"The angel, the angel!"

I shook myself, as if I'd come from wild waters that nearly drowned me. My heart was still drained.

The world felt remote, fragile. But my brain functioned, in a mechanical fashion. It made my lips move.

"I could have seen a different aspect of the being. What happened to you?"

"The crowned head, the shining wings," he crooned. "Your child is safe. She will be given back to you when your penitence is complete. And because of having been among the blessed in her mortal life, she will become a saint of the true Church."

Well, trickled through my head this doubtless isn't the first time the Adversary's made an instrument of people who honestly believe they're serving God. What about Jonathan Edwards, back in old New England? "The floors of hell are paved with the skulls of unbaptized children." Who really was the Jehovah he called upon?

"What did you experience?" Marmiadon asked.

I might or might not have told him my revelation. Probably not; what good would that have done?

A sound distracted us both—nearing footsteps, words.

"What if he hasn't been here?"

"We'll wait for some hours."

"In this thin garb?"

"The cause of the Lord, brother."

I stiffened. Two men coming: monks, from the noise of their sandals; big, from its volume on the stone. The adept I met upstairs must have grown suspicious; or Marmiadon's invocation and its effect had registered elsewhere; or both. If I got caught—I'd been warned. And my existence was beyond price, until I could get home the information that might help rescue Val.

I turned the flash on myself. Marmiadon whimpered as I changed shape. It's well I was in a hurry.

Wolf, with wolf passions, I'd have torn his throat apart for what he'd done if there'd been time. Instead, I went out in a single gray streak.

The pair of monks didn't see me through the gloom until I was almost on them. They were beefy for sure. One carried a stick, the other a forty-five automatic. I darted between the legs of the latter, bowling him over. His buddy got a crack across my ribs with his cudgel. Pain slowed me for a moment. A bone may have been broken. It knitted with the speed of the were condition and I dashed on. The pistol barked. Slugs whanged nastily past. If they included argent rounds, a hit would stop me. I had to move!

Up the stairs I fled. The friars dropped from sight. But an alarm started ahead of me, bells crashing through the hymns. Did my pursuers have a walkie-talkie ball with them? Produced at Nornwell? I burst into the first-floor hallway. There must be other exits than the main door, but I didn't know them. A wolf can travel like bad news. I was through the curtain which screened off the choir vestry before any nightshifter had glanced out of an office or any sleepy monk arrived from another section.

The church was in a boil. I cracked the door to the aisle sufficiently for a look. The chant went on.

But folk ran about in the nave, shouting. More to the point, a couple of them were closing doors to the vestibule. I couldn't get out.

Feet slapped floor in the corridor. The Johnnies weren't certain which way I'd skited, and were confused anyhow by this sudden unexplained emergency. Nevertheless, I'd scant time until someone thought to check here.

A possible tactic occurred to me. I didn't consider the wherefores of it, which a wolf isn't equipped to do. Trusting instinct, I slapped the switch on my flash with a forepaw. The blue entry-room lights didn't interfere with my reverting to human. Darting back to the vestry, I grabbed a surplice and threw it over my head. It fell nearly to my feet. They stayed bare, but maybe no one would notice.

Ascending to the choir loft in record time, I stopped in the archway entrance and studied the situation. Men and women stood grouped according to vocal range. They held hymnals. Spare books lay on a table. The view from here, down to the altar and up to the cupola, was breathtaking. But I'd no breath to spend.

I picked my spot, helped myself to a book, and moved solemnly forward.

I wouldn't have gotten away with it under normal conditions. Conditions not being normal, the choir was agitated too, its attention continually pulled down to the excitement on the floor. The song kept wandering off key. I found a place on the edge of the baritones and opened my hymnal to the same page as my neighbor.

"Mephnounos Chemiath Aroura Maridon Elison," he chanted. I'd better make noises likewise. The trouble was, I'd not had the rehearsals they gave to laymen who wanted to participate. I couldn't even pronounce most of those words, let alone carry the tune.

My neighbor glanced at me. He was a portly, officious-looking priest. I oughtn't to stand around with my teeth in my mouth, he must be thinking. I gave him a weak smile. "Thatis Etelelccm Teheo abocia Rusar," he intoned in a marked manner.

I grabbed at the first melody I recalled which had some general resemblance to the one he was using Mushing it up as much as I dared, I studied my book and commenced:

"A sailor told me before he died—

I don't know whether the bastard lied—"

In the general counterpoint, not to mention the uproar below, it passed. The cleric took his eyes obi me. He continued with the canticle and I with "The Big Red Wheel.

I trust I may be forgiven for some of the other expedients I found necessary in the hour that followed. An hour, I guessed, was an unsuspicious time for a lay singer to stay. Meanwhile, by eye and ear, I'd followed roughly the progress of the hunt for me. The size and complexity of the cathedral worked in my favor for once; I could be anywhere. Unquestionably spells were being used in the search.

But the wizard had little to go on except what Marmiadon could tell. And I had everything protective that Ginny, who's one of the best witches in the Guild, was able to give me before I left. Tracing me, identifying me, would be no simple matter, even for those beings that the most potent of the adepts might raise.

Not that I could hold out long. If I didn't scramble; soon I was dead, or worse. A part of me actually rejoiced at that. You see, the danger, the calling up of every resource I had to meet it, wiped away the despair at the core of hell which I had met in the crypts. I was alive, and it mattered, and I'd do my best to kill whatever stood between me and my loves!

After a while the main entrance was reopened, though watched by monks. I'd figured out a plan to get around them. After leaving the choir and disrobing, I turned wolf. The north corridor was again deserted, which was lucky for any Johnnies I might have encountered. Having doubtless posted a guard at every door, they were cooling their chase. It went on, but quietly, systematically, no longer disruptive of religious atmosphere. Lupine senses helped me avoid patrols while I looked for a window.

On the lower levels, these were in rooms that were occupied or whose doors were locked. I had to go to the sixth floor-where the scent of wrongness was almost more than I could bear—before finding a window in the corridor wall. It took resolution, or desperation, to jump through. The pain as the glass broke and slashed me was as nothing to the pain when I hit the concrete beneath.

But I was Lyco. My injuries were not fatal or permanently crippling. The red rag of me stirred, grew together, and became whole. Sufficient of my blood was smeared around, unrecoverable, that I felt a bit weak and dizzy; but a meal would fix that.

The stars still glittered overhead. Vision was uncertain. And I doubted the outer gatekeepers had been told much, if anything. The hierarchy would be anxious to hush up this trouble as far as might be. I stripped off what remained of my clothes with my teeth, leaving the wereflash fairly well covered by my ruff, and trotted off to the same place where I'd entered. "Why, hullo, pooch," said my young friend.

"Where'd you come from?" I submitted to having my ears rumpled before I left.

In Siloam's darkened downtown I committed a fresh crime, shoving through another window, this time in the rear of a grocery store. I could compensate the proprietor anonymously, later. Besides the several pounds of hamburger I found and ate, I needed transportation; and after humanizing I was more than penniless, I was naked. I phoned Barney. "Come and get me," I said. "I'll be wolf at one of these spots." I gave him half a dozen possibilities, in case the pursuit of me spilled beyond cathedral boundaries.

"What happened to my broom?" he demanded.

"I had to leave it parked," I said. "You can claim it tomorrow."

"I'm eager to hear the story."

"Well, it was quite a night, I can tell you.'

XXVII

MY DETAILED RELATION I gave to Ginny after sneaking back into our house. I was numb with exhaustion, but she insisted on hearing everything at once, whispered as we lay side by side. Her questions drew each last detail from me, including a lot that had slipped my mind or that I hadn't especially noticed at the time. The sun was up before she fixed my breakfast and allowed me to rest.

With a few pauses for nourishment and drowsy staring, I slept a full twenty-four hours.

Ginny explained this to our FBI man as the result of nervous prostration, which wasn't too mendacious. She also persuaded him and his immediate boss (Shining Knife had gone to Washington) that if they wanted to keep matters under wraps, they'd better not hold us incommunicado. Our neighbors already knew something was afoot. They could be stalled for but a short while, our close friends and business associates for a shorter while yet. If the latter got worried, they could bring more to bear in the way of sortileges than the average person.

The upshot was that we kept our guest. When Mrs. Delacorte dropped around to borrow a gill of brimstone, we introduced him as my cousin Louis and mentioned that we'd sent Val on an out-of-town visit while our burglary was being investigated. It didn't rate more than a paragraph on an inside page of the daily paper. However, I was allowed to work again, Ginny to go shopping. We were told what number to call if we received any demands. Nothing was said about the men who shadowed us. They were good; without our special skills, we'd never have known about them.

On the third morning, therefore, I showed at Nornwell. Barney Sturlason was primed. He found a do-not-disturb job for me to do in my office—rather, to fake doing while I paced, chain-smoked my tongue to leather, drank coffee till it gurgled in my ears—until time for an after-lunch conference with some outside businessmen. I knew what that conference was really to be about. When the intercom asked me to go there, I damn near snapped my head off accelerating before I remembered to walk the distance and say hello to those I passed.

The meeting room was upstairs. Its hex against industrial espionage operated equally well against official surveillance. Barney bulked at the end of the table, collar open, cigar fuming. The assembled team comprised eleven, to help assure we'd harbor no Judas. I knew three well besides Barney and myself—Griswold, Hardy, Janice Wenzel—and another slightly, Dr. Nobu, a metaphysicist whom we had sometimes consulted. The rest were strangers to me. One turned out to be a retired admiral, Hugh Charles, who'd specialized in Intelligence operations; another was a mathematician named Falkenberg; a third was Pastor Karlslund from Barney's church. All of these looked weary. They'd worked like galley slaves, practically up to this minute. The last pair seemed fresh, and total undistinguished except that one had a large sample case which he'd put on the table.

Before he got to their names, Barney made a pass and spoke a phrase. "Okay," he said, "the security field is back at full strength. Come on out and join the coven." He grinned at me. "Steve, I'd like you to meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown, representing the company whose proposal we're to discuss today."

Their outlines blurred, went smoky, and firmed again as the Seeming passed. Ginny's hair gleamed copper in the sunlight from the windows. Dr. Ashman opened his case. Svartalf poured out, restored to health, big, black, and arrogant as ever. He stretched cramped muscles. "Mee-owr-r-r," he scolded us.

The pastor offered the cat a soothing hand. I didn't have time to warn him. Luckily, Ashman was in the habit of carrying Band-Aids. Svartalf sat down by Ginny and washed himself.

"How'd you manage it?" the admiral asked with professional interest.

Ginny shrugged. "Simple. Barney'd been in contact with Dr. Ashman, you know, and arranged a time when he'd 've cancelled his appointments. He went to the animal hospital and fetched Svartalf, who can lie quiet in a box if he must. We'd already verified there was no tail on the doctor." Svartalf switched his in a smug fashion. "Meanwhile I'd gone downtown. They're having a sale at Penman's. Easiest crowd in the world to disappear into, and who'll notice a bit of sorcery there? Having changed my looks, I rendezvoused with Dr. Ashman and altered him." Svartalf threw the man a speculative look. "We proceeded here. Barney knew exactly when we'd arrive, and had the field low enough that it didn't whiff our disguises."

She opened her purse, which hadn't needed much work to resemble a briefcase, got out her vanity, and inspected her appearance. In demure make-up and demure little dress, she hardly suggested a top-flight , witch, till you noticed what else she was packing along. .

"To business," Barney said. "We informed this team at once of what you'd discovered, Steve. From the strictly scientific angle, your hints, added to what'd already been assembled, were a jolt. Working together, certain of our people have developed some insights that should prove revolutionary." He paused. But, let's begin with the political mess we're in."

"Or the religious," Janice Wenzel said.

"In this case," Pastor Karlslund said, "I doubt if there's any clear distinction." He was a large, blond, scholarly-looking man.

"If the Johannine Church is indeed of diabolic origin—" Griswold grimaced. "I hate to believe that.

I don't agree with its tenets, but to say they come not from error but from evil does go rather far. Are you sure, Mr. Matuchek, that you really encountered the Adversary?"

"One of his higher-ups, anyway," I said. "Or lower-downs, if you prefer. Not for the first time, either. Those earlier visions and experiences of mine fall into a pattern now."

"I mean, well, you were under considerable stress. A hallucination would be very reasonable . . .

expectable, I mean."

"If the Johnnies are legit," my wife clipped, "why are they keeping quiet? They have Steve's identity. They've had ample time to get in touch with him, or to file an official complaint. But never a peep. Barney's man, sent to fetch his broomstick, took it from where it was parked with no questions asked. I say, they can't risk an investigation."

"They might be trying to get your daughter returned to you through their paranatural contacts,"

Hardy suggested without conviction.

Admiral Charles snorted. "Big chance! I don't doubt the Adversary would like to cancel the whole episode. But how? He can return her with zero time-lapse in hell, you say, Mr. Matuchek—quite astounding, that. Nevertheless, I don't imagine he can change the past: the days we've lived without her, the things we've learned as a consequence."

"Our silence could be her ransom," Hardy said.

"What man would feel bound by that kind of bargain?" the admiral replied.

