Heaven and Hell (59 page)

“But you’re going to do it anyway?” Jennifer asked.

“I can do nothing less.”

“I’ll stand with you,” announced Chris. “I’ve got to.”

“It would avail nothing. To take you on such a journey would be to place you in grave jeopardy. You are a child of God. It would be an inexcusable act on my part. Your place is here.”

“My place is at my wife’s side,” objected Chris, his tone of voice more forceful.

“I cannot take you,” insisted Aaron, “and there is no one else who can. The issue is closed. I will continue to carry messages between you to your wife for as long as possible, I promise. After that, well, I will probably not be here to deliver them. I will return again in two days. I will take to her whatever you wish at that time.”

Aaron did not remain to argue the issue. He left Chris and his mother to their grief.

“This isn’t over,” said Chris, rising to his feet.

The look of alarm on Jennifer’s face was clear. “Where are you going?”

“To see Johann.” Chris hurried into his bedroom.

Jennifer followed closely behind him. “Honey, what can he possibly do?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going.”

Jennifer knew she could not reason with her son when he was in this mood; she wouldn’t even try. She was watching the Father’s words becoming reality, of that she had no doubt. Things weren’t unfolding in the manner she had envisioned, yet she could almost hear His words. This was the future He had spoken of.

A moment later, wearing travel clothing, Chris stepped from the mansion and onto the porch, and then into the yard beyond. He glanced up at the sun, trying to determine what time of day it might be at Kepler’s home. It mattered not. He looked back toward his mother. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Jennifer quickly considered what words of wisdom she should say to him that would help him on his way. She knew not. She had already said it all. There was no point in saying it again. She only nodded.

Chris vanished into a swirling mist of stars. She was certain that her son’s moment of truth was at hand.

As Chris stepped from the misty portal and into the tall grass surrounding Johann’s home, he noticed it was late afternoon. He heard voices, several distinctly different ones. They seemed to be coming from the rear of the home. As Chris walked around the house to see what was happening, he heard a soft eerie whine growing in pitch and intensity. It sounded like some sort of mechanical device, an engine, perhaps. But how could that be, here in Heaven?

Then he saw a large sphere of glass, perhaps 16 feet in diameter, glistening in the sunlight and hovering 10 or so feet above the ground. The upper hemisphere of the mystical sphere appeared to be some sort of crew compartment; a series of high-backed, cushioned chairs formed a circle on an inner floor, while another chair, higher than the rest, sat near the center behind a control panel. There was a man sitting in the center chair, but Chris couldn’t identify him.

Within the lower hemisphere, Chris could see a complex array of machinery; protruding from it were four metallic legs extending downward. He recalled photographs of the old NASA lunar lander, and in some respects, this vehicle resembled it. Yet it lacked anything that looked like a rocket engine; indeed, not so much as a blade of grass below was disturbed by its presence.

Johann and David stood on the ground looking up at the vehicle, apparently not mindful that they had a visitor. A moment later the vehicle descended, landing gently on its four metal legs. The soft whine died away, allowing the natural sounds of the forest to once again dominate the strange scene.

Johann turned to see Chris, “I was wondering when you would arrive.”

Chris was thoroughly confused. “What do you mean?”

“The crisis in Hell,” replied Johann. “It’s been brewing for a while, I fear. I don’t want you to think that it was your letter that created the problem; it wasn’t. I suppose that this was destined to happen. I suppose this proves that satan keeps a close eye on those under his rule. I was hoping that wasn’t the case. Your wife’s peace is about to be interrupted. I’m sorry.”

“How long have you known?” asked Chris who had been totally unprepared for Johann’s response.

Johann walked in Chris’s direction, David at his side. “We’ve had our suspicions for quite a while.” Johann looked toward his young protégé. “At David’s insistence, we traveled to the Hall of Records several times, looked into your wife’s book. It was the incident at the Gateway City of Sheol that first concerned us. It was not so much that she was almost discovered; it was the fact that the city was guarded at all. Why should it have been? After all, who is there to threaten it? Over the past centuries I have viewed Hell through the eyes of hundreds of people, mostly those so unfortunate as to find themselves separated from God. But I have also viewed that place through the eyes of demons.”

That comment brought a look of surprise from Chris. Johann had looked more deeply into the pit than he had at first thought.

“Yes, I have been so foolish,” confirmed Johann. “I know their habits, their ways, and their responsibilities from firsthand knowledge. That has made this situation all the more vexing. Know this; satan’s legions are fanatically loyal to him. They would never knowingly betray their master. The humans are all restrained or trapped in one manner or another. They are powerless to interfere in the comings and goings of demons. The fact that there was opposition at the city told me that something was amiss. The fact that so many demons took up the pursuit was even more surprising.”

“But we didn’t immediately associate that fact with your wife,” noted David. “I mean, it would be absurd for satan to put so much effort into finding one lost soul.”

Johann shook his head. “No, you don’t know satan as I do. He has a single-mindedness of purpose. He will never give up, never admit defeat. He will not rest until he finds her, the task will consume him, as it has these last sixty-seven days.”

“Sixty-seven days?” gasped Chris.

“Yes,” confirmed Johann. “He first became aware of her absence sixty-seven days ago. He has turned Hell up-side-down in search of her; yet so far, he has searched in vain. Unfortunately, Serena will not be able to elude him indefinitely. It has greatly complicated matters, pushed up our timetable. The problem is that we’re just not ready.”

Now Chris was really confused. “Not ready for what? Johann, please tell me what’s going on.”

Johann motioned toward the glassy sphere. A doorway had opened in its side, and a small middle-aged man was standing there watching them.

