Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Eleven

“WHY do you care what I believe? It’s none of your business!” That was Derek, to Lorna.

“It’s everyone’s business now. When the aliens return we have to present them with a solid front. We have to be united in our own beliefs. We have to be prepared to destroy them all before they have a chance to overcome Earth.” Lorna to Derek.

“You’ve gone right off your nut! You talk like a series of posters!”

“What about the Star Child? What about him?”

“What about him? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You hop around like a hungry flea in a litter of pups.”

“We were warned that he had to be given a religious education, taught about our God, our beliefs, and what have we done? We have given him to the U.N., a bunch of Communists and atheists. We were warned and we did nothing!”

“By whom? Your bearded illiterate? Good God, Lorna….”

She gasped and blanched and quickly clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to deny the words.

“Now what?” Derek was leaning across the dinner table staring at her, unmindful of the chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, unheeding of the salad bowl heaped with mixed greens and dotted lavishly with blue cheese.

“You mustn’t say that. It’s blasphemy. If anyone hears you they’ll beat you….”

“Good God! Good God! Good God! Good God….”

Lorna fled, her food untasted on her plate. Derek pushed his own plate back and stared after her. “She’s gone crazy. What did they do to her?”

Lisa, looking at the food. that she had struggled so hard to find and bring home, concentrated on not weeping.

“Young man, you go fetch your sister back to the table and if either of you starts on the Voice of God Church again, I’ll do the beating. Now scat!”

Lorna allowed herself to be brought back, but she refused to look at Derek, and she was silent through the main course. They talked of the weather, and Lorna started to speak, but bit her lips instead and picked at her salad. Obie had predicted another year of drought.

“They’ve known for twenty years or more that the cities have caused the weather changes,” Derek said. “The cloud cover, seeding with dust particles, the great heat output of the cities, that’s what it takes, you know. Everything gets sucked up and dumped out again over the cooler oceans. It isn’t a question of how to alleviate it, but rather why don’t they take the steps.”

“Break up the cities?” Lisa murmured.

“What else?”

“There was a time when we could do that, but now? I don’t think so,” Matt said. “No water inland, all crops, no industry….”

“Brother Cox says—”

“Oh, shut up,” Derek interrupted.

The talk turned to the world situation and the heavy demands of the draft to maintain the forces throughout South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Matt was bitter about it, Derek resigned, and again Lorna looked as if she would like to explain, or comment, and again she didn’t. Obie had predicted an ever increasing need for men to patrol the world in order to keep the raw materials flowing into the bottomless pit that the space programs had created, and to keep the people from whose country they flowed quiet if not happy. Obie predicted also that it was futile, that those people were God-fearing people and the day was at hand when they would rise up and slay the non-believers stripping their lands for a project foredoomed to fail. The Voice of God Church sponsored, outfitted, and supplied guerrilla missionaries all over the world; outlawed by most governments, refused travel cards and credit cards, the Church provided its own credit, its own travel facilities, and no one knew how many of the zealots it had sent out, or where they had gone.

“The trouble is,” Lisa had complained once to Matt, “that if you believe in anything that Obie had condoned, you are forced to doubt your own beliefs. Can I really believe in anything that the Voice of God Church believes in? It doesn’t seem possible.”

They had cake and champagne, there were two bottles, so they all got rather giddy and happy and took their glasses to the living room where they laughed at old times and made elaborate toasts to Derek. It turned into a birthday party after all. Until the Savers arrived at eleven.”

Lorna wanted to let them in, to prove to her family that they weren’t monsters. When she was refused, she said she would go out and join them, and Matt assumed the role that he had used only once or twice in his life, that of the heavy-handed father, lord, master of the house. He couldn’t permit her to leave. Lorna stood up and started for the door, and he got in front of it. She stopped and stared at him with unbelieving eyes.

“You always said that we had to decide for ourselves. I decided. I believe in Brother Cox and what he is doing. I am a member of the Voice of God Church, I am working for it this summer and I’ll go to its school in the fall. Let me go out. They don’t know someone is inside who belongs. They’ll go away when they know your daughter is a member of the Church.”

“Wait,” Matt said. “Listen first.”

The hymn ended and the voice of the Messenger was there in the room with them. “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”

Lorna’s head was cocked slightly to the left as she listened raptly with her eyes half closed. She smiled at Matt when the voice ceased. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “The Voice of God can go anywhere, be heard through any walls, over anything else. Brother Cox heard the Voice of God years ago, and now the gift has been given to all the members. We can hear the Voice of God anytime.”

Derek snorted. “Gift! You pay an electronics expert enough and you too can become the Voice of God. Gift!”

