In Arms We Trust

Part Four of Five

by Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

The cold.

So cold.

The snow dried and gritted in graupels. The air was tight and thick, and each breath he sucked scoured his throat like razor shards of ice. The hairs in his nostrils had crystallized and his white bushy beard encrusted forming a niveous cornice that jutted from the gnarled, broad face.

The beeper, aloof to his efforts, sounded again.

"All right, all right," he gruffed, "hold your horses."

He removed the gloves upon entering the greenhouse and adjusted the thermostat and the humidifier. There was plenty of energy converted by the photoelectric cells to charge a couple dozen wet batteries and keep the vivarium running plus the cabin through the long Yukon nights. He got enough vegetables and fruit growing to provide for and balance an otherwise fish diet.

Alaska claimed to be as isolated as a place can be, not considering the Poles and deserts.

Distracting city throngs, "Bah!" And those academia coops called universities. People pressed together, smelling and breathing each other's closeness -- vulgar, intrusive, gagging! He had to suffer through it all so many times, the lectures in stuffy classrooms, the symposiums, deliberations and ceremonies. What an accolade of pomposity and touching.

Besides, his work did not require the amenities of collectivism. On the contrary, noise and confusion only short-circuited his otherwise orderly synapses. It distracted from the job at hand: to get the hell out and colonize planets!..

Still, even at this distant and obscure cranny, there were those that passed by, dropped in uninvited and pestered him with every nature of slight sliver and petty anxiety. Maybe Tibet -- yes Lhasa -- would tender for what he looked. But too high to breath. And then there was the beeper. "There's no getting away from that little runt."

He shut the door of his cabin and threw two of the logs he brought with him into the waning amber-burgundy spews of the fireplace. After shifting the ash he settled next to the radio-phone and injected the thumb-size beeper into the inset.

"David Chickbrow please ... what? ... yes, yes, the Chief."

Saddle tramp, he glowered at the machine. Don't give a hoot if he's chief or warrior. Redman, chinaman, blackman -- as long as they all keep away.

Professor Aristides Krell, stocky-limbed, toyed with his curved stem birch pipe. He might have been a wrestler but for a pronounced limp and a pair of runny ash eyes. It was late noon and the summer sun blazed on through the glass panes, searing his vision white.

Squat and Neanderthal-looking, in his middle sixties, Krell was the recipient of a couple Nobel Prizes.

One Nobel boasted that the brusque physiognomy had a slight but determining edge over Einstein and Hawking involving the association, but not the unification, of several theories.

While they had endeavored at snail-pace, restricted by the implements of customary science, he bounded steps beyond utilizing his own unorthodox theorems and radical observation procedures.

His paradigm did not go unrewarded, for he had, intentionally or not, unensconced a locality in the Cosmos where miracles abide: the place where electrons go to when they disappear; the venue from where virtual particles pop into conventional space-time; that vicinity of Creation which instantaneously informs a chronon, across the fringe, that its mate has not changed 'flavor' or the quality of its inertness.

Fun-space he called it, because it produced funny outcomes.

The second Nobel came for implementing his observations.

Project SEPTOR was Dr. Krell' brainchild. He fostered and reared it from concept to its much awaited send-off, pending the completion of Lovesigh's giant toroid gate, two hundred miles above the Earth, that emulated the fringe in miniature. He was expressly anxious; bent on exploring for colonizable worlds.

Other than an ochlophobic predisposition, Dr. Krell was partial to a rumor that spread around contending that Earth was tapped dry and would soon cease to subsist and harbor first, the human race, then, progressively, all of life.

"Barbarians."

In two centuries, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the consummation it afflicted, the oil wells were running dry, the coal mines scraped clean, and the few remaining tiny rain forests were guarded round the clock to keep axe-toters and poachers out.

"Philistines."

If that wasn't presage enough, over the past fifty years the world ocean level had crept up two meters. The Dutch and the Italians were being crowded in, and the first to scream. But it was quickly and balmy hushed by other floods consisting of billions in ECU and dollar relief. For it would have been easier to arrest an avalanche than to curtail the impetus of the snow-balling Titan called 'progress'.

"Savages."

No matter. The sequestered man that was Dr. Krell in one of his more eloquent and remarkable poetic moods was noted for his flippant but colorful flair, "Spin me into a fun-beam and I shall fetch thee today the Earths of tomorrow."

He expelled a blue puff of smoke from his polished pipe. "Yea, I'll hold." Caller verification took a while.

"Silly rules. Made for mobs," he mumbled, blowing smoke, copiously.

***

"You're dogmatic, confound you. Too darn bogged down with succotash procedures to abandon them," Lovesigh blurted out at the blinking wall of his den.

"Well, Penelope Lovesigh, now I'm talking to a machine as well. Death maketh fools of us all ... or whatever."

He anguished.

"This gag of a body'll never have the time to get a matrix out. No chance."

He jiggled his head diminutively.

"Too many variables. Too many extraneous roots. Too much trial and error. A hundred years is not to be enough. Ah, but if that machine could only grasp the train of thought, not fluster itself with the maverick vortices -- it'll boil down to a matter of days."

His eyes burned blue.

"The Omega Point at man's beck-and-call. You, dearest woman, star of my stars, that much nearer. If I ... I could simply reach the senile automaton."

He drew away from the console exhausted, angry and disappointed.

He returned to the anarchy of his writing desk and confronted one of the two tall windows behind it.

Dusk infiltrated a pink-maroon softness into his study. Above the tall hedge at the lawn's edge the first stars of night emerged, sparkling their presence as though reassuring him that they were there for him to reach. They enticed and beckoned him to approach, ascend to them and broach their mysteries, and promised in return to become his; they, as well as the kingdom they reigned over.

Is there more here than what meets the eye? he asked, silently. If there is only a way to know 'You shall be as gods' is not all that irrevocable with death.

His face now shone like a candle in the dark.

For a smidgen of a while there was the lift of reliance that hope brings and the assurance that, his mind -- soul, if you must -- lived on, freed now of its malaise body, and worked on, even in some uncharted niche of the Cosmos, to bear his search to fulfillment.

Soon, Dr. Tipler, I shall know if your Physics of Immortality have the probable grits you claim, he thought, bringing to mind the old volume he had once read and never forgotten.

"Ah, but let's not talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," he protested out loud in Shakespearean verse and fashion, "they're ruminations of the terminally destitute."

He wasn't that far gone -- yet. Weak he was. But by conserving strength he might gain months. A year even.

Light from the flickering computer screen exposed a taunted half-smile.

Who're you kidding? it appeared to say.

Outside the window was pitch darkness. From above, a quadrant of star-flecked sky fell upon the now playing eyes. The combination of it, of the 'Christmas tree', and of the monitor's queer iridescence leaped and hopped as the look on Dr. Lovesigh conceded to calm control, then into a curious potpourri of brooding and reveling.

Albeit, bit-by-bit, a puckish grin displaced it. Penelope, who had known well the good professor, would have said that he was chasing the wisp of a tachyon again, a vestigial trace a flash of thought had left behind.

***

Amanda did not go to the doctor as Mr. Alexiou had suggested. She had a rendezvous that day, but with all that took place she almost forgot about it. So many things suddenly began happening in her life. She had never expected to see Frank again, especially here of all places. Another country, another continent. She could not believe it still. Yet, the circumstances made it so likely.

She boarded bus 208 that headed for down town Athens. There she would have to take the trolley from Panepistimiou Street ride it to Omonia Square and down to Larisis Railway Station.

Mark, too, was a part of the bizarre circumstances that had befallen in this previously quiet corner of he globe. The psychology department of Yale did not want to miss out on the Athens phenomenon, and was sending her brother who was assistant to the Head.

It would be comforting to see him, she mused. Apart so many years. They wrote, but to have him here ...

A feeling of warmth settled in her stomach. Such a timid soul was he, the way she remembered him. Quiet, soft spoken, his eyes round, vulnerable and busily aware of everything. How could there be so much difference between brothers -- twin brothers.

Alex on the other hand was the positive, the surer of the two. Alex did not allow feeling or sentiment to interfere with accomplishment. Where Mark hesitated, Alex took over with an impetus unhindered by insecurities or phobias. Alex was the builder, the mason; Mark was the explorer of frontiers, the prober. Both worshipped Amanda. Her refined spirit and fingers filled a part of them with aesthetic wonderment; a beauty attained possible only through the sensitivity of a devoted musician. She in turn saw this in their eyes and was ever grateful that the three of them touched on such fertile grounds.

Alex's letter had arrived three weeks before Mark's. Alex's department at MIT was sending several observers too. He had written:

" ... I'm the delegate of the School of Engineering. You can't imagine the hassle stirred up here. Never thought the old country had anything but old marble and history. Whatever more it's got, is causing a hell of an attraction.

I'll see you, Mark too, a month from now.

Love,

Alex

PS The bunch of us decided to sail there. I'll get in touch."

As the bus headed for the center of Athens the effects of the previous day's occurrence were loudly visible. Garbage and overspilled sewage covered the streets. Before her were scattered broken and shattered objects. Unsecured flowerpots and furniture that must have dropped from balconies and terraces strewed the sidewalks with shards. Broken glass and pieces of plaster littered the roadsides. Cracked showcase windows and sooted shop fronts gaped gritted and blackened by electrical fires.

She could not separate the ruble from the products. All along the bus route thronged pools of bustling, buzzing people, loitering around and appraising the damages. Amanda caught site of fists brandishing in air, loud yells and cries, saw heads shaking in hopelessness and desperation, weariness in faces and doubt, and fear in the eyes. She saw dark red, almost black, patches that stained the asphalt and pavements. Hulking remains from automobile collisions, grease and oil splotches littered traffic lanes. Broad, black, tread marks covered the roads and the lingering stench of gasoline and burnt rubber singed her nostrils and stung her throat.

When they entered the downtown area city traffic was almost at a standstill. Smashed wrecks of cars, overturned buses, and abandoned yellow taxi cabs cluttered the sidewalks and large portions of the avenues. A narrow lane had been cleared by the omnipresent road-aid ELPA vehicles and tractor scoops for public transportation circuits. Large, freshly painted posters and makeshift traffic signs cautioned pedestrians and prohibited drivers from entering this area.

"Oh, God," Amanda whispered, looking over the charred remains of an automobile. She took out a tissue and covered her nose. The stench from the burnt wreck stabbed at her nostrils. It was only when they were right next to it that she glimpsed at the remains of what must have been the driver and his three passengers. A canvas was quickly pulled just then over the relics.

The bus inched its way, worming behind other public vehicles into the city's heart. She watched as tow trucks used all available side streets to dump damaged and abandoned cars. Cranes with giant winches lifted all that could not be dragged or pushed out of the main arteries. Shouts and yells were being drowned out by clangs and screeches of twisting metal, by roaring, whining and pealing of diesel engines at their forte. The raucous plexxed into a clamor of disjointed sounds that came from everywhere. Officers of the law were crowded in by hand waving civilians pointing to unrecognizable heaps of glass and fenders. Many had an arm or a leg hanging in a cast and were being assisted by others while some managed on their own, propped up by walking sticks and crutches. Somewhere amidst the klaxons and the screams Amanda sought escape. A moment of peace from the war that waged around her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Frank's words came back to her then. They had helped, Father Lukas and he, clean up what they could inside her apartment. She had felt her strength slowly return after her faint, and an appetite she had not had in a long long while. When the housekeeping was over Frank and she had gone into the kitchen where a pot of stew, bread, salad and plates with utensils awaited on the table.

"You must be starving," the priest commented as he served a portion of the squid stew in her plate. "Besides that ... I'm fishing for complements. If you know what I mean."

"Is there something you're not involved in, Father Lukas?" Frank asked as he pulled the chair back for Amanda.

The other nodded, "I try to keep away from politics, business, and fundamentalism, Mr. Patroni." He looked at the others as they had their first taste of his cooking.

Amanda was the first to comment, "This is good!"

"Sure is," Frank seconded. "Who was it for?"

"For someone in need," Father Lukas said, and looked down on his own plate.

"And we're eating it?" Amanda put her spoon down. "Father, this isn't right."

"Ow hush ... and eat up now. Here, take some of this fresh bread." He broke two pieces off the crusty loaf and passed them to Frank and her. "One's need is as good as another's. Besides, there's plenty more in the kettle." He filled their glasses with wine.

"Good thing it had a tight lid," said Frank, lapping up the wine sauce.

The three ate and spoke. Tidbits of information were exchanged about their being in the country and the unexpected happenings that bring friends and strangers together.

"Is it a sin, Father, not to place faith in love?" Amanda asked when each finished telling their story. She turned to Frank, "Will I be forgiven?"

"What counts is your motives," Father Lukas said. "If they were true and unselfish. You had not been mature enough then to realize how infinitely deep another's love can be." He turned to Frank, "It's a sin only when we do not want to forgive."

Frank clasped Amanda's hand in his. "What crazy notion made you run away that day?"

***

While Amanda rode the bus to Larisis RR Station that morning, thinking over the previous afternoon's events at her apartment, a rendezvous took place at Father Lukas's place of residence.

The day before, Father Lukas had reassured Amanda that to the best of his knowledge she did not suffer from epilepsy. He had advised rest for the remainder of the day and to seriously consider Mr. Alexiou's counsel and see the doctor.

He had offered Frank a ride in the rented Fiat.

"I'm a good newspaper man," Frank said, taking in the commotion and confusion besetting the swarmed streets, "because I can smell a good story before my peers."

He recoiled. Hell had befallen on the city.

"Right now that smell is bustin' my olfactories, Father Lukas -- "

"Why don't you start, Mr. Patroni." The clergyman took a deep breath and gripped the wheel tightly enough to turn his knuckles bone white. "Start by telling me about an anguished human being called Amanda Rhodes."

Hastily, he took out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth. "Peculiar details, curious and odd aspects of her early life. Anything inappropriate, out of the ordinary." He took a second breath, "Then you'll get your story, Mr. Patroni. All of it."

The other's force of articulation took Frank Patroni like a back-handed hack. He blinked and silently reckoned. The man of the cloth could sure change -- and quick -- into a man of hard bargains, he thought. Something had been pecking the back of his brain since he first saw the priest. Something too familiar perhaps to be true or obvious. He didn't know what ... and yet there was a manner different about this priest.

But the rumination did not last and dissipated irresolutely. Meanwhile the Italian and Greek temperament in him began to simmer just bellow the surface. How dare he associate Amanda to a second-rate newspaper story? he queried dumbly.

"She's been ill." Frank slurred words now. "Not anguish, Father, she's probably been through Inferno and Purgatory. All by herself." He folded his arms. "You've got just as good hearing as I, and you heard all she wanted to say."

"Look around you, Frank ... I'll wait."

Frank did not need to.

"What other disaster awaits? Can you forecast it?"

"What do you mean? Nobody can."

"Perhaps not Amanda Rhodes, but just maybe you and I can." The priest turned the car into a narrow, empty side-street and proceeded to their destination. His tone now was recognizable, more suited to the holy cloth he wore.

