The Divine Invasion (27 page)

The cop, reluctantly, removed the cuffs.

"It would seem to me, Mr. Asher," the speaker sputtered, "that there are internal contradictions in what you say. If you will concentrate on them you will see why you give the impression of being brain-slushed. First you say one thing and then you say another. The only lucid interval in your discourse came when you discussed the Mahler Second Symphony, and that is probably due, as you say, to the fact that you're in the retail audio components business. It is a last remnant of a once intact psyche. Understand that if you go in with the officer you will not be punished; you will be treated as the lunatic that you obviously are. No judge would convict a man who says what you say."

"That's true," the cop beside Herb Asher agreed. "All you have to do is tell the judge about God speaking to you from the bamboo bushes and you're home free. And especially when you tell him that you're God's father—"

"Legal father," Herb Asher corrected.

"That will make a big impression on the court," the cop said.

Herb Asher said, "There is a great war being fought at this moment between God and Belial. The fate of the universe is at stake, its actual physical existence. When I took off for the West Coast I assumed—I had reason to assume—that everything was okay. Now I am not sure; now I think that something dark and awful has gone wrong. You police are the paradigm of it, the epitome. I would not have been grappled if Yah had in fact won. I will not go on to California because that would jeopardize Linda Fox. You'll find her, of course, but she doesn't know anything; she is—in this world, anyhow—a struggling new talent whom I was trying to help. Leave her alone. Leave me alone, too; leave us all alone. You do not know whom you serve. Do you understand what I'm saying? You are in the service of evil, whatever else you may think. You are machines processing an old warrant. You do not know what I've done, or been accused of doing … you can make no sense of what I say because you do not understand the situation. You are going by rules that don't apply. This is a unique time. Unique events are taking place; unique forces are squared off against one another. I will not go to Linda Fox but on the other hand I do not know where I will go instead. Maybe Elias will know; maybe he can tell me what to do. My dream was shot down when you grappled me, and maybe her dream, too; Linda Fox's dream. Maybe I can't now help her become a star, as I promised. Time will tell. The outcome will determine it, the outcome of the great battle. I pity you because whatever the outcome you are destroyed; your souls are gone now. "

Silence.

"You are an unusual man, Mr. Asher," the cop beside him said. "Crazy or not, whatever it is that has gone wrong with you. you are one of a kind." He nodded slowly, as if deep in thought. "This is not an ordinary kind of insanity. This is not like anything I have ever seen or heard before. You talk about the whole universe—
more
than the universe, if that is possible. You impress me and in a way you frighten me. I am sorry I grappled you, now that I have listened to you. Don't shoot me. I'll release your vehicle and you can fly off; I won't pursue you. I'd like to forget what I've heard in the last few minutes. You talk about God and a counter-God and a terrible battle that seems to be lost, lost to the power of the counter-God, I mean. This does not fit with anything I know of or understand. Go away. I'll forget you and you can forget about me." Wearily, the cop plucked at his metal mask.

"You can't let him go," the speaker sputtered.

"Oh, yes I can," the cop said. "I can let him go and I can forget everything he's said, everything I've heard."

"Except that it's recorded," the speaker sputtered.

The cop reached down and pressed a button. "I just erased it," he said.

"I thought the battle was over," Herb Asher said. "I thought God had won. God has not won. I know that even though you are letting me go. But maybe it is a sign, your releasing me. I see some response in you, some amount of human warmth."'

"I am not a machine," the cop said.

"But will that continue to be true?" Herb Asher said. "I wonder. What will you be a week from now? A month? What will we all become? And what power do we have to affect it?"

The cop said, "I just want to get away from you, a long distance away. "

"Good," Herb Asher said. "It can be arranged. Someone must tell the world the truth," he added. "The truth you know, that I told you: that God is in combat and losing. Who can do it?"

"You can," the cop said.

"No," Herb Asher said. But he knew who could. "Elijah can," he said. "It is his task; this is what he has come for, that the world will know."

"Then get him to do it," the cop said.

