Earth Cult Read online

  ‘Reg’lar meetin’,’ said the young man, who had an exaggerated drawl which sounded in Frank’s ears like an impersonation of a youthful Jimmy Stewart. ‘Folks come into town to listen to the preacher. He whips ‘em up, they get drunk, fight a little, then sleep it off. Gettin’ to be two, three times a week recently.’

  ‘You mean to say it’s a Prayer Meeting?’ Frank said, still not sure that he understood.

  ‘Guess so.’ The young man nodded and wiped his large red knuckly hands on his apron. ‘Guess you could call it that.’

  ‘And they hold the meeting right here in the lobby?’

  The young man shook his head. ‘Naw, they get together here to wait for the preacher, Mr Cabel. He ain’t got no reg’lar place to preach, so’s they wait here till he gits hisself all fixed up in the street. Then the proceedin’s commence.’

  He pronounced it co-mmence.

  Frank had heard how some of the small Mid-West communities went in strongly for religious meetings, still carrying on the traditions of the fire-and-brimstone preachers who had wandered the country at the turn of the century, but it seemed odd that red-necked ranchers, farmers and mineworkers should be such devoted students of the good book. It only went to show that living in the city gave you a distorted perspective on what the rest of America was up to; for Frank Kersh it was like stepping back eighty years into the past.

  He said, ‘What denomination does Mr Cabel represent?’

  The young man had absently picked up a knife from the table and was polishing it. ‘Calls hisself a member of the Telluric Faith. The folks round here don’t seem to care what the hell he is so long as he preaches a good sermon. And Mr Cabel sure does that right enough.’

  ‘Telluric?’ Frank repeated. He took a sip of Southern Comfort. ‘Is that some local religious sect? I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘Somethin’ to do with the earth,’ the young man advised him. ‘Mr Cabel talks a lot about earth and fire and water – calls ‘em the prime sources from which everything springs. Myself I don’t know too much about it. I listen in now and then but it don’t seem to make a heck of a lot of sense.’

  The lobby was now full and amongst the gathering Frank caught sight of the hotel clerk. His small thin figure and pale narrow face with its set of corrugated vee-shaped wrinkles seemed conspicuously out-of-place alongside the broad-sunburned ranchers and miners. There were no women present.

  ‘I see the desk clerk’s a member of the congregation.’

  The young man snorted down his nose. ‘That’s Stringer. He helps organize the meetings and goes round with the plate. If you ask me he’s the one behind all this.’

  ‘Behind all what?’ Frank said curiously.

  But the young man had moved away, still polishing the knife, as if he hadn’t heard – or chose to ignore – Frank’s question. There was a small bar with half a dozen bottles and some upturned glasses on a tray and he busied himself behind it, keeping his face averted.

  After a moment he said, ‘Can I get you another drink, mister? I mean sir – they keep telling me I should call hotel guests sir.’

  ‘Unless they happen to be women.’

  The barman-waiter turned his prominent red nose in Frank’s direction. ‘Huh?’ he said, his expression blank.

  ‘You don’t get many customers in here.’

  ‘They’ll be in later, after the meeting. We get pretty busy about ten onwards.’ He seemed willing to talk once again. ‘You prob’bly won’t get much sleep, mister – sir – they go on drinkin’ and yappin’ till all hours, and here’s me got to get up at five-thirty in the mornin’.’ He puckered his lips and thrust them forward in a comical expression of pained martyrdom. ‘An’ Chuck’s the worst one of all,’ he muttered, half to himself.

  ‘I guess Chuck is the cowboy.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The young man leaned his sharp elbows on the bar, his head sunk between his shoulders. ‘But don’t let Chuck hear you call him that. Chuck Strang is a rancher. Runs a breeding herd of 600 head along by Roaring Fork there. The Lazy W ranch.’

  ‘What does he get out of the Telluric Faith? Does it help fatten up his cattle?’

  The young man’s eyes shifted evasively and he traced the wet imprint of a glass on the bar-top with a bony finger. ‘No use askin’ me. I just serve them beer and bourbon.’

