The strength of his cult was appalling, and so was the speed at which it grew. His absence on the Moon seemed not to matter at all. Even from a distance he exerted a pull, as powerful and as mindless as the tug of the Moon itself on our seas. He was, more accurately than the clichй can convey, all things to all men; there were those who loved him for his gaudy nihilism, and others who saw him as a symbol of stability in a tottering world. I don’t doubt that his basic appeal was as a deity: not Jehovah, not Wotan, not a remote and bearded father-figure, but as a handsome, dynamic, buoyant Young God, the incarnation of springtime and light, the creative and the destructive forces bound into a single synthesis. He was Apollo. He was Baldur. He was Osiris. But also he was Loki, and the old mythmakers had not contemplated that particular combination.

His visit to Luna was extended several times. I believe it was the intention of Kralick — on behalf of the Government — to keep Vornan away from Earth as long as possible, so that the dangerous emotions engendered by his arrival in the last year of the old millennium might have a chance to subside. He had been scheduled to stay only to the end of June, but late in July he was still there. On the screens we caught glimpses of him in the gravity baths, or gravely examining the hydroponics tanks, or jet-skiing, or mingling with a select group of international celebrities at the gambling tables. And I noticed Aster beside him quite often, looking oddly regal, her slim body bedecked in startlingly revealing, astonishingly un-Aster-like costumes. Hovering in the background occasionally were Helen and Heyman, an ill-assorted pair linked by mutual detestation, and I sometimes picked out the looming figure of Sandy Kralick, dour-faced, grim, lost in contemplation of his unlikely assignment.

At the end of July 1 was notified that Vornan was returning and that my services would again be needed. I was instructed to go to the San Francisco spaceport to await Vornan’s landing a week hence. A day later I received a copy of an unpleasant little pamphlet which I’m sure did not improve the flavor of Sandy Kralick’s mood. It was a glossy-covered thing bound in red to imitate The New Revelation; its title was The Newest Revelation and its author was Morton Fields. A signed copy came to me compliments of the author. Before long, millions were in circulation, not because the booklet had any inherent interest but because it was mistaken by some for its original, and because it was coveted by others who collected any scrap of printed matter dealing with the advent of Vornan-19.

The Newest Revelationwas Fields’ ugly memoir of his experiences on tour with Vornan. It was his way of venting his spleen against Aster, mainly. It did not name her — for fear of the libel laws, I suppose — but no one could fail to identify her, since there were only two women on the committee and Helen McIlwain was mentioned by name. The portrait of Aster that emerged was not one that corresponded to the Aster Mikkelsen I had known; Fields showed her as a treacherous, sly, deceitful, and above all else amoral minx who had prostituted herself to the members of the committee, who had driven Lloyd Kolff into his grave with her insatiable sexual appetite, and who had committed every abomination known to man with Vornan-19. Among her lesser crimes was her deliberate sadistic torment of the one virtuous and sane member of our group, who was of course Morton Fields. Fields had written:

“This vicious and wanton woman took a strange delight in sharpening her claws on me. I was her easiest victim. Because I made it clear from the start that I disliked her, she set out to snare me into her bed — and when I rebuffed her, she grew more determined to add me to her collection of scalps. Her provocations grew flagrant and shameful, until in a weak moment I found myself about to yield to them. Then, of course, with great glee she denounced me as a Don Juan, callously humiliating me before the others, and…”

And so on. The whining tone was maintained consistently throughout. Fields ticked each of us off unsparingly. Helen McIlwain was a giddy post-adolescent, somewhat overripe; Lloyd Kolff was a superannuated dodderer making his way through gluttony, lechery, and the shrewd use of a mind that contained nothing but erotic verse; F. Richard Heyman was an arrogant stuffed shirt. (I did not find Fields’ characterization of Heyman unjust.) Kralick was dismissed as a Government flunkey, trying hard to save everyone’s face at once, and willing to make any compromise at all to avoid trouble. Fields was quite blunt about the Government’s role in the Vornan affair. He said openly that the President had ordered complete acceptance of Vornan’s claims in order to deflate the Apocalyptists; this of course was true, but no one had admitted it publicly before, certainly not anyone so highly placed in the circles around Vornan as was Fields. Luckily he buried his complaint in a long, clotted passage devoted to a paranoid flaying of the national psyche, and I suspect the point was overlooked by most readers.

I came off fairly well in Fields’ assessments. He described me as aloof, superficial, falsely profound, a mock-philosopher who invariably recoiled in terror from any hard issue. I am not pleased with those indictments, but I suspect that I must plead guilty to the charges. Fields touched on my excessive venery, on my lack of real commitment to any cause, and on my easy tolerance of the defects of those about me. Yet there was no venom in his paragraph on me; to him, I seemed neither fool nor villain, but rather a neutral figure of little interest. So be it.

Fields’ nasty gossip about his fellow committeemen alone would not have won his book much of a following outside academic circles, nor would I be speaking of it at such great length. The core of his essay was his “newest revelation” — his analysis of Vornan-19. Muddled, mazy, stilted, and dreary though it was, this section managed to carry enough of Vornan’s charisma to gain it readership. And thus Fields’ foolish little book achieved an influence out of all proportion to its real content.

He devoted only a few paragraphs to the question of Vornan’s authenticity. Over the course of the past six months Fields had held a variety of contradictory views on that subject, and he managed to pile all the contradictions into a short space here. In effect he said that probably Vornan was not an impostor, but that it would serve us all right if he were, and in any case it did not matter. What counted was not the absolute truth concerning Vornan, but only his impact on 1999. In this I think Fields was correct. Fraud or not, Vornan’s effect on us was undeniable, and the power of his passage through our world was genuine even if Vornan-as-time-traveler may not have been.

So Fields dispensed with that problem in a cluster of blurred ambiguities and moved on to an interpretation of Vornan’s culture-role among us. It was very simple, said Fields. Vornan was a god. He was deity and prophet rolled into one, an omnipotent self-advertiser, offering himself as the personification of all the vague, unfocused yearnings of a planet whose people had had too much comfort, too much tension, too much fear. He was a god for our times, giving off electricity that may or may not have been produced by surgically implanted power-packs; a god who Zeus-like took mortals to his bed; a trouble maker of a god; a slippery, elusive, evasive, self-indulgent god, offering nothing and accepting much. You must realize that in summarizing Fields’ thoughts I am greatly compressing them and also untangling them, cutting away the brambles and thorns of excessive dogmatism and leaving only the inner theory with which I myself wholly agree. Surely Fields had caught the essence of our response to Vornan.

Nowhere in The Newest Revelation did Fields claim that Vornan-19 was literally divine, any more than he offered a final opinion on the genuineness of his claim to have come from the future. Fields did not care whether or not Vornan was genuine, and he certainly did not think that he was in any way a supernatural being. What he was really saying — and I believe it wholeheartedly — was that we ourselves had made Vornan into a god. We had needed a deity to preside over us as we entered our new millennium, for the old gods had abdicated; and Vornan had come along to fill our need. Fields was analyzing humanity, not assessing Vornan.