Sen Yen Babbo & The Heavenly Host

I used to tell my students at the seminary that an evangelical wrestling match was a morality play for our time. Gone were the days of politically ideological wrestling, of grunting Iranian tag teams and fat, sweating pseudo sheiks. Now saints and sinners grappled with each other on a stage of sin and redemption, the struggle between good and evil so clearly delineated that even the most obtuse spectator could comprehend and shout, "Hallelujah!" We could now—thank you, Jesus—see the power, not of a man or even a country, but of the Lord. God was not only good, He was bigger and better than ever.

Unfortunately, He also cursed me with a weakness for libidinous and willing coeds, a weakness that eventually cost me my professorship at the seminary.

It was therefore with a joyful heart that I received a comcall from the Reverend Donald Devout of Denver, a man whose outrageous piety was equaled only by his love of alliteration. "Harry, boy, how are you?" His down-home accent was so thick Moses couldn't have parted it, even though he was from Philadelphia, same as me. "Understand you got some problems at the seminary."

It was the first I had heard from Don since we'd been roommates at Good News of the Airwaves Bible College. In the intervening years, he had become the king of evangelical wrestling and had grown reputedly wealthy and definitely famous in the process. "How did you know I'd been fired?" I asked him.

"How did Daniel know the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar? A Vision came to me in which you dipped into a tender virgin's inner temple!"

I was irked. "For heaven's sake, Don, she was twenty-two if she was a——"

"Blasphemy, too?" he bellowed so loudly my ear hurt. "But Jesus forgives. So do I. Ever think about the wrestling ministry, Harry? It's a great way to serve the Lord." He was finally speaking without italics. "Your plight has reached my cars just as I have lost one of the Lord's servants. It is a sign."

To make a long sermon short, Don offered me the job of villain manager.

Evangelical wrestling, of course, required villainous instruments of Satan, and villains required managers. The managers were to find appropriately ugly baddies and train and outfit them. Reverend Don, fortunately, paid for the cyberprosthetics.

(continued on page 106)Sen Yen Babbo(continued from page 81)

Cyberprossing was what really made evangelical wrestling succeed. The public never would have stood for it in old-time pro wrestling. The outcry had been bad enough when the old-time wrestlers cut themselves with hidden razor blades. So can you imagine the clamor at seeing hands ripped off, ragged stumps pumping blood (oh, yes, human—Reverend Don also owned a medical center) all over the first few rows? Washed in the blood of the Lamb, indeed.

But evangelical wrestling got away with it. Its popularity was so strong that for a public official to condemn it would be suicidal. Literally. The fans were fans in the worst way—fanatics. And it was a pack of those fanatics who unknowingly made an opening for me.

Sinning Sam Silverstein, who not only managed Pilate the Proud and Horrible Herod but was also a Jew, had been savaged by an angry mob outside the stage door. It seems that Herod and Pilate had unwisely roughed up David and Jonathan in a tag-team match before they had allowed themselves to be battered into submission by David's harp, and the crowd took it out on poor Sam, who was pronounced D.O.A. at Denver General. Bad luck for Sam, good luck for me. Reverend Don gave me a week to find a wrestler. "The uglier and meaner and the bigger enemy of Christ the better!" he told me, promising to banklink money for expenses.

•

I found my man easily enough, a 40ish black brother named Mustafa who was ugly enough and mean enough but depressingly neutral toward Christ. We flew to Denver, where Reverend Don met us. Since our seminary days, he had become a huge, hearty man with a crown of hair like a shellacked air bag. Once in his limo, he wasted no time in telling Mustafa and me what the next few weeks would hold.

"You," he said unto me, "are now Harry the Heretic, manager of Mammon, and you," he said unto Mustafa, "are Asphodel, the Ebony Demon!" Then he smiled broadly and generously. "Now, young man, whom the Lord hath seen fit to deliver unto me, which hand would you prefer to have replaced—the right or the left?"

