A Creed for the Third Millennium (50 page)

'Yes, I agree. You had better come to the
White House later this morning, say at eight. I'll arrange to get Dr Carriol
here too. I want to find out what's the matter with poor Dr Christian for
myself. And, Harold, lay off the sauce, will you? It's a big day
today.'

'Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Thank you,
sir.'

Gratefully the Secretary for the
Environment cradled his receiver. His head wouldn't stop going round, he felt
really dreadfully ill, he was so druggily tired he fancied he might never be
able to get up from his desk. And without knowing he actually did so, he laid
his head, so heavy, so dizzy, so glutted with sugary blood, so exhausted, he
laid his head down on his desk, and he slept immediately. Or rather he passed
into the altered state of consciousness indicative of a very severe
hyperglycaemia.

In the outer office Mrs Taverner's desk
was empty. She had taken advantage of the President's phone call and visited her
private rest room. On the way out again she thought she might just sit down on
the edge of her couch for a moment, because her legs were shaking with a mixture
of exhaustion and frayed nerves. But the sitting became lying. She fell at once
into a dreamless sleep.

Somehow on the previous night Dr
Christian had felt he must make an effort, must spend a little time with his
dearly beloved family. He knew he had neglected them badly ever since
God in
Cursing
was published, he knew he had been grossly unfair in his treatment
of them; it was not their fault that the practice and the clinic in Holloman had
disintegrated, it was his fault. Yet he had blamed them. And he had grown out —
not of loving them, maybe, but certainly of liking them. Poor things, so
desperately dependent upon him, so eager to please him, so pathetically cast
adrift by his conduct since they had all gathered in New York City to support
him.

So he had made the effort, sat and talked
to them, even laughed and joked a little. He ate the food Mama plied him with,
he gave words of advice to James and Andrew and Miriam, he smiled with special
sweetness on the little Mouse, and he even tried to conciliate Mary. Alone among
them she did not like him, he was really not sure why; but he admitted there
were many possible reasons.

Oh, he had paid for giving them those
hours! Was it just the food that sat undigested and lumpish in his belly, was it
just the food he had to vomit up? Or was it them as well? The pain of bringing
it up was excruciating, the act unendurably long. How could one love one's executioners? How could one
love one's betrayer? Between lying down and sleeping he asked himself those and
other questions over and over again, but thought was ever-increasingly difficult
and he knew himself to be wandering in strange mental lands.

Sleep had not come until after Dr Carriol
got up and left him. He couldn't sleep with her watching, so he feigned it. Only
after she was gone did he work his little personal miracle, will sleep to come.
And admit that ever since she had begun to minister to him he had been more
comfortable, better equipped to deal with the nightly upsurge of
pain.

He slept very freely and deeply and
contentedly until four in the morning, like a last sleep; no dreams came to
plague him, no sounds penetrated.

But not very many minutes after four
o'clock he rolled over and squashed his right arm up against his side,
compressing the tennis-ball-sized mass of unrelieved necrosis in that axilla; it
tried to condense itself out of the way without success, swilled around the
great nerve-laden arterial trunk that supplied his right arm and hand with
blood, swilled around the great bundle of fibres that supplied his right arm and
hand with feeling and movement, and both these swollen infected ropes of tissue
screamed in agony.

He leaped to sit bolt upright in his bed,
the huge cry swallowed in his throat before it could howl out of his gaping
mouth, and he rocked himself back and forth and back and forth in sweating
horror, so transfixed with agony that for perhaps ten minutes he wondered if it
was possible for a human life to snuff itself out from pure pain.

'My God, my God, take this away from me!'
he whimpered then, rocking back and forth, back and forth. Haven't I already
suffered enough? Don't I know I am only a mortal man?'

But the pain rolled on and on. He
catapulted from the bed to walk the floor in a frenzy, his bare black festering toes unable to guide his feet
along a steady path. And so afraid was he of screaming aloud that in the end he
knew he must find a place to go where a scream would not matter.

Like a shadow he passed through the
darkness of the outer canvas room, into the night. Limping and staggering,
stopping each few agonized paces to rock his pain like a baby.

A tree reared up in his path; he reached
out to grab it, held on to it, slid slowly down it until he crouched on the
grass at its spreading base, and there he held his arms around his head, rocking
back and forth.

'My God, grant me tomorrow!' he gasped,
fighting, fighting. 'Not over yet! Only tomorrow! My God, my God, do not leave
me, do not forsake me!'

Though it may not be possible to die from
pure pain, it is certainly possible to become demented from pure pain. Crouching
there at the base of the tree, Dr Joshua Christian yielded up his reason. So
gladly! So gratefully! So very easily, now he no longer had the strength to
struggle. He went quite mad. Mad in the fullest sense of the word. Free at last
of the chains of logical thought, emancipated at last from the fetters of
conscious will, he floated into a perfect and blissful limbo of unreason, of
madness, racked at last beyond endurance, an animal creature huddled there in
touch with the earth that was formed and firm, warm and welcoming as his
mother.

I never want to see another helicopter
again as long as I live, thought Dr Judith Carriol as her vehicle approached the
temporary helipad marked out in the grass of the park just comfortably outside
the palisaded compound in which the various Christians and governmental
dignitaries were accommodated.

An expert by now, she leaped from the
glass bubble and ran across the grass without waiting more than a second after
the pontoons touched the ground. In the act of entering the tent she stopped,
realizing she would never find the light mechanism; she retreated back outside,
turning towards the perimeter of the compound. The high palisade was policed by
a hundred men.

'Sentry!' she called.

'Ma'am?' He loomed out of the
darkness.

'I need a flashlight.'