Karlslund added: "No contracts can be made with the Low Ones anyhow. Contract implies a meeting of minds, an intent to abide by the terms reached. Being incapable of probity, a devil is unable to believe humans won't try to cheat him in turn."

"So," Charles said, "he'd gain nothing by releasing her, and lose whatever hostage value she has."

Ashman said painfully: "He's already succeeded in dividing the forces of good. I get the impression this meeting is in defiance of the government, an actual conspiracy. Is that wise?"

"I suppose you mean we should make a clean breast to Uncle Sam and trust him to set everything right." The hurt in me powered my sneer.

"What resources have we in comparison?" Ashman asked. "What right have we to withhold the information you've gathered? It's vital to the common weal."

"Let me handle that question," Barney said. "I've got connections in Washington, and Admiral Charles, who has more, confirms my guess as to what's going on there. The key datum is this: that the facts of the kidnapping are being officially suppressed. Our local FBI head is a sharp boy. He saw at once that that's what policy would, and acted in anticipation of a directive he knew he'd get.

"The reasons for such a policy are complicated, but boil down to two items. First, hardly anything is known about the hell universe. This is one of the few cases, maybe unique, that looks like a direct, physical assault from demon territory. Nobody can be sure what it portends. In those circumstances, caution is inevitable. They'll argue in the State Department that the truth could be altogether different from the semblance. They'll argue in Defense that we'd better not commit ourselves to anything before we have more data and especially a bigger military appropriation. The President, the Cabinet, the top men in Congress, will agree on sitting tight. That involves sitting on the news, to forestall an inconvenient public furore.

"Second, maybe less critical at the moment but definitely to be considered, the Johannine Church.

A, This is a democratic country. A lot of perfectly sincere., voters are either Johnnies or believe Johanninism is just another creed. A fair number of important people fall into the same classes.

Remember what a stink went up when the House committee tried to probe around a little. The present affair does suggest the faction is right which says the Johannine Church was instigated by the Lowest as a means of discrediting religion, undermining society, and turning man against man. The last thing the Administration will want—at tlis ticklish juncture—is to go through that 'subversion' versus

'suppression' shouting match again. Secrecy buys peace, quiet, and time."

Barney halted to rekindle his cigar. The room had become very still as we listened. Smoke filled the sunbeams with blue strata and our nostrils with staleness. Ginny and I exchanged a forlorn look across the table. Yesterday I'd gone into the basement to replace a blown fuse. She'd come along, because these days we stayed together when we could. Some things of Valeria's stood on a shelf, lately outgrown and not yet discarded. The everfilled bottle, the Ouroboros teething ring, the winged training spoon, the little pot with a rainbow at the end—We went upstairs and asked our guard to change the fuse.

Her fists clenched before her. Svartalf rubbed his head on her arm, slowly, demanding no attention in return.

"The conclusion," Barney said, "is that, resources or no, the government isn't likely to use them for quite a while, if ever. As of today, we, this bunch of us, have the right and duty to take what action we can.

"You see, Doctor, we've done nothing technically illegal. Steve was not under arrest. He was free to go in and out of his home, in a Tarnkappe via the window if he chose, accountable to nobody. I was free to lend him my broom. The cathedral is open to the public. If Steve went into other parts of the building, looking for someone who might have information helpful in his hour of need, at most he committed a civil tort. Let the hierarchy sue him for damages if it wants. He can charge felonious assault, remember.

One does not have the privilege of using lethal weapons in defense of mere privacy, and he was clubbed and shot at.

"Accordingly, no crime having been committed, none of us are accessories after the fact. No crime being contemplated, none of us are engaging in conspiracy. I grant you, soon the National Defense Act, and anything else the President finds handy, will be invoked. Then we would be in trouble if we behaved as we're doing. But no legally binding prohibition has been laid on us to date; and the Constitution forbids ex post facto proceedings."

"Hm." Ashman reflected.

"As for the withholding of essential information," Barney continued, "don't worry, we aren't about to do that either. We are sifting what we've been told, as responsible citizens who don't want to make accusations that may be unfounded. But we will see that whatever is sound gets into the right hands."

"Must we act so fast?" Ashman demurred. "If the child can be recovered from the same instant as she arrived . . . yonder . . . isn't it best for her too that we let the government operate on her behalf at a slow, careful pace, rather than going off ourselves ill-prepared and under-equipped?"

Admiral Charles' lean features darkened. "Frankly," he said, "if no further incidents occur, I don't expect this Administration will act. It's let unfriendly countries rob, imprison, or kill American nationals-some in uniform without doing more than protest. What do you imagine they'll say in Foggy Bottom at the thought of taking on hell itself for one small girl? I'm sorry, Mrs. Matuchek, but that's the way matters are."

"Be that as it may," said Falkenberg in haste, for the look on Ginny's face had become terrifying, "as I understand the situation, the, ah, enemy are off balance at present. Mr. Matuchek took them by surprise Evidently the, ah, Adversary is debarred from giving them direct help, counsel, or information. Or else he considers it inadvisable, as it might provoke intervention by the Highest. The, ah, Johannine Mages can do extraordinary things, no doubt. But they are not omniscient or omnipotent. They can't be sure what we have learned and what we will attempt. Give them time, however, in this universe, and they will, ah, recover their equilibrium, mend their fences, possibly make some countermove."

Ginny said out of her Medusa mask: "Whatever the rest of you decide, Steve and I won't sit waiting."

"Blazes, no!" exploded from me. Svartalf laid back his ears, fangs gleamed amidst his whiskers and the fur stood up on him.

z

"You see?" Barney said to the group. "I know these people. You can't stop them short of throwing them in jail for life; and I'm not convinced any jail would hold them. They might have to be killed. Do we let that happen, or do we help them while we still can?"

Voices rumbled around the table, hands went aloft, Janice Wenzel cried loudest: "I've got kids of my own Virginia!" Eyes turned from us to Ashman. He flushed and said:

"I'm not going henhouse on you. Remember, all this has just been sprung on me without warning.

I'm bound to raise the arguments that occur to me. I don't believe that encouraging Valeria's parents to commit suicide will do her any good."

"What do you mean?' Barney asked.

"Do I misunderstand? Isn't your intention to send Steven and Virginia—my patients—into the hell universe?"

That brought me up cold. I'd been ready and raging for action; but this was as if a leap had fetched me to the rim of Ginnungagap. The heart slammed in me. I stared at Ginny. She nodded.

The whole group registered various degrees of consternation. I scarcely noticed the babble that lifted or Barney's quelling of it. Finally we all sat in a tautstrung silence.

"I must apologize to this committee," Barney said. His tone was deep and measured as a vesper bell's. "The problem that I set most of you was to collect and collate available information on the Low Continuum with a view to rescue operations. You did magnificently. When you were informed of Steve's findings, you used them to make a conceptual breakthrough that may give us the method we want. But you were too busy to think beyond the assignment, or to imagine that it was more than a long-range, rather hypothetical study: something that might eventually give us capabilities against further troubles of this nature. Likewise, those of you I discussed the political or religious aspects with didn't know how close we might be facing them in reality.

"I saw no alternative to handling it that way. But Mrs. Matuchek reached me meanwhile, surreptitiously." I gave her the whole picture, we discussed it at length and evolved a plan of campaign."

He bowed slightly toward Ashman. "Congratulations on your astuteness; Doctor."

She knew, I thought in the shards of thinking, and yet no one could have told it on her, not even me—not till this instant, and then solely because she chose.

A part of me wondered if other husbands experience corresponding surprises.

She raised her hand. "The case is this," she said with the same military crispness as when first I'd met her. "A small, skilled group has a chance of success. large, unskilled group has none. It'd doubtless sufl more than the Army or the Faustus teams did, sing they retreated quickly."

"Death, insanity, or imprisonment in hell with everything that that implies-" Ashman whispered.

"You assume Steven will go."

"I know better than to try stopping him," she said.

That gave me a measure of self-control again. I not unconscious of admiring glances. But mainly listened to her:

"He and I and Svartalf are as good a squad as you' find. If anybody has a hope of pulling the stunt off, we do. The rest of you can help with preparations a with recovering us. If we don't make it back, you'll have the repositories of what has already been learned. Because this is a public matter. It goes far beyond our girl . . . agreed. That's your main reason for assisiting us. To try and make sure your children and grandchildren will inherit a world worth having;"

She reached in her purse. "Damn," she said, "I'm out of cigarets."

She clung a lot of offers, but accepted mine. Our hands clung for a second. Ashman sat staring at his intertwined fingers. Abruptly he straightened and said, with a kind of smile:

"All right, I apologize. You must admit my reaction was natural. But you're an able group. If you think you've found a way to enter hell and return unharmed, you could be right and you have my support. May I ask what your scheme is?"

Barney relaxed a trifle. "You may," he said. "Especially since we've got to explain it to some of the others."

He stubbed out his cigar and began on a fresh one. "Let me put the proposition in nickel words first," he said, "then the experts can correct and amplify according to their specialties. Our universe has a straightforward space-time geometry, except in odd places like the cores of white dwarf stars. Demons can move around in it without trouble—in fact, they can play tricks with distance and chronology that gave them the reputation of being supernatural in olden days—because their home universe is wildly complicated and variable. Modern researchers have discovered how to get there, but not how to travel around or remain whole of body and mind.

"Well, Steve's information that we could reach any point in hell time, if we knew the method opened a door or broke a logjam or something. Suddenly there was a definite basic fact to go on, a relationship between the Low Continuum and ours that could be mathematically described. Dr.

Falkenberg set up the equations and started solving them for different conditions. Dr. Griswold helped by suggesting ways in which the results would affect the laws of physics; Bill Hardy did likewise for chemistry and atomistics; et cetera. Oh, they've barely begun, and their conclusions haven't been subjected to experimental test. But at least they've enabled Dr. Nobu, as a metaphysicist, and me, as a practical engineer, to design some spells. We completed them this morning. They should protect the expedition, give it some guardianship when it arrives, and haul it back fast. That's more than anybody previous had going for them."

"Insufficient." Charles was the new objector. "You can't have a full description of the hell universe—why we don't have that even for this cosmos—and you absolutely can't predict what crazy ways the metric 'there varies from point to point."

"True," Barney said.

"So protection which is adequate at one place will be useless elsewhere."

"Not if the space-time configuration can be described mathematically as one travels. Then the spells can be adjusted accordingly."

"What? But that's an impossible job. No mortal man—"

"Right," Ginny said.

We gaped at her.

"A passing thing Steve heard, down in the crypts, was the clue," Ginny said. "Same as your remark, actually, Admiral. No mortal man could do it. But the greatest geometers are dead."

A gasp went around the table.

XXIX

WITH APPROPRIATE SEEMINGS laid on, and Svartalf indignantly back in the sample case, our community left the plant on a company carpet. It was now close to four. If my FBI shadow didn't see me start home around five or six o'clock, he'd get suspicious. But there wasn't a lot I could do about that.

We landed first at St. Olaf's while Pastor Karlslund went in to fetch some articles. Janice Wenzel, seated behind us, leaned forward and murmured: "I guess I'm ignorant, but isn't this appealing to the saints a Catholic rather than a Lutheran thing?"

The question hadn't been raised at the conference. Karlslund was satisfied with making clear the distinction between a prayer—a petition to the Highest, with any spells we cast intended merely to ease a way for whoever might freely respond-and necromancy, an attempt to force our will on departed spirits. (While the latter is illegal, that's mainly a concession to public taste. There's no reliable record of its ever having succeeded; it's just another superstition.)

"I doubt if the sect makes any odds," Ginny said. "What is the soul? Nobody knows. The observations that prove it exists are valid, but scattered and not repeatable under controlled conditions.

As tends to be the case for many paranatural phenomena."

"Which, however," Dr. Nobu put in, "is the reason in turn why practical progress in goetics is so rapid :5 once a correct insight is available. Unlike the force-fields of physics—gravitation, electromagnetism, and , so on—the force-fields of paraphysics—such as similarity and ergody—are not limited by the speed of light. Hence they can, in principle, shift energy from any part of the plenum to any other. That is why a vanishingly small input can give an indefinitely large output. Because of this, qualitative understanding is more important to control than quantitative. And so, a mere three days after learning about the time variability of hell, we feel some confidence that our new spells will work . . . But as for the soul, I incline towards the belief that its character is supernatural rather than paranatural."

"Not me," Ginny said. "I'd call it an energy structure within those parafields. It's formed by the body but outlives that matrix. Once free, it can easily move between universes. If it hangs around here for some reason, disembodied, isn't that a ghost? If it enters a newly fertilized ovum, isn't that reincarnation?

If the Highest allows it to come nearer His presence, isn't that salvation? If the Lowest has more attraction for it, isn't that damnation?"

"Dear me," Janice said. Ginny uttered a brittle laugh.

Barney turned around in the pilot's seat. "About your question that started this seminar, Janice," he said, "it's true we Lutherans don't make a habit o€ calling on the saints. But neither do we deny they sometimes intervene. Maybe a Catholic priest or a Neo-Chassidic rabbi would know better how to pray for help. But I couldn't get any on short notice that I dared co-opt, while I've known Jim Karlslund for years . . . Speak of the, er, pastor—" Everybody chuckled in a strained way as our man boarded with an armful of ecclesiastical gear.

