Brother Paul landed—in a plush modern office. “Please be seated,” a pretty secretary said. “The Prince of Darkness will be with you in a moment.”

  Nonplussed, he looked around. Could this be the inside of Satan? What had happened? Every office artifact was in place from the electronic voicescriber to the soft classical music issuing from concealed speakers to the holographic photograph of a pleasant rustic scene mounted on the wall. Something was wrong!

  Suddenly his bowels reacted with the letdown. He had not expended the content of his guts during the river crossing. “Please, Miss—is there a—a restroom here?”

  The shapely woman made an indication with one thumb. There was the sign: MEN. Had he looked about more carefully, he would have been able to spare himself the embarrassment of asking—though he could have sworn the sign had not been there a moment ago. With grudging gratefulness he pushed open the door and went through.

  All was in order. Brother Paul positioned himself, took down his trousers (he was now informally garbed in civilian Earth-style clothing)—and discovered what he lacked. His penis was intact, but he had no scrotum and no testicles. The skin of that region was smooth and unscarred; it was as if he had never had anything there. There was no pain, no discomfort. He might as well have been an immature boy—with no prospect of ever maturing. He was a eunuch.

  He sat on the aseptic sonic-flush toilet and relieved himself of the material portion of his concern. He reached for the toilet paper—and saw words printed on it. He held it up to read. It said: BROTHER PAUL CENJI.

  Every piece of paper was printed with his name.

  He smiled. Hell had surprises yet! He reached behind—and paused. Was he to wipe his ass with his own name?

  Well, why not! It was only a joke like the toilet paper that said “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” or “Get a load off your mind” or “Film for your Brownie.” A fiendishly minor joke. His pride had better things to feed on than this. He took the paper and completed his mission.

  “The Horned God will see you now,” the secretary announced as he emerged. She had to be Amaranth, this time in a minor part—but what about his seeing her body crunched into pieces and dropping down…? He squelched that thought; she was indicating another door, and obviously all her appurtenances were intact. Rather than stare at them a second time with more than sexual curiosity, he walked on through.

  Satan came forward to shake Brother Paul’s hand heartily. The Horned God was human-sized, had human hands and feet, and wore a conservative, circa 1995 plastic business suit complete with Gordian-Knot tie. Only His small, neat horns betrayed His nature. “So good to meet a good man!” He said.

  Brother Paul gave up trying to make sense of things. He was here, and this was surely another aspect of Hell. The Devil would have His way, regardless. “It has been an interesting experience, so far,” Brother Paul said.

  “It has not yet begun,” Satan said pleasantly. Who played this part, Brother Paul wondered. There seemed to be only one reasonable prospect, yet that—well, who could make sense of Hell anyway! “Please make yourself comfortable. This may take some time.”

  “Eternity?”

  Satan laughed with mellow empathy. “Not that long, I trust.”

  The question burst out before Brother Paul knew it was coming. “You just swallowed me! How is it that I’m here, in this office—and that You’re here, in human size?

  “I am everywhere,” the Devil said easily. “I am in you, and you are in Me. Evil is ubiquitous; it has no limits.”

  “But—”

  “If you feel more comfortable knowing the specific geography, I shall provide it. I swallowed you; you are now in My belly. You are being digested. My Stomach acids will dissolve away, layer by layer, all the protective mechanisms you have clothed yourself with, until the fundamental truth of your being is achieved. Then, and only then, may you be fairly judged.”

  “But you—”

  “I am in Myself too. I am everywhere. At this moment, a myriad of other souls are being similarly interviewed in separate offices. I am with each—within My own belly. Only when a given soul is properly processed is it ejected for conveyance to its permanent station.”

  “Defecated out?”

  Satan made a little gesture of unconcern. “Most souls are shit; they must be treated as shit. This is, after all, the region of just deserts.”

