Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  So why, you ask, did he turn up on Easter Saturday, broken and bloodied from the Crucifixion? Simple. Without the stigmata how could we unbelievers have recognised him? His appearance, the timing – it all helped us make the right connections. And would lead us think that he had been catapulted from the rock tomb into the twentieth-century. That was his story too. But there was no proof. At the beginning, he had said it was an accident. Now it was part of the plan. How many more times were his mission orders going to be revised?

  I was not trying, by means of this conjectural manoeuvre, to deny our peripatetic visitor his place in world history. As far as I was concerned he was still The Man. But these renewed doubts allowed me to regain control of my destiny. For if Time was not simultaneous, then we could dump the book analogy overboard. The battle between ‘Brax and the Empire was not a foregone conclusion. The issue was still in doubt. God, the Presence, or Whoever, did not have my life-plot filed away in some cosmic computer. I was still able, along with the rest of humanity, to choose what I would or would not do. To listen to what The Man had to say, or go to hell in a handcart.

  It was a typical ‘Braxian thought but since I had allowed him to creep back into my loins it was only natural he would try to worm his way into my head and gain control of my mind. And it was so much easier to surrender. Sleep clogged my brain and broke up my train of thoughts. I turned over, tucked the quilt down between our bare backs and went out like a light.

  Somewhere around three o’clock, I surfaced from a dreamless void and my sleep-sodden brain slowly became aware of a bluish light coming from the living-room. At first I thought that Miriam had got up and put on the TV then I realised that she lay asleep beside me. I dropped my head back on to the pillow and considered getting up to switch the damn thing off and it occurred to me it could mean that The Man was back.

  I rolled out from under the quilt, groped my way into my robe and padded out of the bedroom, my eyes almost closed in a desperate effort to cling onto sleep. To the point where they didn’t even snap open at what they saw in the living-room. Was it a dream? I don’t know. I’m still not sure. But the light wasn’t coming from the TV set. It came from two palely glowing humanoids that stood on either side of The Man. About six foot three inches in height and dressed in a kind of unisex coverall – like racing-drivers wear. Only these two weren’t covered with advertising. I know they had eyes, a nose and a mouth but beyond that I can’t tell you what they looked like. If I had to name a face, I’d have to say John Philip Law who played the angel in Barbarella. But more almond-eyed. More – Pharaonic. Not that it really matters because, as The Man said, each of us sees angels the way we imagine them to be. That’s why many of the secret gospels that were suppressed by Rome claimed he had the power to change his appearance and emphasised that no two observers saw him in the same way.

  The Man’s companions had this soft light raying out through their bodies. All the details seemed to be in soft focus. I suppose I should have been shocked, flabbergasted but, for some reason, I just took it all in my stride. As I’ve explained, I had this feeling I was dreaming. I greeted The Man with a wave of the hand and scratched my chest. ‘Hi, can I get you guys anything?’

  ‘No,’ said The Man. ‘We’re just passing through.’ He introduced his two companions. ‘This is Michael, and this is Gabriel. I don’t see them as you do. How do they look?’

  ‘Tall, and radioactive,’ I said. We exchanged nods but I didn’t attempt to shake hands. ‘How are things going?’

  ‘Fine,’ replied The Man, ‘We’ve been attending to a few things in the up-when. I was on my way back to Jerusalem and I thought I’d better stop off to tell you not to worry. Everything’s going to turn out just fine.’

  He said he would never he to me but I venture to suggest that the truth of that statement depends very much on one’s own particular point of view. But once again that is with the benefit of hindsight. What I said was – ‘I’m glad to hear it. Does that mean you’re taking care of McDonald and Jeff Fowler? And how about Linda? Is she going to give me trouble?’

  ‘We’re being called down-when,’ said The Man. He patted my arm just below the shoulder. ‘Talk to them. But don’t wait too long. There’s not a lot of time left.’

  ‘But how?’ I heard myself ask tiredly. ‘What am I going to say?’

