The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  I had no real reason to think he was lying to me, but alarm bells were beginning to go off in my head. I said cautiously, "Really?"

  "Absolutely! If you're up to it, I mean. How do you feel? Ready to takeoff?"

  "Ready and willing," I said, getting up. That was paying back a lie with a lie, because by then I had no doubt that all Billygoat's good cheer was fake.

  What I didn't know yet was what was behind it, but the best way I could see to find that out was to go along with him. I did. I observed that Billygoat was nervous as he led me out to the waiting car, nervous still, and uncommunicative as we drove down the hill and along the river to the landing strip. The trip gave me plenty of time to try to guess at what was going on, but time wasn't enough. What I needed was facts, and I didn't have them. By the time we got to the strip I didn't know any more than I had the minute after I woke up: Billygoat was concealing something, I wasn't in any doubt of that, but I couldn't imagine what his secret was.

  The shuttle was standing there on its stilly legs, Jillen Iglesias peering at me out of the doorway. Suspicious as I was, double-checking everything for signs of some kind of treachery, I noticed something about Jillen that also struck me as peculiar. Her face was drawn, as though she'd been crying. I was almost certain that was the case. Yet I couldn't see how that might connect with Billygoat's little deceptions.

  On the other hand, what I thought did connect, Jacky Schottke, Theophan Sperlie and half a dozen other friends and acquaintances were standing around there to see me off.

  Theophan was the first to come up to me. "Good luck, Barry," she said, and leaned forward to kiss me. Then the others lined up to wish me well.

  That was where the connection was. I had the powerful feeling that this was not really a cheering-me-on send-off. What it felt like was a good-bye-forever, permanent farewell.

  Jillen watched impatiently for a moment, but no more than that. When she had had enough of this sentimental display she leaned out of the door and yelled: "Speed it up, will you? We have to go within the next five minutes if I want to make rendezvous." And I finished saying my good-byes and climbed the little ladder to get on board, all my antennae still out and wiggling in the search for whatever was going on.

  Jillen wasn't in a welcoming mood. She was businesslike and remote, but she allowed me to take the copilot seat when I asked. She didn't have any reason not to; there were only the two of us in the shuttle, after all. We strapped down and sealed up, and a moment later we were flattened against our seat backs with the initial burn.

  Ten minutes later we were clear of the atmosphere and Jillen began making the burns for rendezvous as I watched the board over her shoulder . . . and then I was sure of the answer.

  I waited for the current burn to stop. Then I turned to her and smiled. "Did you know I used to be a spotter-ship pilot in the Belt?" I asked her.

  The startled look she gave me lasted only a fraction of a second, but it confirmed my suspicions. If she ever had known that, it had slipped her mind.

  "So," I said, waving at the orbit solutions drawn on the guidance screen, "I can read a screen pretty well. We aren't really going to the factory this trip, are we? It doesn't look that way to me. Matter of fact, I kind of suspected that was the way it was all along because, you know, nobody said a word about taking tools along." I grinned at her. "I couldn't do much on the factory without tools, could I? Of course, there could be an explanation for all that. There could be plenty of tools at the factory itself, and everybody might've just assumed I'd find them when I got there—"

  She had recovered herself by then. "Yes, actually that's the way it was—"

  But I stopped her. "Don't bother," I said. "I told you, I can read a screen. You're not a bad pilot, and I can see that we're over a hundred degrees out of phase for a rendezvous with the factory orbiter. So that's not where we're going. On the other hand, it looks to me as though we're right on target for Corsair. So tell me, Jillen, is that what you've been crying about? Because this whole thing is just a trick to get me out of the way? So you can stick me back in the freezer so I'll quit being a nuisance?"

  I think I must have sounded pretty smug and superior. The reason I think that is that's how I felt. I was patting myself on the back about my brilliant deductive analysis. I really thought I had it figured out.

  Surprisingly, Jillen just gave me a cold look.

