The Race for God Read Free Page B

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