Unassigned Territory (20 page)

Harlan sighed. He tucked the aluminum foil back into place and the sliver of rain-slick street and gray sky went away. He seated himself on the edge of his bed and rubbed his face with his hands. He thought of checking the refrigerator for a beer, but that, like getting to the patio, would mean risking some sort of meeting. It was stupid, really. He didn’t know what Neil Davis had said to the people about why he was there, and they had been nice. Still, the subject had been carefully enough avoided to leave him suspecting it was probably something not that far from the truth. And that was embarrassing. It was worse than embarrassing. And it was certainly not going to end here, in the desert. It was quite likely that at some point upon his return to Los Angeles, he would be asked to step down. They would no doubt be nice about it. The incident would probably wind up being connected in some way to what he had gone through in Africa. He would be told that a good rest was in order. He would still be asked to step down.

This was not, in his opinion, out of line. Visiting elders didn’t go around getting into fistfights. And there was no question in his mind that it was something he could have avoided. He had swung on Floyd Hummer with murder in his heart. And that was the bottom line. There was always, Harlan believed, a bottom line.

When he thought of stepping down, however—of what in plain fact that was going to mean for him—he was faced with a series of conflicting responses. In a way he was relieved. He had carried a lot of responsibility for a long time. On the other hand, there was something depressing about the direction in which he had begun to move. Missionary to Elder, finally back to simple publisher. Not exactly the rising star he had been in his youth. It would just be digging in somewhere now, he and Judith. Perhaps if there had been children, but there was little chance of that now and when he thought along those lines he could see a whole section of his life closing off behind him in some inexorable way. He would even have to hold down some job. He grinned at that prospect and rubbed his face once more. He would try to get something outside, maybe work himself back into shape. His fear was that some brother would offer him something in sales or some damn thing he would no doubt be good at and the money would be too good to turn down. He would grow old and fat and even softer than he was now. At the heart of it, of course, there would be his relationship with his Creator. There would be accountability. A bottom line. And so, if he was imaginative enough about it, he might just see all of this as having a kind of streamlining effect—a cutting back to essentials. He found the prospect at once promising and unrelentingly bleak.

Bleak enough, Harlan decided, to at least warrant a beer. Confrontations be hanged. He rose slowly from the bed. He was dressed in a large terry cloth bathrobe with which the man of the house had provided him. After seeing to it that the garment was securely tied about his middle and pausing at his door long enough to satisfy himself the coast was clear, he left his room and headed for the kitchen.

He was on his way back, beer in hand, nearly home free and congratulating himself on his stealth, when he came close to tripping over the couple’s young son. The boy had taken up a position in the hall near Harlan’s door. He was seated Indian style upon the floor. “Who was the shortest man in the Bible?” the boy wanted to know.

“Beats me,” Harlan said. He had, of course, heard all the jokes before, but the boy seemed to have just discovered them and was always disappointed if he couldn’t deliver the punch lines himself. “Bildad the Shuhite,” the boy said, grinning. “Job 2:11.”

Harlan guffawed several times. “Did you know people smoked cigarettes in Bible days?” the boy asked. This time he didn’t wait for the reply but went right ahead. “Genesis 24:64: ‘And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she lighted off the camel.’”

Harlan haw-hawed his way toward the safety of his room. The boy was standing now. “Here’s one for you,” Harlan said. “Who was the man with the stretchiest skin in the Bible?”

The boy looked stumped. “Balaam,” Harlan said, “once tied his ass to a tree and walked five miles.”

The boy looked slightly dumbfounded for a moment then burst into laughter and ran off in the direction of the living room.

