Blasphemy (44 page)

The ground shook again, and again. Clouds of dust coiled up, near and far. The reddish brown fireball drifted, dimming, dissipating gradually and breaking apart with lassitude.

Begay clutched Maria Atcitty’s shoulders. “You’re in charge. Grab what people and horses you can find and get them down the Midnight Trail.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going after the runaways.”

“Are you crazy?”

Begay shook his head. “One of them’s Winter. Don’t ask me to leave him.”

Maria Atcitty gave him a long look, then turned, yelling at everyone to leave their stuff and double up on the horses.

“You can’t do it alone,” Becenti said to Begay.

“You better go with the others.”

“No way.”

Begay grasped his shoulder. “Thanks.”

More subterranean rumbles shook the ground—now from the southern and eastern ends of the mesa—the same direction the horses had gone. Gazing across the moonlit landscape, he watched a dozen dust coils snake upward above the mesa.

Cave-ins
. The old mines really were collapsing. Over toward Isabella the fires were spreading, rolling clouds of smoke boiling up in plumes, tinged burnt-orange from the fires below. The initial explosion had only been the beginning; now the entire mesa was igniting. The coal-seamed, methane-laced tunnels were venting their rage.

Maria Atcitty returned with her horse. “It’s like the end of the world out there.”

Begay shook his head. “Maybe it is.”

He dropped his voice and spoke the obscure Falling Star chant, “
Aniné bichaha’oh koshdéé‘ . .
.”

FORD CAME TO IN THE DARK, the air choked with dust and the stink of newly released coal gas. Covered with pulverized rock, he peered around, his ears ringing, his head splitting.

“Kate!” he called out.

Silence.

“Kate!”

Panic seized him. Pushing loose rock aside, he freed himself. Scrabbling to his hands and knees and running his hands through the rubble, he saw a gleam and uncovered his flashlight, still lit. As he shone it around, the beam revealed a body lying twenty feet down the tunnel, partly buried in rock. He scrambled over.

It was Hazelius. A trickle of blood came out of his nose. He felt for a pulse—strong.

“Gregory!” he whispered into the man’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

The head turned and the eyes opened—those astonishing azure eyes. Hazelius squinted in the light. “What . . . happened?” he croaked

“Explosion and cave-in.”

Comprehension dawned. “The others?”

“I don’t know. I was just catching up to you when it blew.”

“They ran every which way when the rocks started falling.” He glanced down. “My leg . . .”

Ford began clearing rubble from the lower half of Hazelius’s body. A large rock lay on his left leg. He grasped the edge of the rock and gently lifted it off. The leg underneath was slightly crooked.

“Help me up, Wyman.”

“I’m afraid your leg’s broken,” Ford said.

“No matter. We’ve got to keep moving.”

“But if it’s broken—”

“Help me up, damn you!”

Ford slung Hazelius’s arm around his neck and helped him to his feet. Hazelius staggered, clinging to him.

“If you support me, I can walk.”

Ford listened. In the rattled silence, he could hear distant voices and shouts. Incredibly enough, the mob was still in pursuit. Or perhaps they, too, just wanted out of the labyrinth.

Moving through the rubble, Ford supported Hazelius, one step after another. He dragged Hazelius over rockfalls, under gaping holes in the ceiling, through passages between tunnels which the explosion had opened up, past rooms which the blast had caved in. He could see no sign of the others.

“Kate?” Ford called into the darkness.

No answer.

Ford felt for his SIG. Eight rounds expended, five left.

“I’m getting a little dizzy,” Hazelius said.

Moving slowly, they came out of a narrow tunnel into a transverse shaft. Again Ford recognized nothing. The voices were getting louder now and eerily ubiquitous, as if all around them.

“I just never . . .
expected
. . . this.” Hazelius’s voice trailed off.

Ford wanted to call out for Kate again but he didn’t dare. There was so much dust, so many tunnels, and if she answered, the mob might find her.

Hazelius stumbled again, crying from pain, and Ford could barely hold him up. He sagged like a sack of cement. When Ford could drag him no farther, he crouched and struggled to hoist Hazelius over his shoulders. The tunnel was too tightly confined and the effort caused Hazelius too much pain.

Ford laid Hazelius down and felt his pulse—shallow and fast, with a clammy sweat breaking out on his forehead. He was going into shock.