'Yes, ma'am.' He disappeared.

Half a minute later he was back, a
flashlight beam bobbing up and down in time to his smart steps. With a snappy
salute of respect he handed it to her and went back to his post, where a small
dim puddle of light on the ground gave him his point of reference.

With the flashlight held well down
towards the wooden floor, Dr Carriol passed silently through the tent, and
peeled the flap across Dr Christian's private cubicle away. The scant
furnishings within slid uneasily in and out of the enveloping blackness as she
directed the beam uncertainly towards the bed. There! The light came gliding up
a leg, spilled across the tossed heap of coverings. He wasn't there! He wasn't
in his bed!

For a moment she stood not knowing which
was best, to flood the whole damned tent with light, thereby rousing everybody,
or to commence a stealthy systematic search. The decision came in seconds,
disciplined and cool. If he was cracking she had to get him out quietly, before
anyone understood what was the matter. Mama was pretty close to cracking
herself. Yes, too close to the wire now to risk bringing it all down.

So she prowled the tent in absolute
silence, roving back and forth across every foot of it with her flashlight, into
every backroom cranny, under the tables, behind the chairs. He was not there. He
was not inside at all.

'Sentry!'

'Ma'am?'

'Would you fetch me the officer of the
watch, please?'

He came five minutes later, five minutes
during which she waited in static panic, steeling herself not to
move.

'Ma'am?' He leaned closer. 'Oh, Dr
Carriol!'

Major Withers himself. That was a break.
'Thank God for a familiar face!' she said. 'Major, you understand that I have
Presidential authority, do you not?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'Dr Christian is missing from his bed,
and he is not in the Christian tent anywhere. You may take my word for that. Now
it is absolutely imperative that no fuss be made, that no hint be given to any
other occupant of this compound that we have trouble. But we have to find Dr
Christian! Quickly and quietly and with no more light than we can help. When we
do find him, I want no attempt made to approach him. No matter who finds him, I
want that man to report immediately to me.
Only
to me! I am going to
stand here without moving, exactly where I am now, so I can be located without
delay. Understood?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

Again a wait, a long and painful wait,
with the precious minutes galloping away into the coming dawn. Once she looked
down at her watch by the light of the flashlight, and saw that it was nearly
six. O God in heaven, let them find him! Let him not be out there on the other
side of the palisade among the crowd! She had to get him away before the
compound woke up, before the people outside woke up. Helicopters coming and
going were bad enough. Thank God in this power-deprived day and age for two-hour
daylight saving! They had a few more minutes before it became light enough to
see. Across the grass little jerky jets of light flickered in and out of
shrubbery and trees as a hundred men moved through the darkness.

'Ma'am?'

She jumped. 'yes?'

'We've found him.'

'Oh, thank God for that!'

She followed after the major with her
shoes hushing in the grass,
shish shish, shish shish,
quick and flawless
in their rhythm. Good girl, Judith! You're calm. You'll save it yet. Just keep
calm no matter what they've found.

The major pointed into the blackest patch
of shrubbery.

She approached slowly, not playing her
light around in case it frightened him.

There he was! Huddled at the base of a
great beech tree with his head wrapped in his arms, very still. She came up to
him and knelt down beside him.

'Joshua? Joshua, are you all
right?'

He didn't move.

'It's Judith. What is it? What's the
matter?'

And he heard her. He heard a well-known
human voice and understood that he was not yet dead, that this vale of tears was
still his for the taking. But did he want to take? No! He smiled secretly into
his arms.

'I hurt,' he said, like a
child.

'I know. Come!' She slid her hand in
under his left elbow, and got both of them to their feet quite
easily.

'Judith? Who is this Judith?' he asked,
looking at her. Then he looked beyond her to where the dim thready outlines of a
dozen men towered against a sky that dreamily cherished the first tiny hint of
daybreak.

'It is time to walk,' he said,
remembering the only fact he had carried from sanity into madness with
him.

'No, Joshua, not today. It's over! The
March of the Millennium is over! This is Washington. Now it's time for you to
rest and be healed.'

'No,' he said, more strongly. 'Walk! I
walk!'

'The streets are too crowded to walk,
it's impossible.' She no longer knew the right things to say to him, she could
not follow his thoughts.

He stood stubbornly still. 'I
walk.'

'Then how about walking with me a little
way, just as far as the fence? After that you can
go off on your own, okay?'

He smiled, began to obey, smelled her
fear, and backed off. 'No! You're trying to trick me!'

'Joshua, I wouldn't do that to you! I'm
Judith! You know me, I'm Judith! Your own Judith!'

'Judith?' he asked, his voice rising
incredulously. 'No! Judith? No! You're Judas,' Judas come to betray me!' And he
began to laugh. 'Oh, Judas, most beloved of all my disciples! Kiss me, show me
it's over!' He began to weep. 'Judas, Judas, I want it to be over! Kiss me! Show
me it's over! I cannot endure this pain. This waiting.'

She bent forward and hovered on tiptoe
with her face an inch from his cheek, her eyes closed, almost tasting the smell
of his skin, which was stale and malodorous. Then her lips made the last
enormous journey, and came to rest at one side of his mouth, his mouth bitten to
shreds. 'There,' she said. 'It is over, Joshua.'

And it was over. The only kiss he had
ever asked her for. What might have happened to Judith Carriol and Joshua
Christian if he had wanted to kiss her? Probably nothing different.

It was over. He held out his hands to the
soldiers. 'I am betrayed,' he said. 'My own beloved disciple has betrayed me to
my death.'

The men moved forward, surrounded him. He
began to walk in their midst. Then he turned to where she followed, and said,
'How much did they have to pay you in this day and age?'