Credence Foundation

Chapter Three



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.

They resembled so very much the stills of enemy ships ancient Air Force commanders prompted their pilots with at mission briefings before air attacks in World War II.

Some of the spaceships were as long and tapered as submarines, some were as massive as oil tankers, others as bulky as sports domes, others as sleek and elegant as ocean liners. But there were also a few that were as small as little houses.

Benedict led the applicants to a third window.

Inside another hall, a dozen fresh believers, wearing yellow suits, floated in their training deckchairs, about three feet above the polished floor. This time, the ubiquitous monitors displayed pictures of queer, lush and hulking exoplants, among which a weird barbed palm stood out prominently.

A second instructor glanced at a fan-shaped pad in his hands, checking the synchronization levels of the fresh believers afloat. Though a couple of dots fluttered wildly above and below the fluorescent-green bell of the syncing level, the rest of them crowded along it with commendable precision.

“Before our fresh believers can deal with the largest spaceships,” continued Benedict, “they are required to test their skills on lesser objects.”

He showed the applicants to one last, narrow window.

Beyond a thick security glass, opened an empty, spotless-white hall the dimension of a large hangar. Except for the slit window, every inch of it had been lined with large, square ceramic tiles.

For a minute or so, nothing happened.

Then, all at once, a ripple propagated through the air like a quickly expanding heat wave. Amazingly, one of the barbed exoplants seen in the training room materialized from thin air.

Gnarled and thorny, it was more than twenty feet high. Its roots deprived of the supporting soil, the exoplant crashed loudly to the ceramic floor, sending clods of alien soil all over.

The plant just lay there for a while when, unexpectedly, something dropped from its crown ...

It rolled to the plain tiles of the floor, looking like a round eggplant. But it was no fruit. It uncurled, revealing the black, blinking eyes of a small, dark-blue alien creature resembling a scaled salamander.

There was something disturbing about the way the two gills at either side of its head frantically opened and closed, in the attempt to filter or suck in something that clearly wasn’t air. In moments, it started to squirm and spasm helplessly, choking inexorably ...

Until it noticed the window above, from which the disconcerted applicants were looking. Fighting for life, the creature resorted to its last strength. Clawing at the walls of the hangar, it desperately rushed upward.

To the horror of the onlookers, the creature slithered to level with the corridor window and crawled around the frame like a cockroach trapped in a jar, looking for a way out—but it couldn’t find any.

Almost at the end of its resources as well as of its wits, the only thing the creature could think of was to slam its head into the thick glass. It tried once again, harder this time, but it almost knocked itself out.

Unable to figure out what that place was, wondering where the comfortable world that used to be home had gone, the stunned alien glowered at the humans.

Ever so slowly, the gills stopped pumping and never moved again. The creature had died with its eyes open.

As if the pitiful sight had triggered a hidden switch in the test room circuitry, flames erupted from the ceiling, inundating the hangar below, mercifully obliterating both the exoplant and the alien creature.

Benedict looked up at the shocked applicants. He could sense the many unanswered questions that flooded their minds. Was the horrible death of the little, scaled salamander an unpredictable mistake? Or was it a deliberate show of the overwhelming powers that lay behind Credence?

“The test required for the fresh believers to flush the Arcturian Palm alone. Not the small critters that live on it,” he said. “I’m afraid they’ll have to try again.”

More concerned about the poor performance of his believers than the critter’s demise, he sighed.

“The people who depend on Credence and our services depend in first place on our believers’ total devotion and dedication,” he said. “It is the responsibility of the believers, of their instructors as well as mine that no errors are made in the production of the Main Belief. As I told you, it’s hard, long work, but being a believer is no ordinary job. More than a mission, it’s a call. Don’t ever forget that.”

Nobody said anything. The applicants were still shaken by what they had just witnessed.

Benedict wondered who among them was going to become a believer. In the last five years, he had seen as many as ten thousand of them. He thought he had developed an eye for spotting them. It wasn’t anything scientific, of course, and he knew it was a little foolish thing to do. However, his job didn’t allow for many distractions or amusements, so he gave it a try.

There were three who looked very promising.

The first was a straw-blond haired, ruddy youngster of about twenty-five. He had a straight nose, broad cheekbones and strong shoulders. Even if he tried to be casual about it, he couldn’t quite hide the thick farmworker arms that bulged under a Syntex shirt engineered to look like rough, worn-out jeans fabric.

Benedict was positive that behind the almost dumb look of the young man, a quick, inquisitive brain was to be found. He was sure the man had listened to him very carefully and that he had understood every single word of what he had said. A good competitor.

Seemingly, there was another who hadn’t missed a word of Benedict’s introductory speech. She was a pale and thin woman of about twenty, had long red hair, a pointy nose and a small chin. Her cold, emerald eyes kept moving around, losing nothing of what she saw; another interesting subject.

The third contender was also a young woman. She had jet-black hair woven in long, tight braids pulled up in a bun on the top of her head. She had black opals for eyes, the lean body of an athlete and full, lovely lips. She hadn’t stopped taking notes in her electronic pad for the whole length of Benedict’s speech, except for once, when the fire had engulfed the test room.

“There’s another promising subject,” thought Benedict. It wasn’t just his nose for spotting believers, something else had convinced him.

When the applicants had witnessed the accidental death of the alien creature—the little, helpless scaled salamander—all three had looked straight in Benedict’s eyes. They blamed him for what had happened.

That wasn’t a bad sign at all. On the contrary. A good believer must value life beyond anything else. The more he valued life, the more his belief would be focused, the lesser the chance he made errors in creating the Main Belief.

Benedict allowed his mouth to curl into a little, self-satisfied smile. Yes, those three were going to do very good as believers ...

He snapped out of his personal considerations, extending his arm toward a stern-looking woman of about forty in lab overalls who had suddenly appeared to Benedict’s right.

“Mrs. Matthews will pick up from here,” he said. “She will lead you through the next steps. Good luck to all of you and welcome to Credence ...”

He moved aside, letting Matthews step forth and take charge of the applicants.

“I’m Stephanie Matthews,” said the woman in a crisp and brisk tone of voice. “I’m responsible for the preliminary selection of the applicants. If you have questions about how we choose believers or about how points are assigned at every stage of the interview, just let me know. We will now evaluate your primary attitude for believing. Please follow me.”

Matthews herded the applicants down the corridor. They soon disappeared in one of the many rooms of Credence.

Only Benedict stood in the now-empty corridor—and a previously unseen Trumaine ...