Earth Cult (12 page)

‘They're upset, naturally. They can see that their baby
looks
all right and they can't understand why it doesn't respond in the usual way. But there's nothing wrong with the mothers healthwise apart from the worry of having given birth to a …' He spread his hands, lost for an adequate description.

‘Where do you go from here?'

Bob Bragg shrugged his narrow shoulders. It was less a gesture of dismissal as one of hopelessness. The lines on his forehead were deeply imprinted, the visible trace of a man who had spent many a sleepless night asking himself the same question.

Helen said, ‘You believe us now?'

‘I never doubted your word,' Frank replied. ‘But the fact that what you say is true doesn't necessarily mean that you're right. As Dr Bragg says, the cause or causes have yet to be identified. If the best paediatricians in the country can't offer a medical opinion as to what's wrong I don't see how Gypsum's ace investigative reporter is going to come up with the answer.'

It was rather an unkind jibe and Frank regretted it when he saw Helen's face flush. However, she hadn't treated him with kid gloves and he reckoned that sooner or later she'd have to learn how to take it as well as hand it out; and sooner rather than later wouldn't do any harm.

‘I knew all along you were on their side,' she came back at him, her face stiff and sullen.

‘I'm not on anybody's side, I thought we'd established that,' Frank said with some annoyance. ‘When you can show me a shred of evidence maybe I'll start to take what you say seriously.'

Bob Bragg turned to face Helen. ‘You think you know what's causing this?' he asked mildly. It was implicit in his tone that his question was polite rather than in earnest.

‘I have … an idea,' she said, withdrawing a little, not making it sound too definite.

‘Ideas are in short supply round here at the moment.'

Helen looked at her father. She said, ‘Maybe when I've thought about it some more. I don't want to be accused of making accusations without proof.'

This was said for Frank's benefit, though she wouldn't look at him.

They walked along the ward, from cot to cot, their footsteps eerily loud in a roomful of silent wide-awake babies. That was another thing, Frank realized: none of them were
sleeping – and infants of a few months spent a large part of the day asleep. And it was just as Bob Bragg had remarked, as if they were waiting for something, quite content to bide their time, letting the hours slip away in anticipation of … what?

Was it at all possible, as Helen Renfield maintained, that there was some connection between these babies and the Deep Hole Project? She had made the charge blindly, instinctively, with no real evidence to support it, but Frank could have pointed out (if he'd felt so inclined) that that was the way many scientific theoreticians arrived at their most startling and worthwhile concepts. Basing their hypotheses purely and simply on the need to explain something which hitherto had been inexplicable, they made chance guesses – and quite often not even educated ones – at the casual relationship between two apparently unconnected events, worked it all out mathematically on paper, and then left it to the practical scientists, the technicians and research workers to come up with specific observational evidence which proved the hypothesis to be correct. Or incorrect, if that's the way the evidence pointed. But the actual method used was essentially no different from Helen Renfield's: first the unsupported theory followed by proof either for or against.

So how to arrive at a coherent hypothesis which embraced an abundance of antineutrinos flooding in from the centre of the Galaxy, atmospheric disturbances leading to freak weather conditions, babies born with none of the normal human attributes and having the appearance of meticulously constructed replicas, men meeting their deaths by unknown causes, and a religious cult which believed the mountain to possess divine significance, to contain some form of dynamic energy which made it in their terms a living entity?

Were these all random occurrences, totally unrelated to each other, or was it possible they were linked in some mysterious fashion? And if so, how? What was the causal (acausal?) relationship which would make sense of such
disparate events and draw them together to form a testable hypothesis?

Frank suddenly thought of one possible relationship. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy, perhaps, than Einstein's suggestion that spacetime was curved. And that had been proved.

The question was, could it be put to the test?

When they reached the door he turned to the doctor. ‘Do you have an X-ray department in the hospital?'

Bob Bragg confirmed that they had. He smiled wanly. ‘I know what you're going to say – have we X-rayed them to find out if there's anything wrong with their internal organs? Well we have, Mr Kersh. On the older infants, not the very young babies for fear of damaging them. Everything was normal, bone structure, main organs, alimentary tract, everything just as it should be and functioning perfectly.'

