A Creed for the Third Millennium (39 page)

'Oh, my God!' Mama tottered to a chair
and collapsed.

'It's all right, I don't expect you and
Judith to walk,' he said soothingly. 'You can travel in the car.'

Dr Carriol gathered her tattered dignity
about her and attempted a rearguard action. 'That's all very well, Joshua, but
you have to be sensible too,' she said. 'You'll have to do a little radio and
television, and the worst feature of all towns is that the main television
stations are miles out. So you'll have to compromise by using a car to go to any venue more
than a mile from the rest.'

'No, I'll walk. No car for
me.'

'Look, be reasonable! We're five weeks
into a national tour and we've got at least another ten weeks to go. Every day
the tour gets longer, every day the powers-that-be decide it will be good policy
if we include this goddam town and that goddam town… Joshua, it's got to end as
quickly as it possibly can, or we'll both be dead from exhaustion! I'm already
losing the war with Washington—' She broke off, aghast at her own
indiscretion.

He never even noticed. 'This is not a
publicity tour! It's my life's work! It's what I was born to do! I was pulled
out of Holloman and that other life
to do this!
I thought you said you
understood!'

'Of course I understand,' she said, but
she missed the change in his outlook since Mobile and Mama's news. 'You're
right, Joshua. You — are — right! Okay!' She put both hands to her head. 'No,
not another word! Let me think! I have got to think.' And she went to a chair to
sit, to compose herself, to
think.
'Okay. We're in Little Rock, and we
can't go north again. Winter's here with a vengeance. So we'll move south. We've
got some relocation towns to do in Arkansas, then we'll head for Texas, after
that New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Let's say twelve more weeks, maximum.
But instead of spending one day in each town, we'll spend two, so you can walk
without exhausting yourself. And we'll can the north completely.'

This horrified him. 'No! That's not the
way at all! Judith, we have to go north into the winter! The people who have
stayed behind are going to need me more than anybody down south, whether they're
on relocation or they've been in the south for generations. The northern cities
and towns aren't dead yet, Judith. But after Washington's decision to make
relocation six months instead of four, it's obvious they are going to die. So this year, hard on that news,
think of how many people up there in the northern winter are trying to face a
truth they haven't been able to cope with so far. They'll be afraid, they'll be
depressed, they're feeling the ground has been cut from under them. No way do we
go south! North it is, or nothing. Christmas in Chicago. New Year's in — I don't
know — Minneapolis or Omaha.'

'Joshua Christian, you're raving mad! You
can't
walk up there in winter! You'll freeze to death!'

Mama added her mite, pleading tearfully,
while Dr Carriol tried the more logical approaches.

But to both women he turned a deaf ear, a
walled-up heart. North he would go or nowhere. Walk he would.

So north they went from Little Rock,
working ever further into the depths of the worst winter the world had ever
seen. Even on the Gulf coast there had been snow already; the northern cities
were feet deep in it, and enduring one blizzard a week. But he walked.
Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne. And he was right. The people turned
out to
meet him,
and the people walked with him.

At first Dr Carriol tried valiantly to
walk with him, as did Mama. But neither she nor Mama had his reserves of fuel,
for they weren't interested in burning themselves up or out. So while he walked,
if possible she and Mama had themselves driven, or if not, they sat and waited
for him in their hotel. They knitted, they chatted, they read. And they
waited.

The new schedule had stretched each town
to three days instead of the old one, and after a while Dr Carriol and Mama
admitted it was easier on them, if not on Joshua. They got to sleep longer,
didn't change beds so often, and from Dr Carriol was removed the burden of
keeping unfaltering vigil during the media appearances Dr Christian had almost
entirely eliminated from his daily round. Billy the pilot was equally pleased
at having more time between flights; he did
his own engineering, and now he knew he could keep his little bird flying like a
bird.

And slowly, incredibly, Dr Christian
worked his way towards the southern tip of Lake Michigan. His appearance had
changed somewhat. He remained cleanshaven and he liked to keep his hair short,
but instead of the shabby beanpole in tweeds of the 'Tonight' show, he was now a
polar explorer. He walked very fast. Five miles an hour on a good day when
conditions favoured walking. By walking fast he kept no more than twenty people
around him at a time; they would stride alongside him for perhaps two hundred
yards, then fall away, and be replaced by others waiting along his
well-publicized and well-prepared route.

The efficiency of all the local city
authorities in keeping Dr Christian's path physically clear may have given Dr
Christian a false impression of general conditions in the north, an impression
reinforced by the cessation of the blizzards that had come one after another
earlier in the winter. For in Decatur he announced that he was going to dispense
with the helicopter.

'I'm going to walk from one city to
another,' he said.

'God Jesus in heaven, Joshua, you
can't!'
Dr Carriol literally screamed. 'Decatur to Gary at Christmas?
You'll freeze to death! And if you don't freeze to death, you'll be weeks on the
road! What happens if a blizzard catches you? You know we have to gear
everything around blizzards, from flying to walking. Why the hell do you think
we've given ourselves so much time all of a sudden? Oh, Joshua, Joshua,
please
be sensible!'

'I walk,' he said.

'Oh no you don't!'

Dr Carriol's raised voice penetrated
through Mama's wall; she came in timidly, afraid of what she might learn but convinced it was worse to stay
in her own room wondering.

Dr Carriol turned to her at once. 'Do you
know what this — this
idiot
wants to do? He wants to walk from Decatur to
Gary! And what happens if he's caught in a blizzard? Are we supposed to hover
above him all the way to snatch him up? Mama, doesn't this son of yours have any
sense? You talk to him! I give up!'

