A Creed for the Third Millennium

by Colleen McCullough

  'Please don't attempt to contact Dr Christian,' John Wayne said in the voice which indicated the instructions were not his, but his chief's.

  'I need him!' cried Dr Chasen.

  'I'm sorry, sir, I really can't help you.'

  And that was the end of that, until Dr Judith Carriol walked into his office on Wednesday afternoon.

  'Dammit, Judith, couldn't you at least have given me an opportunity to say goodbye to the man?' he roared.

  Her brows rose. 'I'm sorry, Moshe, I didn't think,' she said coolly.

  'Bullshit! You never stop thinking.'

  'Missing him, Moshe?'

  'Yes.'

  'I'm afraid you'll have to get along without him.'

  He took off his reading glasses and stared at her fixedly. 'Judith, just what is Operation Search?' he asked.

  'A search for one man.'

  'To do what?'

  'Time will have to tell you that. I can't. Sorry.'

  'Can't, or won't?'

  'A bit of both.'

  'Judith, leave him alone!' It was a cry from the heart.

  'What on earth do you mean?'

  'You're the worst kind of meddler. You use other people to attain your ends.'

  'There's nothing unique about that, we all do it.'

  'Not like you,' he said grimly. 'You are a special breed. Maybe it's the times have bred you, I don't know. Or maybe your kind has always been with us, but the times have given you unlimited opportunities to rise high enough to do real harm.'

  'Claptrap!' she said disdainfully, and walked from the office, closing the door behind her gently to indicate that he was whistling into the wind.

  Dr Chasen sat for a moment chewing the earpiece of his glasses, then sighed and picked up a sheaf of computer readouts. But he couldn't see what they said because he hadn't put his glasses on again. He couldn't put them on. His eyes were too full of tears.

  5

  For six weeks Dr Judith Carriol had no contact of any kind with Dr Joshua Christian, but the middle three of those six weeks saw her watching the man in almost every smallest detail on hour after hour after hour of videotape. And when she wasn't watching him or his family or both, she was listening to his patients, his ex-patients, the relatives of his patients and his ex-patients, his friends, even his enemies, talk about him on audiotape. It was highly significant, she felt, that nothing she discovered lessened her enthusiasm for him.

  Even after Dr Moshe Chasen had taxed her so directly with the consequences of her actions, it did not occur to her that in serving her own purpose she might not be serving Joshua's; she saw the two as one and the same, indivisible, and sanctified her prying secret work as evidence of the purest, most selfless devotion. Had Joshua Christian himself known what she was doing and had he taxed her with it rather than Moshe Chasen, still she would have been able to look deep into his eyes and assure him clear through to her core that what she did was for his benefit, and enormous benefit at that. She was not consciously evil; had she been, Dr Christian would have sensed it at once. Nor was she quite heartless. Perhaps the worst thing that could be said of her was that she lacked ethics, that she was not honourable. But then nothing in her life had been conducive to the inculcation of ethics, of honour.

  Her childhood had been a middle-of-the-road case of hardship, poverty and emotional deprivation; had her situation been slightly worse, the state would have removed her to a kinder environment; had it been slightly better, she might have managed to preserve a little of the softness that is surely born into every human baby. Ten years older than Dr Joshua Christian, and moulded by far crueller circumstances, she was the third-last of thirteen children born into a Pittsburgh family just about the time the steel industry had gone into total and permanent depression. Her name then had been not Carriol, but Carroll. Looking back on those years from the pinnacle of her adult accomplishments, she decided that the plethora of children her parents had spawned (she could think of no other suitable verb to describe the process as carried on in the Carroll household) was far more the result of laziness and alcoholism than the lip-service Catholicism they professed; certainly the home atmosphere was more redolent of cheap whiskey than piety. But Judith survived, the only one of those thirteen children who did, though none of them actually died. Not then, at any rate. And she survived because she refused to consider anyone's plight save her own. At twelve she had begun to find part-time work and she continued to work all through her high school years; she kept herself clean, virtuous and healthy, and because she could spur her body to work as hard as her mind, she kept whatever work she found for as long as she wanted to keep it. To her family's pleas for handouts she turned a resolutely deaf ear, and they soon learned that not even physical torture could wring from her the secret place where she hid her money. In the end they left her to her own devices, despising her, tormenting her, but fearing her too. When she achieved a near-perfect score on her SAT's and was offered a full scholarship to Harvard, Chubb, Princeton — a half dozen Ivy League schools — she told her family she had accepted to Harvard and went to Princeton instead. The first thing she did was change her name. And from that day forward she had made it her business never to discover what had happened to the rest of her family back in Pittsburgh.

