GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

“Most people are driven by the same desire.”

“There are great evils and little evils.”

“Great evildoers and little evildoers, you mean. There is no such thing as abstract evil. Evil always consists of concrete acts and concrete actors.”

Burton, who had been listening, became impatient.

“The true philosophy is not in talk, which most philosophers think is philosophy, but in action. Pete, you’re doing a lot of talking about what you’d like to do. Why? Because you’re afraid to act, and your fear comes from your feeling not self-justified?”

“I keep thinking, Judge not lest ye be judged.”

“Do you think for one moment that you won’t be judged even if you refrain from judging others?” Burton said scornfully. “Besides, it’s impossible for anybody not to judge others. Even saints can’t keep from judging, try though they might not to. It’s automatic and takes place in both the conscious and unconscious mind. So, I say, judge right and left, fore and aft, up and down, in and out!”

Nur laughed and said, “But don’t pass sentence.”

“Why not?” Burton said, grinning fiendishly. “Why not?”

“I’ve located a real judge, I mean a judge in the legal sense,” Frigate said. “A man who sat in the circuit court of my hometown, Peoria, during the Prohibition era. I remember reading about him when I was a kid; I also remember what my father and his friends said about him. He was part of the very corrupt municipal system then, he sent many a bootlegger to prison or fined those found with booze in their homes or in speakeasies. Yet he had a cellar full of whiskey and gin he purchased from bootleggers. Some of whom, by the way, he let off because they were his direct suppliers.”

“You’ve been very busy,” Nur said.

“I can’t resist it,” Frigate said.

Burton understood Frigate’s fascination, or, at least, thought he could. Evil people did have a certain magnetism that drew everybody, evil or good or gray-shaded, towards them. First, attraction, then repulsion. In fact, paradoxically, it was the repulsion that caused the attraction.

“The curious thing is,” Frigate said suddenly, as if he had been thinking about it for a long time but had thrust it back down, “the curious thing is that none of these, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tsar Ivan, the Peoria judge, and the baby-rapist I told you about, none of these thinks of himself as evil.”

“Goring did, and that was his first step away from his evil,” Nur said. “These men … Hitler, Stalin, and others … what do you intend to do about them?”

“I’ve put them On Hold,” Frigate said.

“You haven’t made up your mind yet what to do with them?”

“No. But if the Computer starts releasing the eighteen billion people back into The Valley, it won’t do it for those men. Look! I’ve seen what they’ve done! Seen it through their own eyes, seen it through the eyes of the people they did it to!”

Frigate’s eyes were large and wild, and his face was red.

“I don’t want them to keep on doing those evil things! Why should they escape justice now! They did it on Earth, but things are different here! There is some reason why they’re locked in the files and why we are in a position to judge. And to convict and execute if need be!”

“It’s not divine intervention or intention that caused the lockup,” Nur said. “It’s an accident.”

“Is it?” Frigate said.

Nur smiled and shrugged. “Perhaps not. All the more reason for us to act discreetly, reasonably and carefully.”

“Why should we?” Burton roared. “Who cares?”

“Ah,” the Moor said, holding up his index finger and looking at its tip as if it held the answer. “Who knows? Have you perhaps had the feeling, now and then, that we are still being watched? I do not mean by the Computer but by someone who is using the Computer.”

“And just whom could that be?”

“I don’t know. But have you had that feeling?”

“No.”

“I have,” Frigate said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve always had the feeling … al my life … that someone was watching me.”