Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  The Tawani were a seminomadic people who lived for roughly half of the year in each of two locations, one of which was within twenty miles of Maji. The tribe would graze its cattle on a nearby plateau until the grass became sparse and then return to the bushlands some twenty miles farther north across a series of rocky hills. The Tawani were only going to be in the area for a few more days, and were hoping to ditch Matu-ku-oto as soon as possible.

  After a good half hour, they reached the Tawani camp. Several Tawani women, as dark as rubbed walnut and naked to their waists, worked outside over large earthen pots. The returning men were intercepted by three other men, whom Christine would have guessed to be tribal leaders, except that they didn't look any older than the other men. They all looked to be in their mid twenties.

  One of them mentioned the word matu-ku-oto, at which point several of the others sighed and looked wearily at each other, the way Christine's parents used to look at each other when asked about her cousin Olivia who kept trying to convert the family to Seventh Day Adventism and sell them Amway products. The men gestured toward a hut near the center of the village. Maya smiled and thanked them, and she and Christine walked to the hut.

  As they approached, a figure emerged from the hut, leaning forward to fit through the hut's small doorway. For a moment, all they could see was the top of a man's head, covered with thick, silvery-gray curls. Christine's breath caught in her throat. She had never expected to see Mercury again.

  Once outside, the man stood up straight, to his full height of maybe five feet, eight inches. Below the silver curls was a round, olive-colored face with a hooked nose and two small brown eyes. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals.

  "Hi!" shouted the man in a small, high-pitched voice. "I'm Horace Finch. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

  Christine felt like she was going to be sick again. "Horace...Finch? The owner of the Beacon?"

  "Indeed," said Finch. "Hey, aren't you that reporter from the Banner? The one who used to do the Apocalypse stuff?"

  Christine nodded dumbly. She felt dizzy.

  "Wow," said Finch. "I've read all your columns. Really phenomenal stuff. Hysterical, really. You know who you should do an article about, though? Me."

  Christine fainted.

  FOURTEEN

  Having procured a more detailed map of the Anaheim area and a $2.97 protractor, Jacob sat at a donut shop across from the Beacon Building and proceeded to make a more precise version of his shoelace drawing. What he found was both vindicating and troubling: the center of his imaginary circle was, as near as he could determine, the exact tip of the Beacon pyramid. There was some margin of error due to the fact that the tents concealed the exact location of the excavation, but assuming that they were more-or-less centered on the objects of HeadJAC's interest, the center of the circle was within a few yards of the Beacon's tip.

  Jacob finished his coffee and bear claw and walked across the street to the Beacon. He entered the building and strode across the massive marble foyer to the bank of elevators at the center of the pyramid. According to some cursory Internet research he had done, the Beacon Pyramid had fifteen floors, and sure enough, the elevator's top button was labeled "15." Jacob noticed, however, that the number 13 was missing from the elevator's control panel. If his research was correct and the building really did have fifteen floors, then that meant that the top floor should be 16, not 15. That presumably meant that there was an additional floor that was not indicated on the elevator's controls. He took the elevator to the nominal fifteenth floor, which seemed to be taken up by the offices of various corporate bigwigs and midsize-wigs. There was no indication of another floor above him, but the fifteenth floor was clearly large enough to permit at least one more floor on top of it. There had to be something up there, after all, even if it was just air-conditioning units. Or, Jacob thought wryly, a secret temple used by some mysterious sect to communicate with the gods.

  What is happening to me? Jacob wondered. This morning I was a respected FBI forensic specialist. Now here I am, looking for the damned Holy Grail in Anaheim. You can draw a circle to incorporate any three equidistant points that aren't absolutely parallel, he thought. Simply drawing the circle doesn't make it an objectively real thing any more than drawing a tunnel on a sheer rock face allows the Road Runner to run through it. And the center point of that circle would have to fall somewhere; why not the Beacon building? Maybe his calculations were off and the actual center was the donut shop he had just left. Maybe, in fact, he had just accidentally eaten the Mystical Bear Claw holding the Secrets of the Universe.