  “I think my soul is shit too,” Brother Paul said. “I saw it once when I was in meditation. However, it was pointed out to me that shit is ideal compost, a necessary stage in the renewal of life—”

  “Well, we shall find out for sure, now. Shall we proceed?”

  Brother Paul smiled wanly. “Have I any choice?”

  “Oh, yes! Choice is the worst torture of all. Indecision can be far worse than wrong decision. Would you rather postpone this interview?”

  Where would he stay, during the postponement? In one of the several sub-Hells he had toured? “No. Let’s get it over with.”

  “You are intelligent. Were there more like you, My own Redemption would arrive more quickly.”

  ”Your Redemption?” Brother Paul asked, astonished.

  Satan shrugged. “I am supposedly anti-life. It is my ironic torture to be associated with procreation, for with every act of procreation there is another soul, new life. I am the Lord of Evil, and as Evil triumphs in the world, a greater percentage of souls must come to Me. Thus My punishment is governed by yours and outweighs that of all human souls combined. I wish there would be fewer people born and that more of them would go to Heaven. When no souls come to Hell, I will at last be free—and I fear that will be a long, long time yet.”

  “I never thought of that,” Brother Paul said musingly. “God assigned to you all the dirty work—”

  “Precisely. Now if you will lie on that couch, please—”

  “This is a psychoanalysis?”

  “The ultimate. Not for nothing does that term contain the word anal. Sigmund Freud originated the couch posture so that his patients would not see the look of shock on his face as he heard the horrors in their case histories. I really do not suffer from that particular problem, but the couch does seem to work adequately for contemporary occidentals.”

  Brother Paul spread himself on the comfortable couch. “What now?” he asked. “Do I just talk, or—?”

  There was a rustle of papers. “According to your dossier, there was a certain matter of—a clothespin.”

  The clothespin. Instantly Paul was a boy again back on Earth. It was his first time out in a new neighborhood, and he knew no one. He saw a group of children seated in a circle behind a building. They were little girls no older than he, playing some kind of game with many exclamations and titters.

  “Can I play too?” Paul inquired.

  They looked at him, the stranger, with merry incredulity. ” You’re a boy!”

  Paul’s lip pushed out in mild belligerence. “S’not s’pose to be sexcrimination. A boy can do anything a girl can do.”

  They responded with a spontaneous burst of laughter.

  “Well I can!” he insisted.

  “That’s what yoooou think,” one girl said, greatly elevating and extending the you so that it sounded almost like a train whistle.

  “I can play your ol’ game as well as you can!” It wasn’t that he cared about their game; his fledgling pride was at stake.

  “Pride,” Satan said in the background. “One of the Seven Basics. Relates to the Suit of Pentacles. Misapplied Pride brings more souls to Me than any other thing except perhaps Greed—which ties in to the same Suit.”

  The girl studied Paul. She was elfin with curly reddish hair, quite cute. She reminded him of someone—but of course all little girls were played by the same actress. “Wanna bet?”

  “Sure I’ll bet!” But he was uneasy. These girls were too certain of themselves, too full of some secret. They knew something he didn’t. Yet he had no way to retreat.

  “Okay, let him play,” the redhead decided. This was answered by another outbreak of mirth. Strangely, some of it seemed embarrassed; one child was blushing. “But you must promise never to tell.”

  “Okay, I promise,” Paul said. “What’s the game?”

  “Clothespin,” she said, and there was yet another general titter. What was so funny?

  “Okay,” he repeated. “How do you play it?”

  “It’s a contest,” she said. She held up a clothespin—the old-fashioned kind without a spring, just a cylinder of wood bifurcated at one end. The prongs normally slid over the clothes, pinning them to the clothesline so that the wind would not blow them away before the sun dried them out. This was a big clothespin, about fifteen centimeters long. There was a blob of grease on the solid end. “You push it in.”

  “In?” This made no sense to him.

