The Footprints of God (32 page)

"I always felt like an outsider because of that. All my friends went to church or synagogue. I got curious. When I was seventeen, I sought out my Uncle Milton. He told me everything. After that ... I embraced my heritage."

Many small mysteries of Rachel's personality suddenly made sense. Her severe dress, her professional distance, her abhorrence of violence . . .

"The thing is," she went on, "I think I became Jewish more out of emotional and political identification than a desire to do God's will."

"There's nothing wrong with that."

"Of course there is. If you ask me what I really think about God, it has nothing to do with the Torah or the Talmud. It has to do with what I've seen in my own life."

"What do you really think?"

She folded her hands on her lap. "I believe that to create means to make something that didn't exist before. If God is perfect, then the only way he can truly create is to make something separate from himself. So by definition, his creation must be imperfect. You see? If it were perfect, it would
be
God."

"Yes."

"I believe that for human beings to be distinct from God, we must be able to make our own choices. Free will, right? And unless bad choices resulted in real pain, free will would have no meaning. That's why we have such evil in the world. I don't know what religion that adds up to, but whatever it is, that's what I believe."

"That's a good explanation for the world as we find it. But it doesn't address the central mystery. Why should God feel compelled to create anything at all?"

"I don't think we'll ever know that."

"We might. Our sun is going to burn for another five billion years or so. Even if the universe ends by collapsing inward on itself—the Big Crunch—the earliest that could happen is about twenty billion years from now. If we don't destroy ourselves, we'll have plenty of time to answer that question. Maybe all questions."

She smiled. "You and I will never know."

Looking into her dark eyes, I realized just how little I knew about her. "You're not nearly as conventional as you pretend to be. I wish you could have talked to Fielding."

"What did he believe about God?"

"Fielding had a big problem with evil. He was raised a Christian, but he said that neither Judaism nor Christianity had ever faced evil head-on."

"What did he mean?"

"He'd recite three statements: 'God is all powerful. God is all good. Evil exists.' You can logically reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three."

Rachel nodded thoughtfully.

"Fielding thought the Eastern religions were the only truly monotheistic ones, because they admit that evil flows from God, rather than trying to blame a lesser figure like Satan."

"And you?" she asked. "Where do you think evil comes from?"

"The human heart."

"The heart pumps blood, David."

"You know what I mean. The psyche. The dark well where primitive instincts mix with human intelligence. When you look at the atrocities man is capable of, it's difficult to imagine a divine plan behind any of it. I mean, look what happened to your grandfather."

Rachel gripped my arm and looked at me with almost desperate urgency. "On the day my grandfather was murdered, there was a moment when he could have killed that guard. They were alone at a rock quarry, one guard and three prisoners. The Americans were only a day away. But he didn't do it."

"Why not?" I asked, stunned by her passion.

"I think he knew something that we've forgotten."

"What?"

"That if you take up the weapon of your enemy, you become like him. Jesus knew that. Gandhi, too."

"Even with your son standing there beside you? Needing your protection? You turn the other cheek and sacrifice yourself?"

"You don't commit murder," Rachel said firmly. "If my grandfather had killed that guard, he
and
my father might have been executed that night. We can't know the future. That's why what I did yesterday shook me so badly. I picked up your gun and shot a fellow human being. What did I really do when I did that?"

"You saved my life. Yours, too."

"For a while."

I squeezed her hand tight. "We're
alive,
Rachel. And I believe I have something very important to do before I die."

"I know you do."

A male flight attendant appeared in the aisle beside us. I didn't want to look up, so I motioned for Rachel to turn.

"Yes?" Rachel asked in a sleepy voice.

"Are you going to want dinner tonight?"

She looked back at me, and I nodded. "Yes," she said. "Thank you."

The flight attendant glanced at me, then walked away.

Rachel was holding her breath. "What do you think?"

"I don't know. It seemed odd, but maybe he was checking to see if we were going to sleep through dinner. "

She shook her head. "I can't do this."

"Yes, you can. We're fine."

"What about the Tel Aviv airport?"

"We'll make it through."

"You don't know that."

I touched her cheek and spoke with conviction I had not known was in me. "I do know. There's something waiting for me in Jerusalem."

"What?"

"An answer.”

CHAPTER 
28

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White Sands, New Mexico

Ravi Nara revved the throttle of his Honda ATV and drove toward what Godin's technical staff was deluded enough to call the hospital. The New Mexico air parched his throat, and the scorching sun left the neurologist so drained that he tried to stay indoors as much as possible. A white-coated technician crossed his path on foot and raised an arm in greeting. Ravi braked angrily and drove on.

It had taken all his nerve to telephone John Skow, even with the scrambled cell phone the NSA man had given him. But with Godin close to death, he'd had to take the risk. Skow had made it clear that if Godin died before Trinity became a reality, all their careers—and maybe their lives—could be destroyed. Zach Levin, Godin's chief engineer, had predicted that the Trinity prototype could go fully operational in seven to ten days. But that estimate assumed the continued participation of Godin himself. Ravi knew he'd be lucky to keep the old man alive for another twenty-four hours.

He doubted that any doctor had ever worked so hard to keep a patient alive. At thirty-six, Ravi Nara was already a revered scientist. In his native India he was treated as a hero, despite his having become an American citizen. But if Trinity failed under a cloud of scandal caused by the murder of a fellow Nobel laureate, nothing would save his reputation.

Again he wondered if someone had overheard his call to Skow. The security in North Carolina had been intrusive, but White Sands was a bloody military reservation. Still, no one had confronted him yet. Maybe the remoteness of the place made the security people less paranoid.

