Blasphemy wf-2

by Douglas Preston

  “You’re going to look just great, Reverend,” said Wanda, snapping the robe over him and tucking it in around his neck. Then, with a soothing clinking of bottles, combs, and brushes, she set to work, paying special attention to the reverend’s liver spots and the spiderlike clusters of varicose veins on his cheeks and nose. She was good at what she did and she knew it. Regardless of what the others might say, she thought the reverend a fine, handsome man.

  Her long white hands worked with expert economy, swift and precise, but the reverend’s ears were always a challenge. They stood out from the head a trifle too much, and were lighter and redder than his adjacent skin. Sometimes, as he strode about the stage, the backlight would catch his ears, turning them into pink stained glass. To bring them to their proper tonal value, she covered them with a heavy base makeup three shades darker than his face, and finished with a face powder that made them virtually opaque.

  As she smoothed, stroked, brushed, and dabbed, she checked her work in a color-balanced video monitor that displayed a feed from a camera trained on the reverend. It was essential to see her handiwork as it would appear onscreen—something that looked perfect to the eye could show up as a ghastly two-tone on the monitor. She worked on him this way twice a week: for his televised sermon on Sunday, and for his Friday talk show on the Christian Cable Service.

  Yes, the reverend was a fine man.

  REVEREND DON T. SPATES FELT COMFORTED AND cosseted by her professional bustle. It had been a bad year. His enemies were out to get him, twisting his every word, attacking him mercilessly. Every sermon seemed to generate vilification from the atheist left. It was a sad time when a man of God was attacked for speaking the simple truth. Of course, there’d been that unfortunate incident in the motel with the two prostitutes. The ungodly liars had had a field day with that. But the flesh is weak—as the Bible repeatedly confirms. In Jesus’ eyes, we are all hopeless, backsliding sinners. Spates had asked for and received God’s forgiveness. But the hypocritical, evil world forgave slowly, if at all.

  “Time for your teeth, Reverend.”

  Spates opened his mouth and felt her expert hands applying the ivory dentine fluid. In the bright lights of the camera, it would make his teeth flash as pearly white as the gates of heaven.

  After that she worked on his hair, carefully grooming the wiry, orangish helmet until it was just right. She gave it an indirect spritz of hair spray and puffed on a bit of powder to tone the color down to a more respectable ginger.

  “Your hands, Reverend?”

  Spates extracted his freckled hands from under the cover and laid them on a manicure tray. She bustled over them, applying a makeup base designed to minimize wrinkles and color variations. His hands had to match his face. In fact, Spates was particularly insistent that his hands be perfect. They were an extension of his voice. Botched makeup there could ruin the impact of his message, as camera close-ups of laying on of hands revealed flaws unnoticed by the eye.

  The hands took her fifteen minutes. She gouged dirt from under the nails, applied clear fingernail polish, repaired nicks, sanded the nails, cleaned and cut off excess skin, and, finally, covered them with an appropriate shade of makeup base.

  A final check in the TV monitor, a few touch-ups, and Wanda stepped back.

  “All ready, Reverend.” She turned the monitor toward him.

  Spates examined himself in the monitor—face, eyes, ears, lips, teeth, hands.

  “That spot on my neck, Wanda? You missed that spot—again.”

  A quick swipe of the sponge, a touch-up with the brush, and it vanished. Spates grunted his satisfaction.

  Wanda flicked off the coverings and stood back. From out of the wings, Spates’s aide, Charles, rushed in with the reverend’s suit jacket. Spates rose from the chair and held out his arms, while Charles slipped on the jacket, tugged and smoothed down the cloth, gave it a quick brushing, plumped up the shoulders, smoothed and tucked the collar, and adjusted the tie.

  “How are the shoes, Charles?”

  Charles gave the shoes a few swipes with a shine cloth.

  “Time?”

  “Six minutes to eight, Reverend.”

  Years ago, Spates had had the idea to schedule his Sunday sermon for prime time in the evening, to avoid the televangelist morning crush. He called it God’s Prime Time. Everyone predicted he’d fail, going up against some of the strongest programming of the week. Instead, it had proved a stroke of genius.

