Judgment Passed

by Jerry Oltion

Jerry Oltion is the author the novels Paradise Passed, The Getaway Special, Anywhere But Here, and several others. In 1998, he won the Nebula Award for his novella "Abandon in Place," which he later expanded into a novel. He is also the author of more than 100 short stories, most of which have appeared in the pages of F&SF and Analog.
 
"Judgment Passed," which is original to this volume, tells of the Biblical day of judgment from a rationalist viewpoint; a starship crew returns to Earth to find that the rapture has occurred without them.  Oltion has strong views on religion—namely that it's a scourge on humanity—that led him to write this story, which speculates on whether or not being "left behind" would be such a bad thing.

 

 

It was cold that morning, and the snow squeaked beneath my boots as I walked up the lane in search of Jody. Last night's storm had left an ankle-deep layer of fresh powder over the week-old crust, and her tracks stood out sharp and clear as they led away through the bare skeletons of aspen trees and out of sight around the bend. She had gone toward the mountains. I didn't need to see her tracks to know that she had gone alone.

Except for Jody's footprints there was no sign of humanity anywhere. My boots on the snow made the only sound in the forest, and the only motion other than my own was in the clouds that puffed away behind me with every breath. Insulated as I was inside my down-filled coat, I felt an overwhelming sense of solitude. I knew why Jody had come this way. In a place that was supposed to be empty, she wouldn't find herself looking for people who weren't there.

I found her sitting on a rail fence, staring out across a snow-covered field at the mountains. She sat on the bottom rail with her chin resting on her mittened hands on the top rail. Her shoulder-length brown hair stuck out below a green stocking cap. There were trenches dug in the snow where she had been swinging her feet. She turned her head as I squeaked up behind her, said, "Hi, Gregor," then turned back to the mountains. I sat down beside her, propping my chin on my hands like she had, and looked up at them myself.

Sunlight was shining full on the peaks, making the snowfields glow brilliant white and giving the rocks a color of false warmth. No trees grew on their jagged flanks. They were nothing but rock and ice.

The Tetons, I thought. God's country. How true that had proved to be.

"I'd forgotten how impressive mountains could be," I said, my breath frosting the edges of my gloves.

"So had I," she said. "It's been a long time."

Twelve years. Five years going, five years coming, and two years spent there, on a dusty planet around a foreign star.

She said, "There was nothing like this on Dessica."

"No glaciers. It takes glaciers to carve up a mountain like that."

"Hmm."

We stared up at the sunlit peaks, each thinking our own thoughts. I thought about Dessica. We'd waited two months after landing to name it, but the decision was unanimous. Hot, dry, with dust storms that could blow for weeks at a time—if ever there was a Hell, that place had to be it. But eight of us had stayed there for two years, exploring and collecting data; the first interstellar expedition at work. And then we had packed up and come back—to an empty Earth. Not a soul left anywhere. Nothing to greet us but wild animals and abandoned cities full of yellowed newspapers, four years old.

According to those papers, this was where Jesus had first appeared. Not in Jerusalem, nor at the Vatican, nor even Salt Lake City. The Grand Teton. Tallest of the range, ruggedly beautiful, a fitting monument to the Son of God. I could almost see Him myself, floating down from the peak and alighting next to the Chapel of the Transfiguration back by the lodge where we'd spent the night. Hard as it was to believe, it was easy to imagine.

What came next was the hard part. He'd apparently given people six days to prepare themselves, then on the seventh He had called them all to judgment. No special call for the faithful, no time of tribulation for the unbelievers; He'd hauled everyone off at once, presumably to sort them out later. The newspapers were silent on the method He'd used, all the reporters and editors and press operators apparently caught up in the moment along with everyone else, but I couldn't imagine how it had worked. Most people had expected to rise into the sky; but above 15,000 feet they would start to asphyxiate and above 40,000 or so their blood would boil. Not quite the sort of thing I imagined even the Old Testament God would want His faithful to endure. Slipping into an alternate dimension seemed more likely, but I couldn't imagine what that would be like, either.

Trying to visualize the unimaginable reminded me why I'd come looking for Judy. "The captain's going to be holding services in a little while. She thought maybe you'd like to be there."

Jody looked over at me with an expression usually reserved for a stupid younger brother. "Why, to pray? To try getting God's attention?"

I nodded. "Dave talked her into it. He figures the more of us doing it, the stronger the signal."

"Very scientific."

"Dave's an engineer. Gwen agrees with him."

"I suppose she's going to ask God to send Jesus back for us."

"That's the general idea, yeah," I said, beginning to get embarrassed.

She gave me the look again. "You don't really think it'll work, do you?"

"It's worth a try. It can't hurt, can it?"

She laughed. "Spoken like a true agnostic."

I shifted my weight so a knot on the fence rail would stop poking me in the thigh. The joint where the rail met the post squeaked. "We're all agnostic," I pointed out. "Or were." When the mission planners selected the crew, they had wanted people who made decisions based on the information at hand, not wishful thinking or hearsay. Those sort of people tended to be agnostic.

"I still am," she said.

I looked at her in surprise. "How can you be? The entire population of the world disappears, every newspaper we find has stories about the Second Coming of Christ—complete with pictures—and all the graveyards are empty. Doesn't that make a believer out of you?"

She shook her head and asked simply, "Why are we here?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean if I'm supposed to believe that Jesus came back for the second time, called the day of judgment and took every human soul to Heaven, then what are we doing here? Why didn't He take us, too?"

"We weren't on Earth."

"Neither were three thousand Lunar colonists, and they got taken."

"We were doing ninety-eight percent of the speed of light. We were three and a half light-years away."

"And so God missed us. That's my point. If He was omniscient He would have known we were there."

