Mercury Rests

by Robert Kroese

  “Sure,” said Babcock. “But I can personally vouch for several of them. Gabe Horton, my chief of staff, for example. I’ve known him since high school.”

  “Understand, Mr. President,” said Lucifer, “that we BIOs are, for all practical purposes, immortal. Many of us are several thousand years old. Do not underestimate the patience or foresight of your enemy. It’s quite possible that my superiors anticipated that you would one day be in a position of importance and placed Gabe Horton next to you as second trombonist in your high school marching band back in 1985.”

  Babcock was stunned for a moment at Lucifer’s recall. “That’s absurd,” he said at last.

  “Is it?” asked Lucifer. “Tell me, did you know in 1985 that you were going to run for President?”

  Travis was silent. The fact was that he did know. He had felt that he was destined for greatness since first watching Star Wars in 1977. Maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to think that these mysterious BIOs had somehow seen incipient greatness in him, like Darth Vader feeling the presence of Luke Skywalker. Now that he thought about it, he did remember being a little suspicious about Gabe when his family had first arrived from Delaware. What kind of kid willingly played trombone in a high school marching band? And who had ever heard of anyone being from Delaware? If he couldn’t trust Gabe, he realized, he couldn’t trust anyone.

  “In any case,” Lucifer went on, “I am not as worried about betrayal as I am about being misunderstood. Not many people are capable of understanding the true scope of the threat you are facing. My people—the BIOs—will not take kindly to having their authority questioned. Your politicians will understandably want to act cautiously, but there is no room for half measures. If you attack the giant, you must kill the giant. You are in a war for your survival. You did not start the war, but you must finish it.”

  “I understand,” said Travis.

  “I knew you would,” replied Lucifer. “Because you are a man of action. And more importantly, a man of faith. You see, I believe it is no accident that you are president at this time. I believe that I was led to seek you out, to provide you the tools you require to vanquish the greatest threat your race has ever known. Gentlemen, will you pray with me?”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  “Pray?” Lubbers said, unable to fully conceal his disdain. He had hoped they were done with that crap now that he had accepted the King into his heart.

  Travis nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

  Lubbers bit his tongue. Better to just go along with this nonsense than to make an issue of it. Whatever it took to get Rezon to give them the information they needed.

  Lucifer held out his hands to Travis and Lubbers. The three of them joined hands and closed their eyes. Lucifer turned his face skyward.

  “FATHER IN HEAVEN,” Lucifer began, theatrically. “We come before Thee, a triumvirate of supplicants seeking Thy favor and guidance, in this great egg-shaped room cradled in the uterus of this White House, an edifice built in the style of the temples of the wise pagans of old, who might very well have been saved by Thy grace were it not for their poor timing and penchant for buggery.”

  “Amen,” muttered Travis.

  “Father,” Lucifer continued, “this nation—a nation founded by Thy divine providence and dedicated to the principles of democracy and free market capitalism espoused in Thy holy scriptures, a nation saved by the blood of Thy Son and sustained by the blood of patriots—is under siege. Yea! Under siege by the very powers and principalities of which Thou warned us about in Thy word. But we believe that Thou in Thy excellent wisdom will reward the remnant who has remained true to Thy word and grant unto us salvation, for it is written:

  “ ‘From millions of men...one man must step forward who with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a fire thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.’

  “Father,” implored Lucifer, “we ask that Thou wouldst allow President Travis Babcock to be that man.”

  “Amen,” muttered Travis again, not realizing that Lucifer was quoting from Mein Kampf.

  Lucifer went on, “We know, Lord, that Thou art a merciful God, delighting in forgiveness and peace. But we also know that Thou art a just God, pummeling Thy enemies into submission with Thy powerful fists. We beseech thee, O Heavenly Despot, to allow the fighting men and women of the US military to be the iron gauntlets sheathing those fists, and to bless our mission to blast these blaspheming motherfuckers to Kingdom Come. In JESUS’S NAME, AMEN!”

