The Veritas Conflict (48 page)

“… but He certainly
allowed
it.” The professor took a swig of brandy. “How can you reconcile that, Mansfield?”

Across campus, the fire was crackling in the Faculty Club, the crash scenes flickering on the television in the background. Mansfield cupped his coffee mug in his hands and settled farther back into the overstuffed chair, considering his colleague’s question. After a moment he looked up. Jack Sprague was swirling the liquid in his glass, waiting.

Mansfield had learned not to get into it with those who had no desire to listen, but Jack seemed genuinely interested in the debate.

“Jack, let me restate your question. You’re basically saying that if there is a good and loving supreme being—whom I call God—why didn’t he prevent this airplane crash? Correct?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“By asking that you’re assuming that if there was a God, He would be big and inscrutable and powerful enough to somehow, mysteriously stop the airplane from crashing.”

“By definition of what I understand God to be, yes, of course.”

“Then let me ask you a question. If there is a being powerful and inscrutable enough to be able to mysteriously stop the crash of a jetliner, isn’t such a being also inscrutable enough that you and I aren’t going to be able to understand Him and His ways?”

Mansfield watched his words sink in. Jack’s eyes flickered slightly.

“Jack, we can’t have it both ways. Either we acknowledge that God is powerful
and
mysterious enough that we can’t understand why He allows certain events to happen, or we say that God wasn’t powerful and inscrutable enough to have stopped the airplane from crashing, in which case we can hardly get mad at Him.”

Mansfield took a sip of his coffee, watching his colleague over the rim. The other man was pursing his lips, replaying Mansfield’s argument in his mind.

“Not only that,” Mansfield said, “but let me give you a completely different reason. Assuming that God is all-powerful, would you really want to live in the sort of world where He was constantly changing the laws of physics? In order to keep anyone from getting physically hurt, He’d have to be altering the law of gravity one minute, the law
of thermodynamics the next. When you walked out the door in the morning, you’d never know whether you’d keep walking on the sidewalk or float right out into space. Do you really want to live in such an inconsistent world, a world where a deity was constantly playing with your mind? It would be terrible.”

Jack leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know. Having no killer hurricanes or earthquakes sounds pretty good to me.”

“Really? The same law of gravity that causes a ball to bounce also causes killer landslides. God could interfere with natural laws—and probably does, at times—but if it were constant, we’d be completely unable to learn and function rationally. Think about it: We’d never know the consequences of any little action we took during the day. We wouldn’t even have the knowledge we needed to put our coats on when it got cold! And then, because we never learned how to function, God would have to be constantly altering the natural laws to protect us. We’d never mature beyond intellectual and emotional babyhood.”

“Hm.” Jack looked at him for a moment, then stared vaguely into his brandy snifter, as if it held the answers to the mysteries of the universe. “Professor Mansfield, you got me. Those are very … well … hm.”

Mansfield chuckled, settling back in his chair. “Jack, my friend, there’s hope for you yet.

FORTY-THREE

I
AN STARTED UP THE STEPS TO THE MASSIVE DOORS
of Widener Library. Students dotted the steps, talking, reading, eating a late sack lunch, or just enjoying one of the last sunny days before Boston’s winter arrived. He stopped beside a figure sitting halfway up the steps, engrossed in a book.

“Pollyanna?”

Claire looked up, startled. She smiled and slipped the book into her backpack. “No. This week’s reading for philosophy.” She stood up and slung the backpack over her shoulder. “Ready to start?”

Thirty minutes later, deep in the buildings archives, Claire finished describing how she had gone about looking through the initial documents.

“So then you take the grants you thought looked like possibilities and cross-reference them,” she tapped a dusty shelf of card files that lined a back wall, “with this section of the old card catalog …”

Ian made a face when she was done. He looked around at the dozens of old bookcases lining the infrequently visited room. “Wow. Not easy. I’m amazed you found what you did.”