“The capacitor is still not retaining the charge the way I’d hoped,” said the man, sticking his head out of the door. “In the total absence of the field, it would depolarize even more rapidly.”

“As it is, how long would we have?” Johann asked the mysterious man.

“I can’t be sure, fifteen minutes, perhaps less.”

Johann shook his head. “That’s not good enough. We’ll need at least eight times that much time.”

The man jumped to the ground and walked in their direction. “This problem is solvable, we just need time. You should surely understand that. You required nearly twenty years to formulate your three laws of planetary motion. This problem is not so different from that. There are other things to be tried. We will arrive at a solution.”

Chris repeated his request, his frustration growing. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

“Yes, of course.” Johann turned to the man from the sphere. “This is my good friend Nichola Tesla. Nichola, meet Chris Davis.”

Chris was dumbfounded. He knew this man too, or at least he knew him by his earthly reputation. “The inventor of the AC generator?”

“The same,” replied Nichola, bowing slightly, yet not extending his hand. “But please, call me Nick; all of my friends do.”

Chris felt honored to be considered among the friends of yet another of humanity’s great scientists. “Thank you, Nick, it is truly an honor to meet you.”

“Shall we withdraw to my study?” suggested Johann, motioning to the back door.

The group made their way into the house, then through the main hall and into the large study. They gathered around the large oval table near the center of the room.

Johann looked to Chris, who sat directly across the dark, hardwood table from him. “In the nearly seven weeks since we last talked, David and I have examined your problem quite carefully. There are certain techniques that are learned with time when using the books of the Hall of Records. We start with the book of the person of primary interest, and then cross-reference the books of those persons with whom the individual encounters. It can be a slow and painstaking process; but in doing this, we gathered detailed knowledge of the current crisis.”

From the original summons for Serena, issued forth by satan to Moloch, all the way down to the ill-fated exploits of Rathspith and his search for disloyal fallen angels, Johann unfolded the story to Chris. It became abundantly clear that Rathspith was getting nowhere fast.

“We’re keeping almost daily tabs on Rathspith,” noted David. “This dude is in serious trouble. He made promises to Moloch, promises that he can’t keep. Now, instead of promises, all he can make are excuses. At the rate he’s going, he’ll be the one who ends up in satan’s audience chamber.”

Chris turned to Johann. “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

“There was no point in it. There was nothing that you could do, only worry your wife needlessly. We were going to let you know if Rathspith started getting close, and he hasn’t, not yet.”

“But the stuff we’ve learned during the past weeks is just so cool!” David said in his usual youthful excitement. “We’ve been trying to find out why you remember so much more about your life on Earth than other people here. We were trying to figure out why you’re the only one who remembered a loved one in Hell. What we found is that you aren’t the only one. There are others, or at least there were.”

“Like who?” asked Chris.

David smiled. “You should know; you met one of them.”

Chris pondered David’s comment. No, it was more like a riddle. He’d never much cared for riddles. He wasn’t very good at them. Then it came to him in a wave of remembrance. “Wait a minute, the Hall of Records, the oriental woman with the black book in her hand. She was crying, I remember. It was when I’d looked into my mother’s book. By the time we’d finished she was gone. What was her name? I should remember.”

“Mao Yeng,” said David.

“How’d you know that?” asked Chris. Then he answered his own question. “You opened my book, didn’t you?”

“Exactly,” said Johann. “You’d mentioned her in this very study on the day we first met, the day I brought you here. She only appeared briefly in your book, but upon close examination, we concluded that her situation might be similar to yours. We decided to look at her book as well, and then interview Mao Yeng herself.”

“And?” asked Chris, hanging on every word.

“That’s where it becomes confusing,” continued Johann. “We located her book, but it wasn’t white, it was gray. She wasn’t here at all, she was still on Earth. We thought that we might have made a mistake, so we opened her book. It was the same woman all right, but according to her book, she was not here that day, Mao Yeng Wong was in Enola, China. And the man whose book she was reading, her husband, was with her, still alive. They were preaching the gospel in a secret underground church, out of sight of the Chinese government. Further examination showed that his book too was gray, not black. I am certain that they will be here one day, but not yet.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” objected Chris, “I saw her, just as clearly as I see you now.”

“And your book confirms it,” replied Johann. “We haven’t quite figured that one out yet. The records conflict, and they shouldn’t. They never have before.”

“Unless we’re dealing with a temporal paradox,” chimed in David. “You see, they really do exist.”

Johann hesitated. “Perhaps, but we have more important issues to deal with right now.”

Chris hoped with all of his heart that he wasn’t jumping to a wrong conclusion. “To rescue Serena?”

Johann leaned back in his chair. “Yes. We’ve been planning it for over a month.”

“And that vehicle out back, it will take you there?”

“Not as it is,” Nick said.

“Nick and I built that craft years ago,” continued Johann. “We both had a desire to explore the cosmos firsthand, to actually get out there and touch it, but that meant crossing the barriers that separated the different spheres of reality. I had the knowledge of celestial mechanics, and Nick had the knowledge of engineering and force field theory that made the vehicle a reality.”

“During my time on Earth, I sought a source of nearly infinite power,” noted Nick. “I sought it for the betterment of humankind. Yet those who held the reigns of financial power in my day saw my research as a threat to their growing empires. They determined that I should never reach my goal. Only late in my life did I discover that power. It was there all the time, right in front of me, yet I had not seen it. I finally harnessed it here, where it is least diluted.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” admitted Chris.

“How did you come to Professor Kepler’s home today?”