I'd been thinking about that myself in the days since we'd been home. "Maybe He did," I said.

"Huh?"

"Maybe God did know about us. Maybe He left us behind on purpose, as punishment for not believing in Him."

She snorted. "What about atheists, then? What about other agnostics? Why just us eight?"

I held up my gloved hands, palms up. "I don't know. I'm not God."

"If you were, you'd have done a better job."

I wasn't sure whether to take that as a compliment or what, so I decided to ignore it. "What do you think happened, then, if it wasn't God?"

"I don't know. Maybe aliens came and took us all for slaves. Maybe we were a lab experiment and they got all the data they needed. Maybe we taste like chicken. There are plenty of more believable explanations than God."

"What about the photos of Jesus?" I asked.

She rubbed her red nose with a mitten. "If you were going to harvest an entire planet's population, wouldn't you use their local religion to keep them in line?"

"Jesus wouldn't have much sway with Jews," I pointed out. "Or Moslems. Or atheists."

"So says the former agnostic who believes in him because of what he read in the paper." She said it kindly, but it still stung.

"Look," I said, "Gwen's going to start pretty soon. You coming or not?"

She shrugged. "What the hell. It ought to be fun listening to an agnostic sermon."

We swung our legs around off the fence rail and stood up, then started following our tracks back to the lodge, an enormous log hotel built around the turn of the last century to house the crush of tourists who came to visit one of the last unspoiled places on Earth.

I took Jody's right hand in my left as we walked. It was an unconsciously natural act; we weren't a pair at the moment, but we had been a few times. With the small crew on the ship and lots of time to experiment, we had tried just about every combination at least once. The warmth and comfort I felt as we walked through the fresh snow together made me glad we'd never broken up hard. It felt like maybe we were headed for another stretch of time together.

Jody must have been feeling the same way. When we got down in among the aspen trees, she said, "Assuming God really is behind all this, and it's not just some sort of enormous practical joke, then maybe this is a reward."

"A reward?"

She nodded. "I like it here. It's pretty, and peaceful. The last time I was here it was a zoo. Tourists wherever you looked, lines of motor homes and SUVs on the road as far as you could see, trash blowing all around. I feel like now I'm finally getting to see it the way it's supposed to be."

"The way God intended?"

"Yeah, maybe." She grinned an agnostic-theologian grin and said, "Maybe we're the next Ark. We were all set to start our own colony, after all. We're the best genetic stock the UN Space Authority could find, and we've got more fertilized ova in the freezer. Maybe God decided it would be a good time to clear away all the riff-raff and give humanity a fresh start."

"It's a little cold for Eden," I said.

"We've got the whole world," she pointed out.

I thought about that. I supposed we did, at least until the airplanes and hovercars all fell apart. There was no way eight people could maintain a technological civilization indefinitely. Our colonization equipment was designed to keep us at what the UN's social scientists called an "artificially augmented industrial age" until we could increase the population enough to build our own factories and so forth, but that level wasn't particularly cosmopolitan. The idea had been to pick a spot and settle in rather than to play tourist on a new planet. Of course the planet needed at least one habitable spot, which was why we'd given up after two years of searching and come home.

"I'd never considered just going on with our lives," I said. "I mean, after the Second Coming of Christ, that simply never occurred to me."

Jody shrugged. "We just landed; we've all been too busy trying to figure out what happened. Give 'em time, though, and I think most of us will start thinking about it. I mean, this could be all the Heaven we need if we do it right."

A sudden chill ran up my spine, and it wasn't from the snow. "We may not have time," I said. "If Gwen's little prayer meeting works, God may come back for us today."

Jody looked up at me, her face mirroring the concern in my own. "Damn," she said, then she took off running for the chapel. I took off after her, both of us shouting, "Gwen! Gwen, wait up!"

 

Running in snow isn't easy. Our feet punched right through the crust that had supported us when we'd been walking, and we wound up struggling for every step. We were both sweating and panting when we burst into the chapel, gasping for enough breath to cry out, "Don't pray!"

Gwen was standing behind the pulpit, wearing a long white robe with gold hems a hand's width wide. She'd found it in a closet in the priest's sacristy. The wall behind her was mostly window, affording the congregation—Dave and Maria and Hammad and Arjuna and Keung in the front pew—a fantastic view of the Tetons behind her own splendor. Everyone turned and looked at us as Jody said again, "Don't pray. We've got to think this through first."

Gwen frowned. "What's there to think through? We've got to contact God."

"Do we?"

"What do you mean? Of course we do. He left us behind!"

"Maybe that's a good thing." Tugging off her mittens, stocking hat, and coat as she talked, Jody told her what she'd told me, ending with, "So maybe we ought to just keep quiet and go on about our business."

Gwen had been shaking her head the whole time Jody had been speaking. She was a big woman, with a thick halo of curly black hair that wagged from side to side as she shook it. Now she said, "We don't know what that business is. This could just as easily be a test of some sort."

"Exactly! It could be a test, so I think we'd be smart to be careful what we ask for. We might get it."

Dave had been listening with as much impatience as Gwen. Before she could answer, he said, "If God intends for us to repopulate the Earth, wouldn't He have told us so? He told Noah what He wanted him to do."

Jody shrugged. "God was a lot more talkative in those days."

"If you believe the Judeo-Christian bible," Hammad put in.

"The Christian Day of Judgment has come and gone," Gwen said. "What else are we supposed to believe?"

Hammad spread his hands to indicate the chapel, and by implication everything beyond it. "We should believe what we have always believed: the evidence of our own senses. The Earth has been depopulated. Newspapers left behind tell us a being calling himself Jesus Christ claimed responsibility. Beyond that we can only speculate."