  “Amen!” exclaimed Travis.

  Lucifer opened his eyes, and the men released each other’s hands. Lubbers was all shook up. If it weren’t for the calming presence of Elvis in his heart, he might have lost his head.

  “That was some prayer,” Travis said after a moment. He was clearly in awe. Anyone who could pray like that couldn’t be a bad guy—although Travis thought he could have done without motherfuckers.

  “I believe very strongly in the cause,” explained Lucifer. “It makes me emotional.”

  Travis nodded. Lucifer’s sincerity could not be doubted. It was comforting to know that even this stranger from another dimension recognized the truth of the Christian faith and American ideals. If Travis could be sure of anything, it was this: God was on their side.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The fastest pitch ever recorded in the history of Major League Baseball was thrown by Cincinnati Reds southpaw Aroldis Chapman on Saturday, September 24, 2010. The ball traveled at 105 miles per hour for roughly half a second before smacking into the catcher’s mitt. The batter, Tony Gwynn, Jr., said that he never saw the ball until it was behind him. A pitch that fast can kill a man. If you drove a car that fast on the interstate, you’d likely be thrown in jail for the reckless endangerment of your fellow motorists.

  The least vigorous angel in all of creation9 is stronger and faster than any Olympic athlete. A baseball team made up of the nine clumsiest angels in existence, playing in clown shoes while wearing burlap sacks filled with angry wasps tied around their heads, could beat any All-Star team in history like they stole something, as the saying goes.

  Gamaliel was not a particularly unathletic angel. Gamaliel was, in fact, the quarterback of the cherubic football team, the starting pitcher for the cherubic baseball team, and—during the off-season—a surprisingly competent scrapbooker. On a good day, he could throw a baseball over two hundred miles per hour into the strike zone of a legless dwarf, if the situation called for it. And Gamaliel was having a good day.

  The ball of ice spun off his fingers so fast that merely the friction of the air caused it to release a fine spray of water as the surface vaporized. It shot from his hand like a bullet aimed squarely for Mercury’s heart. Mercury didn’t even have time to duck.

  Whoopf!

  Mercury’s sternum cracked, and the air gushed from his lungs. The shock sent him tumbling backward. For a few seconds, his heart stopped. He lost consciousness and began to plummet to the mountainside below. Lightning flashed again, closer this time. The thunderclap was deafening.

  When he had fallen fifty feet or so, he regained his senses. Gasping for breath and clutching his chest in agony, he rose again to meet Gamaliel in the air.

  Gamaliel fired one more. This time the ice ball struck Mercury in the shoulder, nearly tearing his left arm off. He screamed. The pain was intolerable. Still he did not yield.

  “I’ll never understand you, Mercury,” said Gamaliel, a tinge of pity in his voice. “You flit about without any sense of duty until you get some misguided idea of purpose in your head, and then you just won’t give it up, like a bird trying to get out of a closed window. What are you even doing here? Why don’t you stop bothering the grownups and go play on an island somewhere?”

  Mercury was making a small noise in his throat
. After a moment, Gamaliel realized he was laughing.

  “What’s so funny, Merc?” demanded Gamaliel, readying another hailstone.

  Mercury smiled. “You said doody,” he chuckled.

  “Goddamn you, Mercury!” Gamaliel howled in rage. “I’m going to shut that idiotic mouth of yours for—”

  Unfortunately, Mercury never learned what it was that Gamaliel was going to shut his mouth for, due to an unlucky imbalance of electric charge between the mass of Mount Mbutuokoti and the clouds above it. Given that Gamaliel was the proximate cause of this imbalance, he really had only himself to blame. Anyone who is going to play with weather needs to know a little basic meteorology—or at the very least fulminology. Fulminology is the study of lightning.

