help.
Kathleen intensified the program to include computerized telephone spotcalls, bulk-rate mailings, and skytyped messages over football games. The one above Notre Dame nearly instigated a riot.
Christmas approached with all the pleasantness of a funeral procession. Priests and ministers implicated our campaign with the international Satanist/Communist/Corporate/Secular Humanist conspiracy. Rabbis, imams, and assorted shamans hinted that only the Christian God would die on the Christian New Year. The Brahmans sat quietly knowing-or pretending to. The nut cults came farther out of the woodwork.
I asked Kathleen to stick an ad in newspapers and magazines soliciting funds 'to halt the God-killer's campaign of lies and deceit'. The money it brought in went right out again for ads for both sides.
I spent most of my time in the library. If I could have injected the books into a vein, I would have been mainlining religious philosophy. The current stack of books included Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, C. S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, and Thomas Paine. I had Paine's
in hand. He detested organized religions on the grounds that revelation could not be received secondhand. On that basis, he denounced the Bible as mere hearsay. That he promoted his own deistic, disorganized religion didn't prevent me from unearthing information that I found generally useful.
Ann wandered into the library at close to midnight. The official closing time was nine, but nobody really cared about books or libraries anymore. It was more of an underfunded warehouse than anything else.
She looked as if someone had crumpled her up, put her in a back pocket, and gone horseback riding. She plopped down into the chair next to mine and dropped her head upon a pile of notes.
'Happy Birthday,' she muttered, looking down at the papers touching her cheek, staring blearily through the desk to the floor.
'Thanks, doll, but you're off by nearly half a year.'
'Mmm,' she groaned, gazing through the papers to the other side of the planet. 'I just finished speaking to Canfield. The crew's installed the Theta Wave Amplifier onboard
. Canfield's personally integrating the neural interruptors into the amplifier. And Bridget has submitted her altar design for the payload section. It looks good. It can work. Dr. La Vecque says that her heart's in prime condition-no circulatory problems. He thinks she can survive the flight.' She sighed.
'What's wrong?'
She shrugged. 'I thought that keeping the books at Bautista Corporation was a chore. This campaign of yours is so diversified that I'm shotgunning all over the place just trying to keep the finances straight.' She raised her head from the table and rested it on one arm. 'Working with Zacharias's money doesn't simplify things. He's being audited, so I've got to save his ass to cover ours.'
I ran my hand gently through her golden hair. 'He should be thankful for all the work you're doing for him.'
She laughed in a peculiarly weak fashion. 'One thing alone is keeping all of this from blowing us up into the public eye.' She rolled her head to one side in order to gaze up at me. 'Whenever I have to deal with people who might have an interest in tracking us down, they barely notice me and don't remember me five minutes after I'm gone.'
'You make a great front man,' I said.
She didn't take the comment well. 'It's tough,' she said. 'It's tough knowing that you're moving through life like a phantom. Knowing that you drift through the memories of the people you meet like a faint breeze. Feeling that sometime-late at night-they'll remember you in a dream and wake with a shudder or a scream, only to forget again.' She turned her face back down. 'It's like not really being alive at all.'
'How long have you been like this?'
She sat up and sighed. 'All my life. There were times when even my...
couldn't see me.' She stared at the bookcases in silence.
I sat there watching her. Even though tired, she radiated a glow of life that warmed me to my soul-assuming that I still possessed one.
I quit dreaming and returned to my book.
After a moment, Ann said, 'Dell?'
