I looked around in the bright moonlight. Two years had changed the Illinois-scape. There were many more trees than there had been, trees of a type you didn’t expect to see this far north. Whoever was responsible for the change had had many seeds and sprouts shipped in, in preparation for the warmer climate. I knew, for I had checked in Chicago on various shipments and had found that a man by the name of Smith—Smith!—had, two weeks after Durham’s disappearance, begun ordering from tropical countries. The packages had gone to an Onaback house and had ended up in the soil hereabouts. Durham must have realized that this river-valley area couldn’t support its customary 300,000 people, once the railroads and trucks quit shipping in cans of food and fresh milk and provisions. The countryside would have been stripped by the hungry hordes.
But when you looked around at the fruit trees, bananas, cherries, apples, pears, oranges, and others, most of them out of season and flourishing in soils thought unfavorable for their growth—when you noted the blackberry, blueberry, gooseberry, and raspberry bushes, the melons and potatoes and tomatoes on the ground—all large enough to have won county-fair first prizes in any pre-Brew age—then you realized there was no lack of food. All you had to do was pick it and eat.
“It looks to me,” whispered Alice Lewis, “like the Garden of Eden.”
“Stop talking treason, Alice!” I snapped.
She iced me with a look. “Don’t be silly. And don’t call me Alice. I’m a major in the Marines.”
“Pardon,” I said. “But we’d better drop the rank. The natives might wonder. What’s more, we’d better shed these clothes before we run into somebody.”
She wanted to object, but she had her orders. Even though we were to be together at least thirty-six hours, and would be mother-naked all that time, she insisted we go into the bushes to peel. I didn’t argue.
I stepped behind a tree and took off my shorts. At the same time, I smelled cigar smoke. I slipped off the webbing holding the tank to my back and walked out onto the narrow trail. I got a hell of a shock.
A monster leaned against a tree, his short legs crossed, a big Havana sticking from the side of his carnivorous mouth, his thumbs tucked in an imaginary vest.
I shouldn’t have been frightened. I should have been amused. This creature had stepped right out of a very famous comic strip. He stood seven feet high, had a bright green hide and yellow-brown plates running down his chest and belly. His legs were very short; his trunk, long. His face was half-man, half alligator. He had two enormous bumps on top of his head and big dish-sized eyes. The same half-kindly, half-stupid, and arrogant look was upon his face. He was complete, even to having four fingers instead of five.
My shock came not only from the unexpectedness of his appearance. There is a big difference between something seen on paper and that seen in the flesh. This thing was cute and humorous and lovable in the strip. Transformed into living color and substance, it was monstrous.
“Don’t get scared,” said the apparition. “I grow on you after a while.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
At that moment, Alice stepped out from behind a tree. She gasped, and she grabbed my arm.
He waved his cigar. “I’m the Allegory on the Banks of the Illinois. Welcome, strangers, to the domain of the Great Mahrud.”
I didn’t know what he meant by those last few words. And it took a minute to figure out that his title was a pun derived from the aforesaid cartoonist and from Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop.
“Albert Allegory is the full name,” he said. “That is, in this metamorph. Other forms, other names, you know. And you two, I suppose, are outsiders who wish to live along the Illinois, drink from the Brew, and worship the Bull.”
He held out his hand with the two inside fingers clenched and the thumb and outside finger extended.
“This is the sign that every true believer makes when he meets another,” he said. “Remember it, and you’ll be saved much trouble.”
“How do you know I’m from the outside?” I asked. I didn’t try to lie. He didn’t seem to be bent on hurting us.
He laughed, and his vast mouth megaphoned the sound. Alice, no longer the cocky WHAM officer, gripped my hand hard.
He said, “I’m sort of a demigod, you might say. When Mahrud, bull be his name, became a god, he wrote a letter to me— using the U. S. mails of course—and invited me to come here and demigod for him. I’d never cared too much for the world as it was so I slipped in past the Army cordon and took over the duties that Mahrud, bull be his name, gave me.”