Such was my introduction to evangelical wrestling. Mustafa, who required a minimal amount of persuasion and much less money than I would have asked for, chose to have his left hand replaced by a cyberprosthetic one. It was, admittedly, an extraordinary piece of craftsmanship. The technology was so far beyond the myoelectric limbs of the Eighties that it made their owners look like Captain Hook in comparison. Instead of operating through muscle movement, a cyberpros limb is controlled through brain waves whizzing through a micromini implanted beneath the rib cage. Mustafa's new hand, fitted firmly into the slot installed between ulna and radius, did everything a real hand could do, and with extra strength. It was a shame that he would have only the one match in which to show it off publicly.

That Saturday night, we were both extremely nervous as we stood in the ramp waiting to make our entrance. It was nearly eight, and soon Mustafa and I would be on TBS world-wide, seen by tens of millions of people, a significant number of them rabid Bornies howling for Mustafa's blood. Everything was ready. The redpaks and the raw liver had been tucked into the phony wrist, and my man's face had been painted by Reverend Don's make-up artist, though I thought he looked more like a little-theater Mikado than like a demon.

At last I heard Reverend Don introduce me, painting me as one of the great sinners of our age, a man hurled out of the seminary for teaching not only free love and communism but also demonology and photographic techniques in child pornography. The more Reverend Don talked, the more the crowd shrieked out their hatred for me. But his diatribe against me was nothing compared with the number he did on poor Mustafa. There was nothing racially oriented, since Reverend Don had his share of black followers; but when he was finished, there couldn't have been a soul in that arena who believed that Mustafa was anything less than the vilest, most depraved demon of the pit.

For all their hatred, they were well behaved when Mustafa and I entered the arena. They shouted and threw things at us, but nothing heavier than a pair of binoculars. The ring was blazing with light, and high on the eastern wall hung a video screen that displayed a compugenerated Jacob wrestling with the Angel, the same footage that began and ended each show. We climbed through the red-velvet ropes, and then Reverend Don introduced "Solomon the Slammer! The Wisest Wrestler beneath the Heavens!" Solomon came on, handsome, bearded, golden-robed, surrounded by modestly dressed handmaidens.

The match began, and in a brief time Solomon was slamming the Devil out of poor Mustafa, or Asphodel, as I tried to think of him. The fatal moment at last came to pass, and Solomon grasped the left hand, wrenched and stood up with a cry of godly triumph, holding the hand high above his head, the myriad circuits making the fingers flex and twitch as though still connected to the screaming demon writhing on the floor. Mustafa seemed thoroughly possessed by the spirit of the thing, flailing his arm so that the geyser of blood doused a woman in the front row who had been calling him a "nigger Devil" throughout the match.

Finally, the redpak ran dry and the implanted sensors shut off the pump, the chunks of liver hiding the plastic and metal that formed Mustafa's wrist. His struggle subsided and medicos rushed into the ring with a stretcher, tossed Mustafa onto it and whisked him away before anyone could see that he was still breathing. I followed, shaking my head and making in the air what I thought might be interpreted as arcane signs. I was booed, I was spat upon, but I was not hit. At least not hard.

For his pains, Mustafa received five figures, a ticket back East and the cyberpros hand, a $50,000 consolation prize with which he could win bar bets until the day he died.

•

As for me, my remuneration was sufficient but not extravagant. Reverend Don kept the big bucks, and I learned as the months went by that charity was one of the areas in which the reverend could have more closely emulated the Master.

The money, you see, is not in the baddies but in the good guys. They're the ones, always angelically handsome (as though goodness had something to do with looks), who get the commercials, the product endorsements, the workout vids, the guest spots on The 700 Club. My boys got used and abused and tossed back into the anonymity from whence they came, and I spent my days hanging around gyms looking for more canonical fodder. My hopes of managing a hero were nil, because all of them were already managed by—you foretold it—the Reverend of the Ring his divine self. And Don Devout liked it that way.

Weeks went by, and I saw Mary the Virgin trash my gal, the Whore of Babylon; watched David smash my seven-foot-tall Goliath; beheld Moses the Mighty mash my gilded Golden Calf, ripping off his implanted horns and piercing each of his four liquid-hydrogen stomachs with a startling blast of hell-fire. What could a Golden Calf endorse? And a dead one at that? But seeing the calf get sauteed made me think about other livestock, and soon (continued on page 133)Sen Yen Babbo(continued from page 106) the idea came to me for a hero of my very own.

"Samson," I told Reverend Don after the match that night, while I waited for the angry mob that wanted to kill me to disperse.

