The Hercules Text Read online

Harry thought it over. Maybe that was what he should have tried Saturday night instead of the goddam poverty-stricken play in Bellwether. But now it was a bit late. “Thanks, Pete,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Usually Wheeler enjoyed the two-hour drive to Carthage. But that evening, he crossed a barren landscape of skeletal trees and long brown grass and flat gray slate-covered hills. There was a sense of decay in the motionless air, as though this Route 50 had detoured through time and curved back now on a Virginia grown ancient.

  The highway weaved and dipped through bleak furrowed pastures, past abandoned tractors and combines. Clapboard farmhouses stood empty and dark. Occasional junk cars, their engines and carburetors spread on wooden boards or hung from trees, were sunk hubcap-deep in dust and dried mud alongside decaying barns.

  Out near Middleburg, he turned on a talk show. He paid no attention to it, but the sound of voices was soothing.

  It wasn’t Harry’s problem that bothered him. There was something else, something deeper, connected not with one more marriage gone to ruin, but with the thing in Hercules. The constellation was invisible at the moment, hidden by a few drifting clouds. Ahead of him, toward Carthage, the sky was heavy and dark, lit by occasional lightning.

  It was a familiar, if ominous, cloudscape. In recent years, Wheeler had come to love the familiar and the nearby, to cherish things that one could touch, or know directly, stone and sand and rain and polished mahogany. As the telescopes he used reached ever farther into the night, the things of Earth drew him back, and he wondered whether they wouldn’t all be better off if the gathering storm could drown the Hercules signal.

  Just past Interstate 81, the windshield began to pick up spray.

  It was almost eleven o’clock when he arrived, under a steady drizzle, in Carthage. Saint Catherine’s tower, with its big gray cross, rose out of the center of the commercial district. He swung behind the church into a parking lot closed off by an iron fence. A cruising police car paused, watched him get out, and continued on.

  The rectory was a two-story flat brick building. A light burned at the rear, over a door slick with rain. As he approached, the door opened, and Jack Peoples hurried outside, bundled against the weather.

  Peoples never seemed to change much. He was moderately overweight now, had added a few pounds since the last time Wheeler had seen him. But his hair was still black, and he still seemed capable of enthusiasm, inspired by the right cause. (There had been few enough of those in recent years, given the continuing backward drift of the Church toward the nineteenth century.)

  Had things gone differently for him, Wheeler supposed, had Peoples not been born into an old-line Catholic family which had traditionally sent most of its sons into the priesthood (though, from his generation, only Jack had obeyed the call), he might have been a moderately successful accountant or computer technician. He had talent in those directions. “Hello, Pete,” he said, taking Wheeler’s bag. “Good to see you again.” He glanced up past the bell tower. “We’re going to get a bad night.”

  Peoples looked tired. In fact, he always looked tired lately. Jack had been one of those young priests who’d jumped on the Vatican II bandwagon, who’d worn themselves out offering relevance to sex-ridden adolescents, and guitar masses to weary parents. He’d been one of the first to tear out the kneeling benches, but the Community of God had never really arrived. In the end, the parishioners who were to find joy and peace in one another went back to worrying about careers and mortgages in their own hermetically sealed lives, leaving Jack Peoples, and others like him, buried in the wreckage.

  They’d met twenty years before in a speech seminar, and had traded visits back and forth ever since. The older priest was a fountain of Church lore and gossip, wryly dispensed with a wit that would have got him in trouble with the Cardinal, had some of the stories got back.

  Wheeler’s visit had a formal purpose: Peoples had become pastor at Saint Catherine’s, effective the previous Sunday. The appointment had been long overdue; Jack had been the only priest there for three years.

  Wheeler went up to his room (the same one was always prepared for him when he came to Saint Catherine’s), showered, and returned to the pastor’s office.

  Peoples put down a book and broke out some apple brandy. “How’s the program going at Georgetown?” he asked.

