The Race for God (2 page)

McMurtrey cleared his throat, spoke with an absence of difficulty that surprised him. He asked for a readalong cassette of Savnoy’s
Critique of Scholastic Theology,
requested the week before.

This guy has a bad tic,
McMurtrey thought. He stared at the quivering lip, felt unaffected, and breathed a tentative sigh of relief. It had been a most disquieting problem, and he wondered now if God’s visitation that very morning might have something to do with the improvement. Maybe it was intended as proof, a small-scale miracle. In any event, McMurtrey hoped it would last.

The librarian searched through two stacks of book-tapes behind him.

A black fly buzzed irritatingly in McMurtrey’s face and landed on his nose. McMurtrey shook his head, swatted at the insect, and it circled his head, relanded on an ear. McMurtrey swatted the insect away, but within moments it was back once more upon his nose, as if it had landing rights there.

McMurtrey had been through this before. St. Charles Beach flies were tenacious, worse than he had seen in any other climate or locale. The creatures weren’t content to crawl along windows or counter tops. They didn’t look for ways out of rooms, didn’t even seem to care much about morsels of unattended food. They hovered in people’s faces.

McMurtrey shook his head briskly and used the rolled newspaper this time, making wild passes through the air. The fly disappeared from view, may have lodged itself in his hair. He didn’t feel it, gave up the effort.

“Oh, there you are, Savnoy,” the librarian said, locating a cassette that had been lying on its edge behind one pile. He held the book-tape up so that McMurtrey could read the title on its spine. It looked like one of the old-fashioned books still sold in specialty shops, but this was thinner than most of them, with a single cassette inside the cover.

For as long as he could remember, McMurtrey had been intrigued by the different facets of religion, all the major faiths. But the more he learned, the more utterly confused about God he became. He had always been convinced of God’s existence and longed to know God, but none of the doctrinal categories formed by other men seemed acceptable to him.

When the checkout procedure was completed, the librarian chirped, “Have a nice day, sir.” His lip stopped quivering, and he presented a warmed-over, unimpassioned smile, the sort everyone who stepped up to this counter probably received.

“Do something about the flies in this place,” McMurtrey said. “And don’t give me any of that ‘nice day’ crap, you phony functionary!”

“All right,” came the response, with hardly a missed beat. Then, he uttered a common and vile insult . . . words were in the identical “Have a nice day” tone, with the same smile.

McMurtrey felt his jaw drop, and his eyes opened so wide in surprise that they ached.

The irritating fellow held his expression and gazed off insipidly into the distance, civil-servant fashion. He showed no appearance of hostility.

McMurtrey whirled and left without another word, carrying the newspaper and book-tape.

Someday I’ll use my God pipeline to take care of guys like that,
McMurtrey thought.

He cast an anxious gaze at the gray sky over the Bluepac Ocean, half expecting fiery thunder to lash him for the impropriety of what he’d been thinking. It did begin to rain harder, but maybe it would have done so anyway. Nervously, McMurtrey hurried home.

Two evenings later, in Rimil, Wessornia of D’Urth . . .

Johnny Orbust let the fingers of his left hand dangle at his side and stared into the big red electronic eye mounted on one wall of his apartment. A digital counter beneath the eye ticked off thousandths of a second in reverse, and beneath that, a computer-selected scriptural reference was displayed, in black on amber letters: “Omanus 5:12.”

When the counter reached zero, the eye turned green.

Orbust’s hand darted across his body to a shoulder holster concealed beneath his sportscoat, making a soft, rapid slap of leather. Almost instantly he had a black Babul open in both hands, and Omanus 5:12 was beneath one forefinger.

The counter showed his time: 3.414 seconds. Not his best performance, but not bad, either. Orbust practiced constantly, keeping himself in shape for the religious arguments he had a habit of getting into.

He patted an .85 caliber elephant pistol on his hip, smiled at the thought of adversaries who stammered and perspired whenever he unclipped the holster flap. He could never shoot a human, and only once, with an obstinate MDB missionary, had he even drawn the piece. Orbust had toyed with the ammo clip while the terrified missionary glanced around for avenues of escape.

