Free Crucified by Michael Slade

was going to bomb them.
    At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.'
    Near the end of the war—February 1945—Harris had reached the point where he could state, 'I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier.' That same month, his planes unleashed hell on Dresden."
    "So you took him to task?"
    "Wouldn't you?"
    "My grandmother died in the Blitz, and my grandfather was killed in one of the Lancasters lost in that raid."
    Uh-oh, Wyatt thought.
     

THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER

        LONDON
    "A Judas chair?" Liz said. "Why's it called that?"
    She'd met Wyatt at King's Cross Station, after his long and eventful daytrip to York. Taking a cab to his hotel in the heart of the capital, they'd headed right to the bar on the revolving top floor, and here they sat sipping drinks—a single-malt Scotch for him and a gin and tonic for her—as the lights of London slowly swirled beneath their table.
    "How well do you know the Bible?"
    "Minimal," Liz replied. "Just what you pick up here and there. My mom was a second-wave feminist in the burn-your-bra years. She thinks the Bible's a sexist putdown of women."
    "And you?"
    "I never got into it."
    "God is dead?" Wyatt asked.
    "I wouldn't go that far. I've never seen a burning bush, I'm not Adam's rib, and She—by that I mean God—doesn't talk to me. Until I hear from Her, I'll remain a skeptic."
    "What? You didn't slip me this in that teashop?" Wyatt joked. He touched the cartilage in his throat.
    "I don't get it," Liz said, popping a peanut from the bowl on the table into her mouth.
    "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil grew in the Garden of Eden. God forbade Adam to eat its fruit. But the serpent—Satan in disguise—persuaded Eve to eat from the tree and share the fruit with Adam. After he took a bite, Adam became aware of his nakedness. The end result was that God expelled them from Eden and cursed Eve by commanding Adam to rule over her. Thus was born original sin, us having to wear fig leaves, and"—he wagged his finger at Liz—"the need for you to keep your blouse buttoned up."
    "I'm not wearing a blouse," she said, plucking her black pullover with her fingers.
    "You were in the teashop."
    "What do Adam and Eve and my undone blouse have to do with a Judas chair?"
    Wyatt moved his Scotch aside and placed his laptop on the table. He found what he wanted on the Internet, then turned the screen around for Liz to read:

    By his sin, Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all human beings.
    Adam and Eve transmitted on to their descendants a human nature polluted by their own first sin and hence deprived of God's original holiness and justice; this deprivation we call  "original sin."
    As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the domination of death, and inclined to sin.

    "And that," said Wyatt, "is why you mustn't tempt a weakling like me with undone buttons."
    "Original sin?"
    "No. Concupiscence. The passed-on pollution."
    "Con -what?"
    "Lustful desire," he replied.
    "Peanut?" Liz asked, holding one out and throwing him the sexiest of pouts.
    Wyatt grinned.
    He liked this concupiscent game.
    "So what about your cartilage?" Liz prodded, eating the forbidden peanut herself.
    "The Bible doesn't identify the tree of knowledge.
    Mediterranean tradition says it was a fig tree, because Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their genitals. Malum is the Latin adjective for 'evil.' But used as a noun, malum means 'apple.' When the Bible was translated from Latin by northern Europeans, a mix-up occurred, and the forbidden fruit became an apple. The larynx in my throat is more prominent than yours because the apple Eve gave Adam stuck in