Earth Cult

by Trevor Hoyle

  Frank drove the Toronado carefully on the narrow twisting roads, taking in as much of the scenery as he could. It was magnificent country. This was the very heartland of the Rocky Mountains which straddled the Continental Divide like a heavy saddle-pack thrown over a mule’s back. Sharp granite peaks faded into misty blueness in the distance, ranged up one behind the other as if waiting their turn in the queue. In the valleys it was lush and green, and along Blue River the flashing white triangular sails of small sailing boats leaned together to take advantage of the breeze.

  On the other side of Rabbit Ears Pass, following the meandering course of what appeared to be a dried-out riverbed, Frank noticed and remarked on a long ridge of washed stone and gravel resembling the casting of a giant earthworm. Cal Renfield explained that this was the waste of gold dredging that had been in profitable operation as late as 1942.

  He went on to tell the tale of how in 1859 a group of miners, new to the territory, were thrown out of the gold camp of Tarryall. They pushed on to the South Platte River field and came in with one of the biggest strikes ever made in the area. There they built their own town and named it Fairplay, which still survives today, said Cal Renfield, while Tarryall is dead and gone and all but forgotten.

  ‘Rough if not poetic justice,’ Frank observed.

  ‘Tell him about Haw Tabor,’ said Helen from the back seat.

  ‘Haw Tabor was a storekeeper in what was to become Leadville back in the 1870s. At about that time many of the gold workings had been dug out, then somebody discovered that the dark sand the miners had been throwing out and cursing because it got in their way was almost pure carbonate of lead and silver. Tabor grubstaked a couple of miners to 17 dollars’ worth of groceries and they struck a vein of silver yards wide. Tabor sold his share for a million dollars and with the proceeds went on to make another nine million from other diggings. One of them was the Matchless Mine, which is just about the most famous mine in the entire State.’

  ‘And in the end he went broke,’ Helen said laconically, as if this neatly summed up her philosophy.

  ‘That’s right,’ said her father. ‘They repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and during the Panic of 1893 silver prices hit rock-bottom and Tabor’s empire collapsed. When he died in 1899 he was the postmaster in Denver.’

  They arrived in Radium and stopped at a coffee shop for something to eat. Frank and Helen had a tuna fish salad but Cal Renfield required something more substantial for the inner man: he had grilled steak and french fries with onion rings done in batter. Frank felt like delivering a lecture on polysaturated fats and cholesterol levels but he wisely thought twice about it and decided that it was too late to break the habit of a lifetime.

  Afterwards they drove out to the hospital, a new, clean, functional, single-storey building surrounded by neat lawns which glowed verdantly in the mellow autumn sunshine. It seemed colder here and when Frank remarked on it Cal Renfield pointed out that they had climbed nearly six thousand feet and were now a mile-and-a-half above sea-level. Some of the local residents claimed there were only three months to the year at this altitude: ‘July, August, and Winter’.

  Dr Bob Bragg was expecting them. He was a tall lean man, about the same age as Frank, with thinning fair hair that he wore in such a way as to disguise his incipient baldness. His long narrow face bore the marks of worry, the lines on his forehead hardened into a permanent frown as if life was a never-ending series of small battles and minor disappointments. Yesterday had been pretty gruelling, his expression told them, today was about the same, and tomorrow wouldn’t be any better.

  Cal Renfield introduced Frank as ‘a fellow journalist’, which seemed to be all the explanation Dr Bragg required for the visit; in any event he accepted it without comment, leading them through into the Isolation Unit which occupied an annexe of the hospital, separated from the other wards by two pairs of double-doors. There were twenty-two babies in the Unit, ranging in age from fourteen months down to the latest arrival, a baby-girl just nine days old.

  They were perfectly normal in appearance, plump, bright-eyed, with a healthy sheen to their skin, yet this apparent normality was made to seem incongruous and slightly unsettling by their stillness, silence, and lack of activity. They lay in their cots like perfect mute facsimiles, computerized versions of everything babies were supposed to be except for a vital element that had been omitted from the programme – the spark of individuality. There was nothing physically wrong with them that Frank could detect, no signs of mental aberration: they were simply acting as babies with none of the usual signs of babyishness.

