The Müller-Fokker Effect (19 page)

‘Special contributions upstairs.’

‘No, he says he wants to
buy
something. Some kind of tape, he says.’

Jerry missed a peanut. ‘What
did
he say, exactly?’

‘He said—you ain’t religious, are ya?’

Jerry grinned. The cop leaned closer and whispered what he thought the name of the tape was.

‘Morgan, we’ve got a problem. A real problem. This guy seems to know a little too much about our operation here.’

The cop, who himself knew nothing of the operation, scratched his head. ‘That’s bad. You think a tax boy, maybe?’

‘Blackmailer is my guess. Oh, of course we’re not doing anything illegal here, but a clever blackmailer could make it look bad for us. Where is he now?’

‘I left him down by gate five, right by the passage. He’s a little old man with a gold-top cane. You want me to take over for you a few minutes?’

‘Yeah, okay. Now here’s what you do…’ He pointed out the monitors to the cop and told him to watch carefully. If anything went wrong, if Billy started speaking oddly or fell down or anything, he was to push a certain button. It would either light a green panel light or a red warning. The red blinking light was mounted inside a large button marked
SCRUB.
When it was alight, pushing it brought the whole show to a close. He did not explain the meaning of any of this, or how a program could be ‘scrubbed’: Direct connections to the android would make it clutch its chest and crumple, whereupon a ‘doctor’ would rush to ‘Billy’s* aid and the spotlight be taken away from him.

‘You mean all this stuff is just in case Billy falls down or gets laryngitis?’

‘Something like that. This is a million-dollar operation, Morgie—we don’t take chances. Speaking of which, how about loaning me your gun? I don’t want any trouble with this guy, but…’

‘Aw, Christ, Jerry, he’s an old man!’

‘But maybe he’s not alone. Anyway, just in case.’

It was sundown in Las Vegas. The biggest fairy Officer Kulak had ever seen stood in front of a television store, pretending to look at the Billy Koch service. He was more or less respectably dressed, but Kulak knew what he was by the rhinestone-rimmed sunglasses. The trouble was, he wasn’t doing anything. The laws being what they were, Kulak could do no more than kick him a few times and make him move along.

A party of interested tourists stopped to watch. ‘Las Vegas ain’t what it used to be,’ said one. ‘In the old days, they’d haul in a fruit like that, get him to blow everybody in the station, and then pound the piss out of him.’

‘That’s what they oughta do,’ said another. ‘But I guess the criminal element is just taking over.’

The big man in the odd glasses moved off towards the bus station.

‘O God! O God! I’m—well!’

‘Take off that brace, brother.
Show the people the pahwr of the Lord Jesus!’

The man fumbled off his heavy appliance, a neck brace, and threw it to the back of the stage, where a stagehand could retrieve it and return it to the prop room. ‘My God! I’m
ALL RIGHT
!’

The next unfortunate was real, an asthmatic child. Billy’s hands gripped her head. ‘LordOLordhealthischildthispoor-afflictedchildletthepahwrcomedownrightdownherethroughmy-hands
RIGHT DOWN THROUGH MY HANDS AND
—HEAL this child!’

The girl gave a little scream and ran to her mother, a woman in a dress of National Arsenamid feed sacking. ‘Mommy, Mommy, my chest don’t hurt no more!’

Billy, smiling and sweating, swung the child up and stood her on a chair. ‘Let
everyone
see you, honey! Let
EVERYONE
see the
PAHWR
of the
LORD
!’

More people joined the end of the line as Billy next healed a man with a paralysed hand and a girl with a blemish (the blemish didn’t actually go away, but it ‘felt funny’). Next came a teenager on crutches, dragging both legs.

The door opened. It wasn’t Jerry, it was the old man.

‘Hi again! Thought you’d forgotten about me, so I came around to have a look at the tape for myself.’

‘
OUT
!’ The cop slapped his empty holster. ‘This is a restricted area! Didn’t you see the sign?’ (On one of the monitors, Billy seemed to shudder slightly. The
SCRUB
button light pulsated like a painful tooth.)

