“You’re starting to make me feel nervous, Charlie.” I intended it to sound light, but it came out dead serious.

He paid no notice, only began to limp up and down between the worktable and the shelves, staring at the floor, touching the green box each time he passed it, as if to assure himself it was still there.

“Yes, others have visited those chambers. I’m not the first. Scribonius for one. Prinn for another. But most have kept their discoveries to themselves, just as I have. Because the power is enormous. Unknowable, really. Nuclear power? Pah! It’s a joke!” He touched the green box. “What’s in here could, if connected to a source powerful enough, make nuclear energy as insignificant as a child’s cap pistol.”

I wished I’d brought my lemonade with me, because my throat was dry. I had to clear it before I could speak. “Charlie, let’s say everything you’re telling me is true. Do you understand what you’re dealing with? How it works?”

“A fair question. Let me pose one in return. Do you understand what happens when you flick a wall switch? Could you list the sequence of events that ends with light banishing the shadows in a dark room?”

“No.”

“Do you even know if that flick of your finger closes a circuit or opens one?”

“No idea.”

“Yet that never stopped you from turning on a light, did it? Or powering up your electric guitar when it was time to play?”

“True, but I never plugged into an amp powerful enough to light the whole East Coast.”

He gave me a look of suspicion so dark it seemed close to paranoia. “If you have a point, I’m afraid I’m not taking it.”

I believed he was telling the truth about that, which might have been the scariest thing of all.

“Never mind.” I took him by the shoulders to stop his pacing and waited until he looked at me. Only even with his wide eyes fixed on my face, it was more like he was looking through me.

“Charlie—if you’re done curing people, and if you don’t want to end the energy crunch, what do you want?”

At first he didn’t reply. He seemed to be in a trance. Then he pulled away from me and began pacing again, reverting to the lecture-hall prof.

“The transfer devices—the ones I use on human beings—have undergone a number of iterations. When I cured Hugh Yates of his deafness, I was using large rings coated in gold and palladium. They seem hilariously old-fashioned to me now, videocassettes in the age of computer downloads. The headphones I used on you were smaller and more powerful. By the time you appeared with your heroin problem, I had replaced palladium with osmium. Osmium is less expensive—a plus for a man on a budget, as I was then—and the headphones were effective, but they’d hardly look good at a revival meeting, would they? Did Jesus wear headphones?”

“Probably not,” I said, “but I doubt if he wore wedding rings, either, being a bachelor.”

He paid no attention. He paced back and forth like a man in a cell. Or the paranoids who circulate in any big city, the ones who want to talk about the CIA and the international Jewish conspiracy and the secrets of the Rosicrucians. “So I went back to the rings, and created a story that would make them . . . palatable . . . to my congregants.”

“A pitch, in other words.”

That brought him back to the here and now. He grinned, and for a moment I was with the Reverend Jacobs I remembered from my childhood. “Yes, okay, a pitch. By then I was using a ruthenium and gold alloy, and consequently the rings were much smaller. And even more powerful. Shall we leave, Jamie? You’re looking a bit unsettled.”

“I am. I may not understand your juice, but I can feel it. Almost like it’s putting bubbles in my blood.”

He laughed. “Yes! You could say the atmosphere in here is electric! Ha! I enjoy it, but then, I’m used to it. Come, let’s step outside and get some fresh air.”

 • • •

The outside world never smelled sweeter than it did as we strolled back toward the house.

“I have one more question, Charlie. If you don’t mind?”

He sighed, but didn’t look displeased. Once out of that claustrophobia-inducing little room, he seemed sane again. “Glad to answer if I can.”

“You tell the rubes your wife and son drowned. Why do you lie? I don’t see what purpose it can serve.”

He stopped and lowered his head. When he lifted it, I saw that serene normality had taken a hike, if it had ever been there at all. On his face was a rage so deep and black that I involuntarily fell back a step. The breeze had tumbled his thinning hair over his lined brow. He swept it back and then pressed his palms to his temples, like a man suffering a monster headache. Yet when he spoke, his voice was toneless and low. If not for the look on his face, I might have mistaken it for reasonableness.

“They don’t deserve the truth. You called them rubes, and how right you are. They have set aside what brains they have—and many of them have quite a lot—and put their faith in that gigantic and fraudulent insurance company called religion. It promises them an eternity of joy in the next life if they live according to the rules in this one, and many of them try, but even that’s not enough. When the pain comes, they want miracles. To them I’m nothing but a witch doctor who touches them with magic rings instead of shaking a bone rattle over them.”

“Haven’t any of them found out the truth?” My researches with Bree had convinced me that Fox Mulder was right about one thing: the truth is out there, and anyone in our current age, where almost everyone is living in a glass house, can find it with a computer and an Internet connection.

“Aren’t you listening to me? They don’t deserve the truth, and that’s okay, because they don’t want it.” He smiled, and his teeth appeared, the upper and lower sets locked together. “They don’t want the Beatitudes of the Song of Solomon, either. They only want to be healed.”

 • • •

Stamper didn’t glance up as we crossed the kitchen. Two of the mail bins had been emptied and he was working on the third. The liquor box now looked about half full. There were some checks, but mostly it was crumpled currency. I thought of what Jacobs had said about witch doctors. In Sierra Leone, his customers would be lined up outside the door, bearing produce and chickens with freshly wrung necks. Same thing, really; all of it’s just the kick. The grab. The take.

Back in the library, Jacobs seated himself with a grimace and drank the rest of his lemonade. “I’ll have to piss all afternoon,” he said. “It’s the curse of growing old. The reason I was glad to see you, Jamie, is because I want to hire you.”

“You want to what?”

“You heard me. Al will be leaving soon. I’m not sure he knows it yet, but I do. He wants no part of my scientific work; even though he knows it’s the basis of my cures, he thinks it’s an abomination.”

I almost said, What if he’s right?

“You can do his job—open each day’s mail, catalogue the correspondents’ names and complaints, put aside the love offerings, once a week drive down to Latchmore and deposit the checks. You’ll vet gate-callers—their numbers are drying up, but there are still at least a dozen a week—and turn them away.”

He turned to face me directly.

“You can also do what Al refuses to do—help me along the final steps to my goal. I’m very close, but I’m not strong. An assistant would be invaluable, and we’ve worked well before. I don’t know how much Hugh is paying you, but I’ll double—no, triple it. What do you say?”

At first I could say nothing. I was stunned.

“Jamie? I’m waiting.”

I picked up the lemonade, and this time the melting remnants of the ice cubes did click together. I drank, then put it down again.

“You speak of a goal. Tell me what it is.”

He considered. Or appeared to. “Not yet. Come to work for me and get to understand the power and beauty of the secret electricity a little better. Perhaps then.”