  The Man gave me a confident nod. ‘You’ll think of something. I’ll try and get up over the weekend.’ The way he talked, you could almost believe that the Empire had leased the Time Express and was running a shuttle service.

  Michael waved his hand. ‘Be seeing you.’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ I said. Without thinking what that particular exchange might mean, or even noticing whether his lips moved.

  Gabriel just nodded.

  ‘One last thing,’ said The Man. ‘When you get up, don’t miss the news on the radio.’

  I nodded sleepily. ‘Okay …’

  And they were gone.

  I stood there for a few minutes while my eyes got used to the dark then shuffled back to bed. The whole encounter had such a strange, off-beat quality I’m almost certain it was a dream and that, in fact, I never got out of bed. But then what are dreams but other dimensions of being? That extend from the plane of temporal existence into the realms of the infinite.

  The alarm woke me at a quarter-to-seven. Miriam stirred briefly then went back to sleep. I forced myself out of bed, hummed away ten minutes of my life under the shower then padded into the kitchen, put fresh coffee into the percolator and loaded last night’s dishes into the sink so the cleaning lady wouldn’t have a fit. I pressed the ‘On’ button of my Sanyo portable as I went past into the living-room in search of a pack of cigarettes and mulled over the strange dream I’d had about meeting Michael and Gabriel. Normally they fade away almost as soon as I wake up, but the details of this one stuck in my mind.

  When I returned to the kitchen, the seven o’clock news had begun. I listened mechanically as the newscaster ran through the morning’s headlines. Global news, national news; nothing much had changed since yesterday. Then came the local stuff. It wasn’t the first item. These things never are. But during the night, the police and municipal authorities had been bombarded with hundreds of phone calls from people who claimed to have seen a giant UFO hovering above the city. JFK, La Guardia and Newark Air Traffic Control had all reported picking it up on their radar screens but a USAF spokesman at the Pentagon had said that the signal had been caused by freak conditions in the magnetosphere.

  Which was just as well, because the estimated size of the spaceship was twice the length of Manhattan Island …

  I took Miriam in a cup of coffee and described my nocturnal encounter with The Man and his two luminous side-kicks.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she snapped.

  ‘Come on, gimme a break,’ I said. ‘I’m not even sure I was awake myself.’ I told her about the city-sized UFO that had been hurriedly explained away by the Air Force.

  ‘Do you think it was real?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘After what you said last night, I’m not sure if I know what that word means.’

  Dream or no dream, it was clear that The Man knew about the tug-of-war I was having with ‘Brax. Or was it his tug-of-war – and was I just the ribbon around the rope that was swaying back and forth across the line? Overnight, he had produced Michael and Gabriel, cast the shadow of one of the Empire’s longships over New York city and had provided circumstantial evidence that those feet, in ancient times, had been fleetingly shod in blue jogging shoes and black fifty-fifty nylon and wool mix socks.

  As I rode downtown in Jake’s cab, I remember wishing an archaeological team could have dug those withered treads out of the strata containing the rubble of the first-century city. It would have been indisputable proof of his time-travelling. The trouble was, no one would have accepted it. In the same way that scientists could not bring themselves to accept the evidence of the Turin shroud.

  I me
t Brad in the lift. He, Joe and I are always the first three in. Joe and I like to start work early. Brad comes in because the mailroom is a lot nicer than where he lives. He was carrying a radio-cassette player that looked big enough to hold two car batteries.

  Brad flashed a set of teeth that would cost someone like me at least two thousand dollars. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How about that flyin’ saucer. D’ya hear about that?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Did you see it?’

  ‘Nahh,’ he said. ‘How come these things always turn up when ‘most ever’body’s asleep?’

  I grinned at him. ‘It’s to stop guys like you stealing their hub-caps.’

  ‘Yeah …’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Twenty-six miles long. Boy … imagine trying to park that fuckin’ thing.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I didn’t tell him I knew the owner.

