Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

Joshua recognized the patronizing flicker of smile on his father’s lips. Yes, it said, I know it all. You might find out about it—and you are. These visions are the proof.

“Your wife called me again. We have things to discuss.” Benjamin held the notes which Joshua had made during the night. Running his finger down the pages he said, “Of these I saw only the Austrian bomb. And I would not travel to Austria. Jews who remain in Austria after the little Austrian…” Joshua had agreed with his father on this point, until he heard one of the few remaining Viennese Jews explain that he remained because to leave would have been a final victory for Hitler.

“Are you still having them?”

“Like David—”

“In plain English.”

“No.” His father looked away, fidgeted with his beard. “No. Not for two years this month. I had… I refused to…”

“Two years? Mine started two years ago this month.” Joshua wondered if his father’s ability, gift or curse, had been passed to him. And if so, why? Was his father too old to carry on? Would it go to Kevin, or Harlow, or both?

The last of the first, or the first of the last visions came in a dream later that night. It did not seem very important after the onslaught of the previous monstrosities. Two families in Elkhart, Indiana, were threatened and beaten by a gang in white sheets. When he woke, Joshua remembered the names of the victims and the K.K.K. members. As they were the first names he had received, he wrote them down. There were no instructions, merely the names. After witnessing death camps and various massacres, two families’ suffering did not impress Joshua. Three days later, they electrified him.

The story appeared in the local paper, on the National Page as a sidebar. The authorities had no clues as to who had done the beatings. Joshua sent an anonymous fax to the Elkhart police, listing the names he had written down. Nine days later, a series of arrests swept through the revivifying Ku Klux Klan of Northern Indiana.

Joshua had, he realized, seen two days into the future.

Had he acted more quickly, he might have prevented the attacks altogether.

Like it or not, the future was here. From the progressive pattern of the visions, there could be no turning back.

Joshua was still in bed recovering when the next vision vaulted him firmly into the future. It was a near-future, too, not more than a year or two away. As Joshua watched, in his vision, people began to die, strange, horrible deaths. People all over the nation, all over the world. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. Not every person. Only certain people, people with the “Jew gene.” Genocide had been genetically engineered, using a retrovirus which only became viable if a certain gene had a certain chromosome with certain characteristics. Joshua didn’t know enough about genetics to understand how it worked. It didn’t matter.

At the end of the vision, a smiling man in a white lab coat. On the lab coat a nametag which said in German, “Hauss, Assistant Geneticist, State Research & Development, Cologne.” After that came the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles during a concert featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, on September the fourth. In the audience on an aisle seat in the high balcony sat Hauss. Behind him sat Joshua. While Te Kanawa sang “Glitter and Be Gay,” Joshua—

Joshua called his father and told him of the vision.

“This,” his father said over the telephone, “is a true vision.”

“So?”

“Fulfill God’s will. Go to Los Angeles.”

There must be another way, Joshua knew. There must be. What kind of God would demand a blood sacrifice? An Old Testament God! The same God he had turned from when he was old enough to think for himself: why would a God evolve, change when people changed? The God of Vengeance, the God of Wrath.

There must be a way to change this Hauss, to talk to him, to change his mind, to change his life. “There must be,” he told his father.

“There is no other way. You do it God’s way, or the vision comes true. I know! Don’t you think I tried to kill the little Austrian after 1933? After Czechoslovakia? After Kristallnacht? I know.”

“I can wait,” Joshua protested, knowing that September was too close to allow him.

“You cannot wait. You have been given the place. This man might be minutes away from his discovery, from publishing something which somebody else could use. Maybe he figures it out while listening to this woman sing.” There was no arguing with his father’s remorseless logic.

“Thou shalt not kill,” Joshua muttered wanly. A feeble argument.

“Remember Saul and what happened when he disobeyed the Lord.” Another Biblical reference. Surely his father could quote more and more of them, burying Joshua’s sickly objections. The Old Testament God did not relish being crossed. The Old Testament God. Magnified and Sanctified be the Great Name. Amen! Magnified and Exalted. Even the Arabs said that Allah was Merciful. A strange sort of mercy.

Knowing the outcome, Joshua made his plans to go to Los Angeles.

Harlow stood at the front door stamping his feet in a three-year-old’s anger. He was whining, “Don’t go.” Socorro stood behind him with her hands on his tiny shoulders. It was, Joshua knew, Socorro using the boy to express her own feelings. She did not want Joshua to go. Joshua did not want to go. She did not understand and had told him as much. How could she understand what Joshua himself could not understand? I’m going to do the bidding of a God that doesn’t exist. I’m going to murder someone I’ve never met. No, he could not explain matters to her. It was better to say nothing. So he had told her nothing of his plans. He withdrew the money from the savings account—the money they had saved for a trip to Lake Tahoe.

Love went only so far. He had always thought that in a conflict between love and duty, he would choose love. Every time. But this was different.

As for Harlow, there was no point in trying to reason with him. He kissed the boy first, Socorro second, and left. Kevin waved from the front yard and went back to spraying the garden hose on the driveway once Joshua was in the car.

Joshua arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of the third. His travel agent had arranged for the flight, the hotel, but not for the concert ticket. He wanted no record of that. He took a cab to Music Center, bought a ticket at the box office, pointing out the seat he wanted on the chart, paying cash, and stopped on the way back at a hardware store and bought twenty feet of 20 mil wire. He was surprised when he figured out how expensive the concert ticket was. Dame Kiri received as much as many rock stars. The wire was cheap.

In the Times he read about the Symposium on Human Genetics at U.C.L.A. This, he figured, was why Hauss was in the country. In the schedule he noted that a Theodor Alban Hauss was to give a talk in the morning. Open to the public.

The lecture hall was small compared to some he had seen in Princeton: Biology 101 had a seating capacity of over 200. This one would hold half that number. And only about half the seats were filled when Theodor Alban Hauss made his way to the lectern. Outside the door, in the little display box was a notice of the lecture. It was called, “Gene 14, Chromosomes 9 and 11—Breaking the Code.” The audience was mostly students with a few professors in the back. Joshua sat in the back.

When Hauss spoke it was in a heavily accented English.

Joshua didn’t understand what he was talking about, numbers and flags and computer outputs, references to works he’d never heard about. It was Greek to him with a German accent. Joshua did not stay to the end. He left with a pair of professors. One of them said, “Sounds like the same eugenics cant from the 30s.”