I first read this post-apocalyptic fable of Roger Zelazny’s over a half-century ago, and have long since mislaid the paperbound volume in which it was included. I found a text version, replete with OCR errors, dumb quotes, hard line breaks and conventions like _italic_ for italic, online, and have endeavored over the course of a couple of hours’ labor to render it as a friendlier PDF, available here for your reading pleasure. Twenty-nine typographically sparse pages.

I use the term “fable” advisedly, this being science fiction at the soft end of the spectrum, but Zelazny, as was his wont, works in some nice mythical resonances, with faint echoes of Faust and (fainter still) of Job.

cordially,