“I think so.”
“What will you do about Carmichael?”
Hurley sighed. “I like Harry. Despite everything, I like him. The Soviets will expect us to try to keep the entire business quiet. That means no arrest and no trial. I’ve already called the bloodhounds off.
“To maintain the illusion, we’ll have to punish Harry administratively and quietly. His career, of course, goes no further. Maybe he’ll resign. If not, we may have to give him some sort of job on the northern border. Maybe working for Immigration.”
They fled west across southern Maryland toward the Potomac. “There’s a ferry at Hay’s Landing,” said Wheeler.
The rain had begun again. It washed down out of a cold sky into drowned forests. “We need to stop somewhere and get Harry some dry clothes,” said Leslie.
“How do we get to the ferry?” asked Harry.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure where we are.”
“I’m not sure why we’re running away,” said Leslie. “There isn’t really anyplace to go.”
Harry was watching telegraph poles. They were almost hypnotic somehow, rooted symbols of a vanishing world, orderly, solid, uncomplicated. Wheeler had said little since they’d left the priory. The tension between the two men was palpable, and Leslie was beginning to realize there was something she didn’t know.
Harry was frustrated: he had used his best judgment throughout, had done the right things, and yet he still felt guilty. “I couldn’t just let you destroy them, Pete,” he said finally. And Leslie understood at last.
The priest nodded. “I’m going to finish what we started, Harry.” They were approaching a crossroad. An abandoned gas station stood on one corner, its rusted Texaco standard rising and sinking in the storm. The pumps were gone, a few old tires were stacked at the side of the building, and an ancient Ford had been left in one of the bays.
For the second time, Harry heard the sharp snaps of the catches on Wheeler’s briefcase. “Pete,” he said, turning off the road into the station and jolting to a stop. “You don’t want to do this.”
“You’re right, Harry. I don’t, but I have no choice.”
“You’ve got a second chance, Pete. This time, there’ll be no going back.”
Leslie turned in her seat and saw the electromagnet. “Is that how you did it?”
“How’d you manage the switch?” asked Wheeler. “I thought we were reasonably thorough.”
“This is the library set,” Harry explained. “You erased the same set of discs that Baines got earlier.”
Wheeler smiled grimly. He kept a tight grip on the case and held his finger against the switch. Harry closed his eyes as though expecting a bullet.
The priest’s demeanor might have been that of a confessor, sunk in thought at the iniquities and stupidities of the human race. “So it comes down to me after all,” he said.
“Pete, listen. Wait. There’s more to this than you know.” He sensed Leslie tensing beside him and wondered whether she was getting ready to climb over the seat and jump the priest. But there was no way. He laid a restraining hand on her forearm. “We don’t need to give the Text to anyone. We can hide it somewhere, until the world is ready for it. Bury it in a desert, put it in a bank vault. I don’t care. But we don’t have to destroy it.”
“It’d take centuries,” said Wheeler. “In the meantime, someone would find it. Or the people you entrust with the secret would betray it. No. The risks are too high.”
“The benefits are high, Pete. And there’s something else you don’t know. It’s not just us, this world, who will pay the price if you pull the switch.”
Uncertainty flickered in Wheeler’s dark eyes. “What don’t I know?”
“The nature of the sender. Pete, no one could ever understand what they were doing out in the gulf, how the Althean system could have escaped its parent galaxy, or why no such galaxy seemed to exist. We insisted on perceiving them as a species like ourselves. But I think what we really have is a creature who is looking for something else alive and thinking in an empty universe. You remember the lesson of the early days of SKYNET? All those sterile worlds. Literally thousands of terrestrial planets, all embalmed in carbon dioxide or riddled with craters.
“It must be like that everywhere. And maybe, after we’ve advanced a little beyond where we are now, that emptiness will get to all of us, the way it’s already gotten to Gambini. The way it might have gotten to the Altheans. So they took their planetary system and went looking, not through the stars, because the odds against finding life there were too great, but through the galaxies. And they used the most practical search technique they could think of.”
“The Text,” breathed Wheeler.
