for the tap on the shoulder that means I’m in big trouble.”
“I wonder if that’s how religious people normally get through life so they wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention.”
Hammad shook his head. “I doubt if most people even considered it that way. They probably—”
The solid wood door banged open and Dave, Gwen, and the others came in, stomping snow from their boots and talking. Dave glared at Jody and me and took off for his room or somewhere, but Gwen, Maria, Arjuna, and Keung took off their coats and joined us by the fire.
“Well, at least we can say we tried,” Gwen said as she presented her backside to the flames. She had left the robe in the chapel and was wearing a regular shirt and pants.
“So what now?” asked Jody. “Travel? Sightsee? Play with the leftover toys before they all rust back into the ground? Or do we get straight to work starting a colony?”
Arjuna said, “No offense, but after twelve years of close contact with you guys I’m ready for some time alone.”
Keung edged playfully away from her, but he said, “My sentiments exactly. I wouldn’t mind having a whole continent to myself for a while.”
Maria looked shocked. “Wait a minute. Splitting up could mean some of us might get left behind again if God comes back.”
“He’s not coming back,” Keung said.
“What makes you so sure?”
He shrugged. “I’m not, actually, but I didn’t spend my whole life disregarding the issue just to start worrying about it now. If He comes for me, He comes, and if not, that’s fine too. I’ve got plenty to do on my own.”
“That’s kind of how I feel about it,” I said. “I’d like to see the world a little while I’ve got the chance.”
“Me too,” said Jody.
Gwen turned around to face the fire, saying over her shoulder, “The satellite phone system still works, so it shouldn’t be too hard to stay in touch. There’s hundreds of cell phones right here in the hotel, and I’ll bet at least some of them still have active accounts, paid automatically every month by credit card. It shouldn’t be hard to find a working phone for each of us. Of course we don’t all have to play tourist. Whoever wants to could start setting up the colony.”
“Where?” Hammad asked.
“The Mediterranean,” Arjuna said, just as I said, “California.” We looked at each other for a moment, then I shrugged and said, “Okay, the Mediterranean.” A sharp bang sounded from the back of the lodge.
“That sounded like a gun,” Gwen said, and she took off running down the hallway, shouting, “Dave! Dave!” the whole way. The rest of us followed close behind her, but I took the time to grab the fireplace poker. Maybe he’d committed suicide and maybe he hadn’t. A poker wasn’t much of a weapon against a gun, but it felt better than nothing.
We found Dave outside on the deck overlooking the Snake River, a shotgun in his hand and a mess of feathers and blood smeared across the snow. I could see bird seed among the feathers; evidently Dave had scattered a handful and waited for something to come for it. That something had been hardly bigger than a mouse by the looks of its remains.
“Kind of small for dinner, isn’t it?” I asked, reaching out with the poker and flipping the tiny bird body over so I could see its underside.
“It’s an experiment,” Dave said. I was glad to see he was carefully pointing the shotgun away from everyone. “According to Jesus, not even a sparrow can fall without God noticing. I figured that would be pretty easy to test.”
Jody had come up beside me and was examining the bird. “It would be if you’d managed to shoot a sparrow,” she said. “This is a chickadee.”
Dave blushed when we all laughed, but he said, “It’s not the species; it’s the concept.”
“Whatever, it doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Maybe you should have tied a message to its foot first,” I said.
Keung laughed. “You’re supposed to use a pigeon for that.”
“It’s not funny,” Dave snapped. He took a deep breath, then said, “I am trying to attract the attention of God. If you think it’s funny or useless, I’m sorry, but I think it’s important and I’m going to try everything I can until I get the job done.”
“What’s next?” Gwen asked him. “Sacrificing sheep? Rebuilding the Ark of the Covenant?”
“Whatever is necessary,” Dave said.
I felt myself shivering, and when it didn’t stop I suddenly realized all of us but Dave were out there without our coats.
“Come on,” I said to Jody. “Let’s get inside before we catch our death.”
We left the next morning for Yellowstone Park. The rest of the crew split up for other parts of the globe, but Jody and I decided as long as we were that close we might as well visit the biggest tourist attraction in the world. We found a hover car that still ran and whose diagnostics told us it would continue to run for another few hundred hours, tossed our personal belongings in the back, and flew low up the Snake River valley past Jackson Lake and into the park. We ignored the loading ramps and the rail cars that had ferried tourists through for the last fifty years, blowing right past the sign proclaiming it a federal crime to drive a private vehicle within the park’s borders.
The forest seemed endless. We flew along the old roadbed down among the trees so we could see more of it, including the animals the park was famous for. In parts of the world where the human population had been denser, the ecosystem was still out of whack from our sudden disappearance, but Yellowstone had already reached a balance without us before the Second Coming. We watched moose and elk and buffalo plodding along like great hoofed snowploughs, and we even caught a glimpse of a wolf drinking out of a stream near Old Faithful.
The geysers were probably the same as always, too, but with just the two of us standing there on the snow-covered boardwalk in front of Old Faithful it seemed to me that we must be watching its best eruption ever. Steam and boiling water shot up over a hundred feet in the air, and the ground shook with the force of its eruption.
“You know,” Jody said as it subsided, “I just realized how silly it is to come here right now.”
“Silly how?” I asked.
“If Dave succeeds in reaching God, we might have all of eternity to watch this sort of thing in action.”
I looked out at the steaming mound of reddish rock, then at the brilliant white snowfield and green forest beyond it. “You talking about the pretty parts, or the hot parts?”
“Who knows?”
Yeah, who knew? I’d lived a perfectly moral life, by agnostic standards, but who could tell if that would be good enough for God? For that matter, who knew whether Heaven or Hell really existed, even now? So Jesus had come and taken everyone away; he could have hauled them to Andromeda for all we knew.
All the same, I wondered if we were wise for leaving Dave free to pursue God. The crew had talked about it before we’d gone our separate ways, but none of us knew what else we could do about him. He wouldn’t rest until he’d tried everything he could think of, and none of us wanted to attempt confining him to prevent it. I suppose after the prayer meeting and the chickadee incident none of us really believed he would succeed, which was why we weren’t more concerned about it. We were all hoping he’d give it up after a while and become the normal-if somewhat obsessive-friend and crewmember we’d all learned to live with.
We realized we’d made a mistake when Gwen got a call from him a few days later. She had formally renounced her title as captain and flown to Hawaii, but she was still acting as our coordinator. Dave had called to find out where the rest of us were, and when she’d asked him why, he would only tell her to warn us away from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or any place downwind of it.
“Downwind?” I asked when Gwen called us to relay his message. “What the hell is he trying this time?”
Jody and I were in the car again, headed north toward Mammoth hot springs. A ghost of Gwen’s face peered at us through the phone’s heads-up windshield display. “He wouldn’t tell me,” she replied. “He just said to keep
