Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  And, by noon tomorrow, it would be too late. She wouldn’t be the lead dog in the team any more. He would. Brandon Nesbitt, understudy on the spot, the man who’d opened the Ark of the Covenant, come out with Moses’ padded expense accounts, and lived to tell the tale. His name would be all over Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. This was what fame looked like nowadays. He’d have it back, more than he’d ever had before.

  He waited with practiced patience, making admiring noises as Gabriela fought down the whole plate of deadly noodles. Pablo brought Kittirat out of the kitchen. The chef bowed to Gabriela: the salute of one fighter to another. He said something in accented Hebrew and carried away her empty plate with his own hands.

  “Your dinner is on the house,” Pablo said. He turned to Brandon. “Sorry—not yours.”

  “It’s okay,” Brandon said, laughing. As the waiter followed the chef, Brandon asked Gabriela, “How are you doing?” Hunter’s curiosity hid beneath sympathy.

  “I dunno,” she said. “I feel like I swallowed a lit Bic, or maybe three of them. And I’m woozy, too. Should I be woozy after I ate all that hot stuff?”

  “Beats me,” said Brandon, who knew perfectly well. “Want to head back to your room and see if it goes away?”

  “I think I’d better,” Gabriela said, the words spreading out as if she had to find each one separately. She scowled. “This can’t be happening! I’ve got to go on with the Ark.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get you there.” Brandon knew where her room was—right down the hall from his. She didn’t have a fancy suite here, the way she had in Tel Aviv. He tossed enough New Israeli Shekels on the table to cover his steak and to make Pablo happy. Then he helped Gabriela to her feet. She was out of it, all right—he thought he was supporting more of her weight than she was.

  Pablo came back. He smiled as he scooped up the money, then asked, “The lady, sir, she is okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brandon said easily. “She’s just feeling those noodles. The things people do for pride! I didn’t even taste them, but I could smell how strong they were.”

  “I don’t believe she ate them all. Kittirat, he don’t believe it, either,” the waiter said. “You have a pleasant evening, sir, and the lady, too.”

  “Thanks.” Brandon half walked with, half steered Gabriela out of the restaurant and over to the elevators. Up they went. She was almost out on his shoulder by the time the doors opened on the seventeenth floor.

  By then, he’d already fished her key card from her handbag. Luckily, the room wasn’t far from the elevator. Even more luckily, no one came down the hall to see him just about carrying her to the door. He stuck the card in the slot. The light flashed green. He opened the door, got Gabriela inside, and put out the PRIVACY, PLEASE notice before he let it click shut. As soon as it did, he grinned like a Red Army soldier with Berlin spread out before him. He’d won! He was home free!

  Gabriela muttered and stirred a little when he eased her down onto the bed. Her dress gave ground as he did. Her legs were nicer than he’d thought. If he wanted to, he could enjoy himself the way those Red Army men had. She’d be too wasted to know the difference. And if ever a cunt deserved fucking…

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said out loud to himself, shaking his head. If she even suspected anything afterwards, DNA would crucify him like Jesus.

  And besides, he’d screw her with the Ark story harder than he ever could with his dick. He’d get the glory. He’d be the one who made Shlomo Kupferman look like the superstitious fool he was, and in front of a worldwide audience. Gabriela would be the one who came down sick at exactly the wrong time.

  People would talk about her behind her back for the rest of her career, if she had much of a career after this. Maybe he’d be generous and let them go ahead as Brandon and Gabriela for a while after this. Or maybe he wouldn’t. When you were a rocket taking off, did you want a big old weight attached to your first stage?

  He looked at his phone. It wasn’t even midnight yet. They’d go live at four A.M. He’d show up as little before then as he possibly could, to give Saul and everybody else less time to ask inconvenient questions. They could ask all they pleased once he’d saved the day and everything was great—and once he’d shown that old Kupferman bastard what a bunch of bullshit the Biblical God was.

  The first text came in for Gabriela at a little past one. He heard her phone chirp. Ten minutes later, since she didn’t answer, she got another. He didn’t want them getting edgy and sending someone to knock on the door. That wouldn’t be good. Time for Plan B.

