hree years now, and
that's about the outside limit. Unless he's replaced soon, the machine
will be ruined."

Forrester opened his eyes. The wheel spun away and disappeared. "So you
found me to replace Dionysus. I had to look like him, so the mortals
wouldn't see any difference. And the psychological similarity--"

"That's right," Diana said. "It's the same as the wheel again. If you
remove a weight, you've got to put back a weight of the same magnitude.
Otherwise, the wheel's still out of balance."

"And since the power machine works through the nervous system--"

"The governing factor is that similarity. You've got to be of the same
magnitude as Dionysus. Of course, you don't have to be an _identical_
copy. The machine can be adjusted for _slight_ differences."

"I see," Forrester said. "And the fifteen power nodes--" Another idea
occurred to him. "Wait a minute. If there are only fifteen power nodes,
then how come there were so many different Gods and Goddesses among the
Greeks? There were a lot more than fifteen back then."

"Of course there were," Diana said, "but they weren't real Gods. As a
matter of fact, some of them didn't really exist."

Forrester frowned. "How's that again?"

"They were just disguises for one of the regular fifteen. Aesculapius,
for instance, the old God of medicine, was Hermes/Mercury in
disguise--he took the name in honor of a physician of the time. He would
have raised the man to demi-Godhood, but Aesculapius died unexpectedly,
and we thought taking his 'spirit' into the Pantheon was good public
relations."

"How about the others?" Forrester said. "They weren't all disguises,
were they?"

"Of course not. Some of them were demi-Gods, just like yourself. Their
power was derived, like yours, from the Pantheon instead of directly
through the machine. And then there were the satyrs and centaurs, and
suchlike beings. That was public relations, too--mainly Zeus' idea, I
understand. The original Zeus, of course."

"Of course," Forrester said.

"The satyrs and such were artificial life-forms, created, maintained and
controlled by the machine itself. It's equipped with what you might call
a cybernetic brain--although that's pretty inadequate as a description.
Vulcan could do a better job of explaining."

"Perfectly all right. I don't understand that kind of thing anyhow."

"Well, in that case, let me put it this way. The machine controlled
these artificial forms, but they could be t