Towing Jehovah Read Online Free PDF

hand, rotating it sideways, and etching an invisible cross in the air.
    "Remember," said the angel, "no stunts."
    The young doctor looped his arm around Gabriel's shoulder and, like a dutiful son guiding his dying father down the hallway of a cancer ward, escorted him out of the room.
    Thomas studied the barren screen. God's dead body? God had a body? What were the cosmological implications of this astonishing claim? Was He truly gone, or had His spirit merely vacated some gratuitous husk? (Gabriel's grief suggested there was no putting a happy face on the situation.) Did heaven still exist? (Since the afterlife consisted essentially in God's eternal presence, then the answer was logically no, but surely the question merited further study.) What of the Son and the Ghost? (Assuming Catholic theology counted for anything, then these Persons were inert now too, the Trinity being ipso facto indivisible, but, again, the issue manifestly deserved the attentions of a synod or perhaps even a Vatican Council.)
    He turned to the other clerics. "There are problems here."
    "A secret consistory has been in session since Tuesday," said the Pope, nodding. "The entire College of Cardinals, burning the midnight oil. We're tackling the full spectrum: the possible causes of death, the chances of resuscitation, the future of the Church . . ."
    "We'd like your answer now, Father Ockham," said Di Luca. "The Valparaíso weighs anchor in just five days."
    Thomas took a deep breath, enjoying the rich, savory hypocrisy of the moment. Historically, Rome had tended to regard her Jesuits as expendable, something between a nuisance and a threat. Ah, but now that the chips were down, to whom did the Vatican turn? To the faithful, unflappable warriors of Ignatius Loyola, that's who.
    "May I keep this?" Thomas lifted a stray feather from the floor.
    "Very well," said Innocent XIV.
    Thomas's gaze wandered back and forth between the Pope and the feather. "One item on your agenda confuses me."
    "Do you accept?" demanded Di Luca.
    "What item?" asked the Pope.
    The feather exuded a feeble glow, like a burning candle fashioned from the tallow of some lost, forsaken lamb.
    "Resuscitation."
    Resuscitation: the word wove tauntingly through Thomas's head as he emerged from the fetid dampness of Union Square Station and started down Fourteenth Street. It was all highly speculative, of course; the desiccation rate Di Luca had selected for a Supreme Being's central nervous system (ten thousand neurons a minute) bordered on the arbitrary. But assuming the cardinale knew whereof he spoke, an encouraging conclusion followed. According to the Vatican's OMNIVAC-5000, He would not be brain-dead before the eighteenth of August—a sufficient interval in which to ferry Him above the Arctic Circle—though it had to be allowed that the computer had made the prediction under protest, crying INSUFFICIENT DATA all the way.
    The June air fell heavily on Thomas's flesh, an oppressive cloak of raw Manhattan heat. His face grew slick with perspiration, making his bifocals slide down his nose. On both sides of the street, peddlers labored in the sultry dusk, gathering up their shrinkwrapped audiocassettes, phony Cartier watches, and spastic mechanical bears and piling them into their station wagons. To Thomas's eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart. Each vendor wore a wholly impassive face, the shell-shocked, world-weary stare of the urban foot soldier. Thomas envied them their ignorance. Whatever their present pains, whatever defeats and disasters they were sustaining, at least they could imagine that a living God presided over their planet. He turned right onto Second Avenue, walked south two blocks, and, pulling Gabriel's feather from his breast pocket, climbed the steps of a mottled brownstone.