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I smiled. "Jovial old Jehovah is at the top of a hit list and I'm the
torpedo."
Tom burst out laughing. Corbin stared at me. His chin was growing purplish. He
didn't laugh.
"Don't get funny, Ammo."
"You seem to think I'm having a less than humorous effect."
"God's just one of a lot of ideas, Ammo. It's a metaphor for conscience-for
the all-seeing eye that watches your actions and won't let you escape their
consequences. God doesn't exist where you can track Him down and kill Him.
You'd have to kill an idea."
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"I'm hearing echoes," I said. "Deja vu. I've heard all this before. Yet
someone must think it's possible or I wouldn't be drawing a paycheck."
Corbin shook his head. Tom smiled again, saying, "Ghostbusters make a lot of
money ridding homes of entities that don't exist. Someone wants you to
exorcise the Holy Spirit. Better check your client's psychiatric record."
I didn't have to. I already knew it was pretty wobbly.
"Look, Ammo." Corbin spoke softly. "God is a concept deep within most all of
us that exists for a lot of reasons-fear, guilt, hatred. Sometimes even
genuine worship and joy. It's other-directed, it's aimed outward from the
self. When one is compelled to appease an all-powerful thing whose purpose is
beyond human understanding, the stress causes severe psychological damage. In
fact, the degree to which one achieves the good is the degree to which he or
she defies the dictates of God. Or, I should say, what some people say are the
dictates of God." He waved a hand about. "It's all just a way to keep people
enslaved. To keep them from thinking, daring, or rebelling."
"Bravo," I muttered around my cigarette. "A brilliant new hypothesis."
"Not much of what I say is new," Corbin admitted, his face as pleasant as flat
beer. "It just isn't repeated enough." The idea that one can live without God,
or that He's a cruel hoax, or an age-old political tool is so alien to most
people that they consider it a sin even to think about it."
"Perhaps," Tom cut in, "if you started grabbing people on the street, dragging
them into alleys and hypnotizing them, you could get into their subconscious
minds to pluck out the concept."
"Deprogramming?" It sounded like hard work.
Tom shrugged his suitably well-formed shoulders. "Well, not the sort that some
church kidnappers practice. They simply reprogram in a traditional God to
replace a socially unacceptable God. You'd have to leave them without any
deep-seated theistic concepts."
"And there are as many concepts of God," Corbin added, "as there are human
beings."
"And," Tom chirped, "you'd have to destroy the concept in everyone at once.
Otherwise it might re-emerge and God would live again."
"Not only that"-Corbin strode around the room like a hyped-up fight
promoter-"you'd have to provide enough intellectual ammunition to prevent
people from backsliding. Something to battle their doubts with. Thought, after
all, is the enemy of faith."
"You could use television. It's been used to hypnotize the masses for half a
century." Tom was enjoying this as much as Corbin.
The stocky man ran his fingers along his chin. Touching the sore spot made him
wince. He glowered at me. "TV's no good. Doesn't reach all the people. You've
got to lower everyone's brain waves into a theta dream state all at once. As
if they were dozing off. Yet leave in enough alpha wave state to enable them
to alter their gestalts."
"Same as the ancient initiation rituals."
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He smiled at Tom. "Hmm. Isn't that so..." He nodded in my direction. "Know
what we're talking about?"
"Alpha, theta-it's all Greek to me."
"Haw. Haw. Funny man. We're talking about brain wave frequencies." He looked
at me with his small, buried eyes and shook his head. "A tough guy like you
wouldn't care, would you?"
"I'm not tough. You said so yourself. I'm just a soft, sensitive guy who can't
take rejection."
"Take a walk and never come back."
"I presume this concludes our audience?"
Corbin glared at me. "I've given you a warning and offered you my help-"
"Is that what it was? Sounded like a lecture to me." I headed toward the door.
"And you refused to come clean. Whatever you're trying, Ammo, you're up
against stiff opposition. You can't do it alone."
"We all die alone," I said. "To kill, the only partner I need is my target."
"You're looking in all the wrong places."
I kept walking.
Tom stopped me with one lovely hand on my arm. "You can't leave without asking
why he calls this the St. Judas Church."
"Watch me."
Tom was insistent. His fingers tightened with surprising strength around my
arm. The friendly smile never left his lips. "Because all the apostles
betrayed their Lord, but only Judas felt bad enough about it to kill himself."
"Gee," I said, grasping Tom's wrist and squeezing until I felt cartilage
grind, "and all these years I thought Judas should be a saint because he was
instrumental in granting God's greatest wish."
"Wish?" Corbin said.
"To feel what it's like to be human. To feel what it's like to die."
Corbin's jaw dropped as far as it could in its condition. Score one for me.
Tom laughed.
I took one last look at that beautiful face and turned to go. His voice
carried down the steps as I departed.
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