Behind us a psychoperator bent over a sensitive who worked under hypnosis. The sensitive, a girl about nineteen, stirred and muttered; the operator bent closer.
Then he turned to Huxley and the communications chief. “The Voice of God Station has been secured, sir.”
Huxley merely nodded; I felt like turning handsprings, if my knees had not been so weak. This was the key tactic and one that could not possibly be executed until minutes before the Miracle. Since television moves only on line-of-sight or in its own special cable the only possible way to tamper with this nationwide broadcast was at the station of origin. I felt a wild burst of exultation at their success-followed by an equally sudden burst of sorrow, knowing that not one of them could hope to live out the night.
Never mind—if they could hold out for a few more minutes their lives would have counted. I commended their souls to the Great Architect. We had men for such jobs where needed, mostly brethren whose wives had faced an inquisitor.
The comm chief touched Huxley’s sleeve. “It’s coming, sir.” The scene panned slowly up to the far end of the Temple, passed over the altar, and settled in close-up on an ivory archway above and behind the altar—the entrance to the Sanctum Sanctorum. It was closed with heavy cloth-of-gold drapes.
The pick-up camera held steady with the curtained entranceway exactly filling the screen. “They can take over any time now, sir.”
Huxley turned his head to the psychoperator. “Is that ours yet? See if you can get a report from the Voice of God.”
“Nothing, sir. I’ll let you know.”
I could not take my eyes off the screen. After an interminable wait, the curtains stirred and slowly parted, drawn up and out on each side—and there, standing before us almost life size and so real that I felt he could step out of the screen, was the Prophet Incarnate!
He turned his head, letting his gaze rove from side to side, then looked right at me, his eyes staring right into mine. I wanted to hide. I gasped and said involuntarily, “You mean we can duplicate that?”
The comm chief nodded. “To the millimeter, or I’ll eat the difference. Our best impersonator, prepared by our best plastic surgeons. That may be our film already.”
“But it’s real.”
Huxley glanced at me. “A little less talk, please, Lyle.” It was the nearest he had ever come to bawling me out; I shut up and studied the screen. That powerful, totally unscrupulous face, that burning gaze—an actor? No! I knew that face; I had seen it too many times in too many ceremonies. Something had gone wrong and this was the Prophet Incarnate himself. I began to sweat that stinking sweat of fear. I very much believe that had he called me by name out of that screen I would have confessed my treasons and thrown myself on his mercy.
Huxley said crossly, “Can’t you raise New Jerusalem?”
The psychoperator answered, “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
The Prophet started his invocation.
His compelling, organlike voice rolled through magnificent periods. Then he asked the blessing of Eternal God for the people this coming year. He paused, looked at me again, then rolled his eyes up to Heaven, lifted his hands and commenced his petition to the First Prophet, asking him to confer on his people the priceless bounty of seeing and hearing him in the flesh, and offering for that purpose the flesh of the present prophet as an instrument. He waited.
The transformation started—and my hackles stood up. I knew now that we had lost; something had gone wrong . . . —and God alone knew how many men had died through the error.
The features of the Prophet began to change; he stretched an inch or two in height; his rich robes darkened—and there standing in his place, dressed in a frock coat of a bygone era, was the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder, First Prophet and founder of the New Crusade. I felt my stomach tighten with fear and dread and I was a little boy again, watching it for the first time in my parish church.
He spoke to us first with his usual yearly greeting of love and concern for his people. Gradually he worked himself up, his face sweating and his hand clutching in the style that had called down the Spirit in a thousand Mississippi Valley camp meetings: my heart began to beat faster. He was preaching against sin in all its forms—the harlot whose mouth is like honey, the sins of the flesh, the sins of the spirit, the money changers.
At the height of his passion he led into a new subject in a fashion that caught me by surprise: “But I did not return to you this day to speak to you of the little sins of little people. No! I come to tell you of a truly hellish thing and to bid you to gird on your armor and fight. Armageddon is upon you! Rise up, mine hosts, and fight you the Battle of the Lord! For Satan is upon you! He is here! Here among you! Here tonight in the flesh! With the guile of the serpent he has come among you, taking on the form of the Vicar of the Lord! Yea! He has disguised himself falsely, taken on the shape of the Prophet Incarnate!
“Smite him! Smite his hirelings! In the Name of God destroy them all!”
CHAPTER 13
“Bruehler from voice of God,” the psychoperator said quietly. “The station is now off the air and demolition will take place in approximately thirty seconds. An attempt will be made to beat a retreat before the building goes up. Good luck. Message ends.”
Huxley muttered something and left the now-dark big screen. The smaller screens, monitoring scenes around the country, were confusing but heartening. There was fighting and rioting everywhere. I watched it, still stunned, and tried to figure out which was friend and which was foe. In the Hollywood Bowl the crowd boiled up over the stage and by sheer numbers overran and trampled the officials and clergy seated there. There were plenty of guards stationed around the edges of the howl and it should not have happened that way. But instead of the murderous enfilading fire one would have expected, there was one short blast from a tripod mounted or the hillside northeast of the stage, then the guard was shot-apparently by another of the guards.
Apparently the chancy tour de force against the Prophet himself was succeeding beyond all expectations. If government forces were everywhere as disorganized as they were at the Hollywood Bowl, the job would not be one of fighting but of consolidating an accomplished fact.
The monitor from Hollywood went dead and I shifted to another screen, Portland, Oregon. More fighting. I could see men with white armbands, the only uniform we had allowed ourselves for M-Hour-but not all the violence came from our brethren in the armbands. I saw an armed proctor go down before bare fists and not get up.
Testing messages and early reports were beginning to come in, now that it was feasible to use our own radio-now that we had at long, long last shown our hand. I stopped looking and went back to help my boss keep track of them. I was still dazed and could still see in my mind the incredible face of the Prophet—both Prophets. If I had been emotionally battered by it, what did the people think? The devout, the believers?
The first clear-cut report other than contact messages was from Lucas in New Orleans:
HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF CITY CENTER, POWER
AND COMM STATIONS. MOP-UP SQUADS SEIZING
WARD POLICE STAT1ONS. FEDERAL GUARDS HERE
DEMORALIZED BY STEREOCAST. SPORADIC FIGHTING
BROKE OUT AMONG GUARDS THEMSELVES.
LITTLE ORGANI ZED RESISTANCE. ESTABLISHING
ORDER UNDER MARTIAL LAW. SO MOTE IT BE!
LUCAS.
Then reports started pouring in: Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, Minneapolis-all the major cities. They varied but told the same story; our synthetic Prophet’s call to arms, followed at once by a cutting of all regular methods of communication, had made of the government forces a body without a head, flopping around and fighting itself. The power of the Prophet was founded on superstition and fraud; we had turned superstition back on him to destroy him.