The Race for God (6 page)

McMurtrey saw it even as he heard the warning, but he didn’t flinch.

An elephant pistol was holstered on the man’s hip, but he wasn’t making a move for the weapon. He wore a green sportscoat and was tall, with thinning brown hair combed straight back through untamable cowlicks. The eyes were the pale blue of the sea, looking through people, looking through this fraud, Evander McMurtrey.

McMurtrey was glad he hadn’t lied, for men such as this would have seen the truth and exposed him, McMurtrey’s knees quivered, threatening to fold on him and send him crashing to the floor of the stage.

He noticed that this man had a lot of nervous tics, the sort that invariably had distracted McMurtrey in the past, flooding his brain with images that blocked the thought patterns required for conversation. One of the man’s eyelids twitched occasionally, he tapped one foot on the step importunately, and his trigger finger, like an insect leg, rubbed the adjacent thumb.

Inexplicably, McMurtrey didn’t feel his thoughts muddling. He felt strong, at the crest of a momentous event. This was a purposeful strength, and it seemed capable of carrying him a long way.

McMurtrey took a deep breath and met the man’s gaze. “Your name?” McMurtrey asked.

“Johnny Orbust. I’m a Reborn Krassee, here to debate the Lord’s word and way with you, Rooster.”

“I always like to know who I’m talking to,” McMurtrey said. He squinted, detected no aura around the man. Then as he looked out upon the crowd in this fashion, McMurtrey no longer saw any auras, not even around individuals he had seen glowing before.

“Sun bothering you?” Orbust queried.

“No . . . it’s . . . You want to know why the Lord didn’t select a great leader for this task? Why not a person of grand stature, a person capable of engendering the admiration of millions? Why a man who goes around with a chicken on his shoulder?”

Orbust smiled sardonically.

“I’m not here to sell myself to anyone,” McMurtrey said, smoothing the green plumage on No Name’s backside. “Far from it. I’ve denigrated myself before you, exposed my life for the utter farce that it’s been. But the fact remains that God did speak to me and He did produce these marvelous ships. He communicated with many of you as well, or you wouldn’t be here. Perhaps not as He spoke to me, revealing His location, but differently. I sense the truth of this. As I look upon your face, Orbust, and upon the countenances of so many here, I know this is fact.”

Orbust’s jaw dropped. He took a step back, off the staircase and onto the ground. He bent over and lifted a pant leg, revealing a small sheath strapped to his calf.

A weapon,
McMurtrey thought, preparing to duck behind the lectern.
Why not the cannon on his hip?
McMurtrey didn’t see anyone moving toward Orbust to stop him, felt alone and abandoned.

Orbust seemed to have a second thought and paused. He let his pant leg down without pulling forth whatever the sheath held, and straightened.

“What did God say to you?” McMurtrey asked, staring so intensely at Orbust that he forced the man to look away. “It wasn’t . . . words. . . . “ Orbust said. “I felt . . . compelled to come here.”

“You came here concerning a ship? A particular ship that will carry you to Heaven?”

Orbust looked at the ground, like a child being reprimanded. “Y-yes. I saw it on televid.” He pointed. “That white one!”

It was the same ship McMurtrey had selected for himself, likewise for no reason he could form into words.

“Others are here to board that ship as well,” McMurtrey said. “It will hold many passengers. When God’s location was announced and we had no way to go there, many of us formed visions of how we would voyage to God. These ships are from our imaginations, from transmitted thought waves. I didn’t fully realize it myself until scant seconds ago, as I gazed out upon you and absorbed your energies. It wasn’t the first time I had known these energies, and they were familiar to me.” The crowd grew exceedingly quiet. McMurtrey felt an adrenalin surge, and the ensuing words came with a rush: “In days past, your thoughts and mine were channeled through me with such force that they materialized into objects. These ships are not mirages. While I sense what has happened, I don’t fully understand how. But it is something I cannot question, and I sense many of you believe this with me.”

By the hush in the crowd and the trusting, childlike faces that stared at him, McMurtrey saw he had struck a responsive chord. They were hanging on his every word.

“THESE ARE OUR CREATIONS!” McMurtrey shouted. “ENTER THEM!”