"Wait a minute," Maria said, but before she had a chance to finish her thought Arjuna said, "We can too—" and Keung said, "Yeah, what about—" and the room descended into babble.

Gwen hadn't been chosen captain for nothing. She let it go on for a few seconds, then shouted at top volume, "Quiet!"

The chapel grew quiet.

"All right," she said into the silence. "I obviously made a false assumption when I thought we all wanted to ask God to come back for us. Jody doesn't think we should try to contact Him at all. What do the rest of you think?"

A chorus of voices nearly drowned her out again. "One at a time," she yelled. "You, Dave."

"I think we should ask His forgiveness and ask Him to take us with Him."

"Hammad?"

"Ask what He wants us to do, rather than just assume."

"Maria?"

"I . . .uh, I definitely think we should try to contact Him, but I think Hammad kind of makes sense, actually."

"Thank you," said Hammad.

Gwen looked at me. "Gregor?"

I looked at Hammad, then at Jody. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to call His attention to us at all. Depending on whose version of Christianity is true, we could do a lot worse than where we are now."

"Arjuna?"

Arjuna said, "I kind of agree with Jody and Gregor, except I wonder what we'd do if God decides to turn out the lights."

"It's been four years," Hammad said.

"That doesn't mean—" Dave said, and the babble started up again.

"Quiet!" shouted Gwen. She snatched the wooden cross from the front of the pulpit and banged it down like a gavel on the angled top. "All right," she said when we'd quieted down, "let's try this again. Keung, what do you think?"

Keung shrugged. "I don't think it matters. If we can reach Him with prayer, then one of us would have done it already. I think if we can get His attention at all, then there's no point in hiding out because He'll eventually realize we're here."

"Is that a vote for or against praying to Him?"

"It's an 'I don't care.'"

Gwen nodded. "Well then, it looks like the prayer contingent wins, but I don't see anything wrong with asking politely what God intends for us to do before we start begging for divine intervention. Can we all agree on that?"

"No," Jody said, but Dave's and Maria's and Hammad's assent was louder.

Gwen said, "Jody, Keung's right; if prayer works, then somebody's bound to get God's attention sooner or later."

"No they're not," Jody said. "There's millions of guns lying around, but that doesn't mean we have to start shooting each other with them. We don't have to pray."

"I do," Dave said.

Jody stared at him a moment, then shook her head and picked up her coat and hat and mittens again. "I'll wait outside, then," she said, brushing past me toward the door. "Maybe He'll miss me again when he comes for you idiots."

I followed her out. I hadn't taken my coat off, just unzipped it; the cold air felt good through my shirt.

"Idiots," Jody said again when we were alone. "They're playing with dynamite in there. Worse. Antimatter."

"Maybe literally," I said. "Who knows what God might be made of."

"Aaahhh, God, God, God," she growled. "I'm sick of the whole subject. I wish He'd just stayed the hell out of my life."

I poked a finger in her ribs. "He did, silly."

"It's not funny."

"Sure it is. We've spent our whole lives saying it didn't matter what we thought or did about religion, since the truth is inherently unknowable, and now we're afraid somebody is going to pray us out of existence. I think it's hilarious."

We were walking back toward the guest lodge along a path surrounded by pine trees and snowbanks. On impulse I reached up and slapped a branch just as Jody walked under it. "Yow!" she screamed as a clump of snow went down her neck, and before I could back out of range she bent down, scooped up a handful, and hurled it at my face. I stumbled backward and sat down unexpectedly in a snowbank, which saved me from another faceful that flew over my head instead.

As long as I was on the ground I figured I might as well defend myself, so I started throwing snow back at her as fast as I could scoop it up. It was too cold to stick into balls, so we just shovelled it at each other, shrieking and laughing like fools while the rest of humanity prayed for a miracle.

 

The prayer meeting broke up a half hour or so later. By then Jody and I were snuggling on the bear rug in front of the lodge's main fireplace, an enormous flagstone construction with a firebox big enough to roast a hovercar in. Hammad found us first.

"We seem to have failed in raising the deity," he said as he stripped off his coat and hung it over a peg on the wall. "Unless of course there's a time-lag involved."

"Oh great," said Jody. "Now I'll be waiting all night for the skies to open and a choir of angels to wake me up."

"By the looks of you two, you won't be sleeping much in the first place, unless it's from exhaustion." He sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs beside us and stuck his feet toward the flames. "You know, I think you have the right of it," he said. "We should get on with our lives, and let God get on with His. I have to admit I feel greatly relieved to have missed all the commotion."

"Me too," I said. "Ever since we found out He exists, I've felt like an outsider in gang territory. I keep waiting for the tap on the shoulder that means I'm in big trouble."

"I wonder if that's how religious people normally felt?" asked Jody. "Tiptoeing through life so they wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention."

Hammad shook his head. "I doubt if most people even considered it that way. They probably—"

The solid wood door banged open and Dave, Gwen, and the others came in, stomping snow from their boots and talking. Dave glared at Jody and me and took off for his room or somewhere, but Gwen, Maria, Arjuna, and Keung took off their coats and joined us by the fire.

"Well, at least we can say we tried," Gwen said as she presented her backside to the flames. She had left the robe in the chapel and was wearing a regular shirt and pants.

"So what now?" asked Jody. "Travel? Sightsee? Play with the leftover toys before they all rust back into the ground? Or do we get straight to work starting a colony?"

Arjuna said, "No offense, but after twelve years of close contact with you guys I'm ready for some time alone."

Keung edged playfully away from her, but he said, "My sentiments exactly. I wouldn't mind having a whole continent to myself for a while."

Maria looked shocked. "Wait a minute. Splitting up could mean some of us might get left behind again if God comes back."

