by James Blish
There is a demonolater abroad in the world. He shall be deprived of grace, and then called upon to administer extreme unction to a friend. By this sign, let him know himself for what he is.
After a while, Agronski was dead, choked to death by his own tongue. But still it was not over. It was necessary now to make Mike's apartment secure, kill any bees that might have got in, see to it that the escaped swarm died. It was easy enough. Ruiz-Sanchez simply papered over the broken panes on the sun porch. The. bees could not feed anywhere but in Liu's garden; they would come back there within a few hours; denied entrance, they would die of starvation an hour or so later. A bee is not a well-designed flying-machine; it keeps itself in the air by expending energy, in short, by pure brute force. A trapped bumblebee can starve to death in half a day, and Liu's tetraploid monsters would die far sooner of their freedom…
The 3-V muttered away throughout the dreary business. The terror was not local, that was clear. The Corridor Riots of 1993 had been nothing but a premonitory flicker, compared to this.
Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi's uniformed thugs, suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized the control centers. At the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million people as hostages for Egtverchi's safe-conduct, with the active collusion of perhaps five million of them. The violence elsewhere was not as systematic, though some of the outbursts of wrecking must have been carefully planned to allow for the placing of the explosives alone, there seemed to be no special pattern to it—but in no case could it be described as "passive" or "non-violent."
Sick, wretched and damned, Ruiz-Sanchez waited in the Michelises' jungle apartment, as though part of Lithia had followed him home and enfolded him there.
After the first three days, the fury had exhausted itself sufficiently to permit Michelis and Liu to risk the trip back to their apartment in a UN armored car. They were wan and ghastly-looking, as Ruiz-Sanchez supposed he was himself; they had had even less sleep than he had. He decided at once to say nothing about Agronski; that horror they could be spared. There was no way, however, that he could avoid explaining what had happened to the bees.
Liu's sad little shrug was somehow even harder to bear than Agronski.
"Did they find him yet?" Ruiz-Sanchez said huskily.
"We were going to ask you the same thing," Michelis said. The tall New Englander was able to get a glimpse of himself in a mirror above a planting box and winced. "Ugh, what a beard! At the UN everybody's too busy to tell you anything, except in fragments. We thought you might have heard an announcement."
"No, nothing. The Detroit vigilantes have surrendered, according to QBC."
"Yes, so have those goons in Smolensk; they ought to be putting that on the air in an hour or so. I never did think they'd succeed in pulling that operation off. They can't possibly know the corridors as well as the target area authorities themselves do. In Smolensk they got them with the fire door system—drained all the oxygen out of the area they were holding without their realizing what was going on. Two of them never came to."
Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself automatically. Up on the wall, the Klee muttered in a low voice; it had not been off since Egtverchi's broadcast.
"I don't know whether I want to listen to that damn thing or not," Michelis said sourly. Nevertheless, he turned up the volume. There was still essentially no news. The rioting was dying back, though it was as bad as ever in some shelters. The Smolensk announcement was duly made, bare of detail. Egtverchi had not yet been located, but UN officials expected a break in the case "shortly."
"'Shortly,' hell," Michelis said. "They've run out of leads entirely. They thought they had him cold the next morning, when they found a trail to the hideaway where he'd arranged to tide himself over and direct things. But he wasn't there—apparently he'd gotten out in a hurry, some time before. And nobody in his organization knows where he would go next—he was supposed to be there, and they're thoroughly demoralized to be told that he's not."
"Which means that he's on the run," Ruiz-Sanchez suggested.
"Yes, I suppose that's some consolation," Michelis said. "But where could he run to, where he wouldn't be recognized? And how would he run? He couldn't just gallop naked through the streets, or take a public conveyance. It takes organization to ship something as outr?s that secretly—and Egtverchi's organization is as baffled about it as the UN is." He turned the 3-V off with a savage gesture.
Liu turned to Ruiz-Sanchez, her expression appalled beneath its weariness.
"Then it's really not over after all?" she said hopelessly.