We took off again and proceeded to Trismegistus University. Sunlight slanted gold across remembered lawns, groves, buildings. Few persons were about in this pause between spring and summer sessions; a hush lay over the campus, distantly backgrounded by the city's whirr. It seemed epochs ago that Ginny and I had been students here, a different cycle of creation. I glanced at her, but her countenance was unreadable.

Wings rustled near, a raven that paced us. An omen? Of what? It banked as we landed and flapped out of sight.

We entered the Physical Sciences building. Corridors and stairwells reached gloomy, full of echoes.

Desertion was one reason we'd chosen it, another being Griswold's keys to each lab and stockroom.

Karlslund would have preferred the chapel, but we were too likely to be noticed there. Besides, Ginny and Barney had decided in their plan-laying that the religious part of our undertaking was secondary.

We needed someone whose appeal would be unselfish and devout, or no saint was apt to respond.

However, they seldom do anyway, compared to the number of prayers that must arise daily. The Highest expects us to solve our own problems. What we relied on-,what gave us a degree of confidence we would get some kind of reaction-vas the progress we'd made, the direct access we believed we had to the Adversary's realm and our stiff resolve to use it. The implications were too enormous for Heaven to ignore . . . we hoped.

I thought, in the floating lightheadedness to which stress had brought me: Perhaps we'll be forbidden to try.

We picked the Berkeley Philosophical Laboratory for our calling. It was a new, large, splendidly outfitted wing tacked onto the shabby old structure that housed Griswold's department before the salamander episode. Here senior and graduate physical-science students learned how to apply IM forces to natural research. So it had every kind of apparatus we could imagine needing. The main chamber was wide and high, uncluttered by more than a few shelves and workbenches along the walls. Light fell cool through

Cray-green glass in the Gothic windows. Zodiacal symbols on the deep-blue ceiling encircled a golden Bohr atom. You'd never find a place further in spirit from that cathedral at Siloam. My kind of people had raised this. I felt some measure of its sanity enter me to strengthen.

Griswold locked the door. Ginny took off the Seemings and let Svartalf out. He padded into a corner, tail going like a metronome. Karlslund laid an altar cloth on a bench, arranged on it cross, bell, chalice, sacred bread, and wine. The rest of us worked under Barney. We established a shieldfield and an antispy hex around the area in the usual way. Next we prepared to open the gates between universes.

So the popular phrase has it, altogether inaccurately. In truth there are no gates, there are means of transmitting influences from one continuum to another, and fundamentally it does not depend on apparatus but on knowing how. The physical things we set out Bible and Poimanderes opened to the appropriate passages, menorah with seven tall candles lit by flint and steel, vial of pure air, chest of consecrated earth, horn of Jordan water, Pythagorean harp-were symbolic more than they were sympathetic.

I want to emphasize that, because it isn't as well known as it should be: one reason why Gnosticism caught on. The Petrine tenet goes along with the higher non-Christian faiths and the findings of modern science. You can't compel Heaven. It's too great. You can exert an influence, yes, but it won't have effect unless the Highest allows, any more than a baby's tug on your trouser cuff can turn you from your path by itself.

Our prayer was an earnest of our appeal, which God had already read in our hearts. In a way, its purpose was to convince us that we really meant what we said we wanted. Likewise, our spells would help any spirit that chose to come here. But he or she didn't really need assistance. What would matter was that we were doing our best.

Hell is another case entirely. In physical terms, it's on a lower energy level than our universe. In spiritual terms, the Adversary and his minions aren't interested in assisting us to anything except our destruction. We could definitely force our way in and lay compulsions on the demons by sheer weight of wizardry—if we swung enough power!—and we would definitely have to if Val was to be rescued.

The formulas for trying to summon Heavenly aid aren't common knowledge, but they aren't hidden either. You can find them in the right reference works. Our hell spells were something else. I will never describe them. Since you may well guess they involve an inversion of the prayer ritual, I'll state that we employed these articles: a certain one of the Apocrypha, a Liber Veneficarum, a torch, a globe of wind from a hurricane, some mummy dust, thirteen drops of blood, and a sword. I don't swear to the truthfulness of my list.

We didn't expect we'd require that stuff right away, but it was another demonstration of intent.

Besides, Ginny needed a chance to study it and use her trained intuition to optimize the layout.

Karlslund's bell called us. He was ready. We assembled before the improvised altar. "I must first conesecrate this and hold as full a service as possible," he announced. I looked at my watch—damn near five—but dared not object. His feeling of respect for the process was vital.

He handed out prayer books and we commenced. The effect on me was curious. As said, I don't believe any set of dogmas is preferable to any other or an upright agnosticism. On the rare occasions I've been in church, I've found that the high Episcopalians put on the best show, and that's it. Now, at first, I wanted to whisper to Ginny, "Hey, this is a secret service." But soon the wish for a joke slipped from me together with the racked emotions that generated it. Out of that simple rite grew peace and a wordless wonder. That's what religion is about, I suppose, a turning toward God. Not that I became a convert; but on this one occasion it felt as if some aspect of Him might be turning toward us.

"Let us pray."

"Our Father, Who art in Heaven-"

There was a knock on the door.

I didn't notice at first. But it came again, and again, and a voice trickled through the heavy panels:

"Dr. Griswold! Are you in there? Phone call for you. A Mr. Knife from the FBI. Says it's urgent."

That rocked me. My mood went smash. Ginny's nostrils dilated and she clutched her book as if it were a weapon. Karlslund's tones faltered.

Griswold pattered to the door and said to the janitor or whoever our Porlockian was: "Tell him I've a delicate experiment under way. It can't be interrupted. Get his number, and I'll call back in an hour or so."

Good for you! half of me wanted to shout. The rest was tangled in cold coils of wondering about God's mercy. Thy will be done . . . but what is Thy will? Can't be everything that happens, or men would be mere puppets in a cruel charade.

God won't frustrate us. He won't let a little girl stay in hell.

He's done it on occasion. Read police records.

But death finally released those victims, and they were given comfort. Or so the churches claim.

How do the churches know? Maybe nothing exists but a blind interplay of forces; or maybe the Lowest and Highest are identical; or-No, that's the despair of hell, which you have met before. Carry on, Matuchek. Don't give up the crypt. "Onward, Christian so-oldiers" in your irregular baritone. If this doesn't work out, we'll try something else.

And at last we had struggled through the service to the benediction. Then Karlslund said, troubled:

"I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere now. The proper reverence is lost."

Hardy replied unexpectedly, "Your church puts its prime emphasis on faith, Pastor. But to us Catholics, works count too."

Karlslund yielded. "Well—all right. We can make the attempt. What exact help do you wish?"

Barney, Ginny, and the rest exchanged blank looks. I realized that in the rush, they'd forgotten to get specific about that. It probably hadn't seemed urgent, since Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell. Our formula could be anything reasonable . . . presumably.

Barney cleared his throat. "Uh, the idea is," he said, "that a first-rank mathematician would go on learning, improving, gaining knowledge and power we can't guess at, after passing on. We want a man who pioneered in non-Euclidean geometry."

"Riemann is considered definitive," Falkenberg told us, "but he did build on the work of others, like Hamilton, and had successors of his own. We don't

230 know how far the incomparable Gauss went, since he published only a fraction of his thought.

On the whole, I'd favor Lobachevsky. He was the first to prove a geometry can be self-consistent that denies the axiom of parallels. Around 1830 or 1840 as I recall, though the history of mathematics isn't my long suit. Everything in that branch of it stems from him."

"That'll do," Barney decided, "considering we don't know if we can get any particular soul for an ally. Any whatsoever, for that matter," he added raggedly. To Falkenberg: "You and the pastor work out the words while we establish the spell."

That took time also, but kept us busy enough that it wasn't as maddening as the service had been after the distraction. We made the motions, spoke the phrases, directed the will, felt the indescribable stress of energies build toward breaking point. This was no everyday hex, it was heap big medicine.

Shadows thickened out of nowhere until the windows shone down like pale lamps at night. The seven candle flames burned unnaturally tall without casting a glow. The symbols overhead glowed with their own radience, a mythic heaven, and begain slowly turning. St. Elmo's fire crawled blue over our upraised hands and Ginny's wand, crackled from Svartalf's fur where he stood on her shoulders and from her unbound hair. The harp played itself, strings plangent with the music of the spheres. Weaving my way back and forth across the floor I couldn't see for the darkness, hand in hand as one of the seven who trod the slow measures of the bransle grave, I heard a voice cry "Aleph!" and long afterward: "Zain."

At that we halted, the harp ceased, the eternal silence of the infinite spaces fell upon us, and the zodiac spun faster and faster until its figures blurred together and were time's wheel. What light remained lay wholly on the pastor. He stood, arms lifted, before the altar. "Hear us, O God, from Heaven Thy dwelling place," he called. "Thou knowest our desire; make it pure, we pray Thee. In Thy sight stand this man Steven and this woman Virginia, who are prepared to harrow hell as best as is granted them to, that they may confound Thine enemies and rescue an unstained child from the dungeons of the worm. Without Thine aid they have no hope. We beg Thee to allow them a guide and counselor through the wilderness of hell. If we are not worthy of an angel, we ask that Thou commend them unto Thy departed servant Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky, or whomever else may be knowledgeable in these matters as having been on earth a discoverer of them. This do we pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

There was another stillness.

Then the cross on the altar shone forth, momentarily sun-bright, and we heard one piercing, exquisite note, and I felt within me a rush of joy I can only vaguely compare to the first winning of first love. But another noise followed, as of a huge wind. The candles went out, the panes went black, we staggered when the floor shook beneath us. Svantalf screamed.

"Ginny!" I heard myself yell. Simultaneously I was whirled down a vortex of images, memories, a bulbous-towered church on an illimitable plain, a dirt track between rows of low thatch-roofed cottages and a horseman squeaking and jingling along it with saber at belt, an iron winter that ended in thaw and watery gleams and returning bird-flocks and shy breath of green across the beechwoods, a disordered stack of books, faces, faces, hands, a woman who was my wife, a son who died too young, half of Kazan in one red blaze, the year of the cholera, the letter from Gottingen, loves, failures, blindness closing in day by slow day and none of it was me.

A thunderclap rattled our teeth. The wind stopped, the light came back, the sense of poised forces was no more. We stood bewildered in our ordinary lives. Ginny cast herself into my arms.

"Lyubimyets," I croaked to her, "no, darling— Gospodny pomiluie-" while the kaleidoscope gyred within me. Svartalf stood on a workbench, back arched, tail bottled, not in rage but in panic. His lips, throat, tongue writhed through a ghastly fight with sounds no cat can make. He was trying to talk.

"What's gone wrong?" Barney roared.

XXX

GINNY TOOK OVER. She beckoned to the closest men. "Karlslund, Hardy, help Steve," she rapped. "Check him, Doc." I heard her fragmentarily through the chaos. My friends supported me. I reached a chair, collapsed, and fought for breath.

My derangement was short. The recollections of another land, another time, stopped rocketing forth at random. They had been terrifying because they were strange and out of my control. Poko'y sounded in my awareness, together with Peace, and I knew they meant the same. Courage lifted. I sensed myself thinking, with overtones of both formalism and compassion:

—I beg your pardon, sir. This re-embodiment confused me likewise. I had not paused to reflect what a difference would be made by more than a hundred years in the far realms where I have been. A few minutes will suffice, I believe, for preliminary studies providing the informational basis for a modus vivendi that shall be tolerable to you. Rest assured that I regret any intrusion and will minimize the same. I may add, with due respect, that what I chance to learn about your private affairs will doubtless be of no special significance to one who has left the flesh behind him.

Lobachevsky! I realized.

Your servant, sir. Ah, yes, Steven Anton Matuchek. Will you graciously excuse me for the necessary brief interval?

This, and the indescribable stirring of two memory sets that followed, went on at the back of my consciousness. The rest of me was again alert: uncannily so. I waved Ashman aside with an "I'm okay"

and scanned the scene before me.

In Svartalf s hysterical condition, he was dangerous to approach. Ginny tapped a basin of water at a workbench sink and threw it over him. He squalled, sprang to the floor, dashed to a corner, crouched and glowered. "Poor puss," she consoled. "I had to do that." She found a towel. "Come here to mama and we'll dry you off." He made her come to him. She squatted and rubbed his fur.

"What got into him?" Charles asked.

Ginny looked up. Against the red hair her face was doubly pale. "Good phrase, Admiral," she said.

"Something did. I shocked his body with a drenching. The natural cat reflexes took over, and the invading spirit lost its dominance. But it's still there. As soon as it learns its psychosomatic way around, it'll try to assume control and do what it's come for."

"Which is?"

"I don't know. We'd better secure him."

I rose. "No, wait," I said. "I can find out." Their eyes swiveled toward me. "You see, uh, I've got Lobachevsky."

"What?" Karlslund protested. "His soul in yours? Can't be! The saints never—"

I brushed past, knelt by Ginny, took Svartalf's head between my hands, and said, "Relax. Nobody wants to hurt you. My guest thinks he understands what's happened. Savvy? Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky is his name. Who are you?"

