As Andrew Maness grew older in the town of Moxton he watched his father submit to the despair and the wonder that he could not unmake the thing that he and those others had incarnated. On several occasions the reverend entered his son's room as the boy slept. With knife and ax and long-handled scythe he attempted to break the growing bond between his son and the Tsalal. In the morning young Andrew's bedroom would reek like a slaughter-house. But his limbs and organs were again made whole and a new blood flowed within them proving the reality of what had been brought into the world by his father and those other enthusiasts of that one.

There were times when the Reverend Maness, in a state of awe and desperation, awoke his son from dreams and made his appeal to the boy, informing him that he was reaching a perilous juncture in his development and begging him to submit to a peculiar ritual that would be consummated by Andrew's ruin.

"What ritual is this?" Andrew asked with a novitiate's excitation. But the reverend's powers of speech became paralyzed at this question and many nights would pass before he again broached the subject.

At last the Reverend Maness came into his son's room carrying a book. He opened the book to its final pages and began to read. And the words he read laid out a scheme for his son's destruction. These words were his own, the ultimate chapter in a great work he had composed documenting a wealth of revelations concerning the force or entity called the Tsalal.

Andrew could not take his eyes off the book and strained to hear every resonance of his father's reading from it, even if the ritual the old man spelled out dictated the atrocious manner of Andrew's death-the obliteration of the seed of the apocalypse which was called the Tsalal.

"Your formula for cancelling my existence calls for the participation of others," Andrew observed. "The elect of...that one."

"Tsalal," the Reverend Maness intoned, still captivated by an occult nomenclature.

"Tsalal," Andrew echoed. "My protector, my guardian of the black void."

"You are not yet wholly the creature of that one. I have tried to change what I could not. But you have stayed too long in this place, which was the wrong place for a being such as you. You are undergoing a second birth under the sign of the Tsalal. But there is still enough time if you will submit yourself to the ritual."

"I must ask you, Father: who will carry it out? Will there be a convocation of strangers in this town?"

After a painfully reflective pause, the reverend said: "There are none remaining who will come. They would be required to relive the events following your birth, the first time you were born."

"And my mother?" Andrew asked.

"She did not survive."

"But how did she die?"

"By the ritual," the Reverend Maness confessed. "At the ritual of your birth it became necessary to perform the ritual of death."

"Her death."

"As I told you before. This ritual had never been performed, or even conceived, prior to that night on which you were born. We did not know what to expect. But after a certain point, after seeing certain things, we acted in the correct manner, as if we had always known what needed to be done."

"And what needed to be done, Father?"

"It is all in this book."

"You have the book, but you're still lacking for those others. A congregation, so to speak."

"I have my congregation in this very town. They will do what needs to be done. To this you must submit yourself. To the end of your existence you must consent."

"And if I don't?"

"Soon," the Reverend Maness began, "the bond will be sealed between you and the other, that one which is all nightmare of grotesque metamorphoses behind the dream of earthly forms, that one which is the center of so-called entity and so-called essence. To the living illusions of the world of light will come a blackness no one has ever seen, a dawn of darkness. What you yourself have known of these things is only a passing glimpse, a flickering candleflame beside the conflagration which is to come. You have found yourself fascinated by those moments after you have been asleep, and awake to see how the things around you are affected in their form. You look on as they change in every freakish manner, feeling the power that changes them to be connected to your own being, conveying to you its magic through a delicate cord. Then the cord grows too thin to hold, your mind returns to you, and the little performance you were watching comes to an end. But you have already stayed long enough in this place to have begun a second birth under the sign of the Tsalal. The cord between you and that one is strong. Wherever you go, you will be found. Wherever you stay, there the changes will begin. For you are the seed of that one. You are just as the luz, the bone-seed of rabbinic prophecy: that sliver of every mortal self from which the whole body may be reconstructed and stand for judgment at the end of time. Wherever you stay, there the resurrection will begin. You are a fragment of the one that is without law or reason. The body that will grow out of you is the true body of all things. The changes themselves are the body of the Tsalal. The changes are the truth of all bodies, which we believe have a face and a substance only because we cannot see that they are always changing, that they are only fragile forms which are forever being shattered in the violent whirlpool of truth.