  Linda made it to the office around a quarter to ten and kept herself busy with the tapes I’d left on her desk. Finally, she stuck her head around the door. ‘Have you got a minute?’

  I switched on my Mr Nice Guy smile. ‘Sure. Come on in.’

  She crossed the carpet as if it was a minefield and when she got to my desk she seemed unable to decide what to do with her hands. ‘Listen,’ she began. ‘About what happened yesterday. I didn’t know that Gale was going to try to – well, you know – ’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘Nobody got hurt. And, in any case, there was nothing I could tell her. She already knew it all.’ I blunted the barb with an understanding smile but it still cut deep.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ she said. ‘If I’m going to get fired, I don’t want it to be for something I didn’t do. She called me yesterday saying she needed to get in touch with you urgently. You hadn’t said when you might be back so I suggested she try the bookshop. After all, you hadn’t told me to keep her off your back. As for that business about Abraham Lucksteen, maybe I did speak out of turn but you should have taken me into your confidence. I’ve always made a point of knowing who all your clients are and what cases we’re dealing with. When I got this call all I did was check the files to see if I could have made a mistake. Since we didn’t have any record of the guy I didn’t see any harm in saying we didn’t represent him. But I did not give out any confidential information.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy to say,’ she insisted. ‘But I’m getting very confused. I think I ought to tell you I had a long talk with Gale last night and she told me about these blood samples that have got some guy called Fowler jumping up and down. Why did you tell him the blood came from someone who was supposed to have died when you knew all along that it came from Sheppard? What’s wrong with him? Is he carrying some kind of plague or something?’

  It was a good question. Because in a way, he was carrying something that could be regarded by the ‘Braxian world as a fatal disease – Truth. But like its companion, Honesty, it could hardly be described as contagious. ‘Brax had done his best to make sure that most of us were immune to both.

  ‘If I’m going to go on working for you,’ continued Linda, ‘I think I have the right to know exactly what it is that you and Doctor Maxwell are covering up. I’m not asking out of morbid curiosity. I’m concerned. I mean he was such a nice guy. So tell me – is Sheppard in some kind of trouble?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. But I could be.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  How could she? How could anyone guess what Miriam and I had been concealing? A secret that, depending on your point of view, was either truly and utterly amazing or totally absurd. I gazed at her, the words locked in my throat and thought of what The Man had said to me in his fleeting dream-like visit. Zacharias and Joseph had both received important messages in dreams. Why not me? Even though Linda had worked with me for two years I did not know whether I could entrust her with the truth about Mr Sheppard. But I knew I could trust The Man. Or rather, should. I was still a little wary of my new-found belief that The Man would see me through the jam I was in. But he had told me to speak to Linda and now that she had confronted me, I was determined to try.

  What could I lose? If she thought I had become unhinged and told Joe, it would only make him more convinced that I needed the holiday I intended to take. If she ratted on me she’d be out of a job, and if she kept it to herself but found it disturbing, she would leave anyway.

  I motioned her to pull up a chair. ‘Linda,’ I said, ‘I want you to level with me because what I’m about to tell you could wreck my career. Is McDonald offering you any kind of inducement to pump me on behalf of Channel Eight?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. She figured she could crack the Berlin Wall you’d thrown up around Sheppard all by herself.’ She waited for my reaction then, when nothing came down the line, she added, ‘That’s the honest to God truth, Leo. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. We’ve been to a couple of bars but the only thing she’s interested in is finding herself a decent apartment. All of which is none of your damn business. I’m just trying to prove I like working here. Okay?’

  I accepted this declaration with a nod. ‘Did she tell you anything about Mrs Perez?’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘The lady who followed you from the dry cleaning store,’ I said. ‘Tell me, your parents are Hungarian, right? So what does that make you – a Roman Catholic?’

  ‘Yes, but not a very good one,’ she replied. ‘I go to Mass at Christmas and Easter. It’s a kind of family thing. But I stopped going to confession when I was eighteen.’