The muscles bunched, the fangs appeared, a growing ululation swept the room. Svartalf was about to have another fit.

—Sir, by your leave, the thought went in me. He is not hostile. I would know if he were. He is disconcerted at what has occurred, and has merely a feline brain to think with. Evidently he is unacquainted with your language. May I endeavor to calm him?

Russian purled and fizzled from my lips. Svartalf started, then I felt him ease a bit in my grasp. He looked and listened as intently as if I were a mousehole. When I stopped, he shook his head and mewed.

—So he was not of my nationality either. But he appears to have grasped our intent.

Look, I thought, you can follow English, using my knowledge. Svartalf knows it too. Why can't his

. . . inhabitant . . . do like you?

—I told you, sir, the feline brain is inadequate. It has nothing like a human speech-handling structure. The visiting soul must use every available cortical cell to maintain bare reason. But it can freely draw upon its terrestrial experience, thanks to the immense data storage capacity of even a diminutive mammalian body. Hence we can use what languages it knew before.

I thought: I see. Don't underrate Svartalf. He's pure-bred from a long line of witch familiars, more intelligent than an ordinary cat. And the spells that've surrounded him through his life must've had effects.

-Excellent. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

Svartalf nodded eagerly. "Meeoh," he said with an umlaut.

"Guten Tag, gnadiger Herr. Ich bin der Mathematiker Nikolai iwanowitsch Lobatschewski, quondam Oberpfarrer zu der Kasans Universitdt in Russland je suis uotre tres humble seruiteur, Monsieur." That last was in French, as politeness called for in the earlier nineteenth century.

"W-r-r-rar-r." Claws gestured across the floor.

Ginny said, wide-eyed with awe: "He wants to write . . . Svartalf, listen. Don't be angry. Don't be afraid. Let him do what he will. Don't fight, help him. When this is over, you'll have more cream and sardines than you can eat. I promise. There's a good cat." She rubbed him under the chin. It didn't seem quite the proper treatment for a visiting savant, but it worked, because at last he purred.

While she and Griswold made preparations, I concentrated on meshing with Lobachevsky. The rest stood around, shaken by what had happened and the sudden complete unknownness of the next hour. A fraction of me hearkened to their low voices.

Charles: "Damnedest apparition of saints I ever heard of."

Karlslund: "Admiral, please!"

Jan ice: "Well, it's true. They shouldn't have intruded in bodies like, like demons taking possession."

Griswold: "Maybe they had to. We did neglect to provide counter-transferral mass for inter-continuum crossing."

Karlslund: "They aren't devils. They never required it in the past."

Barney: "Whoa. Let's think about that. A spirit or a thought can travel free between universes.

Maybe that's what returned saints always were—visions, not solid bodies."

Karlslund: "Some were positively substantial."

Nobu: "I would guess that a saint can utilize any mass to form a body. Air, for instance, and a few pounds of dust for minerals, would provide the necessary atoms. Don't forget what he or she is, as far as we know: a soul in Heaven, which is to say one near God.

How can he fail to gain remarkable abilities as well as spiritual eminence—from the Source of power and creativity?"

Charles: "What ails these characters, then?"

"Messieurs," my body said, stepping toward them, "I beg your indulgence. As yet I have not entirely accustomed myself to thinking in this corporeal manifold. Do me the honor to remember that it is unlike the one I originally inhabited. Nor have I assimilated the details of the problem which led to your request for help. Finally, while confined to human form, I have no better means than you for discovering the identity of the gentleman in the cat. I do believe I know his purpose, but let us wait, if you will, for more exact knowledge before drawing conclusions."

"Wow," Barney breathed. "How's it feel, Steve?"

"Not bad," I said. "Better by the minute." That was an ultimate understatement. As Lobachevsky and I got acquainted, I felt in myself, coexistent with my own thoughts and emotions, those of a being grown good and wise beyond imagining.

Of course, I couldn't share his afterlife, nor the holiness thereof. My mortal brain and grimy soul didn't reach to it. At most, there sang at the edge of perception a peace and joy which were not static but a high eternal adventure. I did, though, have the presence of Lobachevsky the man to savor. Think of your oldest and best friend and you'll have a rough idea what that was like.

"We should be ready now," Ginny said.

She and Griswold had set a Ouija board on a bench, the easiest implement for a paw to operate. She perched herself on the edge, swinging legs whose shapeliness my associate noticed too, though mainly he worked out in my head the equation describing them. Svartalf took position at the gadget while I leaned across the opposite side to interrogate.

The planchette moved in a silence broken only by breathing. It was sympathetic with a piece of chalk under a broomstick spell, that wrote large on a blackboard where everyone could see.

ICH BIN JANOS BOLYAI VON UNGARN

"Bolyai!" gasped Falkenberg. "God, I forgot about him! No wonder he-but how-"

"Enchante, Monsieur," Lobachevsky said with a low bow. "Dies ist fur mich eine grosse Ehre. Ihrer Werke sint eine Inspiration fur apes." He meant it.

Neither Bolyai nor Svartalf were to be outdone in courtliness. They stood up on his hind legs, made a reverence with paw on heart, followed with a military salute, took the planchette again and launched into a string of flowery French compliments.

"Who is he, anyhow?" Charles hissed behind me.

"I . . . I don't know his biography," Falkenberg answered likewise. "But I recall now, he was the morning star of the new geometry."

"I'l1 check the library, ' Griswold offered. "These courtesies look as if they'll go on for some time."

"Yes," Ginny said in my ear, "can't you hurry things along a bit? We're way overdue at home, you and I. And that phone call could be trouble."

I put it to Lobachevsky, who put it to Bolyai, who wrote ABER NATUERLICH for the lack of an umlaut and gave us his assurances—at considerable length that as an Imperial officer he had learned how to act with the decisiveness that became a soldier when need existed, as it clearly did in the present instance, especially when two such charming young ladies in distress laid claim upon his honor, which honor he would maintain upon any field without flinching, as he trusted he had done in life ....

I don't intend to mock a great man. Among us, he was a soul trying to think with the brain and feel with the nerves and glands of a tomcat. It magnified human failings and made well-nigh impossible the expression of his intellect and knightliness. We found these hinted at in the notes on him that Griswold located in encyclopedias and mathematical histories, which we read while he did his gallant best to communicate with Lobachevsky.

Janos Bolyai was born in Hungary in 1802, when it was hardly more than a province of the Austrian Empire. His father, a noted mathematician who was a close friend of Gauss, taught him calculus and analytical mechanics before he was thirteen and enrolled him in the Royal Engineering College in Vienna at fifteen. Twenty years old, he became an officer of engineers, well known as a violinist and a swordsman dangerous to meet in a duel. In 1823 he sent to his father a draft of his Absolute Science of Space. While Gauss had anticipated some of its ideas in a general, philosophical way—unknown at the time to Bolyai, the young Hungarian had he done the first rigorous treatment of a non-Euclidean geometry, the first solid proof that space doesn't logically need to obey axioms like the one about parallel lines.

Unfortunately, it wasn't published till 1833, and just as an appendix to a two-volume work of his father's which, being in Latin, bore the gorgeous title Tentatem Juventutem Studiosarn, in Edementa Matheseos Puree Introducendi. By then Lobachevsky had independently announced similar results.

Bolyai remained obscure.

It seemed to have discouraged him. He settled down in the same place as his father, who taught at the Reformed College of Maros-Vasahely, and- died there in 1860. His lifetime covered a rising Hungarian nationalism, Kossuth's rebellion in 1848, its failure and the reactionary oppression that followed; but the articles said nothing about his conduct or opinions. He did see the end of martial law in 1857 and the increasing liberalization afterward: though his land did not achieve full national status under the dual monarchy till seven years past his death. I wondered if his ghost had hung around that long, waiting, before it departed for wider universes.

We found more on Lobachevsky. He was born in 1793, in Nizhni Novgorod. His mother was widowed when he was seven. She moved to Kazan and raised her boys in genteel but often desperate poverty. They won scholarships to the Gymnasium, Nikolai at the age of eight. He entered the local university at fourteen, got his master's degree at eighteen, was appointed assistant professor at twenty-one and full professor at twenty-three. Presently he had charge of the library and the museum. It was a tough distinction—both were neglected, disordered, so short of funds that he had to do most of the sheer physical labor himself—but over the years he made them a pride of Russia. In addition, while Czar Alexander lived, he was supposed to keep tabs on student politics. He managed to satisfy the government without finking; the kids adored him.

In 1827 he became rector, head of the university. He built it up in every way, including literally; he learned architecture so he could design proper structures. In 1830, when cholera struck, he pulled the academic community through with scant mortality, by enforcing sanitation as opposed to the medieval measures taken elsewhere in Kazan. Another time a fire totalled half the town. His new observatory, his best buildings went. But he rescued the instruments and books, and two years later had restored what was lost.

As early as 1826, he'd discussed non-Euclidean geometry. He might as well have done it in Kansas as Kazan. Word spread to western Europe with a slowness that would have driven a less patient, unegotistical man up the wall. But it did travel. When Gauss heard, he was impressed enough to get Lobachevsky elected to the Royal Society of Gottingen in 1842.

Maybe that xenophobia, or simple spiteful jealousy—was what prompted the Czarist regime in 1846 to bounce him as rector. They let him keep his study at the university, but scant else. Heartbroken, he with drew to his mathematical work. His eyesight failed. His son died. He thought on, dictating the Pangeometry that crowned his life. In 1856, shortly after he finished the book, that life ended.

Of course he was a saint!

—No, Steven Pavlovitch, you should not raise me above my worth. I stumbled and sinned more than most, I am sure. But the mercy of God has no bounds. I have been . . . it is impossible to explain.

Let us say I have been allowed to progress.

The blackboard filled. Janice wielded an eraser and the chalk squeaked on. To those who knew French—which the Russian and the Hungarian had switched to as being more elegant than German—it gradually became clear what had happened. But I alone shared Lobachevsky's degree of comprehension.

As this grew, I fretted over ways to convey it in American. Time was shrinking on us fast.

—Indeed, Lobachevsky answered. Brusque though contemporary manners have become ( pardoranez-rnoi, je vous en prie), haste is needed, for I agree that the hour is late and the peril dire.

Therefore I called the group to me when at last the questioning was done. Except for Ginny, who couldn't help being spectacular, and Svartalf, who sat at her feet with a human soul in his eyes, they were an unimpressive lot to see, tired, sweaty, haggard, neckties loosened or discarded, hair unkempt, cigarets in most hands. I was probably less glamorous, perched on a stool facing them. My voice grated and I'd developed a tic in one cheek. The fact that a blessed saint had joint tenancy of my body didn't much affect pain, scared, fallible me.

"Things have got straightened out," I said. "We made a mistake. God doesn't issue personal orders to His angels and saints, at least not on our behalf. It appears, Pastor, from the form of your invocation, you understood that. But consciously or not, the rest of us assumed we're more important than we are."

Lobachevsky corrected me. "No, everybody's important to Him. But there must be freedom, even for evil. And furthermore, there are considerations of—well, I guess you can't say Realpolitik. I don't know if it has earthly analogues. Roughly speaking, though, neither God nor the Adversary want to provoke an early Armageddon. For two thousand years, they've avoided direct incursions into each other's, uh, home territories, Heaven or hell. That policy's not about to be changed.

"Our appeal was heard. Lobachevsky's a full-fledged saint. He couldn't resist coming down, and he wasn't forbidden to. But he's not allowed to aid us in hell. If he goes along, it has to be strictly as an observer, inside a mortal frame. He's sorry, but that's the way the elixir elides. If we get scragged there, he can't help our souls escape. Every spirit has to make its own way—No matter. The result was, he entered this continuum, with me as his logical target.

"Bolyai's different. He heard too, especially since the prayer was so loosely phrased it could well have referred to him. Now, he hasn't made sainthood. He says he's been in Purgatory. I suspect most of us'd think of it as a condition where you haven't got what it takes to know God directly but you can improve yourself. At any rate, while he wasn't in Heaven, he wasn't damned either. And so he's under no prohibition as regards taking an active part in a fight. This looked like a chance to do a good deed. He assessed the content of our appeal, including the parts we didn't speak, and likewise chose me.

Lobachevsky, who's more powerful by virtue of sanctity, and wasn't aware of his intent, arrived a split second ahead of him."

I stopped to bum a cigaret. What I really wanted was a gallon of hard cider. My throat felt like a washboard road in summer. "Evidently these cases are governed by rules," I said. "Don't ask me why; I'm sure the reasons are valid if we could know them; in part, I guess, it's to protect mortal flesh from undue shock and strain. Only one extra identity per customer. Bolyai hasn't the capability of a saint, to create a temporary real body out of whatever's handy, as you suggested a while back, Dr. Nobu. In fact, he probably couldn't have used organized material if we'd prepared some. His way to manifest himself was to enter a live corpus. Another rule: the returned soul can't switch from person to person. It must stay with whom it's at for the duration of the affair.