Lorna drifted away from the door. The Savers were gone now, there was no longer any issue of going out or staying in. She said, very serenely, “People like you always scoff. You can’t accept the transcendent. If you can’t weigh and measure it, tear it apart and put it together again, reproduce it at will, you refuse to accept it no matter how many witnesses there are. Like when Blake was with Brother Cox healing….” She stopped and looked quickly at Lisa, who had become very pale.

“Have you seen him?”

“No. I don’t know where he is. No one will say. But they have films and photographs, and there is a Blake Daniels Cox Meditation Room at the headquarters in Mount Laurel, where I work now. He is a healer, Dad. I saw the films and talked to some of the people he healed. They aren’t mistaken.”

Matt shook his head. Ten years ago he thought this issue had been settled. But Lorna had been a child, eight, nine years old. She must remember the discussions they had had about this very thing. She and Derek had laughed at the idea of Blake’s having healing powers then. What had happened?

He said, “It’s nearly midnight, honey. Let’s get some sleep. I have to be at my office by eight in the morning, but I’ll be home from noon on and I’m off the next day, and there’ll be time to talk. Okay?”

In bed, not touching because of the heat; the electricity shortage wouldn’t permit them to run the air conditioners in all of the rooms (they had turned on the ones in Lorna’s and in Derek’s rooms, and the children didn’t know theirs was turned off), Lisa said wistfully, “I used to think that the problems would end when they were grown, you know, no more measles and scraped knees, no more school plays to agonize over, no more pajama parties that would keep everyone awake until morning… I wish those days were back again.”

“I’m worried about her, Lisa. Listen, tomorrow after Derek leaves for the ship and you two are alone, try to find out what you can about this crazy conversion, will you?”

“This must be how Paul’s family felt about it all. When he left home he was Saul, when he returned he was a fiery-eyed Paul.”

“If she had a religious experience anything like that I’d like to know under what conditions….”

“You think he would use LSD, or SNO, or anything like that on youngsters?” Lisa sat straight up in the bed, naked, suddenly shivering in the heat of the room.

“I don’t think so. I think Billy Warren Smith is too cagey to let him try that, but they might have something similar, or… I just don’t know. Get what you can from her.”

Lorna had a copy of an essay she had done about her experience for it writing course, and she gave it to Lisa smiling. “I will turn it over to the Church in the fall. They like testimonials, firsthand reports, and such. I meant to before I left Chicago, but I couldn’t find it. I had packed it away already.” She finished canned peaches, long hoarded for such an occasion, and started on poached eggs and toast. She ate like a field laborer, and weighed a sleek one hundred ten pounds. Since Lisa topped that by only three pounds, there was no envy in her glance, just amusement.

“Don’t they feed you at the mountain camp?”

“Have you ever known any institutional food to be worth eating, Mother? Seriously? The cook is a tall, heavy woman, not fat, just big, broad shoulders and muscles, like that. She has orange hair and it is as straight and hard as… as the string of taffy you get from a spoon when it’s done. You know? It’s brittle. So every morning she has to wrestle with it, get it up and under a cook’s hat somehow. Within an hour it is out again, sticking out this way and that, short sharp ends of hair like a porcupine bristling. Back to the mirror to get it pinned up again. She uses a bushel of hairpins in it, and it won’t stay. So she never has time really to cook. And it’s a shame because the food itself is too good to be wasted by her. Potatoes not quite done, peas soft and mushy, steaks crisp, pork still pink, salad limp and either without dressing, or with something forgotten from the dressing. One day she left out the oil, another time she forgot the vinegar. Or salt. She has a real amnesiac strain when it comes to salt. Either she forgets that she used it already, or she just forgets to add any at all. Anyway we stock up on cheese and apples and things like that for eating in the dorms, and it isn’t too bad.”

But things like that would have had Lorna writing home for rescue as short a time as six months ago, Lisa thought. And here she was cheerful, laughing about it, accepting it happily. Lisa poured coffee for both and sat down to read Lorna’s report of her conversion. Lorna picked up the morning facsimile news and glanced over it without reading. She turned on the kitchen 3D and switched channels for several minutes, again not paying much attention, not interested. Suddenly she asked, “Is my old scooter still in the garage?”

“Of course, why?”

“Maybe I’ll get it out and tinker with it later, go for a ride to see some of the old sights….”

Lisa nodded; she knew Lorna would ride over to visit the temple. She returned to reading the report. She was impressed by Lorna’s writing ability, unsuspected in the past.