  ‘We’ve carried out all the standard checks on the physiological processes, including the autonomic nervous system, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with them,’ Bob Bragg told Frank. ‘At least nothing that shows up. We’ve had specialist paediatricians over from Denver and Dr Samuel Sanborn from the West Coast and none of them know what to make of the syndrome. They’re not mentally defective or subnormal – not in any way that we can tell – and there’s no case study we can find which deals with this type of condition.’

  They moved along the row of cots, the passive stare of each child fixed on some imaginary object in the middle distance. Helen had a look of pain on her face as if the spectacle was too harrowing and unnatural, these tiny waxen effigies masquerading as real flesh and blood. There was nothing there, no vital life-force.

  ‘Do they ever cry?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Not even at birth,’ Bob Bragg said, his thin veined hands resting on the rail of a cot. ‘They’re fed regularly, of course, and they take the food without any trouble, but once when we deliberately delayed the feed by an extra hour not one of them uttered a peep. They just lie there as if they’re waiting for something; but don’t ask me what it is they’re waiting for, I haven’t a notion.’

  ‘What about the mothers, are they okay?’

  ‘They’re upset, naturally. They can see that their baby looks all right and they can’t understand why it doesn’t respond in the usual way. But there’s nothing wrong with the mothers healthwise apart from the worry of having given birth to a …’ He spread his hands, lost for an adequate description.

  ‘Where do you go from here?’

  Bob Bragg shrugged his narrow shoulders. It was less a gesture of dismissal as one of hopelessness. The lines on his forehead were deeply imprinted, the visible trace of a man who had spent many a sleepless night asking himself the same question.

  Helen said, ‘You believe us now?’

  ‘I never doubted your word,’ Frank replied. ‘But the fact that what you say is true doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re right. As Dr Bragg says, the cause or causes have yet to be identified. If the best paediatricians in the country can’t offer a medical opinion as to what’s wrong I don’t see how Gypsum’s ace investigative reporter is going to come up with the answer.’

  It was rather an unkind jibe and Frank regretted it when he saw Helen’s face flush. However, she hadn’t treated him with kid gloves and he reckoned that sooner or later she’d have to learn how to take it as well as hand it out; and sooner rather than later wouldn’t do any harm.

  ‘I knew all along you were on their side,’ she came back at him, her face stiff and sullen.

  ‘I’m not on anybody’s side, I thought we’d established that,’ Frank said with some annoyance. ‘When you can show me a shred of evidence maybe I’ll start to take what you say seriously.’

  Bob Bragg turned to face Helen. ‘You think you know what’s causing this?’ he asked mildly. It was implicit in his tone that his question was polite rather than in earnest.

  ‘I have … an idea,’ she said, withdrawing a little, not making it sound too definite.

  ‘Ideas are in short supply round here at the moment.’

  Helen looked at her father. She said, ‘Maybe when I’ve thought about it some more. I don’t want to be accused of making accusations without proof.’

  This was said for Frank’s be
nefit, though she wouldn’t look at him.

  They walked along the ward, from cot to cot, their footsteps eerily loud in a roomful of silent wide-awake babies. That was another thing, Frank realized: none of them were sleeping – and infants of a few months spent a large part of the day asleep. And it was just as Bob Bragg had remarked, as if they were waiting for something, quite content to bide their time, letting the hours slip away in anticipation of … what?

  Was it at all possible, as Helen Renfield maintained, that there was some connection between these babies and the Deep Hole Project? She had made the charge blindly, instinctively, with no real evidence to support it, but Frank could have pointed out (if he’d felt so inclined) that that was the way many scientific theoreticians arrived at their most startling and worthwhile concepts. Basing their hypotheses purely and simply on the need to explain something which hitherto had been inexplicable, they made chance guesses – and quite often not even educated ones – at the casual relationship between two apparently unconnected events, worked it all out mathematically on paper, and then left it to the practical scientists, the technicians and research workers to come up with specific observational evidence which proved the hypothesis to be correct. Or incorrect, if that’s the way the evidence pointed. But the actual method used was essentially no different from Helen Renfield’s: first the unsupported theory followed by proof either for or against.

