The Past Through Tomorrow (83 page)

“But—Sheol! Maggie, I won’t have it that way.”

“You won’t? We’ll see.” She was out of my arms although I had not let go. “I’ll see you tonight. About one—after everyone is asleep. Leave your door unlatched.”

“Maggie!” I shouted.

She was headed down the path, running as if she were flying. I tried to catch up, tripped on a stalagmite and fell. When I picked myself up she was out of sight.

Here is an odd thing—I had always thought of Maggie as quite tall, stately, almost as tall as I was. But when I held her in my arms, she was short. I had to lean way over to kiss her.

ON THE NIGHT
of the Miracle all that were left of us gathered in the main communications room—my boss and myself, the chief of communications and his technical crew, a few staff officers. A handful of men and a few dozen women, too many to crowd into the comm shack, were in the main mess-hall where a relay screen had been rigged for them. Our underground city was a ghost town now, with only a skeleton crew to maintain communications for the commanding general; all the rest had gone to battle stations. We few who were left had no combat stations in this phase. Strategy had been settled; the hour of execution was set for us by the Miracle. Tactical decisions for a continent could not be made from headquarters and Huxley was too good a general to try. His troops had been disposed and his subordinate commanders were now on their own; all he could do was wait and pray.

All that we could do, too—I didn’t have any fingernails left to bite.

The main screen in front of us showed, in brilliant color and perfect perspective, the interior of the Temple. The services had been going on all day—processional, hymns, prayers and more prayers, sacrifice, genuflexion, chanting, endless monotony of colorful ritual. My old regiment was drawn up in two frozen ranks, helmets shining, spears aligned like the teeth of a comb. I made out Peter van Eyck, Master of my home lodge, his belly corseted up, motionless before his platoon.

I knew, from having handled the despatch, that Master Peter had stolen a print of the film we had to have. His presence in the ceremonies was reassuring; had his theft even been suspected our plans could not possibly succeed. But there he was.

Around the other three walls of the comm room were a dozen smaller screens, scenes from as many major cities—crowds in Rittenhouse Square, the Hollywood Bowl jam-packed, throngs in local temples. In each case the eyes of all were riveted on a giant television screen showing the same scene in the Great Temple that we were watching. Throughout all America it would be the same—every mortal soul who could possibly manage it was watching some television screen somewhere—waiting, waiting, waiting for the Miracle of the Incarnation.

Behind us a psychoperator bent over a sensitive who worked under hypnosis. The sensitive, a girl about nineteen, stirred and muttered; the operator bent closer.

Then he turned to Huxley and the communications chief. “The Voice of God Station has been secured, sir.”

Huxley merely nodded; I felt like turning handsprings, if my knees had not been so weak. This was the key tactic and one that could not possibly be executed until minutes before the Miracle. Since television moves only on line-of-sight or in its own special cable the only possible way to tamper with this nationwide broadcast was at the station of origin. I felt a wild burst of exultation at their success—followed by an equally sudden burst of sorrow, knowing that not one of them could hope to live out the night.

Never mind—if they could hold out for a few more minutes their lives would have counted. I commended their souls to the Great Architect. We had men for such jobs where needed, mostly brethren whose wives had faced an inquisitor.

The comm chief touched Huxley’s sleeve. “It’s coming, sir.” The scene panned slowly up to the far end of the Temple, passed over the altar, and settled in close-up on an ivory archway above and behind the altar—the entrance to the Sanctum Sanctorum. It was closed with heavy cloth-of-gold drapes.

The pick-up camera held steady with the curtained entranceway exactly filling the screen. “They can take over any time now, sir.”

Huxley turned his head to the psychoperator. “Is that ours yet? See if you can get a report from the Voice of God.”

“Nothing, sir. I’ll let you know.”

I could not take my eyes off the screen. After an interminable wait, the curtains stirred and slowly parted, drawn up and out on each side—and there, standing before us almost life size and so real that I felt he could step out of the screen, was the Prophet Incarnate!

He turned his head, letting his gaze rove from side to side, then looked right at me, his eyes staring right into mine. I wanted to hide. I gasped and said involuntarily, “You mean we can duplicate
that
?”