  ‘You can serve me another Southern Comfort,’ Frank said. He looked towards the lobby and saw that the people were slowly filing outside. The preacher must have arrived and the meeting proper was about to begin. As if a light had suddenly gone on inside his head Frank realized the significance of the word Telluric: it derived from the Latin tellus meaning of or pertaining to the Earth. What were these people – Earth worshippers? In one way, he supposed, it did make a weird kind of sense. Miners spent their working lives underground, digging into the bowels of the earth, so it was logical that they had a certain kind of reverence for it. But as for actually worshipping the planet and making it the focus of their religious homage – no, that didn’t seem to square with the miners he had met in the past, tough hard-working men who wouldn’t take bullshit from anybody, much less a fire-breathing preacher who had invented his own screwball religion.

  The young man set the drink down in front of him. He said, ‘You movin’ on in the morning, mister?’

  ‘Not right away.’ There had seemed more than just a casual inquiry in the young man’s tone; or was he reading devious meanings into something that was innocent and blameless, himself affected by this strange cult he had stumbled across in the middle of nowhere? He thought with a flash of wry humour that if they were of the Telluric Faith they probably referred to themselves as Tellurians: inhabitants of the Earth.

  The young man had remained at the table, apparently still waiting for an answer. He wrapped his large raw-boned hands in the folds of his apron, imitating the motion of wiping them, even though they were perfectly dry. Frank Kersh interpreted this as a sign of unease.

  He said, not seeing why he should conceal anything, ‘I’m here on business. There’s a scientific establishment in the area which I’m covering for my journal. I’m a science writer,’ he added, to forestall the inevitable query as to whether this meant he was a reporter. People didn’t seem to understand or appreciate the difference anyway.

  The young man moved slowly away. The information didn’t appear to have registered, or at any rate hadn’t produced a reaction, but Frank saw that he was mistaken when the young man said, ‘Does Stringer know why you’re here?’

  ‘You mean the desk clerk?’

  ‘He’s the owner of this place.’

  ‘No, I didn’t tell him. He never asked and I don’t see what business it is of his.’

  ‘Then I wouldn’t, mister. Don’t tell him.’

  Frank laughed. ‘You make it sound mysterious.’

  ‘I’m jus’ saying: if he doesn’t know, don’t tell him.’

  ‘Doesn’t he get along with the scientists working on the Deep Hole Project?’

  ‘None of them do. No way.’

  ‘You mean the rest of the sect?’

  ‘None of them,’ the young man repeated flatly. He turned and said, ‘Is that the official name of that place – Deep Hole?’

  ‘That’s how it’s known to other scientists. Its official designation is the Rocky Mountain Astrophysical Neutrino Research Station. Why should Stringer have anything against the people who work there? I shouldn’t think he has a clue about what they’re doing there.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to know – what matters to Stringer and the others is where they’ve situated the damn thing.’

  ‘You mean an old abandoned working on the side of the mountain?’

  ‘Right.’ The young man nodded emphatically. ‘The Tell-uride Mine.’

  ‘Is that what it was called before the Project took it over?’

  ‘The oldest mine in this part of the Rockies, so they say. Goes right back to the first rush in the 1850s when Colorado
was opened up for the first time. Men been diggin’ that mine for more than a hundred years, then the scientists move in and everythin’ goes haywire—’

  As if realizing that he was talking too much the young man turned away and went behind the bar; it almost seemed as if he needed to place a physical barrier between them.

  Frank now saw, or thought he did, the connection which linked the religious following to the old mine working: the Telluric sect apparently regarded it as possessing special religious significance because of its name – which in fact, as he now recalled, was the description of an oxide of tellurium, a silvery-white non-metallic element found in association with gold, silver and bismuth. In some weird and wonderful fashion the Tellurians had confused the Latin derivative telluric – meaning ‘of the earth’ – with the mineralogists’ name for a non-metallic oxide: telluride. It seemed plausible enough, though it never ceased to amaze him how the human race had this capacity for conjuring up out of thin air random figments of fantasy and building an entire structure of belief on the shiftiest of premises.

