Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  “Get off the damn frequency, Brax, and stay off!” Novotny snapped when the Alabaman released his mic button. “I’ve told you and Henderson before—either learn to talk fast, or don’t talk on the job. If somebody had a slow leak, he’d be boiling blood before he could scream—with you using the frequency for five minutes to say ‘yeah.’”

  “Mistuh Novotny! My mothuh always taught me to speak slowly and de-stinct-ly. If you think that yo’ Yankee upbringin’…”

  Joe rapped on his helmet until he shut up, then beck-oned to Henderson. “Lije, we got twenty minutes.”

  “Yeah, Joe, want to go see a couple of guys now?” He flashed white teeth and stared back toward the barrack train.

  “Think we can handle it in twenty minutes?”

  “I don’ know. It seem like a short time to do a real good job of it, but maybe if we don’t waste any on preliminary fisticuffin’…”

  “Hell, they didn’t waste any ceremony on Relke.”

  “Less go, then!” He grinned at Relke and held out his fist. “Spit on it?”

  Relke shook his head. Henderson laughed. “Wanted to see if you’d go ptooey in your helmet.”

  “Come on, Lije. The rest of you guys find cover.”

  Relke watched the two of them lope off toward the rolling barracks. “Hey, Joe,” he called after a few seconds.

  The lopers stopped to look back. “Relke?”

  “Yeah. Don’t lose.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll say I sicced you. Don’t lose.”

  “Don’t worry.” They loped again. The longer Relke watched them, the less he liked the idea. If they didn’t do a pretty thorough job on Kunz and Larkin, things would be worse for Relke than if they did nothing at all. Then there was the movement to think about; he didn’t know to what extent they looked out for their own.

  Relke walked out of the danger zone and hiked across the hill where he could get a clear view of the rocket. He stopped for a while on the slope and watched four distant figures moving around on the ground beneath the towering ship. For a moment, he thought they were women, but then he saw that one of them was coiling mooring cable, and he knew they were ship’s crew. What sort of men had the d’Annecy women been able to hire for such a job? he wondered.

  He saw that they were getting ready to lift ship. Lift ship!

  Relke was suddenly running toward them without knowing why. Whenever he topped a rise of ground and could see them, he tried calling them, but they were not using the project’s suit frequency. Finally he found their voices on the seldom used private charter band, but they were speaking French.

  One of the men looped a coil of cable over his shoulder and started up the ladder toward the lock. Relke stopped atop an outcropping. He was still two or three miles from the ship. The “isobar” valve system for the left knee of his suit had jammed, and it refused to take up the increased pressure caused by flexure. It was like trying to bend a fully inflated rubber tire, and he hobbled about for a moment with one leg stiff as a crutch.

  “Listen!” he called on the p.c. frequency. “You guys at the ship. Can you hear me?” He was panting, and he felt a little panicky. The man on the ladder stopped climbing and looked around.

  There was a staccato exchange in French.

  “No, no! Over here. On the rock.” He waved at them and jumped a few times. “Look toward the camp. On the rock.”

  They conversed heatedly among themselves for a time. “Don’t any of you speak English?” he begged.

  They were silent for a moment. “Whoevair ees?” one of them ventured. “You conversation with wrong radio, M’sieur. Switch a button.”

  “No, no. I’m trying to call you…”

  A carrier drowned him out.

  “We close for business,” the man said. “We go now.” He started climbing again.

  “Listen!” Relke yelled. “Ten thousand dollars. Everything.”

  “You crazy man.”

  “Look, it won’t get you in any trouble. I’ve got plenty in the bank. I’ll pay—”

  The carrier cut him off again.

  “You crazy. Get off the air. We do not go to Earth now.”

  “Wait! Listen! Tell Giselle… No, let me talk to her. Get her to use the radio. It’s important.”

  “I tell you, we close for business now.” The man climbed in the airlock. The others climbed up behind. They were, jeering at him. This time it sounded like Arabic. He watched until they were all inside.