The comm chief nodded. “To the millimeter, or I’ll eat the difference. Our best impersonator, prepared by our best plastic surgeons. That may be our film already.”

“But it’s real.”

Huxley glanced at me. “A little less talk, please, Lyle.” It was the nearest he had ever come to bawling me out; I shut up and studied the screen. That powerful, totally unscrupulous face, that burning gaze—an actor? No! I knew that face; I had seen it too many times in too many ceremonies. Something had gone wrong and this was the Prophet Incarnate himself. I began to sweat that stinking sweat of fear. I very much believe that had he called me by name out of that screen I would have confessed my treasons and thrown myself on his mercy.

Huxley said crossly, “Can’t you raise New Jerusalem?”

The psychoperator answered, “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

The Prophet started his invocation.

His compelling, organlike voice rolled through magnificent periods. Then he asked the blessings of Eternal God for the people this coming year. He paused, looked at me again, then rolled his eyes up to Heaven, lifted his hands and commenced his petition to the First Prophet, asking him to confer on his people the priceless bounty of seeing and hearing him in the flesh, and offering for that purpose the flesh of the present prophet as an instrument. He waited.

The transformation started—and my hackles stood up. I knew now that we had lost; something had gone wrong…and God alone knew how many men had died through the error.

The features of the Prophet began to change; he stretched an inch or two in height; his rich robes darkened—and there standing in his place, dressed in a frock coat of a bygone era, was the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder, First Prophet and founder of the New Crusade. I felt my stomach tighten with fear and dread and I was a little boy again, watching it for the first time in my parish church.

He spoke to us first with his usual yearly greeting of love and concern for his people. Gradually he worked himself up, his face sweating and his hands clutching in the style that had called down the Spirit in a thousand Mississippi Valley camp meetings; my heart began to beat faster. He was preaching against sin in all its forms—the harlot whose mouth is like honey, the sins of the flesh, the sins of the spirit, the money changers.

At the height of his passion he led into a new subject in a fashion that caught me by surprise: “But I did not return to you this day to speak to you of the little sins of little people. No! I come to tell you of a truly hellish thing and to bid you to gird on your armor and fight. Armageddon is upon you! Rise up, mine hosts, and fight you the Battle of the Lord! For Satan is upon you! He is here! Here among you! Here tonight in the flesh! With the guile of the serpent he has come among you, taking on the form of the Vicar of the Lord! Yea! He has disguised himself falsely, taken on the shape of the
Prophet Incarnate
!

“Smite him! Smite his hirelings! In the Name of God destroy them all!”

“
BRUEHLER FROM VOICE OF GOD
,” the psychoperator said quietly. “The station is now off the air and demolition will take place in approximately thirty seconds. An attempt will be made to beat a retreat before the building goes up. Good luck. Message ends.”

Huxley muttered something and left the now-dark big screen. The smaller screens, monitoring scenes around the country, were confusing but heartening. There was fighting and rioting everywhere. I watched it, still stunned, and tried to figure out which was friend and which was foe. In the Hollywood Bowl the crowd boiled up over the stage and by sheer numbers overran and trampled the officials and clergy seated there. There were plenty of guards stationed around the edges of the bowl and it should not have happened that way. But instead of the murderous enfilading fire one would have expected, there was one short blast from a tripod mounted on the hillside northeast of the stage, then the guard was shot—apparently by another of the guards.

Apparently the chancy tour de force against the Prophet himself was succeeding beyond all expectations. If government forces were everywhere as disorganized as they were at the Hollywood Bowl, the job would not be one of fighting but of consolidating an accomplished fact.

The monitor from Hollywood went dead and I shifted to another screen, Portland, Oregon. More fighting. I could see men with white armbands, the only uniform we had allowed ourselves for M-Hour—but not all the violence came from our brethren in the armbands. I saw an armed proctor go down before bare fists and not get up.

Testing messages and early reports were beginning to come in, now that it was feasible to use our own radio—now that we had at long, long last shown our hand. I stopped looking and went back to help my boss keep track of them. I was still dazed and could still see in my mind the incredible face of the Prophet—both Prophets. If I had been emotionally battered by it, what did the people think? The devout, the believers?