"I grew up in Brooklyn ghettos. At times that gets the better of me. When I let you off at the Caravel I'm going to the Cathedral to perform holiday Mass as guest clergy. A Christmas Mass, Frank, celebrating the Birth of Jesus, a Mass of hope and rejoicing. Can you do it, Frank? Rejoice amidst a cemetery?"

The previously hard eyes of the priest now looked ahead through the car's windshield, their rims red.

"Damnation, man, do I have to say more!"

The loud expulsion of the words did not startle Frank. It merely made him understand that that which he feared was no longer his sole knowledge and concern. This man somehow knew. And it pained him: The Mass, Amanda, death all over ... the story ... you thought I was there for a story? he asked almost out loud.

Regrouping his thoughts he tried once more not to let on to all that he knew about the woman he loved. Not unless he was adamantly sure that it was ... it was so, and if true, that no harm would come to her. Especially exposure. He was so close to trusting the man next to him. Morally he did trust him, but he sensed that this man was more than just one lamb a bit closer to Him. Not just any cleric was invited to do Mass at the city's Cathedral where the President, Prime Minister, and the Ministers would be attending. His being at Amanda's was no simple coincidence.

But damn, who is he?

There was a way to finding out. He used it seldom and only in extreme necessity, but got what he was after when he did. The austere Catholic upbringing wrought havoc inside him. This was a person of the Church! it tolled. You cannot invade his mind without invading God, Himself! He had infinitesimal time to ponder and solve a philosophy millennia could not cope with. But was not his own gift of entering into another's mind a gift bestowed upon him by the very God he was to invade? Wasn't Amanda's own inherent gift, as all God-given, entitled to protection and privacy? But how can anything so sacred be twisted into so much death and destruction?

"Amanda cannot be doing this," his voice called out before he could check it. He fell back on the seat, perspiration drops flinging on his suit from his shaking head. It was too late to retract his declaration. His betrayal.

Tension slowly receded; only empty resignation remained. His previously caricatured features gave way to a bland, expressionless attony. A pain not dissimilar to the other's brimmed the lost-like gaze. And from the night inside him a galaxy of enlightenment zoomed upon his conscious and weary conscience, all at once.

"The Nobels for Physics and Peace ... " Frank monologued as though whispering an awesome secret. Then a downpour of information about Father Lukas T. Mett -- burst nova like in his brain.

The first person in history to simultaneously receive two of the highest honors recognized by civilization. The first to dispute and disprove Einstein's support of a Unified Field Theory. A year later to synthesize, prove, and apply his own radical discoveries in The Discrete Field Theory. Offshoots from Krell's Theory, the other two-time winner. But Dr. Lukas's discoveries had been of no less importance. Contrary to common knowledge, the humble priest before him was the one who had hypothesized the existence of the fringe, and not Lovesigh -- the third great brain of the triad. Lovesigh, however, had mathematically proven the fringe's existence and its possible emulation. The priests mental vaults had no peers, other than the lone Krell and the dying Lovesigh. Also, Dr. Lukas's had been the dramatic, yet successful results of the incredulous thought experiments on the counter-entropic propensity of the Universe and the launching of NASA into the study and construction of the -- his -- MA(Modified Alpha).

Father Lukas T. Mettropoulos the first in history to acquire not less than ten doctorates. Whose IQ triggered chaos in world psychology, and whose capacity of intelligence could only be measured by an intelligence test he, himself, had conceived and devised ... The human wonder whose power of intuition was compatible to 'a hundred prodigies with a life span no less than their number'. A quote from his very own conservative newspaper.

"I'd get lost in there ... " he said, more to himself, in a normal voice. A light laughter of relief washed over him like fresh clean water. "I'd never get out, Father Lukas."

The man driving glanced at him, this time serenely. "What do you say to just plain simple Lukas, Frank?"

"' ... simple, plain ... ?'" The laughter reached a crescendo.

The priest did not seem annoyed. On the contrary, a birth of a smile gave hint on his lips.

"'Genius," the other tried phrasing between the attacks of tension-releasing laughter, "is the ability to take infinite pains with simple details, but genius is not a simple, plain detail.' Have you ever heard of that, Lukas?"

"No," the other replied shaking his curly combage, "the one I heard goes, 'Genius is 99 percent perspiration and only one percent inspiration'"

The priest pulled aside and stopped the car. They both laughed. They would take turns reciting maxims, adages and anecdotes, and together -- for no apparent reason -- burst into childish, much needed and cathartic laughter. When their jaws began hurting and their sight was blurring by tears they returned to reality. This time, both, more rational and balanced.

"We have a lot to talk about, you and I," Frank said. The other leaned forward and put his elbows on the steering wheel, he then prodded his head on his hands.

"Yes. At my place. Over a simmering, spicy lamb casserole with leeks, and a bottle of Youmenissa Rouge. How did you know where to find her, Frank?"

"Funny," the other said passing his hand through his hair, "I was about to ask you the same thing."

Their eyes met and searched.

"It's a long story," the priest said.

"Yea. So is mine."

***

While Father Lukas, Frank, Amanda and Alex searched in their own fashion for explanations or inklings thereof, Mark Rhodes too was not spared.

Although the dreams did not come as often as before, the ones he now had were much more incredible, awesome and disturbing. Now, though, he could analyze them. Using the power of scientific deontology and psychological methodology he could probe into areas of his mind he could never previously approach. Guilt was not the source of the gruesome dreams. He had managed to convince himself, to the extent possible, that the tragic accident was not brought about by his own conscious efforts alone. What controlled his dreams and subconscious was what manifested the real-as-life illusion that fateful day on the road.

After years of self study, he concluded that a part of him was not quite his 'own'. A portion of him was 'foreign', unpenetratable to the psychoanalysis procedures and techniques he knew. That he was familiar with. This side of him was impervious to the laws of the psyche.

To be awarded his degree it was mandatory to undergo several analyses sessions.

A senior staff member was to coordinate the routine. All went well till the third session concluded.

"Your subconscious has a hell of an imagination," Dr. Jeffrey Oscar Benett had said, clearly at some loss.

"I don't know if I should take that as a complement," Mark said.

"Well, it's not unusual to dig up old relics when under hypnosis," Dr. Benett continued. "And it's not impossible to discover another deeply buried person somewhere in the chaos called unconscious. But to conceive and concoct a 'Galactic civilization' -- well, let's just say, its an original angle. Other than that, nothing's seriously wrong with your sanity.

Mark was afraid more would have surfaced after Dr. Benett got through with him. But apparently hypnosis could not penetrate deep enough. His secret was still intact. Nevertheless, Dr. Benett's restful attitude on accepting such farfetched fantasies with a typical aloof professionalism was what labeled the man staunchly functional. Jeff O. Benett was not one to be taken back or shocked easily. His thirty years endeavors in psychology had brought him an unparalleled reputation as the tops in his field.

"My only comment," he said returning behind his mahogany desk, "is, put it to use."

"I don't follow," Mark said.

"Well, putting it simply, you'd thrive in riches if you went into the writing of sociological science fiction."

He broke into polite laughter.

"Oh, Mark. You ought to have heard yourself. Not even an Assimov, a Heinlein or a Clarke, the great masters of the art themselves, could have spun a tale similar to yours -- and so subtly believable."

Dr. Benett had looked at the young Mark and seeing the concern written on his face he sobered a bit.

"Some of us are born scientists, some doctors, others are poets by birth, or clergy; you -- you have worlds, stars, a galaxy inside your head. So much detail is there that it veered me a little off course. Instead of making objective notes on the job at hand, I was drawn into your 'exposition', or call it narrative, like a fly to sugar. Your alter ego, Mark, is nothing less than fascinating. You've even prophesied in this trance. In the two previous ones you merely described the setting, knitted the galactic background; in this last one, you've placed Earth into it and its, more or less, predestined future. A future of place in a hypothetical galactic community."

Mark had listened attentively to Dr. Benett's revelations. Before, his worries had evolved on not being discovered as a person who made things appear out of thin air. Now, he was being told that inside his brain he was toying with part of Creation -- nothing less than a galaxy at that.

It was not until Dr. Benett's enlightenment that morning that Mark recalled the old dreams. Remembered them more clearly than any other time. Beyond that persistent image of a vein-riddled polyhedron-polygon, so strikingly hauntingly real, there surged a huge complex network of bright points, glowing clouds and immense black reaches. Stretches of immeasurable distances linked together only by myriads of globes, blue pulsing planets, and ... and an astronomical number of people, people he recognized, who were not that much different from himself.

"Here are the tapes of the sessions." Dr. Bennet handed them to him at their last meeting. "They may be more useful to you than to me. Might even help you write that sci-fi book. When you listen to them you'll see more clearly what I mean."

And that was the end.

Mark listened to them once. He saw where the dreams originated, and was satisfied. He had been grateful too, that they had been only a by-product of an overactive imagination. Dr. Benett may have discovered a galactic civilization aestivating inside him, but he got not an inkling even of a suspicion that he, Mark Rhodes, was capable of projecting into reality life-like mental illusions.

Were these, too, part of his vigorous imagination? He had asked then.

Today, years later, he knew they were not. And it was this that altered his stand. Was there some connection between the information on the tapes and this unworldly thing that had befallen on him? He as yet could not associate the two, only speculate and be aware of a presence. So overpowering was this feeling of this awesome presence that he repulsed it with all the strength and courage he could pluck up. He simply could not bare subjugation to the extent its suggestion dictated. He did not accept this invisible but solidly inferring presence as a real force that ruled over him. On the other hand he was bound to it through the 'miracles' coming out of him. The latest being the event on the train.

Up to then he could only make things seem real, not be real. But now he could. He could materialize solidly the illusions he projected. He could give them texture and substance, weight and mass.

Flavor.

Never was this possible before.

The apple that came into being out of nowhere was the first small demonstration. Yet compared to what he attempted next, it resembled a third rate magician's trick.

Later that evening, when he had been alone again in the train compartment, he tried once more.

The life size silhouette displaced space in a mater of only few minutes. It did not merely resemble the subject, but in fact was, to the minutest detail -- the slightest nascent wrinkle, furrow and crease -- the person Mark had in mind. This was the focus of the sum of all his efforts.

The spinning effect came first.

A dizzying, twirling of space that made him shy back. The compartment's lights had blinked. Then, the nothingness before him began to accumulate corporeality and shape, take on a less translucent form. A tall human shape. The air had dehydrated in one terse whoosh! It became electrically and conducively desert dry; and he could feel the hairs on his body responding by standing and crackling into the ionized environment. As energy from the surroundings transformed into atoms, then molecules, the ghastly figure, only a feet or two from him, drew on to itself more substance. Like a hugely powerful magnet it sucked into it all energy availed to it.

Definitions upon its body and face took on recognizable features. Toes, fingers, a naval, ears, nose, eyes, mouth, testicles could now be distinguished. The eyes were closed the mouth open in a dumb scream. A caricature of helplessness and agony carved intense lines of rare anguish upon the forehead and the sides of the tightly shut eyes. If it breathed, it seemed it would have wailed in a heart-ripping bellow of torment and woe. Mark shuddered. If it had air in its lungs it would have expelled an ear-shattering cry of pain. But it did not. It was un-alive yet.

And Mark did not dare.

Immediately, he reversed the process.

The being once again had began to spin like a top. Once more there was a dense flow of energy, cool humid energy this time radiating to the enclosing space. Soon there was nothing left in its place but ripples in the air, and these died off fading into normality and evanescence.

Mark remembered having sat afterwards, having had a great craving for ... for salt. He was dripping and hyperventilating. He was tired, very tired: his body ached as well as his spirit. He had attempted to do something beyond him, that his very own soul rebelled against. He tried to bring someone from the place no one is supposed to return. He wanted his father to return. But he could not say why, he did not know why. Only that the other may not have wanted it.

He looked at the others as they gathered near the dining car's broad windows to watch the Athenian suburbs as they passed through them. He wondered, for only a short minute, what they would have said and done if they knew.

***

Larisis Railroad Station, Spata Airport, Piraeus Harbor and all the transcontinental omni-bus depots buzzed like extraordinary beehives.

The column of entrees into the country, specifically into the capital, that day, was a phenomenon in itself. Never before, although accustomed to large tourist inflows, had the Ministry of Tourism felt such colossal impact and personnel insufficiency within its gears.

The earthquake occurrence, however, did not come as the VAN (the mobile earthquake prognosis station) specialists had forecast. It had come a day earlier, and that which greeted the masses was a state of chaos and calamity.

To restore order strict laws were put into effect and enforced. People were asked to stay off the streets and the police kept a vigil eye on crime suspects so as to reduce the crimes anarchy spawns. An inflexible early curfew was imposed on the six million residents of Athens and its suburbs. It was impossible to include the fresh arrivals. Accommodations and facilities were depleted. The Olympics and the associated last months' preparations were attracting heavy traffic. Hordes of consultants and specialists were entering the country.

Rooms and private homes, even bed space had become drastically insufficient. Toilet and washing areas were kept in constant use. Portable units were being supplied on a round the clock basis by army troops to major spots of population concentrations. Military supplies and rations soon became imperative and were protocolled by the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of The Interior.

As emergency sessions of all the Ministries [including my own Ministry of Foreign Affairs] were being ordered by the Prime Minister, now acting chief of the chief of staffs, a miniature model of the International Board of Science, Engineering and Humanities (IBSEH) of select academians, scholars and top field representatives from broad and specialized endeavors gathered two floors above in the Parliament Building at Constitution (Syntagma) Square. A composite of circuitry was expediently hooked up to the building's telephone network, doubling the communications capability. Several army helicopters were being unloaded by a Signal Corps battalion full of information-processing equipment and other complicated computer accouterments. Busily, electronic experts connected cables, checking mutual equipment compatibility and interfaces.

Seconds later ten truckfuls of green berets climbed on the sidewalk and came to a screeching halt. The rangers emptied out speedily and orderly and took sentry duty at tactful posts around the olden, sand-colored, imposing building.

Twenty-five clicks southwest one could see floodlights lighting twenty square kilometers of grounds as bright as day. West and East terminals were almost inaccessible.

Next to the bustling civilian airport, landways were being cleared and lighted to accommodate the huge UN air transports that approached. The holo cubes and flat screens of the air control tower were under constant scrutiny. The blips had never before been so numerous and densely pact. Safety distances between aircraft were compelled to a minimum as more crowded into the holos and CRT screens. The call on the airport's mainframe computer had never approached such demanding limits before. A pearly necklace in the sky of helicopters had become the prime bridge of commuting high level officials, the sick and the wounded to and fro the airport.

Back in the city, lack of hospital space materialized almost at once. Corridors and halls, cleaning, waiting and store rooms, foyer areas and offices were utilized, filled with beds and bunks. Floor surface was used when nothing else availed itself. Nurses, doctors, priests, relatives, friends and families of the patients frantically pushed their way through the populous to their destinations. Tempers fired, nerves drained, and emotions exploded as the situation asphyxiated any form of organized and due process. Moneys exchanged hands, promises whispered into ears, and beseachments whaled and echoed everywhere.

