The Millennium Blues Read online

  Only after appeals to his religious convictions had Risebad been persuaded to struggle into a spacesuit and open the airlock door into the weightless vacuum outside. But, carefully fastened by safety lines to eyebolts on the surface, they had inspected the outside of the station and the space telescope not far away, although Landis had not been sure how much Risebad saw. He had heard the minister's breathing, like the soundtrack from 2001, and when a stray beam of light had illuminated the inside of Risebad's helmet Landis had seen his eyes rolling toward the big disc of the Earth as if fearful that it would fall on them.

  Risebad had almost refused to visit an asteroid-protection installation. They had had to attach themselves to a vehicle that was little more than two tanks of fuel and a rocket jet, like balloons fastened to a broomstick. Risebad's terror was almost tangible, rippling out from him like gravity waves through skin and spacesuit and void, but Landis had known it was only imagination. And it was only in imagination that he could have seen Risebad clutching the metal bracket to which he was anchored and staring straight ahead lest he look down—up?—what was the use of directions when gravity was gone?—and fall.

  But Landis had also felt, or thought he felt, Risebad's terror ease and his normal optimism return as they had approached the long lattice-work of the rail gun that, when completed, might shoot homing devices at rogue asteroids or stray missiles and then, a few kilometers beyond, the compact cluster of tubes that was the experimental X-ray laser that, in the event of an attack, would destroy itself in an atomic explosion that would channel X-rays from its projecting rods to destroy attacking missiles in the microseconds before the rods themselves were vaporized.

  Risebad's God, it had seemed, was a god of destruction.

  Upon their return, Risebad had seemed to accept their quarters and situation at last. “It's been worth it,” he had said, “to see God's shield over his chosen people."

  “Or man's shield from God's wrath. Whichever it is, we shouldn't forget that there wasn't anything here until scientists and engineers put it here,” Landis had said. “The same ones who are building the space station and planning the colony on the moon and the trip to Mars."

  “God works through his Earthly instruments,” Risebad had said serenely. “But some are the instruments of Satan."

  “A man must be very shrewd to tell the difference,” Landis had said, “and confident he knows who are the chosen people."

  “Of course,” the minister had said. His conviction was unshakable.

  And then their two weeks had been over, the shuttle was back in its dock, and they had reboarded the craft that they had almost forgotten and fastened themselves into their chairs for their descent to Earth.

  What should have been routine had turned into crisis. No one feels quite as helpless as a passenger on an endangered vessel, a ship, an airplane, most of all a space shuttle, Landis thought. No amount of effort can hold out the sea or keep an aircraft from falling, and no pulling at armrests can help control a shuttle bucking in the outer reaches of the air as the heat begins to mount in the cabin.

  After the first few moments of terror, Simpson and McKenzie had relaxed and were exchanging brief, knowledgeable comments about their chances of survival. Risebad also had regained his air of serenity, although Landis thought he could see the minister's lips trembling. Perhaps he was only saying a silent prayer.

  “Are you all right?” Landis asked, suddenly conscious that he was repeating a question he had asked two weeks before.

  “If the Lord wishes to call me to him,” Risebad said, “I am ready."

  “Why would He want to do that?"

  Risebad shrugged. “God's plans are beyond human understanding."

  “You were telling me at the Station that you understood all that,” Landis said, realizing that he was sounding querulous and not able to help himself, “who was doing God's work and who, Satan's, who were God's people and who weren't."

  “And so I do,” the minister said, his jowls shaking, “and so does every man who looks into his own heart and finds God there. But if it is God's will that I join him in Eternity, I will not question, I will not shrink from that fate. Instead I will rejoice and prepare to meet my Maker."

  “What if He's really trying to destroy the space program and doesn't care if He destroys you with it?” Landis asked.

  “Praise the Lord,” Risebad said cheerfully.

  “What if He wants to send an unbeliever like me to Hell and doesn't care if He snuffs you, too?” The cabin was getting uncomfortably warm as the air conditioners labored to cope with the heat from their too-rapid passage through the air. Soon it would give a passable imitation of Hell.

  “That's nonsense,” Risebad said. “You'd be better off spending your last moments in prayer."

  “Or maybe,” Landis muttered, “He wants you and He doesn't care if He takes the rest of us."

  “Judgment Day is coming soon for all humanity, anyway,” the minister said. “Perhaps I have been chosen to go first so that I may greet the others."

  “I thought you predicted the End last New Year's Eve?"

  “A small miscalculation. A human error,” Risebad said.

  “You can make mistakes, then,” Landis said.

  Risebad was incapable of inspecting his premises. “It still makes sense to me that the second millennium should end with the change of the date to two thousand."

  “As it did to millions of others. Psychological rightness is always better than literal truth."

  “I don't agree,” the minister said. But his mind was elsewhere, and his disagreement was perfunctory.

  “What I don't understand is your fondness for Armageddon,” Landis said, hoping to take not only Risebad's but his thoughts away from imminent destruction. “Not just yours, of course, but all you fundamentalists."

  “We anticipate Armageddon because we anticipate the Second Coming of Christ,” Risebad said as if he were repeating a familiar explanation. “It is the place where the last battle will be fought between good and evil on the great day of God. Why wouldn't we long for it?"