  He called Buchbinder. “Brandon! Good to hear from you!” the producer exclaimed. “Where the hell’s Gabriela?”

  “In her john heaving her guts out, unless I’m crazy.” Brandon told Saul how Gabriela had taken on the Sichuan noodles, mentioning Pablo and Kittirat by name. Why not? Everything they’d seen would only back up what he was saying. And he was telling the truth—if you forgot about the smashed roofie, anyhow.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Saul Buchbinder burst out when he got done. “And it sounds like her, goddammit. She can’t resist the spicy shit, any more than I can with chopped liver. This time she won but she lost, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Brandon forcibly held relief from his voice. Saul knew about some of his unsavory past. If the producer tried adding two and two, he might land on four. But he’d gone off on a tangent instead, one that left Brandon out of the equation.

  “What are we gonna do now, though?” Buchbinder said. “We’ve got the Gabriela and Brandon Special ready to rock, only no Gabriela. I don’t want to tell Kupferman—or the people we’re getting airtime from—that we have to wait a day or two. The rabbi’s just itching for a chance to cancel, and that would screw us to the wall bigtime.”

  “Saul, if you want, I can take it. I know the program as well as she does, and the teleprompter will get me through if I fluff.” Brandon worked at sounding the-show-must-go-on, not I’m-jumping-up-and-down-eager. “I can open by saying she’s been taken ill, sadly, but I’m here to fill in for her because this really is her big moment and all.”

  “Could you do that? Would you do that?” Buchbinder sounded like a man splashing in shark-infested waters who’d just spotted a lifeboat he could swim to. “You give her the credit like that, Brandon, you’re a hell of a mensh, y’know?”

  “Least I can do,” Brandon replied. The way it looked to him was, nobody would care about or even remember anything he said before he took the lid off the Ark and showed up Shlomo Kupferman. Words on TV mattered only so far. What really carried the weight was what people saw. That was what they took away with them.

  “A mensh,” Saul said again. “Okay, get your ass over here. You’re still at the hotel, right? Won’t be a fifteen-minute cab ride.”

  “Probably not even,” Brandon agreed. “No traffic this time of night. See you soon. The makeup crew can slap me around a little, and then I’ll be ready to rock. ’Bye.” He broke the connection and headed for the lobby.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as the girls put his game face on him, Brandon started checking everything in the Heikhal Ha-Sefer. The lights. The mikes. Their booms. Where the teleprompter was. And the cameras. “If you move that one a few inches to the right—” he began.

  “No way.” Danny cut him off. “This is how we set it up, and this is where it stays. If I move it, you’ll start shoving the other shit around, too. Take an even strain, okay? We’ll make it work.”

  “Sorry. I always get antsy before a big one.” Brandon sounded sheepish. There weren’t bigger ones than this. But everything looked fine. He wanted to fiddle with the setup to give himself something to do.

  The cameraman yawned. “Wish I could be so bouncy. It’s the middle of the night, man.”

  Brandon eyed his phone. Half past three. Half an hour to go. “I’m up fo
r it. If you can’t get up for it no matter what time it is, you don’t deserve a job in this racket.”

  “I’m here, man. Don’t get on my case,” Danny said.

  Brandon turned away. “Saul!” he said urgently. “Satellite feed okay?”

  “Beautiful, Brandon. Whole board’s green,” the producer answered. “You’re beautiful, too.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Brandon muttered. Saul was also trying to calm him down. That was one of the things Saul did. Except it didn’t work less than half an hour before show time.

  Brandon started to unload on Shlomo Kupferman, then hesitated. The rabbi stood where he should have. He didn’t have many moves. The ones he did have, he’d blocked out with Gabriela the afternoon before. He would hit his marks. That was all that mattered.

  Only it wasn’t. He pulled out a release Gabriela had written and signed. “I would like your signature on this document, too, please, Mr. Nesbitt,” he said. “In case anything goes wrong, I want it clearly understood you were acting of your own free will.”

  “In case of an act of God, you mean?” Brandon made a joke of it.