School playgrounds and yards had as well become packed with foreigners. Classrooms were utilized and impromptu kitchens set up. From surrounding houses and apartments blared radio and television announcers. Directives, assistance, and guidance were continually given over the mass media in Hellenic, English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.

Churches had been conscripted. The faithful from all over the world congregated into these holy institutions of old Orthodoxy, (a plethora of faithful who had spent their last cent, onepense, or ruple to come and be present at the place where the 'miracle' and the Games of Peace had come from) and where Mass ceremonies were in process, healing spiritual damage and restoring faith. But instead of seeing a miracle they were confronting Nemesis. The vengeance of a tired and abused Earth. An Earth that appeared to them to be giving in, caving in from the overbearing excesses of mistreatment, defilement and molestation by her denizens.

It was the maimed and the crippled who suffered intolerably. For they had come from the ends of the Earth in the hope of visiting the home of the 'holy phenomenon'. Others with special needs had arrived to eye witness and asses beforehand the locale of their participation -- the venue of the handicapped division of the Olympiads -- before the crowds the Games' commencement would draw that August. These physically impaired could do very little without assistance. They were the most vulnerable of the lot. But it seemed nature no longer cared.

***

[From the Starseed archives and spy satellite detections, analyses, evaluations and confirmation P.P.]

Like the others, it had been when the half-mad monk had stumbled upon the well-hidden sanctuary within the Holy Mountain thirty years before, that Barbara Rand had first felt the clutching rush: an awesome flood of change that had overtaken then a little baby girl in Arkansas ...

Thirty years had passed since the culprit and lone monk had unknowingly become the medium to activate a station of awesome energy and multi-faceted power.

A complex selection process had then been impelled into motion. It set a sequence of preliminary occurrences into low threshold activity, on stand by, upon another mountain to the west.

But, it was yet too soon to fully power up that mountain's plateau.

Thirty years ago Starseed, below and deep within the Mountain of the Monasteries, using a force unfamiliar to humankind, had begun to rekindle. A sector of its energies, controlling a finely-tuned selection process, had used the man-made satellites circling Earth, and the moon itself, as reflectors to scan life once more upon Earth, at its present state. It took seven hours to collate and classify all living entities comprising the flora and fauna of the planet. It stored this volume of information in several data banks located behind what resembled a ten-story diamond rhomboid with six vertices -- plus an isolated adjoining vertex. A regular hexahedron -- and part of another, a single hedron.

Once the compilation ended, seven transparent conduits filled with needle-thin fibers of ruby-red plasma conductors sprouted from the vertices' tips. Quickly and with acute precision the conduits first extended dendrites to other polygons below them, then the fibers interweaved into a fine plexus of energy-cunducting arteries and veins, linking each to all the others.

The network of the heptite unit was complete. Any break in the chain or the linked 'destinations' would forfeit its functionality until all seven again partook as mutual parts of one plurality. Of Starseed.

The flexible ducts that were the conduits burgeoned tributaries. These spread and searched out more of their interfacing points, and upon locating them coupled with a cubic kilometer of annex machinery supporting the vertices' maintenance, self-repair routines, and the heavily insulated plasma power converters. An ark-shaped craft, that had traveled forty thousand light-years across the Galaxy to convey Starseed's parts, and its building as well, lay dwarfed beside its construct. A thick ancient coat of grit, ash and fallen rubble covered most of this city of ponderous geometric casts, forms and shapes of every contour variation imaginable.

And the alien machine jolted from its long sleep; its drawn-out untiring suspended pause. It commence to thrum, pulse and throb once more.

Through this fine mesh of opaqueness, the edges of the deep blood-red of the ten-story rhomboid, and the plasma of its remaining plaque side -- [or hedron, as it refers to itself] -- could be seen palpitating.

Below each of the seven hedrons emerged a subterranean vibration with an ever-slight "thump", "thump", "thump", a deeper than blood-red, a dark violet -- almost black-red -- irradiation of the region followed each thud. If one had the means to detect it, one would discern the sides themselves vibrating, each attuned to one of seven slightly different composite waive-forms.

Once, in the remote past, the rhomboids had been two, connected as one. They were to auto-neutralize after a pre-determined order of developments: after terrestrial civilization had passed from prehistory into history. When written records appeared, the civilizationizing machine, the Starseed, was to be destroyed by a self-terminating program. The overseers left nothing to chance. Ever.

The one hexahedron, however, and part of the other had survived.

A contained cold fusion thaw, capable of turning carbon steel to powdery ash and granite into molecular dust, was incredibly thwarted. One only hedron, an interface plaque-side of plasma, remained from the second rhomboid hexahedron. The single hedron lingered on along with the intact hexahedron. The other five hedrons/sides of this second hexahedron/rhomboid simply vanished into a disjointed time decay. A warp of time acceleration approaching light speed.

By some queer paradox -- perhaps by a mutation a gamma ray had triggered as it passed through a hypersensitive NAND or NOR node changing it to an AND or OR or both, prompted negative/positive feedback; or maybe the bombardment of alpha particles from the uranium vain which ran through the stratum directly below annulled/invalidated vital commands -- the surviving hexahedron, just before its detonation, generated an alternate space-time reference around the self-destruct charge, and, unavoidably clashing with the ingrained instructions of its twin, interrupted the thaw; itself and one sixth of its companion being the only intact members left, with the vertex of the companion incurring a hair-thin crack, merely a thin, but deep fracture on its plane of plaque.

The thin cranny, however, was a canyon to stray subatomic particles shooting about. They imbedded themselves in it, as well as the cavern's walls and ceiling, spouting fields that played electromagnetic havoc with the adjoining hexahedron and its core program. Beyond the chance scrambling of whatever was within a ten meter radius inside and beyond the cracked facet, the absence of an offsetting and whole second hexahedron activated a never-before-used, fail-safe, redundancy contingency. The machine of Starseed was given two routes to follow (with the 'STOP' command having been invalidated by the ensuing radiation from the cavern itself): One, continue last command till 'STOP' command negotiates next command. Two, initiative priority overrides till 'STOP' command negotiates next command.

I must proceed to alternate route OR wait for 'STOP' command.

It waited for four teraseconds (six teraseconds shorter than originally programmed).

I must negotiate initiative override priority.

So, what was left of Starseed went ahead to mold a recycle of prehistory. But this, within the context of a real history. For millennia after Starseed's reactivation deities of prehistory were juxtapositioned with a humanity that should have overcome their need.

As ages came and passed on and the rerun of the rhomboid’s programming once more neared its end, there were no auto-neutralizing directions to erase from Earth Starseed's furtive presence; remove it from an inquiring and ever-restless world that had already lagged -- was about to lose its just place -- in the scheme of things in the Galaxy.

As the end of this most recent cycle neared, and each hedron vertex blinked out into inactivity, the intact rhomboid in a last attempt to keep itself functioning concentrated on kindling to life just one vertex -- the flawed, sole hedron of what once had been its supplement neighbor -- thereby giving mankind one last deity.

Thirty-three years after, this final 'destination' expired his last breath prematurely -- a paradox to Starseed's longevity and indestructibility support directives as applied to its 'destinations'. Starseed, to countermand, gathered then all remaining energy in its possession and sent it as a burst of life to the corpse. The man in the prime of life stirred from his death tomb and rose. And he had thereafter journeyed far away to the East never to be seen again.

The crystalline rhomboid and the remaining facet of its companion dwindled then into latent inactivity. Their reserves had been exhausted. Starseed's resources were spent.

For the better part of two thousand years it merely existed, and waited: waited till the half crazed monk appeared and walked into its abode. A satchel full of gold, silver, platinum -- all heavy metals, all rich in pure energy-packed elements -- was heaved over his shoulder.

Weakly, with the trickle of energy that remained, Starseed probed through the sack hoisted over the monk's back. The rhomboid detected along with precious metals rare stones of unspoiled consistency and homogeneity. The burden over the monk's shoulder quickly lessened in weight as most of its bulk disappeared, sucked into and assimilated by the looming artificial organism before the glowering monk's eyes.

Regaining part of its strength, the hexahedron swiftly scanned what images the monk had in the foremost part of his brain. It was the reflections of an unrobed woman. Before the rhomboid could solidify the simulacrum completely into flesh an bone, the now delirious monk slowly backed away, staggering and babbling, out of the cavern. And as he did, Starseed glimpsed through the retreating monk's brain, and saw the abound of energy source it was surrounded by. A wealth of raw, unprocessed, but usable reservoir of resources, needed to reactivate it into other cycles; lay all about in the caverns. Instantly, several kilograms of precious metals vanished from one of the heaps.

Meanwhile, the on-looking monk stuttered, shrieked and ran, parroting prayers, into the depths of a nearby tunnel.

One by one the hexahedron's vertices lit up again as well as the one remaining from the second hexahedron, brighter than ever before, all radiating surges of refined potential to seven new 'destinations'. Little did it matter that one of these sides, the lone one with the hairline crack, periodically leaked unchecked.

At first this bleeding of energy was small. It caused no side affects to the 'destination'. But as the 'destination' grew up and her bodily functions modified during adolescence and into adulthood the irregularities brought about upon the body augmented the flaw in the single damaged vertex. The crack no longer trickled forth unchecked energy that harmlessly dissipated. When the vertex became bloated with excess force, its overflow found escape in erratic bursts of mind-blinding vortexes upon this one 'destination', Amanda Rhodes. The raw outflow force traveling on the composite wave to the 'destination', resulted in manifesting disorientation and uncoordination of the nervous system. The 'destination' could not interfere. The vertex itself was helpless with this periodic over-brimming of energy. The pressure for the single corrupt hedron/vertex found this crude, but least self-damaging mode of escape of force, an optimum outlet.

For thirty years, only one other vertex showed signs of marginal and intermittent activity. Dr. Lovesigh had first felt the grasping surge as a breathtaking charge of a change that had then taken hold of him.

He had been in Dr. Krell's class of Particle Cosmic Code at the time, when he gasped and let out a short yelp as this spell cast on him. He had wavered abruptly, become disoriented, nauseous, incoherent, extraordinary -- but hadn't known why. He had been in his twenties then, single and -- it had been electrifying. Magnificent this new thing he felt was; this gush of torrent in his veins. But as this 'destination' passed into middle age, the irregularities brought about upon the body by the commencement of aging manifested now, in addition to uncoordination of the nervous system, also cancers, chronic convulsions of the muscles and partial paralysis.

Compared, however, to the injured vertex of Amanda Rhodes, Dr. Lovesigh's side effects were immediately less drastic. With chronic revival injections of stamina by Starseed Dr. Lovesigh could survive till the final metamorphosis on the mountain. The other five vertices of the intact hexahedron processed their energies without abnormality. But the drain upon the hemorrhaging cracked sole vertex of Amanda Rhodes initiated, with the passing of time, an ever-increasing demand of drain from its source.

Over the years, the spells of outbursts became more violent and injurious because the expulsion of pant up energy slowly eroded the crack further. It was a form of energy man had not yet learned to harness -- even identify -- in its pure form because man's equations were not as yet complete. The most plentiful and potent source of energy was also the most abundant in the Universe: Gravitons. And their complement particles anti-gravitons.

Megatons of crude, gravity-neutralizing but, uprooting force began to issue forth now when the Amanda Rhodes 'destination' was in its weakest days of the month.

Although it could rebuild and repair all other of its parts, Starseed was not capable of mending this major defect of the ruptured lone hedron. So, this facet at intervals expelled unrestrained and progressively multi-fold floods of modulating gravity-opposing energy so as to lessen the burden of gravity upon its ailing and damaged self ... and its 'destination' since it was an indivisible extension of itself.

It was this, this separate but simultaneous occurrence of the phenomenon, on the Holy Mountain and in Athens, that had, in addition to all the others, drawn in swarms the faithful from every point of the globe. But the Mountain, as the first few that had ventured to it discovered, had trifle little accommodation, the barest of monastery space, and the vast majority of it was raw, unaccomodating and wild rocky forest. So, most, returned and stayed in the Capital city.

On the other hand, the six vertices of the whole hexahedron remained for the most part intact and undamaged.

Each of the seven 'destinations' tantamounted to a compound selective process by which an inert, but now prevailing gene, could be detected being present in their chromosomes.

As the program called for, the seven 'destinations' were given twenty-five years to mature and grow cognizant of the extend of their individual power. Each had been given this quarter of a century so the up to now passive but unique genome containing the extraterrestrial Olympion gene could manufacture and complete the molecular dendrites needed to access and predominate over the other twenty-three pairs of normal human chromosomes.

After this familiarization and development evolved to its full potential the crucial time would come when the 'destinations' would seek each other out, meet and be ready to occupy the lofty city on the mountain plateau.

And they would reign from atop the snow-crested ancient mountain once again. The time was almost upon them. The urge from their alter manifestation was already pricking from inside them. The subtle prods would soon modify into unendurable cravings. Obsessions that would at the end drive them up Mt. Olympus, as one sum and body, and rule from their true station. But only in unanimity, in the unanimity of seven attendants, in a one-to-one direct correspondence to their hedron. So, Starseed watched over them. Particularly the two with their inherent difficulties.

The atypical gene had been inborn from the original twelve 'destinations'. It was handed down through sixty generations of passive carriers to be activated upon command from the god-making machine of Starseed. The original twelve had been, in times of long-long passed, the counterparts to the primal twelve vertices of the two rhomboid hexahedrons comprising the full Starseed. The last previous 'destination', the Carpenter, had been discounted since no known offspring had come to being from him.

Now, the inheritor 'destinations' from twelve were reduced to seven since the time-displacement of the cold fusion-down took place. Through them the remaining rhomboid once more would regain control and full self awareness of its mission: To guide Homo Sapiens out of 'prehistory' by the intervention of a handful of intermediaries, otherwise known to humanity from Mythology as the Olympians.

Unlike the unique single 'destination' of the Carpenter, that had been put to death prematurely, Starseed had now the chance again to work with multiple 'destinations'. In its possession it had as well almost unlimited resources of power and would be able to keep operating for untold many full cycles.

An imperishable body and a three-thousand-year life-span awaited the seven 'destinations'. This was necessary, and in Starseed's programming, so as to gradually, and not abruptly, structure conditions to be used as stepping stones to civilizationizing. A civilization process brought about by parameters and a methodology that lagged behind the times by more than eight millennia. A form of civilizationizing would be used whose attributes would heavily weigh on man's primordial fears of the unknown and the supernatural ...

... Such unconscious forebodings and subconscious consternations overshadowed Barbara's own anxiety; a part of herself she could not, by any modern standards explain, but was obliged to live alone with for the past twenty-five years. It had been the reason for her divorce with Frank, too: The introvert she had to became at times in order to survive.

It, also, was the justification she gave herself for deciding to finally seek Frank out and ask for his help.