Supposedly military-issue, the gun was part of a miniaturized weapons and demolition kit he picked up cheap from a door-to-door Bureau of Loyalty-sanctioned armaments salesman. It was a 100 percent prepayment deal, where Orbust received part of the kit on the spot and the rest was supposed to be shipped to him. Secreted cleverly in the holster and the belt were a chemstrip and an array of kill-stun-disable-destroy devices, not all of which worked as represented. Orbust never did receive the additional items in the mail. He had tested what he had on a bunch of old factory-closeout androids and mechanized taxidermy animals that another salesman had unloaded on him earlier, and only half of the devices in the kit worked at all. Some, like the GI Randy Handy Dandy Automatic Lasso, were out and out duds. But the salesman had left him with no address or telephone number, and there were no brand names on anything to contact manufacturers.

Despite all this, the kit was easily worth its price. The pistol worked admirably, blowing a running droidman in half with surprisingly little recoil. Also, the chemstrip was, in Orbust’s words: “neat.” A long white strip of plazymerlike material with a built-in microprocessor, it was activated when a user spoke into it, explaining a particular chemical need. The strip then metamorphosed into what looked like a butterfly, and flew off.

Within a few minutes it would return, carrying a white plazymer bag suspended from a harness arrangement under its “body.” After setting down, the strip would again become a strip, absorbing the butterfly and the bag and revealing the bag’s contents—sometimes pellets, sometimes Plexiglaslike pump sprayers, sometimes vials of liquid or powder. Orbust had employed the device for rat killer, spot remover, and even a miraculous concoction that when sprayed over the fence onto a next door neighbor’s unruly pet harbor seal prevented the animal from barking for four weeks, without apparent permanent harm.

Orbust hadn’t yet ordered food with the chemstrip, fearing it might malfunction and poison him. He wondered where it obtained raw materials, hoped it was from the natural environment and not from a private party. But the device was BOL-sanctioned, so he didn’t have to worry about that. The chemstrip became like a light switch to him, activated when needed without too much thought about its workings.

The weapons kit and quick-draw Babul weren’t all Johnny Orbust had in his arsenal-for-God.

In a sheath strapped to one calf he kept his Snapcard, the ultimate verbal combat weapon, the photon bomb of debating.

He didn’t use it all the time, because he feared atrophy of the brain, worried about over-reliance on the card. Something could happen to it, and if he lost it where would he be? Nonetheless he had grown more dependent on it than he would have liked.

The Snapcard was, for all intents and purposes, irreplaceable.

Orbust was, according to his wife Karin, a “money-squandering gadget freak,” and the devices he had all over the house were a constant source of arguments.

He hadn’t made his high-school debating team. Then in college he vaulted onto the first team, with the help of this card, a crib card, really. Another salesman had been his salvation with this baby, an elderly Floriental gentleman who showed up early one Monday morning and spoke of recent cataract and back surgery as much as he did of his wares, apparently to elicit sympathy.

But Orbust hadn’t liked anything the man showed him on the first go-around. A perennial sucker for sales pitches, Orbust had been a solicitor himself for a time, marketing advertising novelties . . . and an old saying held that the easiest person to sell was another salesman. But on this occasion Orbust was slow to buy. It was early, he felt tired from not having slept well, and he asked the man to leave.

The salesman requested a glass of water, a familiar stalling technique.

Orbust motioned toward the kitchen. “In there.”

Presently the man had a glass of water in hand, and stood in the kitchen doorway, sipping slowly from the glass.

“Look,” the salesman said. “I was a merchant on Maros, and we had a tradition there I still follow. You’re the first customer of the week and I have to make a sale or my whole week is ruined.”

“All right, all right. Whattaya have for under five javits?”

The man shook his head, and his epicanthic eyes narrowed. “No, it must be a real sale. Something valuable.”

“But you don’t have anything I want or need. I’d like to help you out, but I’m tired and—”

“I have just the thing,” the salesman said, smiling in a strange way that revealed the gums of his teeth.

He set the glass on a table, reached down and lifted one pant leg. From a calf-strapped sheath he removed a slender silver metallic card.

“This is ver-r-r-y special,” he said.

The card was about the size of a credit card, and he said there weren’t very many of them in existence. The salesman hesitated for a moment, as if deciding whether or not he wanted to go through with what he was about to say.

“What is it?” Orbust asked.

