New Writings in SF 21 - [Anthology]

by Ed By John Carnell

  He was spared an answer when Sikh took up the conversation again. ‘We three must talk at length, Dr. Scroop. In a way we all operate in a dual capacity, as holy men and technologists and there is much you can tell us about un-absorbed sects in isolated communities, particularly with your specialisation.’ Then with the same effortless capacity he seemed to release Scroop and draw Horwitz and Hobbs into the office. Scroop shook his head at the incredible power of the man—the ‘Miracle Worker of the Punjab’, —and could well believe that he deserved his international reputation. He wondered what Hobbs would make of Sikh’s comment about their dual capacities, for it was fairly clear that the manager had not yet recognised why Scroop, of all Spiritual Advisors, should have been sent here.

  He was in luck again: the VIP wagon was still in front of the Admin. Building when he came out and he persuaded the driver that there would be plenty of time to run him under to City Center. He had hardly the time to savour the luxury of the ride when his chauffeur dialled off and he was left standing on aching legs. It seemed a worse indignity than usual to walk the length of the busy gym, pick up his toilet kit and walk half the length back to the men’s locker room and showers. Moreover, though, the hot water soaked out some of his deep physical fatigue, it served only to release the other, the spiritual pain.

  Despite his real need for sleep, when he retired to his quarters he opened his prayer cabinet, rolled out the mat and sank to calloused knees. With eyes on the composited symbol within, he turned his mind to the preliminary disciplined associations. His thoughts swung from the open-bottomed Omega, signifying the dispensing of all things to men, to the over-printed Alpha, narrowing upward to the infinite point of Godhead. Slowly the period of those pendular thoughts closed, focussing on the cross at the centre of the symbol, the cross in which all crosses were captured and Scroop entered the sanctuary of prayer.

  * * * *

  He surfaced dizzily out of clinging sleep, to realise that the vidphone had been chiming insistently in the office for some time. Making his groggy way to the scanner desk, he spoke furrily into the phone and squeezed his eyes shut once or twice in an effort to read his chrono dial. It was 05.34 and the voice speaking in his ear said ‘Horwitz! Jacob Horwitz. I’m at the dispensary. Sikh had a heart seizure earlier this morning. He managed to call for aid, but by the time the doctor reached him it was too late. I thought you should be the first to know, because it may present complications.’ Which was probably the prime understatement of Scroop’s lifetime.

  By 08.00, Scroop was beginning to realise just how many and how far-reaching the complications were. To begin with, he had learned while signing the death certificate at the dispensary that Sikh was not Rahjan’s family name, but the generic one given him by adoring compatriots. So far as they were concerned, he was The Sikh, the religious example for a people. Try as he might, he could not seem to make the importance of this clear to an irritable, or more accurately, a hostile Alvin Hobbs. The manager had at first refused to see the Spiritual Advisor, fobbing him off with a suggestion that he send a memo and it had only been when Scroop threatened to bring Horwitz into it that Hobbs had backed down. He was still, however, boiling at this new intrusion into his normal schedule.

  ‘Look,’ said Scroop patiently, ‘the UN delegation demanded first that the body be taken immediately to the nearest international airport and flown directly to the Punjab.’

  Hobbs snorted in derision. ‘With that storm out there it will be three days before we can get the copter out, if we’re very lucky.’

  ‘I told them that,’ Scroop explained, ‘and they said what about a boat to Churchill.’

  Hobbs clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Don’t they know anything?’ he groaned.

  Scroop plodded on. ‘I told them that the ice is rotten and even a hovercraft wouldn’t be safe from sudden upthrusts, but nevertheless a boat couldn’t get through.’

  Hobbs said sarcastically, ‘Well, at least you’ve learned something about life up here.’

  Scroop ignored it, and continued. ‘So we have the alternatives of preserving the body until it can be removed for burial, which the delegation say can be no more than three days anyway with stretching the laws, or giving it the proper rites here, which involve cremation, preferably on a pyre and casting the ashes into a river.’