"Bolyai had to make a snap decision. I was preempted. His sense of propriety wouldn't let him, uh, enter a woman. It wouldn't do a lot of good if he hooked up with one of you others, who aren't going.

Though our prayer hadn't mentioned it, he'd gathered from the overtones that the expedition did have a third member who was male. He willed himself there. He always was rash. Too late, he discovered he'd landed in Svartalf"

Barney's brick-house shoulders drooped. "Our project's gone for nothing?"

"No," I said. "With Ginny's witchcraft to help-boost his feline brain power-Bolyai thinks he can operate. He's spent a sizable chunk of afterlife studying the geometry of the continua, exploring planes of existence too weird for him to hint at. He loves the idea of a filibuster into hell."

Svartalf s tail swung, his ears stood erect, his whiskers dithered.

"Then it worked!" Ginny shouted. "Whoopee!"

"So far and to this extent, yeah." My determination was unchanged but my enthusiasm less.

Lobachevsky's knowledge darkened me—I sense a crisis. The Adversary can ill afford to let you succeed. His mightiest and subtlest forces will be arrayed against you.

"Well," Karlslund said blankly. "Well, well."

Ginny stopped her war dance when I said: "Maybe you better make that phone call, Dr. Griswold."

The little scientist nodded. "I'll do it from my office. We can plug in an extension here, audio-visual reception." We were far too groggy to give a curse about the lawfulness of that, though I do believe it's permissible, not being an actual scryertap.

We had a few minutes' wait. I held Ginny close by my side. Our troops muttered aimlessly or slumped exhausted. Bolyai was alone in his cheerfulness. He used Svartalf to tour the lab with eager curiosity. By now he knew more math and science than living men will acquire before world's end; but it intrigued him to see how we were going about things. He was ecstatic when Janice found him a copy of the National Geographic.

The phone awoke. We saw what Griswold did. The breath sucked in between my teeth. Shining Knife was indeed back.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting," the professor said. "It was impossible for me to come earlier. What can I do for your"

The G-man identified himself and showed his sigh. "I'm trying to get in touch with Mr. and Mrs.

Steven Matuchek. You know them, don't you?"

"Well, ah, yes . . .haven't seen them lately-" Griswold was a lousy liar.

Shining Knife's countenance hardened. "Please listen, sir. I returned this afternoon from a trip to Washington on their account. The matter they're involved in is that big. I checked with my subordinates.

Mrs. Matuchek had disappeared. Her husband had spent time in a spyproof conference room. He'd not been seen to leave his place of work at quitting rime. I sent a man in to ask for him, and he wasn't to be found. Our people had taken pictures of those who went into the plant. A crime lab worker here recognized you among the members of the conference. Are you sure the Matucheks aren't with you?"

"Y-yes. Yes. What do you want with them? Not a criminal charge?"

"No, unless they misbehave. I've a special order enjoining them from certain actions they may undertake. Whoever abetted them would be equally subject to arrest."

Griswold was game. He overcame his shyness and sputtered: "Frankly, sir, I resent your implication. And in any event, the writ must be served to have force. Until such time, they are not bound by it, nor are their associates."

"True. Mind if I come look around your place? They might happen to be there . . . without your knowledge."

"Yes, sir, I do mind. You may not."

"Be reasonable, Dr. Griswold. Among other things, the purpose is to protect them from themselves."

"That attitude is a major part of what I dislike about the present Administration. Good day to you, sir."

"Uh, hold." Shining Knife's tone remained soft, but nobody could mistake his expression. "You don't own the building you're in."

"fm responsible for it. Trismegistus is a private foundation. I can exercise discretionary authority and forbid access to your . . . your myrmidons."

"Not when they arrive with a warrant, Professor."

"Then I suggest you obtain one." Griswold broke the spell.

In the lab, we regarded each other. "How long?" I asked.

Barney shrugged. "Under thirty minutes. The FBI has ways."

"Can we scram out of here?" Ginny inquired of him.

"I wouldn't try it. The area probably went under surveillance before Shining Knife tried to call. I expect he stayed his hand simply because he doesn't know what we're doing and his orders are to proceed with extreme caution."

She straightened. "Okay. Then we go to hell." Her mouth twitched faintly upward. "Go directly to hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars."

"Huh?" Barney grunted, as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. "No! You're as crazy as the Feds think you are! No preparation, no proper equipment—"

"We can cobble together a lot with what's around here," Ginny said. "Bolyai can advise us, and Lobachevsky till we leave. We'll win an advantage of surprise. The demonic forces won't have had time to organize against our foray. Once we're out of American jurisdiction, can Shining Knife legally recall us? And he won't keep you from operating our lifeline. That'd be murder. Besides, I suspect he's on our side, not glad of his duty. He may well offer you help." She went to Barney, took one of his hands between both of hers, and looked up into his craggy face. "Don't hinder us, old friend," she pleaded.

"We've got to have you on our side."

His torment was hurtful to see. But he started ripping out commands. Our team plunged into work.

Griswold entered. "Did you—Oh. You can't leave now."

"We can't not," I said.

"But you haven't . . . haven't had dinner! You'll be weak and—Well, I know I can't stop you. We keep a fridge with food in the research lab, for when a project runs late. I'll see what it holds."

So that's how we went to storm the fastness of hell: Janice's borrowed shoulder purse on Ginny, and the pockets of Barney's outsize jacket (sleeves haggled short) on me, a-bulge with peanut butter sandwiches, tinned kipper for Svartalf-Bolyai, and four cans of beer.

XXXI

WE HAD SOME equipment, notably Ginny's kit. This included Valeria s primary birth certificate, which Ashman had brought. The directions he could give us for using it were the main reason he'd been recruited. She put in her own bag, clipped to her waist, for the time being.

Nobody, including our geometers, knew exactly what would and would not work in hell.

Lobachevsky was able to tell us that high-religious symbols had no power there as they do here. Their virtue comes from their orientation to the Highest, and the fundamental thing about hell is that no dweller in it can love. However, we might gain something from paganism. Its element of honor and justice meant nothing where we were bound, but its element of power and propitiation did, and although centuries have passed since anyone served those gods, the mana has not wholly vanished from their emblems.

Ginny habitually wore on her dress the owl pin that showed she was a licensed witch. Griswold found a miniature jade plaque, Aztec, carved with a grotesque grinning feathered serpent, that could be secured to the wereflash beneath my shirt. A bit sheepish under Pastor Karlslund's eye, Barney fished out a silver hammer pendant, copy of a Viking era original. It belonged to his wife, but he'd carried it himself "for a rabbit's foot" since this trouble broke, and now passed the chain around Svartalf s neck.

Projectile weapons weren't apt to be worth lugging. Ginny and I are pretty good shots in the nearly Euclidean space of this plenum. But when the trajectory is through unpredictable distortions that affect the very gravity, forget it, chum. We buckled on swords. She had a slender modern Solingen blade, meant for ritual use but whetted to a sharp point and edge. Mine was heavier and older, likewise kept for its goetic potency, but that stemmed from its being a cutlass which had once sailed with Decatur.

Air might be a problem. Hell was notoriously foul. Scuba rigs were in stock, being used for underwater investigations. When this gets you involved with nixies or other tricky creatures, you need a wizard or witch along, whose familiar won't be a convenient beast like a seal unless you have the luck to engage one of the few specialists. Accordingly there are miniature oxygen bottles and adjustable masks for a wide variety of animals. We could outfit Svartalf, and I tied another pint-size unit to the tank on my back—for Val, in case.

That completed the list. Given time, we could have done better. We could have ridden a dragon instead of two brooms, with an extra beast packing several tons of stuff against every contingency that a strategic analysis team might propose. Still, the Army had used that approach and failed. We had fresh knowledge and a unique scout. Maybe those would serve.

While we bucked ourselves with several helpers, Barney and Nobu made the final preparations to transmit us. Or almost final. At the last minute I asked them to do an additional job as soon as might be.

At the center of the Nexus drawn on the door, whose shape I won't reveal, they'd put a regular confining pentacle set about with blessed candles. A giant bell jar hung from a block and tackle above, ready to be lowered. This was for the counter-mass from the hell universe, which might be alive, gaseous, or otherwise troublesome. "After we've gone," I said, "lay a few hundred extra pounds of material in there, if the area's not too dangerous to enter.

"What?" Barney said, astonished. "But that'd allow, uh, anything" pursuer—to make the transition with no difficulty.

"Having arrived here, it can't leave the diagram," I pointed out. "We can and will, in a mighty quick jump. Have spells ready to prevent its return home. Thing is, I don't know what we'll find. Could be an item, oh, of scientific value; and the race needs more data about hell. Probably we won't collect any loot.

But let's keep the option."

"Okay. Sound thinking, for a lunatic." Barney wiped his eyes. "Damn, I must be allergic to something here."

Janice didn't weep alone when we bade good-bye. And within me paced the grave thought:

—No more may I aid you, Steven Pavlovitch, Virginia Williamovna, Janos Farkasovitch, and cat who surely has a soul of his own. Now must I become a mere watcher and recorder, for the sake of nothing except my curiosity. I will not burden you with the grief this causes me. You will not be further aware of my presence. May you fare with God's blessing.

I felt him depart from the conscious part of my mind like a dream that fades as you wake and try to remember. Soon he was only something good that had happened to me for a couple of hours. Or no, not entirely. I suspect what calm I kept in the time that followed was due to his unsensed companionship. He couldn't help being what he was.

Holding our brooms, Ginny and I walked hand in hand to the Nexus. Svartalf paced ahead. At the midpoint of the figure, we halted for a kiss and a whisper before we slipped the masks on. Our people cast the spell. Again the chamber filled with night. Energies gathered. Thunder and earthquake brawled.

I hung onto my fellows lest we get separated. Through the rising racket, I heard my witch read from the parchment whereon stood the name Victrix, urging us toward her through diabolic space-time.

The room, the world, the stars and universes began to rotate about the storm's eye where we stood.

Swifter and swifter they turned until they were sheer spinning, the Grotte quern itself. Then was only a roar as of great waters. We were drawn down the maelstrom. The final glimpse of light dwindled with horrible speed, and when we reached infinity, it was snuffed out. Afterward came such twistings and terrors that nothing would have sent us through them except our Valeria Victrix.

XXXII

I MUST HAVE blanked out for a minute or a millennium. At least, I became aware with ax-chop abruptness that the passage was over and we had arrived.

Wherever it was.

I clutched Ginny to me. We searched each other with a touch that quivered and found no injuries.

Svartalf was hale too. He didn't insist on attention as he normally would. Bolyai made him pad in widening spirals, feeling out our environment.

With caution I slipped off my mask and tried the air. It was bitterly cold, driving in a wind that sought to the bones, but seemed clean—sterile, in fact.

Sterility. That was the whole of this place. The sky was absolute and endless black, though in some fashion we could see stars and ugly cindered planets, visibly moving in chaotic paths; they were pieces of still deeper darkness, not an absence but a negation of light. We stood on a bare plain, hard and gray and flat as concrete, relieved by nothing except scattered boulders whose shapes were never alike and always hideous. The illumination came from the ground, wan, shadowless, colorless. Vision faded at last into utter distance. For that plain had no horizon, no interruptions; it went on. The sole direction, sound, movement, came from the drearily whistling wind.

I've seen some abominations in my time, I thought, but none to beat this . . . No. The worst is forever a changeling in my daughter's crib.

Ginny removed her mask too, letting it hang over the closed bottle like mine. She shuddered and hugged herself. The dress whipped around her. "I w-w-was ready to guard against flames," she said. It was as appropriate a remark as most that are made on historic occasions.

"Dame described the seventh circle of the Inferno as frozen," I answered slowly. "There's reason to believe he knew something. Where are we?"

"I can't tell. If the name spell worked, along with the rest, we're on the same planet-if 'planet' means a lot here-as Val will be, and not too far away." We'd naturally tried for a beforehand arrival.

"This isn't like what the previous expeditions reported."

"No. Nor was our transition. We used different rituals, and slanted across time to boot. Return should be easier."

Svartalf disappeared behind a rock. I didn't approve of that. "Kammen Sie zuriick!" I shouted into the wind. "Retournez-vous!" I realized that, without making a fuss about it, Lobachevsky had prior to our departure impressed on me fluent French and German. By golly, Russian too!

"Meeowr-r," blew back. I turned. The cat was headed our way from opposite to where he'd been.

"What the dickens?" I exclaimed.

"Warped space," Ginny said. "Look." While he trotted steadily, Svartalf's path wove as if he were drunk. "A line where he is must answer to a curve elsewhere. And he's within a few yards. What about miles off?"

I squinted around. "Everything appears straight."

"It would, while you're stationary. Br-r-r! We've got to get warmer."

She drew the telescoping wand from her purse. The star at its tip didn't coruscate here; it was an ember. But it made a lighted match held under our signatures and Svartalf s paw-print generate welcome heat in our bodies. A bit too much, to be frank; we started sweating. I decided the hell universe was at such high entropy-so deep into thermodynamic decay-that a little potential went very far.

Svartalf arrived. Staring uneasily over the plain, I muttered, "We haven't met enough troubles.

What're we being set up for?"

