Queen Alice was sitting down again, studying her hands. Ram-Ram seemed to have fallen asleep in the hard-backed chair, or he was pretending to be dozing, as a hospital patient might when wishing that a visitor would leave. With a slight shock, Jeffery realized that no one was paying him any attention at all. He might as well have been invisible. Queen Alice picked up a magazine. Someone turned up the volume on the TV set: A ballgame came on, and the spectators’ shouts filled the room. It was as if he’d already left, Jeffery thought. He coughed, picked up his jacket and turned to leave …

As he did, the sound of the spectators at the televised ballgame seemed to rise in volume, and the applause and shouts suddenly roused Oversoul Seven back to himself. Instantly he remembered the giant chuckles of the gods that had propelled him here. But he’d experienced the entire scene through Jeffery. When he discovered this, Oversoul Seven was considerably shaken and confused. Why Jeffery? he wondered. Jeffery wasn’t even one of his own personalities.

And then, as he thought of the gods and Jeffery, between one moment and the next, the two environments—the Olympian rest home and RamRam’s mental institution—met and merged, attaining such unmanageable dimensions that Seven called out for Cyprus. There was no answer. Instead, the dizzying transformation continued. The gods’ rest home with Zeus and Christ and the golden couch was suddenly transposed over the institution’s common room. The magazines on the coffee table fluttered madly through the air, landing on Christ’s couch. The television set, still showing the ballgame, now sat in the gods’ rest home, with Zeus madly adding his shouts to those of the spectators.

Worse, Jeffery, who was just leaving the common room, suddenly—somehow—turned into Will, and stayed. Queen Alice became Zeus’s wife, Hera, and Ram-Ram, like some mad director, was himself and the godologist Ram-Ram as well. Seven was reeling, trying to keep it all straight. In the next moment, however, all the surroundings expanded. Zeus and Christ, all of the inmates of the institution and all of the gods in the rest home, merged into one wildly incoherent supergod, but one so ancient, so grandly senile, so sweetly insane that even the grasses trembled at the very thought of his approach.

For now, in the next scene, Seven saw the world ruled by this spectacular entity, and heard the tempting senile god’s voice as it drifted eerily through all the secret places of the universe, into forest corners, into the deepest, most inaccessible ocean caves, into the invisible closets of people’s minds. And despite himself, Seven was terrified.