A Creed for the Third Millennium (19 page)

She could feel his excitement.
'Yes,
Dr Carriol.' He ventured an unprofessional question which he had not found
the courage to ask during the days Dr Joshua Christian had just spent in
Washington. 'He's it?'

He's it, John! But I am going to have a
fight on my hands and I don't intend to lose. I can't afford to lose. Because
he's
it!'

Oh yes he was. The decision she had made
that night in Hartford seemed more and more right as the days went on. Of the
nine candidates, he was the only one who possessed what this job was going to
need. Therefore it was up to her to get him the chance to do the job only he
could do. The task called for a man without any kind of political or career axe
to grind, a man who didn't care about himself, had no image.

Operation Search was her baby. She had
dreamed it up and she alone fully understood what it searched for. Since meeting
Dr Christian that knowledge had expanded and coalesced at one and the same time,
a sure indication that he was the man. Five years earlier they could simply have
earmarked Senator Hillier for the job and begun to groom him then. But she
hadn't even wanted him included in the 100,000 names her investigators and their
teams and their computers had sifted through. Tibor Reece had come down on
Harold Magnus's side then, but she had been conserving her strength for five
years, and she refused to consider the possibility that Harold Magnus could win
the next time around. Five years earlier had been a preliminary skirmish she
could afford to let Harold Magnus win, so she hadn't made the mistake of letting
it assume the proportions of a battle royal. He may have thought that meant she
didn't have a battle royal in her; if so, he was going to learn differently very
soon.

Somewhere she had always known there was
a man — odd that she, so feminist in her soul, had never honestly believed there
was a woman — for whom the task was
meant.
Fated. A natural, inevitable
destiny. But gone were the days when a man could walk out of the desert or the
wilderness and found a way of life. This was the third millennium, so choked
with people that the very best might remain buried through no fault or lack of
effort of their own, and so sophisticated in its dealings with the few who did
stand out from the masses that it could if it so chose remove those few, or if
it so chose raise them even higher. Maybe the third millennium was just as
bumbling in its way as the two earlier ones, but it had perfected the art of
keeping tabs on its faceless millions, and its brand of cynicism was securely
rooted in facts, figures, trends, exponentials. It had replaced ethics with
synthetics, philosophy with psychology, and gold with paper. Only she for one
did not believe that the gargantuan rivers of eerie silent ice creeping down
from the Arctic Circle were a visitation designed to obliterate the race of Man;
poles apart though they were in nature, she, like Dr Joshua Christian, believed
that Man had the power within himself to overcome all obstacles in his
way.

But wasn't it extraordinary that in the
long run only the stubborn personality and tangential intelligence of one man
had unearthed Dr Joshua Christian? Had his name been allocated to Dr Abraham's
or Dr Hemingway's caseloads, he would probably have fallen by the wayside.
Instead, his name had gone to Moshe Chasen. On such tiny coincidences so much
always rested, no matter how careful a method was devised, how foolproof it
appeared. When all was said and done, it still came down to people. Their
vagaries, their individualities, their genetic uniquenesses. Fitting. One of
Joshua's 'patterns' he talked of.

She put her chin on her hands, and sat
forward, wondering how many other nameless Joshua Christians had not emerged to
the top of Dr Abraham's and Dr Hemingway's caseloads. Was Joshua the best man
for the job? Or was someone better still buried in the fastness of the Federal
Human Data Bank? Well, that was something they would not know unless they took
over 66,000 names and subjected them to Moshe Chasen's programmes. If in truth
the 100,000 names originally culled were the right ones in the light of Moshe
Chasen's approach. Well, too late to wonder. Joshua Christian had emerged. And,
perforce, Joshua Christian was therefore the man.

