Forry smiled, too, but he was not sure that he was not
making a pact with the devil. It seemed that the Ogs
really were evil, but then the Tocs might not be so good,
either. It could be one band of devils fighting another.
38
Childe awoke with a feeling of emptiness and of shame.
He looked at Sybil, who was sleeping by his side, and
then he stared upward for a long time. Something had
happened to him last night, or he presumed it was last
night, since he did not know what time it was. His
wristwatch was gone.
As if a key had been turned in him, unlocking a mem-
ory or releasing a programmed tape, he had gone
through that ceremony without a false step or being told,
really, what to do next.
When he had evoked that pulsing light, he had felt an
ecstasy that was superior, in some undefinable way, to
that of sexual orgasm. It was difficult to untangle the sex-
ual from the photonic, but a part of the glory had been
from that goblet.
That final incident, the one with Vivienne's unattached
head, had seemed at the moment to be fully justified and
exquisitely delightful. But this morning it looked ugly
and perverted. He could not understand what had pos-
sessed him.
The hell of it was, he thought, that the next time he
was seated before that goblet, he was likely to do the same
thing or something equally uninhibited. He did not fool
himself about that.
The worst thing about this was that he was cooperat-
ing with people—beings, rather—who were evil.
But when he had been placed before that goblet, he
had been unable to refuse to act. In a sense, the goblet
had activated him more than he had activated it.
What was supposed to be the final result of this cere-
mony and of others that would undoubtedly follow it?
He decided that he would refuse to do anything more
unless everything was fully explained.
He thought of Sybil. Would she be tortured if he re-
fused to carry out the Ogs' desires? Knowing what he did
of them, he could not doubt that they would do whatever
they thought was required. And so Sybil would be ... He
shuddered.
Somebody knocked on the door. It was faint because
the door was of such thick metal, but he was aware of it.
His sense of hearing seemed to be sharper after last
night's experiences. He rose, noting that he was naked and
not caring, and went to the door. He rapped on it, and the
door swung outward. Vivienne was standing there with
Pao behind her.
"You people are so technologically advanced, you
could find some easier way to get my attention," he said.
"You indicated you wanted privacy in your room,"
Vivienne said. "So we polarized the one-way windows
and turned off the TV monitor and the intercom."
"That's nice of you," he said, thinking that they were
really trying to sell him on how extremely nice they were.
"Show me where this intercom is, and I'll contact you
when I want you. And be sure to keep the other devices
off."
"What the Captain wishes ..." Pao murmured.
"What I wish now, after a good breakfast, are answers
to my questions."
Pao said, "Of course," as if he was amazed that Childe
could have any reason to think otherwise.
"I'll see you in ten minutes," he said. "You'd better tell
me where the breakfast room is. And leave the door un-
locked."
Pao looked embarrassed. He said, "I'm sorry indeed,
my Captain, but you'll have to stay in here. It's for your
own safety. There are evil people who want to hurt you.
You cannot leave this room. Except for the Grailing, of
course."
"The Grailing?"
"Growing that goblet. The Grail."
"There is to be more of that?"
"There is."
"Very well then," Childe said. "I'm a prisoner."
Pao bowed slightly and said, "A ward, Captain. For
your own protection."
She did not want to get out of bed, but he told her he
wanted her to hear everything that would be said. He
started towards the bathroom but stopped when he saw
a hairy pointed head sticking out from under the bed. It
looked vaguely like a sleeping black dog about the size
of a Great Dane. He rapped it on its wet doggy nose,
and it opened its eyes wide.
"What the hell are you and what the hell are you doing
under my bed?" he said.
The eyes were a dark brown and looked familiar. But
the animal that crawled out from under the bed was un-
familiar. Its front part resembled a giant water spaniel,
and the back part was monkeylike. It stood up on its
semi-human feet and staggered over to a chair and sat
down. It leaned its shaggy floppy-eared head on its two
paws. The monkey part was hairy but not so hairy it en-
tirely concealed a pair of human testicles and a warty pe-
nis.
"I was hungry," Childe said aloud. "But seeing you,
whatever you are ..."
He felt repulsed but not scared. The thing did not look
dangerous, not, at least, at the moment. Its weariness and
its big wet gentle eyes added up to harmlessness.
One thing its presence did for him. It reaffirmed the
sense of alienness, of unhumanity, about these people.