"He's not coming back," Keung said.

"What makes you so sure?"

He shrugged. "I'm not, actually, but I didn't spend my whole life disregarding the issue just to start worrying about it now. If He comes for me, He comes, and if not, that's fine too. I've got plenty to do on my own."

"That's kind of how I feel about it," I said. "I'd like to see the world a little while I've got the chance."

"Me too," said Jody.

Gwen turned around to face the fire, saying over her shoulder, "The satellite phone system still works, so it shouldn't be too hard to stay in touch. There's hundreds of cell phones right here in the hotel, and I'll bet at least some of them still have active accounts, paid automatically every month by credit card. It shouldn't be hard to find a working phone for each of us. Of course we don't all have to play tourist. Whoever wants to could start setting up the colony."

"Where?" Hammad asked.

"The Mediterranean," Arjuna said, just as I said, "California." We looked at each other for a moment, then I shrugged and said, "Okay, the Mediterranean."

A sharp bang sounded from the back of the lodge.

"That sounded like a gun," Gwen said, and she took off running down the hallway, shouting, "Dave! Dave!" the whole way. The rest of us followed close behind her, but I took the time to grab the fireplace poker. Maybe he'd committed suicide and maybe he hadn't. A poker wasn't much of a weapon against a gun, but it felt better than nothing.

We found Dave outside on the deck overlooking the Snake River, a shotgun in his hand and a mess of feathers and blood smeared across the snow. I could see bird seed among the feathers; evidently Dave had scattered a handful and waited for something to come for it. That something had been hardly bigger than a mouse by the looks of its remains.

"Kind of small for dinner, isn't it?" I asked, reaching out with the poker and flipping the tiny bird body over so I could see its underside.

"It's an experiment," Dave said. I was glad to see he was carefully pointing the shotgun away from everyone. "According to Jesus, not even a sparrow can fall without God noticing. I figured that would be pretty easy to test."

Jody had come up beside me and was examining the bird. "It would be if you'd managed to shoot a sparrow," she said. "This is a chickadee."

Dave blushed when we all laughed, but he said, "It's not the species; it's the concept."

"Whatever, it doesn't seem to be working."

"Maybe you should have tied a message to its foot first," I said.

Keung laughed. "You're supposed to use a pigeon for that."

"It's not funny," Dave snapped. He took a deep breath, then said, "I am trying to attract the attention of God. If you think it's funny or useless, I'm sorry, but I think it's important and I'm going to try everything I can until I get the job done."

"What's next?" Gwen asked him. "Sacrificing sheep? Rebuilding the Ark of the Covenant?"

"Whatever is necessary," Dave said.

I felt myself shivering, and when it didn't stop I suddenly realized all of us but Dave were out there without our coats.

"Come on," I said to Jody. "Let's get inside before we catch our death."

 

We left the next morning for Yellowstone Park. The rest of the crew split up for other parts of the globe, but Jody and I decided as long as we were that close we might as well visit the biggest tourist attraction in the world. We found a hovercar that still ran and whose diagnostics told us it would continue to run for another few hundred hours, tossed our personal belongings in the back, and flew low up the Snake River valley past Jackson Lake and into the park. We ignored the loading ramps and the rail cars that had ferried tourists through for the last fifty years, blowing right past the sign proclaiming it a federal crime to drive a private vehicle within the park's borders.

The forest seemed endless. We flew along the old roadbed down among the trees so we could see more of it, including the animals the park was famous for. In parts of the world where the human population had been denser, the ecosystem was still out of whack from our sudden disappearance, but Yellowstone had already reached a balance without us before the Second Coming. We watched moose and elk and buffalo plodding along like great hoofed snowplows, and we even caught a glimpse of a wolf drinking out of a stream near Old Faithful.

The geysers were probably the same as always, too, but with just the two of us standing there on the snow-covered boardwalk in front of Old Faithful it seemed to me that we must be watching its best eruption ever. Steam and boiling water shot up over a hundred feet in the air, and the ground shook with the force of its eruption.

"You know," Jody said as it subsided, "I just realized how silly it is to come here right now."

"Silly how?" I asked.

"If Dave succeeds in reaching God, we might have all of eternity to watch this sort of thing in action."

I looked out at the steaming mound of reddish rock, then at the brilliant white snowfield and green forest beyond it. "You talking about the pretty parts, or the hot parts?"

"Who knows?"

Yeah, who knew? I'd lived a perfectly moral life, by agnostic standards, but who could tell if that would be good enough for God? For that matter, who knew whether Heaven or Hell really existed, even now? So Jesus had come and taken everyone away; he could have hauled them to Andromeda for all we knew.

All the same, I wondered if we were wise for leaving Dave free to pursue God. The crew had talked about it before we'd gone our separate ways, but none of us knew what else we could do about him. He wouldn't rest until he'd tried everything he could think of, and none of us wanted to attempt confining him to prevent it. I suppose after the prayer meeting and the chickadee incident none of us really believed he would succeed, which was why we weren't more concerned about it. We were all hoping he'd give it up after a while and become the normal—if somewhat obsessive—friend and crewmember we'd all learned to live with.

 

We realized we'd made a mistake when Gwen got a call from him a few days later. She had formally renounced her title as captain and flown to Hawaii, but she was still acting as our coordinator. Dave had called to find out where the rest of us were, and when she'd asked him why, he would only tell her to warn us away from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or any place downwind of it.

"Downwind?" I asked when Gwen called us to relay his message. "What the hell is he trying this time?"

Jody and I were in the car again, headed north toward Mammoth hot springs. A ghost of Gwen's face peered at us through the phone's heads-up windshield display. "He wouldn't tell me," she replied. "He just said to keep everyone away from the American Midwest for a while."

