Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine

by William Roskey

  “Miss Hotchkiss, please get Director Hoover on the phone for me immediately.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He was looking very much the five-star general now, and I was glad that it wasn’t me who was going to be on the receiving end of his wrath. Once again the room was veiled in a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Finally, there was a faint crackle of static from the intercom.

  “Mr. President? Mr. Hoover’s secretary said to tell you she regrets that Mr. Hoover is indisposed at the moment but that he will call you back when he gets the opportunity.” Ike set his jaw, but his voice was perfectly calm and soft as he answered.

  “Please tell her to pass the word along to Mr. Hoover that I fully realize this is the time when he takes his customary after lunch siesta, and I know how much it means to him. But tell her that if he isn’t on the line in thirty seconds, I am personally going over to his office and kick him off that couch. If I have to do that, it’s going to make me very angry, and it’s going to embarrass him, and we don’t want either of those things to happen.”

  “Yes sir.”

  You could have heard the proverbial pin drop until the intercom crackled again a few moments later. None of us knew what, if any, expressions were playing across the President’s face during the wait, for he had swiveled his chair around and had spent the time gazing out the window. All we could see was the back of his high-backed leather chair. The only words he said were addressed to me.

  “Lightfoot, if you ever get the chance to run a government, any kind of government, pass it by. Not so much because it might play havoc with world history, but because you’ll never know any peace, and they can never pay a man enough to deal with people who figure that they should be giving the orders instead of taking them. There are easier ways to make a living.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Mr. President? Director Hoover is on 2.”

  “Very well, Miss Hotchkiss, I’ll take the call in my office. Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen,” Ike said, rising. “I’ll be right back.” He was gone for all of ninety seconds. I know, because I timed him with my father’s pocket watch. When he reentered the room, he appeared to be totally unruffled, as though he might have left the room to get a drink of water.

  “Next. Dr. Jankor?”

  “I have run a myriad of computer simulations of the mission. All equations from which technical specifications were derived are accurate. I’m perfectly satisfied.”

  “Excellent. Gentlemen, I asked Dr. Jankor here primarily for the purpose of answering any questions you may have regarding the process. Clarence and I have only presented you with an encapsulated, extremely simplified explanation. Perhaps, an oversimplified account. Here is the one man who knows precisely how O’Brien’s journey will be effected. If there are any questions, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Namuh glared at Jankor with undisguised contempt. The arts versus science. “I’m afraid that test tubes and Bunsen burners are not exactly my forte.”

  Jankor grinned and replied, “And I’m afraid that circumlocution and pomposity aren’t mine, so it would appear that we have nothing in common. I’d be worried if we did. Do any of you other gentlemen have any questions or comments?” There were questions, and Jankor answered them clearly, simply, and in a style that demonstrated a wry sense of humor. It was old hat to me, because Clarence had done such a good job of briefing me and the President. Although I did have one question. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t thought of it until now.

  “Dr. Jankor,” I asked, “I understand, at least in a rudimentary way, how you’re going to transmit me through time by having me ‘ride’ the tachyon beam. But how do I travel from Oak Ridge to Palestine? How is the geographical move accomplished? What about the curvature of the earth? Doesn’t the tachyon beam travel in a straight line?”

  “A good question, and one that’s easily answered. The beam does indeed travel in a straight line. We are going to bounce it off the moon. That’s how it and you are going to get to your geographical destination.” When I laughed, I got some strange stares from the men around the table, so I had to explain.

  “Excuse me, it’s just that when I was first interviewed for this mission, I thought it was connected to the space program. Now it seems that, in a sense, I was right. I’ll be the first man on the moon.” Everyone smiled except for Namuh, who sat glowering at Ike.

  He was a man with a one-track mind, a little man in every way. Yet a whole generation of philosophers and scholars venerated him for his presumed wisdom. He was a professor emeritus at one of the finest universities in the country, and he was a Nobel Prize winner. It was a strange world.

  “Not, apparently, that it will do any good whatever, but I do want to emphasize one last time for the record, that I object to this ‘mission’ most vigorously. And, to further compound the mistake, a military man is chosen. The military mind is simply not capable of—”

  “Of what, Doctor?” Ike asked frostily. “I have a passing familiarity with the military mind myself.”

  “Mr. President, may I at least have your personal assurance that, excluding the canister, of course, the captain will carry no twentieth century objects back into time? No guns, hand grenades, binoculars, or similar paraphernalia military types are fond of and deem so essential?”

  The President looked like he was one step away from having the philosopher thrown bodily out of the room, but he answered coolly. “You have, Doctor. What’s more, he will carry no cameras (tempting though that idea is), ballpoint pens, watches, and so forth. I think, with that, we’ve exhausted that topic.”

  “Very well.”

  “Dr. Linstrom,” the President said to the Director of the Smithsonian, “may we have your report next?”