  Hobbs looked closely at Scroop, disbelief growing visibly. ‘Those are alternatives?’ he asked. ‘Here?’ He collapsed into his chair in a fit of laughter. Then, more soberly, he looked again at Scroop and said, ‘Come on, now. How can you be serious? And after all, what does it matter to you ? Oh I know, he’s an international figure, but who besides a bunch of perpetually starving Indians is going to complain if we can’t give him a royal send-off?’ He smiled nastily. ‘Anyway, you’re a Christian. Why should you muck around with a dirty heathen?’

  Scroop felt anger swell his throat shut, choking off any reply. Hold it, he thought, as reason took over, that’s a question my new congregations might well ask. But the answer is so fundamental, his mind—or heart—said. So fundamental, indeed, that he was at a loss to put it into words. He gritted his teeth and turned away in disgust, starting to slip his parka over the white utility suit which hung on his gaunt frame. Inexplicably, his silence seemed to goad Hobbs almost beyond control, for he shouted at the back of Scroop’s silver-haired head: ‘Listen! It’s your problem. You’re so all-loving; you work it out. But I refuse—this office refuses—to be involved.’

  So it was that a dispirited, dull Scroop, head beginning to throb slightly from tension and fatigue, found himself moving almost dreamlike through a day much like the previous one save that yesterday he had been on the offensive. Now he was groping after solutions that he knew didn’t exist, possibilities that he knew were at best improbabilities.

  First on the list was Henri LeBlanc, whose answers were as predictable as the fact that he resented his recent humility. ‘It is known to me, all too painfully, that there are only two drawers in the dispensary morgue,’ he said, pressing a hand to his chest. ‘Are they not both occupied by members of the True Faith ? If Mr. Hobbs had not made certain that the dispatcher was an obstructionist, the body of my poor cousin Claude would be by now in St. Felicien.’ He sighed gustily. ‘It would not be taken kindly by us if the dear departed members were in any way disturbed until they are removed from the townsite.

  ‘But,’ he said with a hint of challenge, ‘you have the powers, my dear Sir. You may not order that they be put together in the one drawer, of course, for that is specific in the regulations.’

  Scroop tried to concentrate on this potential loophole and drew himself up short, recognising that Henri was dangling bait. ‘No, what about the cold rooms and freezers here at the Company?’ he asked, and Henri smiled in false sympathy.

  ‘It is again, quite obviously, against the regulations of the public health. I have, already prepared the citations for you.’ He smiled again, dropping a sheet of foolscap into Scroop’s lap. ‘One may not put the body of even a true believer into those places.’ Scroop did not deny him his moment of triumph: he left while the portly mayor still oozed unctious sorrow.

  Vladmir Homynyk didn’t trouble to disguise his delight at the turn of events and he too was totally prepared for any totally unsympathetic to Scroop’s problem. The Spiritual Advisor, a big-city man, had been only dimly aware of that phenomenon of small communities called instant relay. But Homynyk met every query with detailed information, all of it negative, which revealed that he had been preparing almost from the moment of Sikh’s death. Scroop had the feeling that he was being moved along a giant maze until he either dropped from exhaustion or gave up.

  ‘Surely,’ Vladmir stated, ‘a Chaplain of the Union knows that in a mine the temperature increases. And if that weren’t enough, you know we fill in the older shafts with the slag. As for the storage chambers along the river access branch, nothing may be placed in them which could attract carnivores.’ He shook his head as Scroop objected.
‘Nothing! No matter what it’s sealed in. Although it’s actually left open to the atmosphere, it’s interpreted as part of the Closed Environment. Now the wharves ...’ and he paused until Scroop roused himself to sniff at the carrot. ‘The wharves,’ he continued, ‘are part of the Protected Environment and nothing may be left on them except in the course of loading or unloading cargo.’ It was rather a crude ploy, if not actually vicious and it stung Scroop sufficiently to make him more alert.

  ‘All right,’ he admitted, ‘you can’t help me to hold the body until the storm blows over. But isn’t there any way to cremate it? The separators are out, naturally, but what about the smelters ?’

