Messiah (12 page)

"I should think that the possession of the truth and its attendant sense of virtue is in itself enough, easily spoiled by popularization," I said with chilling pomp.

"Now that's a mighty selfish attitude to take. Sure it makes me happy to know at last nothing matters a hell of a lot since I'm apt to die any time and that's the end of yours truly; a nice quiet nothing, like sleeping pills after a busy day: all that's swell but it means a lot more to me to see the truth belong to everybody and also, let's face it, I'm ambitious. I like my work. I want to see this thing get big, and with me part of it. Life doesn't mean a thing and death is the only reality, like he says, but while we're living we've got to keep busy and get ahead and the best thing for me, I figured about six months ago, was to put Cave over on the public, which is just what I'm going to do. Anything wrong with that?"

Since right and wrong had not yet been reformulated and codified, I gave him the comfort he hardly needed. "I see what you mean. I suppose you're right. Perhaps the motive is the same in every case, mine as well as yours: yet we've all experienced Cave and that should be enough."

"No, we should all get behind it and push, bring it to the world."

"That, of course, is where we're different: not that I don't intend to 'propagate the truth,' rather I shall do it for something to do, knowing that nothing matters, not even this knowledge matters." In my unction, I had stumbled upon the first of a series of paradoxes which were to amuse and obsess our philosophers for a generation. Paul gave me no opportunity to elaborate, however; his was the practical way and I followed. We spoke of means and ends.

"Cave likes the idea of the half-hour show and as soon as we get all the wrinkles ironed out, buying good time, not just dead air, we'll make the first big announcement, along around January, I think. Until then we're trying to keep this out of the papers. Slow but sure; then fast and hard."

"What sort of man is Cave?" I wanted very much to hear Paul's reaction to him: this was the practical man, the unobsessed.

He was candid; he did not know. "How can you figure a guy like that out? At times he seems a little feeble-minded, this is between us by the way, and other times when he's talking to people, giving with the message, there's nothing like him."

"What about his early life?"

"Nobody knows very much. I've had a detective agency prepare a dossier on him. Does that surprise you? Well, I'm going far out on a limb for him and so are our rich friends. We had to be sure we weren't buying an ax-murderer or a bigamist or something."

"Would that have made any difference to the message?"

"No,
I
don't think so but it sure would have made it impossible for us to sell him on a big scale."

"And what did they find?"

"Not much. I'll let you read it. Take it home with you. Confidential of course and, as an officer of the company, I must ask you not to use any of it without clearing first with me."

I agreed and his secretary was sent for. The dossier was a thin bound manuscript.

"It's a carbon but I want it back. You won't find anything very striking but you ought to read it for the background. Never been married, no girl friends that anybody remembers . . . no boy friends either (what a headache
that
problem is in Hollywood, for a firm like ours). No police record. No tickets for double parking, even. A beautiful, beautiful record on which to build."

"Perhaps a little negative."

"That's what we like. As for the guy's character, his I.Q., your guess is as good as mine, probably better. When I'm with him alone, we talk about the campaign and he's very relaxed, very sensible, businesslike: doesn't preach or carry on. He seems to understand all the problems of our end. He's cooperative."

"Can you look him straight in the eye?"

Paul laughed. "Gives you the creeps, doesn't it? No, I guess I don't look at him very much. I'm glad you mentioned that because I've a hunch he's a hypnotist of some kind though there's no record of his ever having studied it. I think I'll get a psychologist to take a look at him."

"Do you think he'll like that?"

"Oh, he'll never know unless he's a mind reader. Somebody to sort of observe him at work. I've already had him checked out physically."

"You're very thorough."

"Have to be. He's got a duodenal ulcer and there's a danger of high blood pressure when he's older; otherwise he's in fine shape."

"What do you want me to do first?"

He became serious. "A pamphlet. You might make a high-brow magazine article out of it for the
Readers' Digest
or something first. We'll want a clear, simple statement of the Cavite philosophy."

"Why don't you get him to write it?"

"I've tried. He says he can't write anything. In fact he even hates to have his sermons taken down by a recorder. God knows why. But, in a way, it's all to the good because it means we can get all the talent we like to do the writing for us and that way, sooner or later, we can appeal to just about everybody."

"Whom am I supposed to appeal to in this first pamphlet?"

"The ordinary person, but make it as foolproof as you can; leave plenty of doors open so you can get out fast in case we switch the party line along the way."

I laughed. "You're extraordinarily cynical."

"Just practical. I had to learn everything the hard way. I was kicked around by some mighty expert kickers in my day."

I checked his flow of reminiscence. "Tell me about Cave and Iris." This was the secondary mystery which had occupied my mind for several days. But Paul did not know or, if he did, would not say.

"I think they're just good friends, like we say in these parts. Except that I doubt if anything is going on . . . they don't seem the type and she's so completely gone on what he has to say . . ."

A long-legged girl secretary in discreet black entered the room unbidden and whispered something to the publicist. Paul started as though she had given him an electric shock from the thick carpeting. He spoke quickly: "Get Furlow. Tell him to stand bail. Also get a writ. I'll be right down there."

She ran from the room. He pushed the bar away from him and it rolled aimlessly across the floor, its bottles and glasses chattering. Paul looked at me distractedly. "He's in jail. Cave's in jail."

Five

1

Last night the noise of my heart's beating kept me awake until nearly dawn. Then, as the gray warm light of the morning patterned the floor, I fell asleep and dreamed uneasily of disaster, my dreams disturbed by the noise of jackals, by that jackal-headed god who hovers over me as these last days unfold confusedly before my eyes: it will end in heat and terror, alone beside a muddy river, all time as one and that soon gone. I awakened, breathless and cold, with a terror of the dying still ahead.

