Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre

but what the hell, his face wasn’t on the banknotes. Mitch was the only one of them to have met the man, and his reluctance to discuss ‘what he’s really like’ was palpable enough for everyone to quit asking. They had all seen him on TV down the years, although obviously not on his own network: sentience tended to interfere with reception of the Christian Family Channel, perhaps the CFC most guilty of fucking up the atmosphere. He had kept a comparatively low mainstream‐
media profile in recent years, only sticking his head above the public parapet again in the past eighteen months or so, but everyone still remembered with great fondness his hugely entertaining Presidential bid in ’92. Back in the Eighties he was so much the detested totem of religious ultra‐
conservatism that if he hadn’t existed already, liberal students like Maria would have had to invent him. He functioned as a kind of anti‐
catechism: if you weren’t sure where you stood on something, you just had to find out Luther’s opinion and take a large step to the left. In latter years, though, he had been mainly a figure of fun, a laughable anachronism. As if rendered harmless by his humiliation, his opinions and pronouncements were now, to most, a source of amusement where they had once seemed an ugly threat. To most, but not to everyone. Maria had read the Vanity Fair article last summer, tracking what its author, Gilda Landsmann (whose journalistic scrutiny had dogged St John for years), perceived to be a calculatedly strategic re‐
ascent towards the limelight. Landsmann said that when St John looked at you, as one outside his ‘Communion of the Saved’, you could physically feel his revulsion, like a leper before a king. Mitch disagreed. Revulsion was a kind of contempt, and contempt ran hot in the blood. When St John looked at you, it was with cold pity. ‘He doesn’t look at you like he hates you,’ Mitch had told her. ‘He looks at you like you’re already dead.’ The fear that his patronage was too good to be true didn’t survive the Gazes Also’s blank‐
cheque refit, far less St John’s gift of the submarine Stella Maris, but it didn’t quite die either. Instead it transubstantiated into the fear that it was too good to last, and each month, each week, brought in new rumours on the breeze. As St John was a far from hands‐
on kind of sponsor, Mitch often seemed like the only link the institute had with him. This, of course, wasn’t true. CalORI’s accountants were in rigidly regular contact with St John’s organisation, and the scientists’ remoteness from the institute’s bean counters – on a number of levels – was the wasteland where the winds of rumour whipped up. But Mitch – and only Mitch – was the guy who presented St John with the fruits of their labours and of his cash. St John wasn’t exactly looking over their shoulders, but he took more than a passing interest in their work. His funding wasn’t just some tax side‐
wind and it certainly wasn’t a PR exercise. He genuinely wanted to know what was going on, enough to send a private jet to fly Mitch to and from Arizona to make his presentations. Presentation being the keyword. Maria had watched Mitch work hours and days perfecting computer models of his findings, 3‐
D rotatable graphics of the sub‐
oceanic landscape, with animated demonstrations of the seismic and geological stages in that landscape’s evolution: the fractures, trenches, plains, seamounts and guyots. He also knew how to pander to his audience, putting special emphasis on samples or developments that could be dated to coincide with biblical periods and events. This involved playing somewhat fast and loose with the error margins of several different dating systems, but Mitch figured if it kept his wallet open to hand the guy a test‐
tube of compressed shell fragments and tell him their former owners bought it around the same time as Solomon, why burst everybody’s