  Vladmir’s face reflected first surprise, indicating that he had not considered this, then distaste and finally near-nausea as he all-too-vividly did consider it. ‘Do you remember what’s done to the ore before it’s fed through the slots into those smelters?’ he swallowed. ‘Say you were desperate enough to do that to a body. How would you separate the ashes from the slag?’

  Scroop nodded mutely and picked up his parka again. He had been going to stop by the autoteria for a late breakfast, but instead he would go straight to the school to talk with Jameson.

  * * * *

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Jameson said in syrupy tones, ‘I sympathise with you, but I fail to see how I can help you in any way.’ A tiny tug at the corner of his mouth belied the tone of voice. ‘Before you even ask, the refrigeration plant is out. We looked into that last year when Henri got an overshipment of beeves for the catering service.’

  Scroop brushed the suggestion away with a gesture of annoyance. ‘Next,’ he said, ‘you’ll tell me that we can’t dispose of the body in the sewage plant, or burn it in the fake fireplace at City Center.’ He gathered up his energy, uttered a mental prayer, and went on. ‘What I had in mind was a trifle different. We can’t do a proper mortician’s job on the body, but it could be placed in a closed container on the rink and allowed to lie in state for a few days. Surely people won’t mind giving up their skating for that long.’

  For a moment Scroop had a wild hope that he’d won, but then Jameson shook his head. ‘Won’t do, y’know,’ he said. ‘We looked into that sort of thing too, for an ice fair with booths. Can’t put anything like that on the rink. Sinks in, after a while, and could easily cut the piping. The nature of ice, of course. You wouldn’t want that gas escaping.’

  Scroop resisted an insane temptation to drag the engineer from behind his desk and into a classroom, just to see what third manner he would adopt there. He was beaten, however: finished; and as frustration settled crushingly upon him all he wanted to do was go back to his quarters and stretch out.

  In the bleak comfort of home, the fact that he had been defeated at his own game somehow hurt much less than that he had failed in a real case of spiritual necessity. He was willing to take a setback as technological expediter, although that had become so much a part of his existence that he had virtually lost his original purpose in mastering the craft. That was the crux of it, wasn’t it ? Something in him had reawakened—the minister to the spirit—and at the first real challenge he had gone down like a gutted tenement. Dare he question the Supreme Intellect, and ask if the humbling of an old man was worth the repercussions in that troubled international world outside ? It was ironic too that the reawakening had been aided by one whose strong spiritual values were alien to Scroop. A lesson for the old man in this as well ? But by whatever God one worshipped, Sikh deserved a far better exodus than seemed inevitable. Even Hobbs, the atheist, should see that or be made to see it. Not his problem! ‘I refuse to be involved!’

  Scroop’s fingers dug into the edges of his mattress as he stared at the grey-white ceiling, incensed by the callousness of the man. ‘Refuse to be...’ But—what if Hobbs were involved? What if it were made his problem? Scroop’s pulse quickened. That wasn’t quite the solution, but it was a pointer. Stirring at the back of his mind was a very recent memory, together with an older one, much older, of a spider that built on others’ webs. With a speed and enthusiasm that threatened bones and tendons, he rolled off the bunk and headed for his scanner, thrusting his classification key into the computer console on his way by. Whatever he might have lost over the years, he had served society and his parish well as a master technologist. Here perhaps the best way to expedite was to allow his victims to spin their own web and even add a little to it.

  * * * *

  If Hobbs had been angry yesterday morning, on this successive morning of interruption he was livid. He stood with his feet planted far apart, gazing the length of the table to the four men at the end of the conference room.

  ‘Scroop—Jameson,’ he spluttered, ‘if this isn’t a bona-fide, first-class emergency; if this has anything to do with that, that stiff over there, I’ll have both of you out of Tundra City within the hour! Walking back to Churchill through that blizzard.’