I, too, had received a letter from my former professor. It had arrived before the trouble developed, and I had not understood his invitation to come live with him and be his demigod. I’d thought he’d slipped a gear or two.
For lack of anything pertinent to say, I asked, “What are your duties?”
He waved his cigar again. “My job, which is anything but onerous, is to meet outsiders and caution them to keep their eyes open. They are to remember that not everything is what it seems, and they are to look beyond the surface of the deed for the symbol.”
He puffed on his cigar and then said, “I have a question for you. I don’t want you to answer it now, but I want you to think about it and give me an answer later.” He blew smoke again. “My question is this—where do you want to go now?”
He didn’t offer to expand his question. He said, “So long,” and strolled off down a side-path, his short legs seeming to move almost independently of his elongated saurian torso. I stared for a moment, still shaking from the encounter. Then I returned to the tree behind which I’d left my water-tank and strapped it back on.
We walked away fast. Alice was so subdued that she did not seem conscious of our nudity. After a while, she said, “Something like that frightens me. How could a man assume a form like that?”
“We’ll find out,” I said with more optimism than I felt. “I think we’d better be prepared for just about anything.”
“Perhaps the story Mrs. Durham told you back at Base was true.”
I nodded. The Professor’s wife had said that, shortly before the Area was sealed off, she had gone to the bluffs across the river, where she knew her husband was. Even though he had announced himself a god by then, she was not afraid of him.
Mrs. Durham had taken two lawyers along, just in case. She was highly incoherent about what happened across the river. But some strange force, apparently operated by Dr. Durham, had turned her into a large tailed ape, causing her to flee. The two lawyers, metamorphosed into skunks, had also beaten a retreat.
Considering these strange events, Alice said, “What I can’t understand is how Durham could do these things. Where’s his power? What sort of gadget does he have?”
Hot as it was, my skin developed gooseflesh. I could scarcely tell her that I was almost certainly responsible for this entire situation. I felt guilty enough without actually telling the truth. Moreover, if I had told her what I believed to be the truth, she’d have known I was crazy. Nevertheless, that was the way it was, and that was why I had volunteered for this assignment. I’d started it; I had to finish it.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “What about a drink, Pops? We may not get a chance at another for a long time.”
“Damn it,” I said as I slipped off the tank, “don’t call me Pops! My name is Daniel Temper, and I’m not so old that I could be…”
I stopped. I was old enough to be her father. In the Kentucky mountains, at any rate.
Knowing what I was thinking, she smiled and held out the little cup she had taken from the clip on the tank’s side. I growled, “A man’s only as old as he feels, and I don’t feel over thirty.”
At that moment I caught the flicker of moonlight on a form coming down the path. “Duck!” I said to Alice.
She just had time to dive into the grass. As for me, the tank got in my way, so I decided to stay there and brazen things out.
When I saw what was coming down the path, I wished I had
taken off the tank. Weren’t there any human beings in this Godforsaken land? First it was the Allegory. Now it was the Ass.
He said, “Hello, brother,” and before I could think of a good comeback, he threw his strange head back and loosed tremendous laughter that was half ha-ha! and half hee-haw!
I didn’t think it was funny. I was far too tense to pretend amusement. Moreover, his breath stank of Brew. I was half-sick before I could back up to escape it.
He was tall and covered with short blond hair, unlike most asses, and he stood upon two manlike legs that ended in broad hoofs. He had two long hairy ears, but, otherwise, he was as human as anybody else you might meet in the woods—or on the street. And his name, as he wasn’t backward in telling me, was Polivinosel.
He said, “Why are you carrying that tank?”
“I’ve been smuggling the Brew to the outside.”
His grin revealed long yellow horselike teeth. “Bootlegging, eh? But what do they pay you with? Moneys no good to a worshiper of the All-Bull.”
