Odyssey Read online

  Jenny had been a graduate student from Boston University, doing a research paper on him. She’d shown up out of the blue to watch him do a presentation at Colonial Hall in Boston. His subject had been “Your Future and Welcome to It.” She’d sat up front, but, incredibly, he hadn’t noticed her until she’d come to him afterward, patiently waiting while others presented books for his signature, shook his hand, and tried to ingratiate themselves. And then she’d been standing there, dark eyes, dark hair, shy smile. And the rest, as they say, was history.

  They’d had three years.

  MacAllister had lived, on the whole, a happy life. He’d accomplished, and in fact far exceeded, his childhood ambitions. He’d become a celebrated figure and a renowned editor. He’d won every major nonfiction literary and journalistic prize. He was accorded VIP status wherever he went, and he was proud of his enemies, who were the self-righteous, the arrogant, the uplifters who wanted to direct the way everybody else did things. During the course of those early years, he’d maintained that love was an illusion generated by chemistry and biological processes. That a man was far better off to resist the urge to mate. And then he’d met Jenny.

  He’d been living in Baltimore then. They’d married within a few months, and she’d moved into his house on Eastern Avenue. And for three years they’d lived a gloriously happy existence. They went everywhere together, attending concerts and VR immersions and ball games. She’d joined him at presentations, had participated in Married to the Mafia panels at press luncheons, had been there when he delivered his graduation remarks at Western Maryland University, a performance that had sounded the clarion call against President Thompson and his corrupt crowd while nearly landing MacAllister in jail. And most of all, there’d been the pleasant evenings on their porch, alternately reminiscing about their own lives together and then debating the influence of Montaigne on Flaubert.

  He lost her suddenly, and unexpectedly, to a disease named for a German researcher, something almost no one ever came down with. Something that twenty-third-century medicine, with all its advances, was helpless to halt. And he’d watched her waste away. The dark eyes had stayed bright until the end. Her mind had remained clear. But her body had shriveled and withered.

  She’d died at home, declining the option that would have kept her alive but left her helpless.

  MacAllister closed his eyes and let his head sink back. He could have re-created the front porch, had he wished. Could have re-created her. Put her beside him where they could watch the lights of passing traffic and talk as they had in the old days.

  A lot of people did that. But it was the way to despair. Furthermore, it would have dishonored her memory. She would have told him to move on. Remember me but move on. So he resisted the temptation, and let her rest in peace.

  “Tilly,” he said, “have you the news wraps?”

  “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. MacAllister.”

  He got up, while Jenny and the Cossacks slipped away, and got himself a beer. “Let’s go, then.”

  He was always looking for stories that could be explored in The National. These, preferably, were tales of abuse by political and corporate authorities, academic malfeasance, wrong-doing in high places, hypocrisy by guardians of the nation’s moral fiber, and, his particular target, school boards that opted for indoctrination rather than literacy and math.

  Last year, at the behest of the English Department of Rogan High School in Berwyck, Georgia, he’d appeared at a board meeting to fight an effort to ban from the schools any book containing any profane expression whatever. Good-bye, Gone With the Wind. Farewell, Moby Dick.

  Attacked as a purveyor of foul language—someone had counted the number of damns in one of his essays—MacAllister had erupted. “When I go to a sporting event,” he’d told the board, “I no more want to sit behind a sewer mouth than any of you. But if it happens, I can assure you the perpetrator will not have learned it from Salinger or Munson or me.”

  It was, he’d discovered, not easy to embarrass a school board.

  It had been an interesting news week. The Heffernan, of course, was the lead story. Oklahoma was in the process of becoming the first state of the original fifty to ban firearms. This after three kids ranging from ten to twelve years old had wandered through a downtown shopping mall in Muskogee, killed seventeen people, and wounded forty-five more. The voters had apparently had enough of watching politicians get bullied by the arms industry and its surrogates.

  In Philadelphia, distraught teenage lovers had climbed out onto a twelfth-floor balcony and jumped. Both families had opposed the match because of political differences. It was believed to be the first time a Greenie and a Republican had leaped together out of a building in Pennsylvania history.

  In London, Philip Cage, a physicist known primarily for making artificial gravity possible during spaceflight, continued to claim he had not been enhanced by his parents, despite evidence to the contrary. The entire affair was in doubt because the records had been destroyed in a fire, and a lot of people thought nobody could be that smart without help.

  From Derby, North Carolina, came the story that caught his attention, and that would make the next edition of The National: A tax auditor had been jailed for assault. The assaultee had been the Reverend Michael Pullman, of the Universal Church of the Creator. The tax auditor, one Henry Beemer, had approached the Reverend Pullman and, with no apparent provocation, struck the preacher with a book he was carrying and knocked him down. The book was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

  The motive? Henry Beemer claimed psychological damage resulting from a church-operated school run by Pullman. “Starting when I was seven,” he was quoted as saying, “they talked all the time about hellfire. How hot it was. How you burned forever. How easy it was to go there. I’m forty-two, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.”

