Brother Odd by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

absurd.
    Brother John was part of a long tradition of monk and priest scientists. The Church had created the concept of the university and had established the first of them in the twelfth century. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk, was arguably the greatest mathematician of the thirteenth century. Bishop Robert Grosseteste was the first man to write down the necessary steps for performing a scientific experiment. Jesuits had built the first reflecting telescopes, microscopes, barometers, were first to calculate the constant of gravity, the first to measure the height of the mountains on the moon, the first to develop an accurate method of calculating a planet’s orbit, the first to devise and publish a coherent description of atomic theory.
    As far as I knew, over the centuries, not one of those guys had accidentally blown up a monastery.
    Of course, I don’t know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t know
anything
.
    Maybe monk scientists have occasionally blown a monastery to bits. I am pretty sure, however, they never did it intentionally.
    I could not imagine Brother John, philanthropist and cookie-maker, in a weirdly lighted laboratory, cackling a mad-scientist cackle and scheming to destroy the world. Although brilliant, he was human, so I
could
easily see him looking up in alarm from an experiment and saying
Whoops,
just before unintentionally reducing the abbey to a puddle of nano-goo.
    “Something,” he finally said.
    “Sir?”
    He raised his head to look at me directly again. “Yes, perhaps something.”
    “Something, sir?”
    “Yes. You asked whether there was a possibility that my work here might blow up or something. I can’t see a way it could blow up. I mean, not the work itself.”
    “Oh. But something else could happen.”
    “Maybe yes, probably no. Something.”
    “But maybe yes. Like what?”
    “Whatever.”
    “What whatever?” I asked.
    “Whatever can be imagined.”
    “Sir?”
    “Have another cookie.”
    “Sir,
anything
can be imagined.”
    “Yes. That’s right. Imagination knows no limits.”
    “So
anything
might go wrong?”
    “
Might
isn’t
will
. Any terrible, disastrous thing might happen, but probably nothing will.”
    “Probably?”
    “Probability is an important factor, Odd Thomas. A blood vessel
might
burst in your brain, killing you an instant from now.”
    At once I regretted not having taken a second cookie.
    He smiled. He looked at his watch. He looked at me. He shrugged. “See? The probability was low.”
    “The anything that might happen,” I said, “supposing that it
did
happen, could it result in a lot of people dying horribly?”
    “Horribly?”
    “Yes, sir. Horribly.”
    “That’s a subjective judgment. Horrible to one person might not be the same as horrible to another.”
    “Shattering bones, bursting hearts, exploding heads, burning flesh, blood, pain, screaming—that kind of horrible.”
    “Maybe yes, probably no.”
    “This again.”
    “More likely, they would just cease to exist.”
    “That’s death.”
    “No, it’s different. Death leaves a corpse.”
    I had been reaching for a cookie. I pulled my hand back without taking one from the plate.
    “Sir, you’re scaring me.”
    A settled blue heron astonishes when it reveals its true height by unfolding its long sticklike legs; likewise, Brother John proved even taller than I remembered when he rose from his chair. “I’ve been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.”
    Getting to my feet, I said, “Brother John…whatever this work is you do here, are you sure you should be doing it?”
    “My intellect is God-given. I’ve a sacred obligation to use it.”
    His words resonated with me. When one of the lingering dead has been murdered and comes to me for justice, I always feel obliged to help