Oliver had appointed the room himself. He could afford it. He could afford anything. Thanks to the near-simultaneous ascents of feminism, fornication, and several major venereal diseases, the planet was using latex condoms in unprecedented quantities, and in the late eighties his father’s amazing invention, the Shostak Supersensitive, had emerged as the brand of choice. By the turn of the decade, astonishing quantities of cash had begun flowing into the family’s coffers, an ever-rising tide of profit. At times it seemed to Oliver that his father had somehow patented the sex act itself.
He sipped his brandy and said, “The chair recognizes Barclay.”
Deciphering Cassie’s fax had been easy. It was in Heresy, the numerical code they’d invented in tenth grade to obscure the records of the organization they’d founded, the Freethinkers Club. (Besides Cassie and Oliver, the club had boasted only two other members, the lonely, homely, and hugely unpopular Maldonado twins.) This is no joke. Come see for yourself. We are really towing…
As the League’s vice president rose, the entire membership drew to attention, not simply to hear Barclay’s report but to bathe in his celebrity. In recent years the United States of America had managed to accommodate a full-time debunker — a counterweight to its twenty thousand astrologers, five thousand past-life therapists, and scores of scoundrels routinely cranking out bestsellers about UFO encounters and the joy of runes — and that debunker was golden-haired Barclay Cabot. Barclay, handsome devil, had media presence. The camera liked him. He’d done all the major talk shows, demonstrating how charlatans appeared to bend spoons and read minds when in fact they were doing nothing of the kind.
He began by reviewing the crisis. Two weeks earlier, the Texas legislature had voted to purge all the state’s high schools of any curriculum materials that failed to accord so-called scientific creationism “equal time” with the theory of natural selection. Not that the Enlightenment League doubted the outcome of a showdown between the God hypothesis and Darwin. The fossils shouted evolution; the chromosomes screamed descent; the rocks declared their antiquity. What the League feared was that America’s textbook publishers would simply elect to duck the whole issue and, readopting their spineless expedient of the forties and fifties, omit any consideration of human origins whatsoever.
Meanwhile, every Sunday, creationism would continue to be taught unchallenged.
In conspiratorial tones, Barclay outlined his committee’s plan. Under cover of night, a small subset of the League, a kind of atheist commando unit, would crawl across the luxurious lawn of the First Baptist Church of Dallas — “the Pentagon of Christianity,” as Barclay put it — and jimmy open a basement window. They would sneak into the church. Infiltrate the nave. Secure the pews. And then, unholstering their Swingline staplers, they would take up each Bible in turn and, before replacing it, neatly affix a thirty-page precis of On the Origin of Species between the table of contents and Genesis.
Equal time for Darwin.
What a bold scenario, thought Oliver, as audacious as the time they’d faked a materialization of the Virgin Mary on Boston Common, as nervy as when they’d upstaged an antiabortion rally in Salt Lake City by hiring the notorious rock group Flesh Before Breakfast to stand across the street singing “What a Drug We Have in Jesus.”
“All in favor of the proposed counterattack…”
Seventeen ayes reverberated through the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall.
“All opposed…”
Inevitably, the League’s recording secretary, cantankerous Sylvia Endicott, stood up. “Nay,” she said, not so much speaking the word as growling it. “Nay and nay again.” Sylvia Endicott: skepticism’s oldest living warrior, the woman who in her radical youth had led a losing campaign to have IN GOD WE TRUST removed from the nation’s coins and an equally unsuccessful fight to get a plaque installed on the Kansas City street corner where Sinclair Lewis had dared the Almighty to strike him dead. “You know my views on scientific creationism — O paragon of oxymorons. You know where I stand on Dallas Baptists. But come on, people. This so-called ‘counterattack’ is really just a prank. We’re the children of Franзois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, for Christ’s sake. We aren’t the fucking Marx Brothers.”
“The ayes have it,” said Oliver. He’d never cared for Sylvia Endicott, who said pompous things like O paragon of oxymorons whenever she got the floor.
“When will we stop being a bunch of dilettantes and start playing hardball?” Sylvia persisted. “I can remember a time when this organization would’ve sued the Texas legislature for de facto censorship.”
“You want to make a motion?”
“No, I want us to acquire some backbone.”
“Any new business?”
“Backbone, people. Backbone!”
“Any new business?” said Oliver again.
Silence, even from Sylvia. The crone of reason sank back into her chair. The fire crackled merrily in the hearth. Throughout the city, the hot July evening simmered away, but within Montesquieu Hall an ingenious deployment of insulation and air conditioners was neatly simulating a frigid February night. It was Oliver’s idea. He’d covered the costs. An extravagance? Yes, but why be wealthy if one didn’t occasionally indulge a personal foible or two?
“I have some new business,” said Oliver, reaching into his silk vest and taking out the troubling communique. “This fax is from Cassie Fowler, currently aboard the supertanker Carpco Valparaíso somewhere off the coast of Liberia. You can see the Carpco logo” — Oliver pointed to the famous stegosaurus — “right here on the letterhead. So the telegram her mother received last week was evidently authentic, and Cassandra is very much alive. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad?” asked comely, jewel-eyed Pamela Harcourt, the guiding light behind the League’s feisty and unprofitable periodical, The Sceptical Investigator (circulation: 1,042).
“The bad branches into two possibilities.” Oliver held up his index finger. “Either Cassandra is having a psychotic breakdown” — he added his middle finger to the illustration — “or the Valparaíso is towing the corpse of God.”
“Towing the what?” Taylor Scott, a frail young man whose affection for the Enlightenment extended to wearing greatcoats and ruffles, flipped open his silver cigarette case.
“Corpse of God. It’s evidently rather large.”
Taylor removed a Turkish cigarette and slid it between his lips. “I don’t understand.”
“Two miles long, she says here. Humanoid, nude, Caucasian, male, and dead.”
“Huh?”
“Corpus Dei. How can I be clearer?”
“Fiddlesticks,” said Taylor.
“Horse manure,” said Barclay.
“Cassandra assumed that would be our reaction,” said Oliver.
“I should hope so,” said Pamela. “Oliver, dear, what’s this all about?”
“I don’t know what it’s all about.” Brandy snifter in hand, Oliver rose and, stepping outside the ring of rationalists, slowly paced the perimeter. Under ordinary circumstances, the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall was his favorite place on earth, a soothing conjunction of mullioned windows, fabric-lined walls, eighteenth-century French redoute floral prints, and his own original oil paintings of famous freethinkers striking characteristic poses: Thomas Paine hurling a copy of The Age of Reason through a cathedral window, Baron d’Holbach offering Pope Leo XII a Bronx cheer, Bertrand Russell and David Hume playing chess with creche figurines. (Two weeks earlier Oliver had added a self-portrait to the gallery, a gesture that might have seemed presumptuous had the painting not included a brutally truthful depiction of his faltering chin and ill-proportioned nose.) But tonight the lounge brought him no comfort. It seemed gloomy and damp, besieged by ignorant armies. “The tanker’s on some sort of burial mission,” he continued. “There’s a tomb in the Arctic. Angels have been spotted. Look, I admit this all sounds utterly crazy, but Cassandra is inviting us to inspect the evidence.”