  That would be an irresistible story for The National. MacAllister assigned one of his reporters to look into it, and decided to go a step further. “Tilly,” he said, “see if you can get this guy Beemer on the circuit for me.”

  HENRY BEEMER DID not look like the sort of man who would assault somebody in a bookstore. He appeared to be about average size. He was thin, with thin lips and thin hair and brooding gray eyes, a man, perhaps, who did not get enough sun. You would have known immediately that he worked in an office, in a subordinate position.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. MacAllister?” he asked. He was seated on a cheap imitation-leather sofa. A wall full of books rose behind him.

  “I’m from The National, Henry.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “We might be interested in doing your story. Would you be willing to cooperate?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” he said. “I’d just like this to be over.”

  “I understand. Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Yes. Mr. Pontis.”

  MacAllister hesitated. Then: “Tell me why you did it.”

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve already talked to the reporters.”

  “Talk to me, please. I’ll only take a minute.”

  “I can’t really explain it in any way that makes sense.”

  “Try me.”

  He scowled. “I was annoyed at what he’d done. What they’re still doing.”

  “What had he done?”

  “He runs the church school.” He cleared his throat. Swallowed. “I mean, I don’t even believe in hell.”

  “If you did, you wouldn’t have attacked him.”

  He laughed. It wasn’t the halfhearted chuckle MacAllister might have anticipated, but a genuine cackle. Then he settled down. “They’re going to fire me.”

  “Who is?”

  “Jackson Brothers. My employers. We’re an accounting firm.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “My own dumb fault.”

  “Tell me what happened, Henry.”

  Beemer thought about it. “You ever been to a church school, Mr. Ma
cAllister?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “Did they talk much about hell?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “For minor things. Miss church, you go to hell. Kiss a girl, you go to hell.”

  “I remember the routine.”

  “I started when I was seven. I hated it. I used to wish I’d been born into some jungle tribe where everybody was a heathen. Thinking that way was a sin they hadn’t thought of, so I thought I was safe.

  “In the history class they talked about freedom of religion. And I used to think how that was for other people, but not for me. I had no freedom to choose how I might worship. If I left the Universals—”

  “The Universal Church of the Creator?”

  “Yes. If I left them, I was damned. And they described in graphic detail how it would be. Imagine putting your hand on a hot skillet and holding it there. For a full minute. Then imagine you can never pull it away. And that is nothing compared to—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “I was pretty innocent, as kids went. But they made it sound almost inevitable. Slip once—”

  “I went through the same thing, Henry. You must have thrown it off at some point.”

  “I did. More or less.” His eyes slid shut. “But I’ve never been able to convince myself that they might not have it right. That when I die, a final judgment will be waiting for me.”

  “All right, Henry. What do you plan to do in court?”

  “Plead guilty. Take what they give me.”

  “You know,” said MacAllister, “there are millions of kids across the country now going through exactly what you went through. Why not confront the church for what they did?”

  “Confront the church?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody would buy it, that’s why. People around here are pretty religious. I’d have to move.”

  “You’ve already shown that you’d like to hit back. Why not do it in a way that wouldn’t get you jailed? That might raise the consciousness of some of these people?”

  He sat for a long minute, staring at MacAllister. “How would I go about doing that?”

  “Decide right now that you’re willing to put up a fight. Do that, and I’ll get you one of the best lawyers in the country.”

  MACALLISTER HAD NOT exaggerated when he’d described his schooling background. He’d come from a religious family. His parents had been conservative, and there’d been a time when his father had hoped young Gregory would become a preacher. Which showed how out of touch the old man had been. The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes. In later years, as his lack of faith became increasingly apparent, he’d driven his mother to tears and his father to distraction. His mother had once told him at a church service that he was an embarrassment to the family. This was a family that had never done anything notable, other than stay out of jail.

  The evening of his conversation with Henry Beemer, MacAllister recruited Jason Glock, who had a long history of fighting unpopular causes, to offer his services to the defendant. Pro bono.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING else of interest. Buried in the routine accounts of rioting in the Middle East, celebrities in trouble, and corrupt politics, was another moonriders sighting. A distant one this time. Out at Capella. Wherever that was. There had been a flurry of sightings recently, and the odd part was that they were being captured by sensors and telescopes. Visuals could be faked easily enough, but it was hard to understand professional pilots going to the trouble. Especially when they knew they were going to be laughed at by skeptics.

  He’d been gathering material for years on a history of self-delusion. The book, with the working title Dark Mirror, would contain chapters on religion, communism, the Shakers (those magnificent celibates who had gone inevitably out of existence), various political movements, the back-to-nature fantasies of the mid twenty-second century, and a host of others. He was coming to realize he should incorporate a section on alien visitors. Yet this didn’t feel like quite the same thing. “Tilly,” he said, “see if you can get through to Priscilla Hutchins for me.”

