The Race for God

Chapter 1

In the vast majority of religions, the really nasty practices and beliefs aren’t documented in sacred texts. These have become matters of practice, of oral tradition or simply of interpretation. Nowhere is it written, for example, that women, blacks and physically handicapped persons cannot be priests in the Church of Modern Day Believers. But this is the way of the organization. For this and allied reasons I say to you: Dismantle every religion.

—General Commentary,

Autobiography of Tananius-Ofo

“Don’t waste my time,” the little man at the cluttered desk said. “We don’t print rubbish in the
Crier.”

With two thick pillows on his chair, he still sat lower than McMurtrey. This was James Robbins, the cantankerous managing editor of the St. Charles Beach
Crier,
a man whose reputation held he never smiled. He was young, with pale gray eyes.

“Every word is the truth!” McMurtrey heard his voice crack, looked away.
I can’t sound anxious,
he thought.
But I’ve got to get the message out

It was a musty, paper-cluttered postage stamp of an office, with only one other desk and no one at it. Muffled voices and sounds of machinery came from the other side of a wall to the rear.

“I know about you,” Robbins said. “The Grand Exalted Rooster . . . the wacko who goes around with a chicken on his shoulder.” His tone became smooth, an irritating whine: “Where is your little pet this morning?”

“I didn’t have to come to your flea-bitten office. Any big city press would—”

The editor sneered, motioned toward a computer terminal by his desk. “We’re all on NewsData. They could find out about you in seconds—unless you used a phony name. But you wouldn’t dare do that, would you?”

Against Bureau rules,
McMurtrey thought.
Presumption of disloyalty.

“It happens that I’ve known about you for quite a while, McMurtrey—everyone in these parts does. Is that rumor true? Did your feisty chicken really peck a man’s
eyes out in the last
town you lived in?”

McMurtrey didn’t know where the rumor of his pet’s ferocity came from, had never protested it

“And that mantra of yours, how does it go?”

“Listen, you—”

“It’s coming back to me. ‘O Chubby Mother, let me rubba your belly . . . let me rubba your belly.’” He waggled the thumb and forefinger of one hand in the beaklike ritual of McMurtrey’s organization.

“You’re a rude little twerp.”

The editor’s eyes flashed. “You wanna start calling names, fella? I could burn your ears, but lucky for you I’m in a good mood today. Speaking of names, what is it you call that chicken? No Name, right?”

McMurtrey sighed, didn’t recall telling anyone about that. Nervously, he rubbed one finger against a broken wooden edge on his chair.

“Your chicken has green plumes and you can walk around with it on one of your big wide shoulders. What is it, a mutant parrot?”

“I had it checked by an expert once,” McMurtrey replied. “He said it was a light Rahma, but a most unusual one, with unique plumage.”

“I see.”

“Aren’t you going to enter that in the data base?”

“Later, maybe. Does it ever defecate on your shoulder?”

McMurtrey shook his head, felt a vein throbbing in his temple. “We get along fine. Look, I don’t have to defend myself. This is the biggest scoop of your squalid little life. It’s exactly like I told you. I was lying in bed this morning, just waking up, and God spoke to me. He told me where He is, gave me the exact astronomical coordinates!”

“Yeah, yeah. At the break of dawn. You said His first words were ‘Seeker, who says religion is the way to God?’ What the hell is that supposed to be—some kind of trumped-up justification for your offbeat society? Is this a publicity stunt?”

“No! The ICCC is a religion, too!”

“Don’t try to kid me. I think you’re up to something.”

“You’re impossible!”

“Why were you chosen, of all people?”

“I don’t know!”

“How did you say it went? Words were floating in the airspace above you . . . little flashes of voice accompanied white light on glimmering wavetops—-as if the bedroom air were ocean water and you were above the surface looking down on it—a surface that hung over you, defying gravity.”

“That’s close.”

“You’re damn right it’s close. That’s my business. I don’t misquote. And I don’t print lies.”

McMurtrey sighed, stared at the ceiling. It was a sprayed-on rough texture, off-white with a brown scrape mark near one wall.