"This is how it will be for all your days: you will be drawn to a place that reveals the sign of the Tsalal-an aspect of the unreal, a forlorn glamor in things-and with your coming the changes will begin. These may go unnoticed for a time, affecting only very small things or greater things in subtle ways, a disruption of forms that you very well know. But other people will sense that something is wrong in that place, which may be a certain house or street or even an entire town. They will go about with uneasy eyes and become emaciated in their flesh, their very bones growing thin with worry, becoming worn down and warped just as the world around them is slowly stripped of whatever seemed real, leaving them famished for the sustenance of old illusions. Rumors will begin to pass among them about unpleasant things they believe they have seen or felt and yet cannot explain-a confusion among the lower creatures, perhaps, or a stone that seems to throb with a faint life. For these are the modest beginnings of the chaos that will ultimately consume the stars themselves, which may be left to crawl within that great blackness no one has ever seen. And by their proximity to your being they will know that you are the source of these changes, that through your being these changes radiate into the world. The longer you stay in a place, the worse it will become. If you leave such a place in time, then the changes can have no lasting power-the ultimate point will not have been reached, and it will be as the little performances of grotesquerie you have witnessed in your own room."

"And if I do stay in such a place?" asked Andrew.

"Then the changes will proceed toward the ultimate point. So long as you can bear to watch the appearances of things become degraded and confused, so long as you can bear to watch the people in that place wither in their bodies and minds, the changes will proceed toward their ultimate point-the disintegration of all apparent order, the birth of the Tsalal. Before that happens you must submit to the ritual of the ultimate point."

But Andrew Maness only laughed at his father's scheme, and the sound of this laughter almost shattered the reverend entirely. In a deliberately serious voice, Andrew said: "Do you really believe you will gain the participation of others?"

"The people of this town will do the work of the ritual," his father replied. "When they have seen certain things, they will do what must be done. Their hunger to preserve the illusions of their world will surpass their horror at what must be done to save it. But it will be your decision whether or not you will submit to the ritual which will determine the course of so many things in this world."

11 A meeting in Moxton

Everyone in the town gathered in the church that the Reverend Maness had built so many years ago. No others had succeeded the reverend, and no services had been held since the time of his pastorate. The structure had never been outfitted with electricity, but the illumination of numerous candles and oil lamps the congregation had brought supplemented the light of a grayish afternoon that penetrated the two rows of plain, peaked windows along either side of the church. In the corner of one of those windows a spider fumbled about in its web, struggling awkwardly with appendages that resembled less the nimble legs of the arachnid than they did an octet of limp tentacles. After several thrusts the creature reached the surface of a window pane and passed into the glass itself, where it began to move about freely in its new element.

The people of Moxton had tried to rest themselves before this meeting, but their haggard look spoke of a failure to do so. The entire population of the town barely filled a half dozen pews at the front of the church, although some were collapsed upon the floor and others shuffled restlessly along the center aisle. All of them appeared even more emaciated than the day before, when they had attempted to escape the town and unaccountably found themselves driven back to it.

"Everything has gotten worse since we returned," said one man, as if to initiate the meeting which had no obvious hope or purpose beyond collecting in a single place the nightmares of the people of Moxton. A murmur of voices rose up and echoed throughout the church. Several people spoke of what they had witnessed the night before, reciting a litany of grotesque phenomena that had prohibited sleep.

There was a bedroom wall which changed colors, turning from its normal rosy tint that was calm and pale in the moonlight to a quivering and luminescent green that rippled like the flesh of a great reptile. There was a little doll whose neck began to elongate until it was writhing through the air like a serpent, while its tiny doll's head whispered words that had no sense in them yet conveyed a profoundly hideous meaning. There were things no one had seen that made noises of a deeply troubling nature in the darkness of cellars or behind the doors of closets and cupboards. And then there was something that people saw when they looked through the windows of their houses toward the house where a man named Andrew Maness now lived. But when anyone began to describe what it was they saw in the vicinity of that house, which they called the McQuister house, their words became confused. They did see something and yet they saw nothing.

