The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Nor did he believe, as had Kurt Vonnegut, the late-twentieth-century avatar of Mark Twain, that we were governed entirely by the chemical makeup of our bodies. God wasn’t the Great Garage Mechanic in the Sky or the Divine Pill Pusher. If there was a God. Frigate didn’t know what God was and often doubted that He existed.

God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.

Still, we were born with different genetic combinations, and these did determine to some extent our intellect, aptitudes, leanings, reactions, in short, our characters. Character determines destiny, according to the old Greek, Heraclitus. But a person could change his/her character. Somewhere in there was a force, an entity, that said, “I won’t do it!” Or-“Nobody’s going to stop me from do­ing it!” Or-“I’ve been a coward but this time I’m a raging lion!”

Sometimes you needed an outside stimulus or stimulator, as had the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. But the Wizard only gave them what they had had all the time. The brains of mixed sawdust, bran, pins and needles, the silk sawdust-stuffed heart, and the liquid from the square green bottle marked Courage were only antiplacebos.

By thought you could change your emotional attitudes. Frigate believed that, though his practice had never matched his theory. He’d been reared in a Christian Scientist family. But when he was about eleven his parents had sent him to a Presbyterian church, since they were having a fit of religious apathy then. His mother cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the babies Sunday mornings while his father read The Chicago Tribune. Like it or not, he went off to Sunday School and then the sermon. So, he had gotten two contrary religious educations.

One believed in free willl, in evil and matter as illusion, in Spirit as the only reality.

The other believed in predestination. God picked out a few here and there for salvation and let the others go to hell. No rhyme or reason to this. You couldn’t do a thing to change that. Once the divine choice had been made, it was done. You could live purely, agonizedly praying and hoping all your life. But when the end of life on Earth came, you went to your appointed place. The sheep, those whom God for some unexplainable reason had marked with His grace, went up to sit on His right side. The goats, rejected for the same mysterious reasons, slid down the prearranged chute into the fire, sinner and saint alike.

When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.

It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn’t stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he’d liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he’ d have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiori­ty for doing so.

His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher’s large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.

The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He’d be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.

Twice, his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had .de­nied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.