“What’s this?” he asked, taking the bulging bag from her. She let him pull back the flap and see for himself: it was a blue plastic tree frog.
He looked up at her quizzically, and she explained how she’d come to have it.
By the time she finished, he was chilled, recalling his own recent interaction with the frog eater, who’d questioned him in the stairwell outside the animal facility on Wednesday morning. Clearly he’ d found out where—and who—“the girl” was. “So why did you bring this to me?” he asked.
“Who else could I take it to? I didn’t even see him this time, only the door latch turning. And that.” She gestured at the envelope in his hands. “I thought maybe you could get fingerprints or something.”
He arched his brows in surprise. “Because I have an in with the police now, after their lengthy questioning of me, coupled with my recent exoneration?”
Her blush deepened, and he was relieved to see genuine chagrin fill her face. “I didn’t think about that. I just thought . . . you’d want to know who he is as much as I do, and you might know who to give this to. Maybe through your friend at the U of A Genetics department . . .” She paused, then asked in a quiet voice, “Did you really see Manny’s body?”
Cam nodded.
“Was it Frogeater?”
“I believe so.”
She turned pale and sank onto the chair before him, her eyes big and troubled. “What is going on here, Dr. Reinhardt?” she whispered. “Who is he? Why is he still out there? And why are they covering all this up?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Though he did have a couple of ideas, they weren’t something he was willing to share here. He decided then that their need to talk freely was too great, and that with Swain off doing whatever it was he was doing, Cam had better seize this God-given opportunity while he could. “Are you still game to go with me to the open house tonight?” he asked.
She frowned, her dark eyes full of uncertainty. “I don’t think Director Swain would like that.”
“Probably not.”
He reached for a pad of sticky notes and scribbled on it—Atrium pond, 6:45 tonight?—then pulled off the sheet and stuck it atop one of the file folders sitting on his desk, as if he’ d just thought of something irrelevant to their conversation.
“I’m not sure I want to do a lot of walking, either,” she said. “I still haven’t recovered from the blisters I got at the theater last week.”
“I understand. There would be a lot of walking.” With his eyes he directed her to the note he’ d just slapped onto the folder. She glanced down, seemed to read the words, then met his gaze again. He wasn’t sure if she nodded or not, but given the fact their conversation was probably being recorded, he would just have to hope she got the message. “I doubt I’ll be in the dining hall tonight, is all,” he said, “given what’s likely awaiting me in this afternoon’s unity meeting.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s right!” She looked genuinely distressed. “Viascola is really going to go after you in that. I’ve heard her plotting. She’s even got one of her assistants serving as your substitute while she launches all her arguments.”
“I’m not surprised.” He made a show of looking through the stacked folders, then pulled one out and opened it.
“She’s going to have half the Inner Circle there, and other people, as well. They’ve already decided to change the venue for lack of space in our original room. Now they’ll be holding it in the common area on the fourth floor.”
“Well, I did ask her to give me the microphone and the podium at dinner one night,” Cam noted ruefully, closing the folder and moving it to the top of the stack, where it covered his sticky note.
“She’s not going to let you speak, you know. She only wants to make you look like a fool.”
He shrugged. “I’ve rejected the doctrine of evolution. That makes me as vile a heretic as ever came along, and you know what happens to heretics when they meet the true believers.”
She cocked her head at him. “You make light of it, but they’re going to tear you apart. I don’t understand why you’ve agreed to this.”
“Because part of the reason I came to K-J was in hopes of giving the gospel to these people. And now, thanks to Gen’s vitriol, the crowd has expanded. There just might be someone among them who is ready to receive what I’ll say. Even though they might not know it right now.”
He burrowed through his files and papers again, just to make his earlier actions look more convincing.
“What are you going to say?”
“Whatever the Lord gives me.”
“And if He gives you nothing?”
“Oh, I doubt that’ll be the case. He set this whole thing up, after all.” Though of course it could only be to give the people at Kendall-Jakes the chance to hear the truth and then reject it. Noah had preached one hundred twenty years, after all, without a single convert.
She leaned forward as if to go, then said, “Well, good luck with it.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Thank you.”
After she left, he dropped the bagged frog into his pocket and wondered if Rudy might be able to get anything off it. Probably not, but he’ d give it a try. Anything to shed light on why exactly Frogeater had sounded so much like Swain. It could be he was one of the man’s many illegitimate sons, out for justice. Or it could be some weird Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. The latter in particular would account for why the voice in the audio recording of Manny’s murder had been so rough and deep—someone had distorted it so as to hide any connection to the director. There was one other thing it could be, but he wasn’t willing to seriously consider that one. Let them rule out the more reasonable possibilities first. Any prints on the frog would go a long way to either confirm or eliminate his theories.
As he turned back to his computer, he pressed the small transmitter button he’ d affixed to the underside of his keyboard tray. About ten minutes later, the fluorescent bulb in the fixture near his office door began to flicker.
Eventually he called maintenance to have someone up to fix it, and when Rudy showed up, Cam spoke to him sharply, because it was the third time he’ d allegedly fixed that bulb.
