The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty Page B

is it?” he asked gently. “What can I do for you?”
    “Well, for one thing, Major Strasser, my men want proper toilet facilities every fifty feet of tunnel. Can you provide that?”
    “Yes,” said Kane.
    Cutshaw glanced swiftly at the wall he had once attempted to climb.
    “Incidentally, have you fixed that goddam wall yet?”
    “No.”
    “But you’ll fix it.”
    “Yes.”
    “Who are you?”
    Kane’s face was in shadow. He did not reply.
    “Who are you?” Cutshaw repeated. “You’re too human to be human.” His face turned suspicious. He walked to the desk. “I’d like a sucker,” he told Kane grimly.
    “What?”
    “A sucker, a common lollipop. Can I have one?”
    “Why?”
    “Okay; so you’re not Pat O’Brien. Pat O’Brien would have given me a sucker without putting me through a third degree or checking my fucking credit references. Who the hell are you? All this suspense is a pain in the ass. Maybe you’re P. T. Barnum,” he ventured. “P. T. Barnum slaughtered lambs. He set up this cage at his side show, see, and he stuck in a panther and a lamb together. And there was never any trouble. Huddy, the public just went wild! They said, ‘Lookit, a panther and a lamb and they don’t even argue! They don’t even discuss!’ But, Hud, what the public never knew was that it was never the same poor lamb. That fucking panther ate up a lamb every single day at intermission for three hundred days, and then they shot him for asking for mint sauce. Animals are innocent. Why should they suffer?”
    “Why should men?”
    “Ah, come on, that’s a setup; that you’ve got answers for. Like pain makes people noble and how could a man be more than a talking, chess-playing panda bear if there weren’t at least the possibility of suffering. But what about animals, Hud? Does pain make turkeys noble? Why is all of creation based on dog eat dog, and the little fish are eaten by the big fish, animals screaming in pain, all creation an open wound, a fucking slaughterhouse?”
    “Maybe things weren’t like that at first.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “Maybe ‘Original Sin’ is just a metaphor for some horrible genetic mutation in all living things a long, long time ago. Maybe we caused those mutations somehow: a nuclear war that involved the whole planet, perhaps. I don’t know. But perhaps that’s what we mean by the ‘Fall’; and why innocent babies could be said to have inherited Adam’s sin. Genetics. We’re mutations; monsters, if you will.”
    “Then why doesn’t Foot just tell us that? Why in Christ can’t he simply make an appearance on top of the Empire State Building and give us the word? Then we’d all be good! What the fuck is the problem? Is Foot running short on tablets of stone? My Uncle Eddie owns a quarry; I can get them for him wholesale.”
    “You’re asking for miracles,” Kane observed.
    “I’m asking for Foot to either shit or get off the pot! Diarrhetic strange gods have been waiting in line!”
    “But—”
    “A busload of orphans went over a cliff today! I heard it on the news.”
    “Maybe God can’t interfere in our affairs.”
    “Yes, so I’ve noticed.” Cutshaw sat down on the couch.
    “Maybe God can’t interfere because to do so would spoil his plan for something in the future,” Kane appealed. There was a caring in his voice and his eyes. “Some evolution of man and the world,” he continued, “that’s so unimaginably beautiful that it’s worth all the tears and all the pain of every suffering thing that ever lived; and maybe when we get to that moment in time we’ll look back and say, ‘Yes; yes, I’m glad that it was so! ’ ”
    “I say it’s spinach and to hell with it.”
    Kane leaned forward. “You’re convinced that God is dead because of the evil in the world?”
    “Correct.”
    “Then why don’t you think he’s alive because of the goodness in the world?”
    “What goodness?”
    “Everywhere! It’s all around us!”
    “After an