Harlan stepped inside and closed the door behind him. At the far end of the hall he could now hear someone in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. He looked at his watch. It would be dinnertime soon. He went to the window and looked outside. The rain had stopped but the sky was still filled with clouds. Harlan sat on the bed and opened his beer. He glanced at the phone on the dresser and closed his eyes. Hopefully, before the evening was over the long-distance calls he had made that morning would bear fruit. There had been one to Los Angeles. Another to New York. He was hoping the phone calls would give him some sense of what his next move should be, for if part of what had been occupying Harlan’s mind since the fight had to do with the shape of his life, another equally substantial part had to do with what he had begun to think of, in an almost obsessive sort of way, as his last official act as a visiting elder. He took some satisfaction from the fact that it was an act at least grounded in Scripture: “What do you think?” the text asked, “If a certain man comes to have a hundred sheep and one of them gets strayed, will he not leave the ninety-nine upon the mountains and set out on a search for the one that is straying? And if he happens to find it, I certainly tell you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that have not strayed.” Harlan Low could not take back his acts at the station. He could still, however, go after Obadiah Wheeler.

H
arlan woke on the following morning to the sound of thunder. When he looked out the window it was the same old thing. He donned the terry cloth bathrobe and went into the kitchen to help himself to some coffee. When he returned he sat on the edge of the bed and looked over the notes he had made the night before. His long-distance calls had indeed borne fruit. The stuff was strewn all over his sheets—a litter of hurriedly scribbled notes.

With no real idea of where to begin looking for the Wheeler boy, he had elected to begin by trying to find out something about this image which seemed of late to keep popping up in one form or another under his nose—this hand. The hand was what the notes were all about.

The building he’d seen from the freeway was indeed a temple: The Temple of the Sons of Elijah. When he had found this out, he contacted a friend in New York to see what they had there on the group. The man he spoke to was a brother by the name of Mitchell. The man had been one of Harlan’s instructors at the missionary training school. He had checked the file, called Harlan back, told him there was a fair amount there, that he could give him a few of the basics but that if he wanted more they would have to talk again, later, as Mitchell was on his way out of town. The basics turned out to be mostly information on a man by the name of Leonard Maxwell, the founder of the Sons of Elijah. It was enough to get Harlan interested.

Maxwell was a black man. He was forty-eight years old. He had soldiered in the war, had dabbled in interests as diverse as script-writing and gold mining before getting into religion. His entrance to the field was marked by the publication of an article in a magazine called
UFO Alert!
The article presented Maxwell’s assertion that evil was a magnetic phenomenon about which something might be done through magnetic manipulation.

The
Alert!
was the first magazine to touch any of Maxwell’s ideas, but when it did the reader response was astonishing. The article became a series of articles and soon Maxwell had invented a whole lost epoch of the earth’s past—something he referred to as the Elder World. There was even a book, a collaboration on the part of Maxwell and the editor of
Alert!

Maxwell claimed to have come by his information with the aid of a Geiger counter-like device capable of decoding what he called the Language of the Spheres—ancient coded messages left in stone by the Celestial Visitors.

His following grew, up until 1953, at which point he screwed up. He tried to market one of his magnetic devices and wound up doing eighteen months in a California prison for fraud. The incident apparently ended his relationship with
Alert!
because when he resurfaced he was on his own—this time claiming to have become a contactee. A contactee, Mitchell explained, was anyone claiming contact with aliens. In 1965, Maxwell set up headquarters in Los Angeles and filed for tax exemption as a church.

This was what Harlan had gotten from Mitchell. The rest of what was in his notes had come from a brother in Los Angeles, a black man who lived near the temple. Harlan had been put in touch with the man because he was supposed to know something about the Sons. The man’s fleshly brother, Harlan had been told, was one himself.

“Know more than I want to about those people,” the man had begun by telling him. “Talking to them is like watching cartoons. It’s all Batman and Robin.”

When Harlan asked for specifics the man had begun to elaborate. “Well, first,” he said, “you got your Elder World and you got your Ancients.”

Harlan now had them in his notes. The Ancients were the controllers of the Elder World, the creators. Unlike the Creator, with whom Harlan was familiar, these had simply done it for sport. It was the kind of sport a demented child might take with bugs in a jar.

