It was Lorna, all right. The voice, like the face, was idealized almost out of all recognition—but not quite. Just enough of the old Lorna's inflection and tonal qualities remained to make me sure I knew her. Down from the sky the gentle music of the voice floated softly.

  "It is the hour for my withdrawal now," Lorna informed the city. "Now I go to my meditation and all of you, my faithful friends, go out to your evening's pastimes. Go with my blessing, Malescans. Remember your priests and their teachings.

  "Drop your tithe without fail into the Temple box when you pay your entrance fees tonight. Be virtuous, be happy. Ensure your reincarnation into higher calling by your conduct tonight and every night. I will await you in Paradise, my friends. I will await you in the sacred pathways of New York."

  I heard a tremendous breath of murmured response all around me as the image began to fade. I couldn't believe what the words were that every man and woman within hearing said as Lorna grew dimmer upon the cloud. And yet I couldn't mistake it. What everyone in the city was murmuring in hushed devout accents was an echo of Lorna's last words.

  "New York! New York!" all Malesco whispered, and the light faded from overhead.

  -

  Chapter VII

  FALVI hurried up the broad steps under the dome of the Baths. The colored lights that said BATH OF THE DIVINE WATERS cast changing reflections on the street and shimmered in the glass of the change-maker's booth beside the entrance. I saw Falvi drop a coin in the glass bowl on the side of the booth and the man at the door clicked a turnstile and let him in.

  In a daze I followed him up the steps, fumbling for the "grain" Dio had lent me. I felt both bewildered and heartened by what I had seen in the sky. It still made no sense, but I felt much more important than I had fifteen minutes earlier.

  It didn't add up, of course. One person fell through into Malesco from Earth and was given some sort of super-beauty treatment and enthroned as a goddess mouthing what I couldn't help regarding as rather chauvinistic gibberish from the clouds. Another person fell through—me—and was instantly set upon by priests and hounded like a criminal through the streets.

  The New York angle of this very materialistic religion in Malesco I wouldn't let myself think about. It was too entirely impossible. Later, maybe someone would explain it to me. Until then I couldn't allow myself to speculate. I would pretend it never happened. The sacred pathways of New York!

  The effect of that vision on the clouds had been enormous. When it faded the city had buzzed with awed murmurings, and even now the normal noises of crowds and traffic were not yet back to their previous volume. I overheard enough on the streets to realize that Lorna's visitation was accepted as something like a miracle. Nobody understood or attempted to understand how such a thing could be achieved mechanically.

  This confused me still more. A city of the technological level that Malesco seemed to enjoy ought not to be rendered speechless with awe at the projection of a television image or the broadcasting of a human voice.

  Naturally I didn't know how the priests had done the job.

  Maybe by drawing a pentagram and working black magic. But I knew how it could be done, so the only awe I felt was amazement at the change in Lorna.

  Falvi vanished under the great arched entrance above me. He was certainly an inefficient conspirator. It seemed to me anybody who glanced at him would know without looking twice that here was a spy on the way to plot with a mastermind ringleader for the overthrow of the government.

  The way he kept looking nervously over his shoulder was in itself a complete giveaway. He glanced again without seeing me—even that showed what a failure he was as a secret agent—and then disappeared into the building.

  I wasn't any too sure of myself. My trouser cuffs and shoes showing under the priestly robes made me nervous. If they'd been lit up with neons I couldn't have felt any more conspicuous. I was afraid of losing Falvi, but I just didn't dare walk up to that booth and try to bluff my way in.

  So I waited until a group of five or six men came along, just cheerful enough to be careless, and fell in behind them as they climbed the steps. One of the men threw several coins in the glass bowl beside the booth.

  They started to file in through the turnstile and the man in the booth called something after them that I didn't hear very clearly. But the head man looked back, grinned sheepishly, then threw another coin into a box on the wall.

  The Temple box, I thought—the priestly jackpot that Lorna had plugged in her commercial from the clouds. I wondered wildly how much was due bowl and box. Then I remembered that Falvi hadn't contributed to the box. The flapping of my headdress against my cheek reminded me why. I was a priest too. We didn't have to contribute to our own support.

  I tossed a coin at random into the glass bowl and shoved through the turnstile after the party ahead. Nobody stopped me. Nobody paid me any attention. I couldn't help looking back as I passed the turnstile and, sure enough, Dio was just starting up the steps from the street.

  When I got into the vast rotunda inside, Falvi was nowhere in sight. I had lost him.

  It seemed unnecessarily ironic. I had managed to keep him in sight from the moment of my entrance into Malesco, only to lose him about five minutes short of Coriole. The big hall was full of people, all of them in the brightly colored tunics and short cloaks which the well-dressed man was wearing in Malesco that night. If there were women here they must have had a separate entrance. This crowd was exclusively male.

  Because I had no alternative I let myself drift with them. The newcomers seemed to be heading in a steady stream for a row of arches on the far side of the room. Hoping Falvi had gone that way too, I drifted with them. Under easier circumstances I'd have enjoyed the experience.

