The room into which they stepped seemed even larger than the one they
had left. The distances were just as hard to measure, and why Forrester
had the feeling, he couldn't have said, but it did feel larger. The
sense of enormous space hung over it.
The wall colors were just the same, however, dripping and changing in a
continuous flow of patterns, with the little sunbursts and rainbows
appearing here and there without any visible reason.
But the room itself was comparatively unimportant, Forrester knew. It
was what went on in the room that sent shivers up his spine, and
instructed one knee to start knocking against other one. He had heard of
the Court of the Gods, though as far as he knew no mortal had ever seen
it. There were certainly no photographs of it, even in the most
exhaustive travel books.
Forrester knew without question that he was standing in that Courtroom.
The knowledge did not make him calm. And the beings sitting and
reclining on couches along the shimmering walls made him feel even
worse. He recognized every one of them, and every one sent a new shock
of awe running through his nerves. His stomach felt like a hard rubber
handball.
There was Zeus All-Father, with his great, silvery, ringleted beard. His
hands were combing through it and he was frowning majestically into the
distance. Next to him was the imperious Hera, Mother of the Gods. She
sat with her hands folded in her lap, as if she were waiting for the end
of the world to be announced. There was Mars, tough and hairy-chested,
scratching his side with one hand and scowling horribly. His fierce,
bearded face looked somehow out of place without the battle helmet that
usually topped it. The horned and goat-legged Pan was there, and Vulcan,
crippled and ugly with his squat body and giant arms, reclining like an
ape on a couch all alone, and motherly looking Ceres using one hand to
pat her hair as if she, not Forrester, were the nervous one.
Athena was there, too, lovely and gray-eyed. She seemed to be smiling at
him with special favor, and Forrester felt grateful.
He needed all the help he could get.
But the other Gods were absent. Where were they? Pluto and Phoebus
Apollo were missing, and so were Mercury, Neptune, Dionysus and Diana.
And ...
"Ah," the great voice of Zeus boomed, as Forrester and Venus stepped
through the Veil. Forrester heard the voice and shuddered. "The mortal
is here," Zeus went on in his awe-inspiring roar. "Welcome, Mortal!"
Forrester opened his mouth, but Hera got in ahead of him.
She leaned over to her divine husband and hissed, in a tone audible to
everyone in the room: "Don't belabor the obvious, dear. Enough's
enough."
"It is?" Zeus said. The roar was exactly the same. "I'm not at all sure.
No! Of course not. Naturally not, my dear. Naturally not." He looked
around slowly, nodding his great head. "Now, now. Let's see. Do we have
a quorum? I don't see Morpheus. Where's Morpheus?"
"Asleep, as usual," Mars growled. He finished scratching his side and
began on his beard. "Where else would the old fool be? He's nothing but
a bore anyway and I say to Hades with him. Let's get on."
"Now, Ares," Pallas Athena said mildly. "Don't be crude."
"Crude?" Mars bellowed. "All I said was that the old bore's not here.
It's true, isn't it? What in Hades is so crude about it?"
"Hah!" Vulcan growled, in a bass voice that seemed to come from the
bottom of a large barrel. "Look who mentions being a bore."
"Why, you--" Mars started.
"Children!" Hera snapped at once.
There was quiet, and Forrester had time to get dizzy. Maybe, he thought,
he had been traveling too much. After all, he had started in New York,
and then he had found himself on what he suspected was Mount Olympus, in
Greece. And now he was somewhere else.
He wasn't entirely sure where. The Court of the Gods existed; he knew
that. But he had never heard just where it existed, and it was entirely
possible that no mortal knew. In which case, Forrester thought
confusedly, I don't even know where I am.
For the first time, he began to think seriously that, perhaps, he was
sane after all. Maybe everything he was seeing and hearing was true. It
was certainly beginning to look that way. And, in that case, maybe the
dizziness he felt was just airsickness, or spacesickness, or whatever
kind of sickness came from traveling through those blue Veils.
At least, he told himself, thinking of the old man he had met on the way
downtown, at least it beat the subway.
He looked behind him. He and Venus were standing in the center of the
room. There was no blue veil behind them. It had, apparently, done its
duty and gone away.
The subway, Forrester told himself solemnly, didn't do that.
Zeus cleared his throat ponderously. "I count eight of us," he said.
"Eight, all told. Of course, that's eight without the mortal." He
paused, and then added: "If you count the mortal in, there are nine."
Pan stirred. "That's a quorum," he announced in a hoarse voice that had
a heavy vibrato in it. It reminded Forrester, oddly, of the bleating of
a goat. Pan crossed his legs and his hooves clashed, striking sparks.
"Pluto and Poseidon said they'd accept our judgment."
"Why the absence?" Vulcan said shortly.
"A storm, I think," Pan said. "Out in the North Atlantic, if memory
serves--and it does. As far as I recall, there are four ships sunk so
far. Quite an affair."
Vulcan said: "Ah," and reclined again.