ENIGMA OF THE SECOND COMING

a novel by Stan I.S. Law

It didn't really start with the Enigma. The errant asteroid came before it. There were also those sporadic meteor showers that started a minor panic at the Moon Base that our friends from NASA had been attempting to build ­ but that came even later. There were also those earthquakes that didn't quake, inundations that submerged some lands only to expose others, and a number of other events that didn't make much sense. Scientific sense, that is. They were things that defied logic. That belonged in Hollywood tabloids.

Then came the viral diseases ­ more like plagues really. It was as though Nature had taken over and decided to run things her own way, relegating man to the role of a dumfounded spectator, powerless and basically unprepared. But what really upset John Hydon was that I, his own little Hey, wasn't disturbed by any of this. Ever. Or so it seemed to him. Even JJ found his own escape from the mounting dilemmas. Only John Hydon, Ph.D., the man others referred to as The Brain, seemed progressively more lost with each day.

"Even now I just don't understand it," my father muttered to himself. I remember: he was looking out through the triangular latticework of aluminium tubes that kept us alive. The view was breathtaking. But all that came later. Many years later.

That's as close as I remember it from my dreams. The rest is conjecture. Mostly derived from talking to about two thousand people. Sometimes I can't be sure. Lately I seem to be losing the distinction between what is real and what isn't. Did it all really happen? I strongly suspect that all things are real. All events, all feelings, ideas Whatever we perceive as such. Even dreams. Isn't the Universe infinite? Maybe there's no limit to the versions of reality.

Occasionally, my perception of reality takes off on a tangent. I don't seem to have too much control over it. Never did. You'll just have to bear with me.

But now we really are well ahead of the story. We would better take a deep, a really deep, breath and start at the beginning. Some thirty years ago. About the time I was born.

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I told Dad about it in bits and snippets. I remembered it all, but I didn't want to share it all at once. Dad told me that a lot of what I had to say sounded as strange as what my mother had told him, when she and Dad were alone.

"Funny that," he said, "your mother described an almost identical vision; to her it was so very real."

"You and Uncle Dave," I said somewhat miffed, "you both always separate the tangible from the intangible. Science from poetry. The visible from the invisible. There is no such separation in the Enigma. Reality is one. Perception of reality is limitless."

Of course, I did not say all that in as many words. I must have been about nine or ten at the time. But evidently I managed to make an impression on Dad in some other way. Years later, he said that the substance of what I'd said was the same. It must have been my schooling; the primary school at the Centre was outstanding. When the time came, I was to attend the high school in Whitehorse, some hundred and fifty kilometres down the Mayo Road.

When I told father about my dream, Dad and I were sitting alone, he nursing a stein of lager, quietly thinking about the old days. His old days. For me, all the days were still young.

I was telling Dad about the Enigma, the 'whatever it was that was hiding behind Pluto'. I couldn't have been making much sense. "Just how did it all start?" he wondered aloud. "Some sort of reflection of what shouldn't be there, and the next thing you're making up all these stories."

I'd first mentioned the Enigma thing some four years earlier. At the time he ignored me. I hadn't shared my dreams with him since. I decided to try again and keep trying. I needed to share my inner life with someone. I was older, I thought, he might take me more seriously. Neither then nor on this occasion, did we call it the Enigma. That came much later. At least we had started taking to each other. One on one. Dad had opened up a great deal over these last few years. And just when I thought that I finally had his undivided attention, his mind shifted to JJ.

"He too has a mind of his own," he mused taking another sip.

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