When God’s voice had come to him, it made him feel insignificant and dominated, but in retrospect he didn’t think it had been a complete, all-consuming domination. The voice had been urgent and curiously plaintive, not the expected commanding tone. It gave McMurtrey the feeling he could have refused to deliver God’s message.

How could he feel this way, that a request from on high was not an edict?

Of course he didn’t oppose it, for God had selected him from all others for a momentous occasion, an unheard-of occasion. McMurtrey couldn’t wait to discover more. Since childhood, he’d felt a deep longing to know God, a longing that hadn’t waned with the formation of his farcical Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood. Now he had the opportunity to fulfill the penultimate dream of anyone’s life, from a package of information thrust conveniently on his lap. But first he had to get past fools like this.

McMurtrey lowered his gaze. The editor was bent over the computer screen, an amber-lit unit, reading McMurtrey’s dossier.

“I’ve never printed a word about you,” Robbins said, without turning his head. “People know you’re a fraud, and I have my own reputation to consider.”

“So you refuse to run the story?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Well, I have.” McMurtrey lunged his big frame up and made for the door to the street. He was ready to slam the door through the jamb, when the editor spoke.

“Come back and sit down. I’ll see what we can use.”

McMurtrey looked over his shoulder, and they locked gazes.

Robbins shook his head. “Credibility you ain’t got. I don’t know why I’m doing this.” He turned back to the computer, began tapping keys.

McMurtrey resumed his seat, watched black letters appear on the screen as the managing editor wrote about the visitation.

Robbins paused. “NewsData says there are around nine thousand church members in your I Triple C. Do those members know it’s a scam? Are they in for the fun of it? With an acronym pronounced ICK’ they’d have to suspect something. I’m sorry, but a lot of details keep bothering me.”

“I’m not here to discuss that,” McMurtrey said. “There is a more important matter.” From the correspondence he received, it was clear that most of his members believed the drivel he’d made up about D’Urth being “an egg of the Great Mother Chicken, the originator of all life in the universe.” A few recognized the ICCC as a spoof, to their great amusement.

“Just a couple of details before we proceed,” the editor insisted. “I’ve got to make you sound credible. With a message from God, that’s critical, I’d say.”

McMurtrey sighed. “All right.”

“You started this organization out with ads-—almost twenty years ago, after you dropped out of college. Rumor has it you didn’t expect any response, that you’d been freebasing sparkle. And
voila!
Checks started pouring in!”

“I wasn’t on drugs!”
Not when I ran the ads, anyway.

McMurtrey stared at his hands, recalled crawling around on the floor of his college dormitory room several months before he ran the ads, looking for spilled bits of Anian sparkle. He and three buddies came up with the chicken church that uproarious night, and before the evening was over they carried the concept to preposterous extremes. Afterward, his buddies promptly forgot about it.

But McMurtrey didn’t forget.

“You’re not making this easy,” Robbins said. “Your grandmother invented pickpocket-proof trousers, and I see you’re wearing a pair. She made a bundle, left you with a trust fund. Are you still living off it or do you need publicity?”

“What’s the matter?” McMurtrey asked. “Don’t you have all the answers in your precious NewsData?”

An uncomfortable pause. Then: “Okay, we’ll stick to the visitation, and I’ll try to make it sound plausible.”

McMurtrey repeated his tale, and presently he was outside with an unseasonably warm winter breeze on his face. The air was clean, a contrast to the mustiness of the office. He walked home through the hilly seaside town, thinking about one of God’s more curious comments.

“Seeker, who says religion is the way to God?”

This had rattled McMurtrey to the core when he heard it—so much so that for agonizing moments as God continued to speak, McMurtrey couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was turned sideways in bed, staring at a pearly, many-chambered nautilus shell that had fallen from the dresser to the carpeted floor months before. He hadn’t bothered to pick it up, had hardly noticed it before the “visitation.” Frequently he didn’t get around to housekeeping anyway.

But as the Leader of the Universe spoke, McMurtrey found himself staring at the shell as if he had never seen it before. The chambers displayed were so exquisitely detailed, coiling to the core where the tiny animal once lived. In its utter perfection, the design brought to mind leaf patterns, spider webs, honeycombs and the flawless rippling wavelets caused by a stone dropped in a pond.