Sybil did not seem frightened; he would have expected
her to be screaming with hysteria.
He said, "Was this your bed partner last night, Sybil?"
"Part of the time," she said.
"There was more than one?"
The only one missing from the ceremony, as far as he
knew, was Plugger.
"I don't think so," she said. "He seemed to have
changed into this about a half hour before we quit."
He did not have to ask her what they had quit doing.
"He said he was almost emptied," Sybil said. "He had
been to the three Toc prisoners before he came to me. I
suppose he buggered them, I mean, he applied his limp
prick to their anuses and shocked them with the only
pleasant shock that I know of. Then he came to me."
Childe did not feel that he was in a position to rebuke
her. What good would it do, anyway? She took sex
where she found it and enjoyed it. And all the time pro-
fessing that he was her only true love. The truth was, sex
was her only true love. Impersonal sex.
The unbelievable element in this was not so much the
metamorphosis of Plugger into this dog-monkey thing as it
was her calm acceptance of the metamorphosis. She
should have been in a deep state of psychic shock.
"Why did Plugger feel it necessary to stimulate the pris-
oners?" he said.
"He told me that everybody in the house had to be
hooked into the Grading and that only if the prisoners
and I had sex with an Og could this be done."
A voice spoke from a jade statuette on a table against
the wall near the bed: "Captain, is there anything you
want?"
"Yes!" he said, facing the statuette. "Get this thing out
of here! Plugger is making me sick!"
A moment later, the door swung out, and the blond
man who had been first in the line entered. Behind him
came two women holding trays. The man took one of
Plugger's paws and led him out while the women served
the food. The coffee was excellent, and the bacon and eggs
and toast and cantaloupe were delicious.
While he ate, he looked steadily at Sybil. She chattered
on as if unaware of his scrutiny. She had certainly ac-
quired a set of stainless steel nerves during her long im-
prisonment.
After breakfast, she went into the bathroom to fix her-
self up for the day, as she put it. Pao and Vivienne en-
tered. The first thing she did was to get onto her knees
before him, murmuring, "Your permission, Captain!" She
kissed the head of his penis.
He did not object. When in Rome, and so on. The cus-
tom certainly beat that of kissing the hand of royalty.
Pao touched his penis with one finger, also murmuring,
"Your permission, Captain."
That was where the power and the glory were stored,
Childe thought. No wonder that Igescu and Grasatchow
and Dolores del Osorojo and Magda Holyani had been
unable to resist using him sexually. The Ogs were sup-
posed to have left him alone to develop into something,
according to what he had garnered from the brief conver-
sation between Vivienne and the leader of the three who
had rescued him from her.
He wondered if the two werewolves had intended to
kill him, as he had thought when they attacked. Maybe
they had only meant to herd him back to his prison. And
when he had been jumped by that wereleopard while he
was killing Igescu in his oak-log coffin, she may have just
been trying to drive him away.
It was obvious now that he was supposed to develop
into a Captain. But there were a number of questions to
which he required answers. For one thing, what about
those abandoned cars in front of his house?
Vivienne said, "Several years ago, we had about half
of a grail in our possession. It was the result of several
thousands of years collecting the materials needed to
make the metal. Then the Tocs stole it. We pursued
them and cornered the one with the grail after killing his
two companions. He had run into a railroad yard to get
away from us, and when he saw he could not escape,
he threw the grail into a gondola full of junk. At that
time, we did not know that. Later, we got the informa-
tion from him."
"I can imagine," said Childe, closing his eyes and
shuddering.
"By then, the grail and the junk had gone into a steel
mill furnace. We had to do some very intense detective
work, very expensive, too, and we found that that par-
ticular load had ended up as metal in a certain num-
ber of cars of a certain make and model. So ..."
"But you did not know which cars exactly?" Childe
said. He was beginning to understand.
"Luckily, they were cars which were transported to
this area. We had narrowed the number to about three
hundred. And so we started to steal them and leave
them in front of your house. We were lucky, very lucky.
Three of the cars contained traces of the metal in the
grail. They activated when you went near them, but you
couldn't see that because the paint hid the glow, which
was extremely feeble, anyway.
"We junked the cars and had them melted in a yard
by a man whom we paid well. We strained out the grail
metal, as it were, and used the tiny bits as a detector for
those other cars that contained the metal. When one bit
of grail is brought close to the other, both glow. We no
longer had to leave cars in front of your house, because
we knew exactly what group of cars contained the metal.
