“Do they normally accept underachieving students?”

“His mother was a chemist at the Polymer Science Institute there. It seems likely she pulled a few strings.”

“Ah.”

“His grades remained lackluster. He was picked up by the campus police a couple of times for drunken behavior, once for public urination, once for grabbing a young lady’s breast in a manner she found offensive.” She put the individual dates up on the time line. A neat, unbroken row of numbers marched across the board. “No charges filed either time.

“I think by now we’ve got a pretty good picture of the sort of guy he was. Weak. Directionless. There was nothing he particularly wanted to do or achieve or become. He had the mental equipment, but lacked any goal that would make him actually exert himself. The only reason he didn’t drop out was that his parents were paying the tab and college provided him with a comfortable existence. Nevertheless, it was as good as written that he was never going to get his degree. He was on a downward spiral.

“Now look here.” She put an enlargement of the transcript up on the whiteboard so they could all see it, and circled the relevant numbers. “Out of nowhere, he pulls himself up out of his tailspin. Look at those grades! He got an A in French! How he managed that after such a sloppy beginning, I’ll never know. He can’t have gotten much sleep. Where did that kind of discipline come from?”

She put the date of his finals up on the board, but left an open space before it, where she inserted a large red question mark. “There aren’t a lot of things that can turn someone’s life around like that. A hitch in the military. Marriage. Or getting religion.”

“He found Jesus,” Amy Cho said warmly. She struggled up out of her seat, and stamped her cane for emphasis. “He discovered the solace and strength of the Lord!”

“He certainly did. We may never know what triggered his conversion. But we know it happened, because during the time he was burning the midnight oil to bring his grades up, he also got involved in Campus Ministries. For about six weeks. Then, abruptly, he quit.”

Amy Cho leaned heavily on the table with both hands and stared down at the transcript, as if it were a holy relic. “They were too mild for him! Liberals and Unitarians, weak tea the lot of them. He’d been touched by holy fire! He needed sacrifice! They offered him prayer meetings and recycling drives. He was looking for a cause that would consume him. One that would accept everything he had and demand more.”

Nobody doubted that she knew what she was talking about.

“He worked in a furniture factory that summer. No absences, no tardiness. In his off hours, he apparently wrote a few papers for creationist on-line journals. Most of them have been erased, but we found one that another creationist group pirated for their own website. In it, he calculated how much water it would’ve taken to cover the Earth during the Flood, and put forward several speculations as to where that excess water might have gone. It differed from most such papers in that it adhered rigorously to known science. In the end, he admitted that none of his speculations could account for the discrepancy in figures, and concluded that God must have worked a miracle.

“Junior year. He changed his major from English Lit to Geology.”

“How deeply involved was he in creationist circles at this time?”

“He was still hoping to discredit science using its own tools. He was an activist, but he hadn’t hooked up with the Ranch yet. We know this because now is when his father died.”

She added the date to the whiteboard:

“He didn’t attend the funeral.”

“There’s no record that he did,” Tom corrected her.

“There’s no record he attended the funeral. If the Ranch had been grooming him at that point, he would have been there. He would have been very careful to sign the register.”

“He was still a pilgrim,” Amy Cho said. She stared down at the papers as if she could read things from them that no one else could. “He moved from creation science to deep creationism. He fell in with the Wrath of Gideon. They talk a good game, but they’re riddled with informers, and everybody knows it. So he moved on. Finally, he discovered the Thrice-Born Brotherhood, and they recognized his potential.”

“You can document this?” Griffin asked Molly.

“No, of course not. It’s the separation of Church and State. Religious organizations don’t have to file membership lists anywhere. These damned fundamentalists don’t appreciate how unregulated they are.”

“So this part of the presentation is speculative, then?”

“Well… yes. But”—she moved swiftly to her next suite of papers—“here, for his senior year, you’ll note that his tuition check was posted from an apartment near the campus, rather than from his mother’s house.”

“Which means what?”

“She threw him out. He’d be hard enough to take as a failure. Imagine him burning with the righteousness of a new convert! But here’s the interesting question: Where did that money come from? Not from Mom. The check is written on his own bank account. He couldn’t possibly have earned enough over summer break to pay for it. For that matter, there’s no record he had a summer job at all.” She placed a red question mark on the time line to mark that summer. “So where was he?”

“Well?”

“We know one particularly well-funded group, don’t we?” Amy Cho said. “Lots of rich old men hoping to squeeze through the eye of the needle. Capitalist carnivores desperate to lie down with the lambs before it’s too late. Oh, Holy Redeemer Ranch does not lack for money.”

“Is that all?” Griffin asked. “Suspicion, innuendo, and a complete lack of physical evidence?”

“Sir, there’s a pattern here!” Molly squirted up the remaining dates, then faded them down so that the time line was dominated by the series of dark red question marks. “There’s a Ranch-shaped gap in our boy’s life. Every summer, every break, he disappears from the records. Do you have any idea how difficult that is? He doesn’t use a credit card. He doesn’t write checks. Where is he?”

“He’s on retreat,” Amy Cho said excitedly. “He’s just spent nine months in the belly of Great Satan Academia, his soul in constant mortal peril from humanism and scientific rationalism. The very first thing they’d want to do is to offer prayers of thanks for his safe return. They’d kill the fatted calf. Followed by fasting and purification. Imagine how filthy the poor boy must feel, pretending to be one of the Devil’s lackeys. Then, when he’s cleansed and rested…”

“A few of the lads would take him out for a bit of Christian rage,” Jimmy Boyle said. “They’d beat up a drug dealer or two, some faggots, maybe an abortionist if they’ve got one lined up. Just to keep the edge on him.”

“I take it this is undocumented as well,” Griffin said.

“It’s what I’d do if I were running him. It’s what anybody would do.”

She had them now, everybody but Griffin. Unfortunately, she was running up against the end of her trail. This was the tricky part. She was not allowed to look very deeply into his post-recruitment history nor at any part of that history in any great detail.

She drew a thick slash across the time line. “Here’s where we recruit him. We could hardly have avoided it. He’d been very carefully prepped. He had skills that we particularly wanted. He looked like a very attractive candidate.

“So what became of him? Almost immediately, he faded into obscurity. He made a competent but unimpressive job of the stratigraphic work that was expected of him. Transferred to Carnival Station and kept the animal register for a time. Transferred to Bohemia Station and ran the bird colony. Transferred to Mjolnir Station and spent a few months preparing skeletons for exhibitions. That’s tedious work. Transferred to Origin Station and prepped tissue specimens. Even more tedious. Transferred to Sundance Station and maintained the boats. Transferred to Survival Station, where he now runs the commissary, stows supplies, and has complete access to the time funnel.