"We've two items in our favor," Ginny said. "First, a really effective transfer spell. Its influence is still pereceptible here, warding us, tending to smooth out fluctuations and similarize nature to home.

Second, the demons must have known well in advance where and when the earlier expeditions would come through. They'd ample time to fix up some nasty tricks. We, though, we've stolen a march." She brushed an elflock from her brow and added starkly: "I expect we'll get our fill of problems as we travel."

"We have to?"

"Yes. Why should the kidnaper make re-entry at this desert spot? We can't have landed at the exact point we want. Be quiet while I get a bearing."

Held over the Victrix parchment, the proper words sung, her dowser pointed out an unequivocal direction. The scryer globe remained cloudy, giving us no hint of distance or look at what lay ahead.

Space-time in between was too alien.

We ate, drank, rested what minutes we dared, and took off. Ginny had the lead with Svartalf on her saddlebow, I flew on her right in echelon. The sticks were cranky and sluggish, the screenfields kaput, leaving usd exposed to the wind from starboard. But we did loft and level off before the going got tough.

At first it was visual distortion. What I saw—my grasp on the controls, Svartalf, Ginny's splendid fig ure, the stones underneath—rippled, wavered, widened, narrowed, flowed from one obscene caricature of itself to a worse. Gobs of flesh seemed to slough off, hang in drops, stretch thin, break free and disappear. Sound altered too; the skirl turned into a cacophony of yells, buzzes, drones, fleetingly like words almost understandable and threatening, pulses too dip to hear except with the body's automatic terror reaction. "Don't pay heed!" I called. "Optical effects, Doppler—" but no message could get through that gibbering.

Suddenly my love receded. She whirled from me like a blown leaf. I tried to follow, straight into the blast that lashed tears from my eyes. The more rudder I gave the broom, the faster our courses split apart. "Bolyai, help!" I cried into the aloneness. It swallowed me.

I slid down a long wild curve. The stick would not pull out of it. Well, flashed through my fear, I'm not in a crash dive, it'll flatten a short ways above—

And the line of rocks athwart my path were not rocks, they were a mountain range toward which I catapulted. The gale laughed in my skull and shivered the broom beneath me. I hauled on controls, I bellowed the spells, but any change I could make would dash me on the ground before I hit those cliffs.

Somehow I'd traveled thousands of miles—had to be that much, or I'd have seen these peaks on the limitless plain, wouldn't I have?—and Ginny was lost, Val was lost, I could brace myself for death but not for the end of hope.

"Yeee-ow-w-w!" cut through the clamor. I twisted in my seat. And there came Ginny. Her hair blew in fire. The star on her wand burned anew like Sirius. Bolyai was using Svartalf's paws to steer; yellow eyes and white fangs flared in the panther countenance.

They pulled alongside. Ginny leaned over till our fingers met. Her sensations ran down the circuit to me. I saw with her what the cat was doing. I imitated. It would have wrecked us at home. But here we slewed sideways and started gaining altitude.

How to explain? Suppose you were a Flatlander, a mythical creature (if any creature is mythical) of two space dimensions, no more. You live in a surface. That's right, in. If this is a plane, its geometry obeys the Euclidean rules we learn in high school: parallel lines don't meet, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the angles of a triangle total 180 degrees, et cetera. But now imagine that some three-dimensional giant plucks you out and drops you into a surface of different shape. It might be a sphere, for example. You'll find space fantastically changed. In a sphere, you must think of lines in terms of meridians and parallels, which means they have finite length; in general, distance between points is minimized by following a great circle; triangles have a variable number of degrees, but always more than 180—You might well go mad. Now imagine cones, hyperboloids, rotated trigonometric and logarithmic curves, Mobius bands, whatever you can.

And now imagine a planet which is all water, churned by storms and not constrained by the ordinary laws of physics. At any point its surface can have any form, which won't even stay constant in time. Expand the two dimensions into three; make it four for the temporal axis, unless this requires more than one, as many philosophers believe; add the hyperspace in which paranatural forces act; put it under the rule of chaos and hatred: and you've got some analogy to the hell universe.

We'd hit a saddle point back yonder, Ginny passing to one side of it, I to the other. Our courses diverge because the curvatures of space did. My attempt to intercept her was worse than useless; in the region where I found myself, a line aimed her way quickly bent in a different direction. I blundered from geometry to geometry, through a tuck in space that bypassed enormous reaches, toward my doom.

No mortal could have avoided it. But Bolyai was mortal no longer. To his genius had been added the knowledge and skill of more than a century's liberation from the dear but confining flesh. Svartalf's body had changed from a trap to a tool, once his rapport with Ginny enabled the mathematician to draw on her resources also. He could make lightning-quick observations of a domain, mentally write and solve the equations that described it, calculate what its properties would be, get an excellent notion of what the contour would shade into next-in fractional seconds. He wove through the dimensional storms of hell like a quarterback bound for a touchdown.

He gloried. For lack of other voice, he sang the songs of a black tomcat out after fornication and battle. We clawed over the mountains and streaked toward our goal.

It was no milk run. We must keep aware and reacting each instant. Often we made an error that well-nigh brought us to grief. I'd lose contact with Ginny and wander off again; or a lurch would nearly make us collide; or the intense gravitational field where space was sharply warped hurled our sticks groundward and tried to yank out guts and eyeballs; or a quick drop in weight sent us spinning; or we shot through folds in space instead of going around and were immediately elsewhere; or we passed into volumes where hyperspace was so flat that our broomspells didn't work and we must get through on momentum and aerodynamics-I don't recall every incident. I was too busy to notice a lot of them.

We traveled, though, and faster than we'd hoped, once Bolyai discovered what tricks we could play when the time dimension was buckled. The deafening racket and disgusting illusions plagued us less as we got the hang of passing smoothly from metric to metric. Moreover, the world around us grew steadier. Somebody or something wanted to lair in a region where disturbances tended to cancel out.

At last we could study the landscape. Hitherto we'd simply kept flying. We'd noted the plain had given way to crags, to miles of jumbled bones, to a pit that seemed without bottom, to a lava sea across which sleeted flames and from which rose fumes that made us don our masks before the lungs were corroded within us. But such glimpses were remote, things to stay well above while we fought to make distance. Now progress was, by comparison, easy. We could spare a little attention. And we'd better.

When Ginny lifted out her globe, a pale but waxing glow from inside it showed we were approaching the goal.

I released her hand, not because I wanted to but because our arms ached from straining across the gap. We flew quietly for a while, observing.

Quietly . . . The wind had fallen behind; nothing blew around us but a murmur of cloven air. It bore a graveyard stench, we gasped in its warmth and slimy humidity, but it could be breathed. The sky remained black, with its more-than-black crawling orbs. Sometimes a huge pitted meteoroid passed close overhead, hardly faster than we, following a track above shallow atmosphere to vanishment over the horizonless world. Sometimes corposants blossomed and bobbed in the nether gloom.

The mournful phosphorescence of the ground remained our chief illumination. We were on the fringes of a swamp as vast as every other piece of country we'd seen here. Pools, bayous, lakes stretched beyond sight, dimly glimmering where they were not scummed with decayed matter. Trees stood thick and gnarled, branches tangled together, cypress knees thrust above water and floating logs; but not one of them was alive. Reeds choked the shorelines, dense and dead. Yellow mists stole through the murk between boles: tendrils of a fogbank that hid the inner reaches of marsh in a slow dirty seething.

Immensely far ahead, light reflected ruddy and restless off low clouds. Without warning, a slip or convulsion in space brought us on top of it.

Sound assailed us drums, pipings, screeches. At the middle of a cleared island, a fire burned, high as a steeple, heat striking from it like a flayer's knife. Past its white heart, where things writhed and screamed that were not clear to the eye, I glimpsed the shapes that danced around it, black, naked, thin as mantises. When they saw us their shrieks pierced the surf roar, of the flames, and the tom-toms went Boorri-ba-daboam, boom-ba-da-boom. A dozen birds labored from the leafless trees. They were the size and color of vultures, but with no flesh on their skulls and cruel claws.

Svartalf spat defiance. Our sticks accelerated and left the flock behind. I don't think it was alive either. From miles in front we heard new drums commence, and after them, a whisper across the leagues, again Boom-ba-da-boom, boom-ba-da-boom.

Ginny beckoned me and I edged close. She looked grim. "If I don't miss my guess," she said, "we're over Diddy-Wah-Diddy and the word's being passed on."

My left hand dropped to my cutlass hilt. "What should we do?"

"Veer. Try for a different approach. But fast."

The wind of our speed felt nearly good after that blistering calor; and presently it cooled and lost its stench. When we'd passed a line of dolmens, the air was again wintry for a while. Beneath us lay a barren moor. Two armies fought. They must have been doing it for centuries, because many wore chain mail and peaked helmets, the rest were in skins and rough cloth, the weapons were sword, spear, ax. We heard the iron clamor, the shuffling, slipping feet, the butcher sound of blows driven home: but no cries, no trumpets, no rasp of breath. Wearily, hopelessly, the dead men fought their war that had no end.

Beyond them we turned and made once more for our destination. We crossed a forest of gallows and a river that flowed with a noise like sobbing and whose spray, cast up by a gust, tasted warm and salt. We suffered the heat and poisonous vapors from a system of roads where motor vehicles of some kind crawled nose to tail, a network miles wide and I know not how—long, nor can I guess its purpose.

We traversed hills gouged with trenches and the craters of explosions, rusted cannon the last sign of life except for one flag, raised as in victory, whose colors had faded to gray The hills climbed till we met another range so high we needed our masks; flitting through its canyons, we dodged stones that fell upward.

But past those mountains the land swooped down anew. Another plain of boulders reached beyond sight. Far off upon it, toylike at their remove, we spied gaunt black towers. The globe flared brilliant, the wand leaped to point in Ginny's forgers. "By Hecate," she cried, "that's it!"

XXXIII

I DREW ALONGSIDE. The air was still cold and blowing, a wail in our ears, a streaming past our ribs, a smell akin to burning sulfur and wet iron. At hover, the broomsticks rocked and pitched. Her foot against mine was a very precious contact.

We peered into the globe she held. Svartalf-Bolyai craned around her arm to see. This close, the intervening space not too different from home geometry, the scrying functioned well. Ginny zoomed in on the castle. It was sable in hue, monstrous in size and shape. Or had it a shape? It sprawled, it soared, it burrowed with no unity except ugliness. Here a thin spire lifted crookedly from a cubical donjon—

there a dome swelled pustular, yonder a stone beard overhung a misproportioned gate . . . square miles of planless deformity, aswarm with the maggoty traffic of devils.

We tried to look through the walls, but didn't penetrate far. Behind and beneath the cavernous chambers and twisted labyrinths that we discerned, too much evil force roiled. It was as well, considering what we did vaguely make out. At the limit, a thought came from just beyond, for an instant-no, not a thought, a wave of such agony that Ginny cried aloud and I bit blood out of my lip. We blanked the globe and embraced till we could stop shuddering.

"Can't afford this," she said, drawing free. "Time's gotten in short supply."

She reactivated the scryer, with a foreseer spell. Those rarely work in our universe, but Lobachevsky had theorized the fluid dimensions of the Low Continuum might give us a better chance.

The view in the globe panned, steadied on one spot, and moved close. Slablike buildings and contorted towers enclosed a certain courtyard in an irregular septagon. At the middle of this was a small, lumpy stone house, windowless and with a single doorway. A steeple climbed from it, suggestive of a malformed ebon toadstool, that overtopped the surrounding structures and overshadowed the pavement.

We couldn't view the inside of this either, for the same reason as before. It seemed to be untenanted, though. I had the creepy feeling that it corresponded in some perverted way to a chapel.

"Unambiguous and sharp," Ginny said. "That means she'll arrive there, and soon. We'll have to lay our plans fast."

"And move fast, too," I said. "Give me an overall scan, will you, with spot close-ups?"

She nodded. The scene changed to one from on high. I noted afresh how it pullulated in the crowds.

Were they always this frantic? Not quite, surely. We focused on a single band of demons. No two looked alike; vanity runs high in hell. A body covered with spines, a tentacled dinosaur, a fat slattern whose nipples were tiny grinning heads, a flying swine, a changeable blob, a nude man with a snake for a phallus, a face in a belly, a dwarf on ten-foot pencil-thin legs, and less describable sights- What held my attention was that most of them were armed. They didn't go for projectiles either, evidently.

However, those medievalish weapons would be bad to encounter.

Sweeping around, our vision caught similar groups. The confusion was unbelievable. There was no discipline, no consideration, everybody dashed about like a decapitated chicken yelling at everybody else, they jostled and snarled and broke into fights. But more arms were being fetched each minute from inside, more grotesque flyers lumbered into the air and circled.

"They've been alerted, all right," I said. "The drums-"

"I don't suppose they know what to expect," Ginny said in a low tight voice. "They aren't especially guarding the site we're after. Didn't the Adversary pass word about us?"

"He seems to be debarred from taking a personal hand in this matter, same as Lobachevsky and for analogous reasons, I guess. At most, he may've tipped his underlings to watch out for trouble from us.

But they can't know we've acquired the capability to do what we did. Especially since we've made an end run in time."