"I also saw what you speak of," whispered the tall, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed hat. "It was a blackness, but it was not the blackness of the night or of shadows. It was hovering over the old McQuister place, or around it. This was something I had not seen in Moxton even since the changes."

"No, not in Moxton, not in the town. But you have seen it before. We have all seen it," said a man's voice that sounded as if it came from elsewhere in the church.

"Yes," answered the tall man, as if confessing a thing that had formerly been denied. "But we are not seeing it the way it might be seen, the way we had seen it when we were outside the town, when we tried to leave and could not."

"That was not blackness we saw then," said one of the younger women who seemed to be wresting an image from her memory. "It was something...something that wasn't blackness at all."

"There were different things," shouted an old man who suddenly stood up from one of the pews, his eyes fixed in a gaze of revelation. A moment later this vision appeared to dissolve, and he sat down again. But the eyes of others followed this vision, surveying the empty spaces of the church and watching the flickering lights of the many lamps and candles.

"There were different things," someone started to say, and then someone else completed the thought: "But they were all spinning and confused, all swirling together."

"Until all we could see was a great blackness," said the tall man, gaining his voice again.

A silence now overcame the congregation, and the words they had spoken seemed to be disappearing into this silence, once more drawing the people of Moxton back to the refuge of their former amnesia. But before their minds lost all clarity of recollection a woman named Mrs Spikes rose to her feet and from the last row of the church, where she sat alone, cried out, "Everything started with him, the one in the McQuister house."

"How long has it been?" one voice asked.

"Too long," answered Mrs Spikes. "I remember him. He's older than I am, but he doesn't look older. His hair is a strange color."

"Reddish like pale blood," said one.

"Green like mold," said another. "Or yellow and orange like a candleflame."

"He lived in that house, that same house, a long time ago," continued Mrs Spikes. "Before the McQuisters. He lived with his father. But I can only remember the stories. I didn't see anything myself. Something happened one night. Something happened to the whole town. Their name was Maness."

"That is the name of the man who built this church," said the tall man. "He was the first clergyman this town had seen. And there were no others after him. What happened, Mrs Spikes?"

"It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I only know the stories. The reverend said things about his son, said the boy was going to do something and how people had to keep it from happening."

"What happened, Mrs Spikes? Try to remember."

"I'm trying. It was only yesterday that I started to remember. It was when we got back to town. I remembered something that the reverend said in the stories about that night."

"I heard you," said another woman. "You said, 'Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.'"

Mrs Spikes stared straight ahead and lightly pounded the top of the pew with her right hand, as though she were calling up memories in this manner. Then she said: "That's what he was supposed to have been saying that night, 'Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.' And he said that people had to do something, but the stories I heard when I was growing up don't say what he wanted people to do. It was about his son. It was something queer, something no one understood. But no one did anything that he wanted them to do. When they took him home, his son wasn't there, and no one saw that young man again. The stories say that the ones who brought the reverend to his house saw things there, but no one could explain what they saw. What everyone did remember was that late the same night the bells started ringing up in the tower of this church. That's where they found the reverend. He'd hung himself. It wasn't until the McQuisters moved into town that anyone would go near the reverend's house. Then it seemed no one could remember anything about the place."

"Just as we could not remember what happened only yesterday," said the tall man. "Why we came back to this place when it was the last place we wanted to be. The blackness we saw that was a blackness no one had ever seen. That blackness which was not a blackness but was all the colors and shapes of things darkening the sky."

"A vision!" said one old man who for many years had been the proprietor of McQuister's Pharmacy.

"Perhaps only that," replied the tall man.

"No," said Mrs Spikes. "It was something he did. It was like everything else that's been happening since he came here and stayed so long. All the little changes in things that kept getting worse. It's something that's been moving in like a storm. People have seen that it's in the town now, hanging over that house of his. And the changes in things are worse than ever. Pretty soon it's us that'll be changing."

Then there arose a chorus of voices among the congregation, all of them composing a conflict between "we must do something" and "what can be done?"

