He stood to stretch, sticking his hand out to me. "The name's Canfield. I piloted some of the old man's shuttles until Georgie boy took over and I got put back in electronics."

He gave me a firm, friendly grip and an open, unpretentious smile. His prematurely grey hair was short and neat.

I introduced Ann and myself, then asked, "Can you fly this thing?"

He gazed up at the shuttle. "If I were suicidal. The old man had us building good, solid spacecraft. None of that multiple redundancy crap you find on most ships. He built them cheap and sturdy, and they worked just fine. Then Turner comes in and decides to comply with FTC regulations. It was downhill after that."

I didn't want to hear the entire history of StratoDyne. "What would it take to get you to fly this thing?"

"Modifications."

"Such as?" Ann asked.

He eyed her up and down, then let his gaze drift to the spacecraft. "I call 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. 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.

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.

"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 another sip of her drink, allowing her cool gaze to warm a bit. "You've read enough by now to realize that the legends of witchcraft consist of a lot of misinterpreted myth. I suspect the only broom Bridget owns is used to sweep out the store."

I polished off my bourbon and spent a moment surveying the patrons of the bar. No one appeared to be eavesdropping, though the wonders of electronics could easily have had me fooled.

"I had planned to do away with Him scientifically."

"Remember what Bridget said. `Two great forces must join and two great forces must clash.'"

"Is that the final piece of the puzzle? If it is, I'm supposed to produce it with a flourish, and you're supposed to say, `Astounding, Holmes.'"

She gazed at me with searching eyes for a long moment. She looked disappointed.

"Final piece or not," she said, "the answer to the puzzle is this. The two great forces that must clash are good and evil."

"I suppose I'm on the side of good? Look who hired me." I ordered another drink.

"Sometimes evil aims can unwittingly set good actions into motion," she said. "Besides, Zacharias changed his mind after thinking about the consequences." She plowed on, undeterred. "The two great forces that must unite are science and magic. The roots of god reach deep into magic and myth. Without magic, no amount of science can affect him."

I shrugged my weary shoulders. Her theory was no more ridiculous than anything else I'd considered.

"All right, angel. I'll give it a whirl. What have I got to lose?"

Ann stared gloomily into her drink and didn't answer.