  “Like this,” she said. She bent her knees and hiked up her dress, showing that she wore no panties. The space between her legs was cleft by a hairless crease quite unlike his own apparatus; he was both fascinated and alarmed. She was incomplete! She fitted the clothespin into the crevice and slowly slid it into her body, one centimeter, two, three, four. “Whoever gets it in deepest wins.”

  Paul was not entirely naive about sex. He had heard stories and seen suggestive things on TV and had been able to piece together a fair picture of the mechanics of human copulation. After his initial surprise at his first direct view of the secret region, he was able to integrate the mental picture with the physical geometry. He recognized this game of “Clothespin” as preliminary, surrogate fornication. But more immediate, and far more important, he realized that he had lost his bet. This was not a game a boy could play, for he had no place to insert the pin.

  She withdrew the clothespin and held it up, glistening with the spread grease. “Now you try it. My mark is there.” And she scratched the wood with her fingernail, indicating the level of deepest penetration.

  All eyes turned to him expectantly, the laughter barely suppressed. Oh, they had shown him all right! He was stuck in an impossible position. Outwitted by a bunch of dumb girls!

  Then he had an inspiration. Girls had more apertures than boys had—but he still did have a place. He took the clothespin, took down his pants while the girls went into a fury of guilty tittering, and jammed it in to the shocked amazement of his audience.

  Paul won his bet—and the contest. But at a price. No one told on him, for the girls were well aware that they could not do so without incriminating themselves and adults tended to take very dim views of children’s private pleasures and explorations. So the matter never came to the attention of the parental authorities. But these girls attended the same school Paul did, as it turned out, and some of them were in his own class, and every time he met one of them she would giggle secretively and pass on without speaking to him. He lived in fear that an adult would catch on to the secret. He should have accepted defeat, rather than the victory.

  For when the clothespin came out, there had adhered to it a blob of shit.

  “So that was the root source of your vision of the Turd back in Triumph Seven, Cup Seven!” Satan exclaimed gleefully. “Oh, beautiful; this one will go into my special file!”

  Brother Paul knew he was blushing furiously with the shame of that memory. Naturally Satan was delighted; this was Hell. No physical pitchfork could have given him equivalent agony. Yet it was a relief to know this consciously now.

  “You chose to seal off the original episode,” Satan continued. “The memory drug withdrawal must have also helped to bury it. But it remained in your subconscious, prejudicing both your self-respect and your relations with women. Shit was your nemesis—and now we know the truth.”

  But that was hardly the whole story.

  “Hmm,” Satan mused. “There remains opacity. We have peeled off only one layer of the onion.” He leafed through His papers. “Was it that episode with Therion? No, that was entrapment and too recent. It is necessary for you to realize that your control of these Animations is not complete. When you enter the area of special expertise of another person, his knowledge and thrust preempt the scene. This was especially true in the early stages before your discipline asserted itself. Thus you were only partially responsible for the act in the Castle of the Seven Cups and cannot be damned to Hell solely on that account. The detail—”

  “I don’t want to review the detail!” Brother Paul cried.

  “You forget where you are,” Satan reminded him. “It is necessary to appraise your total record; we do not do shoddy anal-ysis here. Therion has had an anal fixation since his childhood, much stronger than yours; yours was merely a reflection of each boy’s normal progression through this stage on the way to maturity. But the resolution of that belongs to his analysis, not yours. In this case he indulged in passive sodomy, then attempted to eject the result onto the face of the girl: symbolic defiling of all women in the exact manner of his namesake. The final effort he placed in the Seventh Cup for you to find. Thus he sent you into an extraordinary sequence—”

  “Therion—did all that?”

  “He dictated the scene. You merely played the role he specified for you—as others played the roles you specified for them in other scenes. Your will normally dominates; this was an exception owing partly to your private feeling of guilt. You were not properly aware of the nature of the role and would have balked it had you known. So you are guilty of laxity, not intent. We shall have to look deeper to judge you properly.”

  “But I participated!” Brother Paul cried in anguish.