He raised an eyebrow that closely resembled a woolly-bear caterpillar. "And a horde of Philistines?" he inquired.

"One Philistine. Phil the Philistine."

"Phil the Fornicating Philistine!" he amended.

I nodded graciously. "Whatever. But the gimmick is that instead of beating him with the jawbone of an ass, Samson rips off the Philistine's jawbone."

"His ... jawbone?" Reverend Don's wide and watery eyes glittered, and he stroked his blocky and clean-shaven chin. "His jawbone," he repeated thoughtfully. "I'll have to ask for divine guidance on that one. And find out if cyberpros can rig it up." He shook his head. "Jawbone. Sometimes, Harry, in spite of all your sins, I think the Lord touches you with divine inspiration!"

Maybe so, but the Reverend Don didn't touch me with increased funding after he used my idea. He managed Samson, and yours truly found the slob to play Phil the Philistine—an ex-jock jaw-cancer patient who was only too glad to trade a night in the ring for a state-of-the-art job of reconstructive cybernetic surgery. Everyone made out like a bandit except Harry the Heretic.

•

So the months passed, months of scuffling and hustling, of being the lackey of Reverend Don and the nemesis of good, born-again, wrestling-loving Christians everywhere, months of disguises and subterfuge to avoid being lynched by those same good Bornies. It was a lifestyle that I feared would go on as long as I survived. But that was before Reverend Don found the Hammer of Christ and I found Sen Yen Babbo.

The Hammer, like Samson, was my idea. Reverend Don's imagination had never extended to using a cyberpros limb on a good guy, and when I made the suggestion, hoping against hope that he would let me be the one to find and manage the newest servant of Yahweh, his eyes lit up as quickly as my hopes dimmed. I could tell that he thought it was a great idea—an inspired idea—and that he would never entrust it to me.

I was right. He didn't. Within three days, he had found the Hammer in the guise of a wrestler at Colorado State. The kid was a senior and a glorious monster, with a face like a horny angel's. He was also a Bornie, all six feet eight inches and 300 pounds of him. Fifty pounds, however, were soon happily sacrificed for a cyberpros right arm, a perfect match for the left, natural one, right down to hair, moles and the tiniest pores. It slotted smoothly into the articular capsule, where it moved effortlessly and without the creaking noises that my own age-weary shoulders make.

At first, the Hammer was simple, trusting and enthusiastic. He didn't seem surprised to learn that the blood, sweat, toil and tears were all an act and didn't care, since the subterfuge was, in his words, "truly justified since it doth magnify the Lord." He spoke in italics, too—the Reverend Don influence. The kid was so nice, in fact, that I was afraid he was going to blow his first match.

The crowd was getting dulled out, as my man, Bad Battlin' Beelzebub, wasn't supposed to give the Hammer the works until after the sixth commercial. Beelzebub was doing all right, roaring and cursing and slamming the Hammer with an occasional forearm to get out of the corners, but the kid didn't seem as if his heart was in it.

I stood at ringside, making sorcerous gestures, yelling to the kid that his mom sacrificed to Baal, trying to get him to show a little zip, all to no avail. But, as we were to learn, the kid needed no urging. He'd been setting us up—us and the whole booing crowd.

Finally it was time. Beelzebub made a move that was amazingly slick for a man of his girth and age and had the kid's right arm wrenched up behind his back, pressing the hand and wrist ever higher, until they touched the kid's neck. Not once did the kid's face display the pain that it would have caused anyone with a real right arm.

Now the crowd started to quiet down, so that all 10,000 of them heard the sharp and heart-stopping crack that the cyberpros arm made as it split away from the shoulder in a rush of blood and dangling meat.

The crowd gasped. Even I gasped. Beelzebub laughed in premature triumph and held the dripping arm above his head with both hands, shouting, "Satanas! Satanas!" which endeared him not at all to the shocked throng, who now started to buzz in a definitely menacing undercurrent, and I wondered if we had gone too far. After all, this had never happened before. Not Elijah nor Solomon nor Daniel nor any of the good guys had ever lost so much as a pinkie, and here we were ripping off an entire arm. I felt the blood leave my face as I looked around at all the dream-shattered Bornies apportioning their anger between me and Beelzebub, whose demoniac mirth had begun to be replaced by fear.

