Divinity | Page 5

were mere trifles to him. To him, with a gun loaded with a thousand thermal charges each of which was capable of blasting armor plate. The thing wouldn't even have come close if he himself hadn't been such a timid, cowardly fool. Put Malevski in his place, and the detective would have got the creature as it came out of the trees. He wasn't Malevski.
It was a good thing for him that they couldn't know that. Now his position was completely secure. Now he could relax and enjoy his divine life.
He didn't realize that a much greater danger was yet to come. He found that out after the evening ceremony.
* * * * *
The group that came to see him this time was bigger than ever. Evidently, to honor him they had dropped all other work. Yanyoo seemed to have constituted himself Bradley's priest. He made a tremendously long and rhapsodic-sounding speech, but at the end there was no donation of the usual food and flowers. Instead, Yanyoo backed away, all the others doing the same, and looking at Bradley as if expecting him to follow them.
He followed. In this manner, with his worshippers walking respectfully backwards, they arrived at what seemed to Bradley to be an ordinary small hut. Outside the hut was what he took for a curiously shaped log of wood. The inside of the hut was in shadow, but as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw something in one corner. It was a weird-looking head, also of wood.
It struck him then. The log of wood had been the old god, good enough to worship until he had come along and shown them what a god could really do. Now it had been contemptuously deposed and decapitated. The hut was a shrine. It was all his.
He had been promoted after all. The thought didn't please him in the least. Suppose he failed them too--and that was very possible, for he had no idea of what miracles they expected of him. Then he would be deposed and--he gagged at the thought, but he knew that he had to finish it--decapitated.
But for the moment there was no thought of deposing him. The gifts they offered were more lavish than ever. And in addition to the food and flowers, there was something new. A jug, filled with a warm, sweetish-smelling liquid. He could get the odor faintly through the intake valve of his helmet. Later on, when his worshippers were gone and he had his helmet off, he realized that it smelled up the entire hut.
It couldn't be harmful. Nothing that they had offered him so far was harmful. He took a sip--and sighed with content. This was one of the few things he had been lacking. There was alcohol, and there were flavors and essences that reminded him of the drinks he had encountered on a dozen planets. But this was first class stuff, not diluted or adulterated with the thousand and one synthetics that were put in to stretch a good thing as far as it could go.
Without realizing the danger, he downed the entire contents of the jug.
* * * * *
He felt good. He hadn't felt so good in years, not since his mother had made him a special cake for his birthday when he was--let me see now, was it eight or nine? No matter, it had been many years ago, and the occasion had been notable for the fact that she had let him drink some of the older people's punch, made with a tiny bit of some alcoholic drink. He felt very good. He picked up his helmet and put it on his head, and stuck the stem of a green flower rakishly through the exit valve of the helmet, so that the flower seemed to dance every time he exhaled, and staggered out of his hut.
He was fortunate that it was dark. "I'm drunk," he told himself. "Never been so drunk in my life. Never felt so good. Mother never felt so good. Malevski never felt so good."
He passed a shadowy figure in the dark and said, "Hiya, friend and worshipper. Ever see a god drunk before?"
The figure bowed, and kept its head lowered until he had moved on.
"Drunk or sober, I'm shtill divine," he said proudly. And he began to sing, loudly and impressively, his voice orchestral in his own ears within the confines of the helmet. "Ould Lang Shyne, she ain't what she ushed to be, ain't what she ushed to be--" The words came easily, and as it seemed, naturally to his lips.
After awhile, however, he tired of them. After awhile he found that his legs had tired of them. He sat down with a thump under a spiky tree and said solemnly, "Never felt so