“I’m beginning to think you’re just putting the same bulbs back into the fixture,” Cam complained. Which was exactly what he had been doing.
The elderly janitor insisted he was not and set down his toolbox to arrange his ladder beneath the fixture. While he did so, Cam surreptitiously slipped a small, oddly bulging manila collection envelope into the sheaf of work orders stuffed in the toolbox.
At precisely 5:00 that afternoon, Cam arrived at the changed venue for the Department of Applied Genetics’s weekly unity meeting, moved from the Desert Vista room on the third floor to the fourth-floor common area open to the atrium. As Lacey had predicted, a sea of people clogged the carpeted common area in anticipation of his arrival. The organizers had pulled over every available chair, bench, and sofa, but even that wasn’t enough, forcing many to sit on the floor. The gathering included a number of familiar faces from the Inner Circle, including Nelson Poe, Maia Ahmed-White, Oscar Orozco, and Lee Yuen.
Gen sat in one of the two wing-backed chairs Cam had last seen in the reading area on the other side of the atrium. The second chair, separated from her by an end table, waited for Cam.
As the attendees became aware of his presence, the rumble of conversation damped swiftly, making the trickle of the waterfall and the echoing shrieks of the parrots from the atrium seem loud and close. Cam threaded a path through the gathering, feeling surprisingly calm, despite the hostility radiating around him. Not until he reached the empty chair did Genevieve look up from reading the typewritten paper in her lap.
“Ah. Dr. Reinhardt. Right on time. Guess I won’t be needing this.” She waved the typewritten sheet at him, then tucked it into her red straw bag with the yellow flowers sitting on the floor at her feet.
Her hand emerged from the bag with a black
cube, which she set on the end table, and uneasiness invaded his calm. “What is that for?”
“I thought it might exert a calming influence, considering our subject matter for today.” She smiled, then let her gaze sweep over the others as she addressed them. “As most of you know, we’re tackling the very ticklish subject of religion this afternoon, one that must be approached with the utmost civility and tact. I would like for this to be more a conversation than a lecture, so if you have questions or comments, please feel free to interject. But I also want all of you to remember that just because someone holds an opinion different from your own, they must still be treated with respect.”
Cam spotted Lacey McHenry out in the audience, seated on the floor at Aaron’s feet beside Jade and Mel. As he made eye contact, she flashed him a quick smile and he immediately felt a little less alone.
Viascola went on: “I am sure that Dr. Reinhardt, being the man of science that he is, has many excellent reasons for his beliefs. We should respect his willingness to share them with us.” She turned to him. “So tell us, Dr. Reinhardt, how do you reconcile the truth of evolution with your belief in the Bible’s story of a seven-day creation?”
“Actually, I don’t,” he said, turning toward her, “seeing as they are two antithetical belief systems that cannot be reconciled.”
Hisses of indrawn breaths greeted this statement, followed by irate mutters.
“The theory of evolution is not a belief system!” Maia Ahmed-White declared derisively. “It’s proven fact.”
“Is it?” Cam turned his gaze toward her. “How many of us, not being paleontologists, have actually seen the evidence that allegedly proves it? The way I understand it, the bulk of the theory rests on a slew of hypothetical ancestors the fossil record does not begin to support. But even that I don’t know for sure, since, again, I’m no paleontologist. I must take the respective experts at their words. Which is another way of saying ‘by faith.’ ”
His conclusion was met first with shocked silence, then sputtering outrage.
“That’s ridiculous!” cried Ahmed-White. “Humankind’s breadth of knowledge is simply too great for any one person to have intimate experience with all the evidence. If we don’t take the various experts at their words, no one would ever get anything done.”
“Which is my point,” Cam agreed. On the table to his left, the black box quivered as if it were made of gelatin rather than hard plastic—but only if he wasn’t looking right at it. Far from exuding calm, it stood his hairs on end and filled him with restlessness.
“Science builds on the work of other scientists,” said someone. “There’s nothing wrong with that!”
Cam pulled his mind back to the discussion. Searching in vain for the speaker, his glance caught on Nelson Poe, who sat hunched in a chair not far from Lacey, seeming inexplicably tense as he studied his hands folded in his lap. It wasn’t Poe who’d spoken, though; Cam would have recognized his voice.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” he said, giving up on a direct answer.“ I’m just saying it involves faith. I can put my faith in the word of various scientists and in the assumption that they and their predecessors have properly assembled, evaluated, and reported all the relevant evidence regarding the origins of our world, or I can believe what God has told us about such things in His Word.”
“First you have to believe the Bible is His Word,” said Dr. Orozco.
“No!” interjected Ahmed-White. “First you have to believe that God exists at all, and frankly, I don’t know how you can be involved in science and believe that.”
“I don’t know how you can be involved in science and not,” Cam countered. “So maybe the real question here is not why don’t I believe in evolution, but why do I believe in God? And why do many of you present today choose not to?”
Beside him the box edged forward and closer to him, quivering ever more frantically, as if demanding his attention. He shifted position to put it out of his field of sight, and turned his gaze toward those seated right of center.