And then the Hammer of Christ made his move. Through all of Beelzebub's celebratory posturing, the Hammer had not winced nor cried aloud. He merely stood, his face stony, his shoulder reservoir pumping a steadily diminishing supply of blood onto the ring floor. Now he slowly turned and fixed Beelzebub with an icy glare.

I will never forget that moment—the feel of the flop sweat sticking my sorcerous robe to my flesh, the mixed smells of body odor, popcorn and spilled grape juice, the sound of 10,000 drawn breaths—and, most of all, the look of deity on that young, beautiful and human face.

In utter silence, the Hammer of Christ walked the few steps to his adversary and, with one swift move, ripped the cyberpros arm from his hairy hands, raised it over his head like a maul and brought it down on the head of Beelzebub, driving him to the floor of the ring as brutally as Charlton Heston smashed the Golden Calf in The Ten Commandments.

The crowd loved it. They yelled and screamed and stomped and cheered and stood up and threw their programs and popcorn boxes and hats and coats and Bibles in the air, then picked up what had come down on their heads and threw it up again. And all the time, the Hammer of Christ kept whomping that cyberpros arm—all 50 pounds of it—down upon the unconscious head and body of my boy Beelzebub, that fat, flabby, dumb 50-year-old widower who had just wanted to make enough money in this one night to move to Florida. It was wrong, all wrong. It had been planned, of course, for the Hammer to take the arm and strike down his opponent—but with a pulled blow. One blow—a fake one—not the deadly storm of them that the Hammer was raining down.

I couldn't do a thing. If the Hammer of Christ didn't lambaste me, the crowd would. I could only watch as the Hammer of Christ, the bastard whose sweet face had fooled all of us there in different ways, beat an ex-pug named Billy Petrossian to death while thousands cheered.

At last he stopped, held up the arm for all to see and pressed it back to his shoulder, guiding it skillfully in a move he had rehearsed for weeks, slotting it so that all those little circuits joined, all the little brain waves zipped and zapped and took that dead, ripped-off arm straight up over his head, where a false and bloody fist clenched in holy, inholistic victory.

•

The Hammer and Reverend Don found me sitting beside Petrossian's still form when they came into the dressing room ten minutes later. The medicos had left. They were fakes, of course, and death scared them. Reverend Don had a thin smile on his full face, like a little boy who's won a game by cheating but is happy he's won just the same. The Hammer looked ecstatic. "He's dead," I told them. "You killed him."

The Hammer shook his head. "I'm only His instrument. It was the Lord that brought down destruction."

"It was you that brought down the arm!"

"I was filled with His spirit."

I couldn't believe it. "It's a game, you moron! It's a fake, a show, a fraud! None of it's real; it's not supposed to be real!"

Reverend Don smiled, fully now. "We grieve along with you for the loss of our brother here, Harry, but you must remember he died in the service of Christ and is so ensured of a place among the saints."

"A place ... you mean that's it?" I looked from one face to the other. "That's all there is? Billy Petrossian dies, no sweat? And the Hammer lives to kill another day?"

"The Hammer," Reverend Don intoned, "is the greatest blessing evangelical wrestling has ever seen. He will win more souls to Christ by showing the power of the Lord than any servant of Christ in this sorry century."

"But ... you've got a dead man here!"

"Zealousness in defense of the true and good is no crime. The death of this man is a pity, true, and it shall not happen again"—he gave the Hammer a sidelong glance—"but the ministry of the Hammer of Christ must not be stopped by an unfortunate accident."

I grabbed Reverend Don and hustled him into the hallway, away from the Hammer. "Accident? That was no accident—that kid loved it. It wasn't necessary, not at all! He's a killer, Don!"

"Not with peace but with a sword" Reverend Don reminded me.

I shook my head to try and understand. "You're going to wrestle this kid again? You're going to see he gets off?"

He shrugged. "An accident. One we can avoid in the future. I'll keep him under tighter control, and you find some foes of Christ with tougher skulls."

•

Reverend Don was serious, and he did what he said. There was an inquiry, but the Hammer was exonerated in full, wrestling being a "high risk" profession. It was not a surprising decision, as Reverend Don's influence reached high. I almost quit, but I didn't.

