Ancient Shores (25 page)

Project Forty’s
ratings had gone through the roof. As a consequence, criticism of Old-Time Bill also soared.

Bill’s enemies were the mainstream press, liberal politicians, and left-leaning churches, which is to say all the various forces that were conniving in the moral collapse of the American people. They accused him of every conceivable crime but concentrated particularly on fraud and hypocrisy. They charged that he used religion to solicit donations, that he was a theological con artist, that he probably didn’t even believe in God.

None of this, strictly speaking, was true. To deal with the last first, Bill didn’t think seriously enough about theology to worry about details, but he sincerely believed that, as he often preached, everyone had a direct line into God’s study. Don’t hesitate to use the phone, he said; say what you really mean, and God will never put you on hold.

He sincerely believed in his own uprightness, because he gave hope to the despairing, meaning to those who had lost direction, and a sense of belonging to the unloved. To all who came to him, who wandered the various Sinais of their lives in keeping with the spirit of the Volunteers, he offered redemption, an easing of pain, and a celestial compass.

Oh, yes, Bill was a believer. God stood by Bill’s side
when the choir was singing and the pipes were playing and people sobbed out their sins and promised to amend their lives.

And he most certainly did
not
do it for money.

The money was nice; he never denied that. But he thought of it as a corollary benefit for doing what was right, for walking the path of the Lord, for living by the Book. His real motivation would have been found in the exhilaration of standing before audiences in English-speaking countries around the world and feeling their response to God’s truth. He loved to draw them into the power of the Word, to hold their emotions in his hands, and, with his soaring rhetoric, to loosen the chains that bound them, not to an earthly existence, but to prosaic lives.

Bill understood the romance implicit in the tales of a desert God who had loved his people and who had eventually faced the Roman cross for all who had ever drawn breath. Yes! That was what people understood and what they loved. And they loved
him
because he had made himself part of the message.

His second Fort Moxie broadcast took place during the last snow storm of the season. Ordinarily, Bill didn’t get to see much snow, and it inspired him. While the flakes drifted against the windows, he understood God’s love for Adam in spite of his disobedience. And he felt his people’s hearts beat with his.

“But Adam has gone back into the Garden.”

“Amen,” cried the Volunteers.

“O Lord, we need your strong arm.”

“Alleluia!”

“Give us a sign. Show the faithless You stand by our side!”

He urged his listeners to write to their representatives. “Demand that we withdraw. For we are deaf to His word.” Tears appeared in his eyes. The wind began to build. Bill felt the Presence. “Show them your strength, God of Abraham,” he said. “I ask it in your Son’s name.”

The chorus, on cue, burst into “Rock of Ages.” The room shook and people sobbed and the wind wrapped itself around the building. Amanda Dexter, who could always be counted on to go to pieces at the climax of a good service, shrieked her undying gratitude to her Creator and collapsed in a quivering heap.

They rolled through several choruses while the wind played with the windows. Bill felt something open in his soul, and the power of the Angel of the Almighty entered into him. He knew once again the sheer exuberance of bringing people to the Lord. He flowed into the Angel and became one with it, directing the storm, watching the snow submerge the harsh angles of roof and shutter and drainpipe, enshrouding the building, burying it, removing its harsh lines.

Abruptly, he was back inside and the organ had stopped, and the Volunteers were in the aisles, exhausted, helping one another to their feet, delivering alleluias, collapsing into chairs.

“Praise the Lord,” said Mark Meyer, whose face was ashen. “Did you
feel
it?” He was looking directly at Bill.

“Yes,” said Bill, shakily. “I felt it.” Tonight, more than at any other time in his career, he knew he walked with the Blessed. “I think we got the sign,” he added. “I think we actually got the
sign
.”

He remembered the TV cameras. And at that moment, while he wondered if the network had picked up his remark, the lights went out.

“Check the circuit breakers,” someone shouted.

His people didn’t mind a little power failure, and they laughed their way through “Victory in Jesus.”

Bill put on his headset so he could talk to Harry Staples, his maintenance chief. “I’ll have the lights back in a second,” Harry said.

The room was absolutely dark. Bill could not even see any illumination coming in through the windows. That suggested the streetlights had also gone out.

“Everybody stay put until we get the power working again,” Bill said.

His producer reported that they were off the air. “But we went with a bang,” he added. The Whitburg studio had picked up and was covering with gospel music.

The Volunteers finished with “Joshua.” They cheered, conquering failed lights the same way they conquered everything else.