After three hours spent with Mrs Lucy
Greco, Dr Christian felt a lot better about his book. The professional in him
fully appreciated the way she handled him, and oddly enough that gave him more
confidence in the whole project His numbness had dissipated within minutes. By
the end of the first half hour in her office he was talking freely, quickly,
sometimes passionately. She was such a help! If he lacked anything, it was
logical progression; he was aware himself of the failing, especially since
meeting Judith and Moshe, ruthless critics. Lucy Greco possessed the ability to
think logically in full measure. Not only that. They clicked. He found her a
perfect audience, for she sat like the open mouth of a baby bird, ready to
swallow everything he threw her way, and yet her occasional questions were so
well directed she actually assisted him to plump out his ideas in areas where he
knew he hadn't yet eliminated woolly thinking.

'You should have been a psychologist,' he
said to her as they walked back to Elliott MacKenzie's office.

'But I am,' she said.

He laughed. 'I might have
known.'

'Dr Christian,' she said, so earnestly
that her steps slowed, then halted, and he therefore stopped, 'this is the most
important book I've ever had the good fortune to be associated with. Please
believe me! I mean it. I have never meant anything more in all my
life.'

'But I don't have the answers,' he said
helplessly.

'Oh yes you do! There are some lucky
people who can exist without a spiritual prop, even some who are so alone they
haven't a fellow human being to use as a prop. But most people do need shoring
up. I've heard enough from you in the last hours to know where we're going, and
where I'm going to push you too. You've been afraid, I think.'

'Yes. Very many times.'

'Don't be,' she said, walking
on.

'I'm only a man,' he said, 'and it's a
poor kind of man who isn't afraid. Fear can be as much an indication of sense or
sensitivity as it is of inadequacy. A man without any fear in him is a
machine.'

'Or Nietzsche's superman?'

He smiled. 'I can assure you that you are
not dealing with a superman!'

They entered Elliott Mackenzie's
office.

He was back
long since, sitting
with Dr Carriol, and he looked up curiously, interested to see how Lucy Greco
was taking her new assignment.

Her cheeks were pink, her eyes shone, she
looked as if she had just spent time in the arms of a lover. And Dr Joshua
Christian had come alive. Oh, bravo, Judith Carriol! Mentally he pushed the
first print run way up. Lucy Greco was that publishing house phenomenon, a born
writer with absolutely nothing of her own to say. So give her a client-subject
who did have something to say, and she could sing in prose. Already she was in
that state where the words were roiling inside her. There was going to be a
book.

'I'm off to Holloman today with Joshua,'
she said, too excited to sit down.

'Good!' Dr Carriol rose to her feet. She
held out her hand to Elliot MacKenzie. 'Thank you, my friend.'

Outside the Atticus building Lucy Greco
left them to go home and pack a bag, arranging to meet them at Grand Central in
three hours.

Which left Dr Carriol and Dr Christian
alone at last.

'Come on. We may as well check out of our
hotel and then go on down to Grand Central. We can sit in the coffee shop until
Lucy arrives,' she said.

He sighed with relief. 'Thank God! I
don't know why, but I thought you wouldn't come back to Holloman with
me.'

Her brows leaped upward. 'You were right,
I'm not. After I put you on the Holloman local I'm off to Penn Station and
Washington. No, don't be disappointed, Joshua! I have my own work to do, and now
you've got Lucy you don't need me. She's the expert.'

A cold shiver ran all the way down his
long back. 'I wish I could believe that! This is your idea. I'm not even sure I
want to do this book, even with Lucy helping me.'

She hadn't stopped walking, and she
didn't stop after he said that. 'Look, Joshua, I am going to tell you something
straight from the shoulder, okay? You are a man with a mission. And you are more
aware of that than I am or anyone else. All this vacillation is no more than
surface deep. I understand it. You've not had time to get it all straight in
your mind, and I admit I've pushed you unmercifully. In the bit over a week
since I've met you, it's all happened, and it's all happened because I've pushed
you. Quite frankly, you need a push! If you were a man of religion you would
have had years of preparation for this moment. If you were an evangelist you
would already have jumped in the water, boots and all. And the future is a
mystery, I know. For you especially, so thick and impenetrable you don't see
tomorrow clearly, let alone next week or next year. But you'll get there! And
without my holding your hand.'

