Next we doubled back through New Mexico, where Pueblo Indians dwell in a living museum of anthropology. This was Helen McIlwain's big moment. She led us through the dusty mud village trailing anthropological data. Here in early spring the regular tourist season had not yet begun, and so we had the pueblo to ourselves; Kralick had arranged with the local authorities to close the reservation to outsiders for the day, so that no Vornan-seekers would come up from Albuquerque or down from Santa Fe to make trouble. The Indians themselves came shuffling out of their flat-roofed adobes to stare, but I doubt that many of them knew who Vornan was, and I doubt that any of them cared. They were pudgy people, round-faced, flat-nosed, not at all the hawk-featured Indians of legend. I felt sorry for them. They were Federal employees, in a sense, paid to stay here and live in squalor. Although they are permitted television and automobiles and electricity, they may not build houses in the modern styles, and must continue to grind corn meal, perform their ceremonial dances, and turn out pottery for sale to visitors. Thus we guard our past.

Helen introduced us to the leaders of the village: the governor, the chief, and the heads of two of the so-called secret societies. They seemed like sharp, sophisticated men, who could just as easily be running automobile agencies in Albuquerque. We were taken around, into a few of the houses, even down into the kiva, the town religious center, formerly sacrosanct. Some children did a ragged dance for us. In a shop at the edge of the plaza we were shown the pottery and turquoise-and-silver jewelry that the women of the village produced. One case held older pottery, made in the first half of the twentieth century, handsome stuff with a smooth finish and elegant semi-abstract patterns of birds and deer; but these pieces were priced at hundreds of dollars apiece, and from the look on the face of the salesgirl I gathered that they were not really for sale at all; they were tribal treasures, souvenirs of happier times. The real stock-in-trade consisted of cheap, flimsy little jugs. Helen said with scorn, “You see how they put the paint on after the pot’s been fired, now? It’s deplorable. Any child can do it. The University of New Mexico is trying to revive the old ways, but the people here argue that the tourists like the fake stuff better. It’s brighter, livelier — and cheaper.” Vornan drew a sour glare from Helen when he expressed his opinion that the so-called touristware was more attractive than the earlier pottery. I think he said it only to tease her, but I am not sure; Vornan’s esthetic standards were always unfathomable, and probably to him the debased current work seemed as authentic a product of the remote past as the really fine pottery in the display case.

We had only one minor Vornan incident at the pueblo. The girl running the showroom was a slim adolescent beauty with long soft shining black hair and fine features that looked more Chinese than Indian; we were all quite taken by her, and Vornan seemed eager to add her to his collection of conquests. I don’t know what would have happened if he had asked the girl to stage a command performance in his bed that night. Luckily, he never got that far. He was eyeing the girl in obvious lust as she moved about the showroom; I saw it, and so did Helen. When we left the building, Vornan turned as if to go back in and announce his desire. Helen blocked his way, looking more like a witch than ever, her eyes blazing against her flaming mop of red hair.

“No,”she said fiercely. “You can’t!”

That was all. And Vornan obeyed. He smiled and bowed to Helen and walked away. I hadn’t expected him to do that.

The new meek Vornan was a revelation to us all, but the public at large preferred the revelations of the Vornan it had come to know in January and February. Against all likelihood, interest in Vornan’s deeds and words grew more passionate with each passing week; what might have been a nine-days’ wonder was on its way toward becoming the sensation of the age. Some clever huckster assembled a quick, flimsy book about Vornan and called it The New Revelation. It contained transcripts of all of Vornan-19’s press conferences and media appearances since his arrival at Christmastime, with some choppy commentary tying everything together. The book appeared in the middle of March, and some measure of its significance can be gathered from the fact that it came out not only in tape, cube, and facsim editions, but also in a printed text — a book, that is, in the old sense. A California publisher produced it as a slim paperbound volume with a bright red jacket and the title in incandescent ebony letters; an edition of a million copies sold out within a week. Very shortly, pirated editions were emerging from underground presses everywhere, despite the frantic attempts of the copyright owner to protect his property. Uncountable millions of The New Revelation flooded the land. I bought one myself, as a keepsake. I saw Vornan reading a copy. Both the genuine edition and the various ersatz ones had the same black-on-red color scheme, so that at a glance they were indistinguishable, and in the early weeks of spring those paperbound books covered the nation like a strange red snowfall.

The new creed had its prophet, and now it had its gospel too. I find it hard to see what sort of spiritual comfort could be derived from The New Revelation, and so I suppose the book was more of a talisman than a scripture; one did not take counsel from it, one merely carried it about, drawing sustenance from the feel of the shiny covers against the hands. Whenever we traveled with Vornan and a crowd assembled, copies of the book were held aloft like flashcards at a college football game, creating a solid red backdrop speckled with the dark letters of the title.

There were translations. The Germans, the Poles, the Swedes, the Portuguese, the French, the Russians, all had their own versions of The New Revelation. Someone on Kralick’s staff was collecting the things and forwarding them to us wherever we went. Kralick usually turned them over to Kolff, who showed a weird bitter interest in each new edition. The book made its way into Asia, and reached us in Japanese, in several of the languages of India, in Mandarin, and in Korean. Appropriately, a Hebrew edition appeared, the right language for any holy book. Kolff liked to arrange the little red books in rows, shifting the patterns about. He spoke dreamily of making a translation of his own, into Sanskrit or perhaps Old Persian; I am not sure if he was serious.

Since the episode of his interview with Vornan, Kolff had been slipping into some kind of senile decay. He had been badly shocked by the computer’s views on Vornan’s speech sample; the ambiguity of that report had punctured his own buoyant conviction that he had heard the voice of the future, and now, chastened and humiliated, he had fallen back from his first enthusiastic verdict. He was not at all sure that Vornan was genuine or that he had really heard the ghosts of words in the liquid flow of Vornan’s prattle. Kolff had lost faith in his own judgment, his own expertise, and we could see him crumbling now. This great Falstaff of a man was at least partly a humbug, as we had discovered during our tour; though his gifts were great and his learning was vast, he knew that his lofty reputation had been undeserved for decades, and abruptly he stood exposed as an uncertain maunderer. In pity for him I asked Vornan to grant Kolff a second interview and to repeat whatever it was he had recited the first time. Vornan would not do it.

“It is useless,” he said, and, refused to be prodded.

Kolff subdued seemed hardly to be Kolff at all. He ate little, said less, and by the beginning of April had lost so much weight that he seemed unrecognizable. His clothes and his skin itself hung slack on his shrunken frame. He moved along with us from place to place, but he was shambling blindly, hardly aware of what was happening about him. Kralick, concerned, wanted to relieve Kolff of his assignment and send him home. He discussed the matter with the rest of us, but Helen’s opinion was decisive. “It’ll kill him,” she said. “He’ll think he’s being fired for incompetence.”