"I bet he's going to blow up a nuclear bomb," Jody said. "Cheyenne's one of the Air Force bases where they stored them."

"A nuclear bomb?" asked Gwen. "What does that have to do with God?"

I laughed. "Maybe he thinks we just need to knock loud enough to be heard."

"Yeah, but where's the door?" Jody asked. "Certainly not in Cheyenne. I've been there; it's a dirty little government town out on the prairie."

My smile faded. "If physical location matters at all, I'd guess the Grand Teton, considering that's where Jesus showed up."

"He wouldn't nuke the Tetons, would he?" Jody asked, horrified at the thought.

"I don't know," Gwen said. "Probably not for his first shot, at least. He'll probably just lob one into Nebraska or somewhere. But if that doesn't work, then he might."

We'd been passing through a long straight notch cut in an ocean of lodgepole pine; I let off the throttle and the hovercar slid to a stop, snow billowing up all around it. "We're still in Yellowstone," I told Gwen, "but we could get to Cheyenne in—what, four hours? Five?" We'd been dawdling along on ground-effect until now, but we could fly as high as we liked if we had to.

"I don't know if that's a good idea or not," Gwen said. "I don't like the idea of you two heading toward a nuclear explosion."

"I don't exactly like it either," I said, "but I'm even less happy about the idea of him blowing up an entire mountain range just to get God's attention."

"And screwing up the ecosystem just as it's starting to straighten out again," Jody put in.

Snow had quit swirling around us. The car's fans had blown it all away. I tilted the joystick to the side until the car pivoted halfway around, then pulled upward on it and shoved it forward again. The car rose up above the trees and began accelerating southeast.

I said, "Cheyenne itself should be safe enough. That's where Dave will be, after all. Do you think we should call and let him know we're coming, or should we try to catch him off guard?"

"He'll just hide if we tell him we're coming," Jody said.

"But he might not blow the bomb if we make him think you're near the blast zone," Gwen said.

"Might not?" I asked. "Just how far around the bend do you figure he's gone?"

"Maybe not at all," Gwen said. "I don't know. This is a very emotionally charged issue for all of us. I doubt if any of us are behaving entirely rationally, but how can we tell if we are or we aren't? We're on completely new ground here."

"I don't think exploding a nuclear bomb is a rational act," Jody said.

"Not even if he succeeds in getting God to notice us?"

"Especially not then."

Gwen smiled wryly. "That's not entirely rational either, Jody."

"It's the way I feel."

"And Dave no doubt feels he has to get God to come back for him."

"No doubt. Well I feel like I have to stop him."

Nodding, Gwen said, "Just don't get yourself killed in the process."

Jody laughed. "That would kind of defeat the purpose, now, wouldn't it?"

 

We were flying over a windswept basin about a hundred kilometers northwest of Cheyenne when we saw the mushroom cloud peek up over the horizon.

For a second I was too stunned to move, watching the way the shock wave raced upward in a spherical shell and how the surface of the cloud roiled and churned inside it. Then, remembering where we were, I shouted, "Christ!" and yanked the emergency descent handle under the dashboard. It was the first time I'd ever done that in a car; the air bags blossoming out of the doors and roof and dash slammed me back in the seat and completely blocked my view for ten or fifteen terrifying seconds while the automatic landing sequence took over and dropped us like a rock. We bobbed once, hard, like a cork smacking into water, then settled with a crunch on the ground. The air bags sucked back inside their cubbyholes and I fell forward against the dash. We were listing at about a thirty-degree angle toward the front.

Jody had caught herself with her hands before she fell forward. She looked out the window and said, "We're sitting on a sagebrush."

I looked out my side. Sure enough, a gnarled, knobby little bush was holding the rear end of the car in the air. Not a good position to be in when the shock wave rolled over us. I started the motor and lifted the joystick to raise us off it, and with a sound like ice cubes in a blender the car chopped the bush to shreds, blowing blue-gray bits of foliage everywhere and sending an eye-watering burst of sage smell in through the vents. We lifted up, though, and the wind shoved us forward a few meters before I could set us back down again. We sat there watching the cloud rise and waited for the blast to reach us.

And waited, and waited. The wind shifted a little, then shifted back, and after a while we realized we weren't going to feel anything more this far away so I cautiously took us up a few meters and started flying southeast again. The car had picked up a bad vibration from the sagebrush, but it still flew.

The mushroom cloud blew eastward in front of us as we approached, the wind at different altitudes slowly tearing it apart. We were moving faster than the wind, though, and as we approached it we realized the bomb couldn't have gone off very far out of Cheyenne.

Jody looked at me with a worried expression. "I thought Gwen said he'd lob one into Nebraska."

I was starting to worry, too. "Maybe it went off in the launch tube."

"We'd better call and see if he's okay."

I didn't want to blow our chances of surprising him, but if he was hurt I supposed we should know it. "Okay," I said, and Jody dialed his number.

When it rang half a dozen times without an answer I began worrying in earnest, but then the phone display flickered on and his face appeared before us. "Dave here," he said.

Jody put on a stern expression. "God called, and He told me to tell you to knock it off."

For just a moment, I could see hope blossom in Dave's face. Then he scowled and said, "Very funny. Did you call just to harass me or do you have something important to say?"

"We called to see if you were okay. That blast looked like it was pretty close to town."

"It was in town," said Dave. "At the Air Force base, anyway, which is pretty much the same thing. None of the rockets were in shape to fly, so I just blew one of the missiles in place."

"Where were you?" I asked.

Dave laughed. "Colorado Springs. NORAD control. I've got a half mile of mountain over my head right now, in case you were thinking of trying to stop me."

