A Creed for the Third Millennium (24 page)

She nodded. 'Yes, Mr President, I have.
Had you chosen Senator Hillier, for example, I would have said you
must
tell the man. But I am absolutely against Dr Christian's being allowed to
gain any idea of government involvement or manipulation. He's a natural for the
job, therefore he does not need any boost from us in terms of his morale or his
devotion to duty. It is not necessary to appeal to his patriotism, either. In
fact, it is my considered opinion that were Dr Christian to learn about Operation Search, we
would immediately lose him and all the prospective benefits.'

Tibor Reece smiled. 'I agree with
you.'

'Mr President, I think we are pinning a
hell of a lot of faith —
blind
faith! — on a man we may not be able to
control!' said Harold Magnus, biting off his words to give them an additional
emphasis they didn't actually need, his feelings showed so strongly. 'We are now
talking about the area responsible for my very grave doubts about Dr Joshua
Christian. It never occurred to me that we would pick a man who couldn't be told
what and why — and how.' He shuddered, revolted to the depths of his being. 'I
mean, we are going to have to
trust
the man!'

'We have no choice,' said the
President.

'Mr Magnus, trust will only have to go so
far,' said Dr Carriol calmly. 'Dr Christian will always be under constant
supervision. I myself have established a position of some intimacy with him, and
I intend to remain at the very centre of his life. That means you will have to
trust
me,
but I can assure you that if at any time I feel Dr Christian is
jeopardizing our project, I will deal with him before any harm is done. You have
my word.'

This was news to both of them. Tibor
Reece smiled, Harold Magnus relaxed. Of course they both assumed she meant she
was having an affair with Dr Christian. Let them think it; it would comfort
them.

'I might have known,' said the
Secretary.

'Is there anything further you need from
me personally, Dr Carriol?' the President asked.

She frowned, considering. 'I don't think
at this stage anyway that phase three is going to be expensive. A matter of some
thousands of dollars is all.'

'That's a break!' chuckled the
President.

Dr Carriol smiled briefly, went on. 'The
nice thing about choosing Dr Christian is that he's largely self-fuelling.
Elliott MacKenzie of the Atticus Press says that Dr Christian's book is going to sell
millions, and Elliott is no fool. So Environment's original offer to him to
underwrite any losses he might incur through Dr Christian will not have to be
implemented. Dr Christian himself will become a very rich man into the bargain.
No, the kind of assistance I am going to need from you, Mr President, is
different. I want travel approvals, priority to obtain the most comfortable
accommodations, cars, planes, helicopters and the like.' She stared at Harold
Magnus blandly. 'I will need funds for myself, since I intend to be with Dr
Christian throughout his publicity tour.'

'Whatever you want you shall have,' said
Tibor Reece.

'I can't agree with your choice, Mr
President,' said Harold Magnus, 'but I admit I'm a lot happier now I know Dr
Carriol is going to be with him.'

'Why, thank you, sir!' said Dr
Carriol.

Now that he thought he knew the nature of
her relationship with Dr Christian, Tibor Reece was curious about Judith Carriol
as a woman. 'Dr Carriol, do you mind if I ask you a rather personal
question?'

'Not at all, sir.'

'Does Dr Joshua Christian
mean
anything to you? As a man? As a person?'

'Of course!'

'So what if it should come to a choice
between the man and the welfare of the project he's engaged upon? How would you
decide? What would you feel?'

'I'd be most unhappy. But I will do
whatever I have to do to safeguard the project, no matter what I feel about the
man.'

'That's a very hard thing to
say.'

'Yes. But I have spent over five years of
my life working towards this one objective. It's not a petty objective. Nor am I
built to throw my work out the window for the sake of my private feelings. I'm
sorry if that makes me sound inhuman, but it's
a fact nonetheless.'

'Would you be happier if you could throw
your work out the window?'

'I am not unhappy, sir,' she said
firmly.

'I see.' The President laid his big,
well-shaped hand across the bulky packet of videotape, files and manuscript atop
his desk. 'Operation Search is passe. We need a new name for it.'