Orbust’s impertinent question didn’t require an answer. Not in words. Ironically, God had selected the lowliest prophet in the history of mankind for the most important assignment, a pilgrimage to the Master of Masters.

Gutan took a puff on his opium pipe, watched the subject. She had her eyes closed, awaiting the inevitable that would be brought on when Gutan made the prescribed machine settings and adjustments.

He heard Fork rolling back, the harsh whirrings and squeakings Gutan didn’t always notice.

If this was an elaborate, veiled experiment, it now occurred to Gutan that it had to go beyond the data pouring into the computer system. And theft protection had to be more extensive than the satellite tracking system that his implanted chip said watched the truck-trailer rigs at all times. There had to be eyes everywhere
inside,
something or someone watching Mnemo at all times. Might it be Fork? Or Gutan himself, transmitting via the chip to headquarters, made complacent by the opium that had appeared too conveniently in his life?

Could Gutan destroy the memory machine if he decided he wanted to? Or did the job chip contain within it a governor that prevented such acts? If the opium was part of the conspiracy, part of the veil, how could he have the thoughts he was experiencing now?

He didn’t want to destroy the machine, couldn’t envision doing anything like that.

He studied his pipe, the graceful curvatures of the dark wood stem that circulated the narcotic through his body. A special variety of opium, part of the conspiracy?

He wanted to dash the pipe to the floor and stomp the addiction mechanism to pieces. Then he recalled something he had heard, about drugs inducing paranoia in certain people.

With one hand he slammed shut the door of the mnemonic machine, and through the dark yellow-tinted glass of the door saw the subject’s expression change from serenity to terror.

Gutan glanced at the electric clip pad on the countertop to his left, noted the subject’s name, Anna Salazar, and the required machine settings. He began to make the settings.

Mnemo’s wide instrument console had a thousand tiny dials, half as many miniature toggles and levers, and ninety-three buttons so small they had to be pressed with a metal pick that was kept on a narrow, lipped shelf. All controls were numbered without explanation as to function, but the job chip implanted in Gutan’s cerebrum gave a smattering of information. The dial he was turning now, Number 271, was a sensory deprivator, tied in with the gelatin on Salazar’s body and designed to free the logjam of current events that was suppressing old memories. Sensory stimulation would follow.

The gelatin covering Salazar’s body glowed pale red for an instant, indicating Sensory Deprivation engaged.

Professor Pelter referred to the gelatin as a “Variable Texture Suit,” an electrically conductive surface that could make a subject believe he was wearing any manner of clothing, touching any surface, tasting any type of food ever created, smelling any smell. Pelter had refined and identified more than 600,000 different smells, nearly 100,000 different sounds, thousands more textures, temperatures and tastes. His remarkable machine could simulate any of these sensory enhancers in infinite variety, carrying a subject back in his memory to lives long forgotten.

Gutan knew from his own experiences before this job that were legion. Sometimes as an adult he picked up the pungent aroma of shrubbery that was reminiscent of a yard he used to pass on the way to elementary school. Prison-system cooking aromas were like those of school cafeterias, and embalming fluid odors brought back days spent in the family funeral home. So Mnemo’s capabilities hadn’t surprised Gutan that much.

He lifted a small blue lever in a vertical channel on the console, until it reached the numeral “1.” A brief blue glow in the gelatin indicated Sensory Stimulation engaged, a phase-one injection. They were starting her out slowly, getting her used to the machine. It had to be easier on the body that way, and to this extent she seemed lucky. Automatic testing would follow, for dream images and recent memories, with subtle suggestions from the machine based upon information programmed into it about the subject’s life history.

When the government computer beeped twice, as it would in a few minutes, Gutan would set the stimulator lever on “2,” and so on. Then to other controls, bringing more power, and back the subject would go. In a sense, Gutan and the Feds monitoring the equipment went along for the ride. Even Pelter went along, for his one-of-a-kind machine still lived.