While the people of Moxton murmured and fretted in the light of lamps and candles, there was a gradual darkening outside the windows of the church. An unnatural blackness was overtaking the gray afternoon. And the words of these people also began to change, just as so many things had changed in that town. Within the same voices there mingled both keening outcries of fear and a low, muttering invocation. Soon the higher pitched notes in these voices diminished and then wholly disappeared as the deeper tones of incantation prevailed. Now they were all chanting a single word in hypnotic harmony: Tsalal, Tsalal, Tsalal. And standing at the pulpit was the one who was leading the chant, the man whose strangely shaded hair shone in the light of candles and oil lamps. At last he had come from his house where he had stayed too long. The bell in the tower began to ring, sounding in shattered echoes. The resonant cacophony of voices swelled within the church. For these were the voices of people who had lived so long in the wrong place. These were people of a skeleton town.

The figure at the pulpit lifted up his hands before his congregation, and they grew quiet. When he focused his eyes on an old woman sitting alone in the last row, she rose from her seat and walked to the double doors at the rear of the church. The man at the pulpit spread his arms wider, and the old woman pushed back each of the doors.

Through the open doorway was the main street of Moxton, but it was not as it had been. An encompassing blackness had descended and only the lights of the town could be seen. But these lights were now as endless as the blackness itself. The rows of yellowish streetlamps extended to infinity along an avenue of the abyss. Fragments of neon signs were visible, the vibrant magenta letters of the movie theater recurring again and again, as though reflected in a multitude of black mirrors. In the midst of the other lights hovered an endless succession of traffic signals that filled the blackness like multi-colored stars. All these bright remnants of the town, its broken pieces in transformation, were becoming increasingly dim and distorted, bleeding their radiance into the blackness that was consuming them, even as it freakishly multiplied the shattered images of the world, collecting them within its kaleidoscope of colors so dense and so varied that they lost themselves within a black unity.

The man who had built the church in which the people of Moxton were gathered had spoken of the ultimate point. This was now imminent. And as the moment approached, the gathering within the church moved toward the figure at the pulpit, who descended to meet them. They were far beyond their old fears, these skeleton people. They had attained the stripped bone of being, the last layer of an existence without name or description, without nature or essence: the nothingness of the blackness no one had ever seen...or would ever see. For no one had ever lived except as a shadow of the blackness of the Tsalal.

And their eyes looked to the one who was the incarnation of the blackness, and who had come to them to seal his bond with that other one. They looked to him for some word or gesture in order to bring to fulfilment that day which had turned into night. They looked to him for the thing that would bind them to the blackness and join them within the apocalypse of the unreal.

Finally, as if guided by some whim of the moment, he told them how to do what must be done.

12 What is remembered

The story that circulated in later years among the people of Moxton told how everyone had gathered in the church one afternoon during a big storm that lasted into the night. Unused for decades before this event, the church was strongly constructed and proved a suitable shelter. There were some who recalled that for weeks prior to this cataclysm a variety of uncommon effects had resulted from what they described as a season of strange weather in the vicinity of the town.

The details of this period remain unclear, as do memories of a man who briefly occupied the old McQuister place around the time of the storm. No one had ever spoken with him except Mrs Spikes, who barely recollected their conversation and who died of cancer not long after the biggest storm of the year. The house in which the man had lived was previously owned by relatives of Ray Starns, but the Starns people were no longer residents of Moxton. In any case, the old McQuister place was not the only untenanted house in the skeleton town, and there was no reason for people to concern themselves with it. Nor did anyone in Moxton give serious thought to the church once the storm had passed. The doors were once again secured against intruders, but no one ever tested these old locks which had been first put in place after the Reverend Maness hung himself in the church tower.

Had the people of the town of Moxton ventured beyond the doors of the church they might have found what they left behind following the abatement of the storm. Lying twisted at the foot of the pulpit was the skeleton of a man whose name no one would have been able to remember. The bones were clean. No bit of their flesh could be discovered either in the church or anywhere else in the town. Because the flesh was that of one who had stayed in a certain place too long. It was the seed, and now it had been planted in a dark place where it would not grow. They had buried his flesh deep in the barren ground of their meager bodies. Only a few strands of hair of an unusual color lay scattered upon the floor, mingling with the dust of the church.

MAD NIGHT OF ATONEMENT.