She wanted to confess how peculiarly easy she had lifted, at the age of seven, the front end of the car to pull her pinned Collie free. How at ten she crawled, under the cover of night, beneath a locomotive engine three streets down at the station yard and with her shoulders and arms raised it off the steel tracks and back down again. A locomotive, because it was the heaviest object to test her strength on that she could find in the vicinity of her neighborhood. She wanted to tell Frank how she could never be hurt. Be scratched even, by anything. And that by only willing it alone, and very hard at that, could vaccine syringes pierce her skin.

"What's the matter with me, Frank? Am I going crazy?" she asked herself that morning on her way to Athens.

"No, Barbara, you're not," she replied.

***

Mr. Alexiou lit a candle, kissed the icon of the Holy Mary, and stepped back his head bowed, crossing himself. Theodoros had been riding his motorcycle when the weightlessness struck. He had sent him on errands for the language school. The boy had not returned. He had not called either. Mr. Alexiou knew nothing about his son's whereabouts. The four hospitals he had visited turned up nothing. The police stations were no more helpful than any others. He, the past thirty hours, had been on his feet trying to track down his only child amid a city he could not recognize.

Before he exited he stopped, turned and faced the house of God. The eyes were dry and stern. Wearily, a minute later, he turned about and slowly walked out.

Three blocks away and outside the Parliament a nervous figure stepped into a phone booth and closed the door behind him. He scratched his mustache as he waited for the other end of the line to answer.

"Frank, Sophocles here."

"What's up" Frank looked at the last page on his PC. Later on he was going to send the story to Smythe.

"There's gonna be a war, friend."

"A war?"

"Politicians and scientists are accusing each other's governments of unauthorized use of Mt. Athos and this city as testing grounds."

"Of what?"

Sophocles closed his eyes and swung back and forth on his heels. "Something called MA."

"That's silly. How can a computer do all this. Besides, the MA is still under construction, Sophocles."

"If you say so."

"I know so! "Why only this morning -- It couldn't be."

"This morning?.."

"I'll explain, another time ... " Frank quickly made a note on the last page, 'Stand by for likely IBSEH complications'. " ... what happened."

There was a sigh on Frank's ear-piece. "Two hours ago the East was calling the West 'defunked totalitarians', and the West calling the East 'corrupt isolationists'." Sophocles went silent after that.

 Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And, casting out my self, become a soul.
-- Richard Wilbur

  The ant-mites withdrew from the Q-Alpha 1(c). A bounty of electronic monitoring equipment buzzed and whirred through kilometers of underground corridors of the vast maze that was the most inaccessible building in the world, second to Glixxon's ice palaces.

In the center of this entombed fortress was the computer's habitat, Mite Industries Special Projects, a government co-venture with a private corporation. And the grandest joint venture in the history of recorded mankind.

All, underneath the Sierra Blanca.

Fagan looked around him. Chickbrow, Michael, the brass and a staff of mite-techs dressed in white frocks, spent and weary by the fifteen day operation, scooted about, or spotlessly looked on from their stations as the carcass of Dr. Anthony G. Lovesigh was carted out of the uncontaminated chamber.

All concerned were aware of the vital importance of a second, artificial, fringe.

'All concerned', Fagan reflected, were the Council of ten who along with their regional governments knew that the Earth had less than twenty years to survive. Past that, there would be a calamity to a degree the world had never known.

The polluted atmosphere would preamble for the Greenhouse Syndrome to set irreversibly in: temperatures would rise, the Polar glaciers would melt, the wobble of the globe would de-stabilize as it had once in the past, and nine-tenths of its life would perish.

The hard calculations also revealed that the remaining one-tenth, even with the aid of gas masks and flotilla cities, would have less than one percent chance to weather the ensuing decimation and epidemics.

Then this other. The latest.

Three months had passed since the first Mt. Athos and Athens Phenomenon.

There may not be twenty years ... Fagan thought.

Fagan brought to mind again his only child. Dantea, only twenty-six, pregnant with neonatal life in her, and hope in him.

They must live, had been his one and only pronouncement in his anxiety-driven life.

Four and a half months had passed since in Carlsbad he had first heard of the fringe and Dr. Lovesigh; experienced his first exposure to the termite-ant hybrid strain -- and initially felt the leaning fulcrum of his own desperation change from inept groping to certain hope.

"Anthony Lovesigh is one of those rarest of the rare benefactions that chance, once in a billion or more years, let happen," Chickbrow had revealed to him over the days.

"A life unit that hit the jackpot of optimum genetic combinations. A natural selection that evolved by arranging its mutated nucleotides, the rungs and genetic code of the double helix ladder, Mr. Fagan, in such a way as to allow a propensity for access to universal information. The combination code of Dr. Lovesigh's nucleic acids must, by some quirk of accident, be the mirror image of the universe's fringe code -- proton for proton, electron for electron -- for both seem to establish order where chaos reigned before."

"Come again?"

"Dr. Lovesigh, sir, can not, ever, be wrong."

"He sure doesn't look it."

"Not his body. I am referring to his mind, Mr. Fagan. The deductions and theoretical laws that he arrives at by his inferences and intuitive avalanches point, so far, directly to the very ones the Universe holds in store for us. Perhaps even notches higher than Krell, Father Mettropoulos, Bludrose and all the rest. Who can say? Lovesigh's mind is the Universe's animate counterpart; the only living version of what the Cosmos would have resembled had it been a flesh and blood construct: He embodies the sapient simile of Creation, Mr. Fagan."

"You mean ... "

"As long as he doesn't know it -- "

"Hold on, Chickbrow. The man is a 'little god' and doesn't know it?"

"That's just it. He doesn't," Chickbrow had told him. "We and a handful up there only know. The fewer the better. It's this condition that keeps the composite wave function from reducing -- like religion, Mr. Fagan, it is a proviso of faith. We can believe in as many faiths as we like. And as long as we don't know which religion the true one is, they are all equally true."

Fagan had never heard such crazy nonsense. Yet, he had at times been frankly puzzled, himself, why people didn't just content in believing in a single, simple bonhomie goodness.

Chickbrow then went on to elaborate, on the Schroedinger's Cat Thought Experiment, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and speak about the actual documented evidence prepared on Dr. Lovesigh and his life's work, locked in an SIA vault. "It's indisputable, Mr. Fagan. "Looking at his failing body he would never have guessed himself the extent of this profound endowment; a legacy that could create a door, a bridge, that spans across time and space and over a mathematical geometry to reveal what encompasses it. What is past it.

"Furthermore, the second, infinitesimally smaller fringe, Mr. Fagan, implemented by software support, would allow craft and the arks to use the extra-Universe topology -- where space-time is open -- to reach any point within the known Universe, instantaneously -- "

"What's to keep this smaller fringe, this gate into the vacuum of void, from sucking all of us -- the Earth -- into it? Like a black hole would, Chickbrow?"

"The fringe, itself. Its a safety valve -- that knows!"

"Knows what?"

"Knows where our Universe ends and the extra-Universe begins. It adjusts, controls, severely so, all traffic through the shell of its sphere. Once they had semi-conductors ... the fringe is a selection-conductor. It is capable of choosing options. It is a stupendous, an amazing intelligence, Mr. Fagan. Dr. Lovesigh is trying to re-create a form of Cosmic Intelligence, artificially ... "

A chance to save them, had been Fagan's buoying thought that day. A chance to save many.

***

A chance to leave behind all that holds this spirit back ... a ticket to eternity, a chance to you, my Penelope, had been Lovesigh's last humanly embodied reflection. For, Lovesigh felt it strongly -- in his pain-ridden bones -- that no form of energy ever got lost. The 'soul' and the knowledge it bore was as much part of the Universe as all its Creations. It was a moiety of the Soul of the Universe. And the Universe wasted nothing. Not death even. There was a locality, a residence, a haven that souls -- the souls of the unborn yet, the born when they dreamed and souls of the passed-away -- had access to and which province had spread throughout. Nests in Creation at which the knowledge of man ... but not man alone ... nurtured, matured, learned about Creation Itself, waited for Knowledge to complete, and was curious to see what Wisdom's next step would be. Where this next vault would take It. Lovesigh did not truly want to be the soul of a dead man when this happening eventuated. Something inside of him told him that this thing might have had already begun. Matter of fact he had much greater expectations. There were things two living bodies could do ... that a soul could only ... and perhaps vaguely so ... only remember of having access to ... and delighting in.

"Ah, such kisses and caresses, my Penelope, ... such stormy poetry. Flame and faer, my woman wife," had been Lovesigh's very last-embodied whisper.

***

In another city, another country and on another continent Amanda Rhodes got on the trolley bus with a half hour delay to her debit, and headed through the paralyzed city to the railroad station.

Father Lukas, in his apartment three kilometers north, prepared the lamb casserole he had promised Frank the afternoon before.

The recipe was an old one of his mother's with two alterations concocted by him. He went easy on the salt and added one more pinch of oregano instead. It accentuated the flavor of the East the food craved for it. If he had had the time, he would have ordered Samothracean erif, kid goat, in place of lamb. Another day, he mused.

As the pot simmered, he took the band with the remote communicator off his wrist and returned it to its former place in the suitcase. The curious device, he himself had designed and put together, made it possible for him to do from a distance that which he was able to accomplish by proximity: to link his being to a machine, in this case, his computer found in his apartment.

Next, he tore off the previous day's transcript (annotated with his own mental notes and comments) from the built-in terminal's printer.

He scanned the results ... and nodded.

Pushing the eject contact lightly, a cube popped out and into view above the processor's cube-pack inset. Taking it in his hand, he observed the otherwise marble-colored die, by its marginal darkened inky fill that the storing cache had run. He verified this by checking the counter. He then inserted it back, emptied it and touched 'run refill':

(Frank): "Amanda!.."

(F. Lukas): "Let me help."

(Frank): "Thanks. English is fine, Father -- New York."

(F. Lukas): "Did time there myself. And the young lady?"

(Frank): "An old classmate."

(F. Lukas): "A cold compress might do some good."

( ... )

(Noise)

(F. Lukas): "Sick ... Lord ... I'm sick ... "

(Frank): "Are you all right?"

(F. Lukas): "I think -- Yes -- yes. But I can't seem to walk"

(Frank): "It's the gravity -- stay low -- it's gonna reverse soon. Get your barings ... The pendant light is the ceiling ... "

He stopped the tape at the last few statements. He replayed the same. Clearly, he could hear the other's matter of fact, even alleviating tone. No semblance of any kind to his own half-choked cries. He himself had been terrified and panic-stricken. Patroni had not been phased that much, as though he had some familiarity with this unordinary situation, was primed; perhaps with a similar bizarre occurrence before.

None of the other three phenomena had even approached the violence and power of yesterday's, he reasoned.

"Amanda, Amanda," his lips silently formed the words. "What is inside you, my dear?" Momentarily, the compassion in his eyes changed, and in its place came stern words. "She must never ... never learn," he said. His thinking once more augmented, temporarily, extending itself from the unique quality of faith that the man of God had ... to flex out and traverse beyond humanly imposed restrictions upon creed and doctrine, by way of the man of reason that he was.

Father Lukas did not follow the old school of Orthodoxy. He respected its customs and conventions, but saw also danger there. The threat of his religion being wiped out by Glixxon's, high technology, and smart-looking and clean-kept priests. People wanted bathed, trimmed and slimmed clergymen. But a most disturbing number of Lukas's own faith clerics too had somewhere along the course of their life lost regard of proper hygiene, groom and attire, and proprietary social manner. Their long beards and hair, even at this day and age, reeked of pickled salmon, spilled wine and undercooked sausage; their manifold black robes gave off the sundry stench of unwashed fish and spilt foods, and their eyes glutted of a weary starvation at the scent a passing female emanates. If he was ever beset by, saw, any part of this in himself, he'd know it was time to lay his collar aside ... and live in the way of man -- simple man, but not a man of the cloth.

He knew well that it was this mental agility and knowledge of who he was and what he wanted, this quick-witted versatile rapport with reality and truth that comes out of common sense and from all parts of the vastness inside a soul and mind, at a moment's summons, without fear or passion, but ample in heart, patience and consolation, that kept him sane. Kept him human and humane. Kept him from getting lost within the universe he carried in his own head. Kept him with his God. A God he had named Love and Good. Love and the Good that is there from birth to death in every human being, unexceptionably.

The eyes of the priest now turned to those of a deep-probing physicist. But an inkling of something familiarly warm still remained there, too.

"It's gravity -- stay low -- it's gonna reverse soon ... " came Frank's words again. The tiny cube then slowly filled in the rest of its liquid bites of information. The priest ran over certain other portions. He wanted to be sure his visitor and lunch guest had more to him than only that which meets the eye. The cube and the transcript were there to affirm what the other man may deny having said. And under the present conditions, he may very well disclaim all of it. To protect Amanda, Patroni seemed the kind of man who would deny everything -- to his dying day. I, too, the priest agreed. He trusts me, but not those I work for, he thought and nodded his understanding. Who, ever, trusted tyranny? I must cultivate this trust in me, he urged himself. It's our only bond.

With these words he had made an unprecedented decision: To reveal to this other-like-him what no other person, but his mother, knew.

"Mother, how many more like us are there?" he whispered.

"Why?"

An intermittent soft beep caught his attention. Sitting in front of the screen, he punched a code into the unit. The crisp crackle of static sounded as light and static filled the monitor. The digitally-produced video hash upon it sifted swiftly and resolved into Abe Fagans's image.

"Am I glad to see you," Fagan said, wiping his forehead with his neatly-folded handkerchief.

He then went on to delineate on the influx of news reports that were reaching them stateside.

"It is that grim, Abe, I'm afraid." The priest confirmed, and expounded on his own impression of the phenomenon's aftermath upon the city. "So far, officially counted are 700 dead, 13,000 wounded. But I fear it's only the surface. Other statistical analyses, I'm sending through the secure channel. It's safe enough to say now that this time the entire city, suburbs included, was shaken up badly. Six million people. Energy released was more than a hundred-fold to that of its predecessor. The progression is exponential. It lifted cars, buses, trolleys clearly three meters average off the ground. This time, eddies were involved, gravetic eddies and warps of some kind, dispersed randomly, strong negative weight fluctuations."

Abe Fagan cleared his throat. "Are you on to anything?"

The other cleared his. "It came too soon."

"It's not good enough, Lukas. Everybody is getting restless here. Including me. Maybe our estimate is exaggerated. Eighteen years could be over-optimistic. The diplomats will be at each others' throats. We're holding the damned ball and there's nobody left to toss it to. We got to get the snake out ourselves, Lukas. If this phenomenon thing doesn't kill us, a war today will. Can you estimate when it'll hit again and how big the wallop is going to be?"

"Plus or minus a day at the standard twenty-eight day cycle counting today ... " the priest rattled off data. But his eyes were unfocused, a part of his mind somewhere else.

"The energy index, Lukas," the other pressed.

The priest appraised the other's psychological state.

"Are you sure you want to hear it? Isn't it enough to say the phenomenon mustn't occur again?"

