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price. Several Herbaht death squads moved about the city and began to visit the relatives of more than a thousand families, cutting them down ruthlessly to pay for the invented crimes of their kin. A few managed to make it into hiding, but they were very few in number , and the death squads continued to search for them day and night whilst their pictures were broadcast on every channel of the television, asking for people to volunteer their whereabouts.
    The Goddess herself wasn’t involved in the orders. She couldn’t have brought herself to have given such orders , even though she knew they were necessary if the status quo was to be maintained. Instead she blamed Mitshutosh for all the deaths and demanded that he leave her service to head up the death squads personally. She would simply have to find another driver for when she next wanted to leave the confines of the Temple.
    The problems started fairly soon afterwards when it was discovered that someone had actually made their own tape of the ceremony. Hunshubai was a great fan of the Goddess , believing her to be only capable of good things. He had spent a lot of money making tapes of the various ceremonies; it was a hobby of his, and he had been doing it for the last ten years: one hundred and twenty-seven ceremonies to date. He rarely bothered to watch them again; after all, virtually every ceremony was identical to every other ceremony. It had been partially because of this that they had been so sure no one would bother to tape it. But Hunshubai had them all—all from the last ten years, anyway. All so that the names of the ‘selected’ would be honored forever and would never be forgotten.
    When he started to hear the official version of what had happened at the most recent ceremony, it came as a great surprise to him. The description was totally different from how he remembered it, and so he decided to watch it again. He was dumbfounded if he could see what they meant when they claimed that the crowd was on the verge of attacking the Temple; to him it looked as if they were moving to leave. Those on the edges of the crowd had actually been moving away from the Temple when it had fired upon them.
    He watched it again and again . It certainly didn’t seem to be as the Goddess’ representatives were claiming, but maybe he was missing something they had caught. After three days of watching the tape through, he decided that whatever had happened to trigger the massacre was beyond him. He needed another pair of eyes. He made a copy of the tape and then delivered it to a friend of his with a simple note: ‘ I cannot reconcile the events of the day with the reports we are hearing on the news. Please check this tape over and tell me where I am going wrong. ’
    The friend, Nikshubose , watched the tape and couldn’t believe his eyes. It was definitely not the events that had been reported so clearly over the news time and again and which were still being reinforced nightly. Though a good friend of Hunshubai, Nikshubose wasn’t as big a fan of the Goddess, and watching the tape and listening to the spin that was being reported about the event simply made him angry.
    Nikshubose made copy after copy of the tape and started to distribute them to his friends with a simple comment : ‘ Judge for yourself .’
    It took the death squads less than a week to trace the source of the tapes back to their origin. Both Nikshubose and Hunshubai were taken into custody and put to death on a charge of distributing subversive material shortly afterwards. But the damage had already been done : there were hundreds of tapes already in distribution, and the number was more than doubling every day. Copies began to move beyond the confines of the city to other towns and cities, the message changing slowly from ‘ Judge for yourself, ’ to ‘ Can we trust them? ’
    The whole thing came to a head eight days short of the next lottery. A Herbaht death squad was on the trail of a parcel of