  “Maybe evil might win,” Landis said. “Or maybe, more likely, we'll see Armageddon, and it won't be God's will but human folly, and there won't be any Judgment Day, just total destruction—the end of everything, including human hopes as well as lives. And all because we have this passion for catastrophe."

  But Risebad wasn't listening. His lips were moving again, and his eyes were staring, unseeing, at the wall ahead. The time had passed for talking. The shuttle was descending rapidly through the air, falling through the sky, shifting from side to side, the delta wings groaning as they tried to cope with stresses they were not designed to withstand, the heat building to near intolerable levels as the tiles ablated too and the air conditioning began to fail.

  From the outside, Landis thought, they must look like a Fourth of July rocket, spinning down in flames.

  And then they began to slow. The shuttle still was falling, but the descent seemed more under control. Cheers came over the speaker system from the crew.

  “The shuttle is responding,” one of the crew announced over the speakers. “Most of the excess speed has been killed, and the heat build-up is leveling off. We're going to be okay."

  Celebration seemed premature, Landis thought. They still had to find a place to land, and Kennedy and Vandenberg were on the other side of the planet.

  “What's that place down there?” one of the crew asked. The microphone hadn't been turned off.

  “There's Africa, and that's the Middle East,” another voice said. “And that's Saudi Arabia, right?"

  Risebad, who had begun to relax, was tensing his muscles again. Listening to anyone else, even the nervous voices of the crew, calmed Landis, but Risebad was straining to hear a more authoritative message and it wasn't coming.

  “What's that thing down there?” one of the astronauts asked. “It looks like the longest runway in the world."

  “Don't worry,” Landis sa
id to Risebad. “People like this are used to handling emergencies."

  The crew was up to this one, too. Two minutes later they put the big delta craft down on the Saudi Arabian quarter-mile-wide, six-mile-long causeway at Jubail.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  July 20, 2000

  Paul Gentry

  The muzzle of the handgun looked too big for a .22; perhaps it was a .32 or even a .38. But Paul Gentry had never looked at this end of a pistol when someone was pointing it at him with the apparent intention of pulling the trigger, so perhaps the impression of size was purely psychological.

  Nevertheless, the damage the bullet could do was sufficiently alarming that he could feel his heart hammering inside his bare chest. Why didn't the man say something?

  “Frieda,” he said. “Frieda!” he said again, shaking the shoulder of the woman beside him in the bed.

  She came up slowly out of the sea of sleep, rising from sheeted waves like Venus. Some women were like that; others slept like cats with one eye half open. “Wha—wha?” she said, turning over, sitting up. She did not clutch the sheet to her breasts as so many prurient films had suggested was instinctive but stared, blinking, into the darkness.

  “We have a visitor,” Gentry said calmly, admiring the way he was concealing his panic. “He—I think it is a he—must have let himself into the apartment with a key, because I heard no sound of forced entry, and now he's sitting over there pointing a gun at us."

  Frieda's eyes focused and her pretty face contorted. “You bastard!” she screamed.

  “You seem to know the person,” Gentry said.

  “I should,” she said. “He's my husband."

  They had met, typically enough, at a reception following an afternoon meeting in San Francisco of the advisory board for the Committee on the Environment. The Committee was an umbrella organization for groups concerned about various aspects of the environment, intended to focus and coordinate the efforts of the thousands of volunteers who were passionately committed to the cause of clean air, clean water, clean soil, and the protection of the ozone and all sorts of endangered species, but who often worked at cross-purposes.

  Committees badgered Gentry ceaselessly to lend his time, his efforts, his name, even his money, to good causes. He accepted the few that required little effort and less time, paid his expenses, and offered an opportunity to mingle with people of wealth and influence, who could contribute to his organization or hire him as a consultant or a lecturer. At the least he could arrange a lecture in the area of the committee meeting, and collect his travel expenses twice.

  The board meeting had gone well. He had identified several prominent men and women of means, pinpointed their particular areas of concern, and singled out an earnest young fellow who had enthusiasm and ideas but no means and no constituency. And as that young man, his face shining with vigor and his words made eloquent by passion, had seemed on the point of swinging the board to his particular line of action, to the clear discomfort of Gentry's targeted prospects, Gentry had proceeded to stop the speech in mid-sentence with a single question and then, with sarcasm and wit, to demolish the young man, argument and person, and turn the entire group, the crushed young man excepted, to his program, invented on the spot.

  Later, basking in the afterglow of the exercise of personal power and the promises of support from two of the three prospects and the possibility of a follow-up with the third, Gentry had been sipping the first of several martinis when he hit upon Frieda—or was hit upon. It had not been a new experience but an infrequent one. He knew he was ugly. That in itself was sometimes an attraction to women, but usually it had to be combined with a display of charm or intellectual intensity. But some women had a sense for drama and were drawn to him instinctively. Or so he liked to think.