Man of religion? Evangelist? 'My God!' he
cried. 'Is that how you think of it, Judith? As a
religious
mission?'

'Yes. I would have to say, yes. But not
in the old sense.'

Gnawing shadows. Greyness. 'Judith, I'm
only a man! I'm not equipped!'

Why on earth did he have to bring up
things like this on a New York City street, where the atmosphere and the
physical act they were performing in walking made subtlety and delicacy quite
impossible? And how could she find the right thing to say when for her, too,
events had moved too fast? She had envisioned a progress (at least inside
Joshua's mind) rather in the mood of a glacier, an even grind from A to B. Not
this avalanche! Or maybe without realizing it she had assumed she would be
working with a man like Senator Hillier. A straightforward pragmatist with whom
one could plan, who would see where he was being pushed and gladly give himself
a kick along as well. Where working with a man like Joshua Christian — and he was certainly one of a kind!
—
was turning out to be more like walking a tightrope above the Valley of
Death.

'Forget I said it. I don't know why I
said it. Just get your book out, Joshua. That's really all that
matters.'

She was right, of course. Or so he
concluded somewhere around Bridgeport on the start-stop-start-stop journey home,
with the train crawling along when it did move. Lucy Greco had the good sense to
sit alongside him quietly and not intrude her presence, sensing that something
had happened to unsettle him in the three hours she had been absent.

He was not a fool. He was not so turned
in upon himself that he was blind to the behaviour of others, either. And a few
tiny incidents like Moshe Chasen's eyes when they met, and Elliott MacKenzie's
and Lucy Greco's extraordinary awareness of the extent of his writer's block,
and Judith Carriol's remarks about the nature of what she wanted him to produce
— these minuscule events somehow added up to bulk as large as a mountain. Only
it was a massif he couldn't see, for it was somewhere in the opacity of his
tomorrows. However, nothing he sensed did he feel as malign. Be honest with
yourself, Joshua Christian! Nothing you sense do you feel to be at odds with
what you yearn to do, which is simply to help people.

He didn't trust Judith Carriol. He wasn't
even sure he liked her. Yet from the very beginning she had been the catalyst he
had desperately needed to set him afire. That awful force within him had
responded to her like a beast of great power to a well-known guiding hand. And
he was tugged along helplessly in its wake, as much its victim as he was Judith
Carriol's.

Do what you have to do. And let
tomorrow take care of itself. You cannot see what it holds.

The book, the book The chance. So much to
say! What was most important to say? How could he possibly fit it all inside the covers of
one little book? He would have to be selective, then. Simple in his expression,
but not mindlessly simple. The important thing was to explain to its readers
why
they felt the way they did, so useless, so dreary, so old, so futile.
He thought he was beginning to get a glimmer of why Judith Carriol had used the
words 'religious' and 'evangelist'. Because what his book was going to offer was
a little mystical. Yes, that was what she had meant! Much ado about nothing he
couldn't handle.

Once people gained spiritual strength
they had a basis upon which to build something more positive out of the lives
they had no choice but to live save in the prescribed manner. Not a single hint
of rebellion, iconoclasm, nostalgia, terror, destructiveness. They didn't need
that kind of firing, not with the future they faced — the dwindling water, the
hideous cold, the shrinking land, the anti-American outside world. He had to
bring them to see and believe in a future they would never live to experience.
He had to give them hope. And faith. And most of all, love.

Yes! With the intelligent and capable
Lucy Greco to aid him, to shape what he wanted to say into something people
would want to read, he could do it. He could! And what else mattered besides
that? Did he matter? No. Did Judith Carriol matter? No. And he came to realize
that what he loved in Judith Carriol was her ability to put herself aside. The
twin ability to his own.