The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick Page B

whom we hate. His time has come. I fear for him, knowing as I do, now, what is ahead."
    "Listen," Elias said quietly.
     
    How you have fallen from heaven, bright morning star,
    felled to the earth, sprawling helpless across the nations!
    You thought in your own mind,
I will scale the heavens;
    I will set my throne high above the stars of God,
    I will sit on the mountain where the gods meet
in the far recesses of the north.
    I will rise high above the cloud-banks
and make myself like the Most High.
    Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol,
to the depths of the abyss.
    Those who see you will stare at you,
they will look at you and ponder…
     
    "You see?" Elias said. " He is here . This is his place, this little world. He made it his fortress two thousand years ago, and set up a prison for the people as he did in Egypt. For two thousand years the people have been crying and there was no response, no aid. He has them all. And thinks he is safe."
    Emmanuel, clutching the old man, began to cry.
    "Still afraid?" Elias said.
    Emmanuel said, "I cry with them. I cry with my mother. I cry with the dying dog who did not cry. I cry for them. And for Belial who fell, the bright morning star. Fell from heaven and began it all."
    And, he thought, I cry for myself. I am my mother; I am the dying dog and the suffering people, and I, he thought, am that bright morning star, too … even Belial; I am that and what it has become.
    The old man held him fast.
     

  7  
    C ardinal Fulton Statler Harms, Chief Prelate of the vast organizational network that comprised the Christian-Islamic Church, could not for the life of him figure out why there wasn't a sufficient amount of money in his Special Discretionary Fund to cover his mistress's expenses.
    Perhaps, he pondered as his barber shaved him slowly and carefully, he had too dim a notion of the extent of Deirdre's needs.
    Originally she had approached him—no small task in itself, since it involved ascending the C.I.C. hierarchy rung by rung—ascending without falling entirely off before reaching the top. Deirdre, at that time, represented the W.C.L.F., the World Civil Liberties Forum, and she had a list of abuses—it was hazy to him then and it was still hazy to him, but anyhow the two of them had wound up in bed, and now, officially, Dierdre had become his executive secretary.
    For her work she blotted up two salaries: the visible one that came with her job and the invisible one doled out from the substantial account that he was free to dispense as he saw fit. Where all this money went after it reached Deirdre he hadn't the foggiest idea. Bookkeeping had never been his strong suit.
    "You want the yellow removed from this gray on the side, don't you?" his barber said, shaking up the contents of a bottle.
    "Please," Harms said; he nodded.
    "You think the Lakers are going to snap their losing streak?" his barber said. "I mean, they acquired that What's-his-name; he's nine feet two inches. If they hadn't raised the—"
    Tapping his ear, Harms said, "I'm listening to the news, Arnold."
    "Well, yeah, I can see that, Father," Arnold the barber said as he splashed bleach onto the Chief Prelate's graying hair. "But there's something I wanted to ask you, about homosexual priests. Doesn't the Bible forbid homosexuality? So I don't see how a priest can be a practicing homosexual."
    The news that Harms was attempting to hear had to do with the health of the Procurator Maximus of the Scientific Legate, Nicholas Bulkowsky. A solemn prayer vigil had been formally called into being but nonetheless Bulkowsky continued to decline. Harms had, sub rosa, dispatched his personal physician to join the team of specialists attending to the Procurator's urgent condition.
    Bulkowsky, as not only Cardinal Harms but the entire curia knew, was a devout Christian. He had been converted by the evangelical, charismatic Dr. Cohn Passim who, at his revival meetings, often flew through the air in dramatic demonstration of