A Future Tale

Once more from the beginning; once more until the end. You know who Dr Francis Haxhausen was and how his disappearance affected the scientific world. There was dismay and confusion when one of the leading scientists on earth withdrew from an active life of research. And there was doubt, even anxiety, when he could no longer be reached for consultation on this or that question of urgent relevance to his former colleagues, if not to the vast body of the human race. Ah, the human race. Pacing the floors of gleaming labs, the geniuses in their long white smocks fretted about the missing man of science: they bore the stigmata of worry upon their faces and their voices grew quiet, like voices heard in the shadows of a lonely church. Rumors multiplied, panicky speculations were the order of the day. But however troubled certain people had become in the absence of Dr Haxhausen, they were no less bothered by his sudden return from a strange retirement.

He was now quite a different man, shaking the hands of old friends and smiling with a warmth that was entirely out of character. "I've been traveling here and there," he explained, though he avoided elaborating on this statement. For a time everyone kept an eye on Dr Haxhausen, eager to witness a revelation of some kind, or at least some clue to suggest what had happened to him. And how nerve-wracking vigilance can be. It was not long, however, before the inevitable conclusion had to be drawn: the unfortunate man had lost his reason, gone mad from years of overwork in the service of his calling. But perhaps there still remained some pretext for hoping that the scientist would recover. After all, he managed to avoid the constraints which some, including members of his own family, attempted to place upon his movements. And certainly this was an achievement that hinted at the survival of some measure of his old genius. Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it-freedom, not reason-to pursue his plans for the future.

For almost a year he worked secretly, and alone, in an old, empty factory building located in an open field many miles from the nearest city. And into this building he brought a motley array of equipment-objects, devices, and machinery that belonged to quite different times and places, diverse worlds of human creation. There were of course the most modern machines and instruments of science, some of which had only come into being since Dr Haxhausen's disappearance. But there were also items of far earlier historical periods and a few imported from cultures that would not be considered very far along the path of technological progress. Thus, Dr Haxhausen unpacked several oddly shaped vessels decorated with strange glyphs and primitive images. And these clumsy vessels he rested upon a table among elegant containers of nearly invisible glass. Then he pieced together something that resembled a dirty drainspout or an old stovepipe. And he placed it, for the moment, upon the immaculate metal surface of a computer, which was the color and texture of an eggshell.

More exotic or antiquated paraphernalia were revealed slumbering in crates and boxes: cauldrons, retorts, masks with wide-open mouths, alembics, bellows of different sizes, crusted bells that rang with dead voices, and rusted tongs that squeaked when manipulated; a large hourglass, a small telescope, shining swords and dull knives, a long wooden pitchfork with two hornlike prongs and a tall staff with marvelously embellished headpiece; miniature bottles of very thick glass plugged with stoppers in the shape of human or animal heads, candles in ivory holders with curious carvings, bright beads, beautiful convex mirrors of perfect silver, golden chalices engraved with intricate designs and powerful phrases; huge books with brittle pages, a skull and some bones; doll-like figures made of dried vegetables, puppet-like figures made of wax and wood, and various little dummies composed of obscure materials. Finally, there was a shallow crate from which Dr Haxhausen removed a vaguely circular object that seemed to be a flat stone, but a stone that was translucent and mottled like an opal with a spectrum of soft hues. And all these things the scientist brought together within his dim and drafty laboratory: each, in his mind, would play its part in his design. Clearly his ideas about the practice of science had taken an incredible leap, though whether the direction was forward or backward remained to be seen.

For months he worked with a mechanical industriousness and without worry or doubt, as though following some foreordained plan of assured success. Slowly his invention began to take form out of the chaos of materials he had united in his experiment, a miscegenation that would give birth to a revolutionary artifact, a cross-bred assemblage of freakish novelty. And the result of his labors at last stood before him upon the cold and dusty floor of that factory, and he was pleased by the sight of it.

To the average eye, granted, Dr Haxhausen's invention might have appeared as no more than a bizarre scrapheap, a hybrid of some inscrutable fancy. Dense and unbeautiful, it branched out wildly in every direction, a mad foliage of ragged metal. And it seemed just barely, or not all, integrated into a whole. Through dark hollows within the chaotic tangle of the apparatus, the faces of dolls and puppets peeked out like malicious children in hiding. Incorporated into the body of the invention, their dwarfish forms mingled with its circuitry; these figures alone, by their very presence, might have bred doubts as to the validity of the scientist's creation. And, as must already be apparent, the eccentricities of the machine did not end with a few idiotic faces.