In a teasing voice, Jody said, "Aren't you afraid God will miss you again?"

Dave shook his head. "You wouldn't believe the spy network they've got here. I've got satellite surveillance all over the world. If He shows up I'll know it, and I'll set off another one closer to home. He'll know I'm here."

And so did we, now. I angled the car straight south.

"Have you ever considered how God might feel about nuclear bombs?" Jody asked him. "Destroying so much of His handiwork all at once might make Him mad."

"It's a risk I'm willing to take," Dave said.

"But you're taking it for all of us, and I'm not willing."

"Not now," Dave said, "but you'll thank me when I succeed."

"And what if you don't? None of us are going to thank you for blowing a bunch of fallout into the air. We're going to have to live here, Dave. You too, probably."

He laughed. "That's what the environmentalists thought. So they quit cutting the forests and burning fossil fuels, and all for what? The environmentalists are gone and the forests and the fossil fuels are still here. It was a complete waste."

I could hardly believe my ears. "You really believe that?"

"I really do."

"Then you're a lot worse off than I thought."

His eyes narrowed. "Ah, why am I even talking to you?" He reached forward, and his image flicked out.

Jody looked over at me. "I don't think subduing him's going to be easy. If he's in the NORAD command center, then I don't know if we'll even be able to get to him."

"We'll figure out something when we get there," I said. I was trying to convince myself as well as her. I didn't have any idea what we'd do, but what else could we do but try?

 

Thin as our plans were, the car put an unexpected twist in them just south of the Wyoming-Colorado border. The vibration in the rear fans had been getting steadily worse, and I'd brought us down closer to the ground to reduce the strain on them, hoping to make it to another city before they died completely, but we were still quite a ways north of Fort Collins when the right one gave up with a shriek and the car dropped on that side, hit the ground, then slewed halfway around and flipped completely over. The air bags whooshed out to hold us in place again, but the one in front of Jody burst with a bang and I heard her shriek in surprise as she fell head first into the windshield.

"Jody!" I fought to reach her over the bags still holding me in place. We skidded to a stop, but with the car upside down they deflated slowly, so we wouldn't fall to the roof and break our necks. I managed to squeeze out through the gap between the one in front of me and the one between the seats. Jody lay in the hollow made by the roof and the curved windshield, her face bloody from a gash in her forehead. She was groping for something to pull herself up against.

My first thought was that she should lie flat in case she'd hurt her neck or spine, but then I realized there wasn't enough space for that and she'd probably be better off sitting upright anyway. I took her hand in mine and helped her twist around until she could sit on the roof. The seats were just over our heads. "Is anything broken?" I asked as I looked in the gap between seats and floor for a medical kit.

"I don't know." She flexed her arms and legs, then said, "Doesn't feel like it." She held a hand to her forehead to keep the blood out of her eyes while she blinked to clear them. "Both eyes are okay," she said after a moment. Her voice was a little slurred but completely calm, the result of years of training for emergencies.

I couldn't find a medical kit, so I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and used that to sop up the blood from her wound. She winced when I blotted her cut with it, but I was glad to see muscle instead of bone before the blood welled up again.

"I think you'll live," I said, trying not to let her hear the worry in my voice. Her injuries probably wouldn't kill her, but a night outside in Colorado in the wintertime just might. I bent down so I could look out the windows. The Sun was still fairly high over the mountains. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but I couldn't see any houses and I didn't know how far we could walk to find one. The wind wasn't as strong here as it had been farther north, but it was still blowing hard enough to drop the chill factor by twenty degrees or so. It was already sucking the heat out of the car.

Jody had been thinking along the same lines. "All of a sudden I'm not so happy the world's empty," she said.

"We're not in trouble yet," I told her. "For one thing, the world's not empty." I flicked on the car's phone, dialed upside down, and waited, hoping the transmitter could make contact with its antenna underneath us.

"Who are you calling?" Jody asked. "Dave?"

"That's right. He's the only one anywhere close to us."

"What makes you think he'll help us?"

"I don't know if he will or not. But it can't hurt to ask."

We waited for ten or fifteen seconds while the phone tried to make a connection. Finally we saw a flickering, snowy phantom on the windshield, and Dave's voice, shot through with static, said, "What now?"

"This is Gregor," I said. "We've been in a wreck just north of Fort Collins. Jody's been hurt. Can you come get us?"

His upside-down face looked us over suspiciously. "This is a trick to get me out of here."

"No it's not," Jody said. "Here, have a look." She bent down toward the camera eye and took the blood-soaked rag from her forehead. Dave's expression grew a little more sympathetic, but not enough.

"Sorry," he said. "You got yourselves into this, you can get yourselves out."

I said, "Dave, we're not just asking a favor. We could die of exposure out here."

"Quit being melodramatic. You're resourceful—" His image broke up for a second, then came back. "—must have brought coats and hats and stuff."

"We're in an upside-down car in the middle of nowhere and you're telling us to put on our coats? Damn it, Jody's injured! We need to get her to a hospital and see if she's broken anything. She could have internal injuries."

It was hard to read his expression in the snowy, upside-down image. I thought he was scowling, then for a brief moment the scowl reversed itself. "All right," he said. "I'll come. It'll take me a while to get out of the mountain, and an hour or two more to get up there and find you. Just sit tight." Then before either of us could say anything more, he switched off.

I thought for a moment about his sudden capitulation. I didn't like the feel of it, and pretty soon I realized why.

"The bastard isn't going to come."

Jody looked around at me sharply. "What? He just said—"

"He wants us to think he's coming, but he's going to wait for us to die of exposure. Think about it. What better way to get God's attention than to send a couple of free souls to go knock on Heaven's gates for him?"

"But . . .he . . .would he do that?"

