One Door From Heaven

in a superior intelligence. His own intelligence seemed, to him, to be as superior as anyone could expect. But he was a profound thinker, a philosopher, and a respected academic whose view of the world had been shaped-and could be reshaped-by other academics, the elite of the elite, whose value to society tin his estimation and generally in theirs, too was of unparalleled importance. Five years ago, when he discovered that some quantum physicists and some molecular biologists had begun to believe that the universe offered profuse and even incontrovertible evidence of intelligent design, and that their numbers were slowly growing, his comfortable worldview had been shaken, had been too deeply disturbed to allow him to shrug off this information and blithely go on with his killing. He continued killing, yes, but not blithely. He could not accept any God hypothesis whatsoever because it was too limiting; it resurrected the whole business of right and wrong, of morality, which the enlightened community of utilitarian ethicists had largely succeeded in purging from society. A world created by a superior intelligence, who had imbued human life with purpose and meaning, was a world in which Preston Maddoc didn't want to exist; it was a world he rejected, for he had always been and forever would be the only master of his fate, the only judge of his behavior.
        Fortunately, in the midst of his intellectual crisis, Preston had come across a most useful quote by Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a crisis of his own, Crick had reached a point at which he no longer believed that a sound scientific case could be made for evolution through natural selection. All life at even a molecular level was so irreducibly complex that it argued for intelligent design, which convinced Crick, who also wasn't too keen on this God business that every form of life on Earth-all flora and fauna, the entire ecosystem-had been created not by God, but by an alien race of incomprehensibly vast intelligence and powers, a race that might also have created this universe itself, and others.
        Extraterrestrials.
        Extraterrestrial worldmakers.
        Mysterious extraterrestrial worldmakers.
        If that theory satisfied Francis Crick, Nobel laureate, it was plenty damn good enough for Preston Claudius Maddoc. Extraterrestrial worldmakers were no more likely to care what their creations did with their lives, in a moral sense, than any nerdy kid with an ant farm cared whether the ants inhabiting it were behaving their itty-bitty selves according to a posted set of rules.
        In fact, Preston had a theory to explain why an alien race of incomprehensibly vast intelligence and powers might skip across the universe making worlds and seeding them with infinite varieties of life, intelligent and otherwise. It was a good theory, a fine theory, a brilliant theory.
        He knew it was brilliant, pure genius, but as he stood here spitting on his shoes, he could not remember his splendid theory, not a word of it.
        Spitting on his shoes? Disgusting.
        He shouldn't be standing around, spitting on his shoes, when he hadn't found a window yet. The windows of any house were arranged in certain classic patterns dating back to the Stone Age and seeded in the human racial memory, so they ought to be easy to find even in this bizarre and rambling opium den.
        Windows. Hidden windows. Find one of the mysterious hidden windows. Most likely, an extraterrestrial will be behind the damn thing, big grin on its worldmaker face.
        He had their number. He knew what they were about. Perverse bunch of incomprehensibly intelligent and vastly powerful old farts.
        His theory-yes, he remembered it now-his brilliant theory was that they built worlds and seeded life on them because they got off on the suffering of the species that they created. Not necessarily got off on in the sense of experienced orgasms. This was a brilliant theory, not a tacky one. But they built us to die, to die by the tens of billions over the centuries, because our deaths did something for them, provided them with something of value. Maybe there was a form of
        energy released every lime a creature perished, an energy beyond the human ability to detect, which they employed to power their star-ships and toasters, or which they personally absorbed in order