  The Delhi Treaty had preceded her graduation summa cum laude, but not by so much that its upheavals were old hat. She had taken a double major in psychology and sociology and she walked over the intense competition into a slot in the brand new Department of the Environment, a slot complete with doctoral opportunities. She also became an indefatigable worker for Augustus Rome and the new programmes he set the nation; no one feared and detested large families more than Dr Judith Carriol. While President Rome talked incessantly to his people of the utter necessity of falling into line with the rest of the world concerning the one-child family, she studied its implementation. She went abroad, to China, pioneer in the art since 1978, to India, achieving the same end from the opposite and bloodier pole, to Malaysia, Japan, Russia, the Arabicommune and the Eurocommune, and many other places. She even went to Australia and New Zealand, who had also signed the Delhi Treaty on condition they (like Canada and the U.S.A) would be left severely alone in every other way from military invasion to passive immigration. She followed the teams of Chinese around a dozen nations, watching and listening as they taught, demonstrated, advised.

  The Environment think tank had been her home from her first day in the Department, and she was in the forefront of the massive efforts the Department marshalled to overcome one-child-family opposition and noncooperation. Of course they had followed the Chinese pattern of appealing to good sense, patriotism and the pocket, rather than the Indian method of enforced sterilization. That the programme worked was undoubtedly due to all the other enormous blows the country had received and still reeled from; that it worked was due also to the personal efforts of President Rome, who luckily was a natural one-child parent; and that it worked finally and continually was definitely due to the unassailable fact that an ice age was coming rapidly, and nothing could be postponed until a more favourable day.

  So her enormously successful career had not helped her overcome the emotional desert in which her soul wandered, for it had reinforced her conviction that she was indeed superior in intelligence and courage to the vast bulk of her fellow men and women. Thus she could never be convinced that what she thought and did might contain serious flaws. And she was quite incapable of taking into consideration such picayune factors as the stirrings in a heart, the vapours stealing in a mind, the erosion in a backbone. She was of course a purely reasoning thinker, and reason was her god; whatever might come to endanger reason was anathema.

  Which placed her in a precarious position when dealing with a person as instinctual, illogical and mystical as Dr Joshua Christian. She didn't know it, except in that corner of her mind where she was wont to inveigh against what she saw as his sheer cussedness. How could he not see his own perfection for her purpose? And when
he did see it, as see it eventually he must, how could he not be moved to thank her, to like her, even to love her?

  Thus this moulder of men, this purrer in the shadows, this grey eminence, sat hour after hour day after day looking at Dr Joshua Christian in the most sacred moments of his most sacred privacy, and felt no qualm of conscience, nor questioned the right she had to do so. She knew he picked his nose, she knew he did not masturbate, she knew he sang and giggled and pulled comical faces while he sat to produce his morning motion of the bowels (she even knew he had no tendency to constipation), she knew he talked to himself (sometimes with fantastic passion!) whenever he was alone, she knew he had difficulty in getting to sleep and no trouble at all in getting up, she knew he most genuinely loved his mother, his brothers, his sister and his sisters-in-law; she even knew, alas, that the sister-in-law he called Mouse was deeply and despairingly in love with him, and that his sister loathed him. And her knowledge did not stop with him; it extended through his entire family in the selfsame intimate, distressing way.