  Frieda was tall, nearly as tall as he in her high heels. She was well built but sturdy with big bones, broad shoulders, deep breasts, and generous hips that missed seeming plump by virtue of long legs. All these attributes had been clearly outlined by her long, yellow cocktail dress, with its bodice cut halfway to the waist and its skirt slit far up the thigh. She was shaped like a power forward, he thought, as he watched her make her way toward him, swaying her way through the chattering groups: She had to weigh one hundred fifty pounds, he had thought, but she carried it so well that it would seem like one hundred twenty until he took hold of her. And he would take hold of her, he had known with the certainty bred of long experience.

  First, however, would come the mating dance, the seemingly casual circling and display, the crowing and clucking, the pursuit and modest retreat, the retreat and modest pursuit.... Frieda was not important enough to be a member of the advisory board, but she had been invited to the reception for her social skills and other charms. She had introduced herself and commented on the good reports from his performance at the meeting and the good job he was doing for the environment in general. He had said that the real work was being done by volunteers like her. She had said that a job like his must be very tiring, traveling so much, so many people wanting his time and energy. He had said the secret of survival was relaxation, and he always found a few hours during every trip when he let everything drop and just tried to be himself. She had said that San Francisco had some great places to relax, and perhaps she could recommend some, when he had interrupted and suggested that she show him herself....

  It had been all as ritualized as primitive ceremony or hard-wired animal behavior, and he had told her so after they had made love the first time, smoothing the fine hair around her damp face. She had been as strong and demanding as her body implied, guiding his hands and lips first to this part of her body and then another, applying herself with equal energy to his body, and then, after insisting on a condom that she supplied, maneuvering their bodies into position after position. It was enough to make a lesser man unsure of his masculinity, but Gentry savored it as a change of pace. He had enjoyed plenty of soft maidens whom he had to persuade that there was more to sex than the missionaries had prescribed.

  “Call it what you will,” Frieda had said. She had a fine husky voice, deepened now by copulation, that had stirred Gentry's loins the first time he'd heard it. “Men are all barbarians. They'd prefer to say, ‘Let's fuck,’ and jump into bed and have at it. The women are in charge of civilization—"

  “And sex?” he had said.

  “And they know that pleasure is heightened by delay—that's where the word dalliance comes from."

  “I think you're confusing philosophy with physiology—the mating dance may be nothing more than foreplay, essential for the female, pleasant but unnecessary for the male."

  She had run her hand through the thick mat of black hair on his chest. “Don't give yourself airs,” she had said, and pulled out a handful.

  He had risen from her bed as if in anger and returned, upon her entreaties and apologies, with his tie and a scarf and a pair of long towels. This time he had used his superior strength, against her protests and then her growing anger and threats, to tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Now he was in charge and finally, when she had ceased struggling, her response had been loud and prolonged.

  “You bastard!” she had said into his ear when their breathing had slowed.

  “That isn't the first time you've enjoyed bondage,” he had said. “I noticed the scuff marks on the bedposts when we entered."

  “Not my bondage!” she had breathed. “His!"

  And, to be fair, he had allowed himself to be tied down, fearing the loss of control that he needed but allowing it to heighten his sensitivity to her lovemaking.

  Now, with Frieda's screams of rage still ringing in his ears, Gentry looked at the man sitting by the door. This time, he thought, he had really done it—been caught flagrante delicto by an outraged husband with a gun. Was it worth it? Had it really been worth it, all the flagrante delictos of this life? Well, yes, it had, but that was no reason for it to end here. If he got out of this alive, he would give up—Frieda:
Frieda had been fun but not worth dying for. No woman was worth dying for, and he wouldn't care if he never saw Frieda again; nor, he thought, would she care if she never saw him again. What they had done had been, for them, as natural as breathing. Still, if he could go back and not begin the mating dance—but it had all been preordained, hadn't it?

  Having thought it through, he stopped shaking quite as violently.

  The man by the door reached over and turned on the table lamp beside him. The gun barrel wavered and Gentry decided he would rather be shot standing than sitting in bed beside the suddenly silent Frieda.

  “Don't get up!” the man said.

  Gentry sat back down hastily. The man's voice was soft, even in command, and although Gentry didn't want to risk a sudden move he felt better now that the man had started talking. The man was sitting on the edge of a low chest, and the lamplight, flaring upward, illuminated his throat and chin and cast Mephistolean shadows up the rest of his face. Most of all, however, it made the gun seem more menacing.

  “You're Paul Gentry,” the man said heavily.

  “That's right."

  “For God's sake, Earl—!"

  “You stay out of this, Frieda!” the man warned. “This is between him and me. You're the environmentalist."

  “That's right, Earl."

  “Don't call me ‘Earl,’ the man said. “Just because you've fucked my wife doesn't mean you can call me by my first name."

  “I understand, Earl."

  “For God's sake, Earl,” Frieda said, “what are you doing here? You're supposed to be in New York."

  “Does that make it any better?"

  “You know I wouldn't embarrass you in public."

  “I suppose I should feel grateful for that."

  Gentry started to rise again. “If you'll just let me get my clothes, I'll get out of here and let you two—"

  “Stay where you are!” Earl said firmly. “I want you to tell me something."

  “Whatever I can, Earl,” Gentry said, bracing himself for questions about how he and Frieda had ended up in her bed or what they had done there.