  ‘But you still believe in God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and all the rest of it…?’

  She smiled. ‘Not fervently but yes, I go along with most of it. But what has this got to do with Sheppard?’

  ‘Good question …’ I lit a cigarette to steady my nerve. ‘Do you believe in miracles?’

  She looked at me curiously. I could see she was wondering where this was leading. ‘You mean like in the Bible? I’m not sure. I’m not too happy about the claims made by people who’ve been to Lourdes, but I do believe that there are certain individuals who have the gift of healing – even though I haven’t actually met one.’

  I hesitated then took one step nearer the brink. ‘Would you believe me if I told you that Doctor Maxwell and I had witnessed a miracle?’

  ‘I might,’ she shrugged. ‘It depends what kind.’

  ‘Okay.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Would you believe me if I told you that Sheppard, the man you went shopping with, was lying dead on a slab in a morgue three weeks ago?’

  She did a nervous double-take. ‘Say that again?’

  I spelt it out for her. ‘He was dead when I first saw him.’

  ‘Ahh,’ she said. ‘I see what you mean. Someone thought he’d died but the doctors revived him. Amazing. I’ve heard of that happening. Some people have been dead for up to three hours.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, you’ve got it wrong. There was no mistake. He was killed on Easter Friday. Only not this one. He died two thousand years ago. Forget the doctors. He didn’t need them.’ I glanced at my watch then sat back and waited.

  Her eye flickered across my face then on to the objects on my desk, the window and the pictures on the wall behind me. As if she were playing ‘I Spy’.

  ‘It took him three days to get better,’ I said helpfully.

  She eyed me. ‘I know who died two thousand years ago,’ she replied. ‘But it doesn’t make sense. Whether he was dead or alive, how is it possible for you to see him here in Manhattan?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s the miracle …’

  She sat there staring at me and let her breath out in a long slow sigh. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I replied. ‘I’ve never been more serious in all my life. Now perhaps you can understand why Doctor Maxwell and I felt we had to keep his presence her
e a secret.’

  She laughed nervously. ‘Let me get this straight. Are you trying to tell me that Mr Sheppard is the Risen Christ?’

  I smiled. ‘I know how you feel. His disciples had the same problem. Do you see now why I said it could wreck my career?’

  She laughed again, as I knew she would. ‘I can see it could upset things a little.’

  I leaned forward. ‘I’m not kidding, Linda. This is no joke, believe me. Do you really think that I’d be sitting here telling you something that, if it got out, would probably get me certified? In the last three weeks I’ve seen and heard enough things to put me into the nut-house ten times over. Luckily, Miriam’s been there to witness most of it. Do you think McDonald would be following me around if I was making all this up? Ask her to tell you what happened to Mrs Perez, the lady who followed you, and who dry cleaned Sheppard’s robe, then come back and talk to me.’

  She stared at me, chewing her lip. Trying to dispel the disquieting feeling that I might be telling the truth. ‘But Leo,’ she said. ‘I talked to him. He told me about his place in California, what he was writing – he even knew people that I knew who worked out at Universal Studios.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ I laughed. ‘I told him what to say. And he got all that stuff about Universal Pictures out of your own head.’

  Her cheeks flushed red.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He knows everything about me too. When he landed on me, I had to give him some kind of cover story. I mean, come on, what would you have thought if I’d asked you to take Jesus Christ shopping in Macy’s?’

  She laughed again. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ She shook her head. ‘Listen, it’s a wonderful idea but I have to be honest with you. I accept that you believe it but – it’s not possible.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ I said. ‘That’s what I kept telling myself when he arrived here three weeks ago. But what I’ve seen has convinced me otherwise.’

  She fixed me with her eyes. ‘Where is he now?’

  I stared straight back at her. ‘I believe he is in first-century Jerusalem. One of the things he’s told us is that Time is simultaneous. The past is still happening, the future already exists. And he has the power to manifest himself in any place and any century he chooses.’