  “Yes. In case of an act of God.” Rabbi Kupferman didn’t.

  “Gimme that.” Brandon snatched it from the old man’s hand. He read it before applying his John Hancock. He’d long since learned not to sign anything he hadn’t looked at first. But it was what Kupferman said it was. And he did indeed recognize Gabriela’s almost schoolmarmishly precise script. He had a pen in a trouser pocket. Extracting it, he added his signature below Gabriela’s. As he gave the release back to Kupferman, he asked, “Happy now?”

  “Happy? No.” The rabbi shook his head. “I would be happy if you had sense enough to fear the Lord and forget about this foolish, dangerous stunt.”

  “I’m not afraid, and I don’t think it’s dangerous,” Brandon answered.

  “I know,” Kupferman said mournfully.

  After what seemed a month, Saul called, “Five minutes!” and then, “Two minutes!” and then, “One minute! Places, everybody! We’re going live!”

  Brandon hit his mark. He suddenly didn’t care if it was four in the morning. He was about to go on, to face the world, to remind himself he was real. This was the kickiest high in the world.

  The light under the lens went red. Brandon came alive, too. “Welcome to the Gabriela and Brandon Special!” he said. “Due to a sudden, unfortunate illness, Gabriela can’t be here tonight. I’m Brandon Nesbitt, her longtime colleague, and I’ll be standing in for her. We all regret more than we can tell you that she couldn’t be here at this vital moment she worked so hard to set up. Thank you for joining the show with us tonight—tomorrow morning here in Jerusalem, of course. Together, we’ll explore the mysteries of the newly rediscovered Ark of the Covenant. Before we go on, I want to thank Israel’s Minister for Religious Affairs, Rabbi Shlomo Kupferman, who’s made the program possible. I’d also like to thank you, Rabbi, for joining me here tonight.”

  “You are welcome.” By the way Kupferman sounded, Brandon was anything but. So what, though? The Religious Affairs Minister was doing this, which was all that counted.

  “And I’d like to thank Israel’s Department of Antiquities and Museums, which maintains the wonderful Heikhal Ha-Sefer—the Shrine of the Book.” Brandon hoped he didn’t botch the Hebrew too badly. He went on, “The Dead Sea Scrolls are stored here. Some of you will have watched when they brought the Ark here from under the Temple Mount not long ago.”

  He paused. A monitor showed the cut to tape. There were the Levites in their funny clothes, carrying the Ark from the tunnel. They couldn’t have looked more ecstatic if they’d won $600,000,000 apiece in Powerball. In front of them danced Shlomo Kupferman, as if he were a third his real age.

  “Why did you dance before the Ark?” Brandon asked.

  “To welcome it back to Jerusalem,” Kupferman answered. “David danced before it when it first came into the city. I thought I should do it the same honor.”

  “You danced all the way across Jerusalem. Forgive me, Rabbi, but you’re not a young man. How did you do that?”

  “God lent me strength,” Shlomo Kupferman said. From most people, it would have been a figure of speech. Kupferman sounded as if he meant it.

  Good, Brandon thought. That’ll keep them on the edge of their seats. “Why is it so important that the Ark is back?” he asked.

  “The Ark is the seat of the Lord’s power. He proved that power again and again in the time of the Holy Scriptures. You would be wise, Mr. Nesbitt, to heed it.”

  “I do,” Brandon said. It’s the power to draw eyeballs by the million. What bigger power is there? “That would also be the power that makes the Ark float, right? How does it do that?”

  As he had before, Kupferman answered, “It floats because God wills that it should float. What more proof do you need that it is like nothing else in the world?”

  Brandon hardly listened to him. He went down his own path: “It’s shaped like a chest. What can we expect when we look inside, Rabbi? Does it hold the tablets of stone that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai, the ones with the Ten Commandments on them?” Whenever he said Ten Commandments, he flashed on the fifties movie epic.

