GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

He looked at the man on the floor and said, “That’s Crockett Dunaway. A real troublemaker. I’ve had my eye on him for some time. You wait until I get down there.”

A few minutes later, Tom Turpin, followed by the other members of the party, entered. Alice, Sophie and Aphra took Star Spoon in charge at once and carried her into the room next door. Turpin got a hypodermic full of adrenaline and injected it into Dunaway’s buttock. After a minute, Dunaway groaned and got to his hands and knees. When he saw the others, his eyes widened. He croaked, “What you doing here?”

Turpin did not answer. Dunaway got to his feet and staggered to a chair, sat down, bent over and held his head in his hands. “Man, I got a headache killing me!”

“That’s not all that’s going to kill you,” Turpin said harshly.

Dunaway raised his head. His bloodshot, slightly crossed eyes looked at Turpin. “What you talking about? That bitch come on me, and when I obliged her, she started screaming for help. You can’t blame me for what that slant-eyed whore done. She must’ve heard her man coming, and so she pretended like she wasn’t having none of me.”

“She couldn’t have heard me,” Burton said. “I wasn’t making any sound in the hall. If I hadn’t heard her scream, I would’ve gone right on by the door. You’re guilty as hell, man.”

“I swear ‘fore God I ain’ t,” Dunaway said. “That bitch asked me to give her a good time.”

“There’s no use arguing about it,” Turpin said. “We’ll just run off your memory and get at the truth.”

Dunaway grunted and shot out of the chair. He was headed for the door, but his legs gave way, and he crumpled on the floor.

“Uh, huh!” Turpin said. “I thought so. Dunaway, no one gets away with rape here. You’ve had it, man!”

Dunaway raised his head. Saliva ran from his open mouth. “No, I swear to God … !”

Turpin told his two bodyguards to set Dunaway in a chair before the computer console. “We’ll know in a few minutes what’s what!”

Dunaway tried to struggle, but the two blows had sapped his strength. He was set down in the chair, and a bodyguard asked the Computer to extract Dunaway’s memories of the past hour and display them. Dunaway sat trembling and gibbering while his guilt was shown.

“I’m not only going to kill you,” Turpin said, “I’m destroying your body-record. You ain’t never going to get a chance to do this to a woman again. You’ve had it, Dunaway!”

The man’s screams were snapped off by the ray from Turpin’s beamer. Dunaway fell over in the chair, a narrow hole, cauterized at the edges, on each side of his head.

“Throw him in the converter and incinerate him,” Turpin said to the bodyguards.

Nur said, “Are you really going to dissolve his recording?”

“Why not? He won’t ever be any different.”

“You are not God.”

Turpin scowled, and then he laughed. “You’re insidious, Nur. You’ve been bending my ear so long with all that religious philosophical hoop-de-la you got me confused. OK. So I don’t destroy him? And then, when he goes back to The Valley, he’s going to rape and beat other women. You want that on your conscience?”

“The Ethicals in their wisdom set it up so that anyone, no matter how vicious, will live until this project is ended. No exceptions. 1 trust them. They must know what they’re doing.”

“Yeah?” Turpin said. “If they’re so smart, how come they didn’t catch on to Loga? Why didn’t they make provisions for someone like him? He’s wrecked their schedule and their program.”

“I am not certain that they didn’t make provisions for someone like him,” Nur said calmly.

“Mind explaining that?” Turpin said.

“I have no explanation now.”

Tom Turpin took his time lighting up a big cigar. Then he said, “OK. I’ll go along with you. Up to a point. Just now, nobody’s being sent back to The Valley, so Dunaway ain’t going to do anybody any harm. But when … if … the Computer starts sending them back, it ain’t going to send Dunaway back until I say so. Which may be never. I don’t know just now what I’m going to do when that time comes.”