"And the diabolic forces are stupid," Ginny said. "Evil is never intelligent or creative. They receive word a raid is possible, and look at that mess!"

"Don't underrate them. An idiot can kill you just as dead." I pondered. "Here's what we'll do, if you agree. Rush straight in. We can't prevent them seeing us, so we have to be quick. Good thing our sticks function close to normal in this neighborhood. We won't make directly for the yard or they might block us off. See that palace, I assume it is, over to the left-the one with the columns in front that look like bowels? Must belong to the big cheese, which makes it a logical spot for enemies to drop a bomb on. At the last moment we'll swerve toward our real mark. You get inside, establish our paranatural defenses, and ready the return spell. I'll keep the door. The instant Val appears, you skewer the kidnaper and grab her. Got it?

"Yes. Oh, Steve." The tears ran silently from her eyes. "I love you."

We kissed a final time, there in the sky of hell.

Then we attacked.

The wind of our passage shouted around us. The drear landscape reeled away beneath. I heard Svartalf's challenge and answered with my own whoop. Fear blew out of me. Gangway, you legions of darkness, we're coming to fetch our girl!

They began to see us. Croaks and yammers reached our ears, answered by shrieks from below. The flying devils milled in the air. Others joined them till several hundred wings beat in a swarm across the sooty stars. They couldn't make up the minds they scarcely had what to do about us. Nearer we came and nearer. The castle rose in our vision like the ranges we had crossed.

Ginny must spend her entire force warding off sorceries. Lightning bolts spattered blue on the shieldfield, yards off, followed by thunder and ozone. Lethal clouds boiled from smokestacks, englobed our volume of air and dissipated. I had no doubt that, unperceived by us, curses, hoodoos, illusions, temptations, and screaming meemies rained upward and rebounded.

The effort was draining her. I glimpsed the white, strained countenance, hair plastered to brow and cheek by sweat, wand darting while the free hand gestured and the lips talked spells. Svartalf snarled in front of her; Bolyai piloted the broom. None of them could keep it up for many minutes.

But that conjure wave made it impossible for anything to get at us physically. The creature in charge must have realized this at the end, for the assault stopped. An eagle the size of a horse, wearing a crocodile's head, stooped upon us.

My cutlass was drawn. I rose in the stirrups. "Not one cent for tribute!" I bayed, and struck.- The old power awoke in the blade. It smote home with a force I felt through my bones. Blood spurted from a sheared-off wing. The devil bawled and dropped.

A bat-snake threw a loop around my right arm. I grabbed its neck with my left hand before it could sink fangs in me. Human, I remain wolf; I bit its head off. Barely in time, I cut at a twin-tailed manta coming for Ginny. It fell aft, spilling guts. An aerial hound sought to intercept us. I held my weapon straight and got him with the point.

Horns hooted their discord. The flapping, cawing, stinking flock retreated in its regular disorder.

Our stratagem had worked. Their entire outfit, infantry, air corps, and all, was being summoned to defend the palace.

We pursued to within a hundred yards. The manor was no longer visible for wings and feculent bodies. I lifted my blade as signal. We swung right and whizzed downward. Babel erupted behind us.

We landed jarringly hard. Surrounded by walls, brooded over by the cap of its tower, the building huddled in twilight. I bounced from my seat to the door and tried its ill-feeling handle. It creaked open and we ran in.

A single room, dank jagged stone, lay before us. It wasn't large in area, but opened above on the measureless dark of the tower. The room was bare except for an altar where a Glory Hand cast dull blue light. The arrangement of objects and the pattern on the floor were similar to those we'd employed for transit.

The heart cracked in me. "Val!" I sobbed. Ginny wrestled me to a halt. She couldn't have done so without Svartalf getting between my ankles.

"Hold it," she gasped. "Don't move. That's the changeling."

I drew a lungful of air and regained my sanity. Of course, of course. But it was more than I could endure to look at that chubby shape before the altar, gold curls and empty, empty eyes. Strange, also, to see next to the half-alive thing the mass already exchanged from our house: dust, sandbox contents, coffee grounds, soggy paper towels, a Campbell's Soup can—

The devil garrison was boiling over the walls and through the portals into this courtyard. I slammed the door and dropped the bolt. It was good and heavy: might buy us a few minutes.

How many did we need? I tried to reconstruct events. The kidnaper was doubtless moronic even by hell's standards. He'd heard Marmiadon's curse. A lot of them must have, but didn't see anything they could do to fulfill it. This one noticed our vulnerability. "Duh" he said, and flashed off to collect some kudos, without consulting any of the few demons that are able to think. Such a higher-up could have told him to lay off. His action would give a clue to the link between hell and the Johannine Church, and thus imperil the whole scheme for the sabotage of religion and society that the Adversary had been working on since he deluded the first of the neo-Gnostics.

Being the dimbulb he was, this creature could not solve the momentum problem of transferring a body other than his own between universes, unless the exchange mass was nearly identical in configuration. His plan would have been to appear in our home, scan Valeria as she slept, return here,

'chant a hunk of meat into her semblance, and go back after her. The first part would only have taken seconds, though it got the wind up Svartalf. The snatch ought to have gone quickly too, but the cat was waiting and attacked.

At this moment, if simultaneity had meaning between universes, the fight ramped and Svartalf's blood was riven from him. My throat tightened. I stooped over him. "We'd 've arrived too late here except for you," I whispered. "They don't make thanks for that sort of help. Infinitely gently, I stroked the sleek head. He twitched his ears, annoyed. In these surroundings, he'd no patience with fine sentiments. Besides, currently they were Janos Bolyai's ears too.

Ginny was chalking a diagram around the room for a passive defense against demonurgy. It took care, because she mustn't disturb altar, emblem, or objects elsewhere. They were the fiend's return ticket.

Given them, he need simply cast the appropriate spell in our cosmos, just as we'd use the things and symbols in Griswold's lab for a lifeline. If the kidnaper found himself unable to make it back with his.

victim, God alone knew what would happen. They'd certainly both leave our home and a changeling replace them. But we'd have no inkling of how this came about or where they'd gone. It might provide the exact chance the enemy needed to get his project back on the rails.

Outside, noise swelled-stamp, hop, clang, howl, whistle, grunt, gibber, bubble, hiss, yelp, whine, squawk, moan, bellow. The door reverberated under fists, feet, hoofs. I might well have to transform. I dropped the scuba gear and my outer garments, except for wrapping Barney's jacket around my left forearm.

A mouth, six feet wide and full of clashing teeth, floated through a wall. I yelled, Svartalf spat.

Ginny grabbed her wand and cried dismissal. The thing vanished. But thereafter she was continually interrupted to fight off such attacks.

She had to erect fortifications against them before she could begin the spell that would send us home. The latter ritual must not be broken off till at least a weak field had been established between this point and the lab on earth, or it became worthless. Having made initial contact, Ginny could feel out at leisure what balance of forces was required, and bring them up to the strength necessary for carrying us.

Now she wasn't getting leisure. In consequence, her defensive construction went jaggedly and slowly.

The hullabaloo outside dwindled somewhat. I heard orders barked. Thuds and yammers suggested they were enforced with clubs. A galloping grew. The door rocked under a battering ram.

I stood aside. At the third blow, the door splintered and its hinges tore loose. The lead devil on the log stumbled through. He was rather like a man-sized cockroach. I cut him apart with a brisk sweep. The halves threshed and clawed for a while after they fell. They entangled the stag-horned being that came next, enabling me to take him with ease.

The others hauled back the log, which blocked the narrow entrance. But my kills remained as a partial barrier in front of me. The murk outside turned most of the garrison into shadows, though their noise stayed deafening and their odors revolting.

One trod forward in the shape of a gorilla on man's legs. He wielded an ax in proportion to his size.

It hewed. Poised in karate stance, I shifted to let it go by. Chips sleeted where it hit stone. My cutlass sang. Fingers came off him. He dropped the ax. Bawling his pain, he cuffed at me. I did the fastest squat on record. While that skull-cracker of a hand boomed above, I got an Achilles tendon. He fell. I didn't try for a death, because he barred access while he dragged himself away. My pulse seethed in my ears.

A thing with sword and shield was next. We traded blows for a couple of minutes. He was good. I parried, except for slashes that the jacket absorbed; but I couldn't get past that shield. Metal clashed above the bedlam as sparks showered in twilight. My breath started coming hard. He pressed close. A notion flashed in me. As he cut over the top of his shield, I dropped down again. My weapon turned his, barely. My left hand grabbed the ax, stuck the helve between his legs, and shoved. He toppled, exposing his neck. I smote.

Rising, I threw the ax at the monster behind, who reeled back. A spear wielder poked at me. I got hold of the shaft and chopped it over.

No further candidates advanced right away. The mass churned around, arguing with itself. Through the hammering of my heart, I realized I couldn't hold out much longer. As human, that is. Here was a chance to assume the less vulnerable Lyco state. I tossed my blade aside and turned the flash on myself.

At once I discovered that transformation was slow and agonizing amidst these influences. For a space I writhed helpless between shapes. A rooster-headed fiend cackled his glee and rushed forward, snickersnee on high. Were or no, I couldn't survive bisection. Svartalf bolted past me, walked up the enemy's abdomen, and clawed his eyes out.

Wolf, I resumed my post. The cat went back inside. We were just in time. The garrison finally got the idea of throwing stuff. Space grew thick with rocks, weapons, and assorted impedimenta. Most missed. Hell is no place to develop your throwing arm. Those that hit knocked me about, briefly in pain, but couldn't do any real damage.

The barrage ended when, in sheer hysteria, they tried to storm us. That was turmoil, slice, hack, rip, tumbling about in their vile welter. They might have overrun me by numbers had Ginny not finished her paranatural defenses and come to my aid. Her weapon disposed of the demons that crawled over the pile of struggling bodies.

When at last they withdrew, their dead and wounded were heaped high. I sat down amidst the ichor, the fragments, the lamentations, unreeled my tongue and gulped air. Ginny rumpled my fur, half laughing, half crying. Some claws had reached her; blood trickled from scratches and her dress was tattered into battle banners. Svartalf's aid had prevented her opponents from inflicting serious wounds, though. I glanced within and saw him playing mousey with a devil's tail.

More important was the soft luminosity from the lines woven across the floor. We were accessible as ever to physical force, but goetics couldn't touch us now. To break down her impalpable walls would take longer than we'd possibly stay.

"Steve, Steve, Steve-" Ginny straightened. "I'd better prepare for our return."

"Halt!" called a voice from the dusk. It was hoarse, with an eerie hypnotic rhythm, not calming, but, rather, invoking wrath and blind energy. "Waffenstillstand. Parlementieren Sie mit uns. "

The devils, even the strewn wounded, fell quiet. Their noise sibilated away until the silence was nearly total, and those who could, withdrew until they merged in vision with the blackness behind them.

I knew their master had spoken, the lord of this castle . . . who stood high in the Adversary's councils, if he commanded obedience from these mad creatures.

Boots clacked over flagstones. The demon chief came before us. The shape he had adopted startled me. Like his voice, it was human; but it was completely unmemorable. He was of medium height or less, narrow-shouldered, face homely and a bit puffy, ornamented with nothing but a small toothbrush mus-tache and a lock of dark hair slanting across the brow. He wore some kind of plain brown military uniform. But why did he add a red armband with the ancient and honorable sign of the fylfot?

Svartalf quit his game and bristled. Through diabolic stench, I caught the smell of Ginny's fear.

When you looked into the eyes in that face, it stopped being ordinary. She braced herself, made a point of staring down along the couple of inches she overtopped him, and said in her haughtiest tone, "Was willst du?"

It was the du of insult. Her personal German was limited, but while Bolyai was in Svartalf she could tap his fluency by rapport with her familiar. (Why did the devil prince insist on German? There's a mystery here that I've never solved.) I retained sufficient human-type capabilities to follow along.

I ask you the same," the enemy replied. Though he kept to the formal pronoun, his manner was pe-remptory. "You have encroached on our fatherland. You have flouted our laws. You have killed and maimed our gallant warriors when they sought to defend themselves. You desecrate our House of Sendings with your odious presence. What is your excuse?"

"We have come to gain back what is ours."

"Well? Say on."

I growled a warning, which Ginny didn't need. "If I told you, you might find ways to thwart us," she said. "Be assured, however, we don't intend to stay. We'll soon have completed our mission." Sweat glistened forth on her brow. "I . . . I suggest it will be to the advantage of both parties if you let us alone meanwhile."

He stamped a boot. "I must know! I demand to know! It is my right!"

"Diseases have no rights," Ginny said. "Think. You cannot pierce our spell-wall nor break through by violence in the time that is left. You can only lose troops. I do not believe your ultimate master would be pleased at such squandering of resources."

He waved his arms. His tone loudened. "I do not admit defeat. For me, defeat has no existence. If I suffer a reverse, it is because I have been stabbed in the back by traitors." He was heading off into half a trance. His words became a harsh, compelling chant. "We shall break the iron ring. We shall crush the vermin that infest the universes. We shall go on to victory. No surrender! No compromise! Destiny calls us onward!"