“Yes. How long have they been out there? You agreed that Alpha and Gamma are artificial suns. The pulsar system is unstable, so either they have to have a way to stabilize it or they create a new system every few million years. Pete, they’re looking for us! Throw that switch, obliterate the Text, and we may never be able to reply. Because we’ll never succeed in convincing anyone of the truth! And who’s going to spend money on a project to send a radio signal that won’t arrive at its destination for two million years!”
“Harry,” said the priest, “with or without the discs, no one would bother. What’s the difference?”
“We’d be a hell of a lot more persuasive if we had a record of the transmission, Pete.” Harry relaxed a little. He was winning. “There’s something more,” he said. “Leslie has said all along that she had a sense that we were listening to a lone man in a tower somewhere, not to a species. Pete, there’s a fair amount of evidence that the Altheans are a group creature of some kind, a single intellectual entity.” Harry had twisted around in his seat so that he was face to face with Wheeler. “There’s only one Althean. It’s damned near timeless. Immortal. And it’s alone.”
The rain beat against the cars.
Wheeler closed the briefcase. “This is probably a mistake,” he said.
Harry was breathing again. Leslie squeezed his hand, then reached back and squeezed Wheeler’s. “Next order of business,” said Harry, “is to get another car. One they won’t be looking for.”
“Maybe we should steal one,” said Leslie.
Harry grinned. “We might have to.”
“What do we do with the Text?” asked Wheeler.
“How about a bus terminal locker for the time being?” suggested Leslie. “The sooner we get it off our hands, the better.”
“You’ve been watching too much TV,” said Harry.
They crossed the Potomac on the hovercraft ferry at Hay’s Landing and rented another car at Triangle, using Leslie’s name in an effort to confuse pursuers. Harry finally collected some dry clothes, changed in a men’s room in a downtown hotel, and got a map.
They drove northwest toward Manassas.
It had cleared finally, although there was still no sun. “I have an idea,” said Wheeler. “I think I know where the discs would be safe. For a long time.”
“Where?” asked Harry skeptically.
“Give them to someone with experience in these matters—the Church. Now wait a minute: before you say anything, we earned a reputation transmitting the essential elements of classical civilization to Renaissance Europe. Compared to that, this is a small job. Harry, Les, there’s a parish in Carthage. It’s a small community. A mill town. The pastor up there is an old friend of mine.”
“You want to hide the Text in a church?”
“In the altar stone, Harry. In the altar stone!” He leaned forward with frenetic energy. “There’s no safer place.”
Leslie nodded.
“If we can get it there,” Harry said.
“Keep to the country roads,” Leslie advised.
Harry nodded. “Pete, there’s one more thing. I want to pull out Hakluyt’s disc and give it to him.”
“I have no problem with that,” said Wheeler.
Harry looked at the woman. “Les?”
“Do it,” she said.
“In due time, I think he’ll be able to cure my son.”
“I have my doubts about all that,” Wheeler said.
And maybe he was right: when Harry pulled over to look at the map, he still had to put on his reading glasses. The serum apparently hadn’t worked.
He took a deep breath, sucking damp air and pollen into lungs long ravaged by an assortment of allergies. And the air tasted sweet and clean.
MONITOR
There’s a scene in Milton, in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, I believe, which may describe the situation. God and Adam were talking, and Adam was bitching about the landscaping and his economic status and one thing and another. And he complained about being alone. “All I have to talk to,” he said, “are animals.”
And God promised He’d look into it. And then I guess He must have thought about it some more. “Adam,” he said, “who is more alone than I, that know nothing like myself in all the wide world?”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely the unhappy dilemma of the marvelous being who recently took time to draw our attention.
Closing remarks on the nature of the Altheans by the Reverend Peter Wheeler, O. Praem., at the annual gathering of the American Philosophical Association in Atlantic City in November.
EPILOGUE
RIMFORD HAD GONE out for some eggnog. But he drove onto the desert. Sirius and Procyon, the bright pair, lingered on the horizon. Guarding their secrets, he used to think when he looked on them a few years ago. But they lay exposed now, under Ed Gambini’s eyes. They had fourteen known worlds between them, indexed and catalogued by mass and composition. All were sterile.
