ster said in a voice like thunder.

Symes, galvanized, threw. It flew up in the air. Forrester drew a
careful bead on it, went _zap_ again with the pointed finger, and
blasted the rock into dust.

The silence hung on.

Forrester laughed. "Not a bad throw for a mortal! And a good trick,
too--a fine display!" He faced the crowd. "Now, there--what do you say
to the entertainment your God provides? Wasn't that _fun_?"

Well, naturally it was, if Dionysus said so. A great trick, as a matter
of fact. And a perfectly wonderful display. The crowd agreed
immediately, giving a long rousing cheer. Forrester waved at them, and
then turned to a squad of Myrmidons standing nearby.

"Go to that man and his friends!" he shouted, noticing that Symes's
knees had begun to shake.

The Myrmidons obeyed.

"See that they follow near me. Allow them to remain close to me at all
times--I may need a good stone-thrower later!"

Gerda, her brother and the oaf without a name were rounded up in a
hurry, and soon found themselves being hustled along, willy-nilly, out
of the water, up onto the bridge and into Dionysus' van, where they
followed in the wake of the God, in front of the rest of the Procession.
Of the three, Forrester noted, Gerda was the only one who didn't seem to
think the invitation a high honor. The sight gave him a kind of hope.

_And at least_, he thought, _I can keep an eye on her this way_.

The Procession wended its way on, bending slowly southward toward the
little Temple-on-the-Green again. The musicians played energetically,
switching now from the hymn to their unofficial little ditty. Some
switched before others, some switched after, and some never bothered to
switch at all. The battery, caught between the opposing claims of two
perfectly good songs and a lot of extraneous matter, filled in as best
they could with a good deal of forceful banging and pounding, aided by
the steam calliope, and the result of all effort was a growing cacophony
that should have been terribly unpleasant but somehow wasn't.

The shouting of the crowd, joking and singing, may have had something to
do with it; nothing was clearly distinguishable, but the general feeling
was that a lot of noise was being produced, and that was all to the
good. Noise could have been packaged by the board foot and sold in
quantities sufficient to equip every town meeting throughout the country
in full for seven years, and there would have been enough left over