“I instructed you a moment ago to be more explicit. Who are
’em?”
“Damned souls, of course, out of graves gaping wide. I open up the graves of all damned souls on the nights of my special orgies.”
“What
is the purpose of this ridiculous nonsense?”
“Everlasting torment, my dear lady. Hell is my kingdom. In hell everlasting tortures are inflicted on the hosts of the damned. Following this little session, it is my intention to enjoy an extended interview with the damned soul who immediately preceded me. I’ll soon have him spitting out of the other side of his face, I promise you.”
The Devil beat out a veritable tattoo with his tail. Hermes had the feeling the creature could give you a really nasty thwack with that big black tail. He also had the feeling Aphrodite wasn’t going to put up with this nonsense for very much longer. Her voice was already dangerously silky. “How would I go about it, becoming a damned soul?”
“Nothing easier,” said the creature cheerfully, “particularly for a woman. Just get yourself seduced.”
“Really, as easy as that?”
“Nothing more needed, one of my oldest tricks. Just get yourself solidly seduced.”
Too late, the Devil realized his foolish mistake, talking nonsense about seduction to the very goddess of love. He started his twinkling tricks again, hoping, no doubt, to confuse the issue. Hermes could see the skull with the turquoise inlay, then the scissor teeth, then the cow horns, round and round in a whirling kaleidoscopic display. Aphrodite gave the big thumbs-down, and like a flash Hermes stabbed the button. In the merest fraction of a nanosecond, the ground opened up at left-center.
The Devil was gone now, but the noise he was still able to kick up with his drumming hoof rumbled up from the depths below, more than loud enough to be a nuisance.
“Better clear him altogether,” muttered Aphrodite.
Nothing loath, Hermes pressed the clear-store button. Instantly the noise stopped, but in its place a vast sulfurous cloud of smoke belched up out of the floor like some enormous geyser. Hermes just managed to punch the air-conditioner before the smoke entirely blotted out the console keyboard.
The incident did not improve Aphrodite’s already shortening temper. The acrid smoke left her with red-rimmed eyes, not at all becoming to any girl. Hermes could see things were going to be a bit tough on the two remaining contenders. Yet neither showed any sign of apprehension or even of inconvenience. Up came the fellow with the enormous beard. Hermes would have predicted the fellow would be equipped with a massive voice, it just had to be so. Sure enough, the Voice boomed out, “I am that I am.” Nothing more.
“I am that I am,” repeated Aphrodite. “What d’you make of that one?”
“Shortest possible logical closed loop,” answered Hermes. “Just two interlinked transfer instructions.”
The fellow continued, “I am the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the god of Jacob.”
Aphrodite’s rippling laugh echoed through the hall. “Who are Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham?” Answer there was none. The bearded patriarch stared dead ahead, his eyes focused on infinity. Hermes pressed the query button. It took a second or two for the search to be made. Out came the information on the high-speed printer.
“Nomads. Complex sexual situation. Small-time stuff,” he said.
“Rather what I expected. This fellow has delusions of grandeur.”
Aphrodite was on the very point of a thumbs-down when the Voice intoned, “I live on a throne, high and uplifted. Above it stand the seraphim.”
Hermes watched as Aphrodite’s wonderful mouth opened wider and wider. In astonishment, she asked,
“What
are seraphim?”
“Each seraph hath six wings. With twain they cover my face, with twain my feet, with twain they do fly.”
Once more the laugh with all sunlight in it rippled through the hall. This time the patriarch heard it. With an expansive smile and a guffaw he boomed, “One day I called Samuel, and Samuel rose up and said, ‘Lord thou callest me, I am here.’ So I said unto him, ‘No, Samuel, I called thee not, lie thyself down again,’ whereupon he laid himself down again.”
Aphrodite smiled in her silkiest style. “Let me remind you, I am here to make judgment on a reasoned case, not to listen to drab anecdotes or feverish pronouncements. Suppose you apply yourself to a little coherent thought.”
The fellow stood blinking for quite a while. At last some recollection crossed his mind. “I visited Sarah as I had spoken, and did unto her as I had spoken.”
“What had you spoken?”
“That Sarah shall bear a son. That Abraham’s seed shall prosper.”