"Lukas, give me the index."

"The subterranean strata has been jolted into separation from the core proper yesterday. Although its consistency is for the most part granite, a Rocky Mountains sort of mountain range running below ground level, from west to east, having two major peaks prominently sticking above ground: The Acropolis knoll and the Lycabitus hill. My hypothesis, the entire Attican portion of this range has become unglued and is just resting on top of its base like a house unattached to its foundations. Given time, it will again fuse back due to the sheer pressure of its weight. But -- but if this freak hits once more its force will be sufficient to ... to pull free and fling this city off the face of the Earth and into space."

Abe Fagan wiped his chin and neck. Twice he began to utter something but changed his mind.

Finally, "They are accusing us! They say we're using the MA, testing it on one of our harmless allies!"

"Paranoia, Abe."

"Not much more is needed, Lukas. There's going to be an emergency IBSEH get-together there in exactly three hours. Son, if you permit me to call you that, you can't imagine what your physical presence and your words spoken there, at this session, can mean to a peace-loving world."

The priest nodded in silence, taking in the gravity with which the other spoke. The man was genuinely and morally concerned. This wasn't the government man talking. It was Fagan's way, in the manner he spoke it, of requesting a personal favor:

"Keep us alive!"

***

Two blocks before reaching Larisis Railroad Station the trolley had come to a standstill. The street ahead was totally blocked by abandoned cars, wrecks, and overheated vehicles with their hoods open.

Amanda looked at her watch. It was twelve-thirty; already she was an hour and a half late for the Athens Express that was to arrive at eleven o'clock.

"Christ!" she whispered amid the trolley full of equally impatient and jittery commuters.

"Everybody get off," the driver called out, getting up from his seat.

Amanda was among the first to step off the vehicle since she was right next to the door, avoiding the hustling and pushing of the exasperated commuters. As soon as she was on the street, it was all too clear why the trolley driver let them off. There was hardly room enough to talk in this down town section of the city. Pedestrians actually climbed over bumpers and hoods to make progress to where they were going. Steam and smoke rose from several ancient automobiles as their owners leaned over the dry radiators and super-heated engines.

The scene was dizzying as confused and desperate people leaped over obstacles, some falling to the pavement, to get away from this arena of lunacy. Some helped the helpless and elderly. Most pushed and shoved their way through. Amanda found herself following behind such a gang that appeared to be heading towards the station. Her head ached and exhaust fumes made her eyes sting and her sinuses rebel.

Now the gang turned left and she was abandoned to opening her own path alone.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, when she stumbled upon something and lurched forward. She grabbed at the middle-aged man's shoulder in front of her. She looked down at her obstacle on the pavement -- her heart skipped a beat. A boy of four or five lay below her, bruised and being trampled on.

"Stop it! Stop it!" she yelled.

What occurred next was noticed by few only. Specifically, only two saw the unexplainable take place. It came quickly and was over in a matter of seconds. Later that evening, the old man and his wife, who at the time were taking refuge in their antique Fiat 124, would comment on it to their friends as a miracle that had happened, right before their eyes.

"They just rose in the air!" the old man would tell his visiting neighbor.

"Twenty, thirty of them ... we saw them. Their feet were not touching the road or stepping on the poor infant," said the old man's wife. "A young woman then picked the child up and took it to its shrieking mother."

" ... and everybody was pushed aside and out of the young lady's way -- like dividing the Red Sea -- till the little one was safe in its mother's arms."

"A miracle!" said the old woman and crossed herself three times.

"The Second Coming!" said another.

It was when Amanda started to make her way from the weeping but relieved mother and lose herself once again in the crowd that she felt her anxiety. The havoc around her had been too frantic and frightening for her to notice how easy it had been to save the boy and retrieve him back to his frantic parent. The exhilaration and determination of only instants before, however, still lingered in her blood. Her sinuses and nose felt cleared from all their bloating fluids and strangely enough, the headache was gone and the skin under her fingernails no longer itched. She even discovered that she was now competent and strong enough to push through the masses unassisted. Adrenaline, she explained to herself. Maternal instincts have ways of making a woman strong. Yet, somewhere deep in her mind's far end, incertitude of all that had transpired a little while before, left her oddly irritable and uneasy. Something was uncomfortably disturbing.

Larisis Railroad Station stood amid a sea of various vehicles and people. Only its one side, that which was guarded by a tall chain link fence running along the rail lines, was empty of cars. Behind the fence, multitudes mulled around on the concrete waiting platform. As Amanda approached the giant structure of the station building, her eyes did not catch site of a jagged line traversing the one wall.

The flow line had not been there the morning before. Nor had it been the result of an immediate earthquake, characteristic of this area's seismogenic history. Upon closer observation and examination, a trained eye could discern many other finer, almost hair-thin lines along the many roof slab joints of the old buildings that were not there before. That morning only were these being discovered by many architects and civil engineers who by happenstance glances spotted them on numerous of the city's older buildings. A couple of hours later, the Ministry of City Planning was swarmed with ringing phones. By afternoon an announcement would hasten home and apartment dwellers to check and report any such similar building flaws. By that evening half a million more would be added to the homeless on the streets.

Amanda was not sure at first, but on a second look she recognized him. Theodoros was sitting in one corner of the densely-peopled station, his back leaning against the wall with a white dressing around his temples.

"Theo," she called, and came and sat crouched in front of him.

"Ms. Rhodes," he said, surprised to see the young English teacher.

"What happened?"

"I have had an accident with the motorcycle," he explained, rising. He went on to say how he had to leave the damaged cycle behind, how he got medical care from a mobile army medics unit, and came to the station afterwards to get the parcel of English language video cubes for his father's school. Discovering that it would have been impossible to return to the school, since he could not walk a great distance or stand for that matter, without getting dizzy, he decided to remain at the station overnight where food and warmth were available.

"I was not able to get through to my father, Miss Rhodes. The telephones are practically useless. I overheard one conductor say that many overhead cables and lines have fallen and underground ones damaged. How will I notify him that I am well, Ms. Rhodes?"

Amanda soon realized that she too would not be able to make it back home. She had invited Frank and the priest over for dinner at seven that evening. Meanwhile, she saw the young Theodoros lean back on the wall, his face beginning to drain of color. She assisted him to sit down and told him to wait there, that she'd be back in a little while.

She was about to enter the station master's office to ask about Mark's train when the trundling of steel wheels and screeching metal brakes reached her. A passer-by answered her question. It was the Athens Express, with a two-hour delay.

"Next stop -- Piraeus! Next stop -- Piraeus!" the speaker boomed.

It was when she heard "Piraeus" that Amanda knew what she had to do next, and be quick about it.

As the train was coming to a stop and the multitudes inside it waited anxiously to step off, Amanda ran fast to where she had left the hurt boy.

***

A quarter of an hour had gone by since Father Lukas closed the communications link with Abe Fagan. It was a little past twelve noon. As the other had so gravely stated, the meeting he was to attend in less than three hours from now would be a vital one. It would not be an emergency forum, but a crisis ultimatum. A critical decision-making referendum of angered and suspicious governments, two of which had held a live-or-die reign over humanity. A catastrophe had taken place in a peace-respecting and neutral country. The West, therefore, would accuse Eastern countries of trespassing into their fields. The East, on the other hand, would reciprocate by putting the blame on the West since only they had in their possession the MA and the possible means to initiate such devastation.

And the mad circle of assaults and counter assaults could indeed continue to recycle till it ran away from any check by logic or reason.

The priest prayed things would not go so far. But both these powers and all the world were at a loss at what was taking place and the disastrous blow and consequence it wrought upon the city -- the city memorial to civilization. The city that was in the process of preparing to host again, in just a few months, the 2052, Olympic Games. But peace here, even with the event of the Games, was a distant, seemingly far-fetched idea. Yet, it was too late to transfer them elsewhere.

It was encouraging that the athletic facilities as well as the Olympic Village were left intact. This was because their location was outside the city's center and well beyond the immediate destructive effects of the phenomenon, about fifty kilometers away. The Games could and must take place, Father Lukas pondered. It was the only relief valve they had. Possibly, just possibly, ugly attestations and deadly pledges by either side could be deferred long enough. The time was badly needed to allay anger enough so as to reconstitute what remnant-little balance and common sense could be evoked upon.

It was essential that he stall for time, use every molecule of his intelligence to pacify, even guarantee in some way to his international colleagues, that this unearthly phenomenon was not a plot by either alliances or independent states or any coalition of nations. He had to have ready answers and alternatives at hand to do all this. The difficulty lay not in acquiring a temporary armistice of tempers only, but a sufficiently long one to permit him to tackle and define the problem; somehow prevent the coming of the next phenomenon. At least deviate it from this city.

Although he reasoned out the lateness of Frank's arrival, he set the table and put the food in plates to cool. The recorded conversations came to mind as he waited for the other. His conclusion was that he had not found one, but two "gifted" as he. He deduced from the bits and pieces of the ambiguous and symbolic comments Frank had made when they were alone in his car the day before, that the reporter had perhaps the most important and enlightening of the three gifts: the ability to probe into minds.

"Oh, Holy Mother," the betroubled priest whispered his head bent back. "Is there a purpose to all this?" Immediately then, "Forgive my doubt, Holy One."

 Chapter 14

  Jeremy, the bespectacled mite-tech, tapped Chickbrow on the shoulder. "We're ready."

Chickbrow glanced at Fagan and the four-star Space Force General next to him. "Are we?"

Fagan eyeballed the General and gave a quick nod to Chickbrow.

They crossed over into the deep, twinkling wing ahead of them which was engulfed in a sea of fluttering fireflies.

Brilliant profusions of splintering lights spangled and shimmered where Mike Stromberg, another mite-tech, stood, his head bowed, next to one of ALPHA's terminals modified with I/O audiovisual and holographic faculties.

Fagan cleared his throat.

"Dr. Lovesigh ... Dr. Lovesigh, can you here me?"

What was Dr. Lovesigh stirred, and gathered the parts of himself into a focused wedge of self awareness. It took him, it seemed, forever to get a fix on himself and vanquish the jolt of realization that he was not quite all there, that most of him was missing.

Chickbrow gestured to the tech to raise the gain.

Both speakers and monitors jumped to life.

"Never thought I'd be so glad to hear your voice," came the dull guttural gargle through the audio. Flat, emotionless. A belching sink siphon might have burped the same way.

Big bold letters appeared on the screen and two printers hummed.

The men looked at each other.

Fagan loosened his tie and mopped his face with his handkerchief.

"How do you feel, Dr. Lovesigh? I do not understand all your words ... enunciate more slowly and articulate succinctly." Fagan felt his face was on fire.

Michael, standing beside him, looked his way and cleared his throat, distinctly.

"Ditto." The same textureless voice sounded, but more intelligible now, better-defined. "I am alive. But unattached."

"The interface programs," Chickbrow cut in, "haven't run yet."

He halted, then commenced over, altogether retarding his pace, in check, molding each utterance individually. "YOU ARE NOT LINKED ONE HUNDRED PERCENT WITH THE REST OF THE NETWORK -- YOU DO REMEMBER THE PROCEDURE?"

"Nothing wrong there -- memory is intact. But ... "

A pause.

"But, what, Dr. Lovesigh?" It was Fagan again, sweating profusely.

"Somebody else in here."

"It is your backup being generated, sir, before interfacing. Last minute measures decided -- " Chickbrow lapsed an instant, " -- by higher ups. Duplication will be down to your chromosome configuration. It's as far as we can go."

Pause.

"Dr. Lovesigh?" summoned a red-faced Fagan. "Dr. Lovesigh!"

"It couldn't be any of your doing?" The metallic voice had a slight baritone to it.

"I don't usually make such decisions -- "

"Should've made this one."

" -- but for this one," mumbled Fagan panting, and glancing around him for cheer.

"A damn intelligent one. Credit to you!"

For a moment, Fagan bristled, but only for a moment. His eyes grew and his mouth pinched. His face couldn't decide whether to grin or scowl.

"Can you describe it in there?" interceded Chickbrow. His eyes swiftly scanned the life-signs readouts and the recording equipment.

" ... in the middle of a lush nondescript lattice -- no, tangle. But see and hear you clearer now -- "

"That's the anesthesia wearing off," put in Chickbrow. "In a few minutes the detoxins will purge your cells."

"Along with the other feller, there's an echo too."

"That’s the recorders -- "

"No, I'm on to the recorders. This is something else."

Fagan's eyes were on Chickbrow.

"Dr. Lovesigh, it may be your duplicate. We can isolate that once the backup is completed -- ten minutes' time," assured Chickbrow.

"No qualms with that. One of me in here bungling through is enough to cope with. There're all sorts of weird flack loose throughout -- quick things, flickering and flashing in sheer space."

"Your awareness is recuperating. You're experiencing more of your environment," Chickbrow said. "It is your new body, Professor, welcoming you."

"That conglomerate of ... oh Hades. How do I say, 'glad I could make it'?"

Chickbrow grinned, "You just did."

"Dr. Lovesigh," Fagan hesitated, "how does it feel in there?"

The pause this time was longer, and with each second Fagan felt in dire need of something. Air -- he was holding his breath.

"A hard dream. A movie in a nondescript space with some fire-bolts swishing about. Not much to work with."

Chickbrow, "You're not hooked up to the whole system, Professor. In a few minutes, with your assent, you will be. Or, whenever you're up to it."

Fagan prickled.

"You got your breath back, Mr. Fagan, but I still detect discontent."

"Time, Dr. Lovesigh," the other whispered, "is of the essence. The monkey is almost ready."

"So am I, Mr. Fagan. So am I."

***

Frank Patroni picked up the ringing phone.

"We cannot reach the number, Sir. Shall we continue to try?"

"No," he said and replaced the receiver.

He had been trying all day to get in touch with her. The city's quasi-intact telephone network saturated, finally jamming. Sophocles' call earlier got through due to the high priority that incoming and outgoing calls were given at the Parliament building and the municipal block surrounding it, Frank concluded. It was the same building Sophocles and Father Lukas were in this minute, the former spectator the later a vital participant.

"I know you want to assure her protection," the priest had said earlier in the day over lunch at his place. "She needs help; more so because she's not aware that it's her own doing."

It was a declaration of fact that Frank could not argue with. So were the statements that followed. Father Lukas began his narration with the far past of his life: His family, the loss of his father, then the epiphany of the unexplainable revelation, how the intelligence he possessed helped him open doors to much subtle truth and penetrating knowledge. He told all, it seemed, that had weighed upon him and him alone for what had been long lonely years. A confession it was of sorts, a catharsis that for Frank made it wholesomely easier to follow suit. The man whose food he was sharing, shared the most private of personal secrets about himself. Awesome were these abilities that human beings did not normally inherit or learn.

"Lukas, are we part of something bigger?" he asked an hour and a half later.

The other rose from the kitchen table, sipped the last of the wine in his glass, and began gathering the empty dishes.

"The trend does point to that, doesn't it?" he said and took the plates to the sink.

"Who else? How many?.."

