"Well, nothing," the old man said. "Listen to me, man. I say nothing
against the Gods--right? Nothing at all. Wouldn't want to do anything
like that. But at the same time, it looks to me like we ought to be able
to--reap the fruits of our labors. I read that some place."
"But--"
"In the three thousand years the Gods were gone, we weren't a total
loss, man. Not anything like. We discovered a lot. About nature and
science and like that. We invented science all by ourselves. So how come
the Gods don't let us use it?" The old man dug his elbow once more into
Forrester's rib. "How come?"
"The Gods haven't taken anything away from us," Forrester said.
"Haven't they?" the old man demanded. "How about television? Want to
answer that one, Daddy-O? Years ago, everybody had a television set.
Color and 3-D. The most. The end. Now there's no television at all. Why
not? What happened to it?"
"Well," Forrester said reasonably, "what good is television?"
"What good?" Once more Forrester's rib felt the old man's elbow. "Let me
tell you--"
"No," Forrester interrupted, suddenly irritated with the whole
conversation. "Let _me_ tell _you_. The trouble with your generation was
that all they wanted to do was sit around on their _glutei maximi_ and
be entertained. Like a bunch of hypnotized geese. They didn't want to
do anything for themselves. Half of them couldn't even read. And now
you want to tell me that--"
"Hold it, Daddy-O," the old man said. "You're telling me that the Gods
took away television just because we were a bunch of hypnotized geese.
That it?"
"That's it."
"Okay," the old man said. "So tell me--what are we now? With the Gods
and everything. I mean, man, really--what are we?"
"Now?" Forrester said. "Now you're retired. You're a bunch of retired
hypnotized geese."
The doors of the train slid creakily open and Forrester got out onto the
34th Street platform, walking angrily toward a stairway without looking
back.
True enough, the old man hadn't committed blasphemy, but it had
certainly come close enough there at the end. And if pokes with the
elbow weren't declared blasphemous, or at least equivalent to malicious
mischief, he thought, there was no justice in the world.
The real trouble was that the man had had no respect for the Gods. There
were a good many of the older generation like him. They seemed to feel
that humanity had been better off when the Gods had been away. Forrester
couldn't see it, and felt vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of
someone who believed it. After all, mankind _had_ been on the verge of
mass suicide, and the Gods had mercifully come back from their
self-imposed exile and taken care of things. The exile had been designed
to prove, in the drastic laboratory of three thousand years, that Man by
himself headed like a lemming for self-destruction. And, for Forrester,
the point had been proven.
Yet now that the human race had been saved, there were still men who
griped about the Gods and their return. Forrester silently wished the
pack of them in Hades, enjoying the company of Pluto and his ilk.
At the corner of 34th and Broadway, as he came out of the subway
tunnels, he bought a copy of the _News_ and glanced quickly through the
headlines. But, as always, there was little sensational news. Mars was
doing pretty well for himself, of course: there were two wars going on
in Asia, one in Europe and three revolutions in South and Central
America. That last did seem to be overdoing things a bit, but not
seriously. Forrester shrugged, wondering vaguely when the United States
was going to have its turn.
But he couldn't concentrate on the paper and, after a little while, he
got rid of it and took a look at his watch.
Twenty to six. Forrester decided he could use a drink to brace himself
and steady his nerves.
Just one.
On Sixth Avenue, near 34th Street, there was a bar called, for some
obscure reason, the _Boat House_. Forrester headed for it, went inside
and leaned against the bar. The bartender, a tall man with crew-cut
reddish hair, raised his eyebrows in a questioning fashion.
"What'll it be, friend?"
"Vodka and ginger ale," Forrester said. "A double."
It was still, he told himself uneasily, just one drink. And that was all
he was going to have.
The bartender brought it and Forrester sipped at it, watching his
reflection in the mirror and wishing he felt easier in his mind about
the whole Tower of Zeus affair. Then, very suddenly, he noticed that the
man next to him was looking at him oddly. Forrester didn't like the look
or, for that matter, the man himself, a raw-boned giant with deep-set
eyes and a shock of dead-black hair, but so long as nobody bothered him,
Forrester wasn't going to start anything.
Unfortunately, somebody bothered him. The tall man leaned over and said
loudly: "What's the matter with you, bud? An infidel or something?"
Forrester hesitated. The accusation that he didn't believe in the
practices ordained by the Gods themselves was an irritating one. But he
could see the other side of the question, too. The tall man was
undoubtedly a Dionysian; and, more than that, a member of a small sect
inside the general _corpus_ of Bacchus/Dionysus worshippers. He held
that it was wrong to distill grape or grain products "too far," until
there was nothing left but the alcohol.
That meant disapproval of gin and vodka on the grounds that, unlike
whiskey or brandy, they'd had the "life" distilled out of them.
Forrester, however, was not really fond of brandy and whiskey. He
decided to explain this to the tall man, but at the same time he began
to develop the sinking feeling that it wasn't going to do any good.
Oh, well, there was still room for patience. "Don't fire," as Mars had
said somewhere, "until you see the whites of their eyes."
"No, I'm no infidel," Forrester said politely. "You see, I'm--"
"_No infidel?_" the tall man roared. "Then I tell you what you do. You
pour that slop out and drink a proper drink." He made a grab for
Forrester's glass.
Forrester jerked it back, sloshing it a little in the process--and a few
drops splattered on the other's hand.
"Now look here," Forrester said in a reasonable tone of voice. "I--"
"You spilling that stuff on me? What the blazes are you doing that for?
I got a good mind to--"
Another man stepped into the altercation. This was a square-built,
bullet-headed man with an air that was both truculent and eager. "What's
the matter, Herb?" he asked the tall man. "This guy giving you trouble
or something?" He favored Forrester with a fierce scowl. Forrester
smiled pleasantly back, a little unsure as to how to proceed.
"This guy?" Herb said. "_Trouble?_ Sam, he's an _infidel_!"