“I asked you a moment ago to make an attempt at rationality. How could Abraham’s seed prosper if it was you who visited Sarah? What were these unmentionable things you did to her? Did you give her a little pleasure, a little kindness? Or did you treat her with the summary dispatch of a farmyard animal?”
Ignoring these pertinent questions, the patriarch lifted his right hand high above his head. “I am a jealous god,” he thundered. “I have smitten the first-born in the land. I have caused the waters to close upon mine enemies. I have made the ground to tremble beneath their feet.”
To emphasize his point, the patriarch began to blow out through pursed lips in the manner of a horse. At first there came nothing but a woofing, exactly in the manner of a horse. Then ever so slightly the ground did indeed begin to tremble. Fascinated at this discovery, the fellow went on and on with his woofing. More and more he got the trick of it, until quite suddenly there came a really violent shaking. A glass of fruit juice at Aphrodite’s elbow jiggled and spilled over into her lap. The liquid instantly soaked its way through the resplendent dress. In a fury she shouted, “Stop this ridiculous and childish nonsense!”
There was no stopping it. The Voice boomed on. “I am the lord of hosts. In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth. My spirit moved on the waters.”
The voice of Aphrodite, as she rose from her chair, was also loud and threatening. “Quiet, or I will have you cleared, utterly and finally, so that not a single absurdity is left behind.”
Heedless, the Voice ranted on. “Come then, gather unto my supper that ye may eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses, the flesh of all men both great and small.”
Hermes glanced again at the data sheets from the printer. “Raving lunatic. Worst case of paranoia on record,” he shouted.
At swelling volume, the creature continued to give tongue. “Come, look here,” it thundered, “look and ye shall see. I have a name written on my thigh—king of kings, lord of lords.”
“This one’s got the lot,” bellowed Hermes in Aphrodite’s ear.
“Then give him the lot,” she bellowed in reply.
Hermes extended a deliberate finger to the oblivion button. Instantly, Whitebeard was gone, the ranting stopped. But not without all trace. Like the Devil, this creature vanished in a pall of smoke, this time a sickly smoke—incense, apparently—worse, if anything, than the Devil smoke. Hermes was too taken aback by the intensity of it to reach for the air-conditioner. Yet the pall gradually cleared, and with its clearing Hermes found Aphrodite clinging to him.
“I suspected something like that might happen,” she whispered, “I got to the controls just in time.”
Aphrodite resumed her judgment seat with as much dignity as she could muster. It wasn’t easy to be dignified, for the tumbler of spilled juice had made her abominably sticky. Never again, never again, she decided, was she getting herself into a situation like this. Even the blood-spitting Tamerlenk was fast losing his attractions. Aphrodite was just on the point of making a reluctant judgment in favor of Tamerlenk when a discreet cough reminded her of the fourth contender. The thing was standing there, a big rectangular box with a shining gilt face. It had legs, after all, extremely short, stumpy legs. The face really was nothing but gilt lettering. The thing began in a flat, featureless voice. “In a very real sense. I have been gravely perturbed at the manner in which business has been conducted today. I am referring now, not to the summary dispatch of the two immediately preceding gentlemen, but to an omission on the part of the Chair to state our terms of reference. An observer,
persona curiae,
might well be pardoned for failure to comprehend what this affair is about. I will commence, therefore, by stating terms of reference from the floor.
“Power is the subject of our debate. The contenders, each one of us, has appeared here freely, without constraint or duress. It is the opinion, the belief, the conviction of each one of us that power over the destiny of man resides chiefly in our person. It is my belief that power resides in me. Each of the gentlemen who preceded me held a similar belief. We are here to provide evidence to substantiate our belief. It is the task of the Chair to weigh our several arguments and then to deliver a balanced and final judgment (I might add, parenthetically, that the Chair has graciously condescended to spend a night of extreme frolicsomeness with the winner). These are our terms of reference.”
