Burton managed to smile, but his voice betrayed him. He growled, "How many more are you planning to raise?"

"Not many. I am no maniac."

Burton snorted.

"The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, my immortal companions. You'd like them. Women for them and perhaps a few more for me. My honorable parents, my sisters and brothers and an aunt whom I greatly loved. My children. Of course, I have to find them first." , Frigate groaned and said, "An invasion. The Yellow Peril all over again."

"What?" Li Po said.

"Nothing. I'm sure that we'll all be happy and pleased."

"I look forward to meeting those you will bring back," Li Po said.

Frigate grinned and clapped Li Po on the shoulder. He was very fond of the poet, though, like the others, he was sometimes irritated by him.

Peter Jairus Frigate was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana, near the banks of the Wabash River. Though he called himself a rationalist, he believed, or claimed to believe, that each Earthly area had its unique psychic properties. Thus, Vigo County soil had absorbed the peculiar qualities of the Indians who had lived there and of the pioneers who had driven them away and settled there. His own psyche, soaked with the effluvia of Amerindianness and Hoosierness, would never get rid of these no matter how much they evaporated in other climes and times.

"In a sense, I contain redskins and frontiersmen."

His voice reminded people of that of the Montana movie actor, Gary Cooper, but now and then the Hoosier twang appeared in it. He sometimes pronounced "wash" as "warsh," and a "bucket" was sometimes a "pail."

"Illinois" more often than not was "Ellinois."

In his childhood, he had been subjected to Christian Science, that mélange of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy transmuted into Western religion by the woolly-minded and neurotic Mary Baker Eddy. His parents had originally been Methodist Episcopalian and Baptist, but a "miracle" had occurred when his father's aunt was sent home from a hospital to die of incurable cancer. A friend had talked her into reading The Key to the Scriptures and, while she was doing this, the aunt's cancer had remissed. Most of the Frigate family in Terre Haute had become devout disciples of Eddy and of Jesus Christ as Scientist.

The child Peter Frigate had somehow confused the figure of Jesus with those of scientists he read about at the age of seven, Doctors Frankenstein and Doolittle and Van Hesling. Two of these were involved with dead people come to life, and Doolittle, who fused with St. Francis later on, was involved with talking animals. The precocious and highly imaginative youngster visualized the bearded and robed Christ as working in a laboratory when he was not roaming the countryside and preaching. "Shall we operate now, Judas? I think that that leg goes there, but I don't have the least idea where that eye came from or where it goes."

This conversation would take place when Jesus was trying to raise Lazarus. The problem was complicated by the other bodies that had been put in Lazarus' tomb, before his interment. After lying three days in a hole in a cliff in this hot climate, Lazarus was pretty much decayed and fallen apart, hence the confusion. Hence, also, the gas masks that Jesus and his assistants, Judas and Peter, wore over their surgical masks.

Near them were giant retorts with bubbling liquids and a static generator shooting twisting electrical currents from node to node and other impressive-looking Hollywoodish laboratory equipment. These came, not from the Frankenstein motion picture, which did not appear until 1931, but from a silent movie serial Frigate saw when he was six.

Judas, the treasurer of Dr. Christ's organization, which depended entirely upon voluntary contributions, was nervous about the expense. "This operation will wipe us out," he said hoarsely to the great scientist.

"Yes, but think of the publicity. When the millionaire, Joseph of Arimathea, hears of this, he'll kick in with plenty of shekels. Besides, it's deductible on his income tax."

In later years, when thinking of this scene, Frigate was sure that he had not known about such things as publicity and income tax deductions. He must be reconstructing his childhood imagination. But imagination works backward as well as forward, better in fact.

Perhaps it was this version of Christ as scientist that veered young Frigate toward the reading of science fiction. Though reading heavily in Swift, Twain, Doyle, London, Dumas, Baum, and Homer, he also read the Bible, and an edition of John Bunyan illustrated by Dore. Somewhere, deep in the boiling muddy depths of his unconscious, his religious impulses were mixed with his worship of science as savior of mankind. The early science-fiction magazines and books he read were based on the premise that rationality, logic and science would get Homo sapiens out of the mess it had made during the past hundred thousand years. He had not learned then that, though he lived in a high-technology civilization, the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Dark Ages were in every newborn infant. Baggage that went with every person throughout his or her life. Few there were who would rid themselves of this impedimenta, and no one would ever shuck all of it.

Well, Nur might be an exception.

"There are certain things about those ages that are desirable," Nur had said. "I have not rid myself of them, I am sure."

When Frigate was eleven, his parents slid into religious apathy. They stopped going, for a while, to the First Church of Christ Scientist on Hamilton Boulevard in Peoria. But though they did not want their eldest son to stop attending church, they did not want to transport him every morning to the Christ Scientist Church. So they enrolled him in the Sunday school of the Arcadia Avenue Presbyterian Church, which was within walking distance.

It was here that he ran head on and at full theological speed into predestination. He had not as yet recovered from the concussion of soul and philosophical trauma resulting from the collision.

"The whole world became for me a convalescent ward after that," Frigate had once told Burton. "Of course, I'm exaggerating somewhat."

Until then, Frigate had been convinced that you were rewarded with Heaven if you lived a life full of good deeds and thoughts and of unshaken doubt in the existence of God and the validity of the Bible.

"The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain's theory of pre-determinism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed."

The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, "What the hell?" and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.

But you would not know until after you'd died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.