Read The Race for God for Free Online

that he could. One answer was awakening in his mind as he stood looking out on the town, and he was beginning to feel that he could explain why everything was here, in St. Charles Beach.
    It’s because I’m here, he thought. The white ship—something special about it for me. Why?
    Tremendous energy had been channeled through his mind in recent days, from the aura people. Strangely, despite knowing this viscerally, he felt no fatigue. Adrenalin pumped through his veins, kept him charged. But he felt rising trepidation, an onrushing fear that people would laugh at him.
    He had been going around in public with a chicken on his shoulder for years, letting people think him odd, letting them talk as they wished about him. None of it bothered him before, because it had all been a great big private joke. He didn’t think he cared what anyone thought. Now it seemed to matter, and he wished he hadn’t appeared on televid with No Name.
    He should go before the public now and make them take him seriously. It had to be that way, almost by definition, for he was carrying a momentous holy message.
    He had asked God about that, if religion was supposed to be serious, and the response hadn’t really answered the question. God asked if religion was really the way to reach Him, and He phrased it rhetorically, as if it wasn’t the way.
    God had chosen him, dammit! People wouldn’t dare laugh at him, not with the evidence of God’s power all around, not with the auras, even if only McMurtrey could see them. These were good people, and . . . but some carried weapons.
    It was another problem of definition. Religious people had auras, or at least it was said the holiest did, the saints and prophets. The aura concept seemed almost hackneyed to McMurtrey, too pat, and this was troublesome. Didn’t people only see auras in imagination, in strange visions?
    With so many theological representatives appearing at his doorstep, McMurtrey feared some were there to show him up, to prove him an infamous fraud. He might go out and bluff his way through for a while, taking full credit for the fleet and asserting that this miracle was an affirmation of the Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood. But this facade wouldn’t last long if God intervened.
    On the other hand, maybe God would want him to have fun with it for a while. What was the Leader of the Universe really like?
    McMurtrey agonized over this for a long time, focusing his energies inwardly so intensely that his vision fogged over. Presently he shook his head, and again gazed upon the town.
    Best to be humble, he decided. I’ll go out with No Name and admit everything.

    The man slipped into the seclusion of a thick oak grove, and upon the ground he placed a sheet of white plazymer, which he stepped upon. With two fingers he rubbed the back of one hand until it was hot and a blister formed there.
    From the forefinger of the other hand, a slender blade of blue bone pierced the fingertip bloodlessly, forming a cutting tool. With that blade he sliced around the sides of the blister, releasing an ooze of water and leaving it attached to the back of his hand with only a flap of epidermis. The blue bone blade receded into the fingertip, disappeared from view.
    He lifted the flap of skin, and at a thought-impulse, a lance of red light emerged from one eye, passing through the epidermal flap and touching one of his black leather shoes. The shoe shriveled into a tiny dark flake which dropped on the plazymer. Then the thin white sock on that foot shriveled and fell as a white flake. This exposed the bare skin of the foot, and the skin was not affected by the light.
    Quickly he repeated this procedure with the other shoe and sock, resulting in four flakes on the plazymer sheet. His coat, shirt, trousers and underclothes followed in like manner, and in short order he stood entirely in the buff, with a number of tiny flakes beneath him on the plazymer.
    Then he remembered his cap, removed it and