  At the end of the sixth week, John Wayne at her elbow as always, Dr Judith Carriol finished compiling all her evidence, including a rough draft of God in Cursing: A New Approach to Millennial Neurosis, by Joshua Christian, Ph.D. (Chubb).

  Separately she called in Dr Samuel Abraham and Dr Millicent Hemingway and obtained from each a report about the candidates each had vetted to finality. Then she thanked them and put them to work on the special aspects of relocation Dr Moshe Chasen had cut off from the main flow of his own research as better handled independently. At that time it did not occur either to Dr Abraham or to Dr Hemingway that Operation Search had a finite purpose.

  She notified Harold Magnus that she was ready, and Harold Magnus notified President Tibor Reece.

  The meeting the three held was at the White House, the President's security force feeling that two members of Environment, even if one was its head, were less likely when travelling to attract the attention of the lunatic fringe than the President of the United States of America. Dr Carriol didn't like the venue, feeling that she would rather put her trust in a security she knew than rely on men and women she didn't know and therefore couldn't trust. She suspected Harold Magnus was of a similar frame of mind. Who was to say how many microphones and spy holes they had wired and bored into the White House's conference rooms, and for what purposes, and even who 'they' were? Her own activities in the matter of Dr Joshua Christian were undertaken for the most unimpeachable of reasons, but she was sure she could not say the same for some of the surveillance freaks who frequented the corridors of State, Justice and Defence.

  However, superficially this was just another rather drab meeting between the President and two of his departmental heads, chickenshit stuff the President would undoubtedly have preferred to hand over to someone else, except that every so often he had to make a personal gesture. Therefore just pray the guard dogs in State and the bloodhounds in Justice and the mastiffs in Defence were lying peacefully sleeping beside their own fires, immune to the scent of that modern butt of all national rancour, Environment.

  She was not afraid. She was not even nervous. It suited her to have to do all the talking, for she knew her audience extremely well. Harold Magnus might claim that Operation Search was his baby, but she knew it was her baby, and she was not prepared to yield up control of it to anyone, least of all to her bosses. They didn't know it yet, but they were not going to make the decision. Her applecart was exquisitely stacked; no matter which piece of fruit they picked up to inspect, it would have Dr Joshua Christian's name on it. She had every advantage, of course. She knew exactly what was on the agenda where they did not. She could plan a method of attack where they could not.

  As a matter of course they would be expecting to see only one serious contender for the job, namely Senator David Sims Hillier VII. Magnus wanted Hillier passionately, but of Reece she was not so certain. Where Reece was concerned Dr Carriol had two things on her side. One, the glaring fact that this job carried fantastic power in its train; if it went to a U.S. senator with executive aspirations it might end in direct danger to the present tenant of the White House. The second fact was interesting because of its sheer randomness; there was a fortuitous physical resemblance between Tibor Reece and Joshua Christian, both too tall, both too thin, both very dark in colouring, both cadaverous of face. Of course, genetically they came from not dissimilar stock; Dr Christian was Russian, Armenian and Nordo-Celt, President Reece was Hungarian, Russian, Jewish and Celt.

  Naturally Harold Magnus was aware of Tibor Reece's strong reservations about Senator Hillier, and so would have his own attack well planned. But Tibor Reece was aware of Harold Magnus's awareness, and in his turn would undoubtedly also have evolved a plan of attack. If she could make her presentation a direct hit upon Tibor Reece, she knew he would pick Dr Christian over Senator Hillier; what she had to accomplish was to make the President see that in choosing Dr Christian he would not be putting his own interests ahead of the country's, which he would never do. With complete faith in Tibor Reece as the rightful next President, Augustus Rome had chosen him for the slate during his last term in office, and when it came to divining what was in a politician's heart as well as in his head, old Gus Rome had been a past master. Therefore doubt not Tibor Reece's integrity.