"We can only speculate. The two of us may be the first lot to have found out that three such cases exist. If others knew, I believe they would have been in touch ... unless they, like ourselves, are discovering it now. Essential at this point is to help Amanda and this city. If she knew, I wonder, could she control it -- like you and I?"

A grimace of suppressed emotion contorted Frank's face. Lips pressed tightly together and lines on either side of the eyes appeared momentarily. Wrinkles on his forehead made him look old just then.

The priest seemed to study him, empathized with the other's conflict.

"Sooner or later," Frank began, "she'll learn. It's the guilt, Father. If she were told, she'd hold herself responsible for all the misery -- all this that's around us. It'll madden her. I know Amanda. It'll kill her."

The priest brought his chair in front of Frank and sat. His words came out in whispers, like praying. "Why did you abandon her, my brother? You must have suffered also. But didn't your heart tell you otherwise?"

Frank's eyes turned to the priest. There was awesome struggle in them, regret along with realization.

"We must help me before her," he murmured, seeking to know just how much the other understood.

"Tell me, Frank; I can and will," said the priest, placing his hand on the other's forearm gripping it encouragingly.

Frank hesitated a while before speaking.

"Behind Amanda's conscious mind, further even than her unconscious, there is something. Something or -- I can't put into words -- an inaccessible forbidden region I had glimpses of only. What remained after the experience was an imprinted awareness of foreboding, warding off any further thoughts of probing her ... "

Father Lukas felt shudders going through the other's body. He somehow knew intuitively that at the end of this man's testimony a gate would open. It was faith, not knowledge, in such circumstances that saved, caused miracles to happen. As he looked inside the man's glistening eyes he saw that there was still strength left. The strength of love and, not unlike him, of deep faith.

His tone was comforting as his hold was reassuring. "Is what you confronted interpreted by the church, by us, as evil?"

"What I confronted, in Amanda, and in myself, had no such correlation. No relation or compatibility to religion, dogma or faith. It was in a sense artificial, but animate."

"In yourself?.."

"Yes. It was the reason that kept me from going after her. That day I had to find answers. I didn't believe Amanda's reason for leaving. Her career and music could not have been any more promising. There was no one else, either, not for her or for me. So what drove her away?

Till then I had only entered a few other minds, some because of curiosity, others to get at the truth of some things. But I had never intruded, explored, my own mind. I could not. I didn't know how. Not until the pressure of that day forced me."

"What happened?" the priest asked calmly, his own vital questions about himself now wrestling behind the surface serenity.

"It was so simple. A gimmick relay. I could not intrude upon my being because I could not envision myself as a separate person. Once this differentiation was accomplished I could then treat the procedure as one of entering an other individual's mind.

"A mirror.

"The image of myself would serve as the other person: the mind I was to explore. This illusion did work. And as I faced myself in the full-length mirror of my closet door ... I passed into my own mind. As easily as if it had been another's.

"I became aware of my own thoughts, as though they belonged to someone else. Objectively, I could search the brain of the image across from me as if it did not belong to me. My mind felt no one trespassing it. Not the slightest of hints that at that moment it was host to 'another' awareness, to its alter-awareness.

"My life passed before me in quick un-subjective and non-self-involving flicks: Familiar events, but in an alienated fashion, and in a much clearer procession and manner. Lukas, I saw myself then as Amanda, who knew me intimately, saw me."

The priest nodded. "I understand."

"To a point, you probably do. But what came next, as I sought answers that could explain Amanda's sudden departure, was chilling and familiar. Behind my own unconscious lay ... the exact same vast forbidden region I had confronted in her. In that instant, Amanda and I were one and identical. Ingested in the same single womb ..."

The inferences were all too clear to Father Lukas. Doubt and irrational guilt were haunting blocks separating these two people in love. It was time to test the theory that kindled inside his own head.

Frank had resisted at first, but seeing that it was the only way to nullify his unfounded fears, he had consented to enter the Priest's mind.

***

It was getting late in the evening and Frank realized that he should not be sitting in his room indulging in that afternoon's events at Father Lukas's. Still, the voyage into Lukas' mind had been extraordinary. What's more, it had been conclusive: The same repelling and unidentifiable region had been there, too. A forbidding, an all-encompassing womb, it had pervaded and deposited itself abysmally within the Priest's brain as well. A brain unlike any Frank had entered. A mind of such complexity and dimension, such sphere of spirit, potential and energy, that Frank had to tiptoe through it, had to take utmost care so as not to be overwhelmed, overpowered by it.

And when he had finally withdrawn, he had felt peace as never before. Yes. Lukas, Amanda and he shared that same something.

But, this knowledge alone was enough of a relief, it seemed; sufficient for the obstacles that appeared to mount, that were ahead of them.

As Frank put on his coat and headed through the crammed avenues to Amanda's apartment, several blocks away to the south ... a battle of wit and tolerance raged in the Parliament building. Amidst it, tired but not subdued, Father Lukas was one among the first spokesmen who buffered clashing tempers and antagonisms that had somehow, in the heat of dialogue and argument, veered off into political skirmishes and sorties.

The priest's hands were full as he used all three: religion, science and diplomacy to conciliate the scholars, academicians and theoreticians in the assembly. He had not thought before that so much fanaticism could thrive in an otherwise seemingly peaceful and supposedly neutral circle of top IBSEH members.

The meeting had been called to order at three that afternoon, right after Frank had left the house.

Lukas had to rush like a child late for class to be there at the very start. On his way, the priest tried to anticipate all possible arguments that could be used in the session. On one hand, he was relieved since only a little while before Frank had revealed that he too shared the same area in question. The very same blind region of brain (or psyche) manifestation that the journalist and girl possessed. It was a concrete, although undefined, starting point in dealing with the chaos around them. On the other hand, it had stirred a kind of restlessness in the priest.

"Heavenly Father, what have we stumbled onto?" he had whispered after he managed to reach the building his colleagues were gathered in.

Now, it was half past seven. Four and a half hours had gone by since things began to head on a course from bad to worse.

Lukas sat and took a sip of water from the glass in front of him. His mouth had dried after his forty-minute deliberation. He tried the best he knew to convince beyond any doubt that this was not, could not be, brought about by the Modified Alpha. That his federation categorically denied such rumors as unfounded instigations in an already sensitive crisis.

"The MA is not a weapon," he had reminded them. "It is a sophisticated computer only, with passive only defense capabilities built into it. When it is fully assembled -- hence it is not yet ready -- it will, even then, be as 'threatening' as a personal computer unit. It cannot, I repeat, cannot, offend or do harm of any degree to anyone; its essence is only to protect itself and in so doing protect the network it is part of: NewStates of NovaAmerica, and all or any nations wishing access to it."

He then went on to explain what the MA was, and in so doing risked disclosure of numerous top secret aspects.

"Like any an ordinary computer, the MA uses nothing but software programming. There is no form of atomic fusion or fission incorporated in its construction. Or will any be utilized at its completion. Its power and repelling capabilities use the most abundant, natural, and harmless of resources, sunlight and magnetic flux currents circling our globe. It does not pollute the atmosphere. It does not emit damaging radiation of any sorts. "

"Then how can it destroy an attacking missile?" a voice challenged from the silence of the audience.

"It does not!" the priest assured. "The Met-Par Drive of the MA re-orients Earth's magnetic lines that pass through the area to be protected. To a missile or laser, to all forms of electromagnetic equipment, this change acts as a mirror that only deflects -- does not destroy -- projectiles or intense radiation into outer space. This is done by disorienting the electromagnetic bands that participate in and comprise all electromechanic and electronic inter-reactions. Nothing but flesh, blood and a few synthetics can pass through it. As you can see, fellow colleagues, gravity it does not harness, use, or alter in any fashion. It cannot."

As more inquiries came costumed and clothed in the attire of indignant rebuffs, the more tentatively had he to choose his wording so as not to reveal critical information, yet continue to appease and pacify all those cloaking their curiosity with intrigue and wishful expectation. Father Lukas knew how to do this well. There were deep roots in this methodology. Ones that went back to his early childhood in the ghetto, and ones which at those times dealt directly with life or death.

"Are you not a priest, Dr. Lukas?" Professor Bodin now rose as the other laid the glass down. The deep voice had a thick accent that resonated in the large auditorium.

Father Lukas looked at him for a long steady gaze, and nodded once.

"Were you not performing holy services yesterday at approximately this hour?"

Lukas nodded again.

"While the rest of us were out extrapolating data, using established, tested and proven institutionalized scientific procedures, you -- you celebrated the birth of a child born two thousand years ago?

"I regret then to state ignorance and awe before such invincible, unabashed, imperturbable faith: Your fellow human beings dying and crying in pain, both physical and spiritual, a city brought to its knees by a biblical but pragmatic apocalypse ... and you rejoicing in such -- such hell? How much more can you demand of our reason and minds, Dr. Lukas? How much of our faith can we entrust in a person's credibility when that person himself boasts allegiance to two kingdoms: to that of God and to that of Man? How can such duality benefit, I ask?"

A splitting quiet spread. Eyes shifted from the speaker to the priest’s ashen face.

"Man can serve but one master, Dr. Lukas."

Professor Bodin voice now became low, didactic. "Is this not what your dogma demands of a true believer? How can one claim to serve a triad, serve Man, Science and God, and at the same time be true to only one? You are married to the Church, Father Lukas, are you not? Then, you cannot have other 'spouses", no matter how much you want to, can you?

"I for one can imagine your enthusiasm and open-heartedness for everything. But, Father Lukas, I will disappoint you. A human being has not been born yet with the capacity you claim to possess. Not even The Christ. Therefore, I for one do not believe in what you so fervently state as facts. The MA has many potentials, Sir. One, the one you described. The others -- you even seem to be ignorant of."

A roar of angry voices and din exploded in the amphitheater.

Applause and hateful glances quickly followed aimed at the lone black-clad figure sitting calmly, waiting for the raucous to burn out. Lukas's fingers slowly moved over the earphone terminals of the console which was a standard part of each person's seat. A calm, almost sad voice filled the hissing gap of the earphones.

Professor Bodin heard it, too.

The din subsided quickly, as it had risen.

Several technicians and four interpreters jumped out of their sound-proof booths to examine where the strange voice was coming from. Who was meddling with their equipment and their jobs of doing the translations?

After the turning of heads halted, all eyes fell upon the still Father Lukas. The reply to Professor Bodin had commenced in fourteen languages via the headphones.

All, including fourteen dumbfounded interpreters, listened.

Lukas' lips did not move but once in the fifty-minute riposte. And that had been when he had raised his glass and took a drink of water.

***

It was now ten o'clock and Frank's soles hurt from the unaccustomed walking he had done all day. The last three hours had been like a hurdle-obstacles race in a city clogged with anxious like himself pedestrians, and through crammed impassable streets.

Amanda was not at home. The concerned neighbor had told him that she had not come home since that morning. She was worried for her.

"She has not looked well to me the past two months," she told him and wrote the address of the school Amanda worked at on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

Another marathon from Amanda's apartment to the English School then began.

When he entered Mr. Alexiou's office he confronted a man pale with wariness. Frank surmised that the other had been through no less that day. But the face was calm now, reassuring, after Frank explained the reason of his presence there.

"Mr. Patroni, she is safe," he had said, and brought his hand upon Frank's shoulder urging him to take a seat. "My son is with her. They got a call through a few minutes before you arrived. They are on their way to Litokhoro, a village to the north below Olympus and near the sea. Miss Amanda's brother is with them as well."

Mr. Alexiou then explained how Amanda had stumbled upon his son at the Railway Station, the difficulty in returning to their homes with the injured boy, the decision to get on the train with Mark and continue to Piraeus by means of this only available means of transportation, then sail to Aggistri and from there board the ferry for Litokhoro.

Frank left the school feeling a bit lighter.

She's away from all this, his thoughts reeled, tired and drained as he was and as he approached the hotel. And with no intervention from Lukas or myself. It's a good start.

He wanted to see Lukas and Sophocles in his hotel room early next morning. He wanted to introduce Amanda, as well, to Sophocles. But it could wait. The Hellenic correspondent's, along with Lukas's knowledge of local transport means and of local geography, would enable the two of them to sail for Aggistri, while Sophocles remained behind to keep an eye on things. Also, update them both at their destination, Litokhoro, and the stateside Star.

He entered the hotel lobby and as he crossed it to the elevator, his eye caught a glimpse of the magazine rack. Several late editions of newspapers stood out with black, bold type. He approached and read two of the headlines:

"MIRACLES!"

and

"SECOND PHENOMENON HITS IBSEH"

He bought both and read further:

"At least two dozen reporters amid 270

top world authorities investigating

the Athens Phenomenon got a second jolt

this evening at the IBSEH special session

when the p.a. and interpreting circuits

commenced making a 'phantom' announcement

simultaneously in 14 tongues all on their

own ... "

Frank read on.

Must have gotten pretty rough over there to have to go this far, he thought. The Priest must have faced some tough opposition to chance it. It worked, though. For two weeks, the members agreed to defer any conclusive reports to their governments.

Vital time. Needed more than ever, he thought.

"He's done it, by God!" he uttered loudly, forgetting himself.

"So did I."

Frank's mouth remained half-open. He looked over the newspaper.

"Barbara!"

***

[From the archives of Starseed. P.P.]

Thirty years had gone by since the monk-thief entered his nightmare out of which he did not exit. The instant he had stepped into that particular uncharted catacomb a chain of events had been set into motion that for millennia had been aestivating.

The spark that ignited the sequence of complex interactions was an unprecedently sophisticated warning system that for the most part functioned on the principle of mutual capacitance changes in the tunnel. Once such changes were detected, a series of numerous tiny plasmatic contacts, similar to miniature relays, conducted controlling micro-currents to an equal number of arrays governing a local photon generator, several mental wave processors, and a dual set of ethereal communicators.

The photon generator accounted for the huge cave's artificial lighting as well as the false dawn sky with the stellar map upon it. If the monk had paused long enough his frugal knowledge of stars would have sufficed to disclose that such a star configuration came not from an earthly vantage point of the heavens. And that the profusion of wandering irradiating lights sublimating beneath it were not an intrinsic part of it. But alas, he was spared from this shock added to an already unbearably overloaded conscious and conscience.

The generator also powered the colossal processors of the water-energy converters housed in their insular and function-oriented shell-shaped jackets. The monk could not have known that the giant shiny shapes were neither abodes of devils or castles of angels, but only energy conveying quasi-insulation, enclosing sophisticated and immensely complex fluid electronics. Equipment so fine that it could attune to and process even a dream by analyzing its dreamer's composite brain waves and reproduce it, materially, in real space time. Equipment able to survey each single neuron and its every molecule constituting any one brain, or many brains, simultaneously, and reproduce their atomic, subatomic and energy spectra at any place on Earth.

