Blasphemy (6 page)

“I do.”

“I’m here if you ever feel the need to talk.”

“Thank you.”

Hazelius swept him forward toward a wreck of a young man, early thirties, thin as a rail, with long greasy blond hair. “This is Peter Volkonsky, our software engineer. Peter hails from Yekaterinburg, Russia.”

Reluctantly Volkonsky detached himself from the console he had been hunched over. His restless, manic eyes roved over Ford. He didn’t offer his hand, merely nodded distractedly, with a curt “Hi.”

“Good to meet you, Peter.”

Volkonsky shifted back to his keyboard and resumed typing. His thin shoulder blades stuck out like a child’s under his ragged T-shirt.

“And this is Ken Dolby, our chief engineer and the designer of Isabella. Someday there’ll be a statue of him in the Smithsonian.”

Dolby strode over—big, tall, friendly, African-American, maybe thirty-nine, with the laid-back air of a California surfer. Ford liked him immediately—a no-nonsense kind of guy. He, too, looked frayed, with bloodshot eyes. He extended his palm. “Welcome,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind we’re not at our best. Some of us have been up for thirty-six hours.”

They moved on. “And this is Alan Edelstein,” Hazelius continued, “our mathematician.”

A man Ford had barely noticed, sitting away from the others, raised his eyes from the book he was reading—Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
. He raised a single finger in greeting, his penetrating eyes steady on Ford. His arch look suggested supercilious amusement with the world.

“How’s the book?” Ford asked.

“A real page-turner.”

“Alan is a man of few words,” said Hazelius. “But he speaks the language of mathematics with great eloquence. Not to mention his powers as a snake charmer.”

Edelstein acknowledged the compliment with an incline of his head.

“Snake charmer?”

“Alan has a rather controversial hobby.”

“He keeps rattlesnakes as pets,” said Innes. “He has a way with them, it seems.” He said it facetiously, but Ford thought he detected an edge in his voice.

Without looking up from his book, Edelstein said, “Snakes are interesting and useful. They eat rats. Which we have quite a few of around here.” He shot a pointed glance at Innes.

“Alan does us a double service,” said Hazelius. “Those Havahart traps you’ll see in the Bunker and scattered about the facility keep us rodent—and hantavirus—free. He feeds them to his snakes.”

“How do you catch a rattlesnake?” Ford asked.

“Carefully,” Innes answered for Edelstein, with a tense laugh, pushing his glasses back up his nose.

Once more Edelstein’s dark eyes met Ford’s. “If you see one, let me know and I’ll show you.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Excellent,” said Hazelius hastily. “Now let me introduce you to Rae Chen, our computer engineer.”

An Asian woman who looked young enough to be carded jumped off her seat and stuck out her hand, her waist-length black hair swinging. She was dressed like a typical Berkeley student, in a grubby T-shirt with a peace sign on the front and jeans patched with pieces of a British flag.

“Hey, nice to meet you, Wyman.” An unusual intelligence lurked in her black eyes, and something that resembled wariness. Or maybe it was just that she, like the others, looked exhausted.

“My pleasure.”

“Well, back to work,” she said with artificial brightness, nodding at her computer.

“That mostly does it,” said Hazelius. “But where’s Kate? I thought she was running those Hawking radiation calculations.”

“She took off early,” said Innes. “Said she wanted to get dinner started.”

Hazelius circled back to his chair, gave it an affectionate slap. “When Isabella is running, we’re peering into the very moment of creation.” He chuckled. “I get a kick out of sitting in my Captain Kirk chair, watching us go where no man has gone before.”

Ford watched him settle in his chair, kicking his feet up with a smile, and he thought—he’s the only one in this room who doesn’t look worried sick.

SUNDAY EVENING, THE REVEREND DON T. SPATES fitted his bulk into the makeup chair so as not to crease his pants and handmade Italian cotton shirt. Once in, he adjusted his large bottom, moving it from side to side with a flurry of creaks and squeaks in the leather. He carefully leaned his head back against the headrest. Wanda stood to one side, holding the barbershop robe.

“Do me good, Wanda,” he said, closing his eyes. “This is a big Sunday. A
real
big Sunday.”