“Well, it takes a while, but I find it fascinating.” Claire sat at one of the long tables in the center of the room and opened up her research notebook. “That’s why I got into genealogy research in high school. I did a lot on the Internet, of course, but what I really thought was cool was going down into the basement archives of libraries and looking at the old county records of births, voting records, and all that. Really interesting.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Ian picked up his notebook and pen, gesturing at the card files and bookshelves. “How about you take the A to M section on that end of the room, and I’ll take N to Z?”

“Sure thing.” She walked to the far side of the room and began scanning the shelves, making notes and muttering to herself as she worked.

Ian stood staring at the rows of massive bookshelves in front of him. Lord,
if You want me to find something special about these grants, You’re going to have to guide me to it
.

He picked a row at random and walked between the bookshelves. The faint smell of must rose from the old tomes.
Mansfield must love it down here
. He reached up and picked a book at random.
Genealogy and Heritage of the John Telling Family: From the Revolutionary War to the War of the States
. Hmm. Great bedtime reading.

He replaced the book and ran his hands along the textured spines of several others. Well, he wasn’t getting anywhere like this. He walked to a section of the room and pulled out an oversized ledger. He sat at the long table, the ledger open in front of him, and began taking notes on pages and pages of endowment lists.

The room was quiet for a long while, the gentle hum of the climate control system the only noise besides rustling pages and scratching pens.

The sound of approaching footsteps brought Ian back to the room. The door creaked open, and Ian’s eyebrows rose as a familiar head peered inside.

“Mansfield? What are you doing here?”

Mansfield stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him. “I was in Widener for a meeting and thought I might find you in this section. Have you two found anything yet?”

“No, we really just started the research part about an hour ago. It took Claire a while to explain the whole complicated process in a way that my little brain could understand.”

Across the room Claire giggled.

“Ah, I see.” Mansfield rounded the table and came to stand behind Ian. “What are you working on here?”

“Just one of many lists of people who’ve given endowments or grants. I think these donors are from the 1700s mostly. Some of these lines have a short summary of the grants purpose, but many don’t, and they’re really hard to read. I just finished the
Ns
and
Os
and was starting on the
Ps
. Its slow going.”

Mansfield looked over the list on Ian’s notepad. “Not many
Os,
I see.” He looked closer, “A donation of Bibles for chapel services—Oakley Ostrich, of Philadelphia? Heavens, what a name!”

Claire’s voice carried from behind a bookshelf. “Sounds like a colonial zookeeper, or something.”

Ian snorted on a laugh, and Mansfield chuckled.

“From what you’ve done so far,” the professor asked, “is there anything promising?”

Ian shook his head. “Honestly, this could take days, and we’ve barely started.” He flipped to the next page and began scanning.

“Yes, yes.” Mansfield sighed. “I’m too eager, I suppose. But if you could’ve seen Pike’s reaction—”

Ian gasped, all his attention suddenly riveted on the page.

“What?”

Ian bent forward, nose close to the page, his finger following a line of cramped writing as he spoke. “I’ve been looking mostly at the summary lines for anything that might be a Christian stipulation.” He looked up at his mentor, a strange expression on his face. “But maybe we should’ve been looking for something else.”

Ian shifted the heavy ledger so Mansfield could see it. He could hear Claire approaching from the other side of the room. He rested his finger beside a particular notation. “What do you make of that?”

Mansfield squinted at the writing, then patted his jacket pockets and pulled out a small magnifying glass. “Well, I’ll be …”

Claire had stopped in front of the table. “What? What?”

Ian swiveled the ledger around, and Mansfield handed her the magnifying glass. She bent down and examined the faded script.

“Contribution to the—wow, this handwriting is bad—the endowment for the Pike Fellowships …” her voice slowed suddenly. “Given by Talbot Pike of Cambridge, Massachusetts.” She looked up at the two men. “Pike!”

“Is that just coincidence?” Ian asked. “Could there be any connection? Pike is not an uncommon name. There have to be thousands—”

“In Cambridge, Massachusetts? Involved at Harvard?” Mansfield stepped back from the table and began walking slowly along its length. “I suppose its possible, but it seems unlikely. Anton Pike has been here for nearly fifteen years, although he’s much younger than I am. I wonder if there have been other—”

He stopped walking and a strange look appeared on his face. “Oh.”

