“Did you also have no say in the atrocities you forced mankind to suffer for so many centuries?” Pritchard Robot asked, his voice rising. “Are you going to try to tell me, and my vast audience, that you were forced to bring the Great Flood to the Earth?”
“Well, no,” God said, subdued. “But once they’d created me as a god of wrath, I was forced to live up to the billing.”
“Don’t you think—won’t you admit, Mr. God—that you more than lived up to your mythical role? Didn’t you use that role in a most cynical and ruthless fashion, use it to excuse the most vicious, sadistic acts ever recorded in the annals of the written word? Didn’t you go overboard, Mr. God, in fulfilling your myth role? Didn’t you willfully and demonically desecrate the Earth? Didn’t you perpetrate these crude and malicious atrocities solely because they excited and gratified your own sick mind?” Pritchard Robot was smoking around the ears by the time he had delivered this sharp accusation.
“You’re exaggerating and being totally unfair,” God said. “As I said before, I’m only one of many gods. Others have had to live up to their myth requirements. My requirements were harder than most, that’s all.”
Pritchard Robot said, “Then you think the Great Flood was not an overreaction to tie requirements of your myth role?”
“I think it was within bounds.” God shifted in his chair, putting his robes in place. “I was then only a wrathful god, and I needed to punish mankind to fulfill my role.”
“Punish mankind,” Pritchard Robot said.
“Yes.”
“For what sins?”
“Orgies. Disrespect for parents. A rise in the overall crime rate, an increase in warfare.”
“And your idea of punishment, of teaching mankind a lesson, was to wipe out the entire race except for one single family—the Noahs?”
“At the time, it seemed proper,” God said, running a finger around his ecclesiastical collar.
Pritchard Robot said, “Tell me, Mr. God, are there no orgies in Heaven?”
“Well, occasionally, as you can read in the Bible…” He coughed and wiped perspiration off his face. “Well, after all, some of those angels are as stacked as…”
“And are you not, yourself, responsible for the rape of a woman, one whose last name is unfortunately lost to history, a woman we shall call Mary of Nazareth?”
“Well, rape is a strong word,” God said.
“Did she not have a child by you? And was this child not conceived out of wedlock? And did you not, later, even forsake this child? And when you made Mary of Nazareth with this child, did you not come to her at night while she was quite alone and defenseless, and threaten her with your godly position and your almighty power—which is nowhere near so almighty as was once thought?”
“Well…” God said, weakly.
“And having done all of this,” Pritchard Robot said, “you have the unmitigated gall to sit there and say you reasonably punished humanity with the Great Flood. For things you had done yourself!”
“Uh—” God said.
“We must break now, for a commercial,” Pritchard Robot said. “When we return, we’ll be talking with our second guest for the evening, a mythical creature we all enjoy when he has time to be on the show: the Honest Politician. Now, for this word from—”
The Tri-D picture clicked into two:dimensions then suddenly darkened altogether as the panel concealing the screen slid into place and locked, all this command by remote control.
In that same old-maid-school-teacher-from-Altoona voice, the prison computer said, “I’m sorry to have to interrupt the Pritchard Robot Show, sir, but you have an official visitor. I thought that should have preference.”
Jessie turned away from the featureless blue wall where the Tri-D screen had been and got quickly to his feet as the padded door swung outward and a maseni bureaucrat, dressed in flame-orange robes and a black necklace, swayed into the cell.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Blake.”
There was something naggingly familiar about the alien, though Jessie could not place just what it was. When he couldn’t identify it, he dismissed the thought and said, “I’d like to see my secretary, Helena, and my partner, to be sure they’re okay.”