He held up a third finger. "Three-red is the druidic color of death and life; it is the color of the food offered up to the dead during Hallowmas. And four-above it all is the five-pointed star-the pentagram, symbol of the Goddess, whom they still feel required to acknowledge. It is the single universal symbol of all magic, good or evil. You see it on scores of flags, even that of the U.S. And by the way, Beaver-red, white, and blue are the traditional colors of the Triple Goddess."

Before he could begin to use the fingers on his other hand, Lenny rose up to holler, "Are you implying that the Cold War has been nothing but a power struggle between bricklayers and tree-trimmers?"

"Not at all." Tom's smile remained just as broad. "While there have been minor skirmishes in which the leaders of one God State threw their slaves into battle against the slaves of another God State, all the governments of the world are partners in crime. They are allied to maintain their power and privilege. They're part of the same club. Have you ever seen the leader of one government personally jump for the throat of the leader of an `enemy' government?"

"That's not how affairs of state are handled." Lenny sat again. He hadn't incited the audience enough.

"Indeed not," Tom replied. "Affairs of the God State are handled by forcing some eighteen-year-old to kill another eighteen-year-old while those who planned the slaughter call each other on hotlines to talk about the weather."

"That does it!" Lenny jumped up from his desk, advancing on Russell. "This is my show, and nobody says the U.S. of A. is in cahoots with the Commies!" He seized Tom's shirt and pulled him up to shout, "Get off my show!"

The audience went wild. They cheered, hooted, stomped. Someone threw confetti. They started to chant.

"Beaver, Beaver, Beaver, Beaver…"

Tom smiled, flashed his fingers in an "okay" sign.

The cameras barely registered the friendly grin that appeared and vanished from Lenny's face in the course of an instant. There was nothing "Beaver" Lenny enjoyed more than someone who understood the joke.

I switched the screen off to think for a bit.

I'd heard all the conspiracy theories before, probably even caused a few of them by the nature of my activities. I knew enough to figure out that any particular conspiracy must allocate its resources and confine its activities to areas that present either the greatest opportunity or the greatest threat.

If the "God States" were on my trail, I might have a difficult time surviving one breath to the next.

I needed a drink. Something to numb my mind. Reaching toward the desk drawer, I hesitated.

I had someone to drink with! I punched up the number of Ann's room over at Auberge.

"Sure," she said. "Give me ten minutes."

I poured two drinks. Getting drunk together was better than getting drunk alone. Even though the alcohol blocked the world out, it permitted me to concentrate more closely, however fuzzily, on my own thoughts and on my partner's.

She arrived in a little over ten minutes. A sleek red dress that had been poured on made her look like a pillar of fire topped by golden sunlight.

I handed her a glass and said, "Here's to open government and numb minds."

"Been watching Congress on satellite again?"

"Close-Ad Hominem Attack."

Ann snorted. "Those twits in his audience have their minds set on getting hypnotized by that insulting creep."

"Hypnotized," I muttered. The bourbon trickled into my brain. I took another slug. Something started to click.

Minds set.

Hypnosis.

Mindset.

Subliminal ads.

TV sets.

Satellite TV.

Set.

Setting.

Dosage.

"Jesus H. Christ and his bastard son Harry!"

Ann looked at me with a puzzled frown.

"Ann!" I shouted, jumping up from the chair. "I've got it figured!"

She took a sip of the liquor and continued to frown. "Got what figured?"

"How to kill God!" I felt a surge of excitement rush through me. All doubts about my intentions fled-this was what I wanted to do. Reaching for a notepad and pen, I scrawled a list of anything that came to mind.

She nearly snorted in a delicate sort of way. "That easily?"

I kept scribbling. "Easy to conceive, difficult to execute. That's how God's managed to survive this long." I took her drink and slapped the note in her hand. "Let's get back to Auberge."

She followed me out of the office, reading the list as intently as a tax auditor. "Mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, THC, fentanyl, STP, BZ, DMT, MDMA-are you singlehandedly trying to bring back the Sixties?"

"That's when the first step toward mass deicide began." We zoomed down to ground level in a blissfully operative elevator. The evening sky was dark and clear.

"Tryptophan," she continued, "Vasopressin, B-12, phenylalanine? Getting a bit health-conscious, aren't you?"

"I'm going to need it."

We passed through the old Bonaventure Hotel, striding past the dozing night clerk. One couldn't call the tenants in this high-rise anything but marginally wealthier bums than those who inhabited Arco North.

She read the remainder of the list. "What's all this other stuff for?"

"I'm not sure yet," I said, reaching for a cigarette. We entered Auberge at the hatch on Fourth and Hope. "I'm certain, though, that there's something still lack-"

"Oh no," piped the squeaking voice of Isadora Volante. "Who let you two in?"

I looked down at the telepathic runt, tapped the cigarette on the back of my hand, and raised it to my lips, smiling.

I wasn't too specific when I asked Isadora for her help in a little plan of mine. She agreed to help me after I pointed out that we'd saved her from Zacharias and after she determined that my credit was good. That left me free to concentrate on the setup.

The next day I canvassed advertising agencies from Capistrano Beach to Oxnard. By noon my ears begged for relief from the avalanche of garrulous pitches. Only a few of the alleged people with whom I spoke sounded more original than sandwich boards and handbills.

The handful of impressive ones I invited up to the Union Bank Building for a final decision in my office. Getting them to come to Old Downtown required that I reveal how much I was willing to spend on the campaign. After finding that out, none of them had any qualms about the campaign's contents, either.

Two days later, a dozen advertising types gathered in my office to win my business. They scuttled, strode, or swished in with their presentations in hand. I seated them around the room in a rough semicircle.

Ann watched the exhibition from the far corner. Her makeup valiantly attempted to disguise the dark half-moons of exhaustion under her eyes. She had offered to raise funds for the ads I'd proposed by playing poker at the no-limit tables in Auberge casinos. Her mood dripped from her like weak acid, cutting when it had the strength.

The first pitchman pulled some illustration board from a fake leather portfolio. You could have attached his face to an axe handle and used it to split logs.

"This is a preliminary concept," he said in a nasal voice, deeper than I'd expected, "of our visualization of the ideation you related to us over the phone."

Ann winced.

I lit up a Camel and leaned back to gaze at the small sign he held. In cheerful, pink-hued lettering, it read

You Won't Feel GuiltyOr Full of SinOn the First of the YearWhen God's Done In!

"Too wordy," Ann said, looking out the window over the L.A. basin.

The hack protested weakly. "It's a unified conceptualization that encapsulizes the elements you requested-God's death and the date of it."