By now, April had been granted leave by Colson Labs. She was the only person with the excavation group who was even remotely qualified to address the various researchers. (The waiting list to visit the Roundhouse, and with it the new world, had already grown into the thousands.) On the sixteenth she announced that a committee of prominent scholars would meet in ten days to formulate an investigative and developmental strategy. The immediate questions posed to the committee would be, “What should we do about the world across the bridge?” and “How do we prepare for first contact?”
Columbus, Ohio, Mar. 16
President Matthew R. Taylor
The White House
Washington, DC 20003
Dear President Taylor,
I know that you are very busy, but I hope you can find time to help my dad. He lost his job last week at the paper mill. It happened to some other kids, too. I am in the fifth grade at the Theodore Roosevelt School, and I told some of my friends I was going to write to you. We know you will help. Thank you.
April Cannon had planned to treat everyone, Max and the Laskers and Arky Redfern, to dinner the evening after the tribal council voted down Wells’s offer. But she hadn’t counted on the effects of rising from the status of minor celebrity to international fame.
Once the pictures of the wilderness world, taken by a pool camera crew, flashed around the globe, any chance of anonymity for her and Max was shattered forever. Reporters appeared at the Blue Light in Grafton while patrons crowded around her table and asked for autographs.
There were more reporters at the Prairie Schooner. In the end they went to the Laskers’ home and held a good-natured impromptu press conference from the front porch. When April, hoping for some privacy, suggested they cut the celebration short, Max demurred. “This is part of the story,” he said. “Let them have it. It costs us nothing and gains their good will. We may need it before we’re done.”
In talking to the press, Max had planned to deliver a bromide, a general comment about someone having left behind an inestimable gift for the human race. But when he got up in front of the cameras and the recorders, his emotions took hold. (He had perhaps drunk a little too much by then, not enough to induce a wobble, but enough to loosen his inhibitions.) “You’ve seen pictures of the new world,” he said. “But the pictures don’t really carry the effect. The sea is warm and the beach is wide, and I suspect we’re going to discover the fruit is edible. I was fortunate to find a beautiful woman on the beach, and I was not anxious to come back to North Dakota.” The reporters laughed. April caught his eye and smiled and must have known where he was going because her lips formed a no. But it was too late. Max was rolling. “The place is like nowhere you’ve ever been before. It’s pure magic.” He glanced out through the window at the plain and watched the wind blowing snow around the corner of the barn. “It’s Eden,” he said.
Within a few minutes, every major television network on the planet was breaking into its regular programming.
The Reverend William (Old-Time Bill) Addison, former beer truck driver, former real-estate salesman, former systems analyst, was the founder and driving force of the television ministry he called Project Forty, a reference to the years in the desert and the flagship TV channel which carried his show. He was also pastor of the Church of the Volunteer, in Whitburg, Alabama. Bill was a believer. He believed the end was near, he believed people were intrinsically no damned good and needed divine help every step of the way, and he believed Bill Addison was an exception to the general rule.
He was a recovered sinner. He had been a womanizer. He had known the evils of drink, and he had hotwired more than one Chevrolet during his adolescent years in Chattanooga. He had defied authority in all its manifestations. Even the divine.
And it happened to him, as it had happened to Paul, that a highway had led him directly to the Lord. In Bill’s case, the highway was I—95. Bill was headed to Jacksonville on a rainswept evening, planning a night in the company of sinful women, when his car spun out of control and rolled into a ditch. He should have died. The car exploded and Addison was thrown at the foot of a tree a hundred feet away. But between the moment of the explosion, and the arrival of the police some ten minutes later, the Lord spoke to him, and gave him his mission. Now that mission went forward from a small country church on the south side of Whitburg to 111 affiliated stations across the nation and in Canada.
The morning after Max’s injudicious remark, Bill broached the subject to his electronic flock. He was standing in the book-lined study set that he habitually used to lend a scholarly glow to his perorations. “Last night,” he explained, “I could not sleep very well. I don’t know why that should have been. I usually have no trouble sleeping, brothers and sisters, because I never go to bed with a heavy conscience. But last night something kept me awake. And I wondered whether someone was trying to speak to me.
“Now I don’t say it was God.” He pronounced the name as if it had two syllables. “Hear me well, friends, I don’t say it was God. But, as St. Paul tells us in the book of Romans, it was time to awaken out of sleep.
“I went downstairs and read for a while. The house was quiet. And I put on the television, CNN, that I might have the company of a human voice.
“If you read your newspapers this morning or looked at the news broadcasts, you know what I saw. Scientists claim to have found a door into a new world. I watched, fascinated. They showed pictures of this new world, of its broad purple forest and its blue sea. And its brooding sky.
“Now I don’t know what it is that we, in our insatiable curiosity, have blundered into. But it is disquieting to any good Christian. At first I thought it was a joke, but that cannot be, because it would be too easily found out. To those of you who have asked, therefore, I say yes, I believe the reports coming out of North Dakota are true.
“Some of you have also asked, ‘Reverend Bill, what do you think about this news? What is this place they call the Roundhouse?’ I have no answers. But I will tell you what I suspect and why I think we should close that door forever.
“These scientists are, by and large, godless men and women. But one of them seems to have had an inkling of what I believe is the truth about the land across the Dakota bridge. He was attracted by it, and said he would have liked to stay among its quiet forests. And he called it Eden.
“Brothers and sisters, I propose to you that that is exactly what it is. That some part of this man, atheist as he may be, as he probably is, some living part deep in his soul recognized its long-lost home and yearned, no, cried out, to return.
“We know that God did not destroy Eden. Perhaps He wanted it to remain to remind us of what we had lost. What our arrogance had cost. I do not know. No one knows.”
The faithful caught their cue. “Amen,” they cried.
“You may say, ‘But Reverend Bill, the Bible makes no mention of purple forests. Nor of strange cloud for-mations.’ But neither does it exclude them. It says that the Lord God made two great lights, one to rule the day and the other to rule the night. Do we really know that the second light was our present-day moon, and not the great cloud that we saw on our televisions earlier today?
“Brothers and sisters, I tell you, we take a terrible risk if we go back through that door. If it is indeed Eden, we are defying the will of the Almighty.”