His Highness’ teeth bit the sentence in two. His saber-like gaze slashed suspiciously from face to face.
“You do your own army an injustice to compare its morals with that of any on earth,” soothed the old toady. “I’ll acknowledge that I am somewhat used up. Even Sin might get brain-fag, you know.”
“That excuse is antedated. You have had ample time to recuperate.” The royal digits made a crackling sound as they touched. “You failed egregiously on every important specification of the big fight. Did you keep them at it until the world was engulfed in one red sea of gore? Did you inoculate hate until it over-ruled every gentler human impulse? Did you overcome the too-young at home and the too-old who were to instruct them and the women who were to bear the spawn to continue the slaughter? With all the possibilities of modern wholesaleness, that war was not half what it should have been.”
“Admitting all you say,” the prime minister defended, “I don’t see cause for your august dissatisfaction over our progress with the mortal world.”
“You don’t? What you need is an oculist.”
His Majesty descended the steps and began to pace the great room.
“I have had a day of realization,” he continued in lifted voice. “Something must be done. Things are too slow to suit my purposes. We are not getting our share of those who enter Shadow Land. Entirely too many are ticketed through to the Fields by Mors.”
“You know, Sire, something of my efforts to buy that stubborn old keeper of the outer gate,” interpolated Sin. “Nothing I offer seems to have any value to him. He is polite enough, but drones always the same reminder that for the present he must abide by the records of Earth.”
“The trouble is not with Mors, fool fiend,” Satan snapped. “It is with that book of his—with the ‘Judgments of Men.’ The feelings of mortals do soften sickeningly toward their dead. They say the good die young. Certainly we try to see to it that the bad die old. That’s why everything has seemed to depend upon our new searchlight summoning towers. Mors is able, with only two such towers ranged on either side the Mystery Gate, to make his lists, set his automatic finders and turn on his power. What results? Every evening and all night long they come at his call. There’s certainly nothing attractive about the patriarch. He is grim as the first law of mortality and looks it. Yet every witness he subpœnas comes. Nothing stops them, the long, drear journey, the fear of the unknown, the hissing belly-crawlers along the way. What happens when I build a dozen searchlight towers to his two? I make my selected list of earthlings for whom no modern Ananias could pass a good word. I set my alleged finders and turn on all the power we can generate. With what result?”
Glaringly though he challenged reply, none who knew his latest scheme to add to the population of his kingdom dared remind him of its failure. Of necessity he answered himself.