“Gregory, can you hear me?”

The scientist groaned and turned his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just can’t do it.”

“I’m going to look at your leg.”

Ford slit the pant-leg with the penknife. The compound fracture had forced the splintered thigh bone through the skin. If he carried Hazelius further, the splintered femur might sever the femoral artery.

Ford risked shining around a low beam from the Maglite. He could see no sign of the others, but below the tunnel floor, a shallow stope on the opposite wall a few dozen feet down—partially obscured by a rockfall—suggested concealment.

“We’re going to hide in there.”

He picked Hazelius under the arms and dragged him into the niche. Gathering more fallen rock, he built a low wall they could hide behind. The voices were getting closer.

Please God, let Kate make it
.

Ford used up all the loose rocks in the vicinity. The wall was about two feet high, just enough to hide them if they lay down. Ford got behind it. He took off his jacket and balled it up, making a pillow for Hazelius’s head, and shut off the light.

“Thank you, Wyman,” Hazelius said.

They didn’t speak for a moment, and then Hazelius said, matter of factly, “They’re going to kill me, you know.”

“Not if I can help it.” Ford felt for his gun.

Hazelius’s hand touched his. “No. No killing. Aside from the fact that we’re hopelessly outnumbered, it would be wrong.”

“It’s not wrong if they’re going to kill you first.”

“We’re all one,” said Hazelius. “Killing them is like killing yourself.”

“Please don’t lay that religious shit on me now.”

Hazelius groaned, swallowed. “Wyman, I’m disappointed in you. Of all the team, you’re the only one who won’t accept the amazing thing that’s happened to us.”

“Stop talking and lie low.”

They crouched behind the rough wall of stones. The air smelled of dust and mildew. The voices approached, the footsteps and clinking of the mob now echoing down the stone corridors. After a moment, the dull glow of their torches invaded the dusty air. Ford could hardly breathe, he was so tense.

The mob was noisier, drawing nearer. Suddenly they were there. For a seeming eternity Eddy’s horde was slogging past, their flashlights and torches casting hellish orange shapes on the ceiling, their shadows distorted on the walls. The noise of the mob dimmed, receded, the flickering of the fires dying away. Darkness returned. Ford heard a long, painful sigh from Hazelius. “My God . . .”

Ford wondered for a crazy moment if Hazelius was praying.

“They think . . . I’m the Antichrist . . . .” He gave a low, strange laugh.

Ford rose and peered into the darkness. The sounds of the mob vanished and silence fell once again, broken here and there with the rattle of falling pebbles.

“Maybe I
am
the Antichrist . . .,” Hazelius wheezed. Ford wasn’t sure if it was pain or laughter.
He’s starting to get delirious
, he thought. He put that aside and considered what they should do. Air was moving through the tunnel and with it came the stench of burning coal, as well as an ominously low vibration, the sound of fire.

“We’ve got to get out.”

No answer from Hazelius.

He grasped Hazelius under the shoulders. “Come on. Try to keep moving. We can’t stay here. We’ve got to find the others and get to the hoist.”

A muffled explosion reverberated through the tunnels. The smell of coal smoke increased.

“And now they’re going to kill me . . . .” Again, the eerie laugh. Hoisting Hazelius over his back, gripping him by each arm, Ford dragged him through the tunnels.

“Ironic,” Hazelius mumbled. “To be martyred . . . Human beings are so foolish . . . so gullible . . . . But I didn’t think it through . . . just as stupid as they are . . . .”

Ford shone the light ahead. The tunnel opened into a large cavern.

“Now I’m going to pay for it . . . . Antichrist, they called me . . . . Antichrist indeed!” More spastic laughter. Ford struggled forward and entered the cavernous stope. To his right, caved-in coal piles and rock mixed together with crumbling veins of pyrite that glittered like gold in his flashlight.

He struggled on with the man toward the far end. The gobshaft materialized out of the darkness, a round hole, about five feet in diameter, at the far corner. A rope dangled down the shaft.

He lay Hazelius on the rock floor and rested his head on the jacket. An explosion rocked the room, and he could hear debris dropping all around them, shaken loose from the ceiling. The smoke stung his eyes. At any moment the approaching fire would suck out their oxygen—and that would be it.

He grasped the rope. Disintegrating in his hands, it parted, unraveling and piling down into the deep shaft. A few moments later he heard a splash of water.