‘That's useful to know but in fact I had something else in mind.' Frank paused for a moment, considering how best to phrase it. ‘If you have an X-ray machine then presumably you also have an X-ray dosemeter for detecting the presence of radiation.'

Bob Bragg nodded, his permanent frown firmly in place.

‘And your staff wear radiation monitoring badges which are checked periodically to see that the level of exposure hasn't gone beyond the critical limit.'

‘Yes, that's right,' the doctor said, apparently mystified.

‘Can I ask you to carry out a check while we're here? Place a monitoring badge in one of the cots for fifteen minutes and then run a test on it through the dosemeter. Can you do that?'

‘Well … yes,' said Bob Bragg, blinking. ‘But what on earth for?'

‘To check for radiation.'

‘Radiation? From where?'

‘The babies,' Frank said.

Bob Bragg smiled. Then he laughed. ‘You think they're radioactive?' he said, highly amused.

‘You've tested them for everything else, why not see if they're emitting short wavelength electromagnetic waves?'

‘It isn't possible.'

‘You don't know until you try.'

‘Human beings don't emit X-rays, Mr Kersh. As you probably know, prolonged exposure to any form of radiation is harmful and can be fatal.'

‘To human beings,' Frank said.

‘Yes—' Dr Bragg broke off and stared at him. He didn't say anything for several moments; then in a slow subdued tone, ‘You're seriously suggesting they might be
other
than human?'

Frank shook his head. ‘Not suggesting, Dr Bragg, formulating an hypothesis. Would you run the test for me?'

‘Very well, if it'll satisfy your curiosity.' He pushed open the door and led the way through. ‘You can wait in my office. I'll have some coffee sent in.'

‘What made you think of testing them for radioactivity?' Cal Renfield asked when they were waiting in Bob Bragg's office. The doctor had gone off, saying he wouldn't keep them long.

‘To be honest, I don't really know,' Frank said, being honest. ‘I think maybe it was something Helen said about trusting your instincts. It suddenly occurred to me that no doctor or paediatrician would ever dream of running a radiation check on a new-born baby, it just wouldn't enter their heads. They've tried everything else and got negative response, so perhaps it's worth a try.' He sighed and shook his head. ‘Crazy notion,' he murmured, half to himself.

Helen was watching him, as if at any second amazing revelations were going to issue forth, popping out of his head like cartoon speech balloons. She said:

‘Do you believe there is a connection between the babies and what's been happening at the Project? I mean, can you see a scientific reason why the Project should have affected them in this way?'

‘Not so far. I'm following your advice and relying on
hunches. They could turn out to be skyrockets or damp squibs.'

‘You know,' Helen said, smiling at him faintly, ‘for the first time I believe you.'

‘About my hunches?'

‘About wanting to find out what's happening. And about not being on their side.'

‘I'm on nobody's side,' Frank told her. ‘And you have my word, I'm just as mystified as you are about what's going on around here.' He pushed his hand through the loose dark-brown curls which surrounded his head like a tangled halo. ‘I'm supposed to be sitting behind a desk in Chicago,' he told himself abstractedly, ‘not playing scientific detective along Roaring Fork Valley in the middle of Colorado.'

The receptionist came in with the coffee. They had just finished drinking it when the door opened and Bob Bragg entered the office. He held a small blue badge with a number printed across it.

They didn't need to ask him about the result of the test: the lines of incomprehension printed across his forehead told their own story.

‘Some day you'll make somebody a good wife,' Frank said, laying down his fork. ‘That was the best eezi-freeze TV dinner I've ever tasted.'

Helen Renfield, seated across the table from him, raised her wine glass in sardonic salute. ‘My, my, the way you big-city fellas
do
talk,' she said in the coy drawling simper of a mid-West country girl. ‘Those purty com-ple-ments could sweep a girl clean off her feet.'

Her father wiped his mouth and threw down the napkin,
‘Helen really looks after me,' he told Frank. ‘Feeds me thick juicy steaks, roast potatoes and blueberry cheesecake as part of my calorie-controlled diet. Without her I'd weigh 160 pounds and look ten years younger.'