“With this Snapcard in hand, I could sell you anything. It would tell me precisely how to win any argument with you on any subject. I use it—on occasion—but never for the first sale of the week. That wouldn’t be right. Even when most desperate, I’ve never offered it to another customer. But you . . . for some reason . . . ”

“If it’s so valuable, why sell it to me?”

He considered this for a moment. Then: “I’m getting older, nearing retirement age, and I don’t have any children. You seem like a nice young fellow.”

The salesman held the card in the upturned palm of one hand and squeezed each end of the card slightly, bending it into a gentle arc.

Orbust stared transfixed at the card. It sparkled with tiny golden lights against silver, lights that danced and spun. A while later he was to recall that looking at the lights had made his eyelids heavy. Now thinking back on this years later, Orbust believed he had been hypnotized by the card, which suggested an explanation of how it worked. But the capabilities of the card went far beyond that. They touched one or more ESP wavelengths and tapped into storehouses of information that were too vast to be confined within any one brain.

He tossed such recollections aside for the moment, became aware of a noise behind him. An organizing robot entered the room, carrying a heap of family pictures. The boxy, simulated-oak robot had shelves and trays all over its body, made accessible by its long flexible arms.

“Is this everything?” the robot asked, in a very sophisticated voice.

Orbust shrugged. “I dunno. I guess.”

The robot’s eyes flashed green, indicating message received, and it stood to one side, scanning the photographs for chronology and sliding them into compartments. Orbust didn’t know how it figured out dates, only knew what he’d heard when he bought it, that it always worked.

Orbust’s wife hated the robot, despite the fact that she was a messy person, one who should have welcomed the device, or so it seemed to him.

She used bad language as well, and Orbust couldn’t abide that.

Orbust flipped on the televid and strolled into the kitchen. He opened the upright-freezer door, felt a blast of coolness, and stared without enthusiasm at a leftover plazymer bowl of pastawax he could reheat for dinner.

A news program blared from the televid in the other room, but only bits of information entered his consciousness. He was thinking about his wife, lamenting the problems he had with her.

Karin, his wife of six years, was at a coffeehouse poetry session near the university. Orbust hated those readings, found them boring. Karin was the only money earner in the household, and as a consequence she went where she pleased, whenever she pleased. This had been another source of friction in their lives, and religion was yet another. Orbust had given up trying to discuss religion with his wife, and for nearly a year he had gone off to church without her. He was a Reborn Krassee, one of the recently formed fundamentalist Krassian denominations.

He had the bowl of pastawax in his hands, and as he turned toward the microwave he realized the news announcer had been talking about God.

The oval televid screen was visible through the doorway, and Orbust beheld a most peculiar individual on the screen—an immense man with scraggly hair and what looked like a green-plumed chicken on his shoulder.
Green plumes?
The woman reporter interviewing the man was keeping her distance, because the bird was snapping and hissing and spitting menacingly. Orbust realized in a rush who the man was, from wireservice stories that had been carrying his incredible message across the solar system.

This was the lunatic who said he knew where God was.

“Is it true that the Bureau of Loyalty has approved your spaceships for takeoff, Mr. McMurtrey?” the reporter queried, extending a microphone cautiously.

“Well, I haven’t actually been in touch with any BOL people,” McMurtrey said, uneasily, “but a reliable intermediary informed me today that the Bureau is staying out of this.”

The reporter shook her head, smiled. “I’ve counted half a dozen red and gold Bureau guncopters in the area, every one of ’em undoubtedly brimming with electronic gizmos. You can bet undercover agents are crawling all over this place.”

McMurtrey shifted on his feet. He appeared uncomfortable at the reporter’s candor.

In the background, Orbust saw an almost uniform fleet of spaceships, described in recent news accounts. They extended far into the distance in a most unusual straight line, with some perched precariously on frameworks over building tops or straddling streets, as if the whole bunch had been set down indiscriminately from above. They were fat ships of nearly the same size and shape, like big ripe pomegranates with nubby points on top. Some were bright and shiny red, others glistened varying shades of yellow and orange, and others were white. There appeared to have been some consideration for the town beneath the ships, for wherever a building top, fence, or other structure lay beneath, the underside of the craft had been custom-fitted with a shiny metal landing platform that straddled the structure without touching it, so that the weight of the ship actually rested on the ground.