Recalling this, McMurtrey crossed a sandy field of ice plants, heading toward his modest bungalow on the other side, a tiny driftwood gray structure several houses up from the beach.

There had been something else too, something he hadn’t told the editor. One statement of God’s, in a voice that pulsed weak and strong, was especially provocative: “Cosmic Chickenhood is not everything. It might amount to nothing, along with everything else.”

McMurtrey chewed at one side of his upper lip.

What did that mean? “Might amount to nothing . . . ”
Might.
The Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood might amount to something then, something important if it deserved God’s special attention.

And the voice—mellifluous at times, barely audible at others—like a distant, struggling radio signal. It was not as McMurtrey imagined the God soundtrack should be, but in the marrow of his bones he sensed authenticity.

It scared the hell out of him.

Beyond the rooftops of town, along the horizon between the broad Bluepac Ocean and the cerulean sky, dark clouds were forming. McMurtrey picked up his pace.

Late that afternoon, McMurtrey touched his Wriskron to deactivate the alarm system on his pickpocket-proof trousers, opened three sequential pocket zippers that were keyed to his metabolism so that they could be undone only by him. He removed two sorneys, dropped the coins into the newspaper vending machine, and they clicked into place. The glass front of the machine slid open, and a scoop on a mechanical arm thrust a newspaper into McMurtrey’s hands.

He rezipped his pockets, set the alarm system on his trousers.

It was late afternoon, overcast, and as McMurtrey opened the newspaper a few raindrops spattered dark little splotches on the pages. He located the article on a back page, and it was headed: “STARTLING ANNOUNCEMENT BY CHICKEN MAN.”

He flew into an instant rage.

Chicken man! How he hated that appellation! The implications were obvious.

He read on:

“ST. CHARLES BEACH, Wessornia of D’Urth-Some of you who are familiar with Evander Harold McMurtrey have never taken his words seriously. How does one take this man seriously? After all, his religious ritual involves waggling a thumb and forefinger together as if they were upper and lower beaks, while uttering this mantra:

‘O Chubby Mother,

Let me rubba your belly
. . .

Let me rubba your belly
’

“There is more which good taste prohibits describing, and for manifest reasons we in his home town have never before published anything by him or about him. But this unbearded holy man told our managing editor today in an eerie, strangely convincing fashion that God revealed His location to him at dawn in some sort of an oral visitation, that God is domiciled on the planet Tananius-Ofo in the barely discernible galaxy 722C12009. This planet, according to Mr. McMurtrey, is at the origin of the universe, and is stationary. You-Know-Who lives there, and He’s waiting to be visited by man. The Big Guy has, it seems, invited us to tea.

“There is the slight problem of several trillion parsecs between us and 722C12009, but Mr. McMurtrey indicates that this poses no obstacle, for God is at this moment preparing the means by which we can narrow the gap. ‘
Devices
(unexplained term) will be made available soon. Tomorrow or the day after,’ McMurtrey said. I didn’t hear that part clearly.

“As to how his own pseudoreligion of Cosmic Chickenhood ties in, the Grand Exalted Rooster did not seem to know. Tune in tomorrow, or the next day.”

A heavy vehicle rattled across a speed bump, and McMurtrey looked up from where he stood by the vending machine. The county bookmobile pulled into its usual spot in the parking lot.

He rolled the newspaper in one hand, and when the bookmobile door swung open, he boarded behind an elderly man who was carrying an armload of book-tapes.

The vehicle shook with each step that McMurtrey took, for his corpulence registered in excess of 150 kilos.

The librarian, an effeminate young man with closely cropped blond hair, stood behind a desk at the rear. He was new, and had a trembling lower lip that McMurtrey tried not to look at.

A short while after his period of drug abuse, McMurtrey developed a severe problem in which he couldn’t help noticing a person’s mannerisms: He became distracted to the point of speechlessness by little tics. He’d been to innumerable doctors during his life, but none of them, not even the most expensive psychoformers, had been of any assistance.

McMurtrey’s gaze flitted involuntarily back to the librarian, to the still-quivering lip. The librarian removed foil from a plate of cookies and placed the plate to one side of the counter, apparently for patrons.