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Imagine no religion, it's easy if you try,,.

Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it;
Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor's-Day!


-- from The Challenge of Thor by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

it never stopped. The helter skelter distorted thrum. The minor chords, the electronically compressd hatred, the broken hallelujah. Frank Borman had once described the Apollo 1 fire as a "failure of imagination". Mark David Chapman at least still knew how. Hypocrisy was a dangerous thing. Men who knew who they were could not become evil. Monsters, surely. But to do knowingly seemed a fair compromise with evil when that was the only escape from the flames.

It was getting cold. New York was a special case...the wind through the rat maze was not like the desert nights, the plains and the whisper of the Spirit in the wheat. It was colder. It bit more. Wind off cold metal, towers among timeless mountains -- flowing onto hands that gripped blue steel pistols, into a head full of flying bullets. He was no longer warm. His hand quivered, but the mind no longer. A headshot, then. Divide Lennon's mind once and for all in accordance with what it already wanted, was becoming.

The tin man looked across the street to the wizard. There stood Lennon, between joker and thief. Some suit on the right, the woman who kept his brain in a jar by the door on the left. Sheep and goats. Mark Chapman whispered one final plea for clemency...and fired.

John Lennon's head jerked forward and to the right. He slumped, missing an ear. Yoko screamed and held him. Mark Chapman stepped into the glare of a streetlight, hands in the air. He didn't know yet...but he'd gotten what he prayed for.

And he had caused a lot of people a lot of trouble. It had been easy after all.
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