“Now I’m going to pay for it . . . . Antichrist, they called me . . . . Antichrist indeed!” More spastic laughter. Ford struggled forward and entered the cavernous stope. To his right, caved-in coal piles and rock mixed together with crumbling veins of pyrite that glittered like gold in his flashlight.
He struggled on with the man toward the far end. The gobshaft materialized out of the darkness, a round hole, about five feet in diameter, at the far corner. A rope dangled down the shaft.
He lay Hazelius on the rock floor and rested his head on the jacket. An explosion rocked the room, and he could hear debris dropping all around them, shaken loose from the ceiling. The smoke stung his eyes. At any moment the approaching fire would suck out their oxygen—and that would be it.
He grasped the rope. Disintegrating in his hands, it parted, unraveling and piling down into the deep shaft. A few moments later he heard a splash of water.
He shined his light up and saw a smoothly bored hole going up as far as the eye could see. The rotten end of the rope dangled uselessly. The hoist was nowhere to be seen.
He went back to Hazelius to find him sinking deeper into delirium. More soft laughter. Ford squatted on his heels, thinking hard. Hazelius’s mumbling distracted him, and then he heard a name:
Suddenly he listened. “Did you just say Joe Blitz?”
“Joe Blitz . . . ,” he mumbled, “Lieutenant Scott Morgan . . . Bernard Hubbell . . . Kurt von Rachen . . . Captain Charles Gordon . . .”
“Who’s Joe Blitz?”
“Joe Blitz . . . Captain B. A. Northrup . . . Rene Lafayette . . .”
“Who are these people?” Ford asked.
“Nobodies. They don’t . . . exist . . . . Noms de plume . . .”
“Pennames?” Ford bent over Hazelius. His face, in the faint light, was covered with a sheen of sweat. His eyes were glassy. But there was still a strange, almost supernatural vitality to the man. “Pennames for who?”
“Who else? For the great L. Ron Hubbard . . . Clever man . . . Only they didn’t call him the Antichrist . . . . He was luckier than me, the schmuck.”
Ford was thunderstruck. Joe Blitz? A penname for L. Ron Hubbard? Hubbard was the science fiction writer who had started his own religion, Scientology, and set himself up as its prophet. Before launching Scientology, Ford recalled, Hubbard had famously told a group of fellow writers that the greatest feat a human being could achieve in this world was to found a world-class religion. And then he went out and did it, combining pseudoscience and half- baked mysticism into a potent and appealing package.
A world-class religion . . . Was it possible? Was that the question Hazelius alluded to? Was that the point of his hand-picked team? Their tragic backgrounds? Isabella, the greatest scientific experiment in history? The isolation? The Mesa? The messages? The secrecy?
Ford took a deep breath and leaned over. He whispered, “Volkonsky wrote a note just before his . . . death. I found it. It said, in part:
“Yes . . . Yes . . . ,” Hazelius answered. “Peter was smart . . . . Too smart for his own good . . . I made a mistake there, should have picked someone else . . . .” A silence, and then a long sigh. “My mind is wandering.” His voice quavered at the edge of sanity. “What was I saying?”
Hazelius was swimming back into reality—but only a little.
“Joe Blitz was L. Ron Hubbard. The man who invented his own religion. Was
“I was babbling.”
“But that was your plan,” said Ford. “Wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hazelius’s voice sounded sharper.
“Of course you do. You choreographed the whole thing—the building of Isabella, the problems with the machine, the voice of God. It was you all along.
“You’re not making sense, Wyman.” Now Hazelius sounded like he had returned to reality—hard.
Ford shook his head. The answer had been staring him in the face for almost a week—right there in his file.
“Most of your life,” said Ford, “you’ve been concerned with utopian political schemes.”
“Aren’t many of us?”
“Not to the power of obsession. But you were obsessed, and, even worse, no one listened to you—not even after you won the Nobel Prize. It must have driven you crazy—the smartest man on earth, and no one would listen. Then your wife died and you went into seclusion. You emerged two years later with the idea for Isabella. You had something to say. You wanted people to listen. You wanted to change the world more than ever. How better to do it than become a prophet? To start your own religion?”
Ford could hear Hazelius breathing heavily in the darkness.
“Your theory is . . .
“You came up with the idea for the Isabella project—a machine to probe the Big Bang, the moment of creation. You got it built. You picked the team—making sure they were psychologically receptive. You staged this whole thing. You planned to make the greatest scientific discovery ever made. And what might that be? What else, but to discover God! That discovery would make you his prophet. That’s it, isn’t it? You planned to pull an L. Ron Hubbard on the world.”
“You’re really quite mad.”
“Your wife wasn’t pregnant when she died. You made that up. Whatever names the machine came up with, you’d have reacted the same way. You guessed the numbers Kate would be thinking of—because you knew Kate so well. There was nothing supernatural about this at all.”
Hazelius’s even breathing was his only response.
“You gathered around you twelve scientists—handpicked by you. When I read their dossiers, I was struck that every one of them had been hurt by life, every one seeking meaning in their lives. I wondered why that was. And now I know. You handpicked them because you knew they were susceptible—ripe for conversion.”
“But I couldn’t convert you, huh?”
“You came close.”
They paused. The faint sound of voices reverberated down the tunnels. The mob was returning.
Hazelius let out a long sigh. “We’re both going to die—I hope you realize that, Wyman. We’re both to be . . .
“That remains to be seen.”
“Yes, my intention was to start a religion. But I don’t know what the hell happened back there. It got away from me. I had this plan . . . it just got away from me.” He sighed again, moaned. “Eddy. That was the wild card that blew my hand. A foolish oversight on my part: martyrdom is the way of all prophets.”
“How did you do it? I mean, hack the computer?”
Hazelius slipped the old rabbit’s foot out of his pocket. “I hollowed out the cork stuffing, replaced it with a sixty-four-gig flash drive, processor, microphone, and wireless transmitter—voice recognition and data. I could connect it to any one of a thousand high-speed wireless processors scattered about Isabella, all slaved to the supercomputer. It’s got a lovely little AI program I wrote in LISP, or rather helped write, since much of it’s self- generated. It’s the most beautiful computer program ever written. It was simple to operate, just sitting in my pocket. Although the program itself was anything but simple—I’m not sure even I understand it. Strange, though, it said a lot of things I never intended—things that I never dreamed of. You might say it performed beyond specs.”
“You manipulative bastard.”
Hazelius slipped the rabbit’s foot back into his pocket. “You’re wrong about that, Wyman. I’m not a bad man at all. I did what I did for the highest, most altruistic reasons.”
“Sure. Look at the violence, all the death. You’re responsible for it.”
“Eddy and his people chose the violence, not me.” He winced with momentary pain.
“And you either murdered Volkonsky or had Wardlaw do it.”
“No. Volkonsky was a smart man. He guessed what I was up to. When he really thought it through, he realized he couldn’t stop me. He couldn’t bear to see himself made a fool of, his life’s work manipulated and