  The President welcomed Secretary Magnus and Dr Judith Carriol very warmly, and showed how much importance he attached to the outcome of Operation Search by informing them that he had not put a time limit on the duration of this meeting. So Dr Carriol had perforce to wait, tongue darting and long fingers creeping, while Tibor Reece and Harold Magnus said the usual litany of wives, children, friends, enemies and problems. In an age bracket where the siring of progeny had been left entirely to the discretion of the individual, Harold Magnus possessed two sons and two daughters; but Tibor Reece, in his late forties, had not married until his middle thirties and therefore possessed only one child, a girl who was mentally retarded. His wife had tried with might and main to secure a second child, bombarding the Second Child Bureau with applications so frequently, publicly and frantically that she became a nuisance and an embarrassment. Luck had nothing to do with the fact that she never had got lucky; her husband had seen Harold Magnus on the quiet and deliberately arranged her ill luck. Julia Reece was therefore the only case in the history of the SCB where in fact strings actually had been pulled. Julia Reece was offered up as a sacrifice for the good of the country. For had she drawn a winning red ball in the lottery, no one from highest to lowest would ever have believed strings were not pulled; Tibor Reece knew he did not dare take the chance. But he had paid for it. Julia hadn't exactly gone mad; she merely became mad for men, which was an even greater embarrassment to her husband than her unabated dinning at the SCB door.

  Naturally the litany carefully skirted sensitive topics, and ritually wound itself to a conclusion. The President buzzed and the coffee tray was promptly removed. Dr Carriol could get down to business at last.

  They were sitting in the Oval Office, which this occupant of the White House adored. Dr Carriol had asked for and got a single videotape player with a remote-control panel she could hold in her hand. Thus she was able to orchestrate her visual presentation without a technician's help. There was an audio player on a side table which she hoped she would not have to use, feeling that the mere sound of words after watching faces utter them could not decisively influence the outcome. However, it was better to be fully prepared.

  First she went briefly through the salient facts about seven of the nine final candidates, passing a photograph of each smoothly to the President as she talked, not pausing to check whether he passed them in turn to Harold Magnus. Mr Magnus was quite capable of looking after himself.

  'And now,' she said, 'we come to the dark horse. Dr Moshe Chasen inherited Senator Hillier as a unit in his caseload. But Senator Hillier was not his prime choice. There was one person who outscored Senator Hillier in every important category. In view of thi
s surprise development, I undertook to vet Dr Chasen's three candidates myself, and I too came to the conclusion that the dark horse won hands down, even over Senator Hillier.'

  She flicked the remote-control panel in her hand, and the screen of a very large video monitor set into the wall opposite the President's desk came to life.

  'This is Dr Joshua Christian, a psychologist practising privately in the town of Holloman, Connecticut.'

  There he was on the screen, a tall, gracefully ungainly man pacing back and forth between a jungle of plants in a very beautiful, peaceful room. The volume from the high fidelity, stereophonic speakers grew from a murmur until the sound of Dr Christian's voice, deep and clear and compelling, filled the Oval Office.

  'Mama, you are so lucky. Today I found a truly valid reason for my book A man came to me for help. But I wasn't really able to help him — at least as a psychologist — because what he was suffering from has no answer. His child died last week. Yes. His only child! Of course they could have got permission from the First Child Bureau to replace this boy, but his wife is hysterectomized, and that's a strike they can't overcome no matter how, no matter what. He was still capable of seeking help, his wife is not.'

  Dr Christian stopped, turned to face towards a different direction, was obviously subjected to some amateurish editing on the videotape, then reappeared in the lens of another camera. 'Aren't you lucky, Mama? You've got four children. Yes, I understand the loss of a child is something no parent ever really recovers from, but the only thing in life which can cushion such a loss is the presence of other children. That man was in the midst of the classic nightmare situation of the one-child family. The death of the child. He stood there with the tears running down his face begging me for help — not help for himself so much as help for his wife. As if he had been told I could help. I couldn't help! No one can help. But how could I turn him away? I told him he must find God. Not to help, only to understand. He said he didn't believe in God. That no God could exist and let a child die. Especially, he said, not his child. Because that's what it boils down to, Mama. God is personal, God relates to self.'