Instead, I did as Reverend Don had said and searched for hard skulls. I found them at the rate of one a week. It was easier, since they didn't have to undergo cyberprossing. Oh, sure, when they found out they had to wrestle the Hammer of Christ, some of them balked. But Reverend Don kept the Hammer in check, and none of my boys was hurt too badly, except for the one who caught a concussion when he didn't twist his head at the right moment.

Still, I could see that urge in the Hammer, and I feared he would go over that thin edge again. For all his self-professed piety, he was no Christian but a pagan gladiator, and what I had foolishly mistaken for deity in his face had been an angelically pure blood lust.

•

I came across Sen Yen Babbo in a dirty little gym in Pueblo that looked as if it had tried to be a health spa and failed. The free weights looked well used, while Nautilus machines rusted in the corners. There were no beautiful people there, just a bunch of aging fighters, a few flabby bodybuilders and some young Turks punishing punching bags. I saw no one with the physical oddities that Reverend Don thought made for good villains and was just about to leave when Sen Yen Babbo walked in.

He was the oldest man there, probably in his mid-50s. He was wearing a Gold's Gym T-shirt with so many holes that one saw more flesh than cotton, and that flesh was unpleasant to behold. It was yellow in color, made a muddy ocher by the matted covering of gray-brown body hair that sprouted through the holes in the V-shirt. His bald head looked as though it were made of sponges slapped together with papier-mâché. The nose had been broken times beyond counting, and the ears belonged on a relish tray. He was short and bandy-legged, and his stomach hung several inches over the sagging waistband of his gym shorts. In short, he was a perfect match for the beautiful, godly, diabolical Hammer of Christ.

I walked over to where he'd begun bench pressing a bar with an absurdly large number of iron plates on it. "How you doing?" I asked him. He didn't respond. "That's sure a lot of weight," I observed. He still didn't answer. "My name's Harry," I tried again.

He dropped the bar bell into the supports and looked at me. "Sen Yen Babbo," he said. I must have looked blank, for he went on immediately, "That's m' name."

Sen Yen Babbo turned out to be extremely talkative for a man who didn't talk well. He possessed a host of impediments, all of them acquired from his varied career. Thirty-plus years of prize fighting, professional wrestling and just plain roughhousing with his peers had shattered his jaw, scattered his teeth and cleft his palate until he was left with the barely distinguishable slur of a stroke victim. Still, before long, I was able to make out most of the words and found him astute enough to comprehend the merits of my offer.

"Wan' me ta rassle this Hammer guy."

I nodded. "He's not very nice. He'll hit you hard. You have a tough skull?"

He laughed, an unpleasant, gargling sound. "Touch 't," he grunted, lowering his head so that the bald pate faced me like a small boulder. I felt, delicately, and found a slightly yielding top layer and, beneath, a hard, calcified something. "Scar tisha," he said proudly. "'F ya can't bus' it open, ya can't hur' me."

"Did anyone ever bust it open?"

"Harh!"

"Well, the Hammer might try."

"Leddim."

Sen Yen Babbo didn't seem averse to losing. He'd lost plenty of times when he was a pro wrestler back in the Eighties. "Think they ledda guy look like me win? Naah, I lose alla time, know howda lose good."

The agreement was made, and I took Sen Yen Babbo to see Reverend Don. The holy man loved Sen Yen Babbo, his face, his body, his manner, everything about him but his name. "Sen Yen Babbo? Nonsense, we'll call him the Beast, after the beast in the Book of Revelation."

"Sen Yen Babbo," answered Sen Yen Babbo.

"Pardon?" said Reverend Don.

"Sen Yen Babbo," answered Sen Yen Babbo again.

"I think," I tried to explain, "that he wants to use the name Sen Yen Babbo." Sen Yen Babbo nodded. "Sen Yen Babbo," he repeated.

"But ... but it doesn't mean anything; what does it mean?"

"Means me," clarified Sen Yen Babbo.

The VideoGuide listed the match as the Hammer of Christ vs. Sen Yen Babbo.

The night of the match, we went over the procedures one more time. Sen Yen Babbo had practiced with the Hammer all week, and I thought he was ready. Still, there was a lack of precision about him that made me edgy. I wanted him to remember everything that was supposed to happen, because I didn't want him hurt.

