The Man in the Tree

Chapter Twenty-four

All the rest of that week, the household was in a state of tension. Pongo had told the others briefly what had happened at the Costa Brava Motel; Gene would not discuss it. Irma stayed in her room Tuesday morning and let messages pile up in the answering machine. Margaret broke a pencil and threw the pieces at the wall.

On Thursday Gene and Pongo went into Tampa again in the morning and did not come back until mid-afternoon; Irma and Margaret had cold turkey sandwiches for lunch.

That afternoon, at Gene's direction, Irma called Cliff Guthrie, Nirmal Coomaraswami, and Stan Salomon, and invited them for the weekend. On Friday, Gene and Pongo went into Tampa again. That afternoon, after the others had arrived, the gate signal rang. Irma said, "Yes -- Oh, Mike!"

"Yes, it's me, luv. Can I come in?"

Wilcox entered beaming a few moments later. Irma hugged him and introduced the others. "You didn't bring Nan?"

"No, she's getting married actually. How is everyone?"

"Frantic," said Irma. "Gene has some big secret that he won't tell anybody about. I'm glad you're here."

Pongo came in a little after three. "Gene's in his room," he announced. "Says he won't be down for dinner, but he wants to see everybody in the dining room at nine o'clock."

"Pongo, what's going on?" Irma said. "This is too much."

"He went into the hospital and stayed two hours. That's all I know." Pongo got a slab of beef out of the refrigerator and began doing things to it.

At dinner, Cliff Guthrie said, "Nirmal, you look kind of tired. Is everything okay?"

"Well, it is not really okay. Some things I don't like are happening at the university. A good friend of mine, you probably don't know him,, but he is quite well known in his field, and he happens to be gay. The university dismissed him this week for moral turpitude."

Linck nodded. "These swings in attitude are a very effective way of weeding out deviants," he said. "The door opens, people come out of the closet; then it shuts, and they are outside. What will your friend do now?"

"I don't know. He probably cannot get another job teaching. I have another friend who is gay, a philology professor; he was fired in November, and the last I heard he was tending a bar in Detroit."

"I don't think there has ever been an administration in this country that I have disliked so much," Linck said. "They are militarist; they are bigoted, and they are very ignorant. This adventurism in Central America and Africa -- that is only the beginning."

"How long would you say we've got before the world blows itself to hell?" Salomon asked.

Linck shrugged. "On days when I am optimistic, I think we may last as much as thirty years. By then I will be eighty-four, and it won't so much matter to me. But if there is any advance warning, I think I will try to get out of the northern hemisphere."

"Why the northern hemisphere?" said Wilcox.

"Because if the Soviets and the West bomb each other, they are capable of making the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. I will go to Bolivia, probably. My first choice would be Australia, but there are too many military installations there. Bolivia is an unimportant little country."

"I have heard people talk like this before," said Coomaraswami, "and it is really bizarre, because people are saying, well, the world is going to be destroyed by atomic war, and they all agree, yes, it is going to be destroyed, and then they talk about something else. It is like people going down a river on a raft, and they say, tomorrow morning we will all go over the falls and be killed, and then they play pinochle or something."

"What should they do instead?" Margaret asked.

"Well, I think they should at least talk about some ways of getting off the raft."

"Suppose you were the President -- what would you do?"

"Probably I could not do anything; the problem is global."

"If you were God, then?"

"Well, if I were God," said Coomaraswami, "I think I could make some very good improvements just by changing the rules a little bit. For instance, I could change the rate of radioactive decay so that an atomic explosion would not be possible. Or I could do something even simpler, I could change the rules in such a way that there would be no transparent solids in nature."

"How would that be an improvement?"

"Well, think about it. If there were no transparent solids, then you could not have windshields in cars or airplanes, and you would not be able to travel very fast. We could not have modern bombers or fighter planes. People would have to travel less and stay closer to home; then they would mind their own business more. Also we would not have cameras or telescopes, and that would keep us from killing each other at long distance."

"We wouldn't have eyeglasses, either, or windows."

Coomaraswami shrugged. "No, well, then it would be more of an advantage to have good eyesight, and therefore there would not be so much myopia and astigmatism. And people got along very well without glass in their windows for thousands of years."