  He started leafing through the report from the marketing division, looking first at the bottom line, which was okay. MacAllister always started with the bottom line. In all things. Had anyone asked, he would have said it was the secret of success. He was still analyzing numbers and projections when Tilly told him the connection had been made, and the woman herself materialized in front of him.

  “Hutch.” He put down the papers. “Good to see you.”

  “And you, Mac. It’s been a while.” Despite the leisurely tone, she seemed cool. “What can I do for you?” She always looked good. Dark hair, penetrating eyes, an elfin quality that never quite went away.

  He wondered whether she’d seen, or heard about, the Tampa broadcast. “How’ve you been?”

  “We’re good. You?”

  “On the run.” He wanted to lighten things a bit, but wasn’t sure how. He asked about Tor and Maureen, and whether there was any news yet on the Heffernan.

  “Nothing yet,” she said. “We have two ships in the search area. It may take a while.”

  “What are their prospects?” The Academy spokesman had said only that they were “hopeful.”

  Her demeanor darkened. “Not for release.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Chances are slim. They probably didn’t make it out of hyper.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “So do I.”

  “There’s something else I’d like to ask about.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What do we know about the moonriders?”

  She grinned. “You’re talking about the Ranger story.”

  “I’m talking in general. Is there anything to it? Do we have visitors?”

  “There’s something going on, Mac. But we don’t have a clue what it is.”

  “Are they artificial? The objects people keep seeing?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Is there any alternative explanation that makes sense to you?”

  “We have some speculations that might cover some of the sightings. A lot of them, in fact. But there are a few that are difficult to explain away.”

  “Did the Lassiter find anything?” The Lassiter had gone out a year ago looking for them, had toured a half dozen or so systems where the objects had been seen.

  “You’ve seen the report.” There it was again. She was annoyed with him.

  “Hutch,” he said, “I’m sorry if the broadcast shook things up. I didn’t mean to create a problem.”

  “What broadcast?” The temperature dropped another five degrees.

  “What do you expect me to do? I’m a journalist. They ask me questions, I tell them what I think.”

  “I wish you weren’t so good at it.”

  Hutch was a relatively diminutive woman, but she had a lot of presence. He wished she could loosen up a bit, though. “There’s been speculation that the Lassiter might have found something but that the Academy is keeping it quiet.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve become a conspiracy wacko, Mac.”

  “If they had found something, would you have made it public?”

  “Yes. Look, Mac, it would have been in our interest if they’d found something.”

  “Something unearthly.”

  “I guess you could put it that way. Sure. The public is bored with interstellar exploration. So we’ve become a target for politicians. And opportunistic media types.”

  He let it pass. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” She was about to disconnect.

  “May I ask one more question?”

  “Ask away.”

  “What’s your opinion? What do you think the moonriders are?”
r />   “Mac,” she said, “I don’t do opinions. When we have some conclusions, I’ll let you know.”

  MACALLISTER’S DIARY

  Sometimes the cost of integrity is the loss of a friend.

  —Tuesday, February 17

  chapter 8

  The secret to a successful career in virtually any field is good public relations. Forget results. Forget the facts. Perception is all that matters.

  —Gregory MacAllister, “Downhill All the Way”

  Wednesday, February 18.

  Michael Asquith had not been a child of privilege. He’d grown up on a North Dakota farm. His father had belatedly discovered a talent for oratory and for telling people what they wanted to hear, and had gone all the way from raising corn and tomatoes—the crops had been moving north—to the Senate. He’d made a lot of money along the way. By the time full-blown success had arrived, Michael, the youngest of three sons, was flunking out of medical school at the University of Minnesota. Later he flunked out of business school. He ascribed these early misadventures to his being a restless, independent spirit. No respecter of authority, he was fond of saying. But it didn’t matter. Eventually he collected a doctorate in political science. Meanwhile Dad had gotten him a post with the North Dakota elections commission, and later he connected with a rising young politician from Fargo. Asquith discovered a talent for directing campaigns, and he and the young politician had gone together to Bismarck, and eventually to Washington.

  In time he’d made friends, gained influence, and when the top job at the Academy came open, Asquith had walked into it. His major goal was eventually to run a presidential campaign. Hutch hoped it wouldn’t happen. The prospect of his being close to the seat of power was unsettling. It wasn’t that he was irresponsible. Or ruthless. It was that he was essentially hollow. Believed in nothing save his own advancement. (Although he didn’t realize that. Asquith thought of himself as a shrewd, progressive leader. The nation would be better off were he at the levers of power.) He lived strictly on the surface. Liked symbols. Mistook metaphors for reality. Enjoyed being photographed outside churches, but had no clue what the New Testament was really about. Even now, after several years at the Academy, he could not get excited about a new discovery, whatever it might be. His first thought was inevitably how the discovery might affect the Academy’s political standing, or its funding. To be honest, though, that was his job.