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catch us this time. I won’t go near anyone until I’ve changed clothes and taken a bath.”
    “Do not tempt the angels,” Benito said. He was quite serious. Yeah, and why not? I was expecting devils in Infernoland. Why not angels?
    “That messenger they hoped to see. They wanted him to come.”
    “ They did, yes. But you are a fugitive, Allen.”
    “We. You’re a fugitive, too.”
    “Perhaps.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Allen, you have much to learn.” He leaned against the wall, obviously waiting until I gave up.
    There were no handholds. This time Benito wouldn’t help. I was still trying to climb the wall when a flash flood of people spilled into the far end of the alley. As they foamed toward us in a dreadful silence I made one last attempt to go up the wall. Then they swept us up and floated us away.
    W
    e were in a marble palace. It was enormous, without furniture. The walls were covered with frescoes of bulls and dolphins and pretty girls wearing flounced skirts and little jackets that opened in front to show bare breasts. There were columns everywhere, oddly shaped columns thicker at the top than the bottom. The place reminded me of somewhere, not anywhere I had ever been, but hauntingly familiar. The palace was lit with torches in bronze holders along the walls, and there wasn’t any sign of modern technology at all.
    Except for the palace itself. It wound on and on, chamber after chamber, huge staircases with those great pillars inscribed in languages I couldn’t read. It was too big; it must have been prestressed concrete or something better. I would have liked to stay and look around, but we were embedded in the flow of the crowd. Nobody spoke or paid us any attention. I was glad for Benito’s company. Crowds of strangers bug me, and this one was worse than New York commuters, everyone wrapped up in himself.
    We spilled into an enormous room open at the far end. I had a good view through the pillars. The ground sloped sharply away into the bleakest landscape I’d ever seen. The castle was perched on the side of an enormous bowl, a world-sized bowl. Far down into it were the glimmers of fires and the shadow of smoke. I couldn’t see far into the smog that hung over everything.
    There was an alabaster throne at the far end of the audience chamber. An alien occupied it. He was vaguely bovine, but I’d have taken him for an oversized man if it hadn’t been for his tail.
    Tail!
    “What is that?” I demanded.
    “Minos. Judge of the Dead,” said Benito.
    The Builders had mixed some Egyptian or Cretan mythology with their Christianity. That, or they’d had to warp their landscape to fit a genuine alien. I could believe a cropping beast becoming an intelligent biped, given time and impetus and perhaps an assist from biological engineers. I’d written stories about that kind of thing.
    Could Minos be one of the Builders?
    People went up to present themselves to the monster. I couldn’t hear what the girl in the yellow dress was telling it, but it grinned and nodded. Abruptly its tail looped out and wrapped around and around the girl. It lifted her.
    The tail stretched like the limbs of Plastic Man in the old comic books. The girl shot between two pillars and dwindled, dwindled, dwindled to a speck. Minos’s tail must have been tens of miles long at that point. It came snaking back through the air, while the speck that was the girl sank like a single snowflake.
    My willing suspension of disbelief went all to hell. I started to giggle hysterically.
    Nobody noticed. Nobody but Benito, who watched curiously as I gathered the shreds of my self-control, took him by the arm, pointed at “Minos,” and said, “He can’t do that!”
    He was doing it again! The tail stretched out between the pillars like an infinite length of snake, dropped a man in a postman’s uniform into the murky air, and came coiling back.
    But there wasn’t room! Even ignoring the moment arm—that much weight at the end of