  It’s often erroneously reported that the American inventor, philosopher, and kite aficionado Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. This is not true. Electricity was a known phenomenon before Franklin was born. What Franklin discovered was that lightning was a kind of electricity, no different in theory from the shock you get when walking across your carpet and then touch the cast-iron door of your wood-burning stove. In fact, he realized, you don’t actually have to touch the stove to get the shock. If the built-up charge is strong enough, it will arc through the air from the stove to your finger—or, more accurately, from your finger to the stove. Franklin decided, rather arbitrarily, that the stove was “positively” charged and that your finger was “negatively” charged. Nature abhors this imbalance between positive and negative and will even things out as soon as it possibly can, by spewing negatively charged ions (electrons, which were too small for Franklin to see, even with bifocal lenses) into the stove. The greater the imbalance, the greater distance the arc can span. When there’s a massive imbalance of charges between the earth and the sky, caused, for example, by the sudden formation of a thick mass of water vapor, you get a really big arc. Observe:

  Somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred quintillion pent-up electrons leaped from the clouds to the zenith of Mbutuokoti, easing the imbalance between earth and sky and shedding a trifling amount of energy along the way in the form of light, sound, and the disruption of the molecular structure of one overconfident angel and one very unlucky goat. The goat, mercifully, was already dead. The angel, being immortal, was not. If the goat’s spirit were watching from some sort of goat heaven, it might be somewhat heartened to see that the twelve men who had recently cut its throat were now also dead, their central nervous systems having been shut down by an electrical charge a trillion times bigger than their conduits were designed for.

  The angel’s central nervous system, being essentially identical to that of a human being, also shut down. The only qualitative difference between angelic biology and that of humans is that when the human machine shuts down, the ghost that occupied it is evicted permanently. Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. Where the angelic spirit goes, on the other hand, is well known: nowhere. The spirit of the angel simply hangs around in a noncorporeal and unconscious state, doing its best to repair the machine until it’s in fit shape to be inhabited again. Thus did Gamaliel’s charred and effectively dead but still entirely reparable body fall to the plateau atop Mount Mbutuokoti, where it was virtually indistinguishable from the dozen men lying splayed like paper dolls around the remnants of their altar.

  Mercury might have cheered at the sight of Gamaliel’s demise except that, for one thing, it was really gross. For another, he was still in a ridiculous amount of pain. And on top of that, it now seemed that Christine, running down the side of a mountain during a thunderstorm with a doomsday device in her pocket, was determined to kill herself and quite possibly destroy the world in the process.

  While the two angels had been fighting in the sky above, Christine had retrieved the glass apple from the cave and was now fleeing from a volcanic eruption that seemed to have been triggered by the lightning strike, followed closely by that malignant bastard Horace Finch. The pressure inside the volcano must have been building for weeks, and the lightning had weakened the rock just enough to allow the lava to break through. Dumb luck, thought Mercury. Or synchronicity.

  It was clear that Christine wasn’t going to make it. Even if she somehow managed to keep her footing on the wet, slippery rock slope and avoid falling to her death (and undoubtedly triggering the anti-bomb in the process), it would take a miracle to keep her from being struck by one of the globs of molten rock spewing from the mountaintop. Fortunately for her, a miracle was something that Mercury could provide.

  With his left arm still hanging by strands of muscle and sinew and his rib cage shattered, what he really wanted to do was land on the plain out of range of the volcano and lie down for a day and a half or so. But there was no time for that. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he forced himself to focus on the invisible channels of supernatural energy that riddled the Mundane Plane. Grabbing ahold of the energy, he formed an invisible umbrella of warped gravity just above Christine, causing any lava clumps that would have hit her to change their trajectory just enough to land a few feet away from her. Unfortunately, Finch was following so close that the umbrella protected him as well.

  The farther down the mountain they got, the better their chances of survival were, but from Mercury’s vantage point far above the mountainside their progress was excruciatingly slow. They were no more than a quarter of the way to the plain. Dizzy and nauseous from pain, Mercury began to fall, unable to spare any energy maintaining his altitude. He skittered to a stop on the slope above Christine and Finch, still focusing on deflecting the lava raining down all around them. The rain intensified, and his vision blurred, making it difficult to keep track of the two distant figures clambering down the mountain. Just a little farther, he thought. Just a little farther and you’ll be safe. We’ll be safe.

