e Books, Stamford; other books," the Toon Leader told him.
"The books which are mentioned in The Books. But of course we will
help you. You have a map to show where they are?"

"Not a map; just some information. But we can work out the location of
the crypt."

"A ritual," Stamford Rawson said happily. "Of course."

* * * * *

They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with the Toon
Leader and the Reader and five or six of the leaders of the community.
The food was plentiful, but Altamont found himself wishing that the
first book they found in the Carnegie Library crypt would be a cook
book.

In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated. The latter attached
himself to the Tenant, the Reader, and an old woman, Irene Klein, who
was almost a hundred years old and was the repository and arbiter of
most of the community's oral legends. Altamont, on the other hand,
started, with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the
miller, to inspect the gunshop and grist mill. Joined by half a dozen
more of the village craftsmen, they visited the forge and foundry, the
sawmill, the wagon shop. Altamont looked at the flume, a rough
structure of logs lined with sheet aluminum, and at the nitriary, a
shed-roofed pit in which potassium nitrate was extracted from the
community's animal refuse. Then, loading his guides into the
helicopter, they took off for a visit to the powder mill on the island
and a trip up the river.

They were a badly scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they
watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic
nose. Then, when nothing disastrous seemed to be happening,
exhilaration took the place of fear, and by the time they set down on
the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed aviation
enthusiasts. The trip up-river was an even bigger success; the high
point came when Altamont set his controls for _Hover_, pointed out a
snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to fire
one of the machine guns at it. The lead balls of their own
black-powder rifles would have plunked into the waterlogged wood
without visible effect; the copper-jacketed machine-gun bullets ripped
it to splinters. They returned for a final visit to the distillery
awed by what they had seen.

* * * * *

"Monty, I don't know what the devil to make of this crowd," Loudons
said, that evening, after the feast, when t