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were originally programmed by the masters, who had a logical society or so we
assumed since their whole culture was built around the scientific method
.
Accordingly, the gates had apparently interpreted any excessive zeal for
religion as
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Page No 109
a mental illness, and whisked the zealot off to stasis.
Donna smiled her sweet smile. Try to think of them as very sincere a
nd well-
intentioned people, even if some of them are mistaken.
Mistaken. I stifled a laugh. That was a mild word for jokers who advocat
ed
state religions, a society that banned abortion even to save the life of a
mother, not
to mention other Luddite ideas like banning cloning of any sort, and goi
ng back to
natural farming. With ideas straight out of the dark ages like those, they
would
quickly starve half the world, but they never seemed to worry about
predictable
disaster so long as their religious dogma was followed.
I had other thoughts, too, but kept them to myself. Donna meant well. She
wanted to encourage tolerance, and I didn t want to undercut her. Bes
ides, there
was no sense getting into philosophical arguments when we were going to
become
very busy, very soon. Instead, I pasted a sweet smile on my face, too, a
nd nodded
as if I agreed with Donna one hundred percent.
Donna beamed me a mental thank you she knew how I really thought. We
d
been friends for too long for her not to know. Across from me, Andrew fr
owned and
folded his arms across his chest. He threw me a disgusted look and I cau
ght his
exasperation, as if he had primed himself for a good argument, but was left
without
an opponent when I refused to get involved. I grinned, feeling even bet
ter about
staying quiet. Sometimes silence is the best medicine for know-it-alls.
We ll go to the religious world.
Todd Henderson raised his hand. He and his wife, Sophie, were the only
married couple in our group. They were both Protestants, though not
proselytizers,
and very nice people. Both were dark haired and brown-skinned. They look
ed like
that mixture of many ancestors which you see often in Hawaii and Polynesian
states.
I hadn t had a lot to do with them, but in the few encounters we had shared I
found
their minds and personalities to be more or less reflective of middle-class
America.
As I stared into Todd s dark eyes, I had a fleeting sense that he would
encounter
difficulties. By now my sense of foreboding was so pervasive that I simply
laughed it
off. We all were going to encounter difficulties. How could Todd and Sop
hie have an
easy time working with people from dozens of different fanatical religions?
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Page No 110
We assigned some of the other worlds and came at last to the final choice
the world where Russell and I had decided to put the sexual deviants. Th
ere was
some overlap between these in other criminals, but we had decided to focus on
those people who used sex for power over their victims and nothing else. These
were the pedophiles, sadists and masochists, and those others with their
sexual
identity so fouled up that they never let their neighbors know what they were
up to.
This group included many elite members of society, as well as the dregs, and
various classes in between. Most of them were not physically violent; they
were just
sadly sick so far as normal sex went.
Rita and I had discussed this class of people in other, better times whe
n we
were sitting around our house relaxing. As a psychologist, she liked to
theorize
about how criminals and others might eventually emerge if the gates ever
released
them. Ever the optimist, Rita believed that a change of sex might cure most of
them.
I thought not. For one thing, if a simple sex change would have been eno
ugh to jolt
them out of their pathology, the gates would have let them go right though. We
had
no way to know anything about an individual s previous life before they
entered
stasis. All we could do was note the problems that had caused them to fail to
make it
through a gate the first time. But when it came to sexual offenders, I
believed their
behavior patterns were pretty well fixed. I doubted a gender change woul
d help
much.
Jenny Roberts and Harry Jones volunteered for this last group. They seem
ed
like a logical choice, as well. Jenny was a psychiatrist and Harry had a
PhD in
psychology. Personally, I don t have much use for either field as
you can imagine,
that attitude of mine had provoked a lot of arguments with Rita. I knew Rita
wanted
to help people, and had a heart of gold. I was even willing to grant that most
psychologists and psychiatrists had similar hearts of gold. But that did
n t change the
fact that their so-called science was bunk.
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