  The big room was cool and pleasant. Music was floating through the air from some Malescan version of Muzak; colored lights made layers of rose and green and violet above us, sinking on what looked like drifts of fog in the air overhead. Row upon row of balconies climbed the high dome of the rotunda, and laughter and music and the clink of dishes and glasses drifted down from above. Now and then a slow shower of the advertising confetti sprinkled down through the air or streamers of coiling serpentine spiraled gently downward among the colored mists.

  I wondered why my uncle had never told me about the Baths of the Divine Water. The outer shell of it I remembered from his bedtime tales. Maybe he had never been here. Maybe the Baths were new since his time, though the outer globe of shining fire was not.

  Again I wondered, with consuming curiosity, just what had been his part in Malescan history, whether he'd really entered the place. It was rather like walking through Wonderland and looking for a handkerchief Alice had dropped seventy years ago or the print of her foot on the path through the woods where the Cheshire Cat sat waiting in a tree.

  The Baths were enormous. I knew it was going to be hopeless to run across Falvi by accident or to find Coriole without being actually led up to him and introduced. All I could do was stroll with the crowd and try to ignore the occasional curious glance cast my way.

  A streamer of purple paper wound round my face and commanded me to CALL FOR ALIETTE IN THE CRYSTAL GROTTO. I wondered if Aliette were a girl, a drink, a song or something completely Malescan and strange to me.

  Beyond the arches was a long narrow hall which looked glamorous for a moment and then on second glance turned into a fairly commonplace locker room. The lockers were a wall of shining green stone checkered with white squares, and instead of benches there were rows of individual padded stools. As I stood hesitating, the crowd parted for a moment and there, halfway down the room, I saw a familiar flapped headdress and Falvi's anxious thin nose in profile.

  It seemed too good to be true for a moment. Then common sense took over and I realized that if everyone who entered came first to the locker room it was no miracle that I had found Falvi.

  I edged down the room toward him. He was sitting on a padded stool, one ankle crossed over his knee, working on the lacings of a calf-high boot, and he was talking earnestly to the man on the next stool. The man wore nothing but an orange towel knotted around his waist.

  But he was clothed permanently in a head-to-foot garment of freckles that patterned every inch of his skin as if he had been tattooed with them. He had characteristic stiff reddish hair, cut in a sort of brush on top of his head, and the orange towel looked hideous on him.

  The freckled man laughed, a thin giggle that struck a responsive chord in my mind. Coriole! But I couldn't get near enough to eavesdrop without some better disguise than a priest's robe and headdress. Falvi would know me.

  What better disguise, I realized suddenly, than nothing at all? Clothes make the Malescan, but nakedness in a public bath ought to break down all barriers of fashion. Without my clothing I would be as good a Malescan as anybody so long as I kept my mouth shut.

  I watched what the others were doing, found out and walked along till I located an empty locker. There was a three-inch square of white on the front of it, a blank square. I pushed my thumb against it and the locker slid open. When I took my thumb away, there was a black indentation of whorls and lines left on the white square.

  I stripped in a hurry, having a little difficulty because I wanted to keep my robe on till last. If anyone noticed my garments weren't Malescan, I suppose my entirely fallacious air of self-assurance got me over that hump. Stripped, I stopped feeling conspicuous.

  There was a large sheet of toweling hanging in the locker and, following the precedent I saw around me, I draped myself in the thing before I pushed the locker door shut and heard it click briskly into place. I realized that only my thumb, pressed into the indented print, would unlock it again. My towel was blue, a more fortunate color than Coriole had drawn.

  When I looked again for Falvi I saw him just putting his headdress into the locker. There was a purple towel around his thin shoulders and his thin shanks were meager beneath its lower edge. He was alone.

  In momentary panic I looked around the room, finally spotting an orange towel and a freckled back receding down the hall toward an archway at the end through which steam drifted fragrantly now and then. My job, I realized, was to get to Coriole now and introduce myself before Falvi could intervene.

  If he recognized me, Falvi was perfectly capable of doing something disastrous to us both out of sheer nervous inefficiency. For all I knew he had some deadly weapon hidden in his locker or carried in a fold of the purple towel. Why he was so anxious to kill me I wasn't quite sure, but the fact that he was seemed evident. It was not mine just then to question why.

  I was about to follow Coriole and trust to luck when from the corner of my eye I caught a flash of striped and flapping headdress near the entrance by which I had come. Dio stood there, boldly surveying the hall. I turned my back hastily, thanking heaven for my protective coloration in this hall of nakedness and colored towels.

  Dio would not, I thought, know me unless I were careless. But I was fairly sure he would know Falvi. And then a flash of brilliant wisdom shot through my head and I conceived the perfect scheme for getting rid of both Dio and Falvi.

