The Return | Page 9

are, we will need help in
getting it open."
"Of course! This is wonderful. Copies of The Books!" the Reader exclaimed. "We

thought we had the only one left in the world!"
"Not just The Books, Stamford; other books," the Toon Leader told him. "The books
which are mentioned in The Books. But of course we will help you. You have a map to
show where they are?"
"Not a map; just some information. But we can work out the location of the crypt."
"A ritual," Stamford Rawson said happily. "Of course."
* * * * *
They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with the Toon Leader and
the Reader and five or six of the leaders of the community. The food was plentiful, but
Altamont found himself wishing that the first book they found in the Carnegie Library
crypt would be a cook book.
In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated. The latter attached himself to the Tenant,
the Reader, and an old woman, Irene Klein, who was almost a hundred years old and was
the repository and arbiter of most of the community's oral legends. Altamont, on the other
hand, started, with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the miller, to inspect
the gunshop and grist mill. Joined by half a dozen more of the village craftsmen, they
visited the forge and foundry, the sawmill, the wagon shop. Altamont looked at the flume,
a rough structure of logs lined with sheet aluminum, and at the nitriary, a shed-roofed pit
in which potassium nitrate was extracted from the community's animal refuse. Then,
loading his guides into the helicopter, they took off for a visit to the powder mill on the
island and a trip up the river.
They were a badly scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground
receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing disastrous
seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear, and by the time they set
down on the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed aviation enthusiasts. The trip
up-river was an even bigger success; the high point came when Altamont set his controls
for Hover, pointed out a snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to
fire one of the machine guns at it. The lead balls of their own black-powder rifles would
have plunked into the waterlogged wood without visible effect; the copper-jacketed
machine-gun bullets ripped it to splinters. They returned for a final visit to the distillery
awed by what they had seen.
* * * * *
"Monty, I don't know what the devil to make of this crowd," Loudons said, that
evening, after the feast, when they had entered the helicopter and prepared to retire.
"We've run into some weird communities--that lot down in Old Mexico who live in the
church and claim they have a divine mission to redeem the world by prayer, fasting and
flagellation, or those yogis in Los Angeles--"
"Or the Blackout Boys in Detroit," Altamont added.
"That's understandable," Loudons said, "after what their ancestors went through in the
Last War. But this crowd, here! The descendants of an old United States Army infantry
platoon, with a fully developed religion centered on a slain and resurrected
god--Normally, it would take thousands of years for a slain-god religion to develop, and
then only from the field-fertility magic of primitive agriculturists. Well, you saw these
people's fields from the air. Some of the members of that old platoon were men who
knew the latest methods of scientific farming; they didn't need naive fairy tales about the
planting and germination of seed."

"Sure this religion isn't just a variant of Christianity?"
"Absolutely not. In the first place, these Sacred Books can't be the Bible--you heard
Tenant Jones say that they mentioned firearms that used cartridges. That means that they
can't be older than 1860 at the very earliest. And in the second place, this slain god wasn't
crucified or put to death by any form of execution; he perished, together with his enemy,
in combat, and both god and devil were later resurrected. The Enemy is supposed to be
the master mind back of these cannibal savages in the woods and also in the ruins."
"Did you get a look at these Sacred Books, or find out what they might be?"
Loudons shook his head disgustedly. "Every time I brought up the question, they
evaded. The Tenant sent the Reader out to bring in this old lady, Irene Klein--she was a
perfect gold mine of information about the history and traditions of the Toon, by the
way--and then he sent him out on some other errand, undoubtedly to pass the word not to
talk to us about their religion."