  “I got a break,” Wheeler said. “I don’t know whether I told you or not, but the course is a survey of Rimford’s work. And Rimford just turned up in town. I think I can get him to come out to the school for an evening.”

  They whiled much of the night away discussing Church politics. Peoples, who had left the Norbertines early in his career to become a diocesan priest, tended to attach considerable importance to the ecclesiastical decision-making process, as though it had a serious effect on world affairs. For Wheeler, whose perspective had been altered by his visits to the cosmic gulfs, the Church’s power structure had acquired a ghostlike ambience.

  Abruptly, somewhere around 2:00 A.M., when a second bottle stood empty on an end table, Wheeler realized that he wanted to talk about Hercules. There’d been a lull in the conversation, and Peoples had gone out through glass doors to put some coffee on. Like the adjoining church, the rectory had been built near the end of the nineteenth century. Its delicately carved balusters, hanging lights, and glass-enclosed bookshelves were meticulously maintained. Numerous volumes of standard theological works were packed into the wall behind the pastor’s desk, along with books on church finance, several collections of sermons, and a handful of Dickens novels that someone had donated and that Peoples kept prominently on display. “For my retirement,” he always told curious visitors.

  Wheeler followed Peoples into the kitchen. He was filling a plate with Danish pastries, “Jack,” he said, “something’s been happening at Goddard. Actually, it’s the reason Rimford’s in D.C.”

  He outlined the events of the past week. Peoples, who often served as a sounding board against which Wheeler bounced various speculative, and often farfetched, notions, composed himself to listen. It was a role he’d come to relish, and with it the implied compliment to a parish priest who was thoroughly grounded in Thomas Aquinas and little else. This time, however, the usual array of obscure concepts was missing. The fact of the artificial signal stood out stark and gray in the early morning hours.

  Wheeler concluded with his own opinion that they had indeed heard from another species. “Probably dead and gone by now, all of them. But nonetheless, long before we put the first bricks into Babylon, they were out there.”

  In the silence that followed, the electric clock atop the refrigerator got very loud. Peoples stirred his coffee. “When are they going to announce it? Was it on the news tonight?”

  Wheeler tasted the Danish. “They’re holding on as long as they can. No one wants to take a chance on the organization looking silly. So there’ll be nothing official until there’s no question what the signal means.”

  “Is there a question?”

  “In my opinion, no.” They gathered the refreshments and wandered back toward Peoples’s office.

  “I wonder if it’ll have much effect outside.” The pastor was referring to the world beyond the church doors. “It’s hard to guess how people will react to something like that.”

  “My God, Jack, how can it help but have an effect? It attacks the foundations of the whole Christian position!”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. The Church has known for a long time that something like this would come. We’re prepared.”

  “Really? In what way?”

  “Pete, we’ve maintained for two thousand years that the universe was created by an infinite God. What does it matter to us that He’s made other worlds besides ours?”

  Wheeler sat thoughtfully staring at the leather-bound theology books. “For whom did Jesus die?” he asked idly.

  Peoples kicked off his shoes. This was the kind of conversation he loved, although he would never have allowed any but a
handful of his colleagues to engage him in such a debate, which might conceivably weaken a lesser faith than his. “For the children of Adam,” he said cautiously. “Other groups will have to make their own arrangements.”

  “I wonder if the Altheans retained their innocence.”

  “You mean that they might never have fallen? No original sin? I doubt it?”

  “Why?”

  Peoples shook his head. “It just seems unlikely.”

  “You’re suggesting God stacks the cards.”

  Peoples sighed. “Okay,” he said. “It’s possible.”

  “Do you think we’ll be segregated? The fallen species from the creatures who retained their preternatural state?”

  “It looks to me as if we’re already pretty well segregated.”

  “Jack, to be honest with you, I find this business uncomfortable. I was convinced, I’ve always believed, that we were alone. There are probably billions of terrestrial worlds out there.

