Soon enough the perfect spot appeared. It was a traffic circle with a little park in the middle. It held a couple of flowering bushes and, in the center, a tall statue of someone wearing a hood and a robe. Like everywhere else in Barstow, the park was already crowded with aimlessly moving refugees, and it was rich with stone benches. They were, of course, already all occupied, but that was not a problem for Orbis McClune. All it took was an, "Excuse me, brother, I'm doing God's work," with that great, loving smile, and in a moment the elderly men sharing the bench had, made way for him. As he climbed up he saw that there was a name carved into the base of the statue—Fra Junipero Serra, whoever he was—and he took that as a good omen. That person would have been a papist, of course, but nevertheless a man who had dedicated his life to God—even if it was the wrong God—and thus a colleague. Pleased, McClune turned, raising his arms in benediction to address the bystanders....
Then he saw what was across the street, on the far side of the intersection. It was a storefront with a bright marquee that said Here After.
That omen was not good.
If there was one thing McClune loathed more than the Heechee themselves it was the Here After chain of machine-storage establishments, where the dying, or the merely despondent, could avail themselves of that accursed, Heechee-spawned substitute for actual death. It wasn't simply the blasphemy involved, though blasphemous it certainly was, Orbis McClune had more personally powerful feelings at stake.
But he let them distract him only for a moment. McClune had years of experience at suppressing his personal feelings for his duty. He raised his arms. "Brothers!" he called. One or two passersby paused incuriously to look. Then, more strongly, "Brothers! Sisters!" And the spirit within began to move him. That sweet, empty, enormous smile bathed everyone nearby in its meaningless love as he thundered, "Listen to me, for I bring you salvation and eternal life in the bosom of the Lord!"
Some things are universal. For example, the victims of a great natural disaster—any disaster, any time in the history of the world—share a fixed cocktail of losses. Possessions are irreparably gone: houses, cars, furnishings, the plants that once hung from the ceiling of the family room that doesn't exist anymore, the lamp that was an ancient wedding gift, the thirty-year-old Teddy bear that had once belonged to a now forty-year-old son. Friendships are ruptured as the friends and neighbors are driven apart. Many certain and familiar expectations disappear, with nothing to replace them but worries about what the new future holds. These are universals. It was how it was for the people of Martinique, and the Johnstown flood, and burned-out Dresden and bombed-out Hiroshima, and those things never change.
But there were very large changes of another kind here. Not one single person in Barstow went hungry in the wake of the tsunami. Nor, of course, did almost anyone else in the world; the limitless riches that poured out of the Food Factories could feed any multitudes. Not one person had lost a penny of savings—or of debts, either, for the machine minds that managed the world's banks and credit institutions and tax authorities had instantly, electronically, fled to safer stores. Not one had lost his medical records and list of drug regimes, nor did anyone lack the facilities to get treatment—doctors and mobile treatment centers had been about the first things to be flown in—and many of the survivors still had their own personal machine minds to keep them provided with information. Well, the ones that were well enough off to own them in the first place did, anyway.
But the one thing almost all of them lacked was something to do with their time. That was just fine for Orbis McClune.
So for three hours, without respite in the hot morning sunshine, McClune pleaded, exhorted, warned, threatened, condemned. He put on one of the greatest performances of his life. Sadly, the refugees weren't responding. Most listened apathetically for a while and then moved on. Sometimes some of them tittered. Occasionally a few heckled. But mostly they just moved on.
That never left McClune without a crowd around his bench, however. There was a constant replenishment of aimless strollers, though the next batch was no more interested than the last. Sometimes from his perch McClune could catch sight of Cara le Brun moving about in the crowd, taking pictures of McClune himself as he preached, or trying to get a useful interview from people in the audience. She wasn't the only newsperson doing the same thing, either. There had to be dozens of them, sometimes with palm cameras going, occasionally with elaborate multi-lens setups. He thought this must be the most thoroughly documented catastrophe in the history of the human race.
He even caught an occasional glimpse of the two Heechee doing whatever it was they were doing. It appeared to be no more than simple sightseeing, but with Heechee how could you tell? They didn't seem to be talking to many people, though many gaped at them. Most of the crowd made a space around them. Even when McClune pointed dramatically toward the lingering Heechee and thundered, "Behold the embodiment of evil! Behold the vile tempters who brought death and hellfire down upon your dearest ones!"—even then the Heechee remained impassive. While the human crowds only muttered to each other. And moved on.
It was a real challenge. Here was the biggest audience McClune had ever dreamed of having, and if he had saved one single soul of them, there was no sign of it on their faces.
Perhaps, McClune thought, the problem was in the makeup of the throng. This wasn't only the largest group he had ever faced, it was the youngest and the healthiest. There weren't any tottering oldsters, no cripples, none that showed any sign of wasting disease. In this they were completely unlike McClune's lost Rantoul congregation, where all the younger and healthier members had long since fled to less dismal churches, leaving only those for whom Judgment Day could arrive at any time.
That didn't matter to McClune. He graded the successes and failures of his life not according to how many souls he actually saved, only on how indefatigably he worked at trying to save them. But even he had now and then to bow to more basic needs. When thirst and the need to pee mandated a break, he took it.
In refugee-mobbed Barstow at this time these needs were not easily satisfied. It wasn't until he spotted Cara le Brun standing irritably in a line before the Tae Kwan Do store that he found the solution. There were toilets inside, she told him, and showers, and of course drinking water, all available for a price, and if he chose to wait with her she would pay his way in. So he joined her in the line. She looked him up and down. "Saving plenty of souls, Reverend?" she asked, but the tone showed that it wasn't a serious question, only a sort of social noise. He ignored it. But her need for conversation to take her mind off the indignity of standing in a line was not slaked. "What did you think of our earthquake last night?" she asked. "You know what caused it, don't you?"
He shrugged. Science had never been his favorite subject. "Something about faults, I guess?"
"Not this time," she said, looking superior and sounding that way, too. "It was that damn tsunami. My machine mind explained the whole thing to me. She said all that weight of water squeezed all the, you know, cracks and things that were there all the time in California, and now they're kind of relieving the strain."