Harry’s voice again: “Power failure’s
outside
, Reverend. We’ve lost the heater, too.” Flashlights had appeared on the stairs.

“Okay,” said Bill. “Let’s close up and clear out.” They were staying in motels in Morris, Manitoba, about a half-hour north of the border. He turned to his audience. “You folks have done great,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

They were already filing toward the door, struggling into coats and boots. Bill waited, talking with his people. He heard the front door open.

And a rough masculine voice, breaking tone with the evening, said, “Hey, what the hell is this?”

Bill heard a whimper.

The door had opened on a wall of snow.

Frank Moll was at home listening to a Mozart concerto when the lights went out and the music died. Through his picture window, he could see that the streetlight located immediately in front of the house had also gone dark.

Peg came out of the den with a flashlight, headed for the circuit breakers.

“They’re off all over,” Frank said, reaching for the phone book.

“We are sorry,” came the recorded response at the electric company, “but all our service representatives are busy. Please stay on the line.”

He hung up, sat down, and propped his feet on the hassock. “Must be lines down somewhere,” he said. It was cold outside, but the house was well insulated.

They talked in the dark, enjoying the interruption in their routine. Across the street, Hodge Eliot’s front door opened. Hodge carried a lamp out onto his porch and peered down the street.

The phone rang.

“Frank?” He recognized Edie Thoraldson’s voice. “Something’s happened at Kor’s place. We’re sending the unit.”

That was the Quick Response Team, which Frank had once directed. “What?” he asked. “What happened?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “Apparently somebody got
buried
. I’ve got the police coming in from Cavalier. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you took a look.”

“Okay,” he said, puzzled.

Peg looked at him, worried. “What is it?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Edie says somebody got
buried
. What the hell does
that
mean?” He had his coat on already. “Keep the door locked,” he said.

Kor’s house was only six blocks away. He paused in his driveway for a stream of cars carrying volunteer firemen. Then he backed out into the street and turned left. Two minutes later he parked behind a gathering crowd a half-block away from Kor’s house. He was just behind the Quick Response Team. The neighborhood was thick with box elders, and it was hard to see what was happening. But he could hear a lot of crowd noise.

The fire engine rolled in. The crowd split and flowed away from the emergency vehicles. And Frank finally got clear of the trees.

Where Kor’s house, lately the Backcountry Church, had been, there was now a two-story-high snow cylinder. The snow was swirled at the top like soft ice cream.

Harry Mills liked to say he was pure corn country, bred true
. He had spent thirty years in the Congress of the United States, eight as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before becoming Matt Taylor’s vice president. Harry told people he had no political ambitions other than to serve his nation well. He would be seventy-seven before he could hope for a run at the top job.

He had therefore decided to retire at the end of Taylor’s first term, while he was still young enough to enjoy the leisure. He would write his memoirs; travel the country to spend time with his grandchildren, who were scattered from Spokane to Key West; and get back to playing serious bridge, a pursuit he’d abandoned a quarter-century ago.

The reality was that Harry probably
had
become too old. He had lost his passion for politics, his taste for power. He no longer enjoyed influencing policy, or rubbing shoulders with the decision makers, or even making the Sunday round of talk shows. Tonight he
was at a reception for the Jordanian king, and he devoutly would have preferred to be home with Marian, shoes kicked off, watching a good movie.

As was usually the case at these outings, he was being stalked by half a dozen predators who wanted to use him to push their agendas. One was the NASA director, Rick Keough, who caught up with him near the hors d’oeuvres.

Harry didn’t like Keough very much. The director was a former astronaut, so he was popular with the general public. But he was given to grandstanding, and he was less interested in the organization than he was in his own career.

Keough was nursing a rum and Coke and trying to look like a man bearing up under misfortune and bureaucratic stupidity. They exchanged pleasantries, and he came to the point. “Mr. Vice President, we have a problem. This thing on Johnson’s Ridge. My people are starting to wonder whether they have a future.”

Keough had headed the effort to return to an aggressive manned program when that idea was popular, and during recent years had argued just as effectively for economy, science, and safety. He was short, barely five-six, narrow of both shoulder and intellect. There was an elusiveness in his character, a tendency to become distracted or change the subject without warning. Talking to Keough, one of the capital’s pundits had once remarked in print, was like trying to carry on a conversation with a man hiding behind a tree.

“How do you mean?” asked Harry.

“Are you serious? What’s the point of boosters and shuttles when you can
walk?
” He finished off his drink. “What is the President going to
do
about that thing?”