  If so, he thought, the Secrets of the Universe were damned tasty, and he was going to have a few more before flying back to Washington. Checking his watch, he saw that he had just enough time to grab another bear claw and make it back to the airport to catch his flight. This little side trip would be his secret; no one in D.C. needed to know that he had made a temporary detour into a Dan Brown novel.

  The donut shop was fresh out of bear claws, so he had to settle for a custard-filled éclair. By the time he had made up his mind on this world-shattering matter, he was on the verge of being late for his flight, and he hurried to his little rented Chevy subcompact with the sticky pastry clutched in his right hand and peeled out of the parking lot.

  The quickest route to the airport would take him north, but a manure spreader had jackknifed on the Santa Ana, forcing him to head south in order to take the Garden Grove Freeway west back to LAX, along with tens of thousands of other drivers. As the Chevy crept along the highway, he was dimly aware that the car's radio was playing the maudlin strains of "Stairway to Heaven." Jacob wasn't much into rock music, but he left it on because he enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what Robert Plant was saying in the third verse. He was pretty sure it was "If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be a lawn man. It's just a sprinkling for the banking." He had a vague idea that the song was about gardening.

  He had gotten only a mile from the Beacon building when he saw something that made him forget his efforts at deciphering the string of nonsense syllables emanating from the car's speakers. An electronic billboard on the side of the road was displaying the message:

  JACOB WAS A QUIET MAN,

  STAYING AMONG THE TENTS.

  GENESIS 25:27

  Having given up the hope of getting to the airport on time, Jacob pulled onto the shoulder in front of the sign. Was this a coincidence, too? Or was somebody playing a joke on him? Jacob was a common name, of course, and the Biblical Jacob was a key figure in mythology of the ancient Hebrews, but still, it was odd, wasn't it? Why that verse? If you were going to pick a Bible verse to put on a sign, wouldn't you use something about salvation or Jesus or homosexuality or something?

  The radio crooned, "...and she's buuuuuyyying a staaaaairway to heaven..." Jacob looked down to turn off the radio, and when he looked up, the sign had changed. Now it read:

  HE HAD A DREAM IN WHICH HE SAW A STAIRWAY RESTING ON THE EARTH, WITH ITS TOP REACHING TO HEAVEN, AND THE ANGELS OF GOD WERE ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ON IT.

  GENESIS 28:12

  Jacob found himself getting angry. Somebody was screwing with him, and he didn't like it. If God, or whoever, had something to say to him, then why didn't they just come out and say it? Enough of this passive-aggressive pussyfooting around. As a scientist, he was accustomed to seeking out facts and prying meaning from them; this business of being led around by the nose by vague clues was getting old.

  The sign changed again. Now it read:

  WHEN JACOB AWOKE FROM HIS SLEEP, HE THOUGHT, "SURELY THE LORD IS IN THIS PLACE, AND I WAS NOT AWARE OF IT." HE WAS AFRAID AND SAID, "HOW AWE SOME IS THIS PLACE! THIS IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF GOD; THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN."

  GENESIS 28: 16--17

  "OK!" Jacob shouted at the sign. "I get it! You're trying to get my attention! Now just TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT!"

  The sign changed again. Now it read:

  IT DOESN'T WOR
K LIKE THAT.

  Jacob threw the Chevy into gear and punched the accelerator. He was going to find that damned church and unplug their sign. Or blow it up, if he needed to. "We'll see what God has to say about that," he muttered. "Of course, You won't be able to talk without your damned sign, will You?"

  He exited the freeway and made his way toward the church. It wasn't difficult to find: it was a huge, cathedral-like structure, paneled on all sides with glass. He had to admit that gaudy as it was, it was impressive. Parking on the side of the street, he strode up to the base of the sign. It was bigger than it looked from the highway: a good twelve feet across, it rested on two thick steel poles arising from a concrete base. Encircling the base was a thick evergreen hedge about four feet tall. Jacob approached it, looking for a way through.

