GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"How could he have done that?" Burton said. "And why?"

"How and why was any of this done?"

They went cautiously through the opening, Burton leading. The room was a forty-foot cube. The wall behind the desk was a pale green, but the others displayed moving scenes, one from that planet called the Gardenworld, one of a tropical island as seen from a great distance, and one, which Loga must have been facing, of a daytime thunderstorm at a high altitude. Dark angry clouds roiled, and lightning spat brightly but silently from cloud to cloud.

Incongruous in the clouds, the active screens hung glowing, still displaying the rooms of the tenants.

Red pools glistened on the desk and the hardwood floor.

"Get a sample of the liquid," Burton said to Frigate. "The computer over there can analyze it."

Frigate grunted and went to a cabinet to look for something with which to take a specimen. Burton walked around the room but saw nothing that looked like a clue. It was too bad that the other viewers had not been on. However, whoever had done this must have made sure that they were not active.

Nur, Behn, and Turpin went to search nearby rooms. Burton activated the screens that would display these rooms. Doubtless, none but the three would be in them, but he wanted to keep an eye on them. If one person could be turned into a liquid, why not others?

He stooped and passed a finger through the wetness on the floor. When he straightened up, he held the tip of the finger a few inches from his eyes.

"You aren't going to taste it?" Alice said.

"I shouldn't. In some respects, Loga was rather poisonous. It'd be a strange form of ca

He licked the finger, made a face, and said, 'The mass of the Mass is inversely proportional to the faith of the square."

Alice should not have been shocked, not after what she had gone through on this world. She did look repulsed, though whether it was by his act or his words he did not know.

"Tastes like blood, vintage human," he said.

Nur, Behn, and Li Po came into the room. "There is no one there," the Chinese said. "Not even his ghost."

Aphra Behn said, "Dick, what did Loga say?"

"I don't think he could have said anything. You saw him crack and melt. How could he have spoken after that?"

"It was his voice," Behn said. "Whoever said it, what did it mean?"

" I tsab u. That's Ethical for 'Who are you?' "

"That's what the Caterpillar said," Alice murmured.

"And Alice in Wonderland couldn't tell him," Burton said. "The whole event is crazy."

Frigate called them to the console in the corner.

"I put the specimen in the slot and asked for identification. There you are. You couldn't identify an individual by his blood in a.d. 1983, but now ..."

The console screen displayed, in English, as Frigate had requested: INDIVIDUAL IDENTIFIED: LOGA .

Beneath that was the analysis. The liquid was composed of those elements which made up the human body, and they were in the proper proportions. Flesh had indeed turned into liquid.

"Unless the Computer is lying," Nur said.

Burton swung around to face him. "What do you mean by that?"

"The Computer may have an override command. It could have been told to give this report."

"By whom? Only Loga could do that!"

Nur shrugged thin, brown, and bony shoulders.

"Perhaps. An unknown could be in the tower. Remember what Pete thought he heard when we were celebrating our victory."

"Footsteps in the corridor outside the room!" Burton said. "Frigate said he thought it was his imagination!"

"Ah, but was it?"

It was not necessary to use the console. Burton asked the Computer—as distinguished from the small auxiliary computers—a few questions. A circular section of the wall glowed, and words on it indicated that no unauthorized person had entered Loga's room. It denied that Loga's commands had been overridden.

"Which it would, I must admit, if this mysterious stranger had told it to do so," Burton said. "If that's happened ... well, by God, we are in trouble 1"

He asked for a rerun of the scene they had witnessed through their viewers. There was none. Loga had not directed the Computer to record it.

"I thought everything was going to be clear, unmysterious, straightforward from now on," Frigate said. "I should have known better. It never is."

He paused, then said softly, "He cracked open like Humpty Dumpty, except that Humpty Dumpty broke after he fell, not before. And then he turned to water like the Wicked Witch of the West."

Burton, who had died in 1890, did not understand the last reference. He made a mental note to ask the American about it when there was time.

Burton was going to ask the Computer to send in a robot to clean up the liquid. He decided, after some thought, to leave the room as it had been found. He would lock the door to the apartment with a codeword that only he knew. And then, if someone unlocked it ...

What could he do?

Nothing. But he would at least know that there was an intruder.

Nur said, "We've been assuming that what we thought we saw take place here actually did take place."

"You think that what we saw was computer-simulation?" Frigate said.

"It's possible."

"But what about the liquid?" Burton said. "That's not simulated."

"It could be synthetic, a false clue. Loga's voice could have been reproduced to deceive and confuse us."

Alice said, "Wouldn't it be more logical just to abduct Loga? We might have thought that Loga had just gone away for some reason or another."

"Why in the world would he do that, Alice?" Burton said.

"We were to return to The Valley day after tomorrow," Li Po said. "If Loga wanted to get rid of us, he'd have it done in two days. No, that liquid ... the whole thing ... there's someone else in the tower."

"That makes ten in the tower then," Nur said.

"Ten?" Burton said.

"The eight of us. Plus the unknown who did away with Loga, though more than one might have done that. Plus Fear. That makes at least ten."

"In a sense, we're gods," Frigate said.

"Gods in a gaol," Burton said.

If they felt godlike, their faces did not show the vast assurance and happiness that must distinguish gods from humanity. The first area they had gone to from Loga's apartment was the highest story in the tower. Here, in a huge chamber, was the hangar of the Ethicals. There were two hundred aerial and spacecraft of various kinds there, in any of which they could have flown to any place in The Valley. However, the hangar hatches had to be opened, and that the Computer refused to do. Nor could they operate the hatch mechanisms manually.

The unknown who had liquefied Loga had inserted an override command in the Computer. Only he—or she—or they— had the power to raise the hangar hatches.

They stood close together in a corner of the immense room. The floor, walls, and ceilings were a monotonous, overpowering gray, the color of prison cells. Their means of escape, the saucer-shaped, sausage-shaped and insect-shaped machines, seemed to brood in the silence. They were waiting to be used. But by whom?

At the opposite wall, a thousand feet away, was a fat cigar-shaped vessel, the largest of the spaceships. It was five hundred feet long and had a maximum diameter of two hundred feet. This could be used to travel to the Gardenworld, wherever that planet was. Loga had said that it would take a hundred years, Earthtime, to arrive at its destination. Loga had also said that the ship was so computerized-automatic that a person of average intelligence and little knowledge of science could operate it.

Burton's voice broke the silence.

"We have some immediate pressing problems. We must find out who did that horrible thing to Loga. And we must find a way to cancel the override inhibits in the Computer."