Harry was tired of hearing about the Roundhouse. He was not a man easily rattled, and he was convinced that, given time, it would all blow over. When it did, life would go on. “Relax, Rick,” he said. “There will always be a mission for NASA.”

“Well, maybe somebody better tell that to my people, because they are looking around. Mr. Vice President, they are going to start bailing out. These are
dedicated
people. And they can’t be replaced. Once they get the feeling that what they do doesn’t matter anymore, they’re gone. The organization will
die
.”

And your job with it
. “I’ll talk to the President,” Harry said. “I’m sure he’ll be willing to issue a statement of purpose.”

“I think he’ll have to do better than that. You want
my
suggestion?”

Harry fingered his glass, waiting.

“Condemn the area. Send in a flight of F—111’s and take the top off the escarpment. You can apologize later, and nobody will complain.
Nobody
.”

The press conferences on Johnson’s Ridge were held daily at one o’clock. Pool reporters, wearing pressure suits, had visited the galaxy terminus, which seemed to be located on an off-world platform. No one knew for certain, because no exit from the chamber could be found. But if it was indeed off-world, then it followed
that artificial gravity was now within reach. An expedition was being planned.

Today, however, no one was interested in anything other than the Visitor.

Flanked by Adam Sky, April began by issuing a short statement that admitted a remote possibility that something
might
have come through the port. “We don’t think so,” she said. “We are reasonably sure that the only thing that happened was a brief malfunction. The malfunction opened a channel between Johnson’s Ridge and one of the terminus worlds.”

“The Maze?” asked Peter Arnett of CNN.

“Yes,” she said.

“April,” he pursued, “when are you going to open it up for us? The Maze?”

“As soon as we can be sure it’s not inhabited, Peter.” (Wrong word: She should have said “not occupied.” Sounded less ominous.) “But I’d like to reiterate that we spent more than two hours over there. We saw no sign of life. And we were in no way molested, attacked, or threatened by anyone. After we returned, the system reactivated on its own. No one appeared, and there was no evidence to suggest it was anything but a malfunction. And I hope this puts the rumors to rest.”

“You saw nothing at all?” asked
Le Parisien
.

“That’s correct.”

“But that’s what you’d expect to see, isn’t it,” asked the
London Times
, “if the creature was invisible?”

“How can I respond to that?” asked April. “We didn’t see anything. More than that I can’t say. If the
Times
wants to speculate, go ahead.”

“How do you account for Deekin’s statements?” asked a reporter from
Pravda
. “Deekin swears
something
came across.”

April allowed herself to look distressed. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Deekin about that.”

Reporters, like everyone else, love a good story.
And April knew they were torn between their natural skepticism and an unexpressed hope that there was something to the rumor. Everyone understood that this was the sort of thing that sold newspapers. A
lot
of newspapers.

She had, of course, been less than candid. The guard who had seen the wrong icon light up had been George Freewater. George also believed something had come across. But they had learned the danger of going public with everything they knew.

“Tell a press conference what we really think,” Max had said, “and we’ll have a panic.”

Adam had disagreed. “Nobody’s going to panic. That’s government-speak. I think we’d do best to tell the truth.”

“Truth is overrated,” Max had said, looking wearily at him. “Have you been out to any of these towns lately? They’re barring the doors at night. And you won’t find many kids outside.”

On the same day that Holyoke Industries mailed the bad news to its pensioners, a statement by Heinz Erhardt of the University of Berlin, last year’s Nobel Prize winner for economics, appeared in
Der Tagesspiegel
. Erhardt acknowledged that the world economy had been rocked by the news from North Dakota. “A short-term downturn,” he said, “is inevitable. But if technological applications in manufacturing and transportation become possible, as there is no reason to doubt they will, the world is headed into a period of prosperity unlike anything that has gone before.”

Nobody seemed to be listening. By day’s end, the Dow Jones was down another 240 points and still looking for a floor.

Horace Gibson had started life as an insurance salesman. Bored, he’d joined the Marines, risen to command a battalion, and won a Silver Star in the Gulf and the Medal of Honor in Johannesburg. His units had collected enough citations to paper his den. In 1996 he’d retired, tried another civilian occupation, real estate this time, and lasted almost a year. On the anniversary of his retirement from the Corps, he joined the U.S. Marshals Service.

Within two years he had become commander of the Special Operations Group (SOG). SOG was the marshals’ SWAT team, based in Pineville, Louisiana.

Horace was liked by his people. He was willing to take on upper management when occasion required, and he did not spare himself in ensuring that operations were carried out for maximum success with least risk.