Fear That Man

by Dean Koontz

  Only one way to know for sure. Take out the earplugs...

  Grabbing them, he ripped them free. The rush of sound almost knocked him down. But no Racesong. Racesong was dead. This was nothing more than a mad, ugly babbling. God had been crushed-mentally, not physically.

  Steps in consideration of a program to drive a god over the brink: 1) Assume the god is somewhat insane already (sadistic, masochistic, and a bit paranoid); 2) Bring a killer into the presence of the god, and invite the god to murder the man; 3) The god commits the murder, but in grasping for the radiation of pain, in searching hungrily for the issuance of tortured suffering, the god encounters joy at pain and exultation over oncoming death. Because the god is killing a masochist, not a normal creature.

  Sam had gambled that Buronto’s joy at dying only for the pain-not for some great cause-would be too alien for the Central Being. It was accustomed to the purpose of the race and would assume any race to have a purpose. A confrontation with a creature like Buronto, one enjoying the pain and dying without cause or reason, would disrupt the divine creature’s basics for reasoning. It would throw Its tight, compact scheme of things to the blazes. And there would be nothing to take their place. Once the idea of purposelessness had planted itself, insanity lay only a breath away.

  Perhaps that’s part of our superiority, Sam thought, trying to catch his breath. Perhaps man’s purposelessness, our aimless wandering, keeps us strong and sane enough to handle all things. Men, living as best suits us at the moment, outlive all great causes and plans.

  Stumbling, so very tired, he moved back the way he had come, back toward the hole in the hull.

  Around him, slugs weaved, inundated by the babble.

  Racesong was gone.

  Some of them moved toward him, menacingly waving rifles, but turned away or dropped the guns in confusion. There was no hypnotic command to kill. No submelody demanding murder. They were lost without the Racesong, without a guiding voice. They could see no real reason to kill now. They were beginning the same long climb man had almost finished. Gradually, they would become saner.

  He passed the bodies Buronto was responsible for.

  A hundred yards from the hole they had made, he became aware of a slug following him. He turned, stared at it.

  It mewed, not angrily.

  He turned.

  It moved next to him, mewing.

  "Go away, dammit!" he shouted.

  It mewed, mewed, somehow crossing language barriers with the question it was asking-the question that still lurked somewhere in his own soul.

  "Leave me!"

  Mewing, water through a flute...

  "There will be more gods," he said, vomit suddenly touching the back of his throat. He threw up on the wall, leaned heavily against the gray metal. He gagged, cleared his throat. "There will be more rungs falling down the ladder now." He was talking to a hundred ghosts, living and dead, to Gnossos, Hurkos, Buronto, Coro, Lotus, Crazy, all the dead people in the gore-splattered streets of Hope. They tumbled before him, insubstantial. "There will be more gods. But the ladder is structured like a pyramid, each rung smaller than the last, each god more provincial, less awesome. We’ll whip them, sooner or later. We’ll swat them like flies, those awful, ponderous universe-rulers. We are not property, damn it! We are not property! Dammit, dammit, dammit!"

  The slug touched him, called sweetly in hissing tones.

  "I am not yours," Sam spit through tightened lips. He turned and staggered toward the hole again.

  The slug followed.

  At the hole, he turned to it, his face flushed with an anger that had suddenly become undirectable.

  It mewed.

  "Dammit!" he roared. "Dammit to hell-if there is a hell. Man is his own god. He has to be, if there was ever any purpose." His mouth quivered, his eyes streamed tears. "And I am not your god!"

  He fell through the hole and onto the grass. The slug did not follow.

  In the city, the gutters were clogged with the flow of blood as it poured silently into the sewers. The stars were bright. The sky was without a roof. And darkness spoke to the wind.