book and opened it to display two wide pages. Pete saw writing in a foreign language, held forward for him to read:

KAI THEOS EIN HO LOGOS

Pete couldn’t make it out, nor the jumble of other words which, although neatly inscribed, swam before him in this vision, snatches meaningless to him, such as koimeitheisometha … keoiesis … titheimi… he just could not even tell if it was a genuine language or not: communication or the nonsense phantoms of a dream.

The flaxen-haired youth shut the great book which he held and then, abruptly, was gone. It was like, his coming and going, an old wartime laser hologram, but without sound.

“You shouldn’t listen to that anyhow,” a voice said within Pete’s head, as if his own thought processes had passed from his control. “All that mumbo-jumbo was to impress you. Did he tell you his name, that man? No, he did not.”

Turning, Pete made out the bobbing, floating image of a small clay pot, a modest object, fired but without glaze; merely hardened. A utilitarian object, from the soil of the ground. It was lecturing him against being awed—which he had been—and he appreciated it. “I’ll tell you my name,” the pot said. “I’m Oh Ho.” To himself, Pete thought, Chinese. “I’m from the earth and not superior to mortals,” the pot Oh Ho continued, in a conversational way. “I’m not above identifying myself. Always beware of manifestations too lofty to identify themselves. You are Peter Sands; I am Oh Ho. What you saw, that figure holding that large ancient volume, that was an entity of the noosphere, from the Seas of Knowledge, who come down here all the way from Sumerian times. As Therapeutae they assisted the Greek healer Asclepiades; as spirits or plasmic lifeforms of wisdom they called themselves ‘Thoth’ to the Egyptians, and when they built—they are excellent artificers—they were ‘Ptath’ to the Egyptians and ‘Hephaestus’ to the Greeks. They actually have no names at all, being a composite mind. But I have a name, just as you have. Oh Ho. Can you remember that? It’s a simple name.”

“Sure,” Pete said. “Oh Ho, a Chinese name.” The pot wavered; it was shimmering away. “Oh Ho,” it repeated., “Ho Oh. Oh, Oh, Oh. Ho On. Think of Ho On, Peter Sands, someday when you are talking with Dr. Abernathy. The little clay pot which came from the earth and can, like you, be smashed to bits and return to the earth, which lives only as long as your kind does.”

“ ‘Ho On,’ “ Pete echoed dutifully.

“That which is benign will identify itself by name,” Ho On said, invisible now; it was only a voice, a thinking, mentational entity which had possessed Pete’s mind. “That which won’t is not. We are alike, you and I, equals in a certain real way, made from the same stuff. Peter Sands. I have told you who I am; and from old, Iknew you.”