“We gave these people a free hand,” Neumann said. “We gave them the tools they wanted. There was criticism from certain sectors, of course. I mean, we’re talking about kabalistic magic, trafficking with elementals, alchemy. And the secrecy was a strain; they fought among themselves. But they were brilliant men, and they shared this need to understand certain things—stars, atoms, the plenum itself.”
“Theory,” Palestrina said, wishing he could dismiss it as easily as that.
“They predicted,” Neumann went on blithely, “that there was not a single plenum but many—worlds inside of worlds, if you can compass that, all divided by units of probability, which Planck called quanta. The theory predicted that it might be within the power of the human mind to penetrate those barriers.”
Cardinal Palestrina wanted to say that this was nonsense, chimerical, a snare and a delusion. But of course it was not nonsense, or he wouldn’t be here… Neumann wouldn’t be telling him this. The Curia had some covert knowledge of the so-called Plenum Project; Palestrina understood that Neumann was being more or less open with him.
“I admired those men,” Neumann said. “They were dedicated, they were serious. They were working at a very high level. Mind you, they didn’t pay much attention to the practical applications. An army, say, or even one man, an assassin, who could pretty much move through walls, pass through any barrier …it took them by surprise that anybody might be interested in that. Some of them were appalled when we cast the finding spells, when we sequestered civilians who showed signs of latency. Well, there is a moral question, I’m the first to admit it. But rough measures for rough times. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, right, Your Eminence?”
Palestrina felt ill.
Neumann said, “The Institute’s just around the corner.”
They were deep in the government quarter now, vast stone structures crowding against the cobbled streets, a canyon of sooty architraves decorated with didactic friezes of the Virtues, of Capital and Labor striding hand in hand toward the ostensible future. The factories by the Potomac contributed a pall of oily coal smoke; on a bad day, Neumann had said, you couldn’t tell noon from midnight.
But the Defense Research Institute was the most appalling of any of these structures. The sight of it made the day seem even colder. There was nothing here of the spirituality of the Vatican, an architecture striving toward God; nothing prayerlike in these black stone bastions, a fence of spikes rising automatonlike as the automobile approached. They drove beneath a pillared arch, the eye-and-pyramid motif engraved in the sooty keystone, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.
The building was immense, prisonlike. It had its own powerhouse and commissary, Neumann said, its own shops and laundry. They passed through a second stone portcullis and Neumann identified himself to a guard. The guard presented a plastic tag for Palestrina to wear on his robe; his name was embossed on it. “We’ll need a photograph of you,” Neumann said, “but this will do for now.”
Palestrina hated the tag, hated the association of himself with this place. The inner buildings loomed very large now and some of the windows were barred. He imagined he could hear the screams of the people the Institute had, in Neumann’s ugly euphemism, “sequestered.” But, he thought, surely all that is past?
“We had some trouble in the forties,” Neumann admitted. “Congressional investigations, fanatics trying to close us down. It was a turbulent decade. That’s over now, thank God. But it put our work back by at least a dozen years… and it allowed some of the lapses you may have heard about.”
“The escape,” Palestrina said. “The people who broke out.”
“I don’t like to use unnecessarily melodramatic language.”
Neumann parked the car in a space marked private—reserved. They climbed out, dashed through the cold to an immense iron door which Neumann opened with a key. The hallway inside was sterile with the light of aging fluorescent tubes; the doors were all painted salmon pink and numbered.
Neumann seemed amused by Palestrina’s disorientation. “Follow me, Your Eminence.”
“Where are we going?” Palestrina’s reluctance was an imperative now, a physical resistance.
“My office,” Neumann said. “Unless you want the grand tour right away?”
“I should speak to someone. Someone with rank… someone in charge.”
That smile.
“You’re looking at him,” Neumann said.
Neumann said he’d been at the Institute for almost thirty years now, that his fortunes had fallen and risen with the Plenum Project, that he had been coordinating it independently for the last five years. “I’m not a scientist, mind you. But as far as operations are concerned, goal-setting, management, I have pretty much a free hand.”
Neumann’s office was sere, stony, and blank. Palestrina said, “I want to see this creature you’ve created.”
“You make him sound like one of our homunculi.”
“There are homunculi working as servants at the Vatican Library, Mr. Neumann. I assure you I wouldn’t speak of them in the same tone.”
At last—Cardinal Palestrina considered it a kind of personal triumph—Neumann’s smile faded. “I hate to see you go into this with a negative attitude.”
“I don’t mean to insult your work—”
“Because, you know, the implications are tremendous. Even the Curia has acknowledged that. Frankly, it seemed like an extremely generous thing for the State Department to invite you here. We don’t normally share this sort of material even with allies.”
Palestrina bowed his head. “The stakes are considerable.”
“The oil supply,” Neumann said.
“I was thinking of the survival of Christendom.”
Neumann’s smile flickered faintly. “That, too.”
“Show me the man,” Palestrina said.
“Isn’t that a little premature?”
“I know the history of this place. Do I really have to admire the architecture?” He leaned forward. “The Vatican acknowledges your nation’s generosity. Nevertheless, a moral issue persists. That’s why I’m here.”
“A moral issue,” Neumann said blankly.
“Means and ends.”
“I don’t understand.”
Palestrina was not surprised. “Is he here?”
“Yes, he’s in the building, but—”
“Then take me to him, please.”
Neumann hesitated, annoyed, Palestrina thought, at being forced off his schedule. Finally he shrugged. “I guess there’s nothing to lose.”
4
The room was a gray stone chamber. Neumann agreed to wait outside.
Palestrina understood that, in a sense, he was at Neumann’s mercy. He could not have found his own way here; he doubted he could find his way back out. The Defense Research Institute was literally a maze, corridors turning back on themselves or twining into blank stone walls. The building housed not only Neumann’s Plenum Project but a dozen other deeply shrouded efforts: biochemical warfare, sorcels of invisibility, commerce with the dead. Every level in the bureaucratic hierarchy had its own fragmentary map of the building. The rumor, Neumann said, was that no single comprehensive map existed; no single architect had overseen the project and no living man understood the building as a whole. Neumann offered this as a legend, for its quaintness; Cardinal Palestrina found it only too easy to believe.