us had said, "and I put away
childish things."

Well, Forrester considered, it behooved him to put away childish things,
too. A mere vanity, a mere love of spectacle, was unworthy of the
Goddess he served. And his costume and bearing certainly hadn't got him
very far with Gerda.

He tore his eyes away from her again, and sighed.

Before he could bring his mind back to Athena, there was an
interruption.

Another white-clad acolyte moved out of the shadows to his right and
came softly toward him. "Forrester?" he whispered.

Forrester turned, recognizing young Bates, a chinless boy of perhaps
twenty-two, with the wide, innocent eyes of the born fanatic. But it
didn't become a servant of Athena to think ill of her other servants,
Forrester reminded himself. Brushing the possibility of a rude reply
from his mind, Forrester said simply: "Yes? What is it?"

"There's a couple of Temple Myrmidons to see you outside," Bates
whispered. "I'll take over your post."

Forrester responded with no more than a simple nod, as if the occurrence
were one that happened every day. But it was not only the thought of
leaving Gerda that moved him. As he turned and strode to the small door
that led to the side room off the main auditorium, he was thinking
furiously under his calm exterior.

Temple Myrmidons! What could they want with him? As an acolyte, he was
at least immune to arrest by the civil police, and even the Temple
Myrmidons had no right to take him into custody without a warrant from
the Pontifex himself.

But such a warrant was a serious affair. What had he done wrong?

He tried to think of some cause for an arrest. Blasphemy? Sacrilege? But
he found nothing except his interior thoughts. And those, he told
himself with a blaze of anger fierce enough to surprise him, were
nobody's business but his own and Athena's. Authorities either less
personal or more temporal had no business dealing with thoughts.

Beyond those, there wasn't a thing. No irreverence toward any of the
Gods, in his private life, his religious functions or his teaching
position, at least as far as he could recall. The Gods knew that
unorthodoxy in an Introductory History course, for instance, was not
only unwise but damned difficult.

Of course, he was aware of the real position of the Gods. They weren't
omnipotent. Their place in the scheme of things was high, but they were
certainly not equal with the One who had created the Universe and the
Gods th