"I will," Herb Asher said. "That's where I will go; back to my partner, back to Washington, D.C."

I will forego the Fox, he said to himself; that is the loss I must accept. Bitter sorrow filled him as he realized this. But it was a fact; he could not be with her now, not until later.

Not until the battle had been won.

As the cop ungrappled his vehicle from Herb Asher's he said a strange thing. "Pray for me, Mr. Asher," he said.

"I will," Herb Asher said.

His vehicle released, he swung it in a great looping arc, and  headed back toward Washington, D.C. The police car did not follow. The cop had kept his word.

F
rom their audio shop he called Elias Tate, waking him up from deepest sleep. "Elijah," he said. "The time has come.

"What?" Elias muttered. "Is the store on fire? What are you talking about? Was there a break-in? What did we lose?"

"Unreality is coming back," Herb Asher said. "The universe has begun to dissolve. It is not the store; it is everything."

"You're hearing the music again," Elias said.

"Yes."

"That is the sign. You are right. Something has happened, something he—they—did not expect. Herb, there has been another fall. And I slept. Thank God you woke me. Probably it is not in time. The accident—they allowed an accident to occur, as in the beginning. Well, thus the cycles fulfill themselves and the prophecies are complete. My own time to act has now come. Because of you I have emerged from my own forgetfulness. Our store must become a center of holiness, the temple of the world. We must patch into that FM station whose sound you hear; we must use it as it has in its own time made use of you. It will be our voice."

"What will it say?"

Elias said, "It will say, sleepers awake. That is our message to the listening world. Wake up! Yahweh is here and the battle has begun, and all your lives are in the balance; all of you now are weighed, this way or that, for better, for worse. No one escapes, even God himself, in all his manifestations. Beyond this there is no more. So rise up from the dust, you creatures, and begin; begin to live. You will live only insofar as you will fight; what you will have, if anything, you must earn, each for himself, and each now, not later. Come! This will be the tune that we will play over and over. And the world will hear, for we shall reach it all, first a little part, then the rest. For this my voice was fashioned at the beginning; for this I have come back to the world again and again. My voice will sound now, at this final time. Let us go. Let us begin. And hope it is not too late, that I did not sleep too long. We must be the world's information source, speaking in all the tongues. We will be the tower that originally failed. And if we fail now, then it ends here, and sleep returns. The insipid noise that assails your ears will follow a whole world to its grave, and rust will rule and dust will rule—not for a little time but for all time and all men, even their machines; for all that lies ahead."

"Gosh," Herb Asher said.

"Observe our pitiful condition at this moment. We, you and I, know the truth but have no way to bring it to the world. With the station we will have a way; we will have
the
way. What are the call letters of that station? I will fone them and offer to buy them."

"It's WORP FM," Herb Asher said.

"Hang up, then," Elias said. "So that I can call."

"Where will we get the money?"

"I have the money," Elias said. "Hang up. Time is of the essence. "

Herb Asher hung up.

Maybe if Linda Fox will make a tape for us, he thought, we can play it on our station. I mean, it shouldn't all be limited to warning the world. There are other things than Belial.

His fone rang; it was Elias. "We can buy the station for thirty million dollars," Elias said.

"Do you have that much?"

"Not immediately," Elias said. "But I can raise it. We will sell the store and our inventory for openers."

"Jesus Christ," Herb Asher protested weakly. "That's how we make our living."

Elias glared at him.

"Okay," Herb said.

"We will have a baptismal sale," Elias said, "to liquidate our inventory. I will baptize everyone who buys something from us. I will call on them to repent at the same time."

"Then you fully remember your identity," Herb Asher said.

"I do now," Elias said. "But for a time I had forgotten."

"If Linda Fox will let you interview her—"

"Only religious music will be played on the station," Elias said.

"That's as bad as the soupy strings. Worse. I'll say to you what I said to the cop; play the Mahler Second—play something interesting, something that stimulates the mind."

"We'll see," Elias said.

"I know what that means," Herb Asher said. "I had a wife who used to say 'We'll see.' Every child knows that means—"

"Perhaps she could sing spirituals," Elias said.

Herb Asher said, "This whole business is beginning to get me down. We have to sell the store; we have to raise thirty million dollars. I can't cope with
South Pacific
and I don't expect to be able to cope any better with 'Amazing Grace.' Amazing Grace always sounded to me like some bimbo at a massage parlor. If I'm offending you I'm sorry, but that cop almost hauled me off to jail. He said I'm here illegally; I'm a wanted man. That means you're probably wanted, too. What if Belial kills Emmanuel? What happens to us? There's no way we can survive without him. I mean, Belial pushed him off Earth; he defeated him before. I think he's going to defeat him this time. Buying one FM station in Washington, D.C. isn't going to change the tide of battle."

"I'm a very persuasive talker," Elias said.

"Yeah, well Belial isn't going to be listening to you and neither will be the ones he controls. You're a voice—" He paused. "I was going to say, 'A voice crying in the wilderness.' I guess you've heard that before."

Elias said, "We could very well both wind up with our heads on silver platters. As happened to me once before. What has happened is that Belial is out of his cage, the cage Zina put him in; he is unchained. He is released onto this world. But what I say to you is, 'Oh ye of little faith!' But everything that can be said has been said centuries ago. I will concede Linda Fox a small amount of air time on our station. You can tell her that. She may sing whatever she wishes."

"I'm hanging up," Herb Asher said. "I have to call her and tell her I'm not coming out to the West Coast for a while. I don't want her involved in my troubles. I—"

"I'll talk to you later," Elias said. "But I suggest you call Rybys; when I last saw her she was crying. She thinks she may have a pyloric ulcer. And it may be malignant."

"Pyloric ulcers aren't malignant," Herb Asher said. "This is where I came in, hearing that Rybys Rommey is sitting around crying over her illness; this is what got me involved. She is ill for illness's sake, for its own sake. I thought I was going to escape from this, finally. I'll call Linda Fox first." He hung up the fone.

Christ, he thought. All I want to do is fly to California and begin my happy life. But the macrocosm has swallowed me and my happy life up. Where is Elias going to get thirty million dollars? Not by selling our store and inventory. God probably gave him a bar of gold or will rain down bits of gold, flakes of gold, on him like that manna in the wilderness that kept the ancient Jews alive. As Elias says, everything was said centuries ago and everything happened centuries ago. My life with the Fox would have been new. And here I am once more subjected to sappy, soupy string music which will soon give way to gospel songs.

He dialed Linda Fox's private number, that of her home in Sherman Oaks. And got a recording. Her face appeared on the little fone screen, but it was a mechanical and distorted face; and, he saw, her skin was broken out and her features seemed pudgy, almost fat. Shocked, he said, "No, I don't want to leave a message. I'll call back." He hung up without identifying himself. Probably she'll call me in a while, he decided. When I don't show up. After all, she is expecting me. But how strange she looked. Maybe it's an old recording. I hope so.

To calm himself he turned on one of the audio systems there at the store; he used a reliable preamp component that involved an audio hologram. The station he selected was a classical music station, one he enjoyed. But—

Only a voice issued from the transducers of the system. No music. A whispering voice almost inaudible; he could barely understand the words. What the hell is this? he asked himself. What is it saying?

"…weary," the voice whispered in its dry, slithery tone. "…and afraid. There is no possibility … weighed down. Born to lose; you are born to lose. You are no good."

And then the sound of an ancient classic: Linda Ronstadt' s "You're No Good." Over and over again Ronstadt repeated the words; they seemed to go on forever. Monotonous, hypnotic; fascinated, he stood listening. The hell with this, he decided finally. He shut down the system. But the words continued to circulate and recirculate in his brain. You are worthless, his thoughts came. You are a worthless person. Jesus! he thought. This is far worse than the sappy, soupy all-strings easy-listening garbage; this is lethal.

He foned his home. After a long pause Rybys answered. "I thought you were in California," she murmured. "You woke me up. Do you realize what time it is?"