“This should be called the Universe-city,” the essay started. “A walled town where we are imprisoned and submitted to daily tortures until we become hollow, ready to be pumped full again. By daily injections of the deadly—through boredom—vaccine of education administered by non-entities, in a shotgun blast at the classes of three hundred, five hundred, one thousand, we become immunized against diseases such as admiration of Yeats, fondness for drama, an eye for art, a natural bent for math or science. Sicknesses all. Education is a duty. Education is a chore that modern youth must face up to for the good of the world. Our world will be saved only through the education of its young. Well, ho, and hum.

“One professor remains to me Professor Blur. I sit so far from the lecture stand that he is only a pale blur atop a dark suit and white shirt neatly split down the front by a black tie that is like a crack in a white board fence. I try sometimes very hard to see through the crack, to see what is on the other side, but I think there is nothing there.

“Another professor is Dr. Arms. He waves them constantly. I close my eyes and bet with myself where they will be when I look again. I seldom win. His arm motions are completely random, there is no pattern. He teaches the Overview of Philosophy class, and his voice has found its level and never rises above, or sinks below it. Philosophy has killed him, only his arms won’t die. I think he has two eyes and a nose and a mouth, but I am not certain.

“And so it goes. I attend class or not. There are tapes of all lectures, of course. If everyone attended class there would be bedlam, and no seats.

“We are not allowed beyond the walls of the city. Out there there are wolves. A wilderness where little girls go forth and are never seen again. There is only authorized traffic on the streets; the wolf packs are on foot, howling up and down the streets from dark until dawn, thirsting for blood from innocents. We are the innocents. But such wise innocents, such experienced innocents. Everything is allowed at Universe-city. All drugs that have boon accepted as harmless, all forms of deviation from sexual mores, the attire that strikes one’s fancy. There is no place to rebel, nothing to rebel about. Anarchist? Permission for the stand from three until four on the ninth of the coming month. And is that satisfactory? Communist? Same stand from one until two on the third. Adherents for everything imaginable are permitted to speak freely, and there is no trouble. Chromosomal manipulation to produce workers? When would you like the stand, sir? The recipe for abortion cocktail has been given out so often that no one even attends those meetings now. We sit up until all hours just trying to find a subject that would be denied so we will have a cause. There isn’t any.

“Of course I attended no church. I never did. I learned the patterns of the walls at the museums and libraries, and I counted the grains of sand at the sponsored beaches. We have movies and dances and the monthly psychedelic reverie to look forward to. But what’s it all for?

“For the first three months I floated high on the excitement. What freedom, what courage all about me, unhampered, unquestioned, the first totally permissive environment I had known. I floated. Then fell with a dull thud. Freedom can be confining. Everything is there for the taking, already paid for, ours to be used, squirreled away, consumed, wasted. It doesn’t matter what we do with it, it’s ours. So we don’t even have the thrill of petty thefts that could relieve the sameness and the boredom.

“The walls that lock the mad world out, and us in, ensuring freedom and safety became the prison walls. We plotted escape. Not only escape, but safe passage through the miles of wolf country. The joy and exhilaration of getting out and through the slums to the Loop! There is nothing to compare to it. The older, more experienced among us told us what to wear, how to talk if we got caught, but best of all, don’t get caught. Girls would get raped repeatedly, maybe cut up a little bit, for boys it would be even worse. Especially if they happened to get caught by a gang of she-wolves.

“I had my hair to my shoulders then, nothing significant in it at all. It was the length at the time. I saw on my first excursion out into wolf country that it was a giveaway. Either very long, to the waist if possible, or else very short, bobbed even, but not in between. I decided to let it grow long, and meanwhile I got a wig. I stole it from a shop where the salesman never took his eyes off our group. Seven of us scattered in all directions covering the shop, making him stony very busy. He knew we planned to steal something, but I suppose he had his mind on his jewelry more than on the wigs. I got a black one made of something that burned like a Ping-Pong ball. I learned that later, much later. Betsy McCormack had about five hundred dollars with her, in cash. All of us had credit cards that he demanded to see before he even let us in; he knew we didn’t plan to use them. But the sight of all that cash floored, him. I guess he never had seen so much in one little hand before. So while Betsy haggled with him over an imitation plastic raincoat, I got the wig on, tied my own ribbon around it, and smeared a little vaseline on it to make it look like dirty hair. The shopkeeper never gave it a second look although we stayed in the shop long enough for two other girls to do the same thing. I still wonder if he ever found out what we had taken.