  Looking innocent but concerned, and far more relaxed than a man with his problem ought to be, Scroop left it to Jameson to answer. The engineer, though obviously uncomfortable, could hardly back down now, after calling the first such meeting in the townsite’s brief history. Still he spoke to Hobbs at first with careful deference. ‘There’s a genuine emergency, all right,’ he began, ‘and Henri and Vladmir both agreed at once. It was, uh, Reverend Scroop who pointed it out. The fact still remains, whoever, discovered it, that we must deal with it immediately, ah, Mr. Hobbs.’

  Henri LeBlanc and Vladmir Homynyk nodded agreement and muttered a bit, clearly at a loss to suggest any cut-and-dried answer.

  To the impatient Hobbs this seemed a further irritant, and he burst out with, ‘Well, man, can you let me in on it, or am I supposed to weave a magic wand in the general direction of the townsite. What is it that you can’t solve among yourselves?’ Scroop noted with quiet satisfaction that, far from cowing the trio, Hobbs was bullying them into a rather sullen obstinacy.

  Jameson, having begun, seemed delegated to continue, so he squared his shoulders, glanced around at the others and addressed the explosive Hobbs. ‘It seems that when the tractor train left, the roughnecks forgot to take some stuff back with them. A rather large pile of crating, wooden crating, for hauling the foam layers. It’s sitting in subdivision four.’ He trailed off lamely into silence.

  Hobbs stared at Jameson, at all of them and drew a long breath. ‘There must be more,’ he said ominously. ‘You wouldn’t bother me just for this.’

  Jameson went on doggedly. ‘It really isn’t more than that,’ he replied. ‘There is a very large pile of combustible material in sub-division four of the townsite. In violation of the International Closed Environ ... ment Standard Legislation,’ Hobbs finished.

  ‘Yes, we all know. So? Move it! Why bother me?’ Jameson subsided with a feeble laugh and said, ‘Gentlemen?’

  Henri grunted and absent-mindedly scratched his paunch.

  ‘We find it is not so simple as that. To where do we move this, ah, material?’ He somehow made the last word sound unsavoury.

  Jameson reared up again. ‘Everyone will agree that it can’t be left lying out on my construction site, now that the SAC is meshed. In fact, it can’t be left lying out anywhere in the townsite.’

  Henri stirred himself and added defensively, ‘Yet it must also be agreed that it cannot be stored on the Company’s premises. The regulations, they are very precise on this. In any building, or adjoining annex of any building in which the public is allowed, for business or recreation.’

  ‘Or worship,’ Scroop said mildly, drawing a withering glance from Hobbs.

  ‘Or anything,’ said Henri. ‘So any of the buildings in the townsite are unsuitable.’ Despite himself, Hobbs was beginning to see the intriguing difficulties, but he was in no mood yet to be drawn in.

  ‘Where do you store lubricants?’ he asked Jameson, who sounded slightly condescending when he answered, ‘I doubt any of them would qualify as combustibles these days, but they would be stored in small con
tainers near any machinery that hasn’t a lifetime seal.’

  Hobbs turned to Henri. ‘How does your liquor get by? And what do they ship it in? How do you dispose of it?’

  Henri looked positively petulant. ‘Perhaps you are thinking of the old-fashioned cardboard?’ he asked. ‘Plastic—a quick-deteriorating plastic. Even the bottles, Mr. Manager. I would be pleased to show you the stockroom, to catch you up on the developments.’

  The general manager’s eyes glinted at the implied insult, but he checked his anger and turned to Vladmir Homynyk, who had remained pensively silent. Now, with Hobbs, Jameson, and LeBlanc all looking at him, he cleared his throat nervously. ‘I don’t have it all here at my fingertips,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you pretty straight there’s no place I’m in charge of where you’re goin’ to put that stuff.’ To Hobbs’ flaring anger he said simply, ‘Listen! I got the safety of my men to consider. Combustibles are deadly in a Closed Environment. Then how you gonna put ‘em around the smelters or separators, or in the mine?’ He was probably the least devious in the group at this moment, for he turned to Scroop and explained. ‘I suppose you’re thinkin’ of the mine like Hobbs thinks of the liquor. Well, we gave up timberin’ years ago. It’s all fibreglass knock-ups.’