After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. For the memory now is of pages and not of scenes or of actual human beings still existing in that baleful, tenebrous region of the imagination where fancy and fact together confuse even the most confident of narrators. I have, thus far at least, exorcised demons, and to have lost certain memories to my narrative relieves my system, like a cancer cut whole from a failing organism.

The boy brought me my morning coffee and the local newspaper whose Arabic text pleases my eye though the sense, when I do translate it, is less than strange. I asked the boy if Mr Butler was awake and he said he had gone out already: these last few days I have kept to my room even for the evening meal, delaying the inevitable revelation as long as possible.

After the boy left and while I drank coffee and looked out upon the river and the western hills, I was conscious of a sense of well-being which I have not often experienced in recent years. Perhaps the work of evoking the past has, in a sense, enhanced the present for me. I thought of the work done as life preserved, as part of me which will remain. Then, idly, I riffled the pages of John Cave's Testament for the first time since I had discovered my name had been expunged.

The opening was the familiar one which I had composed so many years before in Cave's name. The time of divination: a straightforward account of the apparent wonders which had preceded the mission. No credence was given the supernatural but a good case was made (borrowed a little from the mental therapists) for the race's need of phenomena as a symptom of unease and boredom and anticipation. I flicked through the pages. An entire new part had been added which I did not recognize: still written as though by Cave but, obviously, it could not have been composed until at least a decade after his death.

I read the new section carefully. Whoever had written it had been strongly under the influence of the pragmatic philosophers, though the style was somewhat inspirational: a combination of a guide to popularity crossed with the Koran. A whole system of ideal behavior was sketched broadly for the devout, so broadly as to be fairly useless though the commentary and the interpretive analysis of such lines as: "Property really belongs to the world though individuals may have temporary liens on certain sections," must be already prodigious. I was well into the metaphysics of the Cavites when there was a knock on my door. It was Butler, looking red and uncomfortable from the heat, a spotted red bandana tied, for some inscrutable reason, about his head in place of a hat. "Hope you don't mind my barging in like this but I finished a visit with the mayor earlier than I thought." He crumpled, on invitation, into a chair opposite me. He sighed gloomily. "This is going to be tough, tougher than I ever imagined back home."

"I told you it would be. The Moslems are very obstinate."

"I'll say! and the old devil of a mayor practically told me point-blank that if he caught me proselyting he'd send me back to Cairo. Imagine the nerve!"

"Well, it is their country," I said, reasonably, experiencing my first real hope: might the Cavites not get themselves expelled from Islam: I knew the mayor of Luxor, a genial merchant who still enjoyed the obsolete title of Pasha. The possibilities of a daring plot occurred to me. All I needed was another year or two by which time nature would have done its work in any case and the conquest of humanity by the Cavites could then continue its progress without my bitter presence.

I looked at Butler speculatively. He was such a fool. I could, I was sure, undo him, for a time at least; unless of course he was, as I first expected, an agent come to finish me in fact as absolutely as I have been finished in effect by those revisionists who have taken my place among the Cavites, arranging history. . . . I'd experienced, briefly, while studying Butler's copy of the Testament, the unnerving sense of having never lived, of having dreamed the past entire.

"Maybe it is their country but we got the truth, and like Paul Himmell said: 'A truth known to only half the world is but half a truth.'"

"Did he say that?"

"Of course he did. Don't you. . . ." he paused. His eye taking in at last the book in my hand. His expression softened somewhat, like a parent in anger noticing suddenly an endearing resemblance to himself in the offending child. "But I forget how isolated you've been up here. If I've interrupted your studies, I'll go away."

"Oh no. I was finished when you came. I've been studying for several hours which is too long for an old man."

"If a contemplation of Cavesword can ever be too long," said Butler reverently. "Yes, Himmell wrote that even before Cavesword, in the month of March, I believe, though we'll have to ask my colleague when he comes. He knows all the dates, all the facts. Remarkable guy. He has the brains of the team." And Butler laughed to show that he was not entirely serious.

"I think they might respond to pressure," I said, treacherously. "One thing the Arabs respect is force."

"You may be right. But our instructions are to go slow. Still, I didn't think it would be as slow as this. Why we haven't been able to get a building yet. They've all been told by the Pasha fellow not to rent to us."

"Perhaps I could talk to him."

"Do you know him well?"

"We used to play cards quite regularly. I haven't seen much of him in the past few years but, if you'd like, I'll go and pay him a call."

"He's known all along you're a Cavite, hasn't he?"

"We have kept off the subject of religion entirely. As you probably discovered, since the division of the world, there's been little communication between East and West. I don't think he knows much about the Cavites except that they're undesirable."

"Poor creature," said Butler, compassionately.

"Outer darkness," I agreed.

"But mark my words before ten years have passed they will have the truth."

"I have no doubt of that, Communicator, none at all. If the others who come out have even a tenth of your devotion the work will go fast." The easy words of praise came back to me mechanically from those decades when a large part of my work was organizational, spurring the mediocre on to great deeds . . . and the truth of the matter has been, traditionally, that the unimaginative are the stuff from which heroes and martyrs are invariably made.

"Thanks for those kind words," said Butler, flushed now with pleasure as well as heat. "Which reminds me, I was going to ask you if you'd like to help us with our work once we get going?"

"I'd like nothing better but I'm afraid my years of useful service are over. Any advice, however, or perhaps influence that I may have in Luxor. . . ." There was a warm moment of mutual esteem and amiability, broken only by a reference to the Squad of Belief.

"Of course we'll have one here in time; though we can say, thankfully, that the need for them in the Atlantic states is nearly over. Naturally, there are always a few malcontents but we have worked out a statistical ratio of nonconformists in the population which is surprisingly accurate. Knowing their incidence, we are able to check them early. In general, however, the truth is happily ascendant everywhere in the really civilized world."