“And?”

“Nothing else beyond what we’ve said, really. It seems he thought that something he and Nichols were doing threatened life on the planet. Whether all life or just human life, I don’t know.”

“I’m wondering if we should take a different tack regarding your grandfather. We’re trying to trace what happened to him and my father and your village.”

“Are you saying we should give up on that?”

I finished a sip of juice. “No. But maybe we should also spend some time focusing on what he said in his message.”

“Are you saying you believe it? I thought you didn’t.”

“It does sound rather apocalyptic, and I tend to dismiss those kinds of things. But he was one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Maybe we’ve approached his message from the wrong angle. Look at this from Ray’s standpoint. What might his words have meant to him?”

“Why would they mean something unique to him?”

“You said Ray was a Christian.”

“Yes. So?”

“That means his worldview was different. He thought of things according to a different reality, just like the religionists—sorry, the Christians—I referred to in my lecture. It may be that Ray’s message meant something that we haven’t caught. Something unique to a biblical worldview. As a historian I have to place myself inside the worldview of others all the time.”

“But I’m a Christian too, and I haven’t caught anything different in his message.”

I shrugged. “I know. Which means this may not get us anywhere. But it’s what I’m trained to do. We might as well give it a shot.”

“Okay. Where do we start?”

“In Genesis.”

My motive, I had to admit, wasn’t singular. I wanted to get inside Ray Caldwell’s head, understand the message from his point of view, yes. But I wanted to do something more. I wanted to understand Abby.

Truthfully, I liked Abigail Caldwell. She was focused and intelligent and had a unique way of looking at the world that was fascinating. But it was more than that. Despite our substantial cultural differences and belief systems that were worlds apart, I was comfortable around her in a way I hadn’t been around a woman in a long time.

There was something else too. I knew that, sooner or later, I wanted Abby to be freed from the myths that composed her basic worldview, to instead embrace some semblance of enlightened twenty-first-century thought. Not through a frontal assault, but gradually.