A Creed for the Third Millennium (35 page)

Dr Moshe Chasen watched 'Tonight' in his
office, with the phone switched off. All he said was, 'That's my
boy!'

On the night of Friday, October 29, 2032,
Dr Joshua Christian became famous.
God in Cursing: A New Approach to
Millennial Neurosis
sold out its enormous first printing within a month, and
continued to sell at the rate of 100,000 copies per day. Everyone everywhere
clutched the white volume with the red lettering and the silver bolt of
lightning across its front, and everyone everywhere was actually reading
it.

By overwhelming popular demand, the Bob
Smith show on which Dr Christian originally appeared was rebroadcast a week
later after a huge advertising campaign, and the whole nation watched. This time
the show's usual sponsors were accommodated in three long commercial breaks, one
at the very beginning of the show, one between Dr Christian's solo speech and
the question-and-answer period, and the last at the end of the show. Though
'Tonight' had not lost revenue on its first broadcast; Environment picked up the
tab.

And soon that gaunt sunken face with the
piercing dark eyes could be seen on the cover of every magazine and periodical;
it was stamped onto T-shirts, and its first edition as a poster, with the single
word believe printed beneath it, sold out in a day.

Dr Moshe Chasen had managed to evade his
colleagues on the night Dr Christian appeared with Bob Smith, but he knew he had
only postponed the inevitable confrontation. So when he came in to work the
following Monday and found two notes on his secretary's desk, he sighed,
scratched his head, and invited Dr Abraham and Dr Hemingway down
for morning coffee.

'Did you watch "Tonight" last Friday,
Moshe?' demanded Dr Abraham before his bottom was into a chair.

'As a matter of fact, I did,' said Dr
Chasen. 'Judith sent me a message that I'd find it interesting.'

'Oho!' cried Dr Hemingway. 'Judith knew,
did she?'

It gave Dr Chasen enormous pleasure to
lean back in his chair and imitate Dr Carriol at her most supercilious; he tried
to drive his brows into his hairline and drawled, 'My dear Millie, when have you
ever caught our esteemed chief napping?'

That stymied both of them, since it was
unanswerable.

'Actually,' Dr Chasen went on, his tone
indicating that he thought he should take pity on them, 'she's a great friend of
the publisher at Atticus, and they've got Dr Christian under contract. I believe
Atticus used Judith as one of the first readers of Dr Christian's book while it
was still in manuscript.'

'So last Friday's "Tonight" show was no
surprise to you, huh?' asked Dr Abraham, still sceptical.

'None at all.'

'Then why didn't you warn us?' asked Dr
Hemingway.

Dr Chasen grinned wickedly. 'I couldn't
resist not warning you. What surprises me most is that you didn't see him when
he was here in Environment earlier this year.'

They both sat up.
'Here?'
bleated
Dr Abraham.

'That's right. After Judith read his
book, she invited him down to talk with me about relocation.'

That took the wind completely out of
their sails; they stared at Dr Chasen with the expressions of two children
discovering far too late that they had missed out on a treat.

'I never realized you were so
close-mouthed,' said Dr Abraham feebly.

Well, Sam, I am, thought Dr Chasen to
himself; and I wouldn't have told you now about his visit to Environment, except
that it's not impossible that someone noticed him here, and it might get back to
you. This way, you've been offered an explanation you must accept whether you
want to or not.

'It
was
an exercise, wasn't it?'
asked Dr Hemingway.

'Yes, Millie, it was,' said Dr Chasen
gently.

Dr Abraham shook his head, unconvinced.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Something sounds fishy to me.'

Dr Joshua Christian spent a week in
Atlanta, mostly shuttling back and forth between the buildings with the pink and
blue and grey and gold and black mirrored walls that formed the semicircle of
Media Plaza. He spoke with Dan Connors and Marlene Feldman and Bob Smith again
and Dominic d'Este and Benjamin Steinfeld, with Wolf Man Jack VI and Reginald
Parker and Mischa Bronski on radio; he gave long interviews to all the important
newspapers and magazines, he did several signing sessions in several big Atlanta
bookstores. Times had changed; Atlanta was now the most influential book town in
America, and rapidly eclipsing New York City as the nation's cultural capital.
Part of this was due to the fact that it had already passed the five million
population mark, and was besides the hub of a large constellation of Band A and
Band B relocation settlements.

He went from strength to strength. Even
Dr Judith Carriol was amazed at the smallness of the opposition to his ideas;
logic said it was because he did not deny God, therefore could not be dismissed
as evil or corrupt save perhaps by those who felt their particular brand of
belief in God was the only one that mattered to God. But privately she
considered the main reason for his instantaneous, positive effect on people to
be the extraordinary power within the man. It
came across undiluted on television or radio, it reached out, it embraced, it
infiltrated a long way farther down than skin. He
made
people believe in
what he said, working through their emotions and their instincts, their pain and
their sense of isolation. The concept of the universal truth had always
intrigued but simultaneously baffled her; he projected it, yet still she could
not fathom its nature.

However, Atlanta was only the beginning
of Dr Christian's publicity tour. Both the Environment think tank in the person
of Dr Judith Carriol, and the Atticus Press in the person of Elliott MacKenzie,
felt that Dr Christian should be
seen
by as many people as possible. So
where most author tours concentrated upon mass exposure via the mass media, Dr
Christian's tour deliberately included a large number of public appearances in
the bigger relocation towns, in the established cities, and in any areas felt to
be either sensitive or influential. After two slightly unpleasant experiences in
Atlanta when he was scheduled to sign copies of his book in stores, signing
sessions were abandoned; he had drawn so many people into the stores that chaos
reigned, and he had to be removed in a hurry. Instead, he was slotted into
formal appearances that were advertised as lectures and to which admission could
only be gained by ticket. These tickets were free of charge, but had to be
applied for.