"Far from it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But maybe the violent phase of it is over. If Egtverchi stays vanished for a few days more, I'll conclude that he is dead. He couldn't stay unsighted that long if he were still moving about. Of course his death won't solve most of the major problems, but at least it would remove one sword from over our heads."
Even that, he recognized silently, was wishful thinking. Besides, can you kill a hallucination?
"Well, I hope the UN has learned something," Michelis said.
"There's one thing you have to say for Egtverchi: he got the public to bring up all the unrest that's been smoldering down under the concrete for all these years. And underneath all the apparent conformity, too. We're going to have to do something about that now—maybe take sledgehammers in our hands and pound this damned Shelter system down into rubble and start over. It wouldn't cost any more than rebuilding what's already been destroyed. One thing's certain: the UN won't be able to smother a revolt of this size in slogans. They'll have to do something."
The Klee chimed.
"I won't answer it," Michelis said through gritted teeth. "I won't answer it. I've had enough."
"I think we'd better, Mike," Liu said. "It might be news."
"News!" Michelis said, like a swearword. But he allowed himself to be persuaded. Underneath all the weariness, Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could detect something like a return of warmth between the two, as though, during the three days, some depth had been sounded which they had never touched before. The slight sigh of something good astonished him. Was he beginning, like all demonolaters, to take pleasure in the prevalence of evil, or at least in the expectation of it?
The caller was the UN man. His face was very strange underneath his funny hat, and his head was cocked as if to catch the first word. Suddenly, blindingly, Ruiz-Sanchez saw the hat in the light of the attitude, and realized what it was: an elaborately disguised hearing aid. The UN man was deaf and, like most deaf people, ashamed of it. The rest of the apparatus was a decoy.
"Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid, Dr. Ruiz," he said. "I don't know how to begin. Yes, I do. My deepest apologies for past rudeness. And past damn foolishness. We were wrong—my God, but we were wrong. It's your turn now. We need you badly, if you feel like doing us a favor. I won't blame you if you don't."
"No threats?" Michelis said, with unforgiving contempt.
"No, no threats. My apologies, please. No, this is purely a favor, requested by the Security Council." His face twisted suddenly, and then was composed once more. "I volunteered to present the petition. We need you all, right away, on the Moon."
"On the Moon! Why?"
"We've found Egtverchi."
"Impossible," Ruiz-Sanchez said, more sharply than he had intended. "He could never have gotten passage. Is he dead?"
"No, he's not dead. And he's not on the Moon, I didn't mean to imply that."
"Then where is he, in God's name?"
"He's on his way back to Lithia."
The trip to the Moon, by ferry-rocket, was rough, hectic and long. As the sole space voyage now being made in which the Haertel overdrive could not be used—across so short a distance, a Haertel ship would have overshot the target—very little improvement in techniques had been made in the trip since the old von Braun days. It was only after they had been bundled off the rocket into the moonboat, for the slow, paddle-wheel-driven trip across the seas of d
ust to the Comte d'Averoigne's observatory, that Ruiz-Sanchez managed to piece the whole story together.
Egtverchi had been found aboard the vessel that was shipping the final installment of equipment to Cleaver, when the ship was two days out. He was half-dead. In a final, desperate improvisation, he had had himself crated, addressed to Cleaver, marked "FRAGILE - RADIOACTIVE - THIS END UP," and shipped via ordinary express into the spaceport. Even a normally raised Lithian would have been shaken up by this kind of treatment, and Egtverchi, in addition to being a spindling specimen of his race, had been on the run for many hours before being shipped.
The vessel, by no very great coincidence, was also carrying the pilot model of the Petard CirCon; the captain got the news back to the count on the first test, and the count passed it along to the UN by ordinary radio. Egtverchi was in irons now, but he was well and cheerful. Since it was impossible for the ship to turn back, the UN was now, in effect, doing his running for him, at a good many times the speed of light.