‘I just wanted to speak to the engineer in charge here…’

‘He went to gate five, to see you!’ The Crusade cop began gently shoving the old man toward the door.

‘Ah well, I must have missed him. Perhaps our paths crossed.’ MacCormick Hines smiled, thinking of the three shots the engineer had wasted. They were certainly out to protect their investment here, no two ways about it. Or the secret of Billy’s success.

‘Wait outside, you! When Jerry gets back, you can…’

‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’ Except that Jerry wouldn’t be coming back for awhile. Two bright young men had seen to that. ‘Yes, I’ll just—Good God! Look!’ He pointed his cane at one of the monitors.

The cop stopped shoving. ‘Jesus! What the hell is going on?’ He stabbed every button on the console, but nothing happened. ‘O Jesus, I’d better go find Jerry!’

Billy went into his usual auction chant that rose and fell and ended in a scream of ‘
HEAL
!’ At the climax his steel fingers closed tightly about the boy’s skull. The kid screamed and dropped his crutches. Nobody seemed to notice that he wasn’t standing alone; he was suspended by those crushing hands.

Billy dropped him and advanced on a woman with a cleft palate, so hypnotized that she was already trying to say she was cured. Back of him, the Crusade cops were crowding on the stage, valiantly trying to screen the boy’s corpse from the audience.

Mumble, mumble, pahwr of the Lord and…

‘
HEAL
!’

The palsied old woman who was next in line tried to back away, but those behind her were stubbornly shoving forward, and Billy stalked her, opening and closing hands that were covered with stickiness.…

‘
HEAL
!’

In quick succession he
HEALED
a mongoloid child, a wheelchair paralytic, a laborer with a slipped disc and a mother with a migraine. Some of the others managed to throw themselves out of reach, fall, scramble or jump off the stage.

Not everyone in the hall panicked at once. While the people in front were screaming and trying to rush the exits, those in back were still climbing up on seats to see the miracles. Even when everyone did get turned around and headed outward, they found the exits barred and guarded by Crusade cops. If, in the tumult, anyone could have heard them, they would have explained: the collection hadn’t been taken up yet.

Trailing a coaxial cable that unreeled from under the stage, Billy descended to the audience. Some of the screams now became coherent.

‘The guy’s nuts! He’s
nuts
!’

‘Stop him!’

‘Somebody stop him!’

Several men seized an usher and started kicking him. People piled up against the exits were beginning to suffocate.

‘Stop him!’

Someone threw a punch that hit him solidly; it only turned Billy in a new direction.

‘
HEAL
!’

A doctor rushed Billy and broke a hypodermic on his arm. The android plowed on, HEALing. His smile was ecstatic.

‘O Christ, somebody…’

‘
HEAL
! HEAL!’

A thread of oil smoke rose from the back of Billy’s collar. It thickened to a fluttering ribbon. As Billy reached to
HEAL
another victim, his collar blossomed into greenish flames.

‘Satan has come among us!’

Billy slowed, faltered, stopped. Flames licked up his cheeks as he raised both arms in benediction and began:

Nearer my God to Thee
Nearer my God to Thee

His thermostatically-controlled-fire-emergency-panic-prevention-system was working perfectly.

The organist took her bitten fingers from her mouth and began a tentative accompaniment. A quavering voice in the balcony took up the refrain, and then the entire audience found itself forcing out the reassuring melody. A few at a time, they fell to their knees.

Billy’s torso was shirted in flames of many colors. Lumps of plastic flesh rolled down to his ankles. Miraculously his strong, manly baritone came loud as ever from the midst of the bonfire.

It did not cease until the song was finished, and the final circuit switched off by fire. There remained then the steel skeleton, blackened machinery and tangles of wire, all fused to a pedestal puddle of pink plastic and smoldering tan oxfords. And in their sockets the pale blue eyes still looked toward heaven.

Bibleland neared the end of its third day of business. There were rumors of trouble in Minneapolis, and a garbled TV newscast about a fire which had ‘possibly injured’ the great healing evangelist. (The service itself had been cut off in the middle, due to ‘network transmission difficulties’). Attendance here did not, in any case, slacken.

