In some perverse way, the robbery had been fun. It was an adventure. His gold was gone, but if thieves didn’t get it, Walter’s ineffectual psychiatrist would. Blaine returned to the thought of Wally frozen in a discus-thrower’s position. His track specialty in high school had been the discus throw. Zona had told Blaine that Walter had been convinced the Bible was a tiny spaceship containing a crew of three hundred and fourteen perversely evil, micro-sized men who were extorting pocket change from some street bum Walter had recently met during his manic space walk. Walter was going to uncoil and hurl the little bastards to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way. Or something. He never really let the thing fly. Should have, probably. A normal person might find comfort in the fundamental religions, with their laws, promises, and the so-called covenant with God. But why listen to a bunch of cockamamie? Wasn’t it better to pursue your own truths? Very few had the courage or the elasticity to go it alone, though. And to view Christianity through the lens of manic psychosis was dangerous. Blaine had shucked his own Bible in Germany just after the war. Blaine was a full-blooded German himself. He even took heat for it at the time (“You’re one of them, Blaine, a fuckin’ kraut”), but he saw what the Germans had done and he had hated them for it. He knew the tendencies. His personality was marred by them, but at least he knew them. You didn’t have to let a bug crawl up your ass and get all hellbent and mean or trample over people to make money. You could treat people right without fearing or trying to please God. You could do it simply because it was human to do it, because love was a more ennobling tendency than hate, and if you were lucky, maybe you could live with yourself and sleep nights.