No one, least of all Dr Carriol, could
know ahead of time how well Dr Christian would take the grind of a full
publicity tour; how quickly the novelty would wear off and the enervation set
in. However, she had prepared herself as well as possible by doing some research
first; she had made it her business to talk to several major writers, a brace of
movie stars, and to the three biggest public relations firms in the
people-pushing business. And from every person she saw she learned much the same
thing; that a publicity tour rapidly became a grind to its star, that
in the end the star would become almost maddened by so much brief contact with
so many people all asking the same questions, and that sometimes the star would
even pack up and go home without notice or apology.

However, Dr Joshua Christian displayed no
sign of ennui, exhaustion or disillusion. He kept right on talking to any soul
who would talk to him, he actually welcomed people when they recognized and
accosted him, he signed his book cheerfully whenever it was thrust under his
nose, he handled the occasional nut or antagonist with professional tact and
smoothness, and with journalists of all sorts he was brilliant.

The worst of it was that the publicity
tour kept getting longer. As the book was read by more and more people and his
name reached the proportions of a genuine household word, town after town
flooded Atticus with requests for a visit from Dr Christian. Understanding the
exigencies of remorseless public exposure, Elliott MacKenzie turned all these
requests down, until a discreet message came from Washington that Dr Christian
should where possible visit all these clamouring places. At least twice a week
Dr Carriol would receive word from Atticus that two or three more towns had been
added to their agenda.

One week had become two, two became
three, and three became four; a month on the road, and still Dr Christian went
from strength to strength, apparently capable, thought Dr Carriol with tired
horror, of going on forever. Once they had quit Atlanta the 'on the road' nature
of a publicity tour made itself felt, for every night (and sometimes during the
day as well, when they were scheduled to visit several smaller communities in
one day) the helicopter picked them up and whizzed them to a new town, they
slept all too briefly in their strange beds, then by eight in the morning at the
latest they would commence the new day's round of engagements, continuing from one
engagement to another without let until helicopter time arrived
again.

Outside of the major cities most of Dr
Christian's engagements fell into the lecture category, and these functions he
relished enormously. He would give a fifteen-minute set speech, never the same,
and follow it up by at least an hour of question-and-answer time. His appetite
for people awed Dr Carriol, who had never seen this side of him, any more than
perhaps anyone else ever had. Not content with the personal exposure he invited
through his question-and-answer periods, he refused to hold himself aloof from
the crowds who flocked to hear him, even on one memorable occasion sharply
rebuking a concerned local official who attempted to give him a brief respite by
ordering the crowds away. Unafraid for his person, undaunted by his reception,
he would arrive at a lecture venue and at once dive into the mass of waiting
people, talking away, questioning, having a ball Only how
could
the man
be having a ball? Absolutely fed up with being civil to hosts of strangers and
dredging up the appropriate small talk, longing for peace and quiet and time on
her own, Dr Carriol could not understand how her charge managed to sustain his
mood of what looked very much like real euphoria. Anybody's people-palate ought
to be cloyed! But apparently Dr Joshua Christian was a bottomless pit when it
came to people.

Of course not all of his public
appearances went well, or even smoothly; Dr Christian refused to prepare his
speeches, insisting that if they were not spontaneously extemporaneous, he would
lose his effect on audiences. But that led to a certain amount of unevenness,
compounded by the fact that he was not consistently logical, nor always able to
resist the wild emotions which had a tendency to come roaring up out of his
buried deeps. Luckily television and radio sobered him a little; he did at least
stick to the subject and answer the questions properly. Be grateful, said
Dr Carriol to herself, for small mercies.
And only let me continue to find the strength to trail around this huge country
in his wake!

While Dr Christian continued his
ever-extending and ever more triumphant tour of the United States, his publisher
was trying to decide when (or if) Dr Christian might be free to tour South
America and the Eurocommune. In both continents
God in Cursing
was
selling enormously well, despite the loss inevitable in translation, and the
ideological differences. The Russians rumbled a little at first, then wisely
piped down while they debated how much editing
God in Cursing
was going
to need before it could be circulated through the many Soviet states; glaciation
was worst in this biggest, most landlocked and northerly of the world's major
powers, and a concept of God which could be allowed to exist side by side with
Marxist philosophy was not to be sneezed at.

The Christian family of course had been
following their Joshua's progress with minute attention to its national import,
and huge attention to Joshua himself. His brothers did at first manfully strive
to keep some degree of detachment, but after a week succumbed to the mood of joy
and pride which the Christian women exuded from every pore.

'He's wonderful!' cried the Mouse after
watching 'Tonight with Bob Smith'.

'Of course he is,' said Mama
complacently.

'He's
wonderful!'
cried the Mouse
after watching Benjamin Steinfeld's 'Sunday Forum'.

'I always knew he was,' said Mama
complacently.

Only Mary kept her own counsel. The pain
in her was not easily classified enough to be called simple jealousy; to
herself, she thought she suffered because somehow it was always Joshua who made
it impossible for her to be happy. But when as the secretary she opened the
Atticus cylinder containing Joshua's poster, down which was stuffed the T-shirt
—
ah, that was the last straw! She hid emotions, poster and T-shirt until after
dinner that night, when she threw them onto the coffee table without a word and
sat back to watch, trembling.

To do the family justice, no one was
quite pleased, even Mama. Andrew's distaste showed clearly, as did James's
bewilderment.

'I suppose it was inevitable,' Andrew
said after a long moment. He shrugged. 'I wonder what Joshua thinks?'