The mob of monsters picked up a cue and cried hail to him. Ginny said: "If you want to make an offer, make it. Otherwise go away. I've work to do."

His features writhed, but he got back the self-control to say: "I prefer not to demolish the building.

Much effort and wizardry is in these stones. Yield yourselves and I promise fair treatment."

"What are your promises worth?"

"We might discuss, for example, the worldly gains rewarding those who serve the cause of the rightful—"

Svartalf mewed. Ginny spun about. I threw a look behind, as a new odor came to me. The kidnapper had materialized. Valeria lay in his grasp.

She was just coming awake, lashes aflutter, head turning, one fist to her lips. "Daddy?" the sleepy little voice murmured. "Mothuh?"

The thing that held her was actually of less weight. It wore an armor-plated spiky-backed body on two clawed feet, a pair of gibbon-like arms ending in similarly murderous talons, and a tiny head with blob features. Blood dripped off it here and there. The loose lips bubbled with an imbecilic grin, till it saw what was waiting.

It yowled an English, "Boss, help!" as it let Val go and tried to scuttle aside. Svartalf blocked the way. It raked at him. He dodged. Gin, got there. She stamped down. I heard a crunch. The demon ululated.

I'd stuck at my post. The lord of the castle tried to get past me. I removed a chunk of his calf. It tasted human, too, sort of. He retreated, into the shadow chaos of his appalled followers. Through their din I followed his screams: "I shall have revenge for this! I shall unleash a secret weapon! Let the House be destroyed! Our pride demands satisfaction! My patience is exhausted!"

I braced myself for a fresh combat. For a minute, I almost got one. But the baron managed to control his horde; the haranguing voice overrode theirs. As Ginny said, he couldn't afford more futile casualties.

I thought, as well as a wolf can: Good thing he doesn't know they might not have been futile this time.

For Ginny could not have aided me. After the briefest possible enfolding of her daughter, she'd given the kid to Svartalf. The familiar—and no doubt the mathematician—busied himself with dances, pounces, patty-cake and wurrawurra, to keep her out of her mother's hair. I heard the delighted laughter, like silver bells and springtime rain. But I heard, likewise, Ginny's incantation.

She must have about five unbroken minutes to establish initial contact with home, before she could stop and rest. Then she'd need an additional period to determine the precise configuration of vectors and gather the required paranatural energies. And then we'd go!

It clamored in the dark. An occasional missile flew at me, for no reason except hatred. I stood in the door and wondered if we had time.

A rumbling went through the air. The ground shuddered underfoot. The devils keened among shadows. I heard them retreating. Fear gripped me by the gullet. I have never done anything harder than to keep that guardian post.

The castle groaned at its foundations. Dislodged blocks slid from the battlements and crashed.

Flamelight flickered out of cracks opened in gates and shutters. Smoke tried to strangle me. It passed, and was followed by the smell of ancient mold.

" . . . in nomine Potestatis, fiat janua . . ." the witch's hurried verses ran at my back.

The giant upheaved himself.

Higher he stood than the highest spire of this stronghold beside which he had lain buried. The blackness of him blotted out the stars of hell. His tottering feet knocked a curtain wall down in a grinding roar; dust whirled up, earthquake ran. Nearly as loud was the rain of dirt, mud, gravel from the wrinkled skin. Fungi grew there, pallidly phosphorescent, and worms dripped from his eye sockets. The corruption of him seized the breath. The heat of his decay smoldered and radiated. He was dead; but the power of the demon was in him.

". . . saeculi aeternitatis. " Ginny had kept going till she could pause without danger to the spell.

She was that kind of girl. But now she came to kneel by me. "Oh, darling," she wept, "we almost won through!"

I fumbled at my flash. The giant wove his head from side to side as if he still had vision. The faceless visage came to a stop, pointed our way. I shoved the switch and underwent the Skin-turning back to human. The giant raised a foot. He who operated him was trying to minimize damage to the castle. Slowly, carefully, he set it down inside the fortifications.

I held my girl to me. My other girl laughed and romped with the cat. Why trouble them? "We've no chance?"

"I . . . no time . . . first-stage field ready, b-b-but flesh can't cross before I . . . complete—I love you, I love you."

I reached for Decatur's sword where it gleamed in the Handlight. We've come to the end of creation, I thought, and we'll die here. Let's go out fighting. Maybe our souls can escape.

Souls!

I grabbed Ginny by the shoulder and thrust her back to look at. "We can send for help," burst from me. "Not mortals, and angels're forbidden, but, but you do have contact established and . . . the energy state of this universe—it doesn't take a lot to—There's bound to be many c-creatures, not of Heaven but still no friends of hell—"

Her eyes kindled. She sprang erect, seized wand and sword, swung them aloft and shouted.

The giant stepped into our courtyard. The crippled devils gibbered their terror, those he did not crush underfoot. His fingers closed around the tower.

I couldn't tell what language Ginny's formula was in, but she ended her cry in English: "Ye who knew man and were enemies of Chaos, by the mana of the signs we bear I call on you and tell you that the way from earth stands open!"

The chapel rocked. Stones fell, inside and outside. The tower came off. It broke apart in the giant's clutch, a torrent that buried the last of hell's wounded. We looked into lightless constellations. The giant groped to scoop us out.

Our rescuers arrived.

I don't know who or what they were. Perhaps their looks were illusion. I'll admit that the quarters of the compass were from which they came, because these are nonsense in hell. Perhaps what answered Ginny's call was simply a group of beings, from our universe or yet another, who were glad of a chance to raid the realm of the Adversary that is theirs too. She had built a bridge that was, as yet, too frail to bear mortal bodies. However, as I'd guessed, the entropy of the Low Continuum made paranatural forces able to accomplish what was impossible elsewhere.

Explain it as you like. This is what I saw—

From the west, the figure of a woman, queenly in blue-bordered white robe. Her eyes were gray, her features of icicle beauty. The dark tresses bore a crested helmet. Her right hand carried a spear whose head shimmered midnight azure with glitters as of earthly stars; and upon that shoulder sat an owl. On her left arm was a long shield, which for boss had the agonized face of another woman whose locks were serpents.

From the south, the greatest serpent of them all. His orbs were like suns, his teeth like white knives.

Plumes of rainbow color grew on his head, nodding in the wind he brought with him, shining with droplets of the rain that walked beneath. More feathers made a glory down his back. His scales were coral, the scutes upon his belly shone golden. The coils of him lashed about as does the lightning.

From the north, a man in a chariot drawn by two goats. He stood burly, red-bearded, clad in helmet and ringmail, iron gloves and an iron belt. Driving with his left hand, he gripped a short-handled hammer in his right. The cloak blew behind him on mighty gales. The rumble of his car wheels went down and down the sky. He laughed, swung the hammer and threw it. Where it struck, fire blasted and the air roared; it returned to him.

Each of these loomed so tall that the firmament would hardly contain them. Hell trembled at their passage. The devils fled in a cloud. When his master left, the giant's animation ceased. He fell with an impact that knocked me off my feet. It demolished a large part of the castle. The newcomers didn't stop to level the rest right away, but took off after the fiends. I don't imagine that many escaped.

We didn't watch. Ginny completed the transfer spell and seized Valeria in both her arms. I tucked Decatur's sword under one of mine—damn if it'd be left here!—and offered Svartalf the crook of that elbow. From the floor I plucked up the kidnaper demon. It had a broken leg. "Boss, don't hurt me, I'll be good, I'll talk, I'll tell ya ever't'ing ya want," it kept whining. Evil has no honor.

Ginny spoke the final word, made the final pass. We crossed.

XXXIV

THAT WAS NOTHING like the outbound trip. We were headed back where we belonged. The cosmic forces didn't buck us, they worked for us. We knew a moment of whirling, and were there.

Barney's gang waited in the lab. They sprang back with a cry, a sob, a prayer of thanks as we whoofed into sight under the bell jar. It turned out that we'd only been absent a couple of hours from this continuum. And maybe no more in hell? We couldn't be sure, our watches having stopped during the first transition. It felt like centuries. I looked upon Valeria and Ginny, and it felt like no time.

The child was blinking those big heaven-colored eyes around in astonishment. It struck me that the terrible things she'd witnessed might have scarred her for life. Shakily, I bent over her. "Are you okay, sweetheart?"

"Ooh, Daddy," she beamed. " 'At was fun. Do it again?"

Ginny set her down. I bent and swept the little one to me. She was restless. "I'm hungry," she complained.

I'd let the prisoner go. After the bell jar was raised, it tried to creep off. But it couldn't leave the pentacle, and Barney had laid the spell I asked for that prevented it from returning to the Low Continuum without our leave. Shining Knife had gotten his warrant. He waited too, with a number of his men. He strode in among us and lifted the demon by its sound leg. The grotesque figure sprattled in his grasp. "Boss, gimme a break, boss," it begged. "I'll squeal."

We found out later that the diabolic mass exchanged for us was a heap of rocks, dirt, and similar material. It happened to include a considerable amount of elemental sulfur, pitch, and light hydrocarbons. Hardy and Griswold had passed some time rearranging this into an explosive-incendiary configuration. Following my request, they mixed in some earthly stuff as well. It had to be safe for us, in case little or none of it got swapped (and in fact, as you see, only a few pounds did). The team scurried around collecting bottles of strong acid, shotgun shells, razor blades, and whatnot. Barney then rigged a photocell-controlled gizmo that would ignite the whole mess the exact instant that it left our universe. I don't suppose that whatever part of hell it materialized in was done any good.

The changeling, of course, vanished from the juvenile home when Valeria was restored. Poor flesh, I hope it was allowed to die.

I didn't think of these matters immediately. Being sure our daughter was well, Ginny and I sought each other. What broke our kiss was a Joy greater yet, a happiness whose echo will never stop chiming in us: "Free! O Father!" And when we could look at this world again, Svartalf was only Svartalf.

The gracious presence within me said: Yes, for this deed Janos Bolyai is made a saint and admitted to the nearness of God. How glad I am. And how glad you won your cause, dear friends, and Valeria Stevenovna is safe and the enemies of the Highest confounded!

(Shyly) I have a selfish reason for additional pleasure, be it confessed. What I observed on this journey has given me some fascinating new ideas. A rigorous theoretical treatment—

I sensed the wish that Lobachevsky could not bring himself to think overtly, and uttered it for him: You'd like to stick around awhile?

—Frankly, yes. A few days, after which I must indeed return. It would be marvelous to explore these discoveries, not as a soul, but once again as a mortal. It is like a game, Steven Pavlovitch. One would like to see how far it is possible to go within the constraints of humanity. (In haste) But I beg you, esteemed friend, do not consider this a request. Your lady and yourself have endured perils, hardships, and fear of losing more than your lives. You wish to celebrate your triumph. Believe me, I would never be so indelicate as to—

I looked fondly, a trifle wistfully at Ginny and thought back: I know what you mean, Nick, and I've every intention of celebrating with her, at frequent intervals, till we reach an implausibly ripe old age.

But you've forgotten that the flesh has physical as well as mental limits. She needs a good rest. I need a better one. You might as well stay for a bit. Besides, I want to see that what you write goes to the proper journals. It'll be quite a boost for our side.

And this is how it happened that, although Bolyai led our expedition, Lobachevsky published first.

XXXV

THERE'S NO SUCH thing as living happily ever after.

You'd like to be famous? You can have it, buster: every last reporter, crystal interview, daily ton of mail, pitch for Worthy Causes, autograph hound, belligerent drunk, crank phone call, uninvited visitor, sycophant, and you name it. Luckily, we followed sound advice and played loose. I ended up with a better position than I probably rate, Ginny with the freelance studio she'd always wanted, and we're no longer especially newsworthy. Meanwhile Valeria's gotten to the boy-friend stage, and none of them seem worthy of her. They tell me every father of a girl goes through that. The other children keep me too busy to fret much.

It was quite a story. The demon's public confession brought the Johannine Church down in spectacular style. We've got its diehards around yet, but they're harmless. Then there's the reformed sect of it—where my old sparring partner Marmiadon is prominent—that tries to promulgate the Gospel of Love as merely another creed. Since the Gnosticism and the secret diabolism are out, I don't expect that either St. Peter or gentle St. John greatly mind.

Before he left me for Heaven, Lobachevsky proved some theorems I don't understand. I'm told they've doubled the effectiveness of the spells that Barney's people worked out in those long-ago terrible hours. Our buddy Bob Shining Knife had a lot to do with arranging sensible dissemination of the new knowledge. It has to be classified; you can't trust any old nut with the capabilities conferred. However, the United States government is not the only one that knows how to invade hell if provoked. The armies of Earth couldn't hope to conquer it, but they could make big trouble, and Heaven would probably intervene. As a result, we've no cause to fear other direct assaults from the Adversary's dominion. From men, yes-because he still tempts, corrupts, seduces, tricks, and betrays. But I think if we keep our honor clean and our powder dry we won't suffer more than we can bear.

Looking back, I often can't believe it happened: that this was done by a red-haired witch, a bobtailed werewolf, and a snooty black tomcat. Then I remember it's the Adversary who is humorless. I'm sure God likes to laugh.