Solomon's Porch (47 page)

“I, I do not … ” The most famous diplomat on earth, known for his ability to speak eloquently and succinctly under any circumstances, was at a total loss for words. He looked at Gabriel, then at Peter and whispered, “Obrigado.” Carlos Benes was overcome with love and truly slain in the Spirit.

Carlos knelt and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, something his mother had taught him to do by the age of five. While he did not have all the answers he’d sought from God, he no longer needed them. When he finished his short prayer, he had only a few words left to say.

“Consider me a disciple, Peter. I commit the rest of my life to God’s service. Please, help me to be of the most use to others.”

Carlos Benes stood, approached Peter and they embraced. Tears of joy flowed freely from both men.

“Damn him, damn that man,” the President’s first former senior advisor said, as he threw a half eaten plate of food at the screen. “We don’t need all of this f***ing drama! Benes is a weak fool, but the scum of the earth worship him. I tell you this whole thing could easily blow up in our faces. Have you considered that? This is not going well.”

“Cool down. Let them have their moment of glory. I’m taking Carson at his word. Late tomorrow night this voodoo restriction psych job will be history. Then just wait and see. I know human nature, there will be a backlash.” The President’s second former senior advisor was doing his best to steady his wavering co-conspirator.

“So what if there is a backlash? If we get caught, you’ll learn what a backlash is alright. I’m worried, no, not worried, f***ing panicked. You should be too.”

“Why? Don’t you see? This whole charade of Carson’s is just that, a charade. These stunts he pulls are impressive, I’ve got to admit it, but we, my friend, we are the real deal. No phony god controls us. We are the princes of this world, not these two bit hustlers with their rinky dink magic show.”

“I suppose it’s my turn up to bat, Peter,” Dr. Carl Fuchs said. If he sounded reluctant, it’s because he was. Of all of the men on the panel, Carl Fuchs was the most out of his element.

It was during his senior undergraduate year at Yale when the future Dr. Fuchs decided he’d figured it all out. He chose to believe that the universe is governed exclusively by discernible rules; every action has a reaction, every cause an effect, every phenomenon an explanation. Nature is essentially orderly and any mysteries are only temporary, science will solve them all eventually.

Carl’s mind processed mathematical information creatively and at near silicon chip speed. He solved complex equations no one else could and found correlations and connections unseen by other less brilliant minds. Through experience, Carl Fuchs developed an unabiding faith in himself. Given enough time, he believed he could always come up with the solution to any quantifiable problem and to Carl everything was, one way or another, a quantifiable problem.

For over fifty years Dr. Fuchs had no doubts, the certainty of his convictions forming his personal and professional bedrock. He was truly without peer as a physicist, or at least any living one. Carl was a toddler when the one man who had ever lived that could rival his intellectual abilities, Albert Einstein, died. Most of the scientific community believed that Carl Fuchs was the only human being yet born who was potentially capable of realizing Einstein’s dream of constructing a valid unified field theory. This was Carl’s greatest ambition.

Unless it could not be avoided, Carl Fuchs spoke only to other scientists. His lab at Princeton was off limits to all but a few faculty, because he trusted no one. He didn’t concern himself with other people, what they thought, feared, cared about, or hoped for. Carl was not overtly evil, he was in fact by nature and practice basically benign, he just did not have any interest in pursuing human relationships. That’s why he’d never married, had no children or friends, and did not maintain contact with his family. To Carl such things as love and mercy were a distraction, a superfluous drain of precious mental energy.

Then, out of the blue, a few weeks ago the strangest things began happening to Carl. First came the dreams. He had never dreamed before, at least he’d had no dreams he could really remember as being in any way significant. Now this “angel” was visiting him every night with some new admonition, imploring him to “humble himself before God.” Carl had seen the pentecostal images from Parkersboro in his night visions and much, much more. He was now haunted, both day and night, by these all too realistic phantasms.

As if the dreams weren’t bad enough, an ethereal voice was telling him that his blind faith in the scientific method as the path to all knowledge was in error. Damn that voice! It jabbed at him relentlessly, like a curse. Carl had come to despise it in a very short time. No one heard it but him, the voice that said he’d been wrong to value nothing other than objective knowledge. Carl seriously considered the possibility that he was going mad.

But now Dr. Fuchs was forced to conclude that he wasn’t insane because the hated voice had been given a face and a name. Gabriel.

Carl did not want to be in the East Room tonight. He wanted nothing to do with the doubts that plagued his disciplined mind and his new sub-conscious awareness that somehow he’d overreached for fifty years. Dr. Fuchs wanted things to go back to the way they were a few weeks ago, but he was too honest to succeed for long at denial.

“So, we finally meet,” Dr. Fuchs said.

Before Peter could respond, Gabriel did. “Yes, Carl Fuchs, we are finally in the same place and time. But we have met elsewhere.”

“Yes, I know. You come and see me every night and you pester me constantly with your tongue. Why? What do you want from me, Gabriel?”

“It’s what God desires of you that is important. I want nothing from you.”

“God? Why must we discuss God? What is God anyway, Gabriel?”

“He is your Creator, Carl Fuchs, your Lord and Master. He is the one who gave you your genius. You must begin to use your gifts for Him and become useful to the Kingdom.”

“I do not believe you, Gabriel. These apparitions you force on us, these dreams and ideas are being generated by some technology we cannot see. I do not believe in God, especially the Christian God.”

“You do not believe because your mind is so filled with knowledge you have lost the capacity for wisdom. You must repent, seek Christ, and fulfill your destiny.”

“My destiny! What do you know about my destiny, Gabriel?”

“God knows everything.”

“Prove it.”

Gabriel smiled, something Peter tried to recall if he’d ever seen him do before. Moving for the first time since he appeared, Gabriel walked over to Carl Fuchs and gently tapped him on the forehead. The angel then walked back and reestablished his position behind Peter.