You also had your Zedroes, Drones, the Super Race, and the Celestial Visitors. It was, Harlan had to admit, a little like watching cartoons. The theology was upside down, with the creators as villains and life fallen from the start. The messiahs of the Elder World were the Celestial Visitors, a small group of ancient astronauts who had come to earth after their own world had been lost in a great cataclysm. In general, the story was as follows:

The Ancients had created life for sport. The trouble was, it got away from them. Or threatened to. New life in all its raw vitality, its utter wildness, was something the stodgy old bastards hadn’t counted on. More than a little annoyed, they even created a race of Zedroes—also known as Half Things, to help keep it in check.

Enter the Celestial Visitors. If the Ancients were antilife, the Visitors were for it. They saw its wondrous potential. Too few in number to challenge the Ancients directly, they set about breeding with the daughters of men to produce a super race. It was, according to Maxwell, an incredible period. The new race, beneficiaries of both the Visitors’ wisdom and their own immense vitality, were indeed something to behold. Even the Ancients were impressed, so much so that in one desperate move—an act demanding all of their terrible power—they effectively brought an end to the Elder World and the first age of men.

To ensure their own survival, the Ancients passed into a state of dormancy within another dimensional plane, from which they had counted on the surviving Zedroes to wake them. The Elder World had not passed quietly into the void, however, and the violence of its passing had created changes in the earth’s magnetic field which even the Ancients had not foreseen. In short, they were stuck. Zedroes were stuck, too, some in the realm of the Ancients and some in the world of men. Those in the realm of men—the conscious realm—were now too few in number to wake the Ancients on their own. It was going to take time. Magnetic tidal flows would have to shift. Stars would have to align themselves. And the Zedroes would need help. They would need Drones.

Drones were humans, either demented, naive, or simply weak-willed enough to be used by the Zedroes. Adolf Hitler had been a prominent Drone. Billy Graham was another. The locating and exposing of Drones was of primary concern to the Sons of Elijah.

“This,” Harlan had asked, “is where it gets like Batman and Robin?”

“Batman, Superman, the Green Hornet, all rolled into one,” the brother had told him.

It wasn’t the first time Harlan had seen this kind of thing. What he had not run across before, however, was the twist Leonard Maxwell had put on the Super Race routine.

Without the Visitors to guide them, the fledgling race soon lost the use of their powers. Ignorantly they toiled with the rest of mankind to emerge from the Great Postwar Darkness. But the Visitors had left messages coded in stone. To break the code was to learn the truth of history. The task had fallen to Leonard Maxwell and Maxwell had learned a number of interesting things. He had learned that the Visitors were black. The race they fathered was black as well and what lay behind the suppression of the black man in the modern era was nothing less than the efforts of Zedroes and their Drones to prevent the race from rediscovering and using their powers.

What it came down to in the end was a kind of race. Would men rediscover the secrets of the Visitors? Or would the slumbering Ancients, aided by Zedroes and Drones, awake?

It had seemed to Harlan, in the beginning, that there were at least three reasons for being interested in all of this. One had to do with the fact that the Sons were a group active in his territory—whether the medallion in the museum had anything to do with them or not. A second reason was that if the medallion was theirs, it might mean the Wheeler boy had gotten involved with them in some way—whether he knew it or not. The third reason was personal. It was based upon speculation that there might in fact be some connection between the hand Harlan had seen in Africa and the two variations he had seen since returning to the States. So far everything he had learned about the Sons of Elijah seemed to work against this—the stuff was too absurd. Connected to the second possibility, however, there seemed to be a legitimate reason for concern. The brother in Los Angeles seemed to think so. “This boy black or white?” he had asked when Harlan mentioned that a boy from his circuit may have become involved with the Sons.

“White,” Harlan had replied. “Is that bad?”

“It’s bad if he’s done anything to make them mad,” the brother said. “Let me put it like this. These guys take the Zedroe, Drone stuff real seriously, if you know what I mean. I mean my own brother’s got himself a pair of Dobermans and a house full of automatic guns. He’s got a license-plate holder says ‘Search and Destroy.’”