Mercury Falls (30 page)

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If you don’t know why a demon would want to vandalize Christine’s apartment, well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you’re a bit out of the loop in Heavenly intrigue. You probably should start attending some meetings. The good news is that it makes a better story if you don’t know at this point.

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Or by someone else wearing a jumpsuit, who has been instructed to do so by someone wearing a tie, and so on.

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People of a “scientific” bent have been known to ridicule those, like Harry, who believe unlikely notions such as the idea that the Universe was created in six days and that the first human being was formed by God breathing into a lump of clay. It should be noted that the latest scientific theories entail that (1) all of the matter in the Universe was once compressed into an area smaller than the point of a pin; and (2) life came about when a chance collision of molecules accidentally lined up
three million nucleic acids
in exactly the right order to form a self-replicating protein.

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A lesser known but related teaching of St. Culain is that the principle of cause and effect is an illusion. Culain argued that Event C could not cause Event E unless the end of Event C and the start of Event E were adjacent in time. But this would mean that there could be no time in between C and E, giving C no time in which to cause E. Further, if time wasn’t made up of indivisible elements like chrotons, then each event could be split into an infinite number of smaller events, each with an infinitely small duration. Since C and E each had an infinitely small duration, and there was no time in between them, the length of time from the beginning of C to the end of E was infinitely small. As this was true of all Cs and Es, the entire chain of all events that had ever occurred and would ever occur would take an infinitely small amount of time. This would result in everything happening at once, which was clearly not the case, particularly during the mind-numbingly dull Dark Ages.

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The identity of the Antichrist is, of course, less important than the fact that there
is
an Antichrist. No one cares much what the Antichrist says or does, but they feel better knowing he’s around. In this way, he is much like the pope or the United Nations.
      It is probably not entirely coincidental that both the pope and the United Nations have often been accused of
being
the Antichrist. Other individuals and organizations have also made the short list, of course. Nero was an early favorite, and dictators like Napoleon and Hitler were strong contenders. Even the affable U.S. president Ronald Wilson Reagan—who had the distinction of having six letters in each of his three names—was named as a potential Antichrist. Later, the name of vaunted Israeli general David Isaacson also tended to crop up among people who discussed such things.
      Yet, on some level, most people seemed to sense that someone like Hitler was a little too obvious a choice. Once you make it clear that your intention is global conquest, the mystery is gone and people start to look for someone with less pedestrian aims. Start talking about a Brotherhood of Man or a New World Order, though, and ears perk up.
      People also seem to intuitively understand that Antichrist is really more of a figurehead position. They expect the Antichrist to make ominous pronouncements that can be disassembled and slotted into a prefabricated eschatological framework, not impose martial law or orchestrate mass killings. It is safe to say, however, that nobody expected the Antichrist to look quite like Karl Grissom.

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More recently, the free will advocate has been attempting to find ways to bolster his position by enlisting the help of quantum physics, which seems to indicate that the principle of cause and effect breaks down at the subatomic level. In fact, if the quantum physicists are to be believed, the entire Universe rests on top of a creamy layer of utter randomness.
      The determinist points out that replacing causality with a roll of the dice doesn’t really help the free will advocate’s position much. It just means that when the serial killer turns out to have had a perfectly comfortable middle-class upbringing, he now has the option of blaming a run of bad luck for that unfortunate incident with the hatchet.
      The determinist also points out that the randomness occurs at such a low level that it’s unlikely to have much of an effect on anything of importance. For example, when you flip a coin, there are literally trillions of quantum events that go into determining whether the coin comes up heads or tails. It’s as if every time you flipped a coin, you set into motion a trillion subatomic coin-flippers who each flip a coin and then report back to your coin with the results.
     
Ping!
goes the coin.
Ping!
go a trillion subatomic coins.
      “Well?” says the first coin. “What’ll it be?”
      “OK,” say the trillion subatomic coin-flippers. “Forty-nine point nine nine nine nine eight four five one zero three five percent of us say heads, and fifty point zero zero zero zero one five four eight nine six five percent of us say tails. Phil, as usual, says to land on your edge and balance there. So it’s basically fifty/fifty.”
      The first coin says, “Great. You guys are a big help, as always,” and ends up on heads because it has a lot more important things to consider other than quantum phenomena that nobody gives a crap about.
      Neither school of thought is in the end entirely satisfying to those who hope to find some shred of meaning in their existence, which is why many mortals—particularly those of a religious bent—tend to believe in a sort of fragile balance of free will and determinism. That is, they believe in a certain amount of freedom, but not so much as to cause the Divine Plan to go off the rails. They believe, in essence, that people are so many subatomic coin-flippers.

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Television meteorologists don’t count.

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Keen observers will note that if the Balderhaz Cube worked reliably 100% of the time, then the channels could be said to be obeying a definite rule. This fact gave rise to the Balderhaz Constant, which states that the Balderhaz Cube in fact only works 99.45% of the time. It was later discovered that this percentage could vary by as much as .00374389%, a number which became known as Balderhaz’s Correction. Variances in Balderhaz’s Correction eventually gave rise to Balderhaz’s Second Correction. When Balderhaz’s Second Correction proved unreliable in certain circumstances, Balderhaz began to spend more of his time perfecting his backhand.

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The veracity of this statement cannot be confirmed.

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Divine providence is a mysterious and wonderful thing.