"After the third commercial break," I told him again, "is when you go for the right arm. It'll come off easy. I don't know when he'll grab it back from you—he milks that like crazy. But when he does, be ready for the blow and go with it. Don't let him hit you head on, because if he sees he's really hurt you, well, something might snap and he might really bang you up."

Sen Yen Babbo looked at me oddly. "Wha' you so worried about me for, huh?"

"I just don't want anybody to get hurt."

"This Hammer guy, he killed that Petrossian, din' he?" I nodded. "Don' you worry about me. That Petrossian, he had a soft head." When he grinned at me, I was glad he liked me. "You good guy. Don' worry. Things turn out aw right."

Surprisingly enough, Sen Yen Babbo was right.

•

The evening began auspiciously enough. The mob hurled imprecations and a number of popcorn boxes at Sen Yen Babbo and myself as we entered the arena. I was accustomed to it, and it didn't bother him. As he climbed into the ring, a juice bottle bounced off his head, but he gave no indication of its presence. Seeing that made me feel better. He strode immediately to the middle of the ring and twirled about with a body not built for twirling. The long red robe wafted outward like a film of blood, and he roared a guttural challenge to the world at large. Then he spat at the audience.

That was a new one on me and a new one on the audience as well. To be spat upon was bad enough, but to be spat upon by ancient, evil, repulsive Sen Yen Babbo was something else entirely. The first three rows stood en masse and moved toward the ring in a wave. But Sen Yen Babbo swirled around again and roared and stilled the waters as quickly as Jesus ever had. Then he laughed and shouted as clearly as he could, "Bring me the Christian."

I was terrified. My previous wrestlers had bullied and blustered but had never spat, and no one had ever called for a Christian in that blasphemous tone of voice. It was fast becoming a nasty crowd.

As loudly as they had reviled Sen Yen Babbo, all the more loudly did they cheer the Hammer of Christ as he entered the arena. "Ham-mer, Ham-mer, Ham-mer!" rang the chant as the Scourge of God vaulted over the ropes and landed with a deft bounce. Here was a man who disdained twirling. He simply strode to the center of the ring, smiled a closed-mouth smile and raised his cyberpros right arm, fist clenched, showing the happy people the Hammer of the Hammer.

They cheered and continued to cheer, and I whispered to Sen Yen Babbo, "Third commercial."

He nodded. "Thir' commersh'."

The ring announcements, alternately laudatory and condemnatory, were made by Reverend Don, who looked crisp and clean and holy in a white-silk suit. The Hammer preened, Sen Yen Babbo snarled and the bell rang.

It was a good show. The Hammer leaped and pirouetted and turned, punishing and being punished with grace and style. And Sen Yen Babbo was magnificent in his own right, biting and clawing and gouging with such artistry that had I not known it was all spurious, I would have been easily convinced that real mayhem was occurring. And every chance I got, I whispered sotto voce to Sen Yen Babbo, "Third commercial," and he would nod and mumble, "Thir' commersh'."

At last the time had come. Reverend Don had plugged the latest evangelical-wrestling viddiscs for the third time, and we were back to meat slapping meat. Now Sen Yen Babbo broke the Hammer's full nelson, spun, grasped the Hammer of Christ by the wrist and wrenched with all his strength. The arm went taut, snapped and Sen Yen Babbo wrenched again, as though trying to tear that last bit of gristle that tenaciously holds the drumstick to the rest of the Thanksgiving turkey.

The drumstick snapped off in a rush of blood, and Sen Yen Babbo held over his head, like some grisly trophy, the left arm of the Hammer of Christ.

Left arm?

Whoops.

•

I suppose I had thought everything was all right because the Hammer had not screamed. He had never screamed before, since screaming was not consistent with his miraculous aura. But the reason he didn't scream now was that he had fainted dead away from pain and shock. Reverend Don walked, trembling, to where the Hammer lay, oblivious to the pumping blood that was staining his ice-cream suit. Sen Yen Babbo still stood, the arm above his head, apparently waiting to have it snatched from his hand and get conked on the head with it. All this time, the crowd was deathly still.