  Spates strode from the room toward the wings of the stage, Charles following. As he came close, he could hear the rustle and murmur of the faithful—thousands of them—taking their seats in the Silver Cathedral from where he broadcast God’s Prime Time for two hours every Sunday.

  “Three minutes,” murmured Charles in his ear.

  Spates inhaled the air in the shadows of the wings. The crowd quieted as the audience prompts scrolled across the screens and the appointed time neared.

  He felt the glory of God energize his body with the Holy Spirit. He loved this moment just before the sermon; it was like nothing else in this world, a surge of rising fire, triumph, and anticipatory exultation.

  “How’s the audience?” he whispered to Charles.

  “About sixty percent.”

  A cold knife stabbed into the heart of his joy. Sixty percent—last week it

  A cold knife stabbed into the heart of his joy. Sixty percent—last week it had been seventy. Just six months ago people had been lining up for tickets, Sunday after Sunday, and had to be turned away. But since the motel incident, on-air donations were down by half and the ratings for the broadcast had fallen forty percent. The bastards at the Christian Cable Service were about to cancel his Roundtable America talk show. God’s Prime Time Ministry was heading into the darkest night since he had founded it in a vacant JCPenney thirty years before. If he didn’t get an infusion of cash soon, he’d be forced to default on the “Own a Piece of Jesus” bonds he had sold over the air to hundreds of thousands of parishioners to finance the building of the Silver Cathedral.

  His thoughts turned back to the meeting with the lobbyist Booker Crawley earlier that day. What a sign of God’s grace that Crawley’s proposal had come his way. If handled right, this might be just the issue he’d been looking for to rejuvenate the ministry and galvanize financial support. The evolution versus creationism debate was old hat, and it was getting hard to gain traction on that one—especially with so much competition from other televangelists. Crawley’s issue, on the other hand, was fresh, it was new, and it was ripe for the plucking.

  Damned if he wasn’t going to pluck that fruit—now.

  “It’s time, Reverend,” came Charles’s low voice from behind.

  The lights went up and a roar came from the crowd as the Reverend Spates strode onstage, his head bowed, his hands raised and clasped together, shaking rhythmically.

  “God’s Prime Time!” he rolled out in his richly timbred bass voice, full of vibrato. “ God’s Prime Time! The Prime Time of God’s Glory Is Nigh!” At stage center, he stopped sharply, raised his head, and stretched his arms outward to the audience, as if beseeching them. His fingertips trembled. His words rolled over the audience.

  “Greetings to all of you in the precious Name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!”

  Another roar rose from the giant Silver Cathedral. He lifted his hands high, palms up, and the roar went on—sustained with the help of the prompters. He lowered his arms, and silence fell once again, like the aftermath of thunder.

  He bowed his head in prayer, then said, in a soft, humble voice, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I.”

  He raised his head slowly, keeping his profile to the audience, and spoke in his richest tone, raising one arm, inch by inch, drawing out each word to its fullest.

  “In the beginning,” he throbbed, “God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

 
He paused, inhaling dramatically. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

  His voice suddenly boomed through the Silver Cathedral like the notes of an organ. “And God said,Let there be light! ”

  A dramatic beat, and he continued, in the barest whisper. “And there was light.”

  He strode to the edge of the stage and beamed a folksy smile on the wor-shippers. “We all know those opening words of Genesis. Some of the most powerful words ever written. No ambiguity there. Those are the very words of God, my friends. God is telling us in His own words how He created the universe.”

  He strolled casually along the edge of the stage. “My friends, will it surprise you if I tell you the government is spending your hard-earned taxpayer dollars in an effort to prove God wrong?”

  He turned, eyeing the silent audience.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  A murmur rose from the sea of faces.

  He pulled a piece of paper from his suit-coat pocket and snapped it in the air, his voice suddenly full of thunder. “It’s right here. I downloaded it off the Internet less than an hour ago.”

  Another murmur.

