Foundation (4 page)
Firrell, who had been pacing around like a caged animal for the last ten minutes, turned to him.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
“I’ll be damned if anything of this makes any sense,” said Trumaine. “Nobody opened the bunker. They used a cumbersome weapon when they could use a knife. And we’ve got a toy that doesn’t belong in here. It’s a big mess, Grant. If there’s a clue at all to be found in here, I’m the tooth fairy.”
“C’mon,” prodded Firrell. “I know you have a hunch.”
Trumaine chuckled. “A hunch?”
“An inkling. A suspicion. An idea. Anything will do,” pleaded Firrell.
With a sigh, Trumaine set his jaw and stared at the blue ceiling of the room.
“You’re gonna think I’m crazy ...”
“Try me,” insisted Firrell.
Trumaine returned his eyes to his captain.
“There’s just one place in the world where they don’t give a damn about walls ...” he said.
Trumaine’s car sped away along the seaside highway, letting out the usual purr.
This time, a multitude of similar noises had joined it: high-pitched whirs, loud buzzes, light thrums, hisses and whizzes. They filled the air, sounding like a swarm of raiding hornets.
They came from the engines of motorcycles, monocars, convertible monocars, open sports car, sedan cars, vans, buses, pickup trucks, semis, as well as from the occasional transporter and concrete-plastic mixer that orderly crowded the highway in the midday rush hour.
Under the hood or the saddle of every single one of all those vehicles, a small, unfailing and durable electrical engine spun without rest, insatiably feeding on the electricity provided by a large, squat pack of quickly recharging, fully replaceable batteries that found place inside the vehicle undercarriage.
Trumaine drove on with the commuters, headed for the huge cluster of white, tall prisms seen in the distance that was the City.
Sleek, polished and friendly, a hundred percent efficient, self-aware, self-cleaning and as environment friendly as it could ever be, the City shone brightly over the horizon. The long, slender fingers that were its buildings spread out evenly toward the sun, like a welcoming hand.
Fully remodeled around and above what remained of the more than two centuries old relics of the metropolis of the first modern age, the City hadn’t changed much in the last eighty years. After it had stopped climbing, it had enlarged and fattened out the same way restless people do when they settle down.
Only minor changes were made here and there, now and then, mainly technological upgrades and energy-saving enhancements.
Trumaine watched the towering prisms get caught in the glare of the sunlight and glisten like quartz crystals.
For the second time that month, he wondered if he shouldn’t move to a nice, aseptic one-room apartment. He had seen the residential area assigned to bachelors; it was nice and blithe. After all, he thought, what was left of the life he was used to? A cold, empty house, a bunch of pictures and fading memories were all that remained.
Trumaine signaled, then pulled to his right. He disappeared down another lane, followed by a considerable chunk of traffic. He went on, turning his back to a large building lined with metal sheets that sat on the coast, half-a-dozen miles away from the City.
With a rumble and a bedazzling flare of light, a cigar-shaped object rocketed out of the spaceport, headed for the higher strata of atmosphere, drawing in its wake a sharp arc of vapor. It slowly dissolved to a mist as the ship shrank to a white dot and made it to space.
Trumaine stopped his car in front of a large gate guarded by a concrete booth. The attempt of making a streamlined object of design out of it had failed miserably and all it looked like was the oversized head of a rat. The booth projected from a continuous seven-foot-tall, massive iron fence that went on and around possibly for a couple of miles.
The head of a young, mousy uniformed porter poked out of the booth window with a questioning look. He wore a dull-gray uniform and a bellboy cap he flicked his forefinger at in acknowledgment.
“How may I help you, sir?” asked the porter.
“Trumaine. To see the responsible.”
“I’m sure you mean Mr. Benedict, sir. But he’s always very busy.” The porter sighed. “You have an appointment?”
Trumaine shook his head. The guard retrieved an electronic pad with a scowl.
“You’ll have to fill this then, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s for the visitor’s pass.”
He offered the pad to Trumaine but he didn’t take it. He shoved his blue police badge in the porter’s face instead.
“I see you already have a pass,” said the porter with a sneer. “Mr. Benedict will be happy to see you ... Mr. Trumaine,” he added after he had perused the badge.
He motioned the detective over with a jerk of the wrist and Trumaine moved through the gate.
He drove at a crawl, following the signs to the visitors’ parking, where he found a spot between a couple of shiny monocars.
He shut down the engine, then climbed out from the car and glanced around him and up.
Trumaine squinted at seeing the massive gray slabs that made the walls of the building he had come to see. More than a thousand feet long and wide and a hundred fifty feet tall, the huge building stood over a low base of glass, where the main entrance was. One would hardly miss the oversized letters that hung above it, forming one word:
CREDENCE
.
“Credence is a federal corporation supporting exoplanet terraforming. We’re not settlers. We’re not space marines. Yet, we provide them with an exceptional commodity: travel across the universe on a real-time basis ...”
It was the calm and deep voice of a formidable man of fifty. Noah Benedict wore a white suit that fit perfectly around his broad shoulders and a tie that matched his ice-gray eyes.