Nevertheless, there was a certain feature of the invention that did appear to suggest some definite purpose. This was the long black tube projecting from the midst of the debris, rising from it in the manner of a cobra set for the attack. But in place of the cobra's pair of fascinating eyes, this artificial serpent was equipped with a single cyclopean socket in which was fixed a smooth disc of beautifully blended colors. When Dr Haxhausen turned a dial on the remote control unit resting in his palm, the dark metallic beast reared back its head and, with a sinister grinding sound, directed its gaze up toward a grimy skylight. For years this window on the heavens had remained sealed. But that night, through the efforts of the inexhaustible scientist, it was opened. And the spectral light of a full moon shone down into the old factory, pouring its beams into the opalescent eye of Dr Haxhausen's machine. Later, when it seemed the beast was sated with its lunar nourishment, Dr Haxhausen confidently flicked a switch on the remote control unit. And the moonlight, which had been digested and transmuted in the bowels of the beast, was now given back to its source, spewing forth as a stream of lurid colors into the blackness, a harsh spectrum which one witness later described to authorities as an "awful rainbow quivering across the night." In the doctor's own description, this was called his Sacred Ray.

With the first stage of his project successfully completed, Dr Haxhausen moved out of his secluded laboratory. His machine, along with other things, was loaded on a truck by some hired laborers. Thus, it could easily be transported from one place to another, to be exhibited before the eyes of any who would come to see it. And this is exactly what the scientist had in mind. Abandoning obscurity and breaking his silence, he once again allowed himself to be known to the world. Naturally there was a great deal of publicity, none of which was complimentary to the worth of the scientist's revelations, though some of which paid sad homage to the former glory of his delicate mind. But public reaction was of no concern to him. His task would in any case be carried out: the world was to be given notice, the annunciation made. So he continued to travel here and there: in rented halls and auditoriums of many cities, he demonstrated the powers of his machine and spread the word to those who would hear it.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he began a typical performance in a typically out-of-date movie theater in a typical town. Standing alone on stage, Dr Haxhausen was wearing an old dark suit; as if to simulate formal attire, he added a new bow tie. His hair was greased and combed but had been allowed to grow far too long to convey a well-groomed image. And his black-framed eyeglasses now seemed far too large on the face of a man who had lost so much weight in the past year or so. Their thick lenses glinted in the glare of the footlights, which cast Dr Haxhausen's gigantic and twisted shadow upon the threadbare curtain behind him.

"Some of you," he continued, "are perhaps aware of who I am and may have an idea of why I am here tonight. Others of you may be curious to discover the meaning of those handbills which have lately appeared around your town or possibly were intrigued by the marquee outside this theater which touts the 'World Famous Dr Haxhausen.' Like many important events in human history, my exhibition has been somewhat accurately reported as far as its superficial aspects are concerned, yet remains sadly misrepresented in its substance. Allow me at this point to disabuse you of a few false conceptions which may have affected your powers of judgment.

"First, I do not claim to be either the Almighty Himself or His incarnation come down to earth; nor, in fact, am I one or the other of these things. Second, I nevertheless do claim that in the course of my recent travels, what the world has called my 'disappearance,' I was granted certain revelations directly from the Creator and in no uncertain terms received an itinerary of action from this same source. Third, and last, I am indeed the scientist known as Francis Henry Haxhausen and not, as can be conclusively proved, an imposter. As an appendix to my previous statements, I should say that my exhibition is not the absurd extravaganza of scientific farce some have portrayed it to be, but a simple agenda consisting of a brief lecture followed by a practical demonstration of a device I have recently constructed. At no point do I attempt, either as an illusion or in fact, to work permanent damage on the body or soul of any member of my audience. That would be contrary to the Creator's law and the truth of His nature. And that is all I have to state in the way of a preamble to what I hope you will find an entertaining and enlightening attraction.