Besides the equipment comprising the processors, the power served as an ether-media carrier wave taking the processors' final resource results to their "destinations". The communicators received and transmitted several bands on this singular one wave. While one band carried the resource results to and from processors on information channels discreetly separated by multiples of quantum levels, other bands maintained continuous uninterrupted and jam-free rapport with each "destination", conveying megajoules of refined energy invisibly and undetectably over complimentary hyper-ethereal diodes.

While one such set of diodes was in continuous rapport since its reactivating, permanently oriented westwardly, crossing the Atlantic; a number of other diodes from a second group of sets, at that very moment, thirty years after their reactivation, slowly converged honing in on a tiny boat chucking along towards an equally tiny island in the Gulf of Argosaronikos.

  "Gentlemen," he had begun, "I suggest we go a step further. Instead of the mites operating to repair this ragged body, an operation that boasts a mere fifty percent success -- and temporary at that -- why not salvage from it?"

A critical murmur of whispering had risen and fallen from the conference as Lovesigh paused for a rest. Nobody had laughed. A score and a half of blank faces had looked back at him.

Several 'angels of mercy' had been among them ...

Dr. Lovesigh chortled. To those attending outside his new abode, it sounded like something between a soft creak and a loud squeal. As his transplanted brain was cleansed from the drugs his awareness heightened...

While he waited he could not help but bring to mind Fagan's reaction, plus the giraffes', and the SIA delegation's -- with their 'Citizen Protectors' around them -- automatic apprehension and alarmed faces to his proposal two-and-a-half months before.

... Ripples of murmurs had rolled over the committee congregating in his study.

Fagan had waited for quiet. "Can you be more explicit, Dr. Lovesigh?"

"Yes, Mr. Fagan. Last night I was looking out that window," he had gestured with his head. "I was drawn by the stars' glimmer in the crisp clearness of the firmament. And I thought, we don't physically bring the stars to us, the planets, the moon -- we go to them. We have the means to do one thing, but not the other."

Lovesigh had felt extremely tired and worn that day.

Twenty years' work and hope, his thoughts had been, so dangerously close to being lost due to his consumed body.

The anomaly of the fringe, the prima materia of the Universe, was a singularity in reverse: A measureless invisible fleece that enclosed the Cosmos, and which purveyed information bounteously. It was a macrocosmic contortion in the hiatus of the universe, the intangible fabric whose every point fused onto all others through this twisted rent of space-time. All this, coupled with millions of man-hours, sweat and diligence ... all flushed now down a fathomless pitch-dark toilet called death.

He raked through the tufts of his graying gold hair.

Fagan and Chickbrow grimaced, waiting.

It was hurt.

They were hurting. He winced with their pain, and his.

It wasn't the fringe's enormous budget, or the big black 'X' that comes with failure, or that an old eccentric crank had bungled it, or the lay-offs. They could all live with those.

It was their faith being betrayed.

Faith in arms we trust as those embracing the distinguishing quality of a feeling kind of wisdom and human sapience. Flesh and bone kind of arms that soothe a baby’s ache, a lovers longing, an elders deep lonliness (... ahh Penelope, my Penelope, were art thou now).

This whole undertaking was an act of faith. Trust in the eager aiding arms and the warm synergy of man to save man without the disgrace of defeat or the dismal, disheartening and dishonoring cloud of autocrats and overlords hanging threateningly and eternally overhead.

He wanted to believe that a cooperative humanity of separate agencies and independent dispositions, predilections and origins, heritage and history, and with a sense -- lots of it -- of good-natured humor and easy friendliness, could have a far greater total effect than the sum of the effects taken individually or by collectives of anarchists, of socialists and capitalists or communists, or self-seeking dictators, religious or otherwise, or by opportunist money-grubbers.

It was to be a showing of what peace sans arms and hard honest work can do, no matter the flag or emblem, no matter the cause or inducement.

It was to be a ceremony of proof that despots, tyrants and oppressors were redundant where a marriage of mankind took place. This was to be a harmonious and an irenic, long-awaited interface with a free Universe. A common ground and communion of an unfettered-mankind and the 'great beyond', with the unconfined and infinite rolling pastures of the Cosmos. The liberation of Earth from humankind's abrasive arms-inpired ways. "Ahh," Lovesigh suspired, somewhere all by himself, "a way to Penelope."

"Professor?"

Lovesigh returned. A daze in his eyes.

Resolutely as he could Lovesigh went on.

"We're not deities, Mr. Fagan, gentlemen." The words came slowly, thoughtfully slow. "Only toddlers playing roles of Gods."

Now, after the initial exhilaration of actually confronting his resolution had worn off, Lovesigh sounded more drawn, spent. Rest. His eyes craved to close for ever.

Not yet. He spurred himself.

He turned his head.

"Michael, please patch your terminal output to the upper monitor," he said. "Let's take a look at the computer's specifications."

Michael engaged a set of electronic links from the main memory banks. A whirring syncopated with a humming somewhere along the metallic frames encompassing them. Patters of buffered crackling and popping over-spilled their enclosures to carry over to the staring team.

Overhead a square three-by-three meter screen erupted to life. Initially, glittering specks of brisk, brilliant lights swelled upon it.

Heads turned to it.

The room lighting dimmed.

The huge, veritable definition projector fully burst on with a snap.

Fagan looked up. Gasped. An unfamiliar falling sensation emptied his lungs, like dropping in deep space. Into eternity. He peered into the firmament: countless stars and clusters of stars and a quarter of the Milky Way -- an amethyst of dazzle that waned all else in the room.

"Sixty seconds ... " Michael's voice dithered. Harmony and chaos, creation unlimited, gloried before them. He had swiveled around to face the screen too. Michael upped his head, and cringed. He had confronted the gigantic hanging screen only once, too long before.

"What are we looking for?" Fagan asked, riddled. He was looking up, his mouth half-open.

"Magic."

Just then a score-and-a-half sets of brows pranced.

"Excuse my Laconic vain," the voice held a remnant of intensity. "But it is sometimes wise to cater to the paradox."

The astric plane rushed away leaving a tangled weave of tracers. A blurred blitz quickly stabilized, bloomed, and began a lethargic rotation.

Now on the screen scrolled passages of technical data with scattered symbols and diagrams.

They speed-read.

Chickbrow nodded to himself several times.

"I'm with you so far," he said.

"Good. Because here's the magic ... "

Fagan tried to scan each spec sheet a second time. His eye straining, caught in the text.

" ... Gentlemen, Mr. Fagan, Mr. Chickbrow," Lovesigh's voice was less subdued now. "Mohammed will go to the mountain. For, to bring back to me my health is to bring a star to Earth, or the mountain to the Prophet. Just as well, it will only be a postponement of the inevitable -- my eventual lapse to an incurable disease again and irreparable decay. But to install my brain into the ALPHA and have the 'mites do their handiwork, interface the surface synapses to it -- would it not solve most all of our problems?"

Fagan's left eye began to twitch hysterically. Discreetly he placed one hand over it and slowly turned to Chickbrow.

" ... And allow me -- right there, inside its guts -- to reckon with the last bit of flack the machine has been ladling out."

Chickbrow made a steeple with his hands. "Conceivable," he mumbled mostly to himself.

"Mr. Chickbrow, do you have a precedence along these lines?" Fagan snorted. There was a flushed spot, getting redder, between his glistening temples.

"No, not to this degree. But 'mites have been programmed to splice neurons before. In theory -- "

" -- Not theory, human brain tissue, sir!" Fagan's other eye was about to set off.

"Champ for one -- "

"Champ is a chimp, Mr. Chickbrow, and whatever else might survive, the human brain might not, and -- "

" -- and it had a ninety-nine point naught-naught-two-five success," Chickbrow related composed. "Mr. Fagan," he continued with disarming lacquer, "we are more than reasonably near to zero-risk here. We will not synthesize the synapses only interface them. This presents no departure, in the slightest, from the chimpanzee procedure. It would of course involve an extended brain micro-scan, a spot-melding map of several billion axons, dendrites too, of the cerebral hemispheres -- "

"Is it feasible?"

For the first time there was emotion discernible in Chickbrow's eyes. He seemed to show somewhat wounded. "It is."

"The figures. Give me figures, Mr. Chickbrow."

"Given time -- fail-safe."

"How much time?" Fagan's eyes were shut.

Chickbrow gave him a good looking over. "Fifty days to two full months to do the scans, program the ant-mites, modify the computer to support a life sustaining system, and manufacture the mono-molecular filament clusters -- sixty days is more likely."

Fagan then only had ventured to open both eyes. He looked, glared rather, with straining open lids at Dr. Lovesigh and had made his pronouncement.

"Time-wise it's acceptable."

Past the initial amusement, that night of two-and-a-half months ago, Dr. Lovesigh had gazed again outside his study's window. The memories of her remained powerful for him. Their glow of hope and assurance in faith lighted an otherwise drained face. Queerly, his sapphire eyes seemed to blend quite markedly with the feebly stirring sparks above the panes of glass.

He had listened as the stars, the galaxies, the nebulas called to him once again. And there was this urge too, ever since he had met the Hellene boy, Peri, thirty years in all. A restless, relentless craving to pilgrimage to the youth's ancestral land, to climb that lofty Mountain of The Gods.

He had taken a deep breath and steadied himself. And had replied. An infirm mumbling at first. Then, more solidly.

"I'm coming, Penelope Lovesigh, either way, I'm coming."

***

[Had Alex Rhodes known Barbara, he would have discovered that they had traveled from Nice to Athens on the same Olympic flight. He and the crew of the fifteen-meter schooner had successfully crossed the Atlantic, only to run upon a reef in the shallows just outside the south of France. The sharp, hard substance carved through the vessel's submerged starboard side like a hacksaw through balsam. Making some quick but temporary repairs held the large craft on the surface till they reached land. But the damage was so extensive that it made it necessary to abandon the clipper in a marina for repairs. Alex, as well as the rest of the school's delegation, dispersed, each seeking quick means of commuting to Athens. P.P.]

Alex's luck stood out as one last seat awaited him at Nice, the relay stop of the New York to Athens Olympic flight. One of its passengers, an burly elderly man, had minutes before been taken with a heart condition to a local clinic.

When the plane took off, Alex mused at the prospect of again seeing his mentor and colleague from the Institute. Dr. Mettropoulos, or rather, Father Lukas Mett(ropoulos) had been a close acquaintance as well as an inspiring and brilliant teacher in his early years at MIT. For reasons known to Alex only, the Priest most always included him as assistant to the multi-phased research of the MA. The delicate and sophisticated electronic set-ups somehow generated zero defects when Alex headed the team. The circuitry, nano-integrated, hard or soft, turned out flawless and free of faults -- a statistical improbability, but nevertheless accepted with little or no fuss.

Since the Priest made no inquiries, Alex Rhodes refrained from volunteering any explanations. Both wanted to see the MA complete. The use of any form of genius was of secondary importance; the minute but vital to the event tell-tails raised insignificantly few brows to warrant further investigation. Time and budget economy had been the essence on this project from its very start. No one, not even its acclaimed creator, had given substance to rumors of unexplainable circuitry being present where none had been designed or assembled. Shop and as-built diagrams compiled a fairly-sized library, and there was no margin in expenditures for staffing a separate group to cross-check the two minutely.

Even if such did exist, Alex was well aware that the subtle and intricate tampering could not have been traced to him or anyone for that matter. The vastness of the project was such that no funding could set off the cost or set back of such a auditing operation. No, he thought, only one other mind could detect the circuit clones. Dr. Lukas's. But in the times they had worked together, nothing had been said or even hinted. Leave well enough alone, had been his thought. At least, until it was deemed necessary to confess his own feats. His personal signature on the MA, along with that of the Priest's.

There was no deception intended or committed on his part, Alex reconfirmed to himself. Only tiny gaps, missing pieces in an otherwise work of engineering insight and scientific art. Both Lukas and he seemed to have conceptualized and even have an awareness of -- possibly from the same unorthodox common core instituted upon physical laws and mathematical axioms that extended, governed indeed a most unorthodox and potent reality -- an alternate, but symbiotic mental presence.

A drop of sweat rolled down Alex's cheek. Why had they then not ever spoken of it?

It was night when the airplane approached Spata's West terminal. In the half hour they circled the vicinity of the airport his eyes scanned the passenger cabin, then the crew's fuselage. All the while, an isometric copy of the plane's circuitry imprinted upon a portion of his brain. No details were missing. Each strand of electrical wire and module of component was there. A quick blink and Alex, in his mind, sensed which circuits were at that instant active, guiding the Ram Plane on its assigned circular route low over the heavily-populated neighborhoods.

Amidst the maze of power generation circuits and clicking relays located aft in the luggage compartment, a sizable spark released a puff of smoke as metal contacts fused together. The port outer breaking flap froze. Automatically its starboard counterpart increased its angle of elevation compensating for the imbalance in wind drag and stabilizing the flight at the expense of optimum overall navigating agility.

Alex saw no immediate danger to the craft or its passengers from the shorted relay that could have been repaired as soon as they had landed. The breaker, however, on the pilot's instrument board did not fall -- the thermal element, Alex saw, had corroded. As the contacts of the defective relay heated unchecked, spurtings of melted metal began to rain over the rear cargo of packetted newspapers and magazines.

The unsuspecting crew and passengers would have called it an optical illusion had they witnessed it. None, of course, were aware of the quick and actual growing of a brand new thermal element in the breaker above the co-pilot's head.

Three seconds later the breaker's mechanism functioned with an audible "click" and an auburn light flashed below it. The co-pilot, a graduate of Annapolis Space Academy and a Mexican War veteran, instantly grasped the trouble and without bothering the pilot about it, tripped on a second by pass circuit. Another relay next to the smoldering one was energized and the flap responded to life.

Simultaneously, the remote smoke sensors activated the extinguishing system -- part of the same circuit -- filling the small cargo space aft in the planes belly with CO2 and white fire-smothering foam. It was at this time the pilot himself noticed the blinking red light.

"Under control, chief," the co-pilot said, seeing the concerned look on his colleague's face. The flashing fire indicator light stopped its alert. "A short in the cargo compartment, but now under control," the co-pilot reassured.

"Too much of a 'short', wouldn't you say?" the experienced pilot commented. "Put in your report the incident and, Jack, get these breakers thoroughly checked. That was too much of a delay for a breaker to fall. I tell you, they don't make 'em like they used to."

The younger co-pilot pressed his lips into a smile and nodded in the direction of the gray-haired commander. "No, sir, they don't."

A few minutes later, the plane coasted into a normal landing. Alex took a peek into the crew's cab as he passed by on his way out and saw the two men standing, one with hands on hips and the other pointing indicatively to a certain breaker on a huge panel above them. Again, Alex knew they couldn't trace the event to anything of his doing. But they would have a hell of a headache after they open the breaker and discover a shiny new element beside a corroded old one. Engineers, he thought, short circuit not too unlike components they work with daily. He knew from his own experience; his very own refusal of accepting what he was capable of performing.

"How can things grow from inanimate dead matter?" he had asked himself over and over in the beginning, not daring to expose any of this to anyone.

Now he was accustomed to it, even used it quite creatively. But with discretion always.