  So how to arrive at a coherent hypothesis which embraced an abundance of antineutrinos flooding in from the centre of the Galaxy, atmospheric disturbances leading to freak weather conditions, babies born with none of the normal human attributes and having the appearance of meticulously constructed replicas, men meeting their deaths by unknown causes, and a religious cult which believed the mountain to possess divine significance, to contain some form of dynamic energy which made it in their terms a living entity?

  Were these all random occurrences, totally unrelated to each other, or was it possible they were linked in some mysterious fashion? And if so, how? What was the causal (acausal?) relationship which would make sense of such disparate events and draw them together to form a testable hypothesis?

  Frank suddenly thought of one possible relationship. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy, perhaps, than Einstein’s suggestion that spacetime was curved. And that had been proved.

  The question was, could it be put to the test?

  When they reached the door he turned to the doctor. ‘Do you have an X-ray department in the hospital?’

  Bob Bragg confirmed that they had. He smiled wanly. ‘I know what you’re going to say – have we X-rayed them to find out if there’s anything wrong with their internal organs? Well we have, Mr Kersh. On the older infants, not the very young babies for fear of damaging them. Everything was normal, bone structure, main organs, alimentary tract, everything just as it should be and functioning perfectly.’

  ‘That’s useful to know but in fact I had something else in mind.’ Frank paused for a moment, considering how best to phrase it. ‘If you have an X-ray machine then presumably you also have an X-ray dosemeter for detecting the presence of radiation.’

  Bob Bragg nodded, his permanent frown firmly in place.

  ‘And your staff wear radiation monitoring badges which are checked periodically to see that the level of exposure hasn’t gone beyond the critical limit.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ the doctor said, apparently mystified.

  ‘Can I ask you to carry out a check while we’re here? Place a monitoring badge in one of the cots for fifteen minutes and then run a test on it through the dosemeter. Can you do that?’

  ‘Well … yes,’ said Bob Bragg, blinking. ‘But what on earth for?’

  ‘To check for radiation.’

  ‘Radiation? From where?’

  ‘The babies,’ Frank said.

  Bob Bragg smiled. Then he laughed. ‘You think they’re radioactive?’ he said, highly amused.

  ‘You’ve tested them for everything else, why not see if they’re emitting short wavelength electromagnetic waves?’

  ‘It isn’t possible.’

  ‘You don’t know until you try.’

  ‘Human beings don’t emit X-rays, Mr Kersh. As you probably know, prolonged exposure to any form of radiation is harmful and can be fatal.’

  ‘To human beings,’ Frank said.

  ‘Yes—’ Dr Bragg broke off and stared at him. He didn’t say anything for several moments; then in a slow subdued tone, ‘You’re seriously suggesting they might be other than human?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘Not suggesting, Dr Bragg, formulating an hypothesis. Would you run the test for me?’

  ‘Very well, if it’ll satisfy your curiosity.’ He pushed open the door and led the way through. ‘You can wait in my office. I’ll have some coffee sent in.’

  ‘What made you think of testing them for radioactivity?’ Cal Renfield asked when they were waiting in Bob Bragg’s office. The doctor had gone off, saying he wouldn’t keep them long.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t really know,’ Frank said, being honest. ‘I think maybe it was something Helen said about trusting your instincts. It suddenly occurred to me that no doctor or paediatrician would ever dream of running a radiation check on a new-born baby, it just wouldn’t enter their heads. They’ve tried everything else and got negative response, so perhaps it’s worth a try.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Crazy notion,’ he murmured, half to himself.