  He smiled, wondering if the scientists over at Deep Hole knew of the rash of rumour, distrust and consternation they had caused by innocently choosing to install their neutrino detection equipment at the bottom of the deepest shaft in North America. That was the whole point of the operation, of course, shielding the perchloroethylene tanks from cosmic rays and other background ‘noise’ with a mile-thick layer of solid rock so that only the elusive massless, uncharged neutrino travelling at the speed of light would get through. Every other particle known to science would be stopped dead in its tracks, with only the ‘ghost particle of the atom’, as it had been called, completing the trip into the depths of the mine.

  It would be unreasonable to expect the layman to understand the need for such a location; he would naturally assume that the scientists were actively seeking something deep below ground and not simply using the mountain as an efficient shielding device to prevent stray and unwanted nuclear interactions.

  Frank said good night and took his drink up to his room. It was on the first floor overlooking the small main square. The dim street lights made pools of pale illumination, leaving murky areas of darkness which were filled with the murmur of low voices. Frank stared out but could see nothing, and after a few moments stripped down to his underclothes and lay on the bed, his drink near at hand, a pleasant drowsiness pressing down on his eyelids.

  Now that he was alone he thought longingly of the girl he had met out on the Coast. She had been very good. It had been one of those instantaneous attractions – for both of them – and five hours after meeting her at a publisher’s cocktail party they had wound up in her bed making very satisfactory love. Susan Cleeve, twenty-nine, small and dark with a sexy generous mouth she had known how to use. Divorced, living alone, an attractive independent woman with a lively mind and a desirable body …

  He had fallen into a light doze, drifting along on the gentle waves of pleasant retrospection, and then he slowly became aware of the sound of low monotonous chanting from the square below. The words were indistinct, lost in the constant drone of voices, but as his senses sharpened he picked out the odd phrase here and there which seemed to have the ring of Biblical quotation. There was something about ‘… and the flood was forty days upon the earth’, and another chant, repeated over and over again, which went, ‘… and the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth’.

  The Tellurians, it appeared, were prophesying doom and destruction in the manner of the Flood as depicted in the Bible. Yet another sect who believed that the end was nigh.

  Turning the light off and going quickly to the window, Frank looked down into the dark square. He could vaguely make out a group of people, the dim lamplight catching the outline of a face, the shape of a hand, and now that his eyes were accustomed to the gloom he could plainly see the white stetson, a ghostly hat on the head of its invisible wearer.

  The preacher, Mr Cabel – if he was there, which Frank assumed he was – was lost in the darkness. The chanting went on, rising and falling to the mournful rhythm of a funereal dirge. It seemed odd, and rather eerie, to be witnessing such an event in what was after all the most technologically advanced country on the face of the earth – and in an age of scientific reason and enlightenment when the antiquated voodoo of religious ceremony had, supposedly, been swept away along with primitive superstition and the belief in spirits.

  The chanting lulled Frank to sleep that night, but his dreams were filled with cataclysmic visions of torrents of rushing floodwater and mountains split asunder by thunderbolts from the heavens.

  THREE

  The drive out to the Deep Hole Project took forty minutes. He hadn’t asked directions, surmising that somewhere along the road east of Gypsum there would be a bridge crossing the Eagle River, and from that point he would watch out for signposts.

  Five miles out of town he came to the bridge, a single-span timber construction with room enough for only one vehicle at a time. There was no sign pointing the way to the Project, which struck him as odd. The main highway carried on along the northern bank of the river to the next town of Avon, and further on, Mintburn, Red Cliff, Breckenridge and Climax. Somewhere in that vicinity – about ten miles away, he reckoned – was the Great Eagle Dam, built in the sixties to supply the High Plains territory to the east of the Continental Divide. This was the farmland of the State, good rich soil robbed of the rainfall it required by the granite backbone of the Rockies which lifted the rain-bearing cloud from the west and claimed most of the water for its own mountain streams. So the Dam had been built to feed Denver and the vast flat acreage where crops were grown and the bulk of the cattle reared.