"Sure he would. He just said so. It's going to take him a 'while' to get out of the mountain, and a 'while' to fly up here, and a 'while' longer to find us. He'll make sure it takes a long while, so when he gets here he can honestly say he tried to rescue us, but he was just too late."

She shook her head. "No, I don't think he'd do that."

"I do. I'm not waiting around to find out the hard way."

"What are you going to do?"

I reached under the seats into the back for our coats. As I helped Jody into hers, I said, "I'm going to walk toward Fort Collins and see if I can find a house or another car that works. I won't go any farther than I can walk back before dark."

She thought about it, then said, "All right. While you're doing that I'll call Gwen and see who else might be able to come get us."

"Good." I pulled on my coat and hat and gloves, then opened the window and slid out onto the frozen ground. A cold blast of air swirled snow inside. I leaned in to give Jody a kiss, then backed away and made sure she closed the window tight before I stood up.

The car was a dark oblong against white snow; I wouldn't have much trouble finding it again if I got back before dark. I started off toward where I hoped town would be, turning back periodically to make sure I could spot the car again until the slope of the land hid it from view. The Colorado foothills didn't have nearly as much snow as Yellowstone, but there was enough to leave a pretty good set of tracks. It would take a few hours for them to fill in, so I wasn't that worried. I trudged along, hands in pockets and head tilted to the side to keep the wind from blowing down my neck, looking for any sign of civilization.

As I walked, I realized how much I was going to hate living a primitive life when all the machinery started falling apart. By the time I was an old man, I'd probably be walking everywhere I went. I might even be burning wood for heat, depending on how long the colony's power plant lasted. No wonder Dave was so desperate to have God come back for him.

I thought about Jody waiting for me in the car, possibly dying of injuries or exposure before I got back. At the moment I didn't mind the idea of a God watching over us, either, provided He'd actually do something to help if we needed it. Even if He wouldn't—or couldn't—keep her alive, the idea that I might somehow join her again after we both died was at least a little comfort. Not much, because I could never be sure it would happen until it did, but the possibility might keep me going for a while.

It came to me then that if Jody died, I could easily join Dave in his quest. But she wasn't going to die. All I needed was to find some shelter and we'd both be fine.

I eventually spotted what I was looking for down in a gentle valley: a house and barn set in among a stand of tall, bare cottonwood trees. There were a couple of vehicles parked out front and a long, winding road leading down to them from a highway off to my left. I kept going cross-country straight for it.

It was farther away than it looked, but I made it just as the Sun touched the mountains. The house was unlocked, so I didn't have to break in. It was also unheated, but it felt wonderful compared to outside. I tried to call Jody on my cell phone, but when I opened it up the screen had a big crack in it and it failed to light. I had apparently landed on it in the crash. The house phone was dead, too; no surprise after four years of weather like this. But I found a hook by the back door with a set of keys dangling from it, so I took them outside and tried them in the vehicles.

There was a hovercar and a four-wheeled pickup truck in the driveway. The hovercar was as dead as the phone, but the pickup lurched forward when I turned the key. I pushed in the clutch and tried again, and was rewarded with the whine of a flywheel winding up to speed. The power gauge read low, but I didn't think I'd need much just to reach Jody and come back.

While the flywheel spun up I checked in the glove box for a working phone, but all I found were a bunch of wrenches and fuses. That wasn't reassuring. I let out the clutch slowly and the truck began to roll forward, though, so I steered it around the driveway and began to bounce and spin my way up toward the highway. I'd heard it was easy to get a wheeled vehicle stuck in snow, so I figured I should drive on roads as much as I could until I got close enough to try driving cross-country.

It was a good idea, and it would have worked if there hadn't been a big drift about a kilometer down the road where it crossed the bottom of the valley and began to climb the other side. I realized too late that the road didn't rise up with the terrain, and by the time the pickup nosed into the bank, shuddered as it dug itself in a few more meters and came to a stop, it was thoroughly stuck. I couldn't back out or go forward, not even when I left it in gear and got out and pushed.

Of course there was no shovel in the truck. I would have to go back to the house to get one. Cursing my stupidity in not thinking ahead, I followed the tire tracks back the way I had come.

It was starting to get dark by the time I reached the house again, so I prowled through the kitchen drawers until I found a flashlight that worked, then went out to the barn and found a shovel. I jogged back to the truck and started digging it out, hoping Jody wasn't too worried that I hadn't come back yet. She was only a kilometer or two away; if I was careful not to get stuck again I could be there in a few minutes.

I had just dug a path for the left wheel and was starting in on the right when I saw a bright light descending toward me from the south. It slid on past, still dropping, right toward the car. Dave.

"Well I'll be damned," I said aloud. "He actually came." I leaned back against the pickup for a moment, catching my breath. I didn't have to break my back at it now; he and Jody would probably be coming for me pretty soon.

If they could find me. My tracks would be pretty hard to follow in a hovercar, and if they missed the farmhouse then they could very easily miss me out on the road in a pickup.

I reached inside and turned on the headlights. That would help. But I started digging again, too.

Ten minutes later I finished the other wheel track. They still hadn't come for me. I climbed into the pickup, put it in forward, and let out the clutch, but it didn't budge.

Back outside with the shovel, this time digging the snow out from underneath. It took another fifteen minutes. When I tried it again the truck moved a little, and I rocked it back and forth until it started rolling, then drove on up the road as fast as I could. Something wasn't right.

Dave had left his landing light on. As soon as I came up over the edge of the valley I saw it, shining straight at our overturned car. I could see a figure standing beside it, but I couldn't tell if it was Dave or Jody.

