Mysterium

He climbed the stairs to Paul Cantwell’s study and loaded the last fifty pages of the Buchanan and Bayard counties white pages into the Hewlett-Packard PC. This work had been interrupted, maddeningly, by the week of darkness, and today by the need to pick up rations. He finished it now with more dread than excitement. The experiment for which he had risked so much—his life, his friend Dex’s life—might be exactly as ephemeral as Dex had predicted. He had built an ornate palace of conjecture, and that delicate structure might well collapse under the weight of reality.

The telephone number Stern gave him hadn’t appeared in the first hundred pages of the phone book—unless the optical reader had mistranslated it, or the program he was reading it into had some kind of flaw. But that was unlikely. More likely was that he simply hadn’t found the number yet… or that it was unlisted.

Howard finished loading the directory and told the computer to sort for the target number. The disk drive chattered into the silent room.

It didn’t take long. The machine announced success as prosaically as it had announced failure. The number simply appeared highlighted in blue; a name and address appeared at the left.

WINTERMEYER, R. 1230 HALTON ROAD, TWO RIVERS

Less than three blocks from here.

∞

He spent a sleepless night thinking about Stern, his mind crowded with a hundred memories and a single image: Stern, so like his name, fiercely intelligent, eyes dark, lips pursed behind a curly beard. Generous but mysterious. Howard had been talking to Alan Stern for much of his life and every conversation had been a treasured event, but what had he learned about the man in back of the ideas? Only a few clues from his mother. Stern the enigmatic, Stern who was, his mother once said, “trying to secede from the human race.”

Howard walked to the Halton Road address in the morning in a dizzy mixture of anticipation and dread.

The house itself was nothing special: an old two-story row house faced with pink aluminum siding. The tiny lawn and the narrow pass-way at the side were obscured by snow; a tin trash can peeked out from a drift. A path snaked to the front door. There was a light in a downstairs window.

Howard pushed the doorbell and heard the buzzer ring inside.

A woman answered the door. She was in her fifties, Howard guessed; slim, small-boned, her gray hair long and loose. She looked at him warily, but that was how everyone looked at strangers nowadays.

He said, “Are you R. Wintermeyer?”

“Ruth. ‘R’ only to my tax form.” She narrowed her eyes. “You look a little familiar. But only a little.”

“I’m Howard Poole. I’m Alan Stern’s nephew.”

Her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Oh my God. I think you really are. You even look like him. He talked about you, of course, but I thought—”

“What?”

“You know. I thought you must have been killed at the lab.”

“No. I wasn’t there. They didn’t have a place for me—I stayed in town that night.” He looked past her into the dim interior of the house.

She said, “Well, please come in.”

Warm air embraced him. He tried to restrain his curiosity but his eyes searched for evidence of Stern. The furniture in the sitting room —a sofa, side table, bookcases—was casual but clean. A book was splayed open on an easy chair but he couldn’t read the title.

Howard said, “Is my uncle here?”

Ruth looked at him for a time. “Is that what you thought?”

“He gave me the telephone number but not the address. It took me a long time to find you.”

“Howard… your uncle is dead.’ He died at the lab that night with everybody else. I’m sorry. I thought you would have assumed … I mean, he did spend most of his nights here, but there was something going on, some kind of work… Did you really think he might be here after all this time?”

Howard felt breathless. “I was sure of it.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It was a feeling.”

She gave him another, longer look. Then she said, “I have that feeling, too. Sit down, please, Howard. Would you like coffee? I think we have a lot to talk about.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The clergy of Two Rivers had responded to the events of the summer by putting together what they called the Ad Hoc Ecumenical Council, a group of pastors representing the town’s seven Christian churches and two synagogues. The group met in Brad Congreve’s basement twice a month.

Congreve, an ordained Lutheran minister, was proud of his work. He had assembled a delegation from every religious group in town except for the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Vedanta Buddhist Temple, which in any case was only Annie Stoller and some of her New Age friends sitting cross-legged in the back of Annie’s self-help store. The churches had not always been on friendly terms, and it was still a chore to keep the Baptists talking to the Unitarians, for instance, but they all faced a common danger in this peculiar new world.