“The clothes in wolf-country were wild. Plastic pants and shirts, covered with plastic coats. Nothing under it. You had to be shaved clean, and the nipples had to be bright red, with white, green, blue lines radiating out from them, like war paint. The navel was colored too, usually red, but this was not arbitrary. The plastic clothes were tinted, yellow, blue, whatever, and they were almost as clear as glass. It wasn’t as if you could really see the body, just almost see it. Also, the plastic had a refraction quality so that the lines wavered when we moved.

“Well, that was in January. We would go out once a week usually, hiding in the buses that brought kids back from visits here or there; sneaking rides in the delivery trucks; sneaking out through the personnel gates. Most of the time we stayed within five or ten blocks of the university, seeing the sex movies, or smoking pot in one of the caves, or watching one of the brawls that always turned into a riot. When they started we always got out of the thick of it, ducked into a store, or the movie, or someplace like that when the thing started to get too rough and the National Guards were called in. It was after one of those fights that I found out the wig I’d stolen would burn.

“We were watching a bunch of the short-paired girls force a grocery truck to the curb and proceeded to rifle its contents, taking great sacks of groceries while the driver was sat on by some of the gang members. We were long hairs, so we stayed as far away as we could and not miss it altogether. The boys came then, and we couldn’t tell which side they were on. They started to roughhouse it with the girls, and suddenly the street was filled with people all screaming, fighting, smashing everything. We turned to go back to school. We knew that the guards would be there in a few minutes and if any of us ever got caught out in one of the riots, we’d be suspended and sent home. The damn fools set fire to the truck though, started it and sent it down the street in our direction. It cracked up half a block up from us and the building that stopped it burst into flames as if it had been waiting a lifetime for such a chance. And before we could get out of there the whole section seemed to be burning. We ran through alleys, climbed fences, ran some more, but the fire was spreading faster than we could outdistance it. And we were turned back again and again by firemen and guards and short hairs with clubs and pipes.

“I was getting so exhausted that I felt like just giving up and letting the fire have me, but every time I stumbled and staggered against a building, or against someone, the thought of being sent home in disgrace put life back in me and I kept going. Then suddenly. there were four boys, about fourteen to seventeen, and they wanted me. They were fanning out the way they do. They had plastic clubs, the kind that don’t usually kill or break bones, but hurt like the devil. The fire was at my back, I’d been running in circles for an hour. Sparks fell on me through the plastic as if it wasn’t even there, and at that moment my wig caught and blazed. I snatched it off before I was actually burned, but the boys were scared and ran. They thought I was on fire. I threw the wig down. I ran into a secondhand clothing store and grabbed a coat and threw it around me. With my own hair and a cloth coat on I got through the cordon of guards who were picking up every slum kid that came streaming out of the fired area. I couldn’t get back to the university however, and I didn’t know where to go, or what to do. I had no money with me, no ID, no credit cards, nothing. I kept walking. I didn’t know what had happened to the other girls I had been with. We had been separated early in the fracas and I hadn’t seen them since. I was hoping they had got back inside the school grounds and that they would cover for me. I didn’t believe I would be able to get back that night.

“They were keeping the riot and the fire pretty much confined to the area near the university, so I walked the other way. I walked and walked; the excitement going on behind me gave me protection. No one had time to pick up one solitary girl right then, and the place was alive with police, National Guards, detectives. Then I saw a window poster advertising the mammoth revival meeting being held at the downtown Municipal Auditorium. I remembered that a number of students had been permitted to attend, they were mostly from psychology classes studying mass hysteria, mob psychology, mass conversion, and such. I thought I could get back with them.

“The meeting had started already, a guest speaker was talking briefly of the advances being made in Brazil, his native country. I was directed to a Seat, down front, not with the school group, by an usher with a lighted taper of some sort, electric I guess, but it looked different, as if a dancing flame were enclosed in the tiny pointed bulb that was tinted pink. I kept craning my neck to try to pick out any of the kids I knew, but there was such a crowd there. The ushers were spaced throughout the auditorium, up and down the steps, at the doors, forming lighted lines along the aisles between rows of seats. It was very effective, beautiful, awesome even. The small lights radiated out from the speakers’ platform like arms of a starfish glowing in the otherwise darkened auditorium.

“I was so tired, and I had been so frightened, and here it was warm and safe. Gradually my heart calmed again and my breath wasn’t coming in gasps, and I could observe and listen to the speaker. I didn’t think much of him. Short, dark, with a heavy accent, he was talking about things I didn’t understand, and I found him very boring, much like the professors at school. Then he was finished. The choir sang a hymn. I didn’t know it. It was one of the new ones published by the Church a few years ago. There was something about it, though…. I analyzed what it was and decided that the composer had deliberately copied the style of Ravel’s Bolero, the same insistence, the same hypnotic building up to a smashing climax. Later I knew I was wrong about that, but then I was feeling smug and superior, and almost sorry for the poor innocent ones there who didn’t have the background to see what was being done. The hymn ended, and when the lights went down that had illuminated the choir, Brother Cox was standing on the dais. As if by magic. I had been watching critically and I hadn’t seen him enter. I still don’t know how he does that.

