“To finish Obie’s jigsaw puzzle for him. It can’t be left with the last few pieces missing. That drives people mad, is driving them mad now. There was only so much that Obie could do, and he has done it, all of it. The rest depends on me.” He bowed slightly toward Obie as he said this. Obie continued to watch him with narrowed eyes. His hand was in his pocket tight about a stun gun.
“What are you talking about?” Wanda asked. Her voice, like the rest of her, was big. It filled the room and reverberated.
“There has to be the finale. Ask Obie, he understands these things. Not in words maybe, but he feels how it has to be. Those millions of people out there understand it, too. They don’t believe Obie can deliver, so the tension grows. I have to die, publicly, isn’t that right, Brother Cox? Then a waiting period while Obie prays to his god, and a miraculous resurrection, again public, and my physical ascension to heaven.” Wanda grew steadily paler as he spoke. He smiled gently at her. “You never did like to have it out where everyone could look at it at the same time, did you? But that’s how it has to be. The tide is coming in and there’s no way now to stop it. You can’t start things of this magnitude, then step to one side and say, I didn’t mean that. You have to ride it out, right to the end, or get smashed by it.”
Wanda continued to stare at him as if hypnotized. “You’re planning a trick of some sort. You won’t let yourself be killed like that….”
“Is this being taped?” At her sudden start he nodded. “I thought so. Okay, then you can have this for future study. I’ll outline it for you. By fall the curtain will go up on the last act. Mobs storming the citadel here, after my blood. The government will have to come to grips with the legislation that is being pushed through, things like teaching the Voice of God Church dogma in schools, like tax allowances for .members,…. You know all that. It will come to the fore by the start of the fall session. Many things will come to light all at once, bribery, perjury, forged documents, phony election returns…. The army will be sent for Brother Cox, and me, because by then I will have become the rallying point. It will all come to pass,” he said very quietly, as Billy started to wrestle himself from the oversized chair that had been built specially for him. “You have this on tape. You can check it point for point. So the Army will come, followed by many thousands of persons, short hairs mostly, but also long hairs who will want in on the excitement. There will be 3D cameras to catch it all. Obie will escape, using my flying trick, but I’ll be shot down. And later, after the crowds realize that they have killed me, a reaction will set in: they will come to mourn where they had come to mock and kill. Obie will return. There will be a resurrection. The body will rise from the coffin on display, and it will keep rising until it has vanished into the clouds.”
Obie was as pale as death when Blake turned from Wanda to face him.
“You’re making all of this up. All of it,” Obie said. “It’s a cheap trick….”
Blake jiggled some coins in his pocket and said nothing.
“We had you searched. You haven’t got anything with you to use to fly with. Whatever that trick was back in Miami, you can’t pull it again without equipment.”
“I’m not going to pull it at all, Brother Cox. You are. When the time gets near, you will come to me and demand to know how I did it, and at that time, I’ll tell you.”
“Get out!” Obie said. He looked very frightened. “Get out of here!”
It came to pass almost exactly as Blake said it would. By the end of summer he was the chief attraction in the Voice of God Church. Obie was the prophet, but Blake was the mystical son of God with the powers of God in him. In Congress speeches were made denouncing the Voice of God Church as an anarchist plot to seize the government and the country. The fear of anarchy pushed harder than anything ever had in the past. By November the call went out to arrest Obie Cox and Blake Daniels Cox and try them as revolutionists and traitors, and more specifically to charge them with attempts to bribe law officers and government officials, and with exerting undue, even criminal, influence over elections, with tax frauds, etc., etc. Obie grew more and more frightened. To no avail did Billy Warren Smith point out that other people had made the same predictions that Blake had made. Hysteria over the coming new year and new century was being manifested in many ways. Obie listened and did not hear. He was afraid of Blake Daniels.
In December he walked into Blake’s room, dismissing the guard posted at the door as he entered. “Where is it?” he demanded.
Blake stood up. He was not smiling now. “You have it in your safe among the goodies you had taken from me when I arrived.”
“Come on,” Obie said. He led the way toward the main house. The guard fell into place. It was a cold, clear night: December 27, 1999.
Obie opened the safe and Blake took out the box that held the few belongings that he had brought with him. There was the opal-like stone, the coins that he liked, the black disc. He took them all. Obie watched him suspiciously. He kept one hand in his pocket. He waved Blake back and examined the objects carefully. “It’s just junk,” he said finally. Blake made a motion toward the stone with fire in the middle of it, and Obie’s hand closed over it. “Get back,” he said. “Way back.” He watched until Blake had crossed the room to sit in one of the contour chairs near the desk. Then he examined the stone again, this time turning it over and over and over and over and over…. Blake smiled.
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE deputy and his men have reached the last road-block now. You can see that it, like the others, is not manned. There are no planes of any sort on the airstrip, no hovercraft, no vto craft of any sort, although it is known that the Voice of God Church possesses every kind of modem aircraft made. Now the deputy and his men are making the last turn.
“From our vantage point high over the mountain we can see most of the grounds. There, on the left of the picture is the main building, a huge colonial-type mansion, three stories high, snowy white and gleaming, and behind it are smaller guest houses. Through the trees, in the center of the picture, you can see the other buildings, hospital, and medical personnel quarters. There is a laboratory there also. Panning to the right now we see a man-made lake perched like a daub of blue paint against the ground lightly sprinkled with snow, surrounded by fir trees and low-growing pine trees. Then we see the campsites. The buildings are not visible….
“The deputy has reached the last leg of his trip up the mountain. He is now at the beginning of a sweeping driveway that winds about beautifully landscaped grounds and ends at the front entrance of the mansion. Still no one has appeared to challenge the deputy. The crowds are pushing hard against the cordon of soldiers who are trying to hold them back. Slowly, foot by foot they have pushed their way up the mountain also, and they are not far behind the deputy and his posse. Ah…. Ladies and gentlemen, the crowds have broken through! They are swarming over the grounds now….”
The picture dimmed momentarily and came back, but the voice was out. The people swarmed over everything in sight during the interlude. They were pressing into the great house, windows broken out, torches here and there flying through the air and the satisfying sudden flare of a building catching fire. The fires went out almost immediately. The mansion was fireproofed in the most thorough manner imaginable.
The announcer’s voice again: “We can’t see the deputy any longer. He is lost in that surge of people below, trying to make his way to the entrance of the house. His ground effect car has been overturned and presumably he is on foot now, as are his men…. Ah, there is his group, still far back. It doesn’t look like they will be able to get through…. Look, over there! To the right….” The camera swung wildly and the 3D image was the vision of a man reeling in a drunken daze. It settled again on a balcony on the third floor of the building. Two figures were there, both in white robes, both blond, both silent. Obie and Blake. The crowds went mad.