  "Don't flatter yourself," she said. Her tone was as nasty as her expression, too. "I've got better things to cry about than you. No, you're wrong, di Hoa. I don't mean you're wrong about us going to Corsair first; no, that part is right enough. But the reason for that is just because Captain Tscharka wants to talk to you before you go to the factory—and, uh, make sure you know where to find those tools when you get there."

  I scowled at her, trying to figure out if she was lying to me. Partly I was sure she was—if only because I was convinced Billygoat had been. But partly I thought she was telling the truth—anyway, some truth—and I couldn't decide which part was which.

  While I was thinking it over, the cycling beep sounded, and ten seconds later the next burn came. I was a little out of practice; I let the sudden thrust distract me for a second—and so I almost missed it when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was reaching down for something stuck in the seat pocket beside her.

  Almost, but not quite. I was, remember, pretty fast. I had a grip on her wrist even before I recognized what the thing she was grabbing for was.

  What Jillen had pulled out of its hiding place was a spraydermic. Intended, of course, to be used on me. She struggled, but I had no trouble taking it away from her.

  I thought that might make her start crying again. Indeed she looked as though she might, for a moment, but then she shook her head. "Why do you want to make things worse than they are, Barry?" she asked plaintively. "I was just supposed to give you a little shot to put you to sleep for a while. They can't deal with your problems down there now. You must know that; you're a nut. You need to get to an Earthside clinic if you're ever going to get any real help—Dr. Goethe says so. It was his idea that we put you back in the freezer and take you home. For your own good."

  That was another surprise. It sounded as though she meant what she was saying. I blinked at her, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. "If you believe that, why were you crying?"

  She gave me an angry look. "Look. I've got about a thousand things to cry about, and not one of them is any of your damn business, di Hoa."

  "Maybe not, but, if I'm going into the freezer anyway, what difference does it make if you tell me a couple of them?"

  "Go to hell," she said, and stared sulkily at the controls. I could see a fresh set of tears forming in the corners of her eyes and, after a moment, she crumpled.

  "All right, damn you," she said. The language was still tough but the words were only words; the passion had gone out of her anger. "Since you want to know I'll tell you. Not that it's any of your business."

  "Of course not, Jillen, if you say so. But please."

  She glared at me, then said shakily, "The main reason I'm crying, if you must know, is because right now I just happen to be fucking pregnant."

  25

  THIS is not understood. The information that your female conspecific, Jilleniglesias, had conceived does not seem relevant. Did she not also reveal the nature of Garoldtscharka's intentions to you at that time?

  Oh, no, she certainly did not. Not then. Actually you can hardly say she ever revealed what Tscharka was up to at all; I had to figure most of it out for myself. On the way up we had nearly an hour before we finally docked with Corsair, but in all that time all she revealed—with some talk, and a lot of crying—was her personal problems with Captain Garold Tscharka.

  Which were considerable.

  It took me a while to get it all straight, but then it made sense. Jillen had simply made a tactical blunder with the man she loved. She'd deliberately got herself pregnant, in the expectation that Tscharka
would come around and accept the fact—maybe even be as thrilled as she was about it—once he was aware it was a fact. She wasn't the first woman to make that mistake, and she wasn't the first to have it blow up in her face.

  Tscharka hadn't clasped her lovingly in his arms when he heard the news. He had screamed at her. Sin piled on sin! How dare she add one more sinner to the sinning world? The only decent thing she could do now, he told her, was to have an abortion; and when she somehow found the strength to refuse, he got more furious still. The kindest things he said were that she was a heretic, a blasphemer and a disgrace, and physically repugnant to him for her foul sins.

  I think she might have stood for anything else, but not the "physically repugnant" part.

  I don't know how to harden my heart against a weeping woman, and I felt really sorry for this one. All I could think of to say was, "He isn't worth it, Jillen. Tscharka is not a good man."