White Sands was bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together. The parcel fenced off for Trinity research was a mole on a white elephant, part of a larger tract administered by the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Before Ravi visited the base, Godin had described the living conditions there as "spartan." A transplanted New Yorker, Ravi had thought North Carolina was the middle of nowhere. White Sands was a hole in the world, a moonscape of white gypsum and rock with only rattlesnakes for company. He half-expected Indians to come riding over the dunes with John Ford cowboys in pursuit, but they never did.

The Trinity compound was laid out with geometric simplicity. There were four major buildings: the research lab, the hospital, Administration, and Containment. There were also barracks, a machine shop, a massive electrical power plant, and an airstrip that could take military jets. The buildings weren't really buildings, but converted aircraft hangars assembled by army engineers in five frantic weeks of construction. Only Containment was different. Containment housed the Trinity prototype.

Ravi could see the strange building to his right, standing alone at the center of the compound. Built like a World War Two pillbox, Containment had four-foot-thick concrete walls reinforced with tempered steel and shielded with lead. It was served by four giant electrical cables, two plumbing pipes, and a residential air-conditioning system. No telephone lines, coaxial cables, or cat-5 network cable ran to it. No antennae or satellite dishes sprouted from its roof, as they did from all the other buildings. Containment was like a structure built to hold Harry Houdini, if Houdini could have digitized himself and escaped through wires or beamed transmissions. If the Trinity prototype ever went fully operational, no one—not even Peter Godin—wanted it connected to the Internet.

Ravi had avoided the hospital today. Godin had been dying by inches for weeks, but two days ago he'd finally begun the slide toward eternity. Ravi was convinced that Fielding's death had done it, a ruthless necessity that hit the old man harder than he'd expected. Of course, Fielding's death had given them the crystal, so any doubts about the rightness of killing him were pointless.

Within hours after getting the crystal, they had made up all the ground lost to Fielding's sabotage, and after discovering the independent work Fielding had done, they'd found themselves within spitting distance of a working prototype. The euphoria of this success had been undercut by the problems with Tennant and his psychiatrist. Godin could ill afford the stress of dealing with that, yet in the final analysis, it was the cancer that was killing him, as it killed everyone who got his type of cancer. Ravi parked the ATV in front of the hospital hangar and walked inside. The hangar was divided into "rooms" by partitions. None had ceilings—not even the bathrooms—so foul smells drifted throughout the building with annoying regularity. Peter Godin was not bothered by this. He occupied an airtight chamber with positive pressure that no infectious agent could penetrate. Served by filtered air and water, the plastic cubicle known as the Bubble sat like an incubator at the center of the hangar floor.

To spare Ravi and the nurses from having to waste time with protective suits, a UV decontaminator had been installed near the Bubble's door. To sterilize himself, Ravi had only to scrub his hands, don a mask, then stand in the radiation long enough to rid his skin and clothing of dangerous organisms. The process only took two minutes, but lately it had begun to get on his nerves. Still, he couldn't blame Godin. Steroids and chemotherapy had beaten the old man's immune system into submission, and Godin wanted what every man had wanted since the beginning of time: to cheat death.

The humming UV unit finally went dark. Ravi stepped on a button that opened the Plexiglas hatch in the Bubble and stepped inside. Godin lay unconscious on a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors and resuscitation equipment. His body was pierced by a central IV line and coupled to the monitors by thin wires. His commanding head had scarcely more color than the white sheet it lay on.

Two nurses bookended the bed, watching for the slightest change in their patient's status. Ravi nodded to them, then lifted the chart from its slot at the end of the bed and gave it a token look.
Brainstem glioma, diffuse
and inoperable.
He'd made the diagnosis six months ago, when he'd first seen the Super-MRI scan of Godin's brain. It was eerie to see a tumor growing inside one of the most gifted minds on earth. When Godin asked Ravi to keep his cancer secret, Ravi hadn't hesitated. Revealing Godin's condition might have ended his chance to take part in the greatest scientific effort in history. Of course, Ravi had exacted a price for his cooperation. It was only proper. Peter Godin was rich, Ravi Nara relatively poor. That imbalance had now been addressed, if only in a small way. Yet the fortune in cash and stock Ravi had received now seemed trivial in the face of what might happen.

"Ravi?" croaked the old man. "Is that you?"

Ravi looked up from the chart and saw the intense blue eyes fix upon him.

"Why am I so tired?" Godin asked.

"Your seizures, probably." Godin still suffered from epilepsy caused by his exposure to the Super-MRI.

Ravi walked around the bed and looked down into the slack face. Peter Godin had been one of the most vital men he'd ever known, yet cancer had laid Godin as low as it would any street beggar. Well . . . that wasn't quite true. No street beggar had Ravi Nara and almost limitless wealth keeping him alive. Even near death, with his hair and eyebrows gone, Godin retained the hawklike profile that had made the driven young computer designer so recognizable in the late 1950s, and for five decades afterward.

"Your tumor is very advanced, Peter. There's only so much I can do. It's a battle between keeping you conscious and keeping you free enough from pain to function."

"Damn the pain." Godin clenched one arthritic hand into a fist. "I can stand pain."

"That's not what you said last night. Last night you told me your face was on fire."

Godin shuddered. "I'm conscious now. Send Levin to me."

Zach Levin had led the R&D department at Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View until he was brought to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity computer. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.

"I'll send him in," Ravi said.

Godin held up one hand. "What have you heard about Tennant and Weiss?"

"There's been no sign of them since Union Station."

The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. "The woman shot Geli?"

"They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes."

When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he'd always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi's skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.

"How is Geli doing?" Godin asked.

"Remarkably well, I hear. They transferred her to Walter Reed. Her father arranged that."