  Helen was watching him, as if at any second amazing revelations were going to issue forth, popping out of his head like cartoon speech balloons. She said:

  ‘Do you believe there is a connection between the babies and what’s been happening at the Project? I mean, can you see a scientific reason why the Project should have affected them in this way?’

  ‘Not so far. I’m following your advice and relying on hunches. They could turn out to be skyrockets or damp squibs.’

  ‘You know,’ Helen said, smiling at him faintly, ‘for the first time I believe you.’

  ‘About my hunches?’

  ‘About wanting to find out what’s happening. And about not being on their side.’

  ‘I’m on nobody’s side,’ Frank told her. ‘And you have my word, I’m just as mystified as you are about what’s going on around here.’ He pushed his hand through the loose dark-brown curls which surrounded his head like a tangled halo. ‘I’m supposed to be sitting behind a desk in Chicago,’ he told himself abstractedly, ‘not playing scientific detective along Roaring Fork Valley in the middle of Colorado.’

  The receptionist came in with the coffee. They had just finished drinking it when the door opened and Bob Bragg entered the office. He held a small blue badge with a number printed across it.

  They didn’t need to ask him about the result of the test: the lines of incomprehension printed across his forehead told their own story.

  THREE

  ‘Some day you’ll make somebody a good wife,’ Frank said, laying down his fork. ‘That was the best eezi-freeze TV dinner I’ve ever tasted.’

  Helen Renfield, seated across the table from him, raised her wine glass in sardonic salute. ‘My, my, the way you big-city fellas do talk,’ she said in the coy drawling simper of a mid-West country girl. ‘Those purty com-ple-ments could sweep a girl clean off her feet.’

  Her father wiped his mouth and threw down the napkin, ‘Helen really looks after me,’ he told Frank. ‘Feeds me thick juicy steaks, roast potatoes and blueberry cheesecake as part of my calorie-controlled diet. Without her I’d weigh 160 pounds and look ten years younger.’

  Frank got up to help Helen clear away the dishes. Cal Renfield sorted through a stack of records and put Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 on the turntable. They sat round the fire drinking black coffee and Salignac five-star French brandy, which Cal Renfield maintained was ‘my only real indulgence, apart from Havana cigars, fast cars and even faster women’.

  Helen’s mother had died seven years before, when she was fi
fteen, of the dreaded scourge of Western Civilization: cancer. It had come as a shock to them both and drawn them even more tightly together as a family unit of two. Helen had been planning to go to the University of Colorado but had suddenly changed her mind, and much against her father’s wishes had decided to remain in Gypsum, taking on the double chore of keeping house and helping him run the newspaper. She insisted it was what she wanted to do; her motivation wasn’t one of pity or maudlin self-sacrifice; she had firmly made up her mind to make a career as a journalist and what better start than on a small-town newspaper? One day she’d try for a newspaper job in Boulder or even Denver itself, but meanwhile she was perfectly happy – and grateful – to be able to learn her trade on the Roaring Fork Bulletin.

  Frank was accustomed to the new breed of career girl (Chicago was chock-a-block with them) and he welcomed it as a healthy sign of female independence, the fact that human potential wasn’t being wasted or submerged by the traditional stereotype of wife/mother/housekeeper/general dog’s-body. At the same time he hated to see women mistaking cold, ruthless – and above all, emotionless – opportunism for genuine emancipation and equality of rights. Many of them felt they had to take on the worst and most aggressive attributes of masculine piggery in order to prove they were as good a man as the next fellow, if not better. But of course they weren’t men, they were women, and it saddened him when they shed their natural feminine qualities and became the epitome of the very thing they were fighting against.

  He didn’t place Helen Renfield in this category. Her cool demeanour and flip humour he saw as part of the defence mechanism of a young person not at all sure of herself – who she was, where she was going, and what she had to offer the big bustling world outside this Rocky Mountain town. She was far too intelligent, he hoped, to allow the false values of the New Liberated Woman to subvert her own finer sensibilities and the real feminine qualities which she undoubtedly possessed.