  Once admit a second creation and where do you stop? Surely, among all those stars, there is a third. And a millionth. Where does it end?”

  “So what? God is infinite. Maybe we’re about to find out what that really means.”

  “Maybe,” said Wheeler. “But we’re also conditioned to think of the Crucifixion as the central event of history. The supreme sacrifice, offered by God Himself in His love for the creature He’d made in His image.”

  “And—?”

  “How can we take seriously the agony of a God who repeats His passion? Who dies again and again, in endless variations, on countless worlds, across a universe that may well itself be infinite?”

  After an exhausted Peoples had gone to bed, shortly before dawn, Wheeler roamed through the rectory, examining stained windows, thumbing through books, and, for a while, standing just outside the front door. The wet street glistened in the reflection from a Rexall drugstore.

  The church was built in a style that Wheeler thought of as Ohio Gothic—squat, urban, rectangular, brick. Its windows were populated by lambs and doves and kneeling women. The rectory stood at right angles to the larger structure. Between the two buildings lay a fenced-off grass plot. The tomb of an early pastor lay in the center, marked by a rough-hewn stone cross.

  The clouds had begun to clear, and a handful of stars floated over the church tower. The sky to the east beyond the warehouses had begun to lighten.

  Why is the creation so large? SKYNET looks out almost sixteen billion light-years, to the Red Limit, to the edge of the visible universe. But it is an “edge” only in the sense that there has not been time for light coming from even more remote places to reach Earth. There’s every reason to believe than an observer placed at the Red Limit would see much the same sort of sky that bends over Virginia. In a sense, Wheeler thought, Saint Catherine’s itself, at this moment, is at the edge of someone’s visible universe.

  Wheeler turned back inside, locked the door, and wandered through the connecting corridor into the church and through the sacristy, from which he emerged near the pulpit.

  The glow of the sanctuary lamp fell across long rows of pews. Security lights in the rear illuminated holy water fonts and the stations of the cross. He could still see the worn places in the marble floor where the statues had been, back in the days of the Tridentine mass. The old marble altar, of course, had also been long since removed and replaced with the modern butcher block that clashed with decor and architecture in all but the relatively new churches.

  He came outside the altar rail, genuflected, and sat down in the front pew.

  The air was heavy, filled with the sickly sweet smell of melted wax. High behind the altar, in a circular stained window, Jesus sat serenely by a running brook.

  He was remote now, a painted figure, a friend from childhood. As a boy, Wheeler had occasionally, in the exuberant presumption of youth, asked for a sign, not to confirm his faith but as a mark of special favor. But Christ had remained inanimate then, as now. Who, or what, had walked along the Jordan with the Twelve? Too many times, Wheeler thought, I have looked through the telescopes. And I have seen only rock and the light-years.

  Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.

  At about the same time, in the operations center, Linda Barrister was filling in the solutions to a crossword puzzle. She was good at them, and they helped keep her reasonably alert when her body ached for sleep. She was trying to recall the name of a Russian river with seven letters when she was suddenly aware that something had changed. She checked her watch. It was precisely 4:30 A.M.

  The auxiliary overhead monitor carrying the TDRSS relay from Hercules X-3 was silent. The signal had stopped.

  MONITOR

  WHERE IS EVERYONE?

  Recently, Edward Gambini of NASA spoke to the annual Astronomical Symposium at the University of Minnesota, supposedly on the subject of the interior mechanics of class K stars. During his remarks, he addressed himself to the question of stable biozones, the probable time periods necessary for the development of a living planet, and finally (or inevitably, if we can accept his logic), the appearance of a technological civilization.

  I am somewhat puzzled as to the connection between science fiction and the mechanics of class K stars. It seems, these days, that no matter where Dr. Gambini goes, regardless of his proposed subject matter, he ends up talking about extraterrestrial aliens. Two weeks prior to the Minnesota exercise, he was in New York to speak at a meeting of Scientists Concerned about Nuclear Weapons, presumably to discuss a strategy for peace. What the Concerned Scientists got was a plea that we restrain ourselves so that we can ultimately join the “galactic society” we will one day uncover.