  Something moved within the hedge, and Jacob took a step back, startled.

  "Trust me," said a deep voice from the hedge. Jacob's breath caught in his throat.

  There was a loud POP! followed by a wisp of smoke arising from the hedge. The sign went dark.

  "I told you," said another voice. "The green wire is the ground."

  "Whoops," said the deep voice.

  "At least it doesn't say 'IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT' anymore."

  "Hey, that was your idea," said the deep voice.

  "No, you asked me what I wanted on the sign, and I said, 'It doesn't work like that.'"

  "Ohhhh. I thought that's what you wanted on the sign. Doesn't work like what?"

  "I meant, I shouldn't have to tell you what I want on the sign. The whole point of this sign was that it's programmable. I'm supposed to just be able to pick a verse on my computer and have it show up on the sign."

  "Wasn't it doing that? I thought we were trying to get it to stop showing Bible verses."

  "No! I mean, it was showing verses, but just random crap from Genesis. I can't get it to display the verse I have selected on the computer."

  "Oh. Sounds like a software problem."

  "That's what I was trying to tell you! I told you there was nothing wrong with the sign. Of course, there is now."

  "Oh, I can fix that. Here, I'll just put the ground back."

  Nothing happened.

  "Great, now the sign is broken."

  "Nah, it's probably just a circuit breaker. I'll go check." A heavyset, balding man in a dirty T-shirt and jeans stood up behind the hedge, and shortly after him a wiry, sandy-haired man in a navy polo and khakis.

  "Oh, hey," said the wiry man. "Nice of you to join us."

  "Um, hi," said Jacob.

  "I'm Pastor Bob," said the wiry man. "I'm the one who called. The girl on the phone said you'd be here at noon. Anyway, Shane's been messing with the sign and he seems to have blown a breaker. So that's the first thing you'll need to deal with."

  Jacob found himself nodding.

  "I can do it," said Shane.

  "You've done enough, Shane," said Pastor Bob. "Why don't you take a break. Give...what did you say your name was?"

  "Jacob," said Jacob.

  "Give Jacob your keys. Might as well get our money's worth. It costs us a hundred bucks every time they send someone out."

  Shane grumbled something and unsnapped a ring of keys. He handed them to Jacob. "Through the lobby, downstairs, second door on your left."

  Jacob took the keys and stood for a moment, staring blankly at them.

  "Do you...need me to write that down?" Pastor Bob asked, a bit condescendingly.

  "Um, no," replied Jacob. "I got it." He trudged off toward the church. He was a bit at a loss regarding what to do next, since the Almighty seemed to have called his bluff by preemptively short-circuiting His own sign. Additionally, his anger at God had been supplanted by anger at Pastor Bob. Maybe he was being overly sensitive, but this wasn't the first time he had been mistaken for a serviceman. Or gardener. Or busboy. He wanted to growl, "I'm not here to fix your damn sign. I'm a scientist! I work for the government!"

  But it wasn't in Jacob's nature to yell. He was a soft-spoken, introverted man who abhorred confrontation. Also, the pronouncement that he was a government scientist would undoubtedly provoke any number of uncomfortable questions, chief among which would be, "Why is a government scientist standing in front of a church sign?"

  He was tempted to toss the keys in the bushes and leave, but it occurred to him that he would have to walk past Pastor Bob and Shane to get back to his car. Maybe he could surreptitiously drop the keys in the bushes and then make a wide loop to sneak back around to his car, but he suspected that such a laborious effort to avoid confrontation would drain the gesture of most of its emotional impact. Trying to explain at this point that he wasn't the man they had been waiting for would be extremely awkward. No, all he could do at this point was to head to the electrical panel and flip the tripped breaker. He could probably help them figure out why they couldn't get the right verse to show up on the sign, too. How complicated could church sign software be? Pastor Bob was probably just pushing the wrong buttons.

