ts or he hadn't.
There was no point in worrying about the inevitable. He felt
anesthetized, numb to any sensation of personal danger. There was
nothing whatever he could do. The Gods had him; very well, let the Gods
worry about what to do with him.

Freed, his mind turned over and over a problem that seemed new to him at
first. Gradually, he realized it wasn't new at all; it had been
somewhere in the back of his thoughts from the very first, when Venus
had told him that he had been chosen as a double for Dionysus, so many
months ago. It seemed like years to Forrester, and yet, at the same
time, like no more than hours. So much had happened, and so much had
changed....

But the question had remained, waiting until he could look at it and
work with it. Now he could face that strange doubt in his mind, the
doubt that had colored everything since his introduction to the Gods,
that had grown as his training in demi-Godhood had progressed, and that
was now, for the first time, coming to full consciousness. Every time it
had come near the surface, before this day, he had expelled it from his
mind, forcefully getting rid of it without realizing fully that he was
doing so.

And perhaps, he thought, the doubt had begun even earlier than that.
Perhaps he had always doubted, and never allowed himself to think about
the doubt. The floor of his mind seemed to open and he was falling,
falling....

But where the doubt had begun was unimportant now. It was present, it
had grown; that was all that mattered. He could find facts to feed the
doubt and strengthen it, and he looked at the facts one by one:

First there was the angry conversation between Mars and Venus, on the
night of the Bacchanal.

He could still hear what Mars had said:

"_... worse than your predecessor._"

And then he'd shut Venus up before she gave away too much--realizing,
maybe, that he had given away a good deal himself. That one little
sentence was enough to bring everything into question, Forrester
thought.

He had wondered why it had been necessary to have a double for Dionysus,
but he hadn't actually thought about it; maybe he hadn't wanted to think
about it. But now, with the notion of a "predecessor" for Venus in his
mind, he _had_ to think about it, and the only conclusion he could come
to was a disturbing one. It did more than disturb him, as a matter of
fact--it frightened him. He wanted desperately to find some flaw in the
conclusion he faced,