  “Of course, Mr. President. We’ll have a crack archaeological team standing by in Tel Aviv. As soon as word is flashed that Captain O’Brien has departed, they will proceed to the excavation site. They will recover the canister, take samples of the dating elements embedded on the exterior, and send them to the laboratories of the British Museum, MIT, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the National Center of Scientific Research in Madrid, the Center of Forestry Research and Analysis in France, the Department of Prehistoric Studies at the University of Bordeaux, the Cairo Museum, and the National Scientific Academy of Japan.

  “Although some of the dating elements consist of radioactive isotopes, most are samples of various types of wood. Wood, after all, is what we’ve been most successful in using to determine the age of an item. New techniques have already made Carbon 14 dating obsolete. We, along with the other institutions I’ve mentioned, have used four relatively new testing methods to date Tutankhamen’s coffin, Egyptian canoes, and ancient wooden implements, with most impressive and extremely accurate results. I refer to measuring the degree of lignite formation, the gain in wood density, the degree of fossilization, and cell modification.

  “As soon as the samples of dating elements have been dispatched to the Smithsonian as well as to the other selected institutions, the canister itself, seals unbroken, will be sent immediately to this room via Secret Service courier. We shall all convene again in this room at that point. The seals will be broken, and we’ll read the captain’s account. That will be approximately 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 11, 1959.”

  “That’s only less than three days after I leave!” I protested. “It’ll take me time to locate Jesus and …” Dr. Shakhurin, the other philosopher on the Council, who had remained silent until now, broke in gently. “You’re forgetting, Captain O’Brien, that the moment after you’ve been transmitted from the L-2 Facility at Oak Ridge, you will have been dead, and the canister will have been in the ground, for two thousand years.”

  22

  Cindy. The kid was a real scrapper, and I saw more courage in this fourteen-year-old girl than I’ve seen in grown men with some pretty impressive medals on their chests. Now courage seems to come in two varieties. There’s your basic sin
gle-heroic-act kind that the aforementioned men with medals have displayed, and the day-by-day grit-your-teeth guts kind that keeps you fighting on, often in unsung and unglamorous situations, when every fiber of your being tells you that you should have given up yesterday or last month or last year. The latter is generally unrecognized and unsung, and I think that’s a crime. Sure, Rudyard Kipling spoke of forcing “your heart and mind and sinew to serve their turn long after they are gone and there is only the will which says to them, ‘Hold on,’” but he was only one man, and the kind of courage he spoke of doesn’t sell newspapers or magazines.

  Someone once said that a hero is no braver than anyone else; he’s just braver for five minutes longer. As a definition of heroism, I’ve never much liked it. It’s glib and it’s flippant, and real heroism is far more complicated. But it does do one thing; it brings endurance into the equation. It’s one thing to, in a supercharged fraction of a second, throw yourself on a live hand grenade to save the lives of your buddies (and I don’t mean to denigrate such acts of valor), but another thing entirely to deal with fear, grief, pain, or loneliness as a way of life. People are decorated for shedding blood, but not for shedding tears. Awards are given for limbs broken or shattered, but not for broken hearts or spirits. Much ado is made over the hero who dies in combat, but how often is the courage of his widow recognized? His worries are over permanently; hers have just begun. How about the courage, the fortitude, it takes for her to cope with heartbreak and grief, to face each gray dawn and get up to struggle to rebuild her life and her dreams, and those of her children?

  It’s often easier to die than to live. Very often. We all know this from our own experiences. Haven’t we all, and more than once, when sunk deep in depression, pain, grief, or sorrow, wanted to be done with it once and for all? Some follow through. They are the suicides. The quitters. As an Apache, I was brought up to believe that Usen, God, doesn’t like quitters. He has no use for them. The earth has turned many times on its axis since my youth on the Arizona desert, and I’m more certain than ever about that.

  Well, Cindy was brave for five minutes longer, a lot longer than five minutes. Better than anyone else I’ve met before or since, she was the personification of what Paul E. Billheimer calls “the heroism of faithful endurance.” He makes the observation, in his Don’t Waste Your Sorrows, “It seems to some that a life which is ended swiftly by an act of martyrdom may be more heroic and a greater testimony of deathless love than … patient endurance of … sorrow, suffering, disappointments, heartaches, and pain.” But may it not be, he asks, “that God is obtaining a similar quality of selfless devotion and sacrificial love” from the latter as from the former? “If so,” he says, “then those who suffer triumphantly, accepting the ‘things that hurt and things that mar’ with submission, thanksgiving, and praise, may be enhancing their eternal rank in a similar way as did the martyrs.” I can see so many things now so clearly that I couldn’t see then.

  Cindy and I got to know each other very well indeed during the six months that I was a guest in the Jones household. As the time went by, she lost more and more strength. We had all expected it, of course, had known it was going to happen, but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared for it. By the end of March, she was too weak even to use her wheelchair, except for very brief periods of time. She was losing weight like crazy, and by mid-April, looked skeletal. That’s also when she began losing her hair. By the beginning of May, she could no longer sit up and so could no longer read. We all had Marge schedule us to read to her at various times throughout the day. As might be expected, her remarkable precociousness was revealed in her choice of books. Just a few we read to her were The Thousand and One Nights, the works of Mark Twain, Don Quixote, The Last of the Mohicans, the Odyssey, everything Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about Sherlock Holmes, and Plutarch’s Lives.

