Half Nelson: A Tom Bethany Mystery - Hardcover

Doolittle, Jerome

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9 ratings by Goodreads

9780671502898: Half Nelson: A Tom Bethany Mystery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671502891 ISBN 13: 9780671502898

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1994

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Journeying to the endangered Oregon forests to protect a charismatic ecologist from a series of death threats, Tom Bethany prescribes his own brand of planet cleaning when a car bomb takes the life of his client

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About the Author:

Jerome Doolittle is a former Washington Post editor and columnist, U.S. Embassy spokesman in Laos, war correspondent in Southeast Asia, Chief of Public Affairs for the Federal Aviation Authority, speechwriter for President Carter, and Harvard faculty member. In addition to the Tom Bethany mysteries, he is the author of The Bombing Officer, a novel of wartime Laos.

In this excerpt, environmentalist leader Robert Rackleff, who has been receiving anonymous death threats, is outlining his philosophy to Tom Bethany.

"Fashions change. Even god changes," Rackleff said. "Mine has."

"To what?"

"From a spiritual god to a physical one. I think that's happening a lot. I wonder if the Apollo mission didn't do it. That picture of earth from the moon. That beautiful blue marble. We already knew it had to look like that, but we only knew it theoretically. Then all at once we knew it in a completely different way. We really knew it, all the way down inside us. That was our blue marble in the photo. It was the only blue marble we had, and the only one we'd ever get.

"It changed us all forever, that picture. And the younger you are, the more it changed you. The children understand the best. A hundred years ago if you asked children what was the most important thing to them, they would have answered something to do with God, Jesus, salvation. Next they would have said the flag, meaning just about the same thing. Now they say the environment, by which they mean that blue marble.

"They don't think about heaven so much nowadays, because heaven is the blue marble and we've become its guardian angels. God is the blue marble, too. We're alone on our blue marble in all that blackness, and we'd better take good care of it. That's what the kids see."

"And that's what you see, too?"

"That's what I see, too."

The first time I saw that picture of earth from the moon was in Vientiane, where I was a Spec/4 assigned to the office of the army attache in Laos. Later the U.S. Information Service put moon rocks on display out at the That Luang fair. They looked just like any other rocks, which didn't surprise the Lao. Most of them figured the whole exhibit was fake, anyway. They knew that the moon was carried on the back of a giant frog that bit bigger and bigger chunks out of it every night until it was all gone, and then slowly puked it back up again. Or that's what we thought the Lao believed, although what we thought we knew about the Lao was mostly wrong.

I might have had my own doubts about Apollo, since I was just then doping out that Kennedy and Johnson had been lying to me non-stop for most of my young life. But I knew they hadn't faked that picture. They were only schemers, not dreamers, and they could never have imagined the blue marble.

The blue marble really was our planet, all right. Before Apollo the Earth had looked big and indestructible to microbes like us. Now we could see that it was all alone and friendless out there in the black nothing, and not so big after all. It was as if a few cancer cells had gone off on a rocket and brought back a photo of the patient for all the other cancer cells to look at. Most of us would probably keep right on multiplying and killing our host, but a few of us, anyway, might get the idea.

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