Ellison, Harlan - Toward The Light

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HARLAN ELLISON

GO TOWARD THE LIGHT

IT WAS A TIME OF MIRACLES. Time, itself, was the first miracle. That we had

learned how to drift backward through it, that we had been able to achieve it at

all: another miracle. And the most remarkably miraculous miracle of all: that of

the one hundred and sixty-five physicists, linguists, philologists,

archaeologists, engineers, technicians, programmers of large-scale numerical

simulations, and historians who worked on the Timedrift Project, only two were

Jews. Me, myself, Matty Simon, a timedrifter, what is technically referred to on

my monthly paycheck as an authentic "chronocircumnavigator" -- euphemistically

called a "fugitive" by the one hundred and sixty-three Gentile techno-freaks and

computer jockeys-- short-speak for Tempus Fugit -- "Time Flies" -- broken-backed

Latin, just a "fugitive." That's me, young Matty, and the other Jew is Barry

Levin. Not Levine, and not Leveen, but Levin, as if to rhyme with "let me in."

Mr. Barry R. Levin, Fields Medal nominee, post-adolescent genius and wiseguy,

the young man who Stephen Hawking says has made the greatest contributions to

quantum gravity, the guy who, if you ask him a simple question you get a

pageant, endless lectures on chrono-string theory, complexity theory, algebraic

number theory, how many pepperonis can dance on the point of a pizza. Also,

Barry Levin, orthodox Jew. Did I say orthodox? Beyond, galactically beyond

orthodox. So damned orthodox that, by comparison, Moses was a fresser of

barbequed pork sandwiches with Texas hot links. Levin, who was frum, Chassid, a

reader and quoter of the Talmud, and also the biggest pain in the . . . I am a

scientist, I am not allowed to use that kind of language. A pain in the nadir,

the fundament, the buttocks, the tuchis!

A man who drove everyone crazy on Project Timedrift by continuing to insist that

while it was all well and good to be going back to record at first hand every

aspect of the Greek Culture, that the Hellenic World was enriched and

enlightened by the Israelites and so, by rights, we ought to be making book on

the parallel history of the Jews.

With one hundred and sixty-three goyim on the Project, you can imagine with what

admiration and glee this unending assertion was received. Gratefully, we were

working out of the University of Chicago, and not Pinsk, so at least I didn't

have to worry about pogroms.

What I did worry about was Levin's characterization of me as a "pretend Jew."

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"You're not a Good Jew," he said to me yesterday. We were lying side by side in

the REM sleep room, relaxing after a three-hour hypnosleep session learning the

idiomatics of Ptolemaic Egyptian, all ninety-seven dialects. He in h!s sling, me

in mine.

"I beg your sanctimonious pardon," I said angrily. "And you, I suppose, are a

Good Jew, by comparison to my being a Bad Jew?"

"Res ipsa loquitur," he replied, not even opening his eyes. It was Latin, and it

meant the thing speaks for itself; it was self-evident.

"When I was fourteen years old," I said, propping myself on one elbow and

looking across at him lying there with his eyes shut, "a kid named Jack

Wheeldon, sitting behind me in an assembly at my junior high school, kicked my

seat and called me a kike. I turned around and hit him in the head with my

geography book. He was on the football team, and he broke my jaw. Don't tell me

I'm a Bad Jew. I ate through a straw for three months."

He turned his head and gave me that green-eyed lizard-on-a-rock stare. "This is

a Good Jew, eh? Chanukah is in three days. You'll be lighting the candles, am I

correct? You'll be reciting the prayers? You'll observe yontiff using nothing

but virgin olive oil in your menorah, to celebrate the miracle?"

Oh, how I wanted to pop him one. "I gotcher miracle," I said, rudely. I lay back

in the sling and closed my eyes.

I didn't believe in miracles. How Yehudah of the Maccabees had fielded a mere

ten thousand Jews against Syrian King Antiochus's mercenary army of 60,000

infantry and 5,000 cavalry; and how he had whipped them like a tub of butter.

How the victors had then marched on Jerusalem and retaken the Second Temple; and

how they found that in the three years of Hellenist and Syrian domination and

looting the Temple had grown desolate and overgrown with vegetation, the gates

burned, and the Altar desecrated. But worst of all, the sacred vessels,

including the menorah had been stolen. So the priests, the Kohanim, took seven

iron spits, covered them with wood, and crafted them into a makeshift menorah.

But where could they find uncontaminated oil required for the lighting of the

candelabrum?

It was a time of miracles. They found one flask of oil. A cruse of oil, whatever

a cruse was. And when they lit it, a miracle transpired, or so I was told in

Sunday School, which was a weird name for it because Friday sundown to Saturday

sundown is the Sabbath for Jews, except we were Reform, and that meant Saturday

afternoon was football and maybe a movie matinee, so I went on Sundays. And,

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miracle of miracles, I forgot most of those football games, but I remembered

what I'd been taught about the "miracle" of the oil, if you believe that sort of

mythology they tell to kids. The oil, just barely enough for one day, burned for

eight days, giving the Kohanim sufficient time to prepare and receive fresh

uncontaminated oil that was fit for the menorah.

A time of miracles. Like, for instance, you're on the Interstate, seventy-five

miles from the nearest gas station, and your tank is empty. But you ride the

fumes seventy-five miles to a fill-up. Sure. And one day's oil bums for eight.

Not in this universe, it doesn't.

"I don't believe in old wives' tales that there's a 'miracle' in one day's oil

burning for eight," I said.

And he said: "That wasn't the miracle."

And I said: "Seems pretty miraculous to me. If you believe."

And he said: "The miracle was that they knew the oil was uncontaminated.

Otherwise they couldn't use it for the ceremony."

"So how did they know?" I asked.

"They found one cruse, buried in the dirt of the looted and defiled Temple of

the Mount. One cruse that had been sealed with the seal of the high rabbi, the

Kohen Gadol, the Great Priest."

"Yeah, so what's the big deal? It had the rabbi's seal on it. What did they

expect, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?"

"It was never done. It wasn't required that oil flasks be sealed. And rules were

rigid in those days. No exceptions. No variations. Certainly the personal

involvement of the Kohen Gadol in what was almost an act of housekeeping . . .

well . . . it was unheard-of. Unthinkable. Not that the High Priest would

consider the task beneath hims" he rushed to interject, "but it would never fall

to his office. It would be considered unworthy of his attention."

"Heaven forfend," I said, wishing he'd get to the punchline.

Which he did. "Not only was the flask found, its seal was unbroken, indicating

that the contents had not been tampered with. One miraculous cruse, clearly

marked for use in defiance of alllogic, tradition, random chance. And that was

the miracle."

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