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Calthorp’s.
    Stagg sat up and then yelled from the pain and the shock. He rolled out of bed, fell to his knees from weakness, struggled to his feet, and staggered to the three full-length mirrors set at angles to each other. He was naked. His testicles were painted blue; his penis, red; his buttocks, white. He did not think about that. He could think about nothing except the two things he saw sticking at a 45-degree angle from his forehead for a foot and then branching out into many points.
    “Horns! What’re they doing there? Who put them there? By God, if I get my hands on the practical joker...” and he tried to pull the things from his head. He yelled with pain and let his hands drop to his side while he stared into the mirror. There was a stain of blood at the base of one of the horns.
    “Not horns,” Calthorp said. “Antlers. I like to be specific. Antlers—and not the hard, dead, horny kind, either. They’re fairly soft, warm and velvety, as a matter of fact. If you will put your thumb there, you can feel an artery pulsing, just under the surface. Whether they will later become the hard dead antlers of the mature—pardon the pun—stag, I don’t know.”
    The captain was scared and looking for something at which to get angry.
    “All right, Calthorp!” he roared. “Are you in on this monkey business? Because if you are, I’ll tear you limb from limb!”
    “You not only look like a beast, you’re beginning to act like one,” Calthorp murmured.
    Stagg could have struck the little anthropologist for his ill-timed humor. Then he saw that Calthorp was pale and his hands were shaking. His attitude was a cover-up for his very real fright.
    “All right,” Stagg said, calming down somewhat. “What happened?”
    Voice trembling, Calthorp told him that the priests had carried his unconscious body toward his bedroom. But a mob of priestesses had rushed in and seized him. For a terrible moment Calthorp had feared that Stagg would be torn apart by the two factions. However, the fight was a mock one, a ritual; the priestesses were supposed to win the body.
    Stagg had been carried into the bedroom. Calthorp tried to follow, but he was literally thrown out.
    “I soon got the point. They didn’t want a man in the room— except you. Even the surgeons were women. I tell you, when I saw them enter your room carrying saws and drills and bandages and all sorts of paraphernalia, I about went out of my mind. Especially when I saw that the surgeons were drunk. In fact, all the women were drunk. What a wild bunch! But John Barleycorn made me leave. He told me that at this time the women were likely to tear apart—literally—any man they encountered. He hinted that some of the musicians had not voluntarily qualified for candidacy as priests; they had just not been spry enough to get out of the way of the ladies on the evening of the winter solstice.
    “Barleycorn asked me if I were an Elk. Only the totem brothers of the Great Stag were comparatively safe during this time. I replied that I wasn’t an Elk, but I was a member of the Lions Club—though my dues hadn’t been paid for a long time. He said I would have been safe last year, when the Sunhero was a Lion. But I was in great danger now. And he insisted on my leaving the White House until the Son—by which he meant you—was born. So I did. I came back at dawn and found everyone gone, except you. I stayed by your bedside until you woke up.”
    He shook his head and clucked with sympathy.
    “Do you know,” Stagg said, “some things are coming back to me. It’s vague and mixed up, but I can remember coming to after taking that drink. I was weak and helpless as a baby. There was a great noise around me. Women screaming as if they were in the pain of childbirth...”
    “You were the baby,” Calthorp said.
    “Yes. How did you know?”
    “Things are beginning to shape a not unfamiliar pattern.”
    “Don’t leave me in the dark when you see the light!” Stagg