Ruiz-Sanchez found a trace of pity in his heart for the born exile, harried now like a wild animal, penned behind bars, on his way back to a fatherland for which no experience in his life had fitted him, whose very language he could not speak. But when the UN man began to question them all—what was needed was some knowledgeable estimate of what Egtverchi might do next—his pity did not survive his speculations. It was right and proper to pity children, but Ruiz-Sanchez was beginning to believe that adults generally deserve any misfortune that they get.
The impact of a creature like Egtverchi on the stable society of Lithia would be explosive. On Earth, at least, he had been a freak; on Lithia, he would soon be taken for another Lithian, however odd. And Earth had had centuries of experience with deranged and displaced messiahs like Egtverchi; such a thing had never happened before on Lithia. Egtverchi would infect that garden down to the roots, and remake it in his own image—transforming the planet into that hypothetical dangerous enemy against whose advent Cleaver had wanted to make it an arsenal!
Yet something like that had happened when Earth was a stable garden, too. Perhaps—O felix culpa!—it always happened that way, on every world.
Perhaps the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was like the Yggdrasil of the legends of Pope Hadrian's birthland, with its roots in the floor of the universe, its branches bearing the planets—and whosoever would eat of its fruit might eat thereof…
No, that must not be. Lithia as a rigged Garden had been dangerous enough; but Lithia transformed into a planet-wide fortress of Dis was a threat to Heaven itself.
The Count d'Averoigne's main observatory had been built by the UN, to his specifications, approximately in the center of the crater Stadius, a once towering cup which early in its history had been swamped and partially melted in the outpouring sea of lava which made the Mare-Imbrium. What remained of its walls served the count's staff as a meteor—rampart during showers, yet they were low enough to be well below the horizon from the center of the crater, giving the count what was effectively a level plain in all directions. He looked no different than he had when they had first met, except that he was wearing brown coveralls instead of a brown suit, but he seemed glad to see them. Ruiz-Sanchez suspected that he was sometimes lonely, or perhaps lonely all the time—not only because of his current isolation on the Moon, but in his continuing remoteness from his family and indeed the whole of ordinary humanity.
"I have a surprise for you," he told them. "We've just completed the new telescope—six hundred feet in diameter, all of sodium foil, perched on top of Mount Piton a few hundred miles north of here. The relay cables were brought through to Stadius yesterday, and I was up all night testing my circuits. They have been made a little neater since you last saw them." This was an understatement. The breadboard rigs had vanished entirely; the object the count was indicating now was nothing but a black enamel box about the size of a tape recorder, and with only about that many knobs.
"Of course to do this is simpler than picking up a broadcast from a transmitter that doesn't have CirCon, like the Tree," the count admitted. "But the results are just as gratifying. Regard." He snapped a switch dramatically. On a large screen on the opposite wall of the dark observatory chamber, a cloud-wrapped planet swam placidly.
"My God!" Michelis said in a choked voice. "That's—is that Lithia, Count d'Averoigne? I'd swear it is."
"Please," the count said. "Here I'm Dr. Petard. But yes, that's Lithia; its sun is visible from the Moon a little over twelve days of the month. It's fifty light-years away, but here we see it at an apparent distance of a quarter of a million miles, give or take ten thousand—about the distance of the Moon from the Earth. It's remarkable how much light you can gather with a six-hundred-foot paraboloid of sodium when there's no atmosphere in the way. Of course with an atmosphere we couldn't maintain the foil, either—the gravity here is almost too much for it."
"It's stunning," Liu murmured.
"That's only the beginning, Dr. Meid. We have spanned not only the space, but also the time—both together, as is only appropriate. What we are seeing is Lithia today—right now, in fact—not Lithia fifty years ago."
"Congratulations," Michelis said, his voice hushed. "Of course the scholium was the real achievement—but you threw up an installation in record time, too, it seems to me."
"It seems that way to me, too," the count said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and regarding it complacently. "Are we going to be able to catch the ship's landing?" the UN man said intensely.
"No, I'm afraid not, unless I have my dates wrong. According to the schedule you gave me, the landing was supposed to have taken place yesterday, and I can't back my device up and down the time spectrum. The equations nail it to simultaneity, and simultaniety is what I get—neither more, nor less."