“You’re going to look just great, Reverend,” said Wanda, snapping the robe over him and tucking it in around his neck. Then, with a soothing clinking of bottles, combs, and brushes, she set to work, paying special attention to the reverend’s liver spots and the spiderlike clusters of varicose veins on his cheeks and nose. She was good at what she did and she knew it. Regardless of what the others might say, she thought the reverend a fine, handsome man.

Her long white hands worked with expert economy, swift and precise, but the reverend’s ears were always a challenge. They stood out from the head a trifle too much, and were lighter and redder than his adjacent skin. Sometimes, as he strode about the stage, the backlight would catch his ears, turning them into pink stained glass. To bring them to their proper tonal value, she covered them with a heavy base makeup three shades darker than his face, and finished with a face powder that made them virtually opaque.

As she smoothed, stroked, brushed, and dabbed, she checked her work in a color-balanced video monitor that displayed a feed from a camera trained on the reverend. It was essential to see her handiwork as it would appear onscreen—something that looked perfect to the eye could show up as a ghastly two-tone on the monitor. She worked on him this way twice a week: for his televised sermon on Sunday, and for his Friday talk show on the Christian Cable Service.

Yes, the reverend was a fine man.

REVEREND DON T. SPATES FELT COMFORTED AND cosseted by her professional bustle. It had been a bad year. His enemies were out to get him, twisting his every word, attacking him mercilessly. Every sermon seemed to generate vilification from the atheist left. It was a sad time when a man of God was attacked for speaking the simple truth. Of course, there’d been that unfortunate incident in the motel with the two prostitutes. The ungodly liars had had a field day with that. But the flesh is weak—as the Bible repeatedly confirms. In Jesus’ eyes, we are all hopeless, backsliding sinners. Spates had asked for and received God’s forgiveness. But the hypocritical, evil world forgave slowly, if at all.

“Time for your teeth, Reverend.”

Spates opened his mouth and felt her expert hands applying the ivory dentine fluid. In the bright lights of the camera, it would make his teeth flash as pearly white as the gates of heaven.

After that she worked on his hair, carefully grooming the wiry, orangish helmet until it was just right. She gave it an indirect spritz of hair spray and puffed on a bit of powder to tone the color down to a more respectable ginger.

“Your hands, Reverend?”

Spates extracted his freckled hands from under the cover and laid them on a manicure tray. She bustled over them, applying a makeup base designed to minimize wrinkles and color variations. His hands had to match his face. In fact, Spates was particularly insistent that his hands be perfect. They were an extension of his voice. Botched makeup there could ruin the impact of his message, as camera close-ups of laying on of hands revealed flaws unnoticed by the eye.

The hands took her fifteen minutes. She gouged dirt from under the nails, applied clear fingernail polish, repaired nicks, sanded the nails, cleaned and cut off excess skin, and, finally, covered them with an appropriate shade of makeup base.

A final check in the TV monitor, a few touch-ups, and Wanda stepped back.

“All ready, Reverend.” She turned the monitor toward him.

Spates examined himself in the monitor—face, eyes, ears, lips, teeth, hands.

“That spot on my neck, Wanda? You missed that spot—again.”

A quick swipe of the sponge, a touch-up with the brush, and it vanished. Spates grunted his satisfaction.

Wanda flicked off the coverings and stood back. From out of the wings, Spates’s aide, Charles, rushed in with the reverend’s suit jacket. Spates rose from the chair and held out his arms, while Charles slipped on the jacket, tugged and smoothed down the cloth, gave it a quick brushing, plumped up the shoulders, smoothed and tucked the collar, and adjusted the tie.

“How are the shoes, Charles?”

Charles gave the shoes a few swipes with a shine cloth.

“Time?”

“Six minutes to eight, Reverend.”

Years ago, Spates had had the idea to schedule his Sunday sermon for prime time in the evening, to avoid the televangelist morning crush. He called it
God’s Prime Time
. Everyone predicted he’d fail, going up against some of the strongest programming of the week. Instead, it had proved a stroke of genius.