After laboring through a crowded passport control and customs he flagged a taxi outside. While Barbara was on her way to Frank's hotel, his own taxi driver wormed through heavy traffic and remote side streets, homing in gradually to Amanda's address in the eastern suburbs, six days sooner than expected.

***

As the second day after the radical change that had befallen the city dawned, Father Lukas pushed the covers aside and hastily rose from a troubled night's sleep. He threw a robe over his lean shoulders and, barefoot headed to answer the door bell.

Immediately, he recognized the somewhat shorter than himself figure that was standing outside. He was not surprised or taken back by the other's presence. On the contrary, he welcomed it.

Alexander Rhodes had a way of popping up when you least expected him, yet you needed him the most. For a fraction of a second, the priest's mind made a curious association, but this quickly gave way as warm and friendly handshaking commenced.

The priest led him by the shoulders into the kitchen and as the other took a seat, he commenced preparing a pot of coffee.

"I didn't know the School of Engineering had the budget to send its very own delegate here," Lukas said, leaning over the kitchen range.

"It isn't just the School, Dr. Lukas, it's the Institute itself; and the sponsorship encompasses several of the science schools besides. The others are on their way."

While Alex explained the previous night's difficulties at not finding a hotel room and later locating and getting to the priest's apartment, Father Lukas poured hot coffee into their cups.

"I wouldn't have imposed on you," Alex said, "but Amanda, my sister, wasn't to be found anywhere last night ... "

"Of course! Amanda Rhodes. That's the resemblance." The priest completed the association out loud.

"You know her?"

"Yes indeed. Small world, isn't it?" Father Lukas said, not wanting to delineate too much on the subject. Yet, the blood tie may have had much more in common than kinship.

His mind rapidly went over the other man's past and their co-efforts on the various projects. Though Alex Rhodes's presence was indispensable in critical and successful phases of each, there was nothing out of the ordinary or mystifying he could pinpoint and use as a springboard.

Nothing but some obscure rumors. And what were they? he asked himself in silence as he blew on the scalding coffee and took sips now and then. No solid testimony, only hearsay of circuits unexplainably appearing or changing where no plans or records of such modifications existed --

Transmutation!

He had to know. There wasn't much time either. He would have to reveal soon enough to the other where his sister was; and worse, how it came by that in less than two hours he and two others would be leaving the city to go and meet up with Amanda.

"It's funny," Alex said after a few of his own sips of the coffee, "I couldn't get through on the telephone but did send a telegram the day before. Shouldn't she have gotten it? Left me some kind of a message, where I could find her. Her and Mark?"

"Mark?" the priest inquired.

"My brother, twin brother, Dr. Lukas. He was to arrive yesterday on the Athens Express. I was to come five-six days from now, but ... "

Alex gave a rundown of the mishap at sea and the change in plans. It gave badly needed time for Father Lukas to think of what to say next.

"With all this havoc in the city, I was concerned about your sister's well-being. Fortunately, through a common friend, I was able to locate her." The impromptu excuse he was about to use would give him the time. It would also justify his and Frank's, as well as Frank's ex-wife's, leaving with them. "You may even know my friend. His name is Frank Patroni."

"Frank's here, too?"

"Yes, and ... " the priest hesitated, "and Barbara, his divorced wife."

"I've heard about the marriage. But don't know her personally." He seemed puzzled as he looked up from his empty cup. "Never could figure out how things had such a turn of fate. Amanda and Frank ... well, they were quite close, you know."

The priest attempted to fill in blanks and steer the conversation away from the inevitable. Again groping for more time. "Well then. No better place to reminisce, perhaps even solve some old differences, than on a quaint village below old Olympus. Matter of fact, Frank and I both would like to get together with Amanda. Now that you're here, we can all go together. We need, all of us, to get away a few days from this unfortunate city."

"I didn't want to burden you further, take you away from your work, but I do need somebody to show me around," said Alex.

"We'll do more than that, Alex. I'll fill you in, in the meantime, on what's been happening here. It'll give you a working knowledge."

Lukas excused himself and went into the room where the phone and his computer were. Although the trip had been already arranged late the night before, when he had gotten a call through to Frank at the hotel, the priest did not want to surprise him by suddenly appearing at the Piraeus dock with Alex. It was also necessary to alert Frank to the fact that the other knew nothing of their true reasons for going to Amanda. Most importantly, he wanted to check Alex. And his twin brother, Mark. And Frank was the only one who could do it.

"Help yourself to more coffee. I won't be long," he called out.

"Thanks -- couldn't ask for more."

Lukas did not take the time to dial the hotel number. There was no chance of getting a line. Like the night before, he simply placed a couple of fingers on two contacts on the back side of his computer. Miroswitches began closing as a strong composite signal reached them through a network jammed with other weaker signals.

A few seconds later, Frank picked up the telephone. Crisp and loud came Father Lukas' voice.

The priest's still lips gave no hint of even a whisper taking place, but already numerous bits of information had been exchanged as in an otherwise normal telephone conversation on Patroni's side.

"Will you do it, Frank?" the priest was asking with his voiceless mode on his side of the line.

"I can't very well say no," registered the reply in the priest's head.

"You can indeed, Frank. I, nobody, can make you. You know that. But if Alex and Mark are not 'like us', I believe we'll be making a mistake telling them about their sister," said the priest silently into the circuit.

"I don't object to your line of reasoning, Lukas. What I meant is that -- " the phone went momentarily dumb.

"Frank, what is it?" A frown wrinkled the priest's forehead.

"Amanda is," the words seemed to come with great difficulty, "not the only woman -- Barbara, too, has a little problem with her strength ... "

***

Alex Rhodes upon thinking of seeing his sister soon broke into a big hardy smile. He wanted embraced her dearly and spin her around.

She was so fragile.

So much more so than Mark.

Both Amanda and Mark, Alex knew, looked upon him as the big brother in the family. Although his birth preceded Mark's only by a few minutes, the tradition held. As though the minutes counted for years.

Alex could accept that tradition took precedence. He could not believe, however, that he, due to his more tensile nature, was in a way stronger than the other two. True, emotions never hindered his actions. They were never allowed to influence his logic and bearing in life either. But he followed this course in his life out of perhaps deeper convictions.

When their father passed away Alex did not allow himself to show the grief that overwhelmed him. There was so much of it in the rest of his family. And he could not do otherwise than feel committed; consigned and ethically delegated to do his best to alleviate it from the two who were struck by it most. So he comforted them. He watched over them. Went out of his way to cover their own desperate needs and deprivations. And, in doing this, he fulfilled his own needs and atrophies.

Intuitively he believed that he, Alex Rhodes, must console them. That he must protect them.

To him, it was Mark who, for some unknown reason, had suffered most. Amanda had been sad and grieved by the loss. But Mark had been mauled. He was subdued by a distress that was unrelenting, that cruelly mangle him; that never quite left him alone, in peace.

Mark and he slept in the same room till they left home to go to college. Many atime Alex had been awakened by an outcrying Mark. A Mark soaked in sweat. Shivering like a wet fish. He would calm him. Speak to him. Sit next to him. Lay his hand on his shoulder till sleep came; often for hours. At times, till dawn.

Alex believed that it had been this hypersensitive condition of his that steered his brother to chose to study psychology. Although he suggested for them to go to the same University, Mark insisted that he should try it alone.

Alex had agreed.

It had been then and there that their paths separated.

They would get together over the holidays at home. Once in a while each would drop in on the other's campus. But with the years they saw less and less of each other.

Alex was partially happy seeing his brother little-by-little became stronger and more self dependent. On one occasion Mark had opened up and told him that the nightmares grew fewer; and at times days would pass without having any. On the other hand, Alex himself was troubled over the years. Preoccupied by something not he even was sure about.

Just before the accident, only for fractions of a second, he thought he had seen something. Ahead of the car, just for an instant the road had disappeared. In its place a huge 'space' materialized. He had glimpsed at a sky with stars, and below it an openness with tall shapes pulsing with light and color ... and directly in front, a colossal red-veined many-sided structure.

The image had been branded in his brain: The startling living scarlets interwoven around a lucid angular core that seemed to hold his very soul. He could not eradicate this feeling he had of possession and subjugation ever since.

He often tried dismissing it. Saying that he had seen nothing. That he had been in a delirium brought on by the shock of the accident. That he imagined the whole thing at a moment of intense instinctive flight from reality just before the violence of the impact. But had it been so, it would have been easy to be forgotten, like so many other imressions life fosters. Be lost in time's passing. But no. It was not so here. This thing persisted, adamant, unadulterated, fixed.

Sparsely, but relentlessly, dreams befell upon him. Dreams that, not unlike Mark's, robbed him of his breath, and left him hollow. Visions that drained his identity, all of it. Left terror and unearthly sensations in its place. However, he had managed to go along with their blows, able to endure them, not resist them. At a point he even encouraged them coming, and often intimidated and challenged what they had brought to show him. He was motivated to do so by an abstract boldness that rose out his repulsion and loathing for all and any ruthlessness and subjugation by any form of bullying.

At the same time, another part of him combated patiently against these intruders. The incentive in this case did not come from vengeance, but from indignation. Seeing Marks suffer all those sleepless nights aroused in him daring questions. Might not the dreams be the same to the ones Mark had? Identical to the nightmares that bent and tormented the sensitive boy? Was it not possible, being twins, they shared alike the haunting visions in their sleep? These questions, and more, rummaged through his mind now for years.

The other questions spurted directly from a sorcery that had become a well-established part of his life. This competence to transfigure and mold extensions on circuits and innate mechanisms.

How hard it had been to keep it hidden, mostly those first years, when it had both fascinated and confused him. He had especially become apprehensive and was daunted by this slight whisper in his head that accompanied each occasion of trial and experimentation. How clearly it guided his layman efforts step by step till he became a master at his 'magic'.

But after ... the whisper had been heard of no more. Its only bequeathment had been the knowledge left upon him. The gift of the cloning of dead matter from and upon other dead matter.

During his adolescent years, when all this was transpiring, he had been too timid and unsure to look into it in any great detail. But as maturity ripened him and his inquiring mind, the adult Alex could not just accept it as a heavenly dropped talent upon his 'selected' being. It was hard enough having faith in the miracles of a Moses and a Christ without vocally protesting any doubt, let alone this.

Now, every time he thought of what he was capable of doing, the vastness of responsibility and consequence leadening his shoulders, these same protests magnified to a mind-cringing toll that deafened him. Reason and his education in the sciences simply could not accept sorcery as part of the real world.

Down to earth that he was he did not believe in the supernatural or paranormal. In unexplained as yet phenomena, yes -- but he was not an occultist. He did not take to Cinderella or Midas type transmutations. God made the Universe to conform to and abide by natural laws. Although this Creation was the greatest of His wonders, still, to science, it was no Biblical miracle. It had been a cause and effect result; moreover, it was an unexplained as yet phenomenon that man nevertheless had already begun to home in on. History had shown that nothing is spared from man's inquisitive nature. It would be this trait, he suspected, if anything, that one day perhaps will actually evince a genuine miracle from man -- man the extension of God -- as it transpires, and allow us to study it as well as marvel at it.

Alex believed in man.

He did not know if a God existed.

If One really did, he thought, He surely could not have been captured by man if man had been an isolated and incomplete genius. No creation could equal its Creator; not unless it was created in His image, was part of His essence. Alex did not know if man was truly the essence of God, but he wanted to believed that he was. More so than in any Divine intervention of sorts.

Then again, there was the priest.

A mind that could not be equaled. Which had no counterpart, ever. What did he see? To keep his faith meant that he believed.

But in which face of God?

What made him embrace science?

Was not God enough?

Was it all one and the same?

And Amanda, his sister? What was she doing in the midst of this? Alex queried himself, relentlessly.

And Frank?

Two people so close once, to separate suddenly? What caused their break up?

No matter what the answers were, Alex was glad he was here. He had missed Amanda. He was nostalgic of the old times when she would pick up her guitar and go into Bach and Vivaldi. When at a blink of an eye she would change repertoire and from the chords produce a Mediaeval Spain and a Renaissance Florence. She had so much talent, yet he doubted that she realized it, had ever even tried to apply it fully.

It was just like her to be this way. To place herself last. Not to believe the praise that others bestowed upon her for her unparalleled musical charisma. Moderation was not the word for Amanda. Humility was. She had been and was, since he could remember, a closed yet searching person who placed unreasonably little impotence in her being; and who much more easily gave than accepted. Her future would have evolved into brilliant success had she not just packed up and left for the ends of Earth that day five years back. And to what ends?

He could only think of two. First, to escape from a broken relationship. Second, to become familiar with the land their father was born in, and of which he spoke so often and nostalgically.

Alex, himself, wondered what this place of myth and stirring, this hearth of civilization was like. Besides hearing about it from his father, it seemed that so much had its beginning here. So much that was genuine. That truly counted. There had been few books he had read or studied that had not at some point referred to this neglected, if not forgotten, niche of Creation. He could not help but wonder what it was that had made this tiny Hellenic peninsula the epicenter of art, science and humanity?

What did Hellas have that made her already incomparably learned -- in such deep and far ancient times -- when the rest of the world still floundered and struggled in barbarism? What induced the Hellenes to be at a level of giving the final touches to the Parthenon, and weighing pensively philosophical deliberation on Socratic Agape (Love) and Arete (Virtue), when others were at a state of -- just then were -- discovering the long boat?

What had propelled this nook of the world, had launched it, millennia ahead of its contemporaries?

Had it been at an optimal geographic venue? Had it been its landscape and climatic location, unique due to its natural aesthetic pliability and mildness of weather? Were the people at cause? Had it been because they were a rare, but sapient, rather than a volatile composite, stock, of bloods; that of Pelasgians, Aeolians, Ionians, Dorians, Achaeans that somehow had discovered that instead of consuming their energy in conquering other peoples they would benefit more by utilizing it in successfully studying the Self? Was this place a land of broad blends and wide experiences because these peoples had developed methodically their commerce, science, art, humanities and the concept of the awareness of the Self higher than elsewhere owing to this point of the Aegean, owing to their crossroads location? How much of the old golden glory, the Hellenic spirit, the gift of their once renown genius remained still in their genes? Finally, why had Hellas once again become the epicenter of civilization?

Why this corner of the world and not a Sinai? Why not a Bethlehem? If a Messiah is to come, Alex speculated, will he now descend from Olympus?

© 1999 Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

A short biography. I am an ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) teacher in Athens, Greece. I have been teaching English on-and-off since 1968, and full-time for the last fifteen years. Prior to that I worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. I went to university in the United States where I received my degrees. My writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Some stateside publications I have written for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. I have received several Distinctive Certificates from WD Writing Competitions held over the years, and also Honorary Mention in my Greek works(narrative and poetry) here in Athens. In Greece I've been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in a local newspaper. My email address is vafx@hol.gr for your comments. Some other e-zines that have puplished my stories in are The Domain, Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, Dark Planet, Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians, Newwords, Zine in Time, and a couple dozen more.

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