  I’ve already mentioned that Cindy wasn’t your average kid. She thought a lot. About a lot of things. As I said before, impending death finally makes philosophers of us all.

  Sunday mornings, when the rest of the family went off to church, was when we’d have our long talks. I’ll never forget one of the very last we had. It was toward the end of June, and the final countdown for the mission was in progress. I’d begun to get cold feet, but I was too scared to back out. At that stage, I was given to emitting long mournful sighs and to spells of depression. That particular Sunday morning, I paused for a moment before climbing the stairs to Cindy’s room. I stood looking at the watercolor family portrait in the beautiful oak frame that Marge had bought for it. Marge had put it up over the living room couch on Christmas day. Since she’d been in on Cindy’s surprise, she’d had the frame in the attic, ready and waiting. The Jones family, dogs included, smiled at me from behind the glass.

  The thing that really got to me, and I’m sure to everyone else, was that she’d painted herself as she would have looked had she not been dying. What a heartbreaking contrast between that image and the poor, pain-racked little girl wasting away upstairs. I gave another of the long sighs for which I was becoming famous around the house and, like an old man, slowly trudged upstairs.

  “Hi, kid.”

  “Hi, Mr. O’Brien.” The doctors had said that, by all rights, she should have been dead a month and a half ago. They couldn’t understand it. She kept hanging on with an iron-willed tenacity that defied belief. It was as if she were waiting for something. As if she knew something would happen if she could only hold on long enough.

  “What’ll it be today? Want to pick up where we left off in the Last of the Mohicans or where we left off in Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Can we just talk for a little while?”

  “Sure,” I said, sitting down.

  “Mr. O’Brien, you’re not going to be with us for too much longer, are you?”

  “No, I’m going to have to go very soon now.”

  “I hate to see you go when you’re feeling so sad.” Just like the kid. She’s dying, and she’s worried about me. I forced a laugh.

  “Oh, I’ll survive. It’s just that I’m nervous about starting a new job, moving to a new place, wondering how I’ll fit in with the new people, and stuff like that. It’s normal.”

  “If it’s normal, how come it’s a secret?”

  “Well,” I waved a negligent hand, “you know how we adults are—self-important, going around making mountains out of molehills all the time.”

  “Have you prayed about your new job?” Great. Leave it to a kid to be direct. An adult would know better than to ask a personal question like that.

  “I envy you your faith. I really do, Cindy. I only wish I could have that kind of faith.”

  “What’s stopping you?” Another one of my sighs.

  “I’ve seen a lot of things. A lot of bad things. A lot of things that a loving God like you say yours is, just wouldn’t allow to happen. I believe in God, I guess, but mine is different from yours. He’s not much given to listening to prayers. Sometimes He intervenes in human affairs, and sometimes He doesn’t. Mostly He doesn’t.”

  “Why doesn’t He?”

  “I don’t really know. I guess maybe He just has more important things on His mind. Anyway, when He does intervene, it’s to take up for the brave, the strong. He has no use for the weak or the irresolute. He stands by the man who’s true to himself and his beliefs, true to his family, his tribe. And even then, Usen sometimes deserts such a man and allows the forces of evil to triumph. Why? Who can say? He’s a hard taskmaster. He is the stern Judge to whom you must finally account. He’s not your God, A God of love, forgiveness, and mercy.

  “Cindy, I’ve seen a lot of things that a loving God like yours just wouldn’t allow to happen. You really haven’t seen that much of life. If you’d seen or been through some of the things that I’ve been through,” I said, thinking of a senseless barroom brawl in Globe that left my father dead, a stretch of highway near Safford where a leering Death took the lives of the only two women I loved, the stupi
dity, the futility of the war in Korea …

  “What you’ve been through, Mr. O’Brien?” Cindy flashed. “What about what I’m going through? Do you think its fun to die a little more each day? To know that you’ll never see your fifteenth birthday? To see the terrible, heartbreaking pain in the eyes of your mother and father every time they look at you? To hear your sister cry herself to sleep nights because she loves you so much that she can’t handle your death?” The sudden unleashing of such powerful, pent-up emotion took me aback. It took her aback too. She made a fist and bit on it hard, blinking back the tears. “Oh, Mr. O’Brien, I’m sorry. I truly am. But we’ve all known pain, disappointments, and the feeling sometimes that not even God cares.” Her eyes searched mine with urgency. “But don’t you see, God uses pain to refine us. It’s all part of His plan. Don’t go away without knowing that.”

  “Cindy, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I feel terrible for being so insensitive. But I’m not going to lie to you. I just don’t see any pattern.”

  “And because you can’t see it, it can’t exist?” It was uncanny. That was how her father had answered my incredulity as Gettysburg, during my initial briefing. When I started to tell him that time travel was impossible, he’d said that everyone else on the Project Council had reacted in the same way at first. “But,” he had said, “that just proves how limited, how small, our own minds and imaginations are. It can’t be so because we can’t conceive of it. Rubbish,” he had said. Cindy was a chip off the old block.