Hermes saw the dark look on Aphrodite’s face. No objection, he knew, would be made to an immediate punching of the windbag button. Yet in all fairness, a thumbs-down could hardly be given on anything the gilt creature had said so far. Besides, Hermes had no wish to leave the field open to the blood-spitting merchant. The flat voice continued. “The contention which I am here to prove is that
I
, a book of rules, a
mere
rule-book, if you prefer to call me so, exercise complete sway over the destiny of man. From front to back, top to bottom, I am a vast aggregation of laws and statutes. With these I bind my subjects far more effectively than the fetters employed by the remaining gentleman on my right. The gentleman imagines himself to be a conqueror. Yet where are his conquests? Are they not all gone now, like thistledown blown away in the wind?
My
conquests become more firmly established as time goes on. My rules become hallowed by time. My laws become established by precedent. Learned men search me from cover to cover, lavishing their energies and talents to insure that I am obeyed in all things, down to the last comma. Strong men quail before me quite as abjectly as they ever quailed before the gentleman whose spittoon is now very definitely spilling over onto the floor of this otherwise clean and pleasant hall.
“As the centuries pass, I hold dominion over an ever-increasing proportion of humanity. Throughout the so-called advanced countries, I control the lives of the people down to the finest details. In one of the oldest of these countries, I have reduced the people to an ultimate paralysis, a paralysis in which no decisions can be taken, a paralysis in which nothing happens except endless and futile argument, utterly without point or urgency. In this last stage, I reduce all humankind to an intellectual senility in which they even become incapable of responding to the most elementary facts.
“A remarkable aspect of my power is that my victims never regard themselves as victims. The more I reduce them to a state of complete inanition, the happier they become. Astonishingly, I do not even write my own laws or my own statutes. I allow humans to pack into my massive chest anything that should take their fancy. This explains why I am quite largely stuffed with rubbish. I contain outrageous logical contradictions. Far from hindering me, this even helps my purposes, for humans torture themselves over the contradictions, not by a genuine removal of logical difficulties, mark you, but by setting up elaborate pretenses that no such contradictions exist. These pretenses greatly assist me in inducing mental collapse in otherwise quite rational and healthy people. I cause mental agony on a vast scale, far more effectively and acutely than the whips, chains, and branding irons employed by the remaining gentleman on my right.
“Absurd talk, you might be disposed to think. Absurd, indeed, but true, utterly true. Why, you may wonder, do they not destroy me, these foolish humans, why not burn me, disintegrate me—eh? Here’s the rub, they cannot do so.
I
cannot be eliminated, because no human organization can succeed without me. Particularly, no army can fight without me. An army without regulations is but a rabble. Now suppose some section of humankind sought to manage without me. It would have no army, save a mere rabble. It would be overwhelmed by the armies of those humankind who pay allegiance to us. It would be wiped from the face of the earth.”
Hermes shifted uneasily. A dread of this gilt-faced creature was beginning to grow within him. There was a curious conviction in the flat, unemotional voice, so sharply in contrast to the other contenders. Aphrodite was feeling it, too. Her face was a chalky-white, for no doubt the thought of a night’s frolic with this appalling thing was beginning to prey on her mind. The creature went relentlessly on. “Let me pass next to an exposure of the weaknesses in the arguments put forward by others who spoke before me. Throughout his former career, the gentleman of the many faces—whom you so rightly converted to a puff of sulfurous smoke—failed in everything he attempted. He failed precisely because he could never bring himself to accept the need for rules and regulations. Had the gentleman ever been able to organize himself, to draw up a rigid and extensive code of sinning, there is no telling to what heights he might have climbed. By nature, if I may be permitted the term, the gentleman was anti-everything, anti-rule, anti-law, which, by the way, is why he smelled so very badly in his final moments.
“The gentleman of the large beard and overpowering voice presents us with a more complex problem. You must understand, my dear young lady, that this gentleman in his time enjoyed a considerable vogue in the world. Many indeed will be distressed to discover him converted so adroitly to a whiff of incense. His passing will leave regrets.”
The gilt rule-book paused for a moment, a dramatic pause, “Now what, we must ask ourselves, lay at the bottom of this vogue? The fact, no more no less, than that the gentleman in question employed my services from the beginning of his career. My services seemed attractive to the gentleman exactly because of my policy of allowing everyone to write his, or her, own laws and commandments. Permit me to read a specimen of the laws written by the bearded gentleman.”