'I have one, Mr President,' said Judith
Carriol, so quickly she could not have coined it on the spot.

'Ah! You're ahead of us! All right then,
what?'

She sucked in her breath, exultant.
'Operation Messiah.'

'Portentous,' said Tibor Reece, only half
liking it.

'It has never been anything else,' she
said.

Dr Joshua Christian hardly missed Dr
Judith Carriol, or indeed hardly even thought of her; he was too busy writing
his book and keeping up a normal patient schedule at the same time. The book
inspired him, ravished him. It was miraculous. Beautiful fluid exquisitely apt
words joined together to form beautiful fluid exquisitely apt sentences that
sounded like him and rang with the same clarion as his voice.
Miraculous!

Mama and James and Andrew and Mary and
Miriam and Martha gave him their wholehearted and unflagging support, spared him
every conceivable task they could, asked no questions, were patient with his
sudden outbreaks of absent-mindedness, reorganized the entire 1047 house to suit
him and his indomitable amanuensis, cooked and laundered and horticultured for
him, involved his patients in the general conspiracy ('He's writing a book, you
know, think of what that will mean to all the people who need him but he hasn't
got the time to see!'). They never complained or criticized or even expected him
to notice their efforts on his behalf, let alone appreciate those efforts. So
when he did notice and he did express his appreciation, they glowed and loved
him anew. That is, all save Mary, who worked as hard for him as anyone and got
her meed of thanks, but would have preferred no thanks.

Many of the hours and hours he spent
talking to Lucy Greco were wasted, he knew that; hours when his thoughts were
undisciplined or he spoke of himself when he himself was not at issue. But the
wasted hours provided grist for the hours that
were not wasted, when he could manage to marshal his enthusiasm and his theories
into a pattern Lucy Greco could follow. And then, while he saw patients or went
off to ruminate some particularly knotty concept into smooth mental paste, she
sat in the room in 1047 Oak Street given to her for an office, and she performed
those verbal miracles that so ravished him when he read them. The big IBM
voicewriter he had never used she used now, and never, she felt, to better
advantage.

Once when he came in he looked curiously
at the label on the side of the machine, and sighed.

'What?' she asked, at a loss.

'Made in Scarlatti, South Carolina,' he
said, very sadly. 'Once, you know, Holloman made a good proportion of this
country's personal printing machines — every kind from plain old typewriter to —
well, not this make of voicewriter, but several others. The factory is still
here. I walk through it sometimes. It's easy to get in, they've given up any
pretence at a security guard or even a caretaker. What for? Who wants to steal
dies and mandrels and presses you can't adapt to any other purpose? So the
factory is just full of emptiness and rusting plant, there's filth on the floor
and ice hanging from the rafters.'

'Maybe you ought to pay a visit to
Scarlatti,' said Lucy, still at a loss. 'There are at least half a dozen big
personal printing machine companies set up there. And I'm sure everything is new
and bright, with better staff facilities and a much nicer working
environment.'

'I never doubted that!' he said,
affronted.

Lucy sighed. 'Josh, honey, sometimes you
do make my life hard! Here I am helping you to write a book about positivity,
and what am I getting?' she asked, shutting her eyes to round up her thoughts
better and exclude his person from them. 'A good proportion of the talking you
do to me is taken up by an utterly negative longing for a world you keep telling
your readers is gone and can never come back
again. Think of the hours you waste! And what a meretricious activity it is!
When you go on the road to publicize your book, you can't let yourself get all
nostalgic, you know. You've set yourself the task of telling the people they
can't afford nostalgia! And if they can't afford it, neither can you, Josh.
That's a fact you've got to face up to. It's not do-as-I-say, it has to be
do-as-I-do. Otherwise it will all blow up in your face.'

