Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Feeling increasing panic, she nonetheless made her way up the second stairs using the ramp and came in sight of her goal. Again, she kept telling herself that these were places she’d been all her life, that she’d played hide and seek in the darkened mode up here when she was a little girl. It didn’t help as much as it should have. Instead, it made her feel even worse for being more frightened now than she’d been at the age of seven or eight.

I know more now than I did then, she told herself.

Finally she turned and glided into the ward room. The door was open, but the lights were on emergency only, and the place looked locked up tight. The clock on the wall, synchronized to the ship’s master clock like all the others, read “18:22.” So she was already too late. Had it been over fifty minutes to come this way? Had she truly been that slow? It seemed barely five or ten minutes since she’d set out.

And as late as she was, was anybody still there? Would she have to slink back, a failure, because she hadn’t made it in time?

She glided over to the meeting room door and pushed the sensor for entry. It hadn’t had any illumination, but suddenly it turned green and the door slid open.

Inside, Doctor Karl Woodward sat in a big fake leather chair at the end of a long table. To his right sat John Robey, who looked quite pleased.

“Ah, Sister Toloway!” the Doctor greeted her, half standing. “Please! Come in! Your young man here has been telling me all about you and your experiences back on the colony! You must be really something! It seems he wants to quit the Arm and marry you!”

The Doctor did not minimize anything in his final talk before they left orbit. After pretty much selecting certain people who’d elected to remain and throwing them off anyway, primarily because of attitudes and comments made, in a few cases because they had been traumatized former hostages who had not been as willful nor as successful as Eve in breaking out of their shells and were therefore going for the wrong reasons, he tried to talk any wavering minds out of it.

“I don’t want anyone with us who doesn’t believe that this is God’s will and that we are bound to succeed based upon our faith in Him,” he warned. “Anybody else would be a fool to come. Nor will this be an easy or comfortable task in any event. We’ve stripped the old Mountain as bare as we could; this is no missionary or teaching expedition. We’ve sold everything of value to insure that we have the most state-of-the-art navigational computing system available, and I think we do. I’ve been told that taking something this large into a wild hole is tantamount to suicide. Well, I don’t believe in committing suicide and I think we can do it. There’s no choice, anyway. If you all stay, we have to have something big enough to transport you!”

That brought something of a tension-breaking chuckle from the congregation.

“This is going to be it,” he continued. “At zero nine twenty tomorrow all the umbilicals and work platforms will be gone, all the hatches sealed. We will power up, and we will move out. You have until about zero eight forty-five to take the last exit, the central hatchway Fourteen A. If you aren’t gone by then, you’re stuck. Also, be prepared for a lot of bizarre flying even before we do what we intend to do. The word is out: we’re headed for the Three Kings and its fabled treasures. In addition to all the tracking devices various groups have bribed workers to implant into the Mountain, there will undoubtedly be a small navy shadowing us, ready to pounce right in behind us when we show them where the entrance lies. It’s not going to happen, but keeping them from doing so will take some fancy flying and some chicanery. And, when we do jump into that hole, the fun really begins. It will probably be the longest, roughest, nastiest, most sickening trip any of us have ever taken. Sensors to the new computers will require millions, perhaps billions of minute corrections in all planes every second just to keep us centered. Just remember that, even inside there, God is there, too.”

As they left to return to their quarters, John and Eve saw Cromwell standing rather casually at the rear. Although most feared the enigmatic security chief and kept their distance, Robey felt like he had a certain link with the man. He didn’t understand him; nobody did, nor probably could who didn’t know the details of the rumored dark past. Still, he did not fear him, either.

“Brother Cromwell,” Robey greeted the big man as they reached the exit. “I should have thought that you and your people would be busily digging out all those tracking devices.”

Cromwell gave a slight smile. “No use in doing that until we’re under way. They’d just put them back again somewhere else. At least we think we know where they all are. I understand congratulations are in order.”

Robey grinned and looked over at Eve, still in her levitating chair but looking much stronger by the day. “As soon as Eve can stand on her own we plan to have the Doctor marry us,” he said.

“Very well. Let me know the time, if you’ll allow me to come.”

Robey was surprised. “I’d be honored, sir. Thank you.”

After they’d gone a ways outside, Robey said, “I’d love to know what drives that man. I’d trust him with just about anything and yet there’s something very scary deep inside him, something dark and dangerous.”

“I know,” she replied. “I wonder if he’s still walking a darkened hall, or, maybe, keeping in the ghosts of all those who died by his hand before he found faith. I keep thinking of what happened to me and the others.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Yes, I should! Too often we take things like faith for granted, and we pay lip service to our beliefs. Maybe we have to get slapped or kicked in the rear and then scared silly in order to fully understand and appreciate it all. We all know that man was a soldier. We just don’t know how many people he killed, or caused to be killed. This, all this, may be the only thing that keeps the darkness from consuming him.”

The sudden onset of the Great Silence had jolted those left on this side of that now unreachable area of humanity’s birth from a solid technological and near totally secular existence back into the arms of religion, which always offered a refuge during times that people could not understand and from things which they feared.

Even with his own emotional involvement, he was certain, as had been the medtechs, that Eve had been headed towards self-destruction. That same sense of faith and religious belief had kept her from going all the way over, and now was the rock against which she pushed to get back to normalcy.

Woodward had always preached that those who had no sense of or feel for religion had simply never been tested. Only those who had really were required to make the most basic of choices.

Robey didn’t know if he’d been tested, really, or was simply the product of his upbringing. He wondered what kind of a test had forced Cromwell’s choice, or, for that matter, Doc Woodward’s.

One thing was for sure: from the time they would shove off tomorrow morning, and ever after, the very nature of The Mountain and its mission would be changed forever, and those who were within it would be dragged along.

Absolutely nobody slept well that night, and few slept at all, knowing the truth of that. Most spent at least some of the time in prayer and conversation with God, in private, as was consistent with their beliefs.

Forward, in his luxurious cabin, stripped as it was of many of the valuables he’d collected over the years, Doctor Karl Woodward tried to sleep, and dozed in fits and starts.