He stood amidst a spotless white corridor wide enough for four to walk along, side by side. Long ribbon windows opened at either side of the corridor behind him, but nothing of what lay beyond could be glimpsed, since Benedict was in the way.
He looked in front of him at a group of standing young men and women, all intent on listening to him.
They were an assorted bunch. From the clothes they wore to the different hairdos they sported, it was clear they didn’t come from the City alone, but from the outskirt towns as well.
Though so different from each other, they were here for the same reason that obliged so many people around the world: apply for a well-paid job.
Actually, this wasn’t the interview yet. That would come later on; this was just Benedict’s introductory speech.
Again, he curled his lips into the ever affable smile of a saint, took a deep, slow breath and kept speaking with the natural ease of a veteran orator.
“The foundations of Credence are not big, energy-consuming machines. The foundations of Credence lie in the groundbreaking intuitions of one man. ‘When a large-enough number of individuals believe that something is going to happen, it does.’ It is the plain and most popular enunciation of Jarva’s first theorem, of course,” he said.
He realized that one too many applicants had frowned at his words, so he made a pause.
Here’s a difficult bunch, he thought.
He was sure most applicants had probably been imparted only the basic schooling and they had no idea what he was talking about. He couldn’t blame them, though. While schooling and a smart brain would help jumpstart and advance a career in most workplaces, the skills that turned individuals into first-class believers had nothing to do with knowledge, or a discriminating mind.
On the contrary, Credence’s best believers had often been people who couldn’t add two-figure numbers, or couldn’t manage to address the shortest speech.
Being a believer was a skill within. It might be improved, of course, if one had it in him, but it couldn’t be forged or planted anew. Usually, only five or six applicants out of a hundred would be good enough to pass the preliminary interview.
Benedict exhaled. He’d better come up with an example to properly illustrate the way Credence worked.
“How many common believers does it take to flush a 190,000-ton spaceship to the other side of the universe?” he asked. He waited for an answer that didn’t come, so he went on.
“Depending on the strength of the belief, I’d say from one and a half million to two million,” he said.
“How many of Credence’s hand-picked, trained believers does it take to do the same thing?” Again, he made a pause, then, with ill-concealed pride, “Only five hundred,” he said.
Benedict stepped aside, motioning for the applicants to take a peek through one of the long ribbon windows whose view he had been obstructing.
The bystanders filed in religious silence past Benedict and fanned out throughout the length of the window. As they looked beyond the opening, a look of amazement spread across their faces.
About three-hundred-feet long and wide and one-hundred-feet high, the believers’ chamber looked like a dark, gigantic bottomless hall. Black soundproofing panels padded the straight walls and the curved ceiling, wrapping the chamber in a surreal silence.
Inside the chamber, five hundred believers, men and women, all fast asleep, all wearing spotless white suits, floated on slim, designer deckchairs.
The couches stood about four feet from each other, forming a closely woven mesh that kept hovering weightlessly above the stretch of the chamber.
Not all spots in the mesh were taken. Here and there, black gaps would be seen, looking like skipped stitches in a cloth’s fabric.
The couches weren’t still. They kept shifting ever so slightly, the same way leaves fallen in a pond do.
Spindly arms emerged from the darkness of the chamber’s bottom, supporting the couches and bringing them around in step with the unpredictable tide.
It didn’t seem to matter to the believers that they were hanging over a gaping chasm more than one hundred feet deep. The trancelike state they had fallen into was but a peaceful oblivion.
“Meet our believers,” said Benedict. “They float gracefully in their natural environment: the believers’ chamber. Through the feed they are administered, they receive all the information they need to flush all spaceships and whatever they carry in total accordance with the intergalactic timetable.”
Benedict smiled seraphically, glanced over as well, then went on speaking.
“Through the study of the marvel that is the human thalamus and the group of theories that go under the name of Pistocentrism, you will be admitted to the secrets of our trade. But make no mistake. Only a privileged few will master what’s actually needed to safely send space vehicles, their crew and the goods they carry to their destination on a daily basis: the Main Belief.”
Benedict made a long, meaningful pause. It was critical that they got this right.
“The Main Belief is the one strength of Credence, the hidden engine that moves all parts,” he said. “Without it, not even a test needle would spin. To build such an amazing force, all beliefs originating from every believer must be collected and synchronized. It can be done, of course, but it’s long, hard work. Much of the time we spend here at Credence is dedicated to properly training our apprentice believers so that, one day, they can enter the chamber and give their contribution to their privileged fellows.”
Benedict motioned the applicants to a second window on the other side of the corridor. The group shuffled over obediently.
“There. Our apprentice believers,” he said.
Twenty apprentice believers, men and women, dressed in orange suits, sat in university chairs. They drank in every word of their instructor, occasionally taking notes in the electronic pads at their side.
The instructor, a brawny man of about sixty, who sported silvery hair and a military haircut, strolled around a streamlined desk that protruded from the floor, standing on one side only.
He waved a yard-long stick at a large screen hanging on the wall, where statistics, graphs and anatomy charts of the human brain kept rolling.
The back and side walls of the lecture hall were lined with monitors showing maps of the Milky Way and of at least twenty other galaxies. A considerable number of them also displayed information about a hundred different spaceships in the form of black silhouettes standing against a white background.