answer.
“Dear,” Father Handy said, “to believe in the Old Church is to flee. To try to escape the present. We, our church; we try to live in this world and face what’s happening and how we stand. We’re honest. We, as living creatures, are in the hands of a merciless and angry deity and will be until death wipes us from the slate of his records. If perhaps one could believe in a god of death … but unfortunately—”
“Maybe there is one,” Lurine said abruptly.
“Pluto?” He laughed.
“Maybe God releases us from our torment,” she answered steadily. “And I may find him in Abernathy’s church. Anyhow—” She glanced up, flushed and small and determined and lovely. “I won’t worship a psychotic ex-official of the U.S. ERDA as a deity; that’s not being realistic; that’s—” She gestured. “It’s wrong,” she said, as if speaking to herself, trying to convince herself.
“But,” Father Handy said, “he lives.”
She stared at him, sadly, and very troubled.
“We,” he continued, “as you know, are painting him. And we are sending our inc, our artist, to seek him out; we have Richfield Station and AAA maps … call it pragmatism, if you want; Abernathy once said that to me. But what does he worship? Not anything. You show me. Show me.” He slammed his flat hand on the table, savagely.
“Well,” Lurine said, “maybe this is—”
“The prelude? To the real life to come? Do you genuinely believe that? Listen, dear; St. Paul believed that Christ would return in his own lifetime. That the ‘New Kingdom’ would begin in the first century A.D. Did it?”
“No,” she said.
“And everything that Paul wrote or thought is based on that fallacy. But we base our beliefs on no fallacy; we know that Carleton Lufteufel served as the manifestation on Earth of the Deity, and he showed his true character, and it was wrathful. You can see it in every handful of dirt and rubble. You’ve seen it for sixteen years. If there were any psychiatrists alive they’d tell you the truth, what you’re trying to do. It’s called—a fugue.” He became silent, then.
Ely added, “And she gets to sleep with Sands.”
No one said anything to that; it, too, consisted of a fact. And a fact was a thing, and words could not retort to a thing: it required another and greater thing. And Lurine Rae, and the Old Church, did not have that; it possessed only nice words like “agape” and “caritas” and “mercy” and “salvation.”
“When you have lived through the ter-weps,” Father Handy said to Lurine, “and the gob, you no longer can live by words alone. See?”
Lurine nodded, troubled and confused and unhappy.
THREE
During the war many toxic drugs had been developed, and afterward, these drugs—a vast variety of kinds—lay about amid the general chaos and could be found here and there like everything else. And Peter Sands took particular interest in these drugs, because some—a few, anyhow—of them, although developed originally as weapons against the enemy, to impede, disorient, and altogether befuddle his faculties, had a certain positive value.
At least so he believed. If one was careful, one could concoct a potion, several drugs taken in conjunction; one became disoriented, but a certain expansion or heightened lucidity also occurred. Green little methamphets, shiny red ’zines, white flat discs of code segmented sometimes into halves, sometimes when stronger into four parts, tiny yellow elves … he had gathered an inventory which he carefully kept hidden. No one but himself knew of this trove which he hoarded … and, while collecting and hoarding, he experimented.
He believed that the so-called hallucinations caused by some of these drugs (with emphasis, he continually reminded himself, on the word “some”) were not hallucinations at all, but perceptions of other zones of reality. Some of them were frightening; some appeared lovely.
Oddly, he poked and tinkered with the former; perhaps a long Puritan background had made him—he conjectured—masochistic; anyhow, it was into the realm of terror that he liked to venture very slightly … he did not wish either to go too far or to stay too long, but he wished for a fair glimpse.
It reminded him of his dad, who, one day before the war at an amusement park, had tried out a shock machine; you put in a dime, seized two handles, and gradually moved them apart. The farther apart, the greater the electric current; one learned just how much he could stand, how far apart he could bear to pry the two handles. Watching his sweating, red-faced