  “And what did I learn? That our government has spent forty billion dollars to prove Genesis wrong—forty billion dollars of your money to attack the holiest Scripture in the Old Testament. Yes, my friends, it’s all part of the government-sponsored, secular humanist war on Christianity, and it’s ugly.”

  He paced the stage. He shook the paper in his fist, crackling it.

  “Right here it says they’ve built a machine in the Arizona desert called Isabella. Many of you have heard of it.”

  A big murmur of agreement.

  “I had, too. I just thought it was another government boondoggle. Only recently was I made aware of its pur-pose.”

  A sudden halt in his pacing, and a slow turn to face the audience.

  “Its pur-pose, my friends, is to investigate the so-called Big Bang theory. That’s right, you heard it, there’s that word ‘theory’ again!”

  His voice was laced with scorn.

  “The Big Bang theory goes like this:thirteen billion years ago a teeny-weeny point in space blew up and created the entire universe—without the helping hand of God. You heard me: Creation without God. Ay-thee-istic Creation.”

  He waited while a disbelieving silence grew. He shook the paper again. “That’s what it says, folks! A whole Web site, hundreds of pages devoted to explaining the Creation of the Universe, and not one mention of God!”

  Another glare around the hall.

  “This Big Bang theory is no different from the theory that says our great-granddaddies were monkeys. Or the theory that says life’s complexity was created by an accidental rearrangement of molecules in a puddle of mud. This Big Bang theory is just another secular humanistic, anti-Christian, antifaith theory no different from evolution, except that this one’s worse. Much, much worse! ”

  Spin, turn, pace.

  “Because this theory attacks the very notion that God created the universe. Make no mistake about it: Isabella is a direct attack on Christian faith. The Big Bang theory says this beautiful, this exquisite, this God-given universe of ours happened all by itself, by sheer accident, thirteen billion years ago. And as if that Christian-hating theory wasn’t enough, now they want to spend forty billion dollars of our money to prove it!”

  He raked the audience with a fierce eye.

  “How about if we asked the savants in Washington for equal time? What if we asked them for forty billion dollars to prove the Truth of Genesis? What about that! The professional Jesus-hating liberals in Washington would gnash their teeth and foam at the mouth! They’d trot out that old saw about separation of church and state! These are the folks who’ve banned Jesus from the classrooms, yanked the Ten Commandments from our courtrooms, outlawed Christmas trees and crèches, mocked and spat on our beliefs—and then these same secular humanists think nothing of spending our money to prove the Bible wrong, to make a lie out of our Christian faith!”

  The hubbub swelled. A few people stood up, then more, then the entire congregation. They surged upward like a tsunami, their voices merging into a single roar of disapproval.

  The prompters remained dark, unneeded now.

  “This is a war on Christianity, my friends! It’s a war to the finish, and they’re taxing you and me to wage it! Are we going to let them spit on Christ and charge us for the privilege?”

  The Reverend DonT. Spates stopped dead at stage center, breathing heavily, gazing out over the seething audience in the Virginia Beach cathedral, flabbergasted at the effect of his words. He could hear it, he could see it, he could feel it—the frenzied swell, the upwelling of righteous anger, the very air crackling with the electricity of outrage. He could hardly believe it. He’d been throwing rocks all his life, and suddenly he’d lobbed a grenade. This was the issue he’d been praying for, hoping for, searching for.

  “God and Jesus be praised!” he cried out, throwing his arms toward heaven and raising his eyes to the glittering ceiling. He sank to his knees in loud, quavering prayer. “Lord Jesus, with Your help, we will stop this insult to Your Father. We will destroy that infernal machine out there in the howling desert. We will put an end to this blasphemy against You called Isabella!”

  7

  AT QUARTER TO EIGHT, WYMAN FORD stepped out of the two-bedroom casita and stood at the end of the driveway, inhaling the fragrant night air. The windows of the dining hall were rectangles of yellow floating in darkness. Above the swish of the sprinklers on the playing field, he could hear the faint sounds of a boogie-woogie piano tune and the murmur of voices. He couldn’t imagine Kate as any different from the irreverent, pot-smoking, argumentative graduate student he had known. But she must have changed—a lot—to become assistant director of the most important scientific experiment in the history of physics.

