The Race for God by Brian Herbert Read Free Book Online Page A

from cadavers forced the firm into bankruptcy. There were also rumors of corneas and other body parts sold illegally to hospitals, but all of it, while true, went unproven by authorities.
    A long period of blacklisting and destitution ensued, in which Gutan bounced between a variety of minimum-wage jobs. Finally he landed a worthwhile position with the government in the Body Disposal Corps. Through a series of staff and management shakeups this led him to the Dispatch Division of the League Penitentiary System.
    Initially Gutan worked with what the prison system called “Damoclean boxes,” giant one-to-a-prisoner cages, with a ten-ton weight suspended from the ceiling of each cage. Through remarkable gearing and engineering, the weight was held by but a single cutaway strand of the prisoner’s own hair. If remained but for the Dispatcher to slice the hair, a simple task.; When the Mnemo position became available, Gutan took a skills test and was selected as one of the elite crew to operate the machine.
    For this assignment Gutan was trained differently, through a job computer chip implanted in his brain. As a consequence, Gutan wondered why any testing had been necessary; unless the job chip worked from a platform of skills already present in the individual.
    The opium permitted Gutan to look at himself objectively, as from afar, and in one facet of this he could study the implanted chip as if he were an outside observer, without having to remove it and subject it to electronic analysis. He perused it occasionally for diversion, and found within the chip some of the documentation left by the professor.
    Anytime Gutan wanted to do so, he could call internally upon all the data in the chip for review. It was a conscious subconscious experience, since with the extent and method of training he didn’t need to think about his tasks. He wondered if he was learning unauthorized information in this process.
    The laboratory-type control methods utilized in the executions, for example, became very apparent upon analysis—the way each condemned prisoner was dispatched with different machine settings, with data fed constantly into an adjacent and sealed government-installed computer.
    Gutan watched Fork place the big woman in the mnemonic machine and strap her into the seat.
    Working with uncharacteristic slowness, Fork unhooked a spray unit from a bracket on an inside wall, pointed the unit at the woman and pulled a long trigger. Clear electropulmonary gel inundated her naked body, covering even her mouth and nose. The stuff gave her body a sweaty sheen and blocked her breathing, causing her face to turn red for several seconds. It made her eyes red as well, and as Gutan had been taught, temporarily distorted vision without permanent harm. As if it mattered.
    A strawberry odor from the gel filled his nostrils, excited him. He used the substance left on bodies as a sexual lubricant.
    Fork clamped a strand of red plazymer tubing from the machine to a gel-covered spot on her neck, and she resumed breathing. Her coloration returned to near normal, but she couldn’t conceal agitation, manifested in little muscular twitches all over her body.
    After a few seconds, convex bubbles formed in front of her eyes, giving her face an alien cast. These bubbles were as clear as those of eyeglass lenses, enabling the dispatchee and the Dispatcher to look at one another.
    Fear had set into her eyes, and this intrigued Gutan. He always enjoyed watching the eyes.
    Soon the woman would scream and her face would become horribly distorted, like all the other dispatchees. Then she would be Gutan’s for a time, to have his way with her.
    Someone was assimilating data from Mnemo, correlating the different settings with variations in the dispatchees’ vital signs and in the times of death. The subjects were being wrenched back in their memories to prior lives, according to Gutan’s implanted job chip. He had seen incredible images flash across the LCD