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her Starfinder. I like that better than S-D/X-93A." He stepped over to pat the
underside of the hulk. "Yeah, a lot of mod-"
One of the glossy black tiles fell to the floor.
He picked the piece up. "George thought it would be wiser to copy the NASA way
of doing things. Junked the old man's spray-on ablation that worked so well.
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I'd want to go back to that."
"Fine," I said. "How much will it all cost?"
"I'll do most of the electrical work myself, if you're really serious about
this. The rest will probably run about a million or so. That's in Panpacific
dollars, mind you." He tossed the tile into an oil drum filled with trash.
"Where'll you be sending her?"
"To crash the gates of heaven and kill God."
He laughed, then said in a wistful tone, "I'd pay that price to get into space
again."
I frowned. Was I getting another kook in on this? "We'll be taking her up to
synchronous orbit. A satellite repair flight."
Canfield rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Lot of junk up there. Which one do you
plan to retrieve?"
I smiled. "I don't plan to retrieve anything. It'll be an in-orbit
modification, which we'll discuss nearer our launch date." I took a moment to
eyeball the shuttle again. "I'm putting you in charge of hiring the right
people as of now."
"Okay. Everyone's files are still in the office. I'll call the good ones
back." He jerked a thumb toward Starfinder. "Her lifting tanks are still in
Guatemala. Turner refused to bribe the local bureaucrats after the last
flight. Other than that, we'll probably need a lead time of five month-"
"Can't," I said. "Five weeks max. We launch on New Year's Eve."
He gulped audibly. "Okay. Umm... five weeks." He withdrew a small, bent
notebook and a pen from his flight suit. "December thirty-one, nineteen
ninety-nine. Hour to be determined." He looked up from the notepad.
"Say-you're not involved with those ads I've been hearing on the radio, are
you?"
"Open conspiracy," Ann muttered, looking away.
"Something about God dying on January first?"
I kept my mouth shut.
"Are they serious about killing God?" he asked.
"Were you?" I said.
We left him staring at us, his face a puzzled field of thought.
18
Magick
I spent more and more time either accessing information on plaques or sitting
in the library in Old Downtown. I preferred being at the library. Sitting
there in bad lighting, wedged between stacks of real books and old drunks, I
absorbed all I could about religion, psychology, ESP, drugs....
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Each previous assassination had required extensive research and planning. This
one turned out to be no different. The preliminaries usually consisted of
surveillance-watching the victim to gain knowledge of his routines.
In this case, the Victim was well hidden. When it came time for the
confrontation, I'd have to be ready for any possibility.
I had just finished scanning a book-the umpteenth by yet another illiterate
who claimed he was able "to intimately contact" the Holy Spirit that was
sending UFOs to tell us to eat wheat germ and bean sprouts and refrain from
sex, profit, and other base urges.
I threw the book against a stack to my left. Nut literature toppled, spilling
across the worn table. Another library patron, using a sack of plain-wrap gin
for a pillow, roused a bit to eye me blearily.
I realized that I still didn't believe the crap.
The thought hit me like a set of knucks. Here I was up against God
Almighty-encountering portents in the sky, priests bent on mayhem, and satanic
rites amidst nuclear rubble.
And I still didn't believe that God was anywhere to be found.
"It's just fear," Ann said when I told her about it that night. We sat in the
bar of Casino Grande.
"Fear of failure?"
"No. I mean that believing in god is just fear. Fear of the unknown. And no
matter how much anyone professes not to believe in god, deep down there is
that trace of fear of the unknown that impels the belief in an unknowable
power beyond man. It's the existence of that fear that you must believe in.
That is what you must attack."
Even though she'd been meeting with promotional people all day, she still
maintained a glow of freshness and energy about her. She toyed with her
champagne glass and smiled.
"In fact," she said, "rather than conjuring up a belief, perhaps you merely
ought to suspend your disbelief temporarily." Her smiled faded into
seriousness. "Magical ceremonies and rituals are designed to create the sort
of atmosphere you'd need."
I snorted. "Magic? You mean the sort of theatrical drivel Zack performs? Whom
shall I cut open?"
She stopped fingering her glass to shake her head emphatically. "No. What he
engaged in was a black mass-a Christian heresy. It is a magical ritual, but
one hopelessly ineffective and crude."
She leaned over the table toward me. She seemed a touch drunk.
"I'm speaking of the Old Ways. The craft that Bridget preserves and
practices."
I stared at her. "Witches?" This was getting to be too much. "Broomsticks and
black cats and cauldrons?"
"We needn't take the cauldron, Dell." Having broached the subject, she took
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another sip of her drink, allowing her cool gaze to warm a bit. "You've read
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