Pagan Passions Part 26

The man barked a laugh. "None of your business." He turned to Kathy, who had devoted the previous few seconds to getting her _chiton_ on again.

Hurriedly, Forrester wished back his own costume. Kathy got up, staring straight back at the intruder. Fear was gone from her face, and a kind of calmness that Forrester had never seen before possessed her now.

"So!" the intruder bellowed. "The minute my back is turned, off you go!

By the Stars and Galaxy, I--I don't know what to call you! You're worse than your predecessor! Can't turn anything down! You--"

"Now wait!" Forrester bellowed in his most G.o.dlike voice. "Just hold still there! Do you know who you're talking to? How dare you--"

And Kathy interrupted him. Forrester stood mute as she stripped the stranger with a voice like scalding acid. "Listen, you," she said, pointing a finger at the man. "Who do you think you are--my husband?"

"By the Stars--" the stranger began.

"Don't bother trying to scare me with your big mouth," Kathy went on imperturbably. "You don't mean a thing to me and you can't order me around. What's more, you know it. You're not my husband, you big thug--and you're never going to be. I'll sleep with whomever I please, and whenever I please, and wherever I please, and that's the way things are going to be. After all, lard-head, it's my job, isn't it? Got any questions?"

Her _job_?

Forrester began to wonder just what he had managed to walk into now. But that was a detail. The important thing was that his G.o.dhood had been grossly, unbelievably insulted--and at a d.a.m.ned inconvenient time, too!

He stepped between Kathy and the intruder, his eyes flashing fire. "Do you know who I am? Do you know that--"

"Of course he knows," Kathy put in abruptly. "And if you don't want to get hurt, I'd advise you to stay out of this little quarrel."

Forrester turned and stared at her.

What the everlasting b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l was going _on_?

But there wasn't any time to think. The intruder put his face up near Forrester's and glared at him. "Sure I know who you are, buster," he said. "You're a wise guy. You're a Johnny-come-lately. And I know what I ought to do with you, too--take you apart, limb by limb!"

That did it. Forrester, seeing several shades of red, decided that no G.o.d could possibly object if this ugly blasphemer were blasted off the face of the Earth. He raised a hand.

And Kathy grabbed it. "_Don't!_" she said in a frightened tone.

The intruder grinned wolfishly at him. "Pay no attention to Little Miss Sacktime over there, Forrester. You go right ahead and try it! All I need is an excuse to vaporize you. Just one tiny little excuse--and I'll do the job so d.a.m.n quick, your head won't even have time to start swimming." He set himself. "Go on. Let's see your stuff, Forrester."

Forrester's arm came down, without his being aware of it. There was only room in his mind for one thought.

The intruder had called him Forrester.

Where had he gotten the name?

And, for that matter, how had he seen the two of them in the darkness?

While the questions were still spinning in Forrester's mind, Kathy threw herself forward between him and the stranger. "Ares!" she screamed. "You stupid, jealous idiot! Get some sense into that battle-scarred brain of yours! Are you completely crazy?"

"Now you listen to me--" the stranger began.

"Listen, nothing! If you want to pick a fight, do it with me--I can fight back! But if you lay a hand on Forrester, we'll never find another--"

The stranger reached out casually and clamped one huge paw over her mouth. "Shut up," he said, almost quietly. He glanced at Forrester and went on, in the same tone: "Don't give away everything you've got, chum."

A second pa.s.sed and then he took the hand away. Kathy said nothing at all for a moment, and then she nodded.

"All right," she said. "You're right. We shouldn't be losing our tempers just now. But I didn't start--"

"Didn't you?" the stranger said.

Kathy shrugged. "Well, never mind it now." She turned to Forrester. "You know who we are now, don't you?"

Forrester nodded very slowly. How else could the man have come through the cordon of Myrmidons and seen them in the darkness? How else would he have dared to face up to Dionysus--confident that he could beat him? And how else could all this argument have gone on without anyone hearing it?

For that matter, why else would the argument have begun--unless the stranger and Kathy were--

"Sure," he said, as if he had known it all along. "You're Mars and Venus."

He could feel cold death approaching.

CHAPTER TEN

William Forrester sat, quite alone, in the room which had been given him on Mount Olympus. He stared out of the window, a little smaller than the window in Venus' rooms, at the Grecian plain far below, without actually seeing. There was no vertigo this time; small matters like that couldn't bother him.

The whole room was rather a small one, as G.o.ds' rooms went, but it had the same varicolored shifting walls, the same furniture that appeared when you approached it. Forrester was beginning to get used to it now, and he didn't know if it was going to do him any good.

He peered down, trying to discern the patrolling Myrmidons around the base and lower slopes of the mountain, placed there to discourage overeager climbers from trying to reach the home of the G.o.ds. Of course he couldn't see them, and after a while he lost interest again. Matters were too serious to allow time for that kind of game.

The Autumn Baccha.n.a.l was over, a thing of the past, on the way to the distortion of legend. Forrester's greatest triumph had ended--in his greatest fiasco.

He closed his eyes as he sat in his room, the fluctuating colors on the walls going unappreciated. He had nothing to do now except wait for the final judgment of the G.o.ds.

At first he had been terrified. But terror could only last so long, and, as the time ticked by, the idea of that coming judgment had almost stopped troubling his mind. Either he had pa.s.sed the tests or he hadn't.

There was no point in worrying about the inevitable. He felt anesthetized, numb to any sensation of personal danger. There was nothing whatever he could do. The G.o.ds had him; very well, let the G.o.ds worry about what to do with him.

Freed, his mind turned over and over a problem that seemed new to him at first. Gradually, he realized it wasn't new at all; it had been somewhere in the back of his thoughts from the very first, when Venus had told him that he had been chosen as a double for Dionysus, so many months ago. It seemed like years to Forrester, and yet, at the same time, like no more than hours. So much had happened, and so much had changed....

But the question had remained, waiting until he could look at it and work with it. Now he could face that strange doubt in his mind, the doubt that had colored everything since his introduction to the G.o.ds, that had grown as his training in demi-G.o.dhood had progressed, and that was now, for the first time, coming to full consciousness. Every time it had come near the surface, before this day, he had expelled it from his mind, forcefully getting rid of it without realizing fully that he was doing so.

And perhaps, he thought, the doubt had begun even earlier than that.

Perhaps he had always doubted, and never allowed himself to think about the doubt. The floor of his mind seemed to open and he was falling, falling....

But where the doubt had begun was unimportant now. It was present, it had grown; that was all that mattered. He could find facts to feed the doubt and strengthen it, and he looked at the facts one by one:

First there was the angry conversation between Mars and Venus, on the night of the Baccha.n.a.l.

He could still hear what Mars had said:

"_... worse than your predecessor._"