His voice changed color suddenly. The change transformed him from a fat man delighted with a new toy into the philosopher-mathematician Henri Petard as no disclaimer of his hereditary title could ever have done.
"I invited you to hold your conference here," he said, "because I thought you should all be witnesses to an event which I hope profoundly is not going to happen. I will explain:
"Recently I was asked to check the reasoning on which Dr. Cleaver based the experiment he has programmed for today. Briefly, the experiment is an attempt to store the total output of a Nernst generator for a period of about ninety seconds, through a special adaptation of what is called the pinch effect.
"I found the reasoning faulty—not obviously, Dr. Cleaver is too careful a craftsman for that, but seriously, all the same. Since lithium 6 is ubiquitous on that planet, any failure would be totally disastrous. I sent Dr. Cleaver an urgent message on the CirCon, to be tape-recorded on the ship that landed yesterday; I would have used the Tree, but of course that has been cut down, and I doubt that he would have accepted any such message from a Lithian had it not been. The captain of the ship promised me that the tape would be delivered to Dr. Cleaver before any of the remaining apparatus was unloaded. But I know Dr. Cleaver. He is bullheaded. Is that not so?"
"Yes," Michelis said. "God knows that's so."
"Well, we are ready," Dr. Petard said. "As ready as we can be. I have instruments to record the event. Let us pray that I won't need them."
The count was a lapsed Catholic; his injunction was a habit. But Ruiz-Sanchez could no more pray for any such thing than the count could—and no more could he leave the outcome to chance. St. Michael's sword had been put into his hand now so unmistakably that even a fool could not fail to recognize it. The Holy Father had known it would be so, and had planned for it with the skill of a Disraeli. Ruiz-Sanchez shuddered to think what a less politically minded Pope would have made of such an opportunity, but of course it had been God's will that this should happen in the time of Hadrian and not during any other pontificate. By specifically ruling out any formal excommunication, Hadrian had reserved to Ruiz-Sanchez' use the one gift of grace which was pertinent to the occasion a
t hand. And perhaps he had seen, too, that the time Ruiz-Sanchez had devoted to the elaborate, capriciously hypercomplex case of conscience in the Joyce novel had been time wasted; there was a much simpler case, one of the classical situations, which applied if Ruiz-Sanchez could only see it. It was the case of the sick child, for whose recovery prayers were offered.
These days, most sick children recovered in a day or so, after a shot of spectrosigmin or some similar drug, even from the brink of the terminal coma. Question: Has prayer failed, and temporal science wrought the recovery?
Answer; No, for prayer is always answered, and no man may choose for God the means He uses to answer it. Surely a miracle like a life-saving antibiotic is not unworthy of the bounty of God.
And this, too, was the answer to the riddle of the Great Nothing. The Adversary is not creative, except in the sense that He always seeks evil, and always does good. He cannot claim any of the credit for temporal science, nor imply truthfully that a success for temporal science is a failure, for prayer. In this as in all other matters, He is compelled to lie.
And there on Lithia was Cleaver, agent of the Great Nothing, foredoomed to failure, the very task to which he was putting his hand in the Adversary's service tottering on the edge of undoing all His work. The staff of Tannhauser had blossomed: These fruits are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
Yet even as Ruiz-Sanchez rose, the searing words of Pope Gregory VIII trembling on his lips, he hesitated still again. What if he were wrong after all? Suppose, just suppose, that Lithia were Eden, and that the Earth-bred Lithian who had just returned there were the Serpent foreordained for it? Suppose it always happened that way, world without end?
The voice of the Great Nothing, pouring forth lies to the last.
Ruiz-Sanchez raised his hand. His shaken voice resounded and echoed in the cave of the observatory.
"I, A PRIEST OF CHRIST, DO COMMAND YE, MOST FOUL SPIRITS WHO DO STIR UP THESE CLOUDS—"
"What? For heaven's sake, be quiet," the UN man said irritably. Everyone else was staring in wonder, and in Liu's glance there appeared to be a little fear. Only the count's glance was knowing and solemn.