He held up his right hand. The thumb and two middle fingers were bent. The index finger and little finger were held straight out. I didn’t respond immediately, and he looked hard. I imitated his gesture, and he relaxed a little.
“I’m bootlegging for the love of it,” I said. “And also to spread the gospel.”
Where that last phrase came from, I had no notion. Perhaps from the reference to “worshiper” and the vaguely religious-looking sign that Polivinosel had made.
He reached out a big hairy hand and turned the spigot on my tank. Before I could move, he had poured out enough to fill his cupped palm. He raised his hand to his lips and slurped loudly. He blew the liquid out so it sprayed all over me. “Whee-oo! That’s water!”
“Of course,” I said. “After I get rid of my load of Brew, I fill the tank with ordinary water. If I’m caught by the border patrol, I tell them I’m smuggling pure water into our area.”
Polivinosel went hoo-hah-hah and slapped his thigh so hard, it sounded like an axe biting into a tree.
“That’s not all,” I said. “I even have an agreement with some of the higher officers. They allow me to slip through if I bring them back some Brew.”
He winked and brayed and slapped his thigh again. “Corruption, eh, brother? Even brass will rust. I tell you, it won’t be long until the Brew of the Bull spreads everywhere.”
Again he made that sign, and I did so almost at the same time.
He said, “I’ll walk with you a mile or so. My worshipers—the local Cult of the Ass—are holding a fertility ceremony down the path a way. Care to join us?”
I shuddered. “No, thank you,” I said fervently.
I had witnessed one of those orgies through a pair of fieldglasses one night. The huge bonfire had been about two hundred yards inside the forbidden boundary. Against its hellish flame, I could see the white and capering bodies of absolutely uninhibited men and women. It was a long time before I could get that scene out of my mind. I used to dream about it.
When I declined the invitation, Polivinosel brayed again and slapped me on the back, or where my back would have been if my tank hadn’t been in the way. As it was, I fell on my hands and knees in a patch of tall grass. I was furious. I not only resented his too-high spirits, I was afraid he had bent the thin-walled tank and sprung a leak in its seams.
But that wasn’t the main reason I didn’t get up at once. I couldn’t move because I was staring into Alice’s big blue eyes.
Polivinosel gave a loud whoop and leaped through the air and landed beside me. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his big ugly mule-eared face into Alice’s and bellowed, “How now, white cow! How high browse thou?”
He grabbed Alice by the waist and lifted her up high, getting up himself at the same time. There he held her in the moonlight and turned her around and over and over, as if she were a strange-looking bug he had caught crawling in the weeds.
She squealed and gasped, “Damn you, you big jackass, take your filthy paws off me!”
“I’m Polivinosel, the local god of fertility!” he brayed. “It’s my duty—and privilege—to inspect your qualifications. Tell me, daughter, have you prayed recently for a son or daughter? Are your crops coming along? How are your cabbages growing? What about your onions and your parsnips? Are your hens laying enough eggs?”
Instead of being frightened, Alice got angry. “All right, Your Asininity, would you please let me down? And quit looking at me with those big lecherous eyes. If you want what I think you do, hurry along to your own orgy. Your worshipers are waiting for you.”
He opened his hands so she fell to the ground. Fortunately, she was quick and lithe and landed on her feet. She started to walk away, but he reached out and grabbed her by the wrist.
“You’re going the wrong way, my pretty little daughter. The infidels are patrolling the border only a few hundred yards away.
You wouldn’t want to get caught. Then you’d not be able to drink the divine Brew anymore. You wouldn’t want that, would you?“
“I’ll take care of myself, thank you,” she said huskily. “Just leave me alone. It’s getting so a girl can’t take a snooze by herself in the grass without some minor deity or other wanting to wrestle!”
Alice was picking up the local lingo fast.
“Well, now, daughter, you can’t blame us godlings for that. Not when you’re built like a goddess yourself.”
He gave that titanic bray that should have knocked us down, then grabbed both of us by the wrists and dragged us along the path.
