77 Shadow Street

either. This thought soon led to the consideration that perhaps the ruling elite—he didn’t yet capitalize the term in his mind—manufactured crises in order to control the masses with fear and thereby increase their power.

He was preoccupied with this theory for a while, but then this girl he hoped to bed told him that he was a conspiracy theorist, “a super-nutty fruitcake,” and that he was as likely to see her naked as he was to prove that Elvis Presley was not dead and was living in Sweden after gender-change surgery. For a week, Fielding misconstrued her sarcasm as a hot tip, but the Elvis-in-Sweden rumor proved to have no substance, at least none that he could find. When he fully realized the cruel nature of the girl’s rejection, he was saddened, but not for long.

As Fielding had continued to research threats against humanity, civilization, and the planet, he eventually had a major breakthrough that made his controlling-the-masses-with-fear theory seem childish. These days, even if alone, he sometimes blushed when he thought about how naive he had been to believe the truth was anything that simple. The truth was more terrible, far darker. Scientists dealt with facts, right? A consensus of scientists implied a lot of very smart people agreeing on the provable facts, right? Therefore, the facts must in fact be the facts. If the consensus was that there would be an ice age displacing millions of people by 1990, then there must be an ice age well under way here in 2011. The clever Ruling Elite were not manufacturing crises, after all; they were instead trying to conceal a fearsome slew of genuine crises from the public, to prevent panic, the collapse of civilization, and the loss of their power.

Now, as he returned to his computer, settled in his chair, and sipped his refreshing homemade cola, a curious slithering sound arose overhead and quickly grew loud enough to be annoying, as if Fielding lived under a serpentarium. He assumed the wind had found a way into the Pendleton’s attic, where it was chasing its own tail among the posts and rafters, and after a while it grew silent.

Exerting totalitarian control of the worldwide media, the Ruling Elite never grew silent but aggressively told lies 24/7 to hide one terrifying truth after another from the gullible public. The heroic scientists, even though funded by rich government grants that should have co-opted them, bravely dared to speak truth to power, warning of the oncoming cataclysms, only to be made to look foolish when the cataclysms didn’t happen—except that they did happen but were covered up by the Ruling Elite.

Fielding had tumbled to this chilling reality when, watching a TV-news report that was supposedly live from Canada, he glimpsed what appeared to be a palm tree, maybe two, in the background of one shot. He realized at once that the report didn’t come from Canada, that they were faking Canada, shooting Georgia or someplace for Canada, the way that movie directors sometimes shot day for night. They goofed. And Fielding Udell nailed them. They would have no reason to shoot Georgia for Canada unless Canada was buried under hundreds of feet of advancing ice that would one day likewise crush and claim most of the United States.

Initially, it seemed that the global-warming threat didn’t comport with the reality of an ongoing ice age, but once he began to apply his new theory, he found that it answered every question. Clearly, both groups of scientists were right, and both an ice age and an age of deadly global warming were occurring simultaneously, the former descending on the world from the north pole while the latter burned northward from the south pole. Eventually, humanity would be restricted to the equator, pressed in a climate vise, one jaw of which was killing cold, the other searing heat. The Ruling Elite concealed this opposing-threats situation by faking news from South America, creating an elaborate fantasy of what was happening down there and selling it as news in order to conceal that millions of people in that part of the world had already perished in droughts, famines, heat waves, wildfires, and numerous incidents of spontaneous human combustion.

This meant that Earth did not have many nations each with its own interests, that it was instead a police state with a well-hidden dictatorial class that operated through puppet governments to conceal the true nature of the world. All news and entertainment media were co-opted, and people who said they traveled to Canada recently must be either lying or brainwashed, and the same for those claiming to have had a lovely vacation in Peru or Chile.

The biggest remaining mystery was the identity of the Ruling Elite. They were not merely elusive and secretive. They were as invisible as ghosts, all-powerful malevolent spirits, everywhere at once and yet never showing their faces. Over the years, Fielding considered all kinds of possibilities and ruled out none. Well, he ruled out the Masons and the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and the Jews because, as supposed villains, they were so cliched that they could be nothing but red herrings, and because everyone who hated them to the point of organizing against them proved to be babbling lunatics with whom Fielding wanted no association. He inclined toward the belief that survivors from the lost continent of Atlantis, living now in an undersea supercivilization, might be at work behind the scenes, or else extraterrestrials, or maybe the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, whom no one ever suspected of being involved in conspiracies, which was exactly what made them seem suspicious to Fielding Udell.

As he set aside his glass of cola and returned his attention to the computer, a low and portentous voice arose at a distance, muffled and yet close. The speaker sounded like a TV-news anchor reporting some horrendous event involving hundreds of deaths. Fielding could almost but not quite make out what was being said.

He rolled his wheeled chair back from the computer and turned slowly in a full circle, cocking his head this way and that, trying to get a fix on the source. The voice seemed to originate from all around him, not from one point more than from any other. He decided it must be coming from the apartment below, although the thick concrete-and-steel floors seldom allowed sound to translate from one level of the Pendleton to another.

On the second floor, two apartments were directly below his. One was currently without a resident and up for sale. The other belonged to the Shellbrooks, who were away on vacation. Fielding remained certain that the voice came from below, not from the attic, where the slithering noise had arisen.

He slowly swiveled in his office chair again, and by the time he came around 360 degrees, he was pretty sure that the TV anchor—if that’s who he heard—was speaking in a foreign language, though not one that he could identify. Moment by moment, the voice changed, grew more urgent, more insistent, as if broadcasting a warning.

No, not a warning. A threat.

Fielding was self-aware enough to know he might be paranoid, as the bed-worthy girl had accused him of being. That didn’t mean he was wrong about the Secret World Order and the Ruling Elite or that his Case for Prosecution was in any way misguided. He could be dead right and paranoid. The two things weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, being right made paranoia a requisite for survival.

The speaker, definitely spouting something other than English, suddenly seemed to be not one voice but many, a gang of muttering conspirators urging one another to act, to strike, to commit some monstrous deed, now, right now, immediately.

Alarmed, convinced that he was correctly interpreting the tone and intent of the speakers, Fielding rose from his office chair.