Another dial, Number 140, was a Climate Control setting, and this Gutan set on zero to begin, neutral. He wouldn’t have to reset it for this subject, since Mnemo’s built-in computer would take over when things really got rolling. If a subject was experiencing a life in ancient Afsornia, for example (as in the recent case of a dispatchee at San Felipe Penitentiary), the computer would set temperature, humidity and air components according to known historical data and probabilities—thus enhancing the odds of stimulating more memories. All the foods, ancient and modern, were in other automatic mechanisms that Gutan didn’t have to fool with.

Some of the settings involved the injection of memory-enhancing nutrients, such as lecithin, phosphatidylcholine, arginine vasopressin and thiamine. Varying combinations of these and other neurotransmitters softened neuron membranes, produced acetylcholine in the tissues, improved synaptic connections and made further structural and chemical renovations, thus maximizing the ability of the brain to accept sensory stimulators.

Gutan stepped back, saw his own reflection clearly in the tinted mnemonic machine door, with Salazar visible beyond.

Like a camera lens adjusting focal length, he focused on Salazar, then back on his own reflection and then to the entire mnemonic machine itself. The machine was taller than Gutan and pentahedral front and back, but not at the sides. The flat surfaces circumnavigating the sides gave it the appearance of a big wheel that needed further refinement by its inventor before it would roll. It was pale yellow alloy, of indeterminate composition, with a darker yellow-tint oblong door taking up most of the front and an oblong LCD screen on top. The wide console was separate, on the side of the door, and linked to the machine via the entrance platform, which apparently had cables concealed within it

On schedule, Gutan threw on the red master power switch. Salazar’s body jerked, and the LCD screen projected an explosion of orange followed by a wild array of other colors. A landscape came into focus: high arched streetlight in the foreground with a long driveway beyond, leading to a barn-shaped house. Colors faded to black and white, then contrast darkened and the screen became black.

Salazar jerked again, hideously, and a “pop” sound issued from the machine. Six faces of men and women appeared side by side, then drew back, revealing frumpy-clothed forms. The clothing fell away, reappeared and fell away again.

A whirl of faces, landscapes, buildings and colors filled the screen. Cars, homes and household articles appeared, from centuries past. They were going fast, piling on top of one another. The ferocious, hate-crazed image of a man came into focus, and suddenly the image folded in upon itself, turned inside out. Salazar screamed, the most awful, gut-wrenching sound in all of creation. Her arms ripped free of their restraint straps, flailed wildly, and her face was a picture of hideous terror, features distorted beyond recognition.

For an instant Gutan saw his own reflection in the glass: His eyes were feral, satanic.

Salazar’s body went limp, the screen grew dark and all became silent except for Gutan’s labored breathing. It always ended like this, with overwhelming images that stopped everything.

Mnemo’s life-support systems couldn’t keep subjects alive when they went into trauma, and this seemed to be a great failing of the machine. Perhaps Professor Pelter should have worked in close or closer collaboration with medical technicians. Maybe he relied too much on his own knowledge, tried to do too much himself.

These thoughts took but an instant, as in a dream. Gutan had experienced them previously, and more rapidly each time, perfecting them it seemed, honing them and getting them out of his way.

He became frenzied, and beyond his own reflection saw what he wanted. He threw open Mnemo’s door, and in a superhuman effort freed Salazar’s massive cadaver from the seat and dragged it out.

Twenty minutes later she was quick-chilled and lay in bed beneath Gutan. He used the slippery electropulmonary gel still on her to perform the sexual act, but rationalized that he wasn’t a complete degenerate. . . . He didn’t do this with children, and with a man only once—an act of desperation.

Only after the passion subsided did his recurring worry about surveillance surface, those Federal eyes he suspected were everywhere. Why didn’t they put him under arrest? They had to know! The airspace once occupied by his severed finger throbbed from the cold, and he thrust the entire hand between his thighs, seeking warmth.

The sleeping compartment was permeated with the strawberry odor of gel, and Gutan felt unclean.

A wave of guilt struck him and he thought: I’m an ungodly son of a bitch if there ever was one! Why do I do these terrible things?

He felt helpless to change. Why bother? When a life has as many debits as mine, nothing I do now can change the balance. Perhaps if I had started to change earlier, if I’d tried to overcome . . . But now my acts are heaped around me and I can’t get past them. It’s easier to continue. . . .