Three Days to Never by Tim Powers Page A

students and the instructor had finally stood at noon in a shadeless, yards-wide summit ring of carved, weathered stones under an empty sky, and the old instructor had meditated for a while and then pressed his right hand on to an indentation in one of the stones—and then they were reeling with vertigo in the center of a clanging whirlwind, but it had palpably been a living, sentient whirlwind; and young Lepidopt had known in his spine and his viscera that it was the world that was spinning, and the alien creature, the Aeon Pazuzu, that was holding still. In comparison to it, nothing he had ever encountered had been motionless.
    Nothing else in the training had been as dramatic as that, but some things had been more upsetting—as when the students had been trained in astral projection. On the several occasions when Lepidopt’s consciousness had hung in the air, looking down at his own slack body on a couch,he had always been afraid that he would be spun away into the whirling honeycomb of the world and never find his way back to his physical body. Every time he had pulled himself back into his body, sliding into it as if he were inching into a tight sleeping bag, it had been with a profound sense of relief and a resolution never to leave it again.
    There had always been afternoon prayers in the truck, and evening ones if the lessons went on that long, but the Psalms all seemed to Lepidopt to have been chosen for their apologetic or resentful tone.
    L epidopt realized he’d been staring across the table at Glatzer’s collapsed body. He stood up and crossed to the wide front window, and leaned his forehead against the curtained glass, idly listening to the faint music audible from the speaker taped against the windowpane—it was the new U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
    Neither have I, Lepidopt thought. We seem to be very close now, but I wonder if I’ll live to find the…the technique, the technology, the breakthrough that Isser Harel has been searching for ever since learning of a nameless little boy who appeared in England in 1935 long enough to leave impossible fingerprints on a water glass.
    It had opened up a whole new direction of scientific inquiry. Isser Harel had kept it very secret, but perhaps not everyone else involved had been as discreet.
    The Iraqis had been pursuing research in the same direction in the late 1970s; and Lepidopt, working with a Halomot team on a war-surplus destroyer in the Persian Gulf in ’79, had detected the Iraqi research station at Al-Tuweitha, a few miles southwest of Baghdad. The world thought it was simply an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israeli F-16s bombed to rubble in June 1981; only Menachem Begin and a few agents in the Halomot—and Saddam Hussein and his top advisors—had known what sort of device the Iraqis had been trying to build behind the cover of installing the French-built Tammuz reactor.
    How odd, he thought, that Moslems could even get close! Had they studied the Hebrew Kabbalah?
    The intelligence services of several countries seemed to be aware of the new possibility, just as they had vaguely known of “the uranium bomb” in the early ’40s; in 1975 the Soviet premier Brezhnev had asked for an international ban on weapons “more terrible” than any the world had yet seen.
    But it had been a Jew who discovered this thing, twenty years before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948; and in the text of the second-century Zohar was the passage, At the present time this door remains unknown because Israel is in exile; and therefore all the other doors are removed from them, so that they cannot know or commune; but when Israel will return from exile, all the supernal grades are destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom of which hitherto they knew not.
    And Israel wasn’t in exile