  His mind seemed to slide naturally into memories of her and their time together, thoughts that had the unfortunate tendency to become X-rated. He hastily shoved them back into the id corner of his mind from which they had sprung. This was not, he thought, a responsible way to begin the investigation.

  He skirted the sprinklers, reached the front door of the old log trading post, and entered. Light and music spilled from a recreation room to his right. He walked in. People were playing cards or chess, reading, working on laptop computers. Away from the Bridge, they appeared almost relaxed.

  Hazelius himself sat at the piano. His tiny fingers jumped around the keys for several more bars and then he rose. “Wyman, welcome! Dinner is just ready.” He met Ford halfway across the room, took his arm, and led him toward the dining hall. The rest began to rise and follow.

  A heavy pine table set with candles, silver, and fresh wildflowers dominated the dining room. A fire blazed in a stone fireplace. Navajo rugs hung on the walls; Nakai Rock style, Ford guessed from the geometric designs. Several bottles of wine stood open, and the smell of grilled steak wafted in from the kitchen.

  Hazelius acted the genial host, seating people, laughing, joking. He ushered Ford to a seat in the middle, next to a willowy blonde.

  “Melissa? This is Wyman Ford, our new anthropologist. Melissa Corcoran, our cosmologist.”

  They shook hands. A mass of heavy blond hair tumbled down around her shoulders, and her pale green eyes, the color of sea glass, turned on him with curiosity. A smattering of freckles dusted an upturned nose; a beaded Indian vest, both stylish and simple, set off her pants and shirt. But Corcoran’s eyes, too, were faintly bloodshot and rimmed in red.

  The seat on his other side was empty.

  “Before you start on Wyman,” Hazelius said to Corcoran, “I’d like to finish introducing him to those who didn’t meet him earlier.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This is Julie Thibodeaux, our quantum electrodynamicist.”

  A woman opposite Ford gave him a curt hello before returning to a querulous monologue aimed at the white-haired,
leprechaun-like man next to her. Thibodeaux resembled the stereotype of the female scientist: dowdy, overweight, dressed in a dingy lab coat, her short hair stringy from lack of washing. A set of pens in a plastic pocket protector completed the caricature. Her file said she suffered from something called “borderline personality disorder.” Ford was curious to see just how that manifested itself.

  “The gentleman talking to Julie is Harlan St. Vincent, our electrical engineer. When Isabella is running at full power, Harlan manages the nine hundred megawatts of electricity pouring in here like Niagara Falls.”

  St. Vincent stood and extended his hand across the table. “Pleased to meet you, Wyman.” When he sat back down, Thibodeaux went on with her disquisition, which seemed to involve something called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

  “Michael Cecchini, our Standard Model particle physicist, is the gentleman at the far end.”

  A short, dark man rose, extended his hand. Ford took it, struck by his curiously flat, opaque gray eyes. The man looked dead inside—and the handshake was the same: clammy and lifeless. And yet, as if in defiance of the nihilism at the center of his existence, Cecchini had taken fastidious care with his dress; his shirt was a white so brilliant it hurt the eyes, there was a knife-edge crease in his slacks, and his hair was parted with military precision and groomed to perfection. Even his hands were immaculate, as soft and clean as patted dough, the nails emery-boarded and polished to a high gloss. Ford caught a faint scent of an expensive aftershave. But nothing could completely cover up the whiff of existential despair clinging to him.

  Hazelius finished the introductions and disappeared into the kitchen, and the noise level grew.

  Ford still hadn’t met Kate. He wondered if that was a coincidence.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever met an anthropologist before,” Melissa Corcoran spoke to him.

  He turned. “And I’ve never met a cosmologist.”

  “You’d be amazed at how many people think I do hair and nails.” Her smile seemed an invitation. “What exactly will you be doing here?”

  “Getting to know the locals. Explaining to them what’s going on.”