“It sounds like Christian Gnosticism.”
“I don’t know a lot about that.”
Howard took his cup in both hands and rocked back on the legs of his chair. “Before Christianity was unified in the Hellenic world there were various schools of Christian doctrine, all kinds of books claiming to be narratives of the life of Jesus or secret keys to Genesis. The New Testament—our New Testament—is what was left after orthodox bishops like Irenaeus purged the texts they disapproved of. Some of these Christian mystery cults were pretty strange, from our point of view. They believed in scripture as a kind of coded message; you were enlightened when you penetrated the mystery. So they were called Gnostics—the ones who know. Valentinus was a major Gnostic figure.” He sipped the coffee, made a face, spooned in more sugar. “I suppose, in this world, the Gnostic churches were never suppressed. They became the dominant strain of Christianity.”
“Okay.” Dex stared across the table. “So how does a graduate physics student know so much about Gnosticism?”
“From Stern,” Howard said. “He talked about Gnosticism all the time. He was obsessed with it.”
And they were silent for a while.
They drank Howard’s thick, stale coffee until curfew was less than an hour away. Daylight began to fade from the window; the sky was a gray turmoil. Despite the oven, the kitchen grew colder.
At last Dex pushed his cup away and said, “We have to stop dicking around, Howard. Four, five months, we’ve all been in a walking daze. Begging for scraps of water and electricity. It’s time to wake up. This isn’t a good place we’ve come to. The town isn’t safe, and every day the fences get higher and trucks take away some more people. We need a way out.”
Howard shook his head. “We need a way home.”
“You know how unlikely that is.”
“We don’t know anything, Dex. Not until we understand what happened at the lab.”
“Is it really important? Even if we do figure it out, is that a reprieve? I’m not a physicist, but I’d bet what happened at the defense plant was a kind of explosion. Some kind of really weird explosion that blew half of Bayard County into the next universe, but still, an explosion—and even if you understand an explosion, you can’t put it back in the bottle. Some things are irreversible. I would guess this is one.”
“It may be. But what’s the alternative? The fences are already up, Dex. The best fence is the forest and the weather. There’s only the one road out, from what I’ve heard, and it leads straight to Fort LeDuc, which is a military town. Sixty miles away. It’s not practical to hike that far.”
“It could be done,” Dex said.
“Maybe, with the right gear and supplies. Then you have the problem of arriving without money or ID or useful skills. And evading the Proctors while you’re at it. And who are we talking about here? You, me, a few able-bodied men? It would still leave most of Two Rivers under martial law.”
“I know. I’m not happy about it. If you have a better idea, tell me.”
“We find Stern.”
“Jesus, Howard.” Dex sighed. “What makes you think he’s alive?”
“His telephone number. He gave me a private number where I could reach him. Mostly evenings, he said. I wrote it down.”
“I don’t see—”
“No, listen. The thing is, it’s a four-one-six exchange. Everything at the lab, including the dorms, was a seven-oh-six number. Here in town, most numbers are four-one-five, four-one-six, four-one-seven. The one time I called his private line, a woman answered. Not a switchboard. Just, ‘Hello? Yes?’ So the obvious implication is that he had a town residence, an apartment or a room or maybe a woman he was seeing. He might have been there when the accident happened.”
“More likely he wasn’t. If something was going on at the lab, wouldn’t he have been involved?”
“Well, I don’t know. Not necessarily.”
“But you don’t have any real evidence he’s alive. You haven’t seen him.”
“No—”
“It’s a small town, Howard.”
“He would be hiding. Like me. Maybe somebody picking up rations for him, so he doesn’t have to go out in the street. But no, I have no direct evidence. Just …”
“What?”
“A feeling.”
“Pardon me, but that’s not too scientific.”
“A hunch. No, it’s not scientific. But, Dex, doesn’t it seem like there’s something happening here? I won’t say ‘supernatural,’ that’s a stupid word, but something out of the ordinary?”
“That’s a safe bet!”
“Not just the obvious. I mean, subtler things. Dreams. My dreams are different now. Visions. Maybe what I saw in the woods was a vision. I never believed in so-called psychic phenomena. But since the accident at the lab…” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I believe. Maybe a hunch is not something to ignore.”
That was logical, Dex thought, but it was a suspicious kind of logic. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “All you have is the number?”
“No address. Stern didn’t like people knowing too much about him—even a favorite nephew.”
“The Proctors hooked up their own phone lines, but they haven’t fixed the exchanges. I don’t know what the hell good a number is.”
“Well, it might be in the phone book.”
“What, under Stern?”
“Obviously not. But I keep thinking about the woman who answered. The way she answered. Her tone of voice. Casual. Proprietary—it was her phone. Probably the number is in the book, but under another name.”
“Great. There must be twenty-five thousand names in the Bayard County phone book. What do you do, leaf through it a page at a time?”
“No. Nor is there any way to get the information from the phone company, or whoever used to be the phone company. That stumped me for a long time. But the man who owned this house, Paul Cantwell, he was a CPA. You know what he has in the bedroom upstairs? A PC with every kind of accounting and data-basing software known to man. Quite capable of sorting the phone book for a number.”
“You can’t type in the text of the phone book. Or does he have that on disk, too?”
“No, but look: we don’t have to type it in. You know what an optical reader is?”
“Takes text from a printed page.”
“Right. So we can scan the phone book. Feed it to the computer a page at a time.”
Howard was dangerously enthusiastic about this, Dex thought. “You have an optical reader in the house, too?”
“No. That’s the tricky part. We need to get one. There’s a store on Beacon—”
“Howard, all those stores are roped off. The Proctors are shipping out the contents.”
Howard leaned forward, rattling his empty cup. “I walk down Beacon every time I go to the food depot. There’s a store called Desktop Solutions on Beacon between Oak and Grace. The Bureau inventory is working south from Oak and west from the lakeshore. They haven’t been there yet.”
“Still, it’s behind a rope.”
“I can cross a rope.”
“There are militiamen on every corner.”
“They’re sparser at night,” Howard said.
“Oh,” Dex said. “Oh, no. They’re on a hair trigger out there, Howard. They shoot people.”
“Out the back gate of this house there’s an alleyway that runs to Oak. Across Oak there’s a similar alley in back of the Beacon Street shops. The alleys aren’t well lit and they aren’t patrolled like the main streets.”
“Purely insane. And what are you taking this risk for? A telephone number?”
“To find out what happened!” Howard was visibly trembling. “To know, Dex! Even if we can’t go home. And anyway—Christ, it’s my uncle!” He looked down. “1 don’t know anybody in this town except you. I never really lived here. My family was all in New York State. Except Stern.”