The first clear-cut report other than contact messages was from Lucas in New Orleans:

HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF CITY CENTER, POWER AND COMM STATIONS. MOP-UP SQUADS SEIZING WARD POLICE STATIONS. FEDERAL GUARDS HERE DEMORALIZED BY STEREOCAST. SPORADIC FIGHTING BROKE OUT AMONG GUARDS THEMSELVES. LITTLE ORGANIZED RESISTANCE. ESTABLISHING ORDER UNDER MARTIAL LAW. SO MOTE IT BE!—LUCAS.

Then reports started pouring in—Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, Minneapolis—all the major cities. They varied but told the same story; our synthetic Prophet’s call to arms, followed at once by a cutting of all regular methods of communication, had made of the government forces a body without a head, flopping around and fighting itself. The power of the Prophet was founded on superstition and fraud; we had turned superstition back on him to destroy him.

Lodge that night was the grandest I have ever attended. We tyled the communications room itself, with the comm chief sitting as secretary and passing incoming messages to General Huxley, sitting as Master in the east, as fast as they came in. I was called on to take a chair myself, Junior Warden, an honor I had never had before. The General had to borrow a hat and it was ridiculously too small for him, but it didn’t matter—I have never seen ritual so grand, before or since. We all spake the ancient words from our hearts, as if we were saying them for the first time. If the stately progress was interrupted to hear that Louisville was ours, what better interruption? We were building anew; after an endless time of building in speculation we were at last building operatively.

TEMPORARY CAPITAL
was set up at St. Louis, for its central location. I piloted Huxley there myself. We took over the Prophet’s proctor base there, restoring to it its old name of Jefferson Barracks. We took over the buildings of the University, too, and handed back to it the name of Washington. If the people no longer recalled the true significance of those names, they soon would and here was a good place to start. (I learned for the first time that Washington had been one of us.)

However, one of Huxley’s first acts as military governor—he would not let himself be called even “Provisional President”—was to divorce all official connection between the Lodge and the Free United States Army. The Brotherhood had served its purpose, had kept alive the hopes of free men; now it was time to go back to its ancient ways and let public affairs be handled publicly. The order was not made public, since the public had no real knowledge of us, always a secret society and for three generations a completely clandestine one. But it was read and recorded in all lodges and, so far as I know, honored.

There was one necessary exception: my home lodge at New Jerusalem and the cooperating sister order there of which Maggie had been a member. For we did not yet hold New Jerusalem although the country as a whole was ours.

This was more serious than it sounds. While we had the country under military control, with all communication centers in our hands, with the Federal Forces demoralized, routed, and largely dispersed or disarmed and captured, we did not hold the country’s heart in our hands. More than half of the population were not with us; they were simply stunned, confused, and unorganized. As long as the Prophet was still alive, as long as the Temple was still a rallying point, it was still conceivably possible for him to snatch back the victory from us.

A fraud, such as we had used, has only a temporary effect; people revert to their old thinking habits. The Prophet and his cohorts were not fools; they included some of the shrewdest applied psychologists this tired planet has ever seen. Our own counterespionage became disturbingly aware that they were rapidly perfecting their own underground, using the still devout and that numerous minority, devout or not, who had waxed fat under the old regime and saw themselves growing leaner under the new. We could not stop this counterrevolution—Sheol! the Prophet had not been able to stop
us
and we had worked under much greater handicaps. The Prophet’s spies could work almost openly in the smaller towns and the country; we had barely enough men to guard the television stations—we could not possibly put a snooper under every table.

Soon it was an open secret that we had faked the call to Armageddon. One would think that this fact in itself would show to anyone who knew it that
all
of the Miracles of Incarnation had been frauds—trick television and nothing more. I mentioned this to Zebadiah and got laughed at for being naive. People believe what they want to believe and logic has no bearing on it, he assured me. In this case they wanted to believe in their old time religion as they learned it at their mothers’ knees; it restored security to their hearts. I could sympathize with that, I understood it.