The road curved the wrong way. Cursing my luck, I gunned the pickup and swerved off the road, bouncing over rocks and sagebrush and trying to steer whenever the wheels touched ground. The tires spun and the flywheel motor screeched in protest, but I kept the throttle all the way to the floor and held on while the pickup bounced toward the two air cars. As I drew closer I could see that it was Dave standing in the light, and Jody was lying flat on the ground in front of him. She wasn't moving.

I popped open the glove box just as the truck hit a hard bump, scattering wrenches all over the seat and floor. I snatched one of the bigger ones in my right hand as I skidded to a stop beside Dave's car, leaped out with it upraised, and shouted, "What have you done to her?"

He didn't even try to defend himself. He just stood there with a beatific smile on his face and said, "Go ahead. It won't matter. I'll even tell God it was justified."

"God ain't the guy you'll be talking with," I said. I raised the wrench to cave in his head, but with him just standing there I found that I couldn't do it. Not even with Jody lying before us on the ground.

He'd taken off her coat and gloves. Her face and hands were white as the snow, and no breath rose from her open mouth.

"We should have realized right away that one of us would have to go get Him for the rest of us," Dave told me as I bent down to feel her neck for a pulse. "I would have gone myself once I figured it out, but Jody was already so close I figured she might as well be the one. It really doesn't matter."

I didn't see any wounds other than the one on her forehead. She must have been unconscious when he arrived, or he'd stunned her somehow. I couldn't find a pulse, but my fingers were so cold from digging snow that I probably couldn't have found my own. I bent down and felt for breath against my cheek, but there was none. Not knowing what else to do, I covered her mouth with mine and blew a breath into her lungs.

Dave grabbed me by the collar. "No, I can't allow that. You can't bring her back until we're sure she's done the job."

In one quick motion I stood up and smacked him in the left temple with the flat of the wrench. His head jerked sideways, and he fell over backwards with a thump that swirled snow up around him. I bent back down to Jody.

Five compressions of the chest, breath, five compressions of the chest, breath, over and over again. Sometime between forever and an eternity later, she shuddered, gasped a breath on her own, and moaned.

I whooped with joy, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her over to Dave's car, where I set her in the passenger seat and turned the heater up all the way.

I ran around to the other side and climbed in. She woke with a scream when I slammed the door, then she saw it was me and slumped back in the seat. "Christ you scared me," she said. "I had a hell of a crazy dre—wait a minute." She looked around at the car, a much bigger one than what we'd been flying.

"This is Dave's car," she said after a moment. "He did come."

"That's right, and he dragged you outside to die, too." I looked out to make sure he was still lying where he'd dropped. I had just enough time to realize he wasn't when the door beside me popped open and he stood there with my wrench in his hand.

I lunged for the lift controls, but he reached across me and rapped my hand with the wrench before the car even began to move. "No you don't," he said. "Get out. We're going to finish this experiment one way or another."

I cradled my suddenly numb right hand in my left, wondering if I could clench it into a fist, and whether I could do any good with it if I could.

Jody leaned over so he could see her. "It's already finished," she said.

"What do you mean? It can't be. You're still alive."

She laughed. "I'm alive again, idiot. I was dead. I was there. I saw your precious gates to Heaven, and they're slammed tight."

"You did?" I asked.

"They are?" asked Dave.

"Yup." Jody's eyes held a spark of elemental fire as she looked at him.

Dave let the wrench drop to the ground. In a subdued voice, he said, "Let me in. It's cold out here."

I thought about it a moment, much preferring the idea of leaving him outside a while longer, but Jody said, "Go ahead, I've got something I want to tell him," so I tilted my seat forward and let him climb in back. The moment he sat down I pulled on the lift control and took us straight up a hundred meters or so.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"High enough to make you think twice about trying something cute," I replied.

"He won't try anything," Jody said. "Not now or ever again."

"What makes you so sure?" I asked.

She grinned like a whole pack of wolves surrounding a deer. "Because if he does, he might get hurt, and if you think it's lonely on this side of the great divide, wait 'til you see what's waiting for us over there."

"What?" Dave asked, leaning forward between the seats. "What did you find?"

She got a faraway look in her eyes. "I found the place where Heaven used to be. At the end of a long tunnel of light. There weren't gates really; it was more of a . . .a place. It's hard to describe physically. But I could tell that was where I was supposed to go, and I could tell it was closed."

"Permanently?" Dave asked.

"It felt that way. There was just the memory of a doorway, no promise of one to come. So I turned around to come back, but I couldn't find the way at first. I wandered around quite a while before I stumbled across it. If Gregor hadn't kept my body going, I don't think I would have found it."

"Wandered around where?" Dave demanded. "What was it like?"

"Like fog," Jody said. Her voice picked up a tremor as she added, "I was just a viewpoint in a formless, shapeless, gray fog. There wasn't any sound, any smell; I didn't even have a body to hear or smell or feel with. I don't even know if I was actually seeing anything. There was nothing there to see."

"Then how did you know where your body was?"

"How do you know where your chin is? It was just there." Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. "Look, I'm tired and my head hurts and I've been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."

I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.

 

Later, after we'd bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I'd wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn't let me.

"His teeth are pulled," she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. "He'll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can."

"Integrate him back into our lives?" I asked incredulously. "After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!"

She giggled. "Well, I'm not so sure about that."

"Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?"

She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway."

I stared at her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.

She shrugged. "I don't remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me."

"You don't?"

"No."

"You're one hell of an actress, then."

"Good, because I want him convinced."

I thought about that. "Even if we aren't?" I asked after a while.

"What?"

"You want Dave convinced, but we're still in the same shape we were before. We don't know anything at all about what's waiting for us after we die."

She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. "Then God is just, if He exists," she said. "After all, I'm agnostic. I wouldn't have it any other way."