The ten-acre park was divided into four ‘lands’: Old Testament Land, New Testament Land, Heaven Land and Hades Land. Among the crowd of child pilgrims and pilgrim families, a lone man attracted the attention of Crusade cops.

They were on the alert for pickpockets and perverts, and this man was especially perverted-looking, in his wrinkled gray business suit, tennis shoes and ladies’ rhinestone-rimmed sunglasses. Two plainclothesmen were detailed to keep an eye on him.

He began with the Garden of Eden boat ride. Here a train of boats moved through the still waters of a winding lagoon, passing in sequence all of the mechanical tableaux of the bible story. Adam was shown alone, then shaking hands with his new partner and bride, then the two shared a meal of grapes. Adam and Eve inevitably fell, but their discovery of nakedness was omitted, for our original parents wore modest fig-leaf bikinis from the start.

The stranger seemed oddly unmoved by it all. He did not look up even when an angel drove them from the Garden with a neon sword, or when Adam fought a Tyrannosaur with his stone ax. Instead, he gazed steadily at the waters of the artificial lagoon, and at the innumerable floating islands of ice-cream wrappers, ice-cream sticks, pop bottles and souvenir programs.

The suspect rode the Promised Land roller coaster, catching, from one of its summits, a Pisgah view of Heaven Land. He visited the small zoo called Noah’s Ark on time to see the lions get their dinner. It looked suspiciously like lamb. He took a trip on that children’s favorite, the Fiery Chariot (transfigured by flashing lights and fluorescent paint from an old Octopus), and tried his luck at knocking Goliath into a bucket of water with a basketball. He won a prize here and elsewhere: for knocking down pyramids of Philistines with a ‘jawbone’ boomerang, a plaster ten commandments bookend; for setting fire to Sodom and Gomorrah with an electric-eye rifle, a winged kewpie; for pounding a weight to the top of Jacob’s Ladder, a plastic telescope showing a view of Solomon’s temple.

Methuselah, despite the suspect’s newly sprouting short gray hair, guessed his age accurately, but anyway awarded him a keychain containing a drop of the Red Sea in plastic. You could tell it was real because it was bright red. The man ate a double-dip cone of Manna Whip, a 100 % Certified Beef Quailburger and two Pillar-of-Fire Candy Flosses. Declining to let ‘Joseph’ read his fortune in the Ark of the Covenant (not all pitches were strictly chronistic) he headed for New Testament Land.

It began with a large Crêche at the entrance, with life-size moving figures. Mary smiled, Joseph turned to look, the shepherds genuflected, and so on. The ox moaned at regular intervals.

‘A real wise guy,’ said the attendant later to the two cops. ‘He ast me if the cow was having a baby.’

In the Pavilion of Miracles, a magician in wig and beard walked on water, turned water into wine-colored liquid, and after disappearing from a locked casket, reappeared in the audience with a collection plate. The suspect gave generously.

Passing down the New Testament midway, he was invited to look at Herod’s Holy Innocents (formerly a ‘Story of Life’ exhibit of pickled foeti), to throw the first baseball at an adultress, and to visit Pilate’s Chamber of Atrocities.

Among the thousands of devotional items for sale were rubber crowns of thorns (some with cardboard sun visors), Veronica dishtowels, mustard seeds, ‘Paul in prison’ interlocking puzzles, marionettes, souvenir scourges. He bought everything he saw, and gorged himself on sugar skulls, hot-cross buns, pretzels, chocolate nails and apostle haloes, though he’d scarcely had time to digest his first Eden apple.

Apostle haloes were donuts sold in individual bags, each stamped with the name of an apostle.

‘Get ’em all,’ said the vendor. ‘Get ’em all and get a prize. Get all twelve, you get a prize.’ More than one poor visitor had stuffed himself to vomiting, eating as many as twenty without having been warned there were two Jameses.

The suspect rode the St John Desertmobile, the Galilee speedboat, and allowed himself to be glued to the wall (by centrifugal force) of the chalice for a few moments. In the Garden of Gethsemane Chug-A-Lug contest he drained the cup and was awarded Peter’s victim’s rubber ear. Then on to Crucifixion.