  Beyond the bridge the road turned from smooth grey asphalt into red shale. It started to climb, gradually at first, past small rocky outcrops, then steepened and began to curl in a series of sharp hairpin loops. Below and to his left Frank could see the winding thread of the river, and further away a speckle of buildings which was Gypsum.

  The Mount of the Holy Cross was immediately above him, so close that he couldn’t get a good look at it. The weather at the moment was fine and clear, the temperature quite mild for the time of year, but he could easily imagine what it would be like when the snows came and blanketed the range, virtually sealing off the Project from the outside world. He wondered what they did in winter for supplies; if there was a suitable piece of flat ground it was possible that helicopters could maintain the supply-line, or maybe they stocked up for months ahead and sat it out – but it would be a bleak kind of existence, marooned up here on the side of the mountain.

  Still no marker. This annoyed him a little and for a moment he thought he’d taken the wrong road; yet how could he lose his way when there was only a single track leading upwards in ever-decreasing spirals? Most scientific establishments (except the top secret ones) were adequately signposted and there was no reason he could think of why Deep Hole shouldn’t be the same.

  The road levelled out and up ahead he could see three logs lashed together to form an entrance. Nailed to the one spanning the road there was a sign which read: Telluride Mine. This had to be the place. And then he did see a small metal plaque, no bigger than a letter-box, which as he drove slowly up to it transpired to have the words US Institute of Astrophysics stamped across its metal face, and below in smaller letters, Solar Neutrino Research Station.

  Nothing like being ostentatious, Frank thought.

  The prefabricated huts, half a dozen or so grouped together, were set some distance away across a compound of packed red earth from the mine-head, which itself was enclosed by a new brick building, the winding gear above contained in a latticework of steel girders painted bright orange. The authorities had obviously spent more on the equipment than on the living quarters, which Frank personally thought was a poor balance and bad psychology. The best equipment in the world wouldn’t achieve results if the personnel who had to operate it were living in what they
felt were below-standard conditions.

  There were several people about but none of them paid any attention to him as he stepped out of the car and slung his Pentax camera and Plustron cassette recorder across his shoulder. He’d chosen to wear a short denim jacket and jeans, anticipating that part of the day would be spent scrambling in and out of a wire cage and travelling for periods underground. He hoped they wouldn’t object to his taking photographs, which even if the editor decided not to use them were always useful as reference. Some scientists could be touchy about giving too much away, despite the fact that their particular line of work might be known and well-documented in umpteen scientific papers.

  But Professor Friedmann raised no objection. He’d been given advance warning of the visit and seemed amenable to Frank’s request to take shots of the underground installation. He was a tall spare man – in his mid-fifties, Frank guessed – with short grey hair that was razored in a line above his ears. He wore blue-tinted spectacles with metal frames which seemed to lend him a rather bemused attitude as if life’s little surprises always took him aback slightly. He wasn’t vague or absent-minded, yet there was almost a kind of innocence about him that reminded Frank of a brainy though naive schoolboy.

  His greeting was cordial, if a little guarded, but then Frank Kersh was accustomed to the caution of scientists and academics when dealing with the press. They had it firmly fixed in their minds that he was ‘a reporter’, and as such had to be treated with scepticism, if not open distrust.

  ‘If you’re looking for a “scoop” I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,’ said Professor Friedmann with forced joviality. ‘Isn’t that what you fellows are always after, a new and exciting scientific “breakthrough”?’

  He spoke the jargon self-consciously, in the arch manner of an adult unused to conversing with children but making a gallant effort to do so.

  ‘I’m with Science Now, not Hustler,’ Frank said with a smile. ‘Our editorial policy is to treat scientific and technical subjects with the degree of seriousness they deserve. But if you’ve made a breakthrough in neutrino astronomy I’d be happy to hear about it.’