Spates strode from the room toward the wings of the stage, Charles following. As he came close, he could hear the rustle and murmur of the faithful—thousands of them—taking their seats in the Silver Cathedral from where he broadcast
God’s Prime Time
for two hours every Sunday.

“Three minutes,” murmured Charles in his ear.

Spates inhaled the air in the shadows of the wings. The crowd quieted as the audience prompts scrolled across the screens and the appointed time neared.

He felt the glory of God energize his body with the Holy Spirit. He loved this moment just before the sermon; it was like nothing else in this world, a surge of rising fire, triumph, and anticipatory exultation.

“How’s the audience?” he whispered to Charles.

“About sixty percent.”

A cold knife stabbed into the heart of his joy. Sixty percent—last week it

A cold knife stabbed into the heart of his joy. Sixty percent—last week it had been seventy. Just six months ago people had been lining up for tickets, Sunday after Sunday, and had to be turned away. But since the motel incident, on-air donations were down by half and the ratings for the broadcast had fallen forty percent. The bastards at the Christian Cable Service were about to cancel his
Roundtable America
talk show. God’s Prime Time Ministry was heading into the darkest night since he had founded it in a vacant JCPenney thirty years before. If he didn’t get an infusion of cash soon, he’d be forced to default on the “Own a Piece of Jesus” bonds he had sold over the air to hundreds of thousands of parishioners to finance the building of the Silver Cathedral.

His thoughts turned back to the meeting with the lobbyist Booker Crawley earlier that day. What a sign of God’s grace that Crawley’s proposal had come his way. If handled right, this might be just the issue he’d been looking for to rejuvenate the ministry and galvanize financial support. The evolution versus creationism debate was old hat, and it was getting hard to gain traction on that one—especially with so much competition from other televangelists. Crawley’s issue, on the other hand, was fresh, it was new, and it was ripe for the plucking.

Damned if he wasn’t going to pluck that fruit—now.

“It’s time, Reverend,” came Charles’s low voice from behind.

The lights went up and a roar came from the crowd as the Reverend Spates strode onstage, his head bowed, his hands raised and clasped together, shaking rhythmically.

“
God’s Prime Time
!” he rolled out in his richly timbred bass voice, full of vibrato. “
God’s Prime Time! The Prime Time of God’s Glory Is Nigh
!” At stage center, he stopped sharply, raised his head, and stretched his arms outward to the audience, as if beseeching them. His fingertips trembled. His words rolled over the audience.

“Greetings to all of you in the precious Name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!”

Another roar rose from the giant Silver Cathedral. He lifted his hands high, palms up, and the roar went on—sustained with the help of the prompters. He lowered his arms, and silence fell once again, like the aftermath of thunder.

He bowed his head in prayer, then said, in a soft, humble voice, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I.”

He raised his head slowly, keeping his profile to the audience, and spoke in his richest tone, raising one arm, inch by inch, drawing out each word to its fullest.

“In the beginning,” he throbbed, “God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness
was upon the face of the deep.”

He paused, inhaling dramatically. “And the Spirit of
God
moved upon the face of the waters.”

His voice suddenly boomed through the Silver Cathedral like the notes of an organ. “And God said,
Let there be light
! ”

A dramatic beat, and he continued, in the barest whisper. “And there was light.”

He strode to the edge of the stage and beamed a folksy smile on the wor-shippers. “We all know those opening words of Genesis. Some of the most powerful words ever written. No ambiguity there. Those are the very words of God, my friends. God is telling us in His own words how He created the universe.”

He strolled casually along the edge of the stage. “My friends, will it surprise you if I tell you the government is spending your hard-earned taxpayer dollars in an effort to prove God wrong?”

He turned, eyeing the silent audience.

“You don’t believe me?”

A murmur rose from the sea of faces.

He pulled a piece of paper from his suit-coat pocket and snapped it in the air, his voice suddenly full of thunder. “It’s right here. I downloaded it off the Internet less than an hour ago.”

Another murmur.

“And what did I learn? That our government has spent forty billion dollars to prove Genesis wrong—forty billion dollars of
your
money to attack the holiest Scripture in the Old Testament. Yes, my friends, it’s all part of the government-sponsored, secular humanist war on Christianity, and it’s
ugly
.”