  And then Christine slipped and fell. Mercury held his breath, waiting for the anti-bomb to go off. But a second passed, and then another, and they were all still around.

  But then, of course they were. This had all happened before, hadn’t it? Christine had told him how she and Finch had run down the side of Mbutuokoti, escaping safely from the lava and the lightning. If they hadn’t, Finch never would have gotten the apple and Mercury would never have stolen it from him and imploded the moon. None of what was happening now couldn’t be happening if it hadn’t already happened.

  Mercury shook his head dimly, trying to make sense of the situation with his addled brain. Down below, Finch was dragging Christine’s limp body behind an outcropping that would offer some shelter. They were safe. Mercury smiled and passed out, tumbling like a ragdoll down the mountainside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “All right,” said Lubbers, trying to conceal his impatience. “How are we going to strike back against the BIOs?”

  Lucifer smiled. He had no reason to delay any further. He had Lubbers and Babcock eating out of his hand. “I was thinking,” he said, “that we would use Wormwood.”

  Travis paled at the word. Lubbers looked from Lucifer to the president, trying to figure out what he had missed. “Wormwood? What’s Wormwood?”

  “How do you know about that?” the president demanded, his voice betraying a combination of anger and fear.

  “As I said,” Lucifer replied calmly, “I have many contacts within your government. Little of importance happens without my knowledge. I would say that the development of a ten-kiloton nuclear device that can fit in a standard carry-on bag qualifies as important, wouldn’t you?”

  Lubbers’s jaw dropped. Rumors of so-called “suitcase nukes” had circulated among conspiracy theorists for better than thirty years. While Lubbers knew that such a device was theoretically possible, it was generally agreed that any nuclear device small enough for a person to carry would have any number of practical problems. The main problem was that the explosive yield of a bomb was limited by the amount of fissile material used. For a suitcase-sized bomb, the yield would be less than one kiloton, given current techn
ical limitations—less than a tenth the size of the of “Little Boy” bomb used by the Americans on Hiroshima. The other problem was that having a nuclear bomb in a suitcase required someone to carry around a nuclear bomb in a suitcase. The sort of person who would be willing to do that was the sort of person that in no case should be allowed to operate anything more dangerous than a belt sander.

  But apparently someone in the government had decided that there was a need for such a device. Unbelievable. The potential for misuse if a portable nuclear weapon fell into the wrong hands was off the scale. No wonder Lubbers had been left out of the loop. His boss, FBI Director Keith Hansen, probably didn’t even know.

  “The thing must weigh a hundred pounds,” said Lubbers.

  Travis eyed Lubbers and then Rezon. Neither of them was cleared for this information. Project Wormwood was known about by only a few dozen people. Half of them were scientists and high-ranking military personnel and the other half were government officials—Travis, the vice president, a few cabinet members, and a handful of senators. Officially, the project did not exist.

  “Look, Mr. President,” said Lubbers. “We can play the security clearance game if you want, but clearly Mr. Rezon already knows about your super-top-secret project, and he’s just told me about it. In any case, we’re all on the same team here.”

  Travis nodded slowly. Lubbers was right. There was no point in standing on protocol now. “All told, the device weight is eighteen pounds,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” said Lubbers. Then, remembering his place, said, “Sorry, Mr. President. In my opinion that statement sounds like bullshit, Mr. President.”

  “Ultra-grade plutonium-239,” said Lucifer. “Ninety-nine point nine percent pure. Virtually no contamination from plutonium-240 or other isotopes. As far as most of the world knows, impossible to produce. With ultra-grade PU-239, you can build a ten-kiloton bomb that fits in an attaché case and emits less radiation than a typical microwave oven. The power to level a small city in a package that can fit in a backpack.”