“Come along, little ones. I’ll introduce you around. And we’ll all have a ball at the Feast of the Ass.” Again, the loud offensive bray. I could see why Durham had metamorphosed this fellow into his present form.
That thought brought me up short. The question was, how had he done it? I didn’t believe in supernatural powers, of course. If there were any, they weren’t possessed by man. And anything that went on in this physical universe had to obey physical laws.
Take Polivinosel’s ears and hoofs. I had a good chance to study them more closely as I walked with him. His ears may have been changed, like Bottoms, into a donkey’s, but whoever had done it had not had an accurate picture in his mind. They were essentially human ears, elongated and covered over with tiny hairs.
As for the legs, they were human, not equine. It was true he had no feet. But his pale, shiny hoofs, though cast into a good likeness of a horse’s, were evidently made of the same stuff as toenails. And there was still the faintest outline and curve of five toes.
It was evident that some biological sculptor had had to rechisel and then regrow the basic human form.
I looked at Alice to see what she thought of him. She was magnificent in her anger. As Polivinosel had been uncouth enough to mention, she had a superb figure. She was the sort of girl who is always president of her college sorority, queen of the Senior Prom, and engaged to a Senators son. The type I had never had a chance with when I was working my way through Traybell University.
Polivinosel suddenly stopped and roared, “Look, you, what’s your name?”
“Daniel Temper,” I said.
“Daniel Temper? D.T.? Ah, hah, hoo, hah, hah! Listen, Old D.T., throw that tank away. It burdens you down, and you look like an ass, a veritable beast of burden, with it on your back. And I won’t have anybody going around imitating me, see? Hoohah-heehaw! Get it?”
He punched me in the ribs with a big thumb as hard as horn. It was all I could do to keep from swinging at him. I never hated a man—or deity—so much. Durham had failed if he had thought to punish him. Polivinosel seemed to be proud of his transformation and had, if I understood him correctly, profited enough by his experience to start a cult. Of course, he wasn’t the first to make a religion of his infirmity.
“How will I be able to bootleg the Brew out?” I asked.
“Who cares?” he said. “Your piddling little operations won’t help the spread of the div
ine Drink much. Leave that up to the rivers of the world and to Mahrud, bull be his name.”
He made that peculiar sign again.
I couldn’t argue with him. He’d have torn the tank off my back. Slowly, I unstrapped it. He helped me by grabbing it and throwing it off into the darkness of the woods.
Immediately, I became so thirsty, I could hardly stand it.
“You don’t want that filthy stuff!” Polivinosel brayed. “Come with me to the Place of the Ass! I have a nice little temple there— nothing fancy, understand, like the Flower Palace of Mahrud, may he be all bull—but it will do. And we do have a good time.”
All this while, he was ogling Alice shamelessly and projecting more than his thoughts. Like all the degenerates in this area, he had absolutely no inhibitions. If I had had a gun, I think I would have shot him then and there. That is, if the cartridges could have exploded.
“Look here,” I said, abandoning caution in my anger. “We’re going where we damn well please.” I grabbed the girl’s wrist. More wrist-grabbing going on lately. “Come on, Alice, let’s leave this glorified donkey.”
Polivinosel loomed in our way. The slightly Mongolian tilt of his eyes made him look more Missouri-mulish than ever. Big and mean and powerful, with the accent on mean.
“Don’t think for a minute,” he bellowed, “that you’re going to get me mad enough to harm you so you can go tell your prayerman to report me to Mahrud! You can’t tempt me into wrath! That would be a mortal sin, mortals!”
Shouting about my not being able to disturb his Olympian aloofness, he put his arm around my neck and with the other hand reached into my mouth and yanked out my upper plate.
“You and your mushmouthing annoy me!” he cried.
He released his choking grip around my neck and threw the plate into the shadows of the forest. I rushed toward the bush where I thought I’d seen the white teeth land. I got down on my hands and knees and groped frantically around, but I couldn’t find them.
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