Ram-Ram finally stopped to clear his throat, and Seven said, “Where did you get all that, uh, information?”

“From Christ himself,” Ram-Ram said. “Under hypnosis, it all came out.” He rubbed his hands together triumphantly. “I have it all in the case history.”

And Seven said, “Well, would you mind showing me the case history itself? Then you won’t have to go to all the bother of describing it.”

Ram-Ram turned on the eternal recording machine, saying, “All of these images came directly from Christ’s mind, but first, here’s an exterior shot of the experiment conditions. Look.” He aimed the machine at the eastern wall of the godologists’ building, and the wall disappeared for all practical purposes. Instead, the projections from the machine flashed out against the sky—somewhat like a drive-in theater, Seven thought, except that the whole sky was the screen. He wondered how many others were watching.

Christ lay on a golden couch, spread with royal velvet robes, his eyes closed, his long brown-gray ringlets in disarray about his face, his hands folded upon his chest, and a coverlet pulled up where his johnny robe left off. He seemed to be asleep or dreaming. Occasionally one divine toe twitched beneath the coverlet. Beside him sat Ram-Ram, in his professional capacity. “Now, count backward slowly,” he was saying, “from one million back to zero.”

“That must have taken forever,” Seven whispered.

Ram-Ram, rather annoyed, said, “Never mind, we’ll dispense with the hypnotic induction and the count.” He touched a lever. “I’ll skip ahead a bit. Ahah, here we are: Prenatal memories.”

Seven leapt back as a gigantic Lucifer appeared in the sky projection. His form took a thousand images at once, while, overall, one huge leering visage remained.

“The original bogeyman,” Ram-Ram said, with great satisfaction. “Quite effective, don’t you think? You might say that Lucifer was Christ’s shadow, and represented all the portions of his personality that he had to deny: the love of power, lust for knowledge, and the sheer automatic vitality, or the masculine aspects in earthly terminology. Christ’s gentleness, understanding, and so forth, stressed the feminine—‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ and all of that. Well, Lucifer in a way is the exaggerated other side of that image: the uninhibited—”

“Couldn’t you just be quiet for a minute?” Seven interrupted uneasily. He stared at the Lucifer image, and cautiously dematerialized at the same time. He’d never seen such a terrifying figure. Though it didn’t speak, it raged. The mouth moved insinuatingly as if it were calling out for blood and vengeance in a thousand unspoken languages.

Ram-Ram said proudly, “That image was projected directly from Christ’s mind. In a way, it was born with him.”