“Air Intelligence,” Chaney mused. “A sharpie?”
“You can bet your last tax dollar, civilian. Do you remember those maps Katrina gave us yesterday?”
“I’m not likely to forget them. Top secret.”
“Read that literally for the Major: he memorized them. Mister, if you could show him another map today with one small Illinois town shifted a quarter of an inch away from yesterday’s location, old William would put his long finger on the spot and say, ‘This town has moved.’ He’s good.” Saltus was grinning with high humor. “The enemy can’t hide a water tank or a missile launcher or an ammo bunker from him — not from him.”
Chaney nodded his wonder. “Do you see what kind of team Katrina is putting together? What kind the mystery man Seabrooke has recruited? I wish I knew what they really expect us to find up there.”
Arthur Saltus left his room and crossed the corridor to stand at Chaney’s door, dressed for a summer day.
“Hey — how do you like our Katrina?”
Chaney said: “Let us consider beauty a sufficient end.”
“Mister, did you swallow a copy of Bartlett?”
A grin. “I like to prowl through old cultures, old times. Bartlett and Haakon are my favorites; each in his way offers a rich storehouse, a treasury.”
“Haakon? Who is Haakon?”
“A latter-day Viking; he was born too late. Haakon wrote Pax Abrahamitica, a history of the desert tribes. I would say it was more of a treasury than a history: maps, photographs, and text telling one everything he would want to know about the tribes five to seven thousand years ago.”
“Photographs five thousand years ago?”
“No; photographs of the remains of tribal life five thousand years ago: Byzantine dams, Nabataean wells, old Negev water courses still holding water, still serving the people who live there today. The Nabataeans built things to last. Their wells are water-tight today; they’re still used by the Bedouin. Several good photographs of them.”
“I’d like to see that. May I borrow the book?”
Chaney nodded. “I have it with me.” He stared at a closed door and listened to the snores. “Wake him up?”
“No! Not if we have to live in the same room with him all day. He’s a bear when he’s routed out of his cave before he’s ready — and he doesn’t eat breakfast. He says he thinks and fights well on an empty stomach.”
Chaney said: “The company is Spartan; see all their wounds on the front.”
“I give up! Let’s go to breakfast.”
They quit the converted barracks and struck off along the narrow concrete sidewalk, walking north toward the commissary. A jeep and a staff car moved along the street, while in the middle distance a cluster of civilian cars were parked about a large building housing the commissary. They were the only ones who walked.
Chaney asked: “This is swimming weather. Is there a pool here?”
“There has to be — Katrina didn’t get that beautiful tan under a sun lamp. I think it’s over that way — over on E Street, near the Officers’ Club. Want to try it this afternoon?”
“If she will permit it. We may have to study.”
“I’m already tired of that! I don’t care how many million voters with plastic stomachs affiliated with Party A will be living in Chicago twenty years from now. Mister, how can you spend years playing with numbers?”
“I’m fascinated by them — numbers and people. The relief of a plastic stomach may cause a citizen to switch from the activist A to the more conservative B; his vote may alter the outcome of an election, and a conservative administration — local, state, or national — may stall or do nothing about a problem that needed solving yesterday. The Great Lakes problem is a problem because of just that.”
Saltus said: “Excuse me. What problem?”
“You’ve been away. The Lakes are at their highest levels in history; they’re flooding out ten thousand miles of shoreline. The average annual precipitation in the Lakes watersheds has been steadily increasing for the past eighty years and the high water is causing damage. Those summer houses have been toppling into the Lakes for years as the water eroded the bluffs; in a very short while more than summer houses will topple in. Beaches are gone, private docks are going, low land is becoming marshes. Sad thing, Commander.”
“Hey — when we go into Chicago on the survey, maybe we should look to see if Michigan Avenue is underwater.”
“That’s no joke. It may be.”
“Oh, doom, doom, doom!” Saltus declared. “Your books and tables are always crying doom.”
“I’ve published only one book. There was no doom.”
“William said it was poppycock. I haven’t read it, I’m not much of a reader, mister, but he looked down his nose, And Katrina said the newspapers gave you hell.”
“You’ve been talking about me. Idle gossiping!”
“Hey — you were two or three days late coming in, remember? We had to talk about something, so we talked about you, mostly — curiosity about one tame civilian on a military team. Katrina knew all about you; I guess she read your dossier forward and backward. She said you were in trouble — trouble with your company, with reviewers and scholars and churches and — oh, everybody.” Saltus gave his walking companion a slanted glance. “Old William said you were bent on destroying the foundations of Christianity. You must have done something, mister. Did you chip away at the foundation?”
Chaney answered with a single word.
Saltus was interested. “I don’t know that.”
“It’s Aramaic. You know it in English.”
“Say it again — slowly — and tell me what it is.”
Chaney repeated it, and Saltus turned it on his tongue, delighted with the sound and the fresh delivery of an old transitive verb. “Hey — I like that!” He walked on, repeating the word just above his breath.
After a space: “What about those foundations?”
“I translated two scrolls into English and caused them to be published,” Chaney said with resignation. “I could have saved my time, or spent my holiday digging up buried cities. One man in ten read the book slowly and carefully and understood what I had done — the other nine began yapping before they finished the first half.”
His companion was ready with a quick grin. “William yapped, and Katrina seemed scandalized, but I guess Gilbert Seabrooke read it slowly: Katrina said the Bureau was embarrassed, but Seabrooke stood up for you. Now me, I haven’t read it and I probably won’t, so where does that put me?”
“An honest neutral, subject to intimidation.”
“All right, mister: intimidate this honest neutral.”
Chaney looked down at the commissary, guessing at the remaining distance. He intended to be short; the subject was painful since a university press had published the book and a misunderstanding public had taken it up.
“I don’t want you yapping at me, Commander, so you need first to understand one word: midrash.”
“Midrash. Is that another Aramaic word?”
“No — it’s Hebraic, and it means fiction, religious fiction. Compare it to whatever modern parallel you like: historical fiction, soap opera, detective stories, fantasy; the ancient Hebrews liked their midrash. It was their favorite kind of fantasy; they liked to use biblical events and personages in their fiction — call it bible-opera if you like. Scholars have long been aware of that; they know midrash when they find it, but the general public hardly seems to know it exists. The public tends to believe that everything written two thousand years ago was sacred, the work of one saint or another.”