"Never!" He squeezed the trigger.

The bullet punched through my skull with a shattering impact to blow a fist-size chunk out the back. The effect was not much worse than being severely drunk. I kept talking.

"You style Yourself a God of Love, yet killers pray to You for victory in war. You call Yourself a Just God, yet promise to torture souls eternally for the most petty of transgressions, such as free thought."

"Propaganda. People have twisted My Word for their evil ends."

"Which You permit. A God who cared would correct all errors instantly and provide personal, on-the-spot instruction. You style Yourself the Father. Does a parent let a child maim itself playing with fire, waiting until it's dead to inform it of its mistake? Does a parent teach a child how to behave morally through the use of torment and pain? Eternal suffering? The only lesson we children learn is that God is insane and must be destroyed at any cost. Which is why I'm here!"

He inserted another magazine into the rifle and gave me a dozen rounds up and down my midline. I didn't quiet down.

"A good God is a metaphor for conscience. How does it feel to have one of Your own?"

"Shut up!" He said. "Lies. All lies. Lies of the Deceiver!"

"A Deceiver You permitted to exist. For the same reason a government allows an enemy government to exist. Without an external enemy, Your slaves would recognize the internal enemy. Without Satan to fear-whatever His name-humanity wouldn't see the need to give You the sacrifices You demand. So You keep Satan on as a silent partner."

I felt like jumping on Him and thrashing His brains out for all the evils done in His name. I knew, though, that He was crumbling without my help.

"You defraud the world by pretending that the executor of Your twisted vengeance is Your enemy. Your holy wars created hypocrites, not converts. Your inquisitions generated lies, not truth. Your jihads were gangland feuds. Your Exodus was a wild-goose chase. Your Prince of Peace became the God of Repression. Every seed You sow reaps misery and pain."

He dropped His rifle and slid to the bottom of the crater, weeping.

"Why?" He shouted over the whiz of bullets, stones, and electrons. "Why?"

"You lusted for a contradiction. You wanted us to love and accept You of our own free wills, yet You threatened us with ceaseless torment if we didn't. You provided for redemption at the last possible moment of life-before we have proof of Your existence-yet You made atonement impossible after death."

I knelt beside Him. "You confused us. You let others confuse us in Your name. You let us retain our faculties for logic, then asked us to worship You in the absence of any logical reason. You offered not even the merest shred of proof that You're something other than a demented prankster or cruel torturer. At least the back-alley thug who murders and rapes doesn't ask his victim to love him for it."

"Can I change?" He asked, hugging His rifle. The tears ran down his face, clearing the mud off in narrow streaks.

"It's too late," I said. "You've blown it. That I'm here at all, capable and willing to be Your assassin, proves that. That I could even consider killing God is proof that You're at the end of Your cycle."

He closed His eyes. "She," He whispered. "If only She-"

Before He could finished, the flash of a hydrogen bomb turned everything around me to the purest of pure, hard white light. I felt what it was like to be a star.

I novaed.

I stood at the final doorway. It was one solid slab of ornately carved oak. I was about twenty pounds slimmer and wearing a well-cut double-breasted suit. I felt young. In command. I adjusted my hat and reached out to knock…

"Don't bother," said a tired, wasted voice. "You've got the key, Mr. Ammo. You've always had the key."

A light tap of my fingers pushed the door open. "Seems I don't need a key."

"You are the key."

"Cut the Hollywood pretensions," I said, looking around the study. All four walls were lined with bookshelves. The books were thick, leatherbound volumes. Though the room had no windows or lamps, light came from somewhere, soft and low. The sound of crashing waves reached in from outside.

I shut the door slowly behind me.

In the center of the room sat a high-backed chair on a fading rug, facing away from me. I stepped over to it.

"Tell me, Mr. Ammo," asked a voice from the chair, "how did an assassin ever come to be such a seeker after truth?"

I leaned on the back of the chair for a moment. "An assassin is one who doesn't accept myths, most notably the myth of power. He sees through the eyes of a hunter who is as mighty as his prey, yet is apart from the game being played. He participates in the events of history, turning them to his ends, yet he remains an objective viewer. That is, if he wants to stay in business. He sees clearly that any deified `leader' is as evil as any small-time hood-and a lot less honest."

I stepped around to the front of the chair to gaze into the eyes of a weary old man.

Neither lean nor fat, tall nor short, dark nor light. He looked like the commonest of the common men. Absolutely average. Except for His eyes. They bespoke the ennui of absolute power corrupted absolutely.

I felt myself drawn toward those eyes. Drawn downward. Sinking. Falling.

I shook it off.

He continued to look deeply into me. "A proud man." He nodded. "I made pride a sin."

"Having a good opinion of oneself should never be a crime."

"No man a villain in his own eyes, correct, Mr. Ammo?" He folded His hands, nodding lightly. "Why do you want to kill Me? Did you hate your father?"

"No," I answered truthfully. "Don't look to psychological roots in my actions. Look to my chosen values."

"You probably hated him," He continued. "Leaders are father figures."

"Proper fathers don't rule the lives of their children by force. My father never did. He never taxed me or tithed me or imprisoned me and said he was doing me a favor. He never made me feel guilty for being born his son."

"He never showed you anything to worship. He mocked your sense of wonder."

"It survived." I found a pack of Marlboros in the left pocket of my jacket. Not my brand, but they'd do. Matches were in the vest pocket.

"What about your mother?"

"I didn't know You were a Freudian." I lit up and waved the first puff of smoke around. "Why don't we talk about Your Mother."

He pounded on the leather arm of the chair with a tightly balled fist. "I never had a Mother. Understand? Never! I am God! I am self-created! I am the Alpha and the Omega."

I shrugged mildly. "I don't know," I said. "If I can descend from an infinite number of ancestors going back down the evolutionary trail, I don't see why there can't be an infinite regress of gods and goddesses evolving through time. Perhaps when I see You, I'm looking at the next curve of the ascending helix of my own evolution-"

"Evolution." He almost spat the word out. "How I fought it. Change. I don't know why I bother. I tried saving things." He stared up at me with an imploring gaze. "I tried to make amends, but…" His hand made a futile gesture, like a dying bird.

"Yeah," I said. "I know. Christ died for our sins and all that."

His face turned three shades of purple as He shouted, "Christ didn't die for your sins! He died for Mine!" He began to weep. "What I did with the Flood was wrong. What I did to Sodom and Gomorrah was wrong. I'd violated My own commandment. Things weren't going the way I wanted, and I got angry. I said I was jealous." He paused, staring at the floor. "Doesn't it even things out that I let you kill My only Son? He died as Jesus and as Osiris and as Tammuz and as a dozen others. Won't you ever forgive Me?"