was bad enough, or something much worse.

He was dead.

Forrester shivered. The idea of an immortal God dying was, in one way,
as horrible a notion as he could imagine. But in another way, it seemed
to make a good deal of sense. As far as plain William Forrester had been
concerned, the contradiction in the notion of a dead immortal would have
made it ridiculous to start with. But the demi-God Dionysus had a
somewhat different slant on things.

After all, as Vulcan had told him, a demi-God could die. And if that was
true, then why couldn't a God die too? Perhaps it would take quite a lot
to kill a God--but the difference would be one of degree, not of kind.

It seemed wholly logical. And it led, Forrester saw, to a new
conclusion, one that required a little less effort to face than he
thought it would. It should have shaken the foundations of his childhood
and left him dizzy, but somehow it didn't. How long, he asked himself,
had he been secretly doubting the fact that the Gods were Gods?

At least in the sense they pretended to be, the "Gods" were not gods at
all. They were--something else.

But what? Where did they come from?

Were they actually the Gods of ancient Greece, as they claimed?
Forrester wanted to throw that claim out with the rest, but when he
thought things over he didn't see why he should. To an almost
indestructible being, three thousand years may only be a long time.

So the Gods actually were "Gods," at least as far as longevity went. But
the decision didn't get him very far; there were still a lot of
questions unanswered, and no way that he could see of answering them.

Or, rather, there was one way, but it was hellishly dangerous. He had no
business even thinking about. He was in enough hot water already.

Nevertheless....

What more harm could he do to his chances? After the Bacchanal fiasco,
there was probably a sentence of death hanging over his head anyhow. And
they couldn't do any more to him than kill him.

It was ridiculous, he told himself, with a return of caution and sanity.
But the notion came back, nagging at his mind, and at last it took a new
form.

The Gods had the rest of the information he needed. He had to go to one
of them--but which one?

His first thought was Venus. But, after a moment of thought, he ruled
her regretfully out as a possibility. After all, there was Mars' mention
of her "predecessor." If that meant anything, it meant that the current
Venus wasn't