Brother Odd

the subject of Indianapolis and its many wonders, a lot of people have nothing more of interest to say.
        I knew we had reached the stone stairs down to John's Mew when I stumbled into them and nearly fell. Snow had drifted against the door at the bottom of the steps.
        The cast-bronze words libera nos a malo, on the plaque above the door, had mostly been obscured by encrusting snow, so that instead of reading Deliver us from evil, it read simply evil.
        After I unlocked the half-ton door, it pivoted open smoothly on ball-bearing hinges, revealing the stone corridor bathed in blue light.
        We went inside, and the door closed, and we disengaged ourselves from the tether that had kept us together during the slog.
        "That was most impressive, Mr. Thomas."
        "Psychic magnetism isn't an earned skill, sir. Taking pride in it would be like taking pride in how well my kidneys function."
        We brushed snow from our coats, and he took off his bearskin hat to shake it.
        At the brushed stainless-steel door with LUMIN DE LUMINE embedded in polished letters, I knocked one foot against the other to shed as much caked snow as possible.
        Romanovich removed his zippered boots and stood in dry shoes, a more considerate guest than I.
        Translating the words on the door, he said, "'Light from light.'"
        "'Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,'" I said. "Then God commanded light. The light of the world descends from the Everlasting Light that is God."
        "That is surely one thing it means," said Romanovich. "But it may also mean that the visible can be born from the invisible, that matter can arise from energy, that thought is a form of energy and that thought itself can be concretized into the very object that is imagined."
        "Well, sir, that's a mouthful to get out of three words."
        "Most assuredly," he agreed.
        I flattened the palm and fingers of my right hand against the plasma screen in the wide steel architrave.
        The pneumatic door slid open with the engineered hiss intended to remind Brother John that in every human enterprise, no matter with what good intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks. Considering where his work apparently had led him, perhaps in addition to the hiss, loud bells should have rung, lights should have flashed, and an ominous recorded voice should have said Some things men were never meant to know.
        We stepped into the seamless, wax-yellow, porcelain-like vessel where buttery light emanated from the walls. The doors hissed shut at our backs, the light faded, and darkness enveloped us.
        "I have no sense of motion," I said, "but I'm pretty sure it's an elevator, and we're going down a few floors."
        "Yes," Romanovich said, "and I suspect that surrounding us is an enormous lead reservoir filled with heavy water."
        "Really? That thought hadn't occurred to me."
        "No, it would not."
        "What is heavy water, sir, besides being obviously heavier than ordinary water?"
        "Heavy water is water in which the hydrogen atoms have been replaced with deuterium."
        "Yes, of course. I'd forgotten. Most people buy it at the grocery store, but I prefer to get the million-gallon jug at Costco."
        A door hissed open in front of us, and we stepped into the vestibule bathed in red light.
        "Sir, what is the purpose of heavy water?"
        "It is used chiefly as a coolant in nuclear reactors, but here I believe it has other purposes, including perhaps, secondarily, as an additional layer of shielding against cosmic radiation that might affect subatomic experiments."
        In the vestibule, we ignored the plain stainless-steel doors to the left and right, and went forward to the door in which were embedded the words PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
        "'For ever and ever,'" said Romanovich, scowling. "I do not like the sound of that."
        Pollyanna Odd, surfacing again, said, "But, sir, it's merely praising God. 'For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.'"
        "No doubt that was Heineman's conscious intention when he chose these words. But one suspects that unconsciously he was expressing pride in his own achievements, suggesting that his works, performed here, would endure for ever and ever, beyond the end of time, where only God's kingdom otherwise