  That made her stiffen up and glare at me—momentarily—but then she slumped again. "Hell, di Hoa," she said, "I'm not sure I know what's good and what's bad anymore. It was all going to be good, you know. Garold promised that. Pava was going to be our sacred retreat from the evil world, where we would all be of the same faith, all repentant for our guilt in being alive. It didn't happen that way. When Garold got here and saw how the church had fallen apart while we were making the run to the Moon he was furious, but it was worse than just being mad. He was all broken up, too. I guess Pava just isn't a good place for a person to be very religious. . . ."

  I didn't have any answer for that at the time except to pat her on the shoulder. But you know, now, thinking it over, I have an idea she might have been right about that. Sort of, anyway.

  I don't mean that when human beings arrived on Pava they necessarily stopped believing in their gods—whoever their gods were, and assuming they had ever had any. They kept on going to their churches, no doubt of that.

  But I think that was largely just a matter of habit. They had more immediately urgent things on their minds, like just staying alive. Getting into religious arguments wasn't high among their priorities . . . and, of course, there was the example of you people always before their eyes. You sowed doubt in a lot of previously unquestioning minds.

  You see, you had a better deal than they did. You didn't have to take your heaven on faith. You didn't even have to earn it. For you heaven was just what inevitably happened as soon as you reached your sixth instar, whether you had done anything to deserve it or not.

  I had plenty of time on the way up to decide what I had to do, and when we docked I made sure I was the first one out of the shuttle.

  I kicked myself out into the open as fast as I could, ready for anything. What I was afraid of was that Tscharka would be right there waiting for me, and if he were I wanted to catch him off guard.

  He wasn't. Nobody at all was in the control room. "Where's the captain?" I asked as Jillen pulled herself out after me.

  She said somberly, "How would I know? At a guess, I would suppose he's down in the storage hold with Friar Tuck, shifting things around to make room for the antimatter from Buccaneer."

  That was a brand-new surprise. I couldn't believe I'd heard her right. "Are you saying that they're going to transship all that antimatter into Corsair here? Why, for God's sake?"

  She only shrugged. She was holding on to a clamp by a little wall locker, looking drained and miserable. I thought she still knew something she wasn't telling me, but I couldn't guess what. I looked around the control room suspiciously—

  That was when I noticed that someone had taken the covers off the control panels.

  That didn't make any sense, either. No one ever does that—well, except maybe when the ship's been brought in for a complete refit. Then they might do it for maintenance and inspection. Nobody has any need to do it in any other case, because there's never anything wrong with a ship's navigation programs. They are sealed in when the ship is built, with triple redundancy in the system. If anything should happen to the active circuit, which it practically never does, you would just cut in one of the standbys, and then replace the whole old one next time you were in port.

  "What's going on here?" I asked, turning back to Jillen Iglesias.

  She didn't answer that, because she had one more surprise for me.

  This time she was holding something that, it seemed, she had just taken out of the opened locker behind her while I was looking away, and the thing she was holding was a gun.

  A gun! It took me a moment to be sure that was what it was; I'd hardly ever seen one, except the harmless little toy ones they make for children to play with. Certainly I hadn't expected to see anything like it on Pava.

  "Well," I said. I don't know whether Jillen noticed that my voice was unsteady, but I did. "Are you planning to shoot me?" I asked.

  She frowned in concentration, pondering over the answer. She wasn't actually pointing the thing at me, I noticed. I wondered if I could get a good kicking place on the wall behind me and dive right at her, maybe, with luck, knocking the gun out of her hand before she could shoot.

  Then she said, sounding faintly surprised, "No, I can't actually do that, can I? I don't want to kill you, Barry. I don't want to kill anybody—or even help anybody kill anybody—especially a lot of people I've never even met. . . ."

  That was when the penny dropped, and it all began to come together in my mind.

