“It was quite necessary, once we realized who you might be and saw the potential there. It preserved you—innocent, virginal, unattached, and naive. It froze you as you were, a young girl unsullied by the world.” He paused a moment, and his tone became more practical. “You will notice that the curse is not lifted, merely suspended at our whim. That suspension can be lifted at any time, for any reason, and you will become as bad as you were or worse than you were. If we wished you could become an automaton, seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, thinking—but unable to control any part of your body whatever voluntarily, doing only what you were told to do. It’s up to you.”
“You won’t get away with this! I’ll be missed at the Institute. Security will search for me. Greg will—”
“Greg is most probably dead by now,” he told her bluntly. “I should like to have interrogated him, as I should have liked to talk with your father, but others intervened. I should not count on Security. You will have to bear their watching eyes on their little monitors if you stray into habitable territory, I fear, but don’t expect any help from that quarter. As for any others, this island is at the moment being placed under a security blanket. In modern, tense times like these, those in power tend to believe what their computers print out, particularly when it is confirmed by people in their own employ. This island has become a tiny independent republic for the duration of this—er, emergency, and will be run as one from this point on, with the aid and support of Magellan and the NATO and Caribbean pacts. No one will get on, or off, this island without our knowledge and permission. No one will be able to communicate in any way with the outside world unless we first approve it.”
“But you can not keep this up forever!” she told him. “Sooner or later someone will get suspicious and they will demand to come and see for themselves!”
“By that time, we will be in total control of every living thing here. You would be surprised at how long it could be sustained. You see, we control more than you or anyone has dreamed by now. We can access the data banks upon which they rely, make a saint into a KGB spy, order suspicious probers to duty in Greenland or Antarctica from a dozen military forces. We can cause diversions—wars in the Middle East, for example, and other threats to vital areas—that will take their minds off us. And we do not have to do it forever, only for a short while. Three or four months. People believe their computers. They depend upon them and the telecommunications networks that tie them together. You would be shocked at what we can do without any resort to the supernatural.”
“What are you?” she practically screamed at him. “Are you a man? A demon? The devil himself?”
The Dark Man laughed. “Perhaps I am none of those. Call me John the Baptist, if you will.”
“You profane and mock the sacred!”
“Well, it has always been the fashion to do so. Perhaps you have been too insulated. The world goes around saying, ‘Jesus Christ!’ at the slightest provocation, and ‘God damn!’ is probably the second most popular profanity humanity uses. The world is full of the profane. Hell is rampant, as it always has been. And do you know why? Because that’s the way God ordered it to be. He’s supposed to be all-seeing, all-knowing, omniscient and omnipresent, yet He’s never gotten over the fact that He made humanity in His own image and humanity proceeded to screw itself up. He ordered humanity tested, and humanity failed, so He ordered humanity to be tempted, tormented, and punished, rather than face the fact that He, Himself, was obviously imperfect or mad, in that He created an imperfect thing.”
“It is you who are mad! There was war in Heaven before the Fall!”
“A later invention; a rationalization by his more intelligent followers to explain the contradiction. It is not so, and Job proves that Hell served God’s will by God’s command. Nothing is clearer.”
“You can not judge God by man’s standards! It is impossible for any lesser being to understand God’s will and ways!”
“I will agree that madness is a relative term. By our lights we are sane and God, and God’s followers and defenders and rationalizers, are mad. It is a point of view. Consider the evil that God knows of and allows. Consider that He must know what is going on here, yet does nothing to help, nothing to stop it. His solution to the mess was to crucify Jesus in agony. Since that time, the Christian church has primarily venerated its martyrs and been dominated by the charlatans and the power-mad. He allowed the Holocaust and condemned His chosen people who survived to eternal warfare. His other aspects are as bad. Many have sacrifice, including human sacrifice, and all sorts of cruel rites. The Japanese Shintoists actually looked forward to suicide under certain conditions. The Shi’ites venerate masochism and beat themselves with chains. The Hindus use Him to freeze society in an odd variation of the divine right of kings. The only thing as stupid and wasteful as a Crusade is a Holy War. This is madness. This is a universe based upon madness.”
“And in the name of restoring sanity you reduce people to animals, kill, torture, maim, send monsters to crush people to death, cause wars, do all that you boast of doing! That is some sanity!”
“In World War II, millions were sacrificed by much of the world to defeat Hitler, who was the greater evil. We feel that the entire universe is at stake. All of humanity, and countless other races out there among the stars. The innocent will suffer and pay the price as it always has been in wars. As to our methods, we are constrained to use them. God’s rules, you know. We must play by the rules, as must you, until the battle is joined. The war against Heaven, you see, has not yet been fought. God will not intervene here on Earth, and for a cold, practical reason. It means nothing to Him. You mean nothing to Him. We threaten only the Earth, not Heaven. But it is here that it must start—according to the rules. We must make a move here first in order to attack His seat of power.’’
“And you will lose! That, too, is the rules!”
“Will we? Would we even attempt it if we didn’t believe we could attain victory? John of Patmos warned Christians to shape up because God was returning soon and it would be too late. Yet here we are, two thousand years later, more or less, and ‘soon’ has lost its meaning. John was a fanatic and a mystic and he was certainly either insincere or wrong on his timetable. There is no reason to believe his outcome, either. We know Him. We know His location and His weaknesses. And even if we lose, which we do not intend, we would rather lose and suffer the true death of oblivion than to live under a God like that.”
She was shaken and stunned by his statements. Her initial terror had subsided now, and she felt in control once again. She would still have gone after him if she could, but it was useless. He had far too much power, and had to be fought by ways she did not know. What was most chilling was his matter-of-fact brazen blasphemy and his commitment to Armageddon and beyond even if it meant losing.
He sensed her confusion and despair, and jumped on it. “Think of it this way, my dear. Armageddon is coming, as was prophesied and commanded by God. The time is now truly soon. Is it blasphemy to oppose or prevent it when it is so clearly God’s will? It is an interesting point, and one we may debate off and on in the times to come. Now, we must deal with the more immediate and intimate situation. We must deal with you.”