Frank got up to help Helen clear away the dishes. Cal Renfield sorted through a stack of records and put Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 on the turntable. They sat round the fire drinking black coffee and Salignac five-star French brandy, which Cal Renfield maintained was ‘my only real indulgence, apart from Havana cigars, fast cars and even faster women'.

Helen's mother had died seven years before, when she was fifteen, of the dreaded scourge of Western Civilization: cancer. It had come as a shock to them both and drawn them even more tightly together as a family unit of two. Helen had been planning to go to the University of Colorado but had suddenly changed her mind, and much against her father's wishes had decided to remain in Gypsum, taking on the double chore of keeping house and helping him run the newspaper. She insisted it was what she wanted to do; her motivation wasn't one of pity or maudlin self-sacrifice; she had firmly made up her mind to make a career as a journalist and what better start than on a small-town newspaper? One day she'd try for a newspaper job in Boulder or even Denver itself, but meanwhile she was perfectly happy – and grateful – to be able to learn her trade on the
Roaring Fork Bulletin
.

Frank was accustomed to the new breed of career girl (Chicago was chock-a-block with them) and he welcomed it as a healthy sign of female independence, the fact that human potential wasn't being wasted or submerged by the traditional stereotype of wife/mother/housekeeper/general dog's-body. At the same time he hated to see women mistaking cold, ruthless – and above all, emotionless – opportunism for genuine emancipation and equality of rights. Many of them felt they had to take on the worst and most aggressive attributes of masculine piggery in order to prove
they were as good a man as the next fellow, if not better. But of course they weren't men, they were women, and it saddened him when they shed their natural feminine qualities and became the epitome of the very thing they were fighting against.

He didn't place Helen Renfield in this category. Her cool demeanour and flip humour he saw as part of the defence mechanism of a young person not at all sure of herself – who she was, where she was going, and what she had to offer the big bustling world outside this Rocky Mountain town. She was far too intelligent, he hoped, to allow the false values of the New Liberated Woman to subvert her own finer sensibilities and the real feminine qualities which she undoubtedly possessed.

This was how Frank Kersh, in his role of amateur social anthropologist, saw her. As Frank Kersh, healthy thirty-three-year-old bachelor with normal libido quotient, he wanted, euphemistically speaking, to sleep with her.

Cal Renfield asked him what he intended to do next, now that his hunch had proved to be correct and the radiation count confirmed as positive. Would he take it up with Professor Friedmann and see what explanation he could offer?

Frank hadn't yet decided what the next step should be. He said, ‘It still doesn't constitute absolute proof that the Project is to blame. Friedmann could quite easily reject it out of hand – in fact that's probably what he will do – and in a sense he's perfectly right. There still isn't any hard-and-fast evidence to link the babies in the hospital with the neutrino detection experiments being carried out at the Deep Hole Project. They could be entirely unconnected – and we'd have a tough time trying to prove otherwise.'

‘Strange that babies giving out radioactivity should be cared for in a place called Radium,' Helen said.

‘It is strange,' Frank agreed. ‘Just one of those odd coincidences that no one can explain. They might easily have been taken to another hospital, in Glenwood Springs maybe, or Lakewood.'

‘Might have been but weren't,' said Cal Renfield, sipping his brandy.

‘You're getting to sound like your local preacher – what's he called – Cabel? Delivering gloomy prophecies of doom and disaster from the Book of Genesis. Do you think the people round here really believe in him or do they treat it all as a joke?'

‘You want to hear him sometime,' Cal Renfield said. ‘He's pretty impressive. He's got the whole thing worked out.' He leaned back at ease in the armchair and clasped his short stubby fingers together across his stomach, as comfortable and content as a cat fed on cream and caviar. ‘The Telluric Faith states that we're all, each and every one of us, an integral part of the Cosmos. There are different levels of awareness but most people are only aware of the one level they inhabit, what you might call the everyday world. Cabel says that in fact we're part of the living Earth – not living
on
it, you understand, but
part
of it. And as part of the Earth we're also part of the living Sun, and so on up through the various levels to the Cosmic.' He frowned and said to Helen, ‘What's that phrase he uses to describe the different levels?'