  “In Exodus 12:19, we read that Moses broke the tablets the Lord gave him,” Kupferman replied. “In Chapter 34, verse 1, the Lord said He would write them again. But verse 28 of the same chapter says Moses did the writing. So that is uncertain. And it is uncertain whether these tablets, whoever wrote them, lie within the Ark to this day.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Brandon said.

  “That is what you are here to find out,” Kupferman said, which might have been halfhearted agreement or more handwashing.

  Brandon chose to take it for agreement. “In just a few minutes, we’ll take the lid off the Ark and find out what’s inside. Our worldwide audience will see it at the same time we do. We have lights and a camera overhead to look straight down into the Ark once the lid comes off.”

  “You made those arrangements, yes.” Kupferman wasn’t putting his name on anything. But he was here. And he’d let Brandon come, which was the be-all and end-all, the Alpha and the Omega.

  “I am going to approach the Ark. I wish Gabriela could be up here to do this.” Lying through his teeth with that last sentence, Brandon made himself sound awed and respectful. As he took half a dozen slow steps toward the gleaming chest, the TV light above it came on. So did the downlooking camera. Brandon smiled and nodded. Everything was on track.

  He reached out to take the lid off the Ark.

  When you wanted to see something that started at four in the morning, you had two bad choices. You could stay up and be a zombie or set your alarm for a little before four—and be a zombie.

  After some argument, Eric and Orly set their alarm for twenty to four. Eric killed it when it went off. He didn’t jump on it and stomp it into electronic chunks, which proved he had no energy at twenty to four. Instead, he staggered into the kitchen and made espresso.

  Orly lay in bed, calling down curses on Whoever’d put North America so many time zones away. She seized the tiny cup Eric brought her like a starving vampire seizing a vein. Once she drank the sweet, scalding caffeine, she started cussing out Kupferman and Gabriela instead.

  Eric had already started doing that. “Do we get to look inside the bloody Ark?” he said. “Oh, no. All we did was find it. Who does? That fast-talking charlatan. She’d cut her mother’s throat for a rating point.”

  “Somebody ought to cut her throat, for making me be awake at this hour.” Orly held out the cup. “Is there more?”

  “Yeah.” Eric had gulped his, too. By the time he came back with refills, he was almost halfway toward life. He got back into bed with her. As if by accident, his hand fell on her thigh. She knocked it away—she wasn’t that lively yet.

&n
bsp; He fired up the TV. It hadn’t turned four yet. Smooth pitchmen who could reduce your waistline and your bankroll were as ubiquitous here as back in the States. If that didn’t say something depressing about mankind, Eric was damned if he knew what did.

  Then he was looking at the inside of the Shrine of the Book, and at the Ark floating above the floor. He was looking at Rabbi Kupferman scowling into the camera. And…

  It turned out not to be Gabriela. “Welcome to the Gabriela and Brandon Special!” Brandon Nesbitt said.

  The show came with Hebrew subtitles here, but Eric ignored them. “Yoram isn’t invited,” he snarled. “How cheesy is that? If not for him, the Ark’d still be missing.”

  “Yoram didn’t want to be there with Gabriela and Brandon,” Orly said. “He’s not like Kupferman—he doesn’t want publicity 24/7.”

  “Maybe,” Eric said. “Hell, I want to be there. If anybody gets to see what’s in the Ark, it should be a trained archaeologist, not that trained seal. And Kupferman’s pimping for him so he can get his own puss on TV.”

  “It’s not just not wanting to be on television,” Orly said. “Yoram is more frum than he lets on. I think he’s worried what will happen on the show.”

  “If God wants to strike Brandon Nesbitt, He’s had excuses before,” Eric said. Orly snickered, but he wasn’t kidding. Brandon had done some things over the years to make himself tabloid fodder, and to raise the wrath of a God like the one in the Old Testament.

  No denying the son of a bitch was smooth, though. “Our worldwide television audience will see it at the same time we do,” he said. “We have lights and a camera overhead to look straight into the Ark when the lid comes off.”

  “You made those arrangements, yes.” Kupferman sounded gloomier than usual. Eric thumbed his nose at the TV screen. That wasn’t a common Israeli gesture. It made Orly giggle.