No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night’s dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon.

It was a nerve gas.

It caused the organs of the body to eat one another.

“Well,” the Dominus McComas growled, picking at his hardy teeth, “if the inc can do it, fine. If I was an Elter I wouldn’t give a damn if it looked like Lufteufel or not; I’d just get a good fat wicked bloated pig-face up there; you know, a swilling face.” And his own swilling face beamed, and how strange it was, Father Handy thought, because McComas looked like one would imagine the Deus Irae to look… and yet, the color photo had shown a man with pain-smeared eyes, a man who seemed ill in a deep and dreadful way even as he gorged on roast chicken with a lei around his neck and a girl—not pretty—to his right… a man with shiny, heavy, tumbled black hair and too much stubble, even though no doubt he carefully shaved; it was subdermal, showing through: not his fault, and yet it was the mark. But of what? Blackness was not evil; blackness was what Martin Luther in his translation of Genesis had meant when he said, “Und die Erde war ohne Form und leer.” Leer; that was it. That was what blackness was; when spoken it sounded like “layer”… a film negative, which, having been exposed to unshielded light, had, due to chemical action, turned to absolute opaqueness, to this quality of feerness, this layer of glaucomalike blindness. It was like Oedipus wandering; what he saw, or rather what he failed to see. His eyes were not destroyed; they were really covered: it was a membrane. And so he, Father Handy, did not hate Carleton Lufteufel, because that billion who had died had not gone like those who had been gassed by the U.S. nerve gas; its death had not been monstrous.