  White fury lanced the ground and spread in a white sheet beneath the ship and roiled up in a tumult of dust and expanding gasses. It climbed on a white fan, gathering velocity. Relke could still make it out as a ship when its course began arcing away from the vertical. It was beginning a trajectory in the direction of Copernicus. When it was out of sight, he began trudging back toward the work site. He was nearly an hour overdue.

  “Where you been?” Novotny asked him quietly after watching him hobble the last quarter of a mile in stony silence. He was squinting at the lineman with that faintly puzzled look that Relke recognized as a most ominous omen. The squint was lopsided because of a cut under one eye, and it looked like a chip was missing from a tooth.

  Relke showed his stiff leg and bounced the heel against the ground a couple of times. “I walked too far, and the c.p. valves got jammed. Sorry, Joe.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. Let’s see.”

  The pusher satisfied himself that the suit was malfunctioning. He waved the lineman toward the barrack train. “Go to supply and get it fixed. Get back on the double. You’ve slowed us down.”

  Relke paused. “You sore, Joe?”

  “We’re on duty. I don’t get sore on duty. I save it up. Now—haul ass!”

  Relke hobbled off. “What about… what you went for, Joe?” he called back. “What happened?”

  “I told you to keep your nose out of politics!” the pusher snapped. “Never mind what happened.”

  Joe, Relke decided, was plenty sore. About something. Maybe about a beating that backfired. Maybe about Relke taking an hour awol. Either way, he was in trouble. He thought it over and decided that paying a bootleg ship ten thousand to take him back to Earth with them hadn’t been such a hysterical whim after all.

  But then he met Larkin in the supply wagon. Larkin was stretched out flat on his back, and a medic kept saying, “Who did it to you? Who did it to you?” and Larkin kept telling him to go to hell out of a mouth that looked like a piece of singed stew meat. Kunz was curled up on a blanket and looked even worse. He spat in his sleep and a bit of tooth rattled across the deck.

  “Meanest bunch of bastards I ever saw,” the clerk told Relke while he checked in the suit. “They don’t even give you a chance. Here were these two guys sleeping in their bunks and not bothering anybody, and what do you think?”

  “I quit thinking. What?”

  “Somebody starts working them over. Wham. Don’t even wake them up first. Just wham. You ever see anything like it? Mean, John, just mean. You can’t even get a shift’s sleep anymore. You better go to bed with a knife in your boot, John.”

  “It’s Bill.”

  “Oh. What do you suppose makes a guy that mean anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s jumpy, I guess.”

  The clerk looked at him wisely. “There you have put your finger on it, John. Looney nerves. The jitters. Everybody’s suit-happy.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “You know how I tell when the camp’s getting jittery?”

  “Listen, check me out a suit. I’ve got to get back to the line.”

  “Now wait, this’ll surprise you. I can tell better than the psych checkers when everybody’s going on a slow panic. It’s the sleeping bag liners.”

  “What?”

  “The bed wetters, John. You’d be surprised how many grown men turn bed wetters about the middle of a hitch. At first, nobody. Then somebody gets killed on the line. The bag liners start coming in for cleaning. By the end of the hi
tch, the wash tank smells like a public lavatory, John. Not just the men, either. Some of the engineers. You know what I’m doing?”

  “Look, Mack, the suit…”

  “Not Mack. Frank. Look, I’ll show you the chart.” He got out a sheet of paper with a crudely drawn graph on it. “See how it goes? The peak? I’ve done ten of them.”

  “Why?”

  The clerk looked at him blankly. “For the idea box, John. Didn’t you know about the prizes? Doctor Esterhall ought to be glad to get information like this.”

  “Christ, they’ll give you a medal, Charley. Now give me my damn suit before I get it myself. I’m due on the line.”

  “OK, OK. You got the jitters yourself, haven’t you?” He went to get the suit. “I just happened to think,” he called back. “If you’ve been turning in liners yourself, don’t worry about me. I don’t keep names, and I don’t remember faces.”

