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 formations.’ 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.”
Akron, OH, Mar. 17 (UPI)—
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company today denied reports that massive layoffs announced last week were tied to revelations coming out of Johnson’s Ridge. “Laughable,” said a company spokesman. “We are reengineering and reorganizing. But we are confident there will always be a strong market in this country for tires.”
The stock market is down 650 points as of this hour. The biggest losses have been in the auto and airline industries. Analysts attribute the sell-off to fears that a revolutionary new transportation system is on the horizon, based on Roundhouse technology.
In Boston, United Technologies denied today that massive layoffs are planned.
(CNN Noon Report)
Jeremy Carlucci was so excited he was having trouble breathing. He had been an astronomer, he liked to tell people, since he was four years old, when he sat out back on the open porch of his grandfather’s farm north of Kenosha to look for Venus and Mars. Carlucci was near the end of a long and distinguished career.
Now he stood on a beach five thousand light-years from Kenosha, in a night filled with diamonds and stellar whirlpools. The great roiling clouds beneath the Horsehead were lit by inner fires, summer lightning frozen in place by distance.
“Magnificent,” someone said behind him.
A cloud-wrapped globe was rising in the east.
The young Class A blue giants were particularly striking. The nebula was a cradle for new stars. Jeremy’s joy was so great that he wanted to cry out. “We need to put an observatory here,” he whispered to Max.
“A Hubble,” said Edward Bannerman, who was from the Institute for Advanced Study. “It should be our first priority. We have to figure out how to enlarge the port so we can get equipment over here.”
The wind worked in the trees, and the sea broke and rolled up the beach.
Bannerman, who was a diminutive, sharp-featured man with thinning white hair, watched it come, and then glanced out at the Horsehead. “We are less than two miles from Johnson’s Ridge,” he said.
The wave played itself out and sank into the sand.
“It’s absurd,” he continued. “What happened to the laws of physics?”
MIRACLE IN NORTH DAKOTA
The port works.
A team of eleven people stood today on the surface of a world that astronomers say is thousands of light-years from Earth….
(Wall Street Journal, lead editorial, Mar. 18)
Are there people in Eden? If so, we may be hearing from them shortly. Whoever built the bridge between North Dakota and the Horsehead Nebula will probably be less understanding than the Native Americans were when their neighborhood went to hell.
(Mike Tower, Chicago Tribune)
Tony Peters left his office in the Executive Office Building just after the markets closed. His face was ashen, and he felt very old. His cellular telephone sounded as he strode out onto West Executive Avenue. “The Man wants you,” his secretary said. The president was at Camp David for the weekend. “Chopper will be on the lawn in ten minutes.”
Peters had known the call would come. He dragged his briefcase wearily through the crowds and the protesters along Pennsylvania Avenue (“Bomb the Roundhouse”) and entered through the main gate just as a Marine helicopter started its descent toward the pad. The wildest of wild cards had been introduced into the global economy. And he could think of only one recommendation to make to the president.
“The world needs to be reassured,” Peters was telling him a half-hour later in the presence of a dozen advisors. “The wheels came off the markets last fall because people thought that automobiles might not wear out every five years. Now they think automobiles might become obsolete altogether. And aircraft and elevators along with them. And tires and radars and carburetors and God knows what else. You name it, and we can tie it to transportation.”
The people seated around the conference table stirred uneasily. The vice president, tall, gray, somber, stared at his notebook. The secretary of state, an attack-dog trial lawyer who was rumored to be on the verge of quitting because Matt Taylor liked to be his own secretary of state, sat with his head braced on his fists, eyes closed.