The Godmakers

Chapter One

Lewis Orne could not remember a time when he had been free of a peculiar, repetitive dream, when he had been able to go to sleep in the sure knowledge that the dream’s wild sense of reality would not clutch at his psyche. The dream began with music, this really hokey unseen choir, syrup in sound, a celestial joke. Vaporous figures would come out of the music adding a visual dimension of the same quality.

Finally, a voice would override the whole silly thing with disturbing pronouncements: “Gods are made, not born!”

Or: “To say you are neutral is another way of saying you accept the necessities of war!”

To look at him, you wouldn’t think him the kind of person to be plagued by such a dream. He was a blocky human with the thick muscles of a heavy planet native— Chargon of Gemma was his birthplace. He possessed a face reminiscent of a full-jowled bulldog and a steady gaze, which often made people uncomfortable.

Despite his peculiar dream, or perhaps because of it, Orne made regular obeisance to Amel, “the planet where all godness dwells.” Because of the dream’s pronouncements, which remained with him all through his waking life, he enlisted on the morning of his nineteenth birthday in the Rediscovery and Reeducation Service, thereby seeking to reknit the galactic empire shattered by the Rim Wars. After training him in the great Peace School on Marak, R&R set Orne down one cloudy morning on the meridian longitude, fortieth parallel, of the newly rediscovered planet of Hamal, terra type to eight decimal places, the occupants sufficiently close to the homo-S genetic drift for interbreeding with natives of the Heart Worlds. Ten Hamal weeks later, as he stood at the edge of a dusty little village in the planet’s North Central Uplands, Orne pushed the panic button of the little green signal unit in his right-hand jacket pocket. At the moment, he was intensely aware that he was the lone representative on Hamal of a service which often lost agents to “causes unknown.”

What had sent his hand thrusting for the signal unit was the sight of about thirty Hamalites continuing to stare with brooding gloom at a companion who had just executed a harmless accidental pratfall into a mound of soft fruit. No laughter, no discernible change of emotion.

Added to all the other items Orne had cataloged, the incident of the pratfall-in-the-fruit compounded Hamal’s aura of doom.

Orne sighed. It was done. He had sent a signal out into space, set a chain of events into motion, which could result in the destruction of Hamal, of himself, or both.

As he was to discover later, he had also rid himself of his repetitive dream, replacing it with a sequence of waking events which would in time make him suspect he had walked into his mysterious night world.