Gene paused outside the dining room. His throat was dry, and that was absurd, because it was his house, his friends and companions, and yet he felt that he was about to attempt something ultimately perilous. That was where the excitement came from. It was one thing to solve a problem in a daydream, and it was another to translate it into reality. For that, he needed to persuade other people -- real, living people, the people he had never understood. Would they be indifferent? Incredulous? Would they laugh?

Their heads turned as he walked in and took his seat; he could tell by their expressions that they saw him as somehow changed, as a new enigma. That was good.

Mike Wilcox was sitting between Margaret and Nirmal; he raised his hand slightly in greeting.

"Hello, Mike. When did you get here?"

"Just this afternoon. I'm not sure I'm meant to be here actually -- I didn't know there was going to be a meeting."

Gene pulled his chair out and sat down. "It's all right, I want you to hear this. Has anyone told you that I healed a man named Cooley, Monday afternoon in Tampa?"

"Well, Irma did say something. I can't quite follow it."

"He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- Lou Gehrig's disease. I healed him by touching him. I know how this sounds, but reserve your judgment. The doctor who looked at him afterward is named Montoya. I got hold of him Wednesday and talked him into taking me through the intensive-care unit at Tampa General; He didn't want to do it, but I put some pressure on through the head of the fund-raising committee; I'm one of their heavy donors. He took me in there Thursday morning. It was an awful place -- I had no idea. It's one big room partitioned off with portable screens -- people yelling in pain, blood on the nurses' uniforms, blood on the floor, just a madhouse. Anyhow, we went down the row. I healed an old man with a massively bleeding ulcer, and a woman dying of cancer, and a girl with a crushed larynx. I'm getting follow-up x-rays, but I know I did it. I healed them. Yesterday I went in and tried it again. I healed three patients; that seems to be about my limit -- after that I feel as if I'd been running uphill."

There was a silence.

"Had you ever done this before?" Salomon asked.

"I'm not sure. I remember once in Greece, a friend of mine hurt his toe. He was barefoot, and he tripped and hit the doorsill. He thought his big toe was broken, and I looked at it and touched it, and it was all right. I didn't think anything about it then -- just thought he'd made a fuss over nothing. The only time I ever tried to heal anybody was years before that, in New York, when my best friend was dying of a heart attack. I couldn't do it; I didn't know enough. If I had, I could have saved him. There were things I could have done -- open the airway, chest massage, mouth-to-mouth breathing. It wouldn't have taken a miracle, just somebody being there who knew the right thing to do. But I didn't know. After that, I never tried again, until Cooley."

Wilcox cleared his throat. "I'm not sure if this means anything," he said, "but you remember looking at Nan's leg, before we left? Well, when I got her home, she went down to start her physical therapy the next day, and when they took off the brace, the knee was completely mobile -- not a thing wrong with it. They told her to go home and not be a nuisance."

"So. Maybe I healed her too. If so, I wasn't aware of it." Gene folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. "Now I've got to demonstrate something, because I want you to believe me. Pongo and Irma have already seen this, the rest of you haven't. Nirmal, will you hand me something from your wallet -- something you think would be hard to duplicate?"

"Hard to duplicate?"

"Yes. Not a pack of cigarettes, not a coin. Something one-of-a-kind. Don't worry, I'll give it back,"

"I am not worried, but I am confused. Will this do?" Coomaraswami handed over a credit card with a broken corner.

"Sure. Now watch." Gene laid the card on the table, covered it with his big hand for a moment. His hand moved sideways across the table. When he lifted it, there were two credit cards. He handed them to Salomon, who stared at them a moment before passing them to Coomaraswami. Margaret and Cliff Guthrie got up to look over his shoulder. Both credit cards had the same embossed twelve-digit number, both said "N. K. COOMARASWAMI" on the front; both had the lower right-hand corner broken in the same way.

"May I see?" said Wilcox. He took the two credit cards and looked at them closely.

"Mike, could you do that?"

"Yes, with a little preparation."

"Could you do it the way I did -- not knowing in advance what Nirmal would give me?"

"Oh, yes. Not at all difficult."

Gene sighed, "All right," he said. He reached into his pocket, took out a little cloth bag with a drawstring and slid it down the table. The others stood up to see better as Wilcox opened the bag and drew out an oblong bar of bright gold. On the surface of the bar was the embossed legend, "CREDIT SUISSE, 500g GOLD, 999.9."

"Have you ever seen one of those before?" Gene asked.

"No, never. My lord, that's heavy. What's it worth?"