  I can think of more pressing reasons to halt the arms race.

  The fact is that anyone who invites Dr. Gambini to speak on anything can expect to hear about aliens.

  If all this strikes you as a trifle odd, it becomes almost grotesque when you realize that SKYNET, to which Dr. Gambini has access, has looked rather closely at planetary systems within a hundred light-years or so and found nothing that supports the notion that anything may be alive out there.

  Many people have argued compellingly that this result implies that we are indeed alone in the universe. It is a position with which any reasonable man would be hard-pressed to argue.

  There is an even more telling point to be made. Surely, if civilizations were to develop with any sort of regularity, the Milky Way would, after these last several billion years, be overrun with them. There would be tourists and exporters everywhere!

  Even one civilization, using relatively unsophisticated vehicles for interstellar travel, the sort of vessel that we should ourselves be able to build in another century or so, would by now have filled every habitable world in the Milky Way and points south. So if they’re there, why haven’t we seen them?

  Where is everybody?

  —Michael Pappadopoulis

  The Philosophical Review, XXXVII, 6

  5

  HARRY HAD NEVER known a colder October in Washington. The sky turned white, and drizzly knife-edged winds sliced through the bone. Temperatures dropped below freezing on the first of the month, and stayed there. He was, of course, delighted: the assorted pollen that sometimes hung on until nearly Christmas was damped down, and he could count on seven months before the cottonwood and poplar would open another round.

  That was also the month Harry conceded his son. He could see no way to provide a home for the boy without Julie. And the fact humiliated him because he knew Tommy expected his father to put up more of a fight.

  He was playing in a bantam basketball league with other third and fourth graders. Harry showed up when he could, sitting on the gym floor beside an uncomfortable Julie. The boy played well, and Harry was proud. But there were always tears at the end, and eventually Julie suggested that they work out a schedule to ensure that both parents weren’t there at the same time, since things seemed to go better that way.

&nbs
p; Harry reluctantly agreed.

  At home, the gas heater didn’t sound healthy. It banged and hammered and threw loose parts around. He called the service contractor, who cleaned it, charged sixty-five dollars, and went away. After that, the thing stopped working altogether.

  Hercules X-3 remained silent, and hope faded that the transmission would be followed swiftly by a second signal. Toward the end of the month, Wheeler’s suspicion that the aliens might, indeed, have nothing more to say became common currency. But silence, Gambini argued, is not the natural state of a pulsar.

  So they continued to listen.

  The second Thursday of November was a bleak, wintry day that clawed the last of the leaves out of the elms behind the Business Operations Section. Rosenbloom showed up unannounced and summoned Harry and Gambini to the Director’s suite, which he used on the rare occasions when he was at Goddard. “I think both your careers,” he said, “are about to take off. The President will be making a statement tomorrow afternoon from the White House. He’d like both of you to be there. Three o’clock.”

  Since Rosenbloom spent so little time at Goddard, the Director’s suite smelled of furniture polish rather than cigars. He lit up and slid into a chair beneath a charcoal of Stonehenge. “Ed,” he said, “you’ll probably be asked to say a few words. The reporters will damn well want to talk to you in any case. You might think about what you’re going to say. I suggest you try to come up with some immediate benefits we’ve gotten out of the Hercules contact or out of the technology we’ve used. Probably there’ll be some peripherals into laser surgery or fiber optics or something. You know, the same way we handled the space program. Look into it.” His elation was mixed with a trace of wariness. “Under no circumstances do we want to speculate about another signal. I would like to take the tack that we’ve intercepted evidence of engineering on a large scale very far away. You cannot overemphasize the distance. We should leave the impression that it’s over, and we now know we’re not alone. And let it go at that. Tell them anything else is speculation.”