  “So you believe that even in the absence of knowledge or intent, you were culpable because of the act?”

  “Yes,” Brother Paul said without full conviction. “I should have guessed or stayed off those drugs. I should have kept control so as to prevent it happening.”

  “Then you must answer for it,” Satan said. “You must do penance, and the penance is this: provide a species-survival rationale for sodomy.”

  “You want me to justify human homosexuality?” Brother Paul demanded, shocked.

  “I don’t want; I require,” Satan said. “You seem to be having the damnedest trouble remembering your situation. Kindly confine yourself to the issue: sodomy is not identical to homosexuality. The former is an act; the latter is a preference.”

  “My situation,” Brother Paul repeated. He could not at the moment imagine anything more hellish than this penance.

  “No stalling,” Satan said. Flames danced about Brother Paul’s feet: hot-foot galore. The pain was intense.

  “I’m answering!” he screamed, and the flames subsided. Rationale? What rationale could there possibly be? Sodomy was an abomination!

  The flames began to rise again. And under that savage prodding, Brother Paul vomited out his answer, the connection between feet and mouth virtually bypassing brain. “Reproduction is essential to the species. Therefore, it is compulsory behavior, rather than voluntary. Animals have in-heat cycles, with the smell of the female coercing the male to copulation. But human beings are more intelligent; they take longer to mature and have much more to learn. So they need a family situation with a male staying close to help protect, feed, and educate the offspring—”

  “I question the relevance of this line of exploration,” Satan said. “It sounds like an argument for heterosexuality.” The flames reappeared, flicking playfully at Brother Paul’s toes. His feet now seemed to be bare.

  “It’s relevant!” Brother Paul cried. “I am not talking about homosexuality, as you pointed out. I’m talking about the rationale for an act that may occur in a normally heterosexual situation.”

  “Well, I’ll allow it this time,” Satan said. The flames subsided again.

  “So in primates the heat cycle is abandoned,” Brother Paul continued hurriedly. “Sexuality is perennial. The female can be receptive any time of the day or year, and in this way she holds her man. But sometimes the family is interrupted by circumstance, such as war or natural catastrophe. A function that goes too long unused is apt to be lost, such as man’s former ability to manufacture ascorbic acid in his body. Vitamin C. So the sexual drive in men is continuous and insistent. When there are no women, it expresses itself in various alternate ways—and one of these is sodomy. If it were not so, the drive to indulge in the sexual act with another individual might atrophy at the peril of the species.”

  “Yes, that will do nicely,” Satan said. “Is sodomy therefore a sin?”

  “Well, considered that way, in special circumstances—”

  “You see,” Satan said decisively, “there is no such thing as objective sin. A person only sins when he does what he believes to be wrong. Your definition of sin does not, upon reflection, include involuntary sodomy. Case dismissed.”

  Maybe so. Brother Paul would have to sort it all out more carefully at another time. “Therion—he served you well, if selfishly. Why did you kill him?”

  “I did not kill him. There is no death in Hell. That’s the Hell of it! Death would represent escape from retribution. I merely tortured him a little. A well-deserved humiliation, preparing him for the penance he must do.”

  Again Brother Paul wondered who was playing the part of Satan. It had to be Therion—yet how could he talk about himself this way? Unless this whole Animation really was guided by some Godly power, and this role was part of Therion’s penance. Was there any way to be sure? “But if he made a bargain with You to bring us all here—”

  “The Horned God makes no bargains! All souls that are My due will come to Me in due course. Why should I bargain for what is already Mine?”

  “But you accepted my bargain—to spare Carolyn.”

  “Not really. She is innocent—not even a clothespin mars her record. She is as yet unborn. I cannot take her. And you—were already in My power.”

  “Then why did You torture me by threatening her?”

  “This is Hell,” Satan said simply. And of course that was true. Brother Paul realized that he had taken too narrow a view of Hell. Torture came in many forms—and the worst of these were internal.