"About seven thousand dollars, I suppose. I haven't followed the market lately. Have you got a penknife?"

"A knife? Yes."

"Scratch your initials in it, or any symbol you like. Pongo, will you get a grocery bag from the kitchen?"

"Aha," said Wilcox good-humoredly. He took a knife out of his pocket, opened it, and carved the initials "MBW" on the bar.

Pongo came back and handed him a brown paper bag. "Examine it, please," said Gene. Wilcox turned the bag over in his hands, opened it, and peered in.

"Now put the bar in the bag. Take it out again. Now fold the top of the bag and hold it with both hands. Raise the bag a little, so it doesn't touch the table." Wilcox followed instructions, watching Gene with a glint of amusement in his eyes.

Gene stood up. He walked down the table until he was behind Wilcox; then he reached over and lightly touched the side of the brown paper bag. The bag dipped suddenly in Wilcox's hands and hit the table with a solid thump.

Wilcox had turned pale. He opened the bag and looked in, then drew out a gold bar and laid it beside the first. They gleamed in the middle of the table, each one with the same initials scratched in it.

After a moment Wilcox looked up. "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you'll teach me that trick," he said.

Gene sat down again. "Mike, if I can do this, what do I need your money for? Haven't you ever asked yourself how I got so rich?"

"Well, I did wonder -- "

"I bought diamonds and copied them, just the way I copied that gold bar, and sold them to Piet's firm in Amsterdam."

Linck was nodding. "lt's true. Millions of dollars' worth, over a period of years. It was very profitable to us."

"I still think it is a trick," said Coomaraswami, laughing weakly.

"Why?"

"Because it is impossible,"

"Have you ever heard of the 'many-worlds' explanation of quantum physics?"

"Yes, of course. That is Hugh Everett's theory. He says that when two things can happen, at the particle level, both things do happen, and so you get a kind of splitting of reality into two separate worlds. It is a very interesting theory."

"And it's true, I've known it all my life. I can see into those other worlds, a little bit; I can reach in and turn them, I haven't created anything, I've just taken that gold bar from another world and moved it into this one. And I now know that I can heal people the same way."

He went on, "This is what I've been waiting for. A couple of years ago, in Japan, I woke up one morning and realized I was almost forty years old, and I had a power that I'd never done anything with except to kill people and make myself rich. So I came back here and built this house. I wanted a place where I could sit still for a while and get things straight in my head, and I wanted a place where I could spend the rest of my life in reasonable comfort, if I couldn't figure out anything better to do."

"And now you know what you want to do?" Irma asked..

"Irma, I knew what I wanted to do before -- I just didn't see how to do it."

"And what is that?" asked Linck.

"Save the world." He sat back and looked at them. "Why not? The problems are not that difficult. I mean, most of these things are obvious: we have to reduce population and pollution, we have to have world-wide disarmament, and so on. People aren't dumb. They know their institutions are pushing them into stupid and destructive things, but nobody wants poverty, and nobody wants to get killed. Suppose you could get, let's say, sixty percent of the people on earth into one room and talk to them, show them how to get out of this mess. If you could convince them, and then send them home, do you think they wouldn't change the world?"

"That's a very large number of people," said Linck.

"Sure it is. Three billion. But let's take some arbitrary numbers. Suppose I can sign up ten thousand people a month through public appearances, and suppose each one of those can recruit one more person a month -- how long would it take to get up to three billion? Has anyone got a calculator?"

"That is not necessary," said Coomaraswami. He thought a moment. "At the end of eighteen months you would have about two and a half billion people, and of course, doubling at that rate, at the end of the nineteenth month you would have five billion. But that is not a reasonable rate of increase. People can only recruit other people who live in their own locality, you see. Pretty soon, if you have a rapidly growing organization, everybody is trying to recruit everybody else. That is why pyramid schemes always collapse."

"What would you say was a reasonable rate of increase?"

"That depends on a lot of factors. But I would say that if you have good organization and very enthusiastic people, a million at the end of the first year would be a reasonable goal, and then perhaps ten million the second year, and so on. Most organizations of this kind reach a point of diminishing returns fairly early, but supposing yours did not, then I would say it would take at least ten years to reach three billion."

After a moment he added, "Gene, you know, what you are talking about sounds a good deal like what some other people are already doing -- Barry Commoner, for instance, the Planetary Initiative, and so on. They are doing all right, but they are not sweeping the world. Why do you think you can succeed where they are failing?"