“Well,” said Gen, “it has always seemed obvious to me there is no God. Just look at the chaos and suffering in the world.”
“God is just a human construct,” said Ahmed-White, “left over from an age when people did not understand the underpinnings of our world. God worship gave them answers to the questions of where they came from and why they are here.”
“And now that we’ve found the answers for ourselves,” said Gen, “we don’t need it anymore.” She shook her head in puzzlement. “You’re a man of learning, Cameron. I should think this would be obvious to you.”
“You like the answers your conclusions give you, then?” Cam asked.
“That we came from slime, a random accident, and there is no purpose for our lives?”
“We make our own purpose.”
“Ah.” He let the silence draw itself out.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, Aaron Stiles blurted, “It’s part of religion’s purpose to blind people. That’s why it always goes after the kids. If you’re raised in a particular belief, when you grow up you can’t break free.” He glanced down at Jade, who’d turned to look up at him as he spoke, and gave her a triumphant smile. For winning the bet on whether he’ d have the courage to bait his boss, perhaps?
“My parents are unbelievers,” Cam said. “I was not raised in any church. I believed in Christ on a dark desert plain in Afghanistan when I was twenty-one.”
“Before you went to college,” Gen noted.
“Nothing I’ve learned in university has changed what I believed that night in the desert.” His restlessness was deepening into outright anxiety, and his pulse pounded in his ears as a high-pitched whine now wrapped itself around his head, making it harder and harder to hear anything else.
Gen drew the conversation back to reasons why she didn’t believe in God, and there followed a lively interchange among the crowd, which he only partially heard, where various members of the meeting voiced their objections to blind faith, magical thinking, superstition, and the other usual protests.
“Where is God when we have all this misery and suffering?”
“If the Bible says we’re to pray for whatever we want and we’ll get it, why haven’t all the cancer patients been healed?”
“If He is love, how can He allow wars and famines and serial killers . . . ?”
Increasingly distracted by the quivering box and the mounting whine, Cam was caught off guard when the diatribe finally ran down and their attention returned to him. Having affirmed their mutual beliefs in materialism, facts, and their own flawless logic, they defied him to say anything about God that could possibly fit into those three criteria.
The waterfall in the atrium had grown into a roar, as if trying to drown out the box’s whine. It didn’t help that a voice at the back of his mind derided him for his anxiety. Here was his chance to proclaim truth. He knew what he believed. He knew he wasn’t what they thought, that his reasons were not without logic or basis. Yet he shook like a whipped dog and said nothing. Gutless is what Gen called him.
She prodded him. “So, Doctor, what do you have to say to all of that?”
He looked at the people around him, tried desperately to haul his mind back to the issues, and prayed for words. And amazingly, they came: “There’s too much complex order and design in the natural realm to think otherwise.”
“Order and design?” Gen cried. “What about all the chaos and suffering?”
“Suffering and chaos are mostly products of the free will of sinful men.”
“Tsunamis? Earthquakes? Mudslides? Those are the result of sinful men?”
“Those are evidence that the world is fallen along with the people that live in it.”
“I thought you just said there was order and design in it all.”
He stared at her, wondering if she really couldn’t understand what he’d meant or just didn’t want to.
“And how can the world be fallen? Natural proces
ses don’t have . . .”
The whine surged, drowning out her words. He concentrated harder, trying to hear past it, but she stopped talking before he could figure out what she’ d said.
“Are you all right, Doctor?” Gen was regarding him curiously.
“I’m fine. The point is, you cannot prove the existence of an immaterial being if you demand that proof be made in material terms.” He wasn’t sure that was the point at all, since he’d forgotten what he’ d been trying to get across and had no idea what she’ d just said in rebuttal. But his statement was the crux of the matter.
“Hah!” Gen cried in exultation. “You admit, then, that He doesn’t exist.”
“I admit that One who is spirit by definition cannot be measured by empirical means. But rationalism can logically deduce His existence from what we see that He has made—the detail, the complexity, the inherent purpose in biological life and systems alone show that.”
“That is an inference, not a proof.”
“And what is evolution but the conclusion to a string of inferences?” he asked, somewhat testily.
She ignored him, turning her attention to their audience even as she pretended to speak to him. “You refuse to admit defeat, even though you’ve just conceded the fact there is no proof for God’s existence.” At her fingertips the box was literally jumping about now, seeming to fly at him every time he looked at it. Yet none of the others appeared to notice, all of them staring hard at Cam.
“There is no more proof for God’s existence than there is for fairies,” Gen declared. “Or unicorns. Or flying spaghetti monsters . . .”
Maybe the box wasn’t flying at him. Maybe it was actually drawing him into itself. . . . Cameron dragged his attention back to her words. “Except that no fairies, unicorns, or flying spaghetti monsters have sent us a communication proclaiming their existence—”
“Communication? You’re hearing voices now?”
“I’m referring to the Bible.”
She reddened, realizing she’d missed his obvious point and immediately countered with, “The Bible?! That thing is so full of inaccuracies, so full of nonsensical happenings, myths, and magical stories! It’s obviously man’s creation of his god. . . .”
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