Punctured. Pricked. Deflated. Zapped.
'Oh, God! You are so right!' he cried, and collapsed in a tangle of arms and
legs, a broken doll. Then he began to laugh, and he leaped from the chair,
capering around the room running his hands through his stiff black hair until it
looked as if the raging winds of his mind were erupting through his scalp. 'You
are so right!
So right!
Oh, woman, I have needed you and I have needed
Judith Carriol so badly! I have needed your new minds and souls to listen to me
prate instead of all those sweet slavish devoted bigots next door! How can I get
my thoughts into order when they sit listening to me with such an
I-love-Joshua-he-can-do-no-wrong attitude that they never give me constructive
criticism? Thank you, thank you, thank you!'

He came to a halt, standing pressing his
hands together over the groin he never thought of. 'I want to say — oh, how
beautiful rich emotions are if you can learn not to wallow in them, and how
natural grief is, and what a great friend time can be, and that nothing that
ever happens —
ever
happens! — is without purpose. That the new can
founder on the old, and that courage and strength can be just as lovable as
weakness.' He stopped, glared at her. 'Why can't I write all that down?' he
demanded, exasperated. 'I can speak words to an audience — any audience! — as if
my tongue was made of silver and my voice was made of gold and my soul had
wings. Yet let me stare at a sheet of blank paper or a tape recorder or one of
these fantastic voicewriters and the words all rush off
somewhere to hide and no matter how hard I try, I cannot roust them
out.'

'Well, either it's a psychological block
or a physiological one,' she said, more to calm him down than out of
interest.

'Both,' he said instantly. 'Somewhere
there's a little cerebral relay that's shorted out — a thrombosis or a plaque or
a knot of scar tissue — and sitting right on top of it is the awful festering
cesspool of my subconscious.'

Lucy couldn't help but laugh. 'Oh, Josh,
you're such a gentle good man that I don't believe your subconscious can be any
different!'

'The best kept and tightest run ship
still accumulates bilge, and the most immaculate house still needs its drains,
so why shouldn't human minds have to obey the same law?'

'I think that's bordering on sophistry,'
she said.

He grinned. 'Well, the Mouse put me
through her full gamut of tests, and I do have a genuine dysgraphia, if that's
any consolation.'

'You can also be mighty slippery,' said
Lucy Greco.

Elliott MacKenzie read the rough draft
before passing the only copy to Dr Judith Carriol; he had promised her not to
keep a word of the manuscript anywhere within his publishing house. But he hated
digesting that sort of magic and then being obliged to give it up without
keeping so much as one copy. Oh, Lucy had a copy in Holloman, but that too was
not available to him. What if this precious book got lost? What if Environment
decided there was something subversive about it and withheld it from
publication? They owned all the rights on Dr Christian's behalf, Judith Carriol
had seen to that.

Lucy Greco found time somewhere to keep
in touch, and she was imbued with a kind of enthusiasm he had never seen in her before. In fact, she
was behaving like a young nun in the grip of divine possession; she obviously
felt herself a privileged vessel filled with Joshua Christian's essence, and
found genuine ecstasy in spilling it upon the sheet after sheet of paper her
voicewriter spat out.

Elliott MacKenzie thrust a cautious toe
into the sea of her opinion and asked her if Dr Christian was capable of
articulating his thoughts in front of cameras and microphones, since his
writer's block extended to voice-triggered machines.

'He'll knock 'em in the aisles,' was
Lucy's reply. 'So long as there's a human face and a pair of human eyes he can
look into, he'll be fantastic'

So if Environment decided to quash the
Christian book, what would Atticus do?

Two weeks after he had couriered the
manuscript to her office in Washington, Dr Carriol rang him.

'It's go, Elliott,' she said. 'All stops
out. The sooner the better. When can Lucy have a final draft ready?'

'Another month, she thinks. The trouble
is he keeps producing more stuff she can't bear to leave out, and yet there's a
definite reader's cutoff point for any book of this kind, so we have to keep it
trimmed down to a maximum 256 pages in print. Oh, we can produce a follow-up
volume next year, but that means additional time in editing while we look at the
whole final draft and pick out what must go in the first book and what can wait
until the second.'