"I would like to open my lecture with the following anecdote. There is a legend, and I hasten to underline the word legend, that I learned while I was traveling here and there. It seems there was a sorcerer, or an alchemist or something along those lines, who dreamed of transforming the world through the creation of an artificial man. This man, the sorcerer dreamed, would not be subject to the flaws and limitations of the former type, but would instead live through many lifetimes, accumulating the knowledge and wisdom it would one day use to serve and improve the human race. The sorcerer, like all dreamers of this kind, was intent upon his vision and not particularly concerned with its ramifications in a larger scheme of things. Thus, he set about employing all his thaumaturgical arts in the creation of his 'new man.' First, a physical form was made out of the simple materials of wood and wax, resulting in a grotesque thing rather like a gigantic ventriloquist's dummy. Next, the sorcerer practiced a secret chemistry and a hermetic linguistics to elevate this lifeless effigy into a rather admirable semblance of human life-fatefully admirable, I might add. Without wasting a moment glorying in his own achievement, uttering not a single word of self-praise, the sorcerer engaged his creature in a course of learning that would enable it to function and evolve toward its destiny after the sorcerer's death. However, it was not long after this regimen had begun that the Omnipotent One realized what the sorcerer was intending to do. And so it happened that the creature, strong and well-coordinated but still a child in its mind, was awakened in the dead of night by a voice that cursed it as a blasphemy and an abomination. The voice bid the creature to go to its foul maker in the attic where he had sequestered himself among evil books and impure devices. Confused and terrified, the creature ascended several stairways and entered the attic. And there he found the sorcerer, motionless and hung upon the wall like something in a puppet-maker's workshop, his dark robe grazing the dusty floor and his head drooping down. Acting on a mechanical impulse beyond dread or despair, the creature raised up his master's head and saw that it was now no more than wood and wax. The sight was a maddening one, and it did not take long for the creature to find the rope with which it hung itself from the rafters of the attic. Thus was concluded the judgment passed upon the house of the sorcerer."

There was a pause in the scientist's flow of words. Calmly, he pulled a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his coat and wiped his face, which was perspiring in the heat of the footlights. Then he briefly scanned the faces of his audience, many of which bore dumbfounded expressions, before resuming his lecture.

"Who can know the intentions of the Creator? That which is suited to human designs may not suit His. With these rather unquestionable premises in mind, what conclusions might be drawn from the example of the sorcerer? By way of exegesis, I would say that the sorcerer, in conceiving a creature of limitless promise for good and none for evil, had violated a mysterious law, transgressed against a secret truth. And how had he strayed from this law and this truth? Simply in this manner: he had failed to provide for the corruption of his creation, not merely as a possibility but as a fate. And it was precisely by this oversight that the sorcerer fell out of step with the Creator's own design. It is the vision of this Great Design that I have been privileged to see, and that is why I am here tonight. As a footnote, however, I should state that even before I was granted certain divine insights, I had already been traveling toward them, approaching their truth in the unconscious or accidental manner of great scientific discoveries. And I thus found myself somewhat in readiness to receive and accept the proffered vision.

"Let me explain that I have spent nearly all my life as a scientist in a methodically frantic pursuit of perfection, driven by the dream of utopia, by the idea that I indeed contributed to an earthly paradise in the making. But slowly, very slowly, I began to notice certain things. I noticed that there were mechanisms built into the system of reality that nullified all our advancements in this world, that rerouted them into a hidden laboratory where these so-called blessings were cancelled out altogether, if not converted into formulas for our collapse. I noticed that there were higher forces working against us and working through us at the same time. On the one hand, our vision has always been of creating a world of perpetual vitality, despite our grudging recognition of death's 'necessity.' On the other hand, all we have constructed is an elaborate facade to conceal our immortal traumas, a false front that hides the perennial ordeals of the human race. Oh, the human race. And I began to see that perfection has never been the point, that both the lost paradise of the past and the one sought in the future were merely convenient pretexts for our true destiny of...disintegration.

"As a scientist I have had the opportunity to observe the workings of the world at close quarters and over a relatively extended stretch of time, not to mention space. And after careful observation and painstaking verification I was forced to this conclusion: the world thrives on its faults and strives, by every possible means, to aggravate them, while at the same time to mask them like a congenital deformity. The signs are everywhere, though I could not always read them.