“What?” Ian and Claire said together.

“I just remembered. Decades ago I did my postdoctoral work here. I took several economics courses, and one of them almost ruined my record. There was one professor that just … well, I prefer to avoid going into the sordid details, but let’s just say I empathize with every student who’s ever been treated unfairly by his instructor. My memory is fuzzy, but I’m almost positive that professor’s name was Pike.” Mansfield drummed his fingers on a chair back, his tone dubious. “But I never would’ve thought about a connection to our friend Anton.”

“Besides, what does this have to do with anything?” Ian asked. “So there was a Pike that gave money to Harvard hundreds of years ago. And a mean ol’ Pike who tried to fail you in economics. And a mean of Pike who’s a business professor today.” He paused. “And who is also the chairman of the academic steering committee.”

“As I remember,” Mansfield’s eyes stared into the distant past, “my economics professor Pike—his first name was William, come to think of it, because I was annoyed that he had my name—was in some sort of leadership position at Harvard, too. Maybe more
in the graduate school, though. I just can’t remember.”

Ian flipped to a clean page of his notebook and began jotting down notes. “So we have those three: Talbot, William, and now Anton. But I still wonder what that has to do with anything.”

“Do you think,” Claire said, “that there’s something about the Pike family—if it is one family—that Anton Pike didn’t want you to find, and that’s why he acted so strange about further investigation of the grants and endowments?”

Ian nodded. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But how would we find out?”

“Well,” Claire said, “if I was doing a family genealogy investigation, the next thing I’d do would be to cross-reference whatever information I had. So I’d cross-reference these names and find out if there were any other Pikes on the Harvard faculty.”

She pulled the ledger toward her. “Come to think of it, we have another trail to follow right here!” She tapped on the line they had been examining, her voice intent. “This Talbot Pike, whoever he was, gave money to endow the Pike Fellowships. If that’s some sort of scholarship, perhaps it still exists today. And if we find out about that, I bet we can work backward in time and find out what Anton Pike was worried about!”

She looked up at them, and her expression changed to one of consternation. “Or … not. I’m sorry. I get carried away sometimes. I—”

“Claire.” Mansfield crossed his arms and stared at her.

“Yes?” Claire’s voice came out on a soft squeak.

“That is a brilliant idea.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” Mansfield put his hands on the table and leaned toward her. “As I think I told you yesterday, as well.” He straightened up and looked down at Ian. “If you all agree, I suggest that we set aside our search for Christian grants for the moment. The issue is with the administration, and there frankly is no hurry unless we find something even more important, which is unlikely given our personnel constraints and the size of the task.”

He smiled at Ian’s relieved look. “Given this new trail—I think you called it that, Claire—I suggest we follow it in three ways. First—” he nodded for Ian to take notes—“check whether there are other Pike donations recorded in these old records and what the donations were for. Second, check the modern records for scholarships and such and see if there is still a Pike Fellowship at Harvard. Third, find the archives for Harvard’s staff lists and see what you can find out about other Pikes who worked here.” He pointed at Ian. “You keep checking this ledger for Pike grants—”

“Oh goodie.”

“And Claire, you check for anything else in this room about Pike donations. I’ll pop upstairs and ask if the archives for faculty lists are in this building somewhere. Then
perhaps one of you can go over to the financial offices and see about the Pike Fellowships.”

He glanced over to see if they understood, nodded once, and vanished out the door.

Claire and Ian looked at each other and shrugged. Claire went over to the card catalog, and Ian turned back to the ledger. He perused each line carefully, thankful that Mansfield had left his magnifying glass.

Peterson … Philbrick … Perry … Patterson … They must have been using some logical system to arrange these names, but darned if I know what it was
.

“Aha!”

Ian looked up at Claire, who was standing at the card files. She was holding up a tan index card triumphantly. “I thought it might be here!”