We had to do some more bribing of authorities to get
the owners' names, and it was impossible to steal all the
cars.
"But we got enough to act as a seed for the growth of
more metal. It is a procedure that is terribly tiring for
the Captain. And it exhausts those who take part in the
ceremony. But it has to be done."
Childe did not completely understand. He asked that
Pao explain everything to him. This took an hour and a
half with several questions still to be asked.
Nor did he accept Pao's word that the Tocs were the
evil ones and the Ogs the good. The Tocs could be evil,
but if they were, they were certainly matched by the Ogs.
However, what the Ogs wanted of him was not some-
thing that he had to refuse for the good of Earth. Far
from it. If he took the Ogs to their home world, he would
be doing his world a vast service. He would never be
rewarded by humans for his heroism. In fact, if he
were to bring his deeds to then attention, he would be
put into an insane asylum.
There were several disturbing things about being a
Captain. One was that he could return to Earth and
there arrange to transport the Tocs to their home planet,
too. If the Ogs could scrap cars and make a grail, the
Tocs could do the same. There were plenty of cars left
for that purpose.
The Ogs must have thought of this possibility. What
did they intend doing about it? He hated to ask them,
because he was afraid of both the truth and the lies.
If they meant to kill him or hold him prisoner on their
world, they would not, of course, tell him so. And if he
asked them about it, they would know that he would
have to be killed or imprisoned. Either way, he would
lose.
"It will be glorious," Vivienne was saying. "When the
Grail is complete, then you, my Captain, can materi-
alize all the Ogs who are wandering the face of this
planet as energy complexes."
Childe was startled, and he had thought he was beyond
being surprised anymore.
"You mean that I am expected to give all your, uh,
dead, new bodies?" he said.
"You will enable them to give themselves their ma-
terial bodies," she said.
"It will be a resurrection day for us," Pao said. His
slanting vulpine eyes glowed. The light from the lamp
was reflected redly in them.
"And just where will this resurrection, or rematerial-
izing, or whatever you call it, take place?" Childe said.
"They will materialize in the barn behind this house,"
Vivienne said. "There is more than enough room, even
with all the goods stacked there."
"Approximately nine hundred of them," Pao said.
'They won't be brought into matter all at once. You can
control that, Captain. Ten or twenty or so at a time, and
these will be conducted out of the place into this house
or into rooms in the barn."
Theologistics
of resurrection day, he thought. And am
I really a sort of god?
"Will Lord Byron, my real father, be among them?"
he said.
Pao said, "Oh, no. You forget that …"
He did not want to continue. No wonder. Byron would
be among the Tocs, who would not be materialized. And
Pao must be trying to guess what Childe was contem-
plating. How could he avoid the conclusion that the
Tocs might be the good ones, if his own father was a
Toc?
"Byron was a very talented but a very evil man,"
Pao said slowly. "History does not reveal how evil,
though there are hints. The world never knew the story
behind the story, of course. If it had, it would have ex-
ecuted him. I am sorry to say that about your father, but
it has to be said. Fortunately for you, we saved you from
the Tocs."
The implication was that they had also saved him from
following the evil ways of his father.
"I have a lot of thinking to do," Childe said, "so I'd
like to be alone. What are your plans for me today, if
any?"
Pao spoke in an apologetic tone. "The Tocs will be
gathering for an attack on this house. Time is more
essential than ever because of this. We were hoping that
you would be quite rested by evening and ready for
another Grailing."
"See me after dinner," he said.
Pao bowed and Vivienne started to suck his cock
again, but he stopped her.
"I'll save my power."
Pao looked pleased at this, but the woman frowned
and bit her lip. She turned to go, but Childe said, "One
moment, Vivienne. Last night. You know what hap-
pened? I mean, are you conscious when you, uh, come
apart?"
She said, "I must be dimly conscious. When I came to,
all put together, I remembered vaguely what went on.
It was like a poorly remembered dream."
"Can you have an orgasm when you're disconnected?"
"Not that I remember. If you were getting revenge,
you got a pale shade of it, just as I probably got a pale
shade of orgasm."
Childe said, "I can understand even the weirdness of
the others, since they are known in folklore and super-
stition. But I have never heard of your type. Was your
kind ever known among humans?"
Vivienne said, "If you're referring to my structure, to
the thing in me, to my discreteness, as I call it, no. I am