  What Tscharka was planning to do, at least in general outline, was all there for me to see. Although I'd been slow to put things together, I could see that all the ingredients were there:

  1. The basic dogma of the Millenarist faith.

  2. Large quantities of available antimatter.

  3. Setting a new course on the ship's automatic navigation controls.

  When you added them up, they could only mean one thing.

  "Shit, Jillen," I said, "is Tscharka crazy enough to be planning to blow something up?"

  She nodded, her brow puckering in surprise that I had taken so long to figure it all out. "Of course he is, Barry. He's going to rescue the planet Earth from its sin."

  I still don't know at what point Tscharka and Friar Tuck made the actual decision for genocide. Did it happen when he had ordered all that antimatter? After I had had that little talk with Tuchman about what that much antimatter could do to a planet? It could have been anytime. Tscharka could have had a dozen different plans and changed them as he went along.

  I suppose I never will know all the answers, now. But I understood the important parts. Tscharka had not been willing to let himself be defeated. If the colonists on Pava were not unanimous in repentance for their original sin, maybe the next-best thing was to put an end to the world where original sin was born.

  It was, of course, in his view, a kindness.

  I could hardly make myself put the question into words, but I did it. "Is that what Tscharka and Tuchman want to do, wipe out life on Earth?"

  She nodded slowly, as though admitting it to herself for the first time. "That's right. Oh, Barry, you wouldn't believe how happy they were when they told me about it! I guess it was what they call religious ecstasy. Bringing the Millennium to Earth—well, the next-best thing, anyway—it solved everything, they said. So he reprogrammed the navigational computer for automatic return, and when it got back it would be programmed to crash into the planet. Earth, I mean. With all those pods of antimatter aboard." She shook her head mournfully. "To save all those people from the sin of being alive past the Judgment Day, you see," she explained.

  I didn't say anything. I parted her shoulder some more, while I thought.

  Would that kind of explosion really have wiped out life on Earth?

  In spite of everything I'd said to Tuchman, I don't really know the answer to that. There's a hell of a lot of energy in two hundred pods of antimatter. As a minimum that would have produced, I guess, a megablast like no human being had ever seen, probably not far from the magnitude of that sixty-five-million-years-ago acciden
t when something from out of the sky crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula—and that one did, it seems, at least kill off the dinosaurs. And, of course, with Earth gone, the habitats and the colonies would not live much longer. When the long list of things they continually needed to import from Earth ran out they would simply sooner or later die on the vine.

  What I finally decided was that the exact numbers didn't really matter. The blast might or might not have killed everybody, but at a minimum it surely would have brought quite a few hundred million living sinners to a rapid state of deceased grace.

  "Well," I said, pushing myself away from her and stretching in midair, "I guess I need to get involved, don't I?"

  She was still holding the gun, so she could have said no. She almost did, I think. She stared at me wretchedly for a moment and then, wretchedly, she nodded at last. "Just don't hurt Garold, please," she whispered.

  Well, you know the rest of it.

  Here again, you probably know a lot of it even better than I do, I suppose, because to tell the truth I was getting pretty ballistic around that time. I knew what I had to do. I even succeeded in doing it—somehow—but it's only by the grace of God (if any) that I didn't destroy Corsair, and maybe Buccaneer and the factory orbiter as well, and possibly even a big chunk of the nearest hemisphere of Pava, because I was playing with pretty serious stuff. All those hundred pods of antimatter fuel could have gone up at once if I'd made the wrong move, and then Pava would have had a momentary new sun in low orbit overhead.

  See, crazy or not, I know how to do my job as a fuelmaster. I was a lot less skilled as a ship's engineer, though, and, unfortunately it was engineering skills that were needed.

  What I did was go down into the drive centrum. I made sure the ship's internal power source was purring along the way it was supposed to be—I knew enough not to deprive those pods of external power—but then I isolated the drive itself. Disabled the safety circuits, all nine of them. Overrode the bridge controls. Opened it up full.