“There was a yellow light on him. I was close enough to see how bronzed he was, how healthy-looking, how alive. His hair and beard gleamed, his eyes shone as if he were giving off light. I was wishing that I had a notebook to make notes on it all. I was fascinated and repelled. But when he began to speak…. And here is the mystery: I had heard the same things from other people who had been converted, and I had read of him, and of course, in my home, we had discussed the Church and all it implied, but when I heard Brother Cox talk about it, explain the real reasons for his faith, explain the significance of the Church and what it was doing and what it stood for, I knew he was right. It was that simple. I was still able to observe the cleverness of the organization in the lighting, and the buildup to this moment, but even with this objective consideration of the mechanics of the proceedings, I knew that what he had to say warranted any means of gaining attention long enough for the people to understand it all.

“All about me the lights were flickering like fireflies, and there was no sound in the auditorium except for his voice, and his voice was in my ears. In the ears of everyone there. I know it is an acoustical trick done with electronics, but it has a purpose: it symbolizes how Brother Cox receives his messages from God. It is the Voice of God speaking to each one of us through this chosen man.

“I can’t repeat what Brother Cox said that night. It is all documented, all on record, and for me to add to that record would be redundant. The non-believers won’t accept the truth of his words, and the believers don’t need further proof. Instead, I will try to explain my own feeling that night. I had been stumbling about in wolf country, daring fate, tempting evil to myself. I had had no religious training as a child. I didn’t believe in God, any God. I didn’t see that He was necessary, or even possible. If I had been tempted to believe in Him, I would have despised Him for all the evil He allowed to exist. God was an invention of man, used to excuse man his weaknesses, used as magic to bring about the unobtainable, used as a scapegoat to be blamed for the wickedness of man to man. I didn’t need such a God. I rejected him and relied on reason and humanism, as my parents did before me. I don’t blame them. They had rejected the same false god that I had cast from my life. They didn’t know that Brother Cox is invoking, not that false god, but the true God that the churchmen and scholars and secular interests had taken from mankind. They knew nothing about the space travel that would become a reality in this century; they had grown up in an age where other worlds, travel between suns, other people were fantasies of writers who were published in cheap pulps. They could not visualize or conceptualize a God of the Universe, the entire universe, not just this poor planet Earth. Not an anthropomorphic God, but a God who is so vast, so unimaginable, so unlike anything dreamed up by the poets and the prophets that to speak of Him in the same breath as the Biblical god of the ancients is to blaspheme. And this God is locked in immortal battle with Forces of Evil that are as vast as He is. This is the message of Brother Cox. A drop of water is not the ocean, yet who can believe in the ocean until he has witnessed it? A grain of sand is not the beach. But a blind man can be led to the beach and walk for miles on it, feeling the presence of the sea, feeling the stir within himself that proclaims this to be the ocean and the beach and come to believe in them without ever having seen them with his eyes. And once he has accepted their existence, the drop of water and the grain of sand can symbolize the boundless ocean and the endless beach. This is how I have come to accept this vast, unimaginable God. I have felt His Presence, have been stirred by the currents from within myself yearning for Him. I know He is. I can’t prove it, but I don’t have the need to prove it. Just as the blind man can deny the existence of the ocean and the beach by withholding himself from it, so can the non-believers continue to deny His existence. But the ocean is, nevertheless. The beach is. God is.

“The answer to those non-believers who claim that the Church threatens their lives is an answer I recall from my own childhood. My father, one of the most tolerant of men, a man of ethics so Godlike that I must believe him, said that any religion must be permitted just so long as it does not threaten mankind. The Catholic Church at the time, he said, was threatening mankind, all of mankind, with its policy on birth control. It was no longer enough for them to acknowledge the rights of others to practice birth control if they so chose, they were threatening mankind by their own adherence to dogma. So we see today that the non-believers are threatening mankind by their acceptance of the atheistic dogma that the Star Child is property belonging to the U.N. By refusing to accept God’s word that He will come to the aid of mankind only if His house, this Earth, is in order, the atheists are threatening to open Earth to the strangers when they return full of wrath and seeking vengeance. Today universal birth control is a fact although the Catholic Church was virtually destroyed in the battle to establish it. Mankind was saved, the Church was lost. Again mankind must be saved. At whatever the cost.”

That ended the essay.