After Gabriel touched him Carl Fuchs had a puzzled expression on his face, like a person who couldn’t quite figure out where he’d left something valuable. For a couple of minutes he sat at the conference table fidgeting, looking around, and drawing imaginary numbers in the air. Gabriel kept smiling. No one, including Peter, knew what was going on.

“Will someone please give me a piece of paper and a pencil. For the love of God!” Professor Fuchs abruptly ended his quizzical ticking and became very excited. The Reverend Peterson was sitting right next to him and hurriedly passed Fuchs a pad and a pen.

As if he was the only person in the room, Fuchs began to scribble frantically. Back and forth his hand went, flying across the paper, all the while he muttered to himself incoherently.

“My God,” Fuchs finally said when he stopped writing.

“Yes. Your God and your destiny,” Gabriel answered.

Carl grabbed Howard Simms and they began to mumble back and forth. Obviously the angel had given Carl some important information, but it remained a temporary mystery to everyone else.

“You must tell them,” Gabriel said in a commanding tone, his smile now absent.

“No. What I need to do is get back to my lab. I’ll take Howard with me. Who else should I call, I mean who do you call when … ”

“Tell them.” Gabriel’s inflection was sterner still.

Carl Fuchs was unaccustomed to taking orders from anyone, even from supernatural beings. Until a few moments ago he didn’t even believe in supernatural beings. But now everything had changed.

“They will not understand,” Dr. Fuchs argued.

“Do not be so arrogant, of course they will understand,” Gabriel replied.

Fuchs looked over at Howard Simms who was totally absorbed in the equations Carl had hastily written down on the pad. Aware he was being stared at, Simms raised his head, looked up at Dr. Fuchs and shrugged his shoulders.

“Gabriel, I believe. No, let me start over. Gabriel has somehow given me a very simple and straightforward series of equations which I have no doubt are a complete and perfect unified field theory. In only a few minutes these equations have taken my mind in directions I never would have considered otherwise in two lifetimes. The theory can and no doubt will be tested and validated by others. That may take years, but I do not need any proofs or experiments to know what it is. There is no doubt.”

The men of science in the audience now reacted. They began to talk amongst themselves, loud enough to be heard by the panel at the conference table. Their comments ranged from rude to profound. All of them were dying to see the paper Howard Simms was intensely studying. None of the scientists would have given any credence to the outlandish claim that a unified field theory had been generated by divine osmosis, except that it was being made by Dr. Carl Fuchs, twice a Nobel winner and generally believed to be the smartest person alive.

“I did ask you to prove it, didn’t I, Gabriel.” Fuchs was truly humbled, which was a brand new state of mind for him.

“Yes, you put God to the test, Carl Fuchs. Now He says use this blessing for the benefit of His creation. See to it the miracle is not abused.”

“Gabriel, I don’t know what to do anymore. You have literally altered the way I think. What is next for me? How should I proceed?” The invulnerable Dr. Fuchs sounded more like a small child asking a parent for directions than the “Lion of Princeton,” as his colleagues often called him.

“Seek the counsel of your brothers, Carl Fuchs. Peter and the disciples can open your mind to greater truths than these,” Gabriel said, pointing at the paper full of equations Howard Simms was now jealously guarding.

“Greater truths than understanding how the universe was formed, how matter and energy are essentially the same, how to manipulate time?” Fuchs ran off just a few of the inevitable applications of a valid unified field theory.

“Unless your discovery results in the betterment of man and brings him closer to God, of what use is it? Love is the greatest power in any universe, Carl Fuchs. It is at the heart of any valid theory. Look for it in what God has given you. Find the Uncreated Energy and you will find the Lord, love, and all the answers you seek.”

In a crazy, completely non-rational way Gabriel’s statement made sense to Carl Fuchs. To everyone else it sounded like fantastical gibberish.

“Peter, I am at your service. That I have become a follower of Christ should be an amazement to you. I know it is to me.”

The panel discussion generated an information blitzkrieg. It was impossible for the news media to keep up. “Slow down!” was the editors’ most common response to the furious pace of electronic submissions. But they could not slow down because every White House reporter had lost his or her objectivity. Most were deathly afraid of missing the slightest detail. They knew how critical it was to get it right. The press had become part of the process, witnesses more than correspondents. Only a soulless robot would be immune to the influence of the Power in the East Room, and none of the reporters present fit that description.

Martz, Doris Spence, and Alex gave up trying to moderate the discussion. It was obvious that their help was no longer needed.

“Well, Mr. Stone, I guess that leaves just you and me,” the President said, after Carl Fuchs finished his short speech. “I think I’ll pass on my turn. Folks hear me drone on too much anyway. The world needs to hear from you, Roger Stone.”

Despite Doris’ earlier introduction, no one other than Peter, Alex, and the President really knew why Roger Stone was taking up space on the most prestigious panel in history. The concept that God had invited him explained little or nothing about why he was here to most observers. Weren’t all the panelists invited? Who was this guy who could be a poster boy for Nerds ‘R Us?

Ask Roger Stone why he was here and he’d tell you that he didn’t have a clue. God wanted it to be so. End of story. But then the Lord had always been everything to Roger Stone. Nothing else really mattered to him other than to try and stay in right standing with God.

Roger was never the best or the brightest or the most handsome. As a child and as a young adult he showed a moderate interest in his education, but none in sports or socializing or arts or any of the thousand other things young people get caught up in as they grow up.

Roger Stone was, and always had been, interested in only one thing, God. And not so much through theology as through experience. Roger was a prayer warrior. He prayed for the neighbors when they got sick, asked God to find the resources to fill the food banks in his town, and pleaded with the Lord to restore love and kindness to broken marriages in his church.