Brother Odd

but I was nonetheless identified and approved. With a pneumatic hiss, the door slid open.
        Brother John says the hiss is not an inevitable consequence of the operation of the door. It could have been made to open silently.
        He incorporated the hiss to remind himself that in every human enterprise, no matter with what virtuous intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks.
        Beyond the steel door waited an eight-foot-square chamber that appeared to be a seamless, wax-yellow, porcelain vessel. I entered and stood there like a lone seed inside a hollow, polished gourd.
        When a second heedful hiss caused me to turn and look back, no trace of the door could be seen.
        The buttery light radiated from the walls, and as on previous visits to this realm, I felt as though I had stepped into a dream. Simultaneously, I experienced a detachment from the world and a heightened reality.
        The light in the walls faded. Darkness closed upon me.
        Although the chamber was surely an elevator that carried me down a floor or two, I detected no movement. The machinery made no sound.
        In the darkness, a rectangle of red light appeared as another portal hissed open in front of me.
        A vestibule offered three brushed-steel doors. The one to my right and the one to my left were plain. Neither door had a visible lock; and I had never been invited through them.
        On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
        For ever and ever.
        In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polished letters blazed.
        Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.
        I stepped into a round chamber thirty feet in diameter, barren but for a cozy arrangement of four wingback chairs at the center.
        A floor lamp served each chair, though currently only two shed light.
        Here sat Brother John in tunic and scapular, but with his hood pushed back, off his head. In the days before he'd become a monk, he had been the famous John Heineman.
        Time magazine had called him "the most brilliant physicist of this half-century, but increasingly a tortured soul," and presented, as a sidebar to their main article, an analysis of Heineman's "life decisions" written by a pop psychologist with a hit TV show on which he resolved the problems of such troubled people as kleptomaniac mothers with bulimic biker daughters.
        The New York Times had referred to John Heineman as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Two days later, in a brief correction, the newspaper noted that it should have attributed that memorable description not to actress Cameron Diaz after she had met Heineman, but to Winston Churchill, who first used those words to describe Russia in 1939.
        In an article titled "The Dumbest Celebrities of the Year," Entertainment Weekly called him a "born-again moron" and "a hopeless schlub who wouldn't know Eminem from Oprah."
        The National Enquirer had promised to produce evidence that he and morning-show anchor Katie Couric were an item, while the Weekly World News had reported that he was dating Princess Di, who was not-they insisted-as dead as everyone thought.
        In the corrupted spirit of much contemporary science, various learned journals, with a bias to defend, questioned his research, his theories, his right to publish his research and theories, his right even to conduct such research and to have such theories, his motives, his sanity, and the unseemly size of his fortune.
        Had the many patents derived from his research not made him a billionaire four times over, most of those publications would have had no interest in him. Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.
        If he hadn't quietly given away that entire fortune without issuing a press release and without granting interviews, they wouldn't have been so annoyed with him. Just as pop stars and film critics live for their power, so do reporters.
        If he'd given his money to an approved university, they would not have hated him. Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.
        At some time during the years since all that had happened, if he had been caught with an underage hooker or had checked into a clinic for cocaine addiction