"Because I can do something they can't do. I can really heal the sick. Think about this a minute. I'll have people with incurable ailments. Paraplegics, people with cancer. They'll be screened by physicians, we'll do before and after x-rays. I'll heal them publicly, you'll see it happen. And people will listen to me."

"And what will you tell them?"

"That's what I want you all to think about. Tomorrow we'll meet again after breakfast, if you're willing. Good night." He stood up and left the room.

The rest looked at each other. No one seemed to want to speak. At last Wilcox said, "There's your question again with knobs on, Maggie. What would you do if you were God? I'm not sure I want to know."

They got up and separated, Pongo and Irma to the kitchen, Margaret and most of the others to separate corners of the living room. Wilcox went into the garden by himself; through the glass doors they could see him pacing up and down. After a while he went up to his room. One by one, the others joined Linck in his pool of light at the end of the room. Conversation was desultory until Salomon said, "Did you see in the paper that there's another expedition to Ararat to find the Ark?"

"No, but I am not surprised," Coomaraswami answered. "It seems to me they have found it three or four times in the last thirty years, but it always gets lost again."

"Maybe so, but I think the reason for this expedition is interesting. it's a little fundamentalist group in Florida -- they say they have to find the Ark in order to measure it, so they can find out how long a cubit is."

"Why a cubit?"

"Because until they know how long a cubit is, they can't rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and until they do that, Christ can't come again."

"Have they got government funding?" Linck asked drily.

"Not that I know of, but it may come to that. You know, these people give me a royal pain. Of all the ways there are of being wrong, I think theirs is the worst."

"What do you mean by that? What way are they wrong?" Cliff Guthrie asked. "I'm a Baptist myself," he added.

"Well, Cliff, no offense to your religion, but they're wrong because they claim to know what the answers are. They say the Bible is literally true because it's the word of God, but that can't be: because the Bible is full of contradictions. There are two accounts of the Creation in Genesis, two genealogies of Jesus, two different accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot."

"I never heard that before."

"Well, it's true -- you can look it up."

Linck coughed delicately. "In justice to the Christians, I should say that they have explanations for all this. They say that the second chapter of Genesis merely expands on the first chapter, for instance, and that one of the genealogies is Jesus' father's father's line, the other one his father's mother's line. And they say that Judas hanged himself, and then the rope broke and he burst his bowels over a stone."

"Yes, but the Jews never reckoned descent through the female line. We aren't even told who Mary's father was."

"According to the Coptic Gospels, and I think also in Pseudo-Matthew, her father was Cleopas," Linck said apologetically. "But that gets us into a terrible muddle, because Hegesippus says that Cleopas or Cleophas was an uncle of Jesus, who was married to another Mary, who also had three sons with the same names -- James, Joses, and Simon. And then, some authorities say that Cleopas is a Greek form of the name Alphaeus, which turns up in some of the Gospels as the name of one of the disciples, and these names are also a terrible muddle. For instance, in the Gospel of Matthew the disciple who is a publican" -- he bowed slightly toward Cliff Guthrie -- " is called Matthew, in Mark he is Levi of Alphaeus, in Luke he is just Levi, and John does not mention him at all. And so on. I sometimes think that when we read the name Cleopas or Alphaeus in the Bible, it is a code word meaning, 'We don't know this person's name.' "

Later Guthrie found Linck alone in the garden, lighting a cigar.

"Piet, there were a couple of things you said before that I didn't quite understand. Those gospels you mentioned, I never heard of them -- the Coptic, and pseudo-Matthew?"

"They are apocryphal gospels. They were not included in the canon, but some of them were quite widely read -- more so than one or two of the canonical gospels, perhaps."

"And you read these, what, in the original languages?"

"I do read a little Coptic and Greek," said Linck mildly, "but that is not necessary. You can find them in a translation by M. R. James called 'The Apocryphal Gospels.' "

Guthrie produced a small notebook and wrote it down. "The other thing," he said, "I noticed you looked at me when you were talking about the publican, and I had a feeling I was missing something."

"Don't you feel that we are all Gene's disciples, Cliff?"

Guthrie stared at him. "But what's that got to do with -- A publican is a bartender, isn't it?"

"Yes, quite right, but at the time the King James Bible was translated, it meant a tax collector."