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. 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....

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.

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