  Barefooted, I pattered down the warm tiled floor after Falvi, who was now making for the far archway. I caught up with him about where I'd intended, beyond that misty threshold. The room beyond might have been any size, for it was filled with a dry tingling kind of steam or smoke, hot and perhaps electrically charged. My hair stirred a little and a vibration ran along my skin.

  Shapes moved dimly in that curtained dimness. Falvi had blurred to a skinny shadow and I walked faster, timing myself carefully. I had to say something to him, but I didn't want to give him time enough to recognize my face.

  Just behind him, I hissed in his ear, "Listen! It's important! Your life may depend on it!"

  He kept right on walking. As I'd hoped he was thoroughly conditioned to Malescan commercials.

  I spotted a group of shadows near me and just before I drifted toward them I whispered, "Dio's following you, Falvi!"

  He did a double-take. It wasn't what he'd been expecting to hear. Probably his mind assumed for a second or two that he was being ordered to drink Elixir. Then he snapped to a halt and turned round wildly.

  But by then I was safely concealed among that shadowy group of Malescans. I could see Falvi, though not clearly. But he couldn't see me because he didn't know where to look. In that dim room one figure was exactly like another.

  I saw the vague shape that was Falvi hesitate, take a few steps in one direction, pause again. Then the priest made an indistinct gesture with his arms and plunged away, back toward the locker room. I drifted in that direction, but I didn't leave the concealment of the dry steam. There was no sign of Dio, but Falvi was getting dressed again with furious haste.

  I retreated into the mist. I started looking for Coriole. There are few red-haired, freckled men in any single social group. At least, I found only one in the series of interlocking steam rooms here—and that one, of course, was Coriole.

  I located him after a rather nightmarish sequence in which I floated in ghostly fashion through what gradually became an Elysian Fields, peopled with apparitions. I was considering following Ulysses' example and opening a vein in my arm to attract the ghosts when I unexpectedly saw a pair of freckled legs. They were covered with red hair, floating in the fog, the soles of two feet staring up at me with an odd air of black expectancy.

  Luckily the air was thicker than ever here. All I could see was Coriole's legs, but the rest of him was presumably reclining on a couch. I clutched the towel around me and dithered slightly for a bit. Now that I'd found the man, I didn't know what came next.

  I was going on a very tenuous assumption after all. Maybe it would be better to feel him out a little before I gave myself away. I saw the dim outlines of an empty couch beside Coriole's and I sat down on it tentatively. It had a firmly yielding surface, slick and warm. I sat staring at Coriole's dim outlines, revolving opening lines in my mind and discarding them. There was a long pause. Then Coriole stirred.

  "Falvi?" he asked. "Is that you?"

  It was all the cue I needed. I tried to remember what little I heard of Falvi's intonation. I pitched my voice to the front of my mouth, spoke thinly and a little through my nose like Falvi and ventured one brief word.

  "Yes."

  Then I held my breath. Apparently it worked for Coriole rolled over to face me and said, "Lie down then. Relax and tell me what happened."

  Willingly I lay down because it hid my face better. However, my scheme was not to do the talking but to get Coriole started. I said experimentally, "Well—"

  Somebody blundered past us in the steam. Coriole laughed the already familiar thin chuckle and said loudly:

  "Did you hear the story about Blandus? He was complimented on his stable and he said it was because his horses ate such fine pargani. Even the Hierarch didn't get anything better. The joke was of course, that it's exactly what did happen on Tuesdays!"

  I forced a polite laugh. The blunderer stubbed his toe, swore and receded. Coriole, an orange-shrouded ghost in the steam, got up and nudged me.

  "There's an empty clear-room at the end of the row," he said. "This is too public. Come on."

  I made a great effort to put myself in Falvi's mental shoes and said in Falvi's voice, as we stumbled through the dimness:

  "Coriole, what am I going to do?" I put some of Falvi's panic into the query.

  "Do what Dom Corbi did," Coriole said with dreadful joviality. "Call it a nolli secundo and the second race won't be run today."

  I was silent, wondering just how well I really understood Malescan.

  "The first thing I want you to do," my guide said in a lower voice, "is to find that man from New York. The second thing is to stop playing with fire. You had no business fiddling with the Earth-Gates and you ought to know it by now. For a man as timid as you, Falvi, you do run the most terrible risks."

  "I meant to kill him," I said, remembering Falvi's defense on the communicating waffle I had watched him use.

  "I know you did. I'm inclined to have you killed if you do. Fortunately for me he did get away. The next thing's to find him."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "He needs me and I need him," Coriole said illuminatingly, taking me by the arm. He paused for a moment. Then he said, "Here's the passage. Look out!" He stumbled heavily and fell against me, gasping an apology as we both reeled.

  "Sorry," I said mechanically as I regained my balance.

  Coriole stood perfectly still in the mist. He did not speak and he did not move. I couldn't even hear him breathing. There was something terrifying about that sudden immobility. I didn't understand it for a long moment. Then it came to me. I heard the echo of my own apology still hanging in the air, and it was not in Malescan I had spoken.

  I had spoken English.