  “You blab plenty, though,” Relke grumbled to himself.

  The clerk heard him. “No call to get sore, John.”

  “I’m not sore, I’m just in a hurry. If you want to beg for a stomping, it’s nothing to me.”

  The clerk came back bristling. “Who’s going to stomp?”

  “The bed wetters, I guess.” He started getting into the suit.

  “Why? It’s for science, isn’t it?”

  “Nobody likes to be watched.”

  “There you put your finger on it, John. It’s the watching part that’s worst. If they’d only quit watching us, or come out where we could see them! You know what I think? I think there’s some of them among us. In disguise.” The clerk smirked mysteriously at what-he-knew-but-wouldn’t-tell.

  Relke paused with a zipper halfway up. “Who do you mean—watching? Checkers?”

  The clerk snorted and resumed what he had been doing when Relke entered: he was carefully taping his share of stock in Mme. d’Annecy’s venture up on the wall among a display of pin-ups. “You know who I mean,” he muttered.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The ones that dug that mine, that’s who.”

  “Aliens? Oh, bullspit.”

  “Yeah? You’ll see. They’re keeping an eye on us, all right. There’s a guy on the African team that even talked to some of them.”

  “Nuts. He’s not the first guy that ever talked to spooks. Or demons. Or saucer pilots. You don’t have to be a Looney to be a lunatic.”

  That made the clerk sore, and he stomped off to his sanctum to brood. Relke finished getting into the suit and stepped into the airlock. Some guys had to personify their fear. If there was danger, somebody must be responsible. They had to have an Enemy. Maybe it helped, believing in gremlins from beyond Pluto. It gave you something to hate when your luck was bad.

  He met Joe just outside the lock. The pusher was waiting to get in.

  “Hey, Pappy, I own up. I was goofing off awhile ago. If you want to be sore—” Relke stopped. Something was wrong. Joe was breathing hard, and he looked sick.

  “Christ, I’m not sore! Not now!”

  “What’s wrong, Joe?”

  The pusher paused in the hatchway. “Run on back to the line. Keep an eye on Braxton. I’m getting a jeep. Back in a minute.” He went on inside and closed the hatch.

  Relke trotted toward the last tower. After a while he could hear Braxton talking in spasms on the frequency. It sounded like sobbing. He decided it was sobbing.

  “Theah just isn’t any God,” Bama was moaning. “Theah just couldn’t be a God and be so mean. He was the bes’ frien’ a man evah had, and he nevah did nothin’ to de-serve it. Oh, God, oh, God, why did it have to be him? Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven, to treat a man that way, when he been so…” Braxton’s voice broke down into incoherent sobbing.

  There was a man lying on the ground beside the tower. Relke could see Benet bending over him. Benet was clutching a fistful of the man’s suit. He crossed himself slowly and stood up. A safety team runabout skidded to a halt beside the tower, and three men piled out. Benet spread his hands at them in a wide shrug and turned his back.

  “What happened?” Relke asked as he loped up to Beasley.

  “Kama was welding. Lije walked over to ask him for a wrench or something. Bama turned around to get it, and Lije sat down on the strut with the hot weld.”

  “Blow out?”

  “He wasn’t that lucky. Call it a fast slowout.”

  Novotny drove up, saw the safety jeep, and started bellowing furiously at them.

  “Take it easy, chum. We got here as quick as we could.”

  “Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven…”

  They got Henderson in the safety runabout. Novotny manufactured a hasty excuse to send Braxton off with them, for grief had obviously finished his usefulness for awhile. Everybody stood around in sickly silence and stared after the jeep.

  “Genet, you know how to pray,” Novotny muttered. “Say something, altar boy.”

  “Aw, Joe, that was fifteen years ago. I haven’t lived right.”

  “Hell, who has? Go ahead.”

  Benet muttered for a moment and turned his back. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…” He paused.

  “Can’t you pray in English?” Joe asked.

  “We always said it in Latin. I only served at a few masses.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Benet prayed solemnly while they stