The Footprints of God (18 page)

"What?"

"That's not the first dream I've had like that. Where I was someone else, someone from the present day. I had one the day Fielding died."

"Describe it for me."

A Durham police cruiser passed us in the westbound lanes. My heart clenched, but the cruiser didn't slow or blink its lights.

"Yesterday, when I was making my videotape—just before you came in—I dreamed I was Fielding just prior to and during his death. It was so real that I felt I'd
actually died.
I couldn't see . . . couldn't breathe. When I answered the door for you, I didn't know which way was up."

"But Fielding had already died that morning."

"So?"

She held up her hands as if to emphasize an obvious point. "Don't you see? Your Fielding dream didn't
predict
anything. It could easily have been a grief reaction. Have you had any more dreams like that?"

I looked back at the road. We had reached the Research Triangle Park. I-40 ran right through it. Less than a mile away, Geli Bauer was directing the hunt for me.

"David, have you had other dreams like that?"

"This isn't the time to discuss it."

"Will there be a better time? Why did you skip your last three appointments with me?"

I shook my head. "You already think I'm crazy."

"That's not a medical term."

"Descriptive, though."

She sighed and looked out the window at the perfect green turf on her side of the road.

"That's Trinity," I said. "Coming up over there."

The lab was set so far back from the road that little was visible.

"The sign says Argus Optical," she said.

"That's cover."

"Ah. Look . . . what's the point of keeping a hallucination from me? What part of yourself do you think you're protecting?"

"We'll talk about it later." I could see that she didn't intend to drop it. "I need drugs, Rachel. I can't afford to be passing out five times a day while we're on the run."

"What have you been taking? Modafinil?"

Modafinil was a standard narcolepsy treatment. "Sometimes. Usually I take methamphetamine."

"David! We talked about the side effects of amphetamines. They could be exaggerating your hallucinations."

"They're the only thing that can keep me awake. Ravi Nara used to get me Dexedrine."

She sighed. "I'll write you a prescription for some Adderall."

"A scrip isn't the problem. I could write that myself. The problem is that they know I need it. They'll be watching all the pharmacies."

"They can't possibly cover every pharmacy in the Triangle."

"They're the NSA, Rachel, and they know I need drugs. These are the people who recorded the cockpit chatter of the Russian pilots who shot down that Korean airliner over Sakhalin Island in 1983. That was twenty years ago, and it was a
random
incident. They are actively searching for us. You read
1984?"

"Twenty years ago."

"When I say
NSA,
think Big Brother. The NSA is the closest thing we have to it in America."

"But you still need your drugs."

"You must know somebody."

"I could get it at the hospital pharmacy."

"They'll be watching for us there."

"Well, shit."

I'd almost never heard her use profanity. Maybe it came with the blue jeans. Maybe she shed her demure exterior with her silk skirts and blouses.

"I know a doc in North Durham who'll give us some samples," she said.

We'd already left Durham behind and were well on our way to Raleigh. My knowledge of Geli Bauer made me reluctant to linger in the area longer than necessary. Also, paradoxically enough, something in me did not want the dreams to stop. My last one had saved our lives, and though I'd never confess it to Rachel, I felt somehow that my dreams—however frightening they might be—were giving me information about our plight, information I could gain in no other way.

"We're not going back," I said.

"What if you pass out at the wheel?"

"You saw how it works at the house. It doesn't happen instantly."

"You weren't driving then."

"I usually have a couple of minutes' warning. I'll pull over the second I feel something wrong."

Rachel was clearly unhappy. As though to drain off some anger, she put one foot up on the dash, untied her shoe, then retied it. Then she did the same to the other. This compulsive ritual seemed to calm her.

I took the 440 loop around Raleigh, then merged onto U.S. 64, which would take us all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The highway was generic Southern: two broad strips of cement running through pine and hardwood forest. It would be another two hours before the land started to drop toward the Outer Banks. Fielding would have been traveling this road today if he hadn't died, a road he had traveled before, to a destination my wife and I had visited twelve years earlier. Thoughts like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like
space-time.
The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time. The Nags Head cabin Fielding and his wife had honeymooned in appeared to be the same one my wife and I had used— but in reality it was not. In the fabric of space-time, it was altogether different. The school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran—none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action. Life from death.

"I don't want to make things worse," Rachel said, "but since you can't call the president anymore, what exactly can you do? Where can we go?"

"I'm hoping something at the cabin will give me a clue. Right now I'm just trying to keep us alive."

"Why don't we just go public? Drive to Atlanta and tell it all to CNN?"

"Because the NSA could just say I was lying. What can I really prove at this point?"

She folded her arms. "You tell me. Would a Nobel laureate like Ravi Nara perjure himself to cover all this up?"

"He wouldn't hesitate. National security is the ultimate rationalization for lying. And as for the Trinity building, it could be totally empty by now."

"Lu Li Fielding would support you."

"Lu Li has disappeared."

Rachel's face lost some color.

"Don't assume the worst yet. She had a plan to escape, but I have no idea whether she made it or not."

"David, you must know more than you're telling me."

"About Lu Li?

"About Trinity!"

She was right. "Okay. A couple of weeks ago, Fielding decided that the suspension of the project was just a ruse to distract the two of us. He thought the real work on Trinity was continuing elsewhere, and maybe had been for a long time."

"Where else could they be working on it?"

"Fielding's bet was the R and D labs at Godin Supercomputing in California. Godin's been flying out there quite a bit on his private jet. Nara's gone with him several times."

"That doesn't prove anything. For all you know, they're playing golf at Pebble Beach."

"These guys don't play golf. They work. They'd sell their souls for what they want. When you think of Peter Godin, think
Faust.
"

"What do they want?"

"Different things. John Skow was about to be canned by the NSA when Godin asked that he administer Project Trinity. That resurrected his career."

"Why would Peter Godin want a man like that?"

"I think Godin has something on Skow. He probably compromised him a long time ago and knows Skow will keep quiet about anything he's told to. Working at the NSA doesn't make you rich. But being the man who delivered a Trinity computer to the agency would put Skow in the director's chair. And after that, he'd be invaluable to private corporations. Skow will do anything necessary to make Trinity a reality."

"And Ravi Nara?"

"Nara demanded a million dollars a year to come on board. What the government wouldn't pay, Godin made up in cash. Beyond that, Nara's contribution to Trinity would give him a lock on another Nobel. Shared with Godin and Jutta Klein, of course. Fielding would deserve it the most, but the Nobel committee doesn't give posthumous awards. Tack on unlimited research funds for life, Nara's name in the history books ..."

"And this Jutta Klein?"

"Klein is straight. She's an older German woman, and she already shared a Nobel with two other Germans back in 1994. She's on loan to Trinity from Siemens. That's the way it's set up with several companies. Godin wanted the best people in the world, so he borrowed them from the R and D divisions of the best computer companies. Sun Micro. Silicon Graphics. In exchange, those companies will get to license certain parts of the Trinity technology once it's declassified.
If it's
declassified."

"If Jutta Klein is straight," Rachel said, "maybe she's the person who can help us."

"She couldn't if she wanted to. They'll have her sewed up tight."

Rachel gave a frustrated sigh. "And Godin? What does he want?"

"Godin wants to be God."

"What?"

I eased into the left lane to pass a motor home. "Godin doesn't care about Trinity making a profit. He's a billionaire. He's seventy-two years old, and he's been a star since he was forty. So forget being the father of artificial intelligence or anything like that. He wants to be the first—maybe the only—human being whose mind is ported into a Trinity computer."

Rachel pushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "What's he like? An egomaniac?"

"He's not that simple. Godin is a brilliant man who believes he knows what's wrong with the world. He's like the people you knew in college who thought
Atlas Shrugged
was the answer to the world's problems, only he's a genius. And he's made major contributions to science. So far, America is truly a better place because Peter Godin lived here. His supercomputers played a significant role in winning the Cold War."

"It sounds like you admire him."

"He's easy to admire. But he scares me, too. He's practically killing himself to build the most powerful computer in the world, and he doesn't care that he won't understand how it works when it finally does. Godin's building Trinity to use it himself. And I don't know if there's anything more dangerous than a powerful man obsessed with remaking the world in his own image."

As I reached out to set the Audi's cruise control, my vision started to blur. A wave of fatigue washed through me, and Rachel's last words slipped out of my head. My eyesight cleared, but the familiar high-pitched humming had begun in my head. I braked and swerved onto the shoulder.

"What is it?" asked Rachel.

"You need to drive. I may go under."

She sat up. "Okay."

I got out and walked around to her side of the car. Rachel climbed over the console and slid behind the wheel. Before getting back in, I looked up and down the highway. Traffic was moderate but steady, and no drivers showed any interest in me.

She studied me closely. "Are you all right, David?"

"A little shaky."

She reached over and fastened my safety belt. "Is it an episode?"

The humming had descended to my back teeth. "Yes."

"Close your eyes. I've got the wheel."

"Just keep going east. Our destination is about"—I held up three fingers—"hours away." In the glove compartment was a map of the Carolinas. I located Highway 64 and pointed to Plymouth, near where the Roanoke River ran into Albemarle Sound. "If I don't wake up by the time we reach here, wake me up."

Rachel put the Audi in gear and began accelerating along the shoulder. When she reached fifty, she pulled onto the highway and goosed the pedal.

"Is it getting worse?" she asked.

In my mind I said,
I'm fine,
but some part of my brain realized that my lips had not moved. I was about to go under. My palms were tingling, and my face felt hot. Rachel laid a hand on my forehead.

"You're burning up. Does that always happen?"

I tried to answer, but I felt as I had as a boy in the Oak Ridge swimming pool, trying to talk to my friends underwater. We yelled as loud as we could, but we couldn't make our words understood. Rachel's hand seemed to be melting into my forehead. That pleased me somehow. I wanted to check the visor mirror and see if her hand really was melting, but I couldn't move. A woman was calling my name from far away. Before I could answer, the deep blue swell of a wave broke over me and I went under, rolling and tumbling into darkness.

I'm sitting outdoors in a circle of sleeping men, leaning
against a wall. Banked embers glow at the center of the
circle. The sky is on fire with stars. A robed man named Peter sits beside me. He seems upset.

"Why do you want to do this?" he whispered. "If you
go, you'll suffer all manner of indignities. Even if the people listen, you'll be rejected by the priests and elders. And
what of the Romans? I fear you will be killed."

Though he does not name the place, I know he's
speaking of Jerusalem. "Go away," I tell him. "You
value what the dog values. Your body, your next meal,
your life."

He takes hold of my arm and shakes it. "You don't
drive me off so easily! I've seen it in a dream. If you go,
you will be executed."

"Whoever will save his life shall lose it," I reply.

Peter shakes his head, his eyes filled with confusion.

The scene changes suddenly. I'm on a high mountain, looking out over a plain. Three men sit with me.

"When you go into the towns," I ask, "who do you say
that I am?"

"We say you are the anointed one."