He shined his light up and saw a smoothly bored hole going up as far as the eye could see. The rotten end of the rope dangled uselessly. The hoist was nowhere to be seen.

He went back to Hazelius to find him sinking deeper into delirium. More soft laughter. Ford squatted on his heels, thinking hard. Hazelius’s mumbling distracted him, and then he heard a name:
Joe Blitz
.

Suddenly he listened. “Did you just say Joe Blitz?”

“Joe Blitz . . . ,” he mumbled, “Lieutenant Scott Morgan . . . Bernard Hubbell . . . Kurt von Rachen . . . Captain Charles Gordon . . .”

“Who’s Joe Blitz?”

“Joe Blitz . . . Captain B. A. Northrup . . . Rene Lafayette . . .”

“Who are these people?” Ford asked.

“Nobodies. They don’t . . . exist . . . . Noms de plume . . .”

“Pennames?” Ford bent over Hazelius. His face, in the faint light, was covered with a sheen of sweat. His eyes were glassy. But there was still a strange, almost supernatural vitality to the man. “Pennames for who?”

“Who else? For the great L. Ron Hubbard . . . Clever man . . . Only they didn’t call him the Antichrist . . . . He was luckier than me, the schmuck.”

Ford was thunderstruck. Joe Blitz? A penname for L. Ron Hubbard? Hubbard was the science fiction writer who had started his own religion, Scientology, and set himself up as its prophet. Before launching Scientology, Ford recalled, Hubbard had famously told a group of fellow writers that the greatest feat a human being could achieve in this world was to found a world-class religion. And then he went out and did it, combining pseudoscience and half-baked mysticism into a potent and appealing package.

A world-class religion . . . Was it possible? Was that the question Hazelius alluded to? Was that the point of his hand-picked team? Their tragic backgrounds? Isabella, the greatest scientific experiment in history? The isolation? The Mesa? The messages? The secrecy?
The voice of God
?

Ford took a deep breath and leaned over. He whispered, “Volkonsky wrote a note just before his . . . death. I found it. It said, in part:
I saw through the madness. To prove it, I give you a name only: Joe Blitz
.”

“Yes . . . Yes . . . ,” Hazelius answered. “Peter was smart . . . . Too smart for his own good . . . I made a mistake there, should have picked someone else . . . .” A silence, and then a long sigh. “My mind is wandering.” His voice quavered at the edge of sanity. “What was I saying?”

Hazelius was swimming back into reality—but only a little.

“Joe Blitz was L. Ron Hubbard. The man who invented his own religion. Was
that
what this was all about?”

“I was babbling.”

“But that was your plan,” said Ford. “Wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hazelius’s voice sounded sharper.

“Of course you do. You choreographed the whole thing—the building of Isabella, the problems with the machine, the voice of God. It was you all along.
You’re
the hacker.”

“You’re not making sense, Wyman.” Now Hazelius sounded like he had returned to reality—hard.

Ford shook his head. The answer had been staring him in the face for almost a week—right there in his file.

“Most of your life,” said Ford, “you’ve been concerned with utopian political schemes.”

“Aren’t many of us?”

“Not to the power of obsession. But you were obsessed, and, even worse, no one listened to you—not even after you won the Nobel Prize. It must have driven you crazy—the smartest man on earth, and no one would listen. Then your wife died and you went into seclusion. You emerged two years later with the idea for Isabella. You had something to say. You wanted people to listen. You wanted to change the world more than ever. How better to do it than become a prophet? To start your own religion?”

Ford could hear Hazelius breathing heavily in the darkness.

“Your theory is . . .
demented
,” Hazelius said, with a groan.

“You came up with the idea for the Isabella project—a machine to probe the Big Bang, the moment of creation. You got it built. You picked the team—making sure they were psychologically receptive. You staged this whole thing. You planned to make the greatest scientific discovery ever made. And what might that be? What else, but to discover God! That discovery would make you his prophet. That’s it, isn’t it? You planned to pull an L. Ron Hubbard on the world.”

“You’re really quite mad.”

“Your wife wasn’t pregnant when she died. You made that up. Whatever names the machine came up with, you’d have reacted the same way. You guessed the numbers Kate would be thinking of—because you knew Kate so well. There was nothing supernatural about this at all.”