At last Sen Yen Babbo turned impatiently and saw Reverend Don bending over the Hammer, saw how pale the Hammer was where he wasn't splashed with red and saw how pale Reverend Don was as well. It was enough to give Sen Yen Babbo pause and make him examine the grisly relic he held. A cursory glance at the strips of muscle and ligament dangling from the shoulder joint told him something was awry, and he then did the only thing that he apparently felt he could do under the circumstances. Clinging desperately to the now-aborted scenario, he attempted to knock himself unconscious with the arm, since it didn't look as though the Hammer of Christ was going to be able to in the near future.

The attempt was unsuccessful. The arm bent limply at the elbow and flopped over Sen Yen Babbo's shoulder. He dropped it and looked at me in dismay.

•

I could give him no consolation, for I knew that we were doomed. The crowd's stunned silence had ceased, and a low, turbulent roar was slowly growing. In another moment they would be upon us, destroying both the slayer and the manager who had been responsible for the destruction of their hero. Even now they were rising, shoulders hunched forward, eyes burning with the zealous fire of divine retribution. I started to pray.

And the prayer was answered. A voice spoke out that could be heard in each corner of the arena——

"Six-six-six!"

At first I thought it was God but quickly realized it was Reverend Don on his mike.

"The mark of the beast! Here on his head! Hidden in his hair! The sign of the Antichrist!"

I realized several things at once then. I realized that it was the Hammer's head Reverend Don was referring to and not Sen Yen Babbo's, since Sen Yen Babbo had no hair; and I realized, too, that no wrestler for God, in the six years in which evangelical wrestling flourished, had ever lost a match. And Reverend Don did not intend a wrestler for God to start now. If a wrestler for God lost, then he could be no wrestler for God. Reverend Don was a man who knew how to cut his losses.

"The Hammer of Christ? No, my friends—rather the Hammer of the Antichrist!" He called to the medicos. "Remove this pestilence from our sight!" They rushed into the ring, threw the unconscious and possibly dead Hammer onto the stretcher and dashed out.

"And here" Reverend Don went on, pointing to Sen Yen Babbo, "is God's instrument! As the Lord Jesus converted Saul the sinner to Paul the saint, so he has converted this sinner to his truth! No longer shall this man be Sen Yen Babbo, but he shall be Paul the Convert! And as such he shall battle for the Lord and smite the heads of the sinners!" I almost expected Sen Yen Babbo to decline the name change again, but he seemed to realize the gravity of the situation and accepted the new appellation with good grace.

Then I came to my last realization—that if I did not join in quickly, the train that was bound for glory and riches would leave without me.

"Hallelujah!" I cried in letters as italic as I could squeeze from a fear-parched throat, leaping into the ring and embracing first Sen Yen Babbo and a confused Reverend Don, whose microphone I took easily. "I have seen the light at last! Through my unwitting guidance has this man Paul defeated a minion of Satan!"

"M' manager!" Sen Yen Babbo grunted into the mike.

"Hallelujah! The manager of Paul the Convert! Born again—as are we all—to manage this man against the forces of evil! To join hands with Reverend Don and rid this good world of the sin and the vermin that corrupt it!"

I grinned at the man in the strawberry-ice-cream suit, and handed him back his mike. "Right, Don?" I asked him, and he nodded dully as the crowd screamed their delight at the saving of the souls of Sen Yen Babbo and Harry the Heretic.

•

There's not much else to tell. The Hammer lived, which was more than he deserved, and sued Reverend Don when he wouldn't buy him a second cyberpros arm. The Hammer lost, of course. You just don't sue Reverend Don in Colorado. Paul the Convert became, as everyone knows, the most beloved wrestler since Hulk Hogan, and I've managed him ever since, along with the rest of the Apostles, the hottest tag team in the business. They're a good bunch, with a lot less violence and a lot more showmanship, which seems to be the direction in which evangelical wrestling is going.

One more thing. I found out from one of the Apostles that Sen Yen Babbo was a good friend of Billy Petrossian, the pug the Hammer killed in his first match. Maybe, despite the childish ignorance he conveys on The 700 Club, Sen Yen Babbo isn't quite as punchy as I gave him credit for being.

The Lord works in mysterious ways His blunders to perform.

"At last I heard Reverend Don introduce me, painting me as one of the great sinners of our age."