  He was aware of the irony---that he had somehow been drafted into repairing a sign that he had moments earlier sworn to destroy. He justified this about-face by rationalizing that the sign's messages hadn't been directed at him after all: they were just verses randomly selected by a software glitch---or perhaps just human error. He was under a lot of stress, given the debacle at ACHOO and his resulting reassignment; obviously he wasn't thinking clearly. So: he would flip the breaker, help Pastor Bob figure out his software, and then drive to LAX and hop the next flight to Washington, D.C.---at which point he could begin repairing the damage he'd done to his career.

  Following Shane's instructions, he found the church's electrical room. The church evidently had a ridiculous number of incandescent lights; it had twelve separate electrical panels lining the wall of a room in the church's basement. Wait, no, he thought. There was a thirteenth panel set apart from the others. The others were labeled one through twelve, but this one had no label. Additionally, a schematic of the church's electrical system had been posted on the wall, with every section labeled with a number corresponding to one of the boxes. There was no thirteenth section.

  Jacob opened the cover of the thirteenth panel. A bank of some twenty breakers greeted him. Why would someone install twenty breakers for a nonexistent section of the church?

  An idea struck him. He pulled the Anaheim map from his pocket and located the church. The circle he had drawn cut right through the small gray square denoting the church's property. Doing some quick calculations, he determined that if the tip of the Beacon really was the center of the circle, then the nearest point on the circle to his present location would lie about thirty yards to the southeast of the electrical room. Forgetting the reason he was there, Jacob left the room and traversed the storage room to the south. He ended up staring at a steel door marked "PERMITTED USE ONLY."

  The door was locked, and the key ring proved to be no help. Jacob clutched and pulled at the doorknob to no avail.

  He felt like he should be angry, but he wasn't sure whom to be angry at or what to be angry about. It wasn't like anyone had forced him to go exploring beneath a church in Glendale. He was here of his own free will. Having experienced a series of random phenomena, he had decided that there had to be some sort of unifying explanation---that someone was trying to communicate something to him. An impenetrable obstacle like a locked door weighed against that hypothesis, but it wasn't the fault of the hypothesis that it was inadequate. The hypothesis hadn't asked to be brought into being, and it would be perfectly happy to be allowed to run free with others of its kind in the Land of Inadequate Hypotheses.

  What Jacob needed, he realized, was a new hypothesis---one that didn't involve a supernatural entity attempting to communicate with him through vague signs and symbols. Why would a being with such power choose to communicate in such an imprecise, haphazard manner anyway? Surely God, if He existed, could just pick up a phone if He had something to say. This method of communicatio
n, if that's what it was, had to be the most inefficient way of delivering a message since the time of Pheidippides.7

  No, thought Jacob, if the Almighty was trying to send him a message, He was going to have to do better than this. Unless, of course, the message was "Fuck you, Jacob."

  Suddenly he became aware of cool air blowing on his face.

  Holding out his hand, he felt a jet of air escaping around the door. The air was a good ten degrees cooler than the storage room.

  Strange, he thought. Some kind of ventilation system? Maybe a cold room, like they use for banks of web servers?

  Pressing his ear against the door, he heard a sort of rattling-humming sound. It rapidly grew louder until it sounded like whatever-it-was was right on the other side of the door. There was a clanging noise, and a sound like a metal grate being shoved aside. And then voices, just behind the door.

  The door handle turned.

  As the door opened, Jacob spun out of the way and flattened himself against the wall to the left of the hinges. The door swung wide open, concealing the figures that entered the room. One of them spoke.

  "Well, that's done with," he said.

  "Yeah. Kind of a shame after all the work that went into it," said the other.

  "It's just a tool," said the first man. "Soon the Order will have the new one up and running, and then..."

  The men had reached the stairs, and the remainder of their words was drowned out by the sound of their footsteps.

  Jacob might have gotten a look at the men, but he had made a split-second decision to turn back toward the door and reach around to keep it from latching shut again. When he was sure they were gone, he pulled the door open.