But Mama didn't talk. The image of her
husband's frozen, perfectly preserved body rose up in front of her as clearly as
if it had been yesterday they called her to Buffalo to go through the countless
corpses in search of Joe. Only in her mind the frozen body wasn't Joe; it was
Joshua.

Memories pushed and crushed and squashed,
memories of the thousands of others like herself plodding from one stiff cold
thing to another, the muffled sobbing, the sudden keening of an identification,
the hideous hope that maybe — just maybe — the loved one wasn't there after all,
but still snowed in in some lonely farmhouse. Until the moment. The
face.

She went into hysterics, screeching,
howling, yammering, beating herself against walls and furniture like a great
golden moth. Neither her son nor Dr Carriol could get near her, they had to
stand by helplessly and let her bruise and break herself into the relative calm
of huge and stormy weeping.

It sobered him; from somewhere very dim
and ancient he grasped at a memory, of his father. Of his father who — who froze
to death in a blizzard?

'We'll use the helicopter between
cities,' he said to Dr Carriol abruptly, and went into his bedroom.

Thanks! thought Dr Carriol, left to cope
with Mama. If that isn't typical of a man, even a man as different as Joshua
Christian!

So violent had the hysterical seizure
been that Mama was still partially insensible when Dr Carriol and her son loaded
her into the helicopter. Obtaining medical help in strange towns was difficult in
this weather, and perhaps in a way it was better for Mama to run the full gamut
of physical distress. Certainly by the time Billy helped her alight in Gary and
passed her tenderly to her son, she was able to speak without hiccoughing her
way into a fresh storm of tears.

'Dearest Joshua,' she said to him as he
helped her across the ice to shelter, 'you can only do so much. You're only a
man. Flesh and blood and bones. So do a sensible part of what you'd like to do,
because that's all you
can
do.'

'But I'm missing the farmers!' he
pleaded.

'Not all of them. It's amazing how many
manage to get into whichever town you're visiting. Don't forget that your book
is out there in the farmlands. It's going to all the places you'd never be able
to reach if you lived to be two hundred years old and kept walking the whole
time.'

Billy the pilot, hand firmly under Dr
Carriol's elbow to help her keep her footing, followed mother and son across the
ice at a discreet distance.

He was of them yet not of them; still a
serving member of the armed forces with the rank of master sergeant, he had been
seconded to the President's helicopter fleet three years before. When Dr
Christian was allotted government transportation, Billy was handed over to Dr
Carriol because he was engineer as well as pilot. The days were long gone when
parts and repair services for machines as sophisticated as helicopters could be
found in most places.

And much to his surprise, Billy had found
himself enjoying working for this mad bunch of people. Instead of buzzing
placidly around the Washington skies or taking Presidential VIPs south
somewhere, he was really
flying
the bird. Not to mention acting as errand
boy, purchaser of underwear and outerwear, mechanic — it sure was an interesting
life. After Mama joined the party Dr Christian transferred himself into the
spare front seat alongside Billy, leaving the
two women together in the back; and, as is the wont of men thrown together, they
became friends despite their very different backgrounds and outlooks.

On the ground Billy kept himself very
much to himself. He didn't dine with them, he didn't travel in the car with
them, he didn't stay in the same hotel as them if he could help it. And all his
spare time he spent with his beautiful bird. Tonight he knew something was very
wrong, of course, but it went against the grain to ask. However, the formidable
Dr Carriol was a kind of Service person, so when he found himself escorting her,
he did nerve himself to ask.

'Ma'am, what's up?'

She didn't try to sidestep. 'Dr Christian
is being a little difficult,' she said. What an understatement! 'He wanted to
walk from Decatur to Gary.'

'You're kiddin'!'

'I wish I was. You probably know from the
articles about Dr Christian that his father perished in a blizzard. So when Dr
Christian told his mother he planned to walk from town to town in future, she
went off the deep end. I'm glad she did. It brought him to his senses. I
hope!'

Billy nodded. 'Thanks, ma'am.' They had
reached the small building at the edge of the helipad, and Billy gazed around
its unwelcome interior. 'Here we go again!' he said, but to himself. 'Gary,
Indiana, on Christmas Eve. Man, I gotta be crazy too!'

As Dr Joshua Christian in Wisconsin and
Minnesota walked through forty-below weather during January of 2033, Dr Carriol
chanced a separation and flew back to Washington. It was high time she checked
at first hand what the current feelings were in the corridors of power about Dr
Christian; besides which, she knew she must have this break, or break down.
Billy got her as far as Chicago, where she caught one of the scheduled priority
flights out of Chicago bound for Washington. Thank God for Alaska! And the
Canadians! So much experience and equipment meant things could be made to
function in all weather save the worst blizzards — at least on a limited
scale.

Moshe Chasen met her at the airport.
There was snow on the ground here too, but compared with where she had come from
its six inches were a mere powdering, and the temperature was in the high
twenties Fahrenheit, a real heat wave. And to see dear old Moshe's big broad
rugged face almost triggered tears. My God! What's the
matter
with me? Am
I so tired? Am I so at my wits' end?

Dr Chasen had followed the soaring star
of Dr Christian with bated breath ever since Dr Carriol had filled him in about
Operation Messiah. Proud as if the man had been his own son (his own son was a
marine biologist living in Haiti), he revelled in the twin feelings of
self-vindication and his candidate's vindication. What a man! Did he have
charisma, or did he have charisma?

However, when the first month of Dr
Christian's progress became the second month and Dr Chasen realized that the tour was going to be
very long, then realized that the tour was going north into this terrible
winter, he began to experience twinges of doubt. After that he worried. What was
with Joshua, trying to do what no man could do? Yet Joshua kept right on doing
it! And what was with Judith, to let him do it?

'Shalom, shalom!' he cried, kissing Dr
Carriol on either cheek and tucking her arm through his.