The mesas moved ponderously against the desert sky.
The Althean had done a remarkable thing. He’d examined a pair of quasars, widely separated in the viewing hemisphere, each approximately eighteen billion light years distant, one a little more, the other a little less. And he had determined they were the same object, seen from different perspectives! That could only mean that his telescopes had penetrated completely around the vault of the cosmos! Moreover, since the quasars were not precisely on opposite sides of the sky, it was clear that the universe was not spherical.
The desert looked unfamiliar. Years before, when he and Agnes were newly married, and he was stationed at Kitt Peak, they’d driven across this same stretch of wilderness on another Christmas Eve. That seemed a long time ago now. In those days the sky was filled with mysteries. But tonight he held the universe in his hands, understood everything except, perhaps, the secrets of his own existence.
A few details remained unclear, but they were trivial: points about light and wave theory, that sort of thing.
He knew the size and shape, the essential architecture of the universe. And he understood why the cylinder was twisted, the only reason it could be twisted: it was wrapped around something else. And what could that something else be but a second universe? Or, more correctly, the anti-matter aspect of this one.
Beneath the desert stars, he tried to summon his old powers, to visualize the two systems locked in each other’s embrace, a cosmic double helix.
And he understood a great deal more. For him, the great question had never been the shape of the universe, but the subtle mysteries of its working parts. How had the laws come to be that decreed light speed or packed enormous stores of energy into the atom or designed the proton? That the universe was habitable, indeed that it existed at all in a structured form, required a set of coincidences of incredible proportions. He recalled the old analogy of the monkeys with the typewriter. How long would it take the chimp to produce, by pure accident, the Bible?
The odds on the monkey were considerably better than the odds that this universe could happen by accident. Which was to say, it was utterly impossible for a Baines Rimford to drive a car across a desert on a December evening.
There were theories, of course. There were always theories. Some argued for an infinite number of bubble universes drifting through a superspace void. Others believed that the universe happened an infinite number of times until, by accident, nature got everything right.
They were hardly satisfactory notions. But Rimford had an idea: if the universe existed as two disconnected entities, tied together somehow but eternally separate, then expansion and contraction would necessarily occur in both systems on a similar timetable. But under no imaginable circumstances could the timetable be exact. That is, at the beginning of each cycle, there would be two fiery eruptions into material existence, but never at precisely the same instant.
The problem with the old idea of universal oscillation is that there is no way to transmit information from one phase to the next. Everything is wiped out in the cosmic crunch and subsequent explosion that heralds each new epoch. But the Althean believed that coded data could be passed back and forth between the matter and antimatter universes: this works, and that does not. So that, eventually, over incredible gulfs of time, you get an evolved cosmos.
You get the starry skies over Pasadena.
But it was the next step that was unsettling.
If the universe was indeed evolving, what was it evolving toward?
There was evidence that the ultimate goal was to create an ideal refuge for intelligence. And how could that be unless someone had written into the cosmic programming a directive that such an end be sought?
Rimford was not inclined toward religion. The notion of a supreme being raised more questions in his mind than it answered. As did a suggestion offered some years ago that, if indeed the bubble universe concept was correct, then the superspace in which it was adrift might be home to a race of designers.
For where would they have come from?
There was another possibility. He wondered whether the universe itself might not be holistic in some sense: a pattern that strove reflexively for order in its early incarnations. And, having eventually, after countless tries, learned how to make hydrogen, and consequently stars, it went on, seeking consciousness and, eventually, intelligence.
It would need us!
The red and white running lights of four jets lifted from the desert on his left, and he abruptly realized he’d gone all the way out to Edwards. He watched the planes climb into the jeweled dark. Immediately ahead of them, the moon lay partly hidden in a tangle of cumulus. Yes: however it had happened, it was a magnificent universe.
He continued up to the intersection with Route 58 and called Agnes from a restaurant. “I missed my stop,” he said.
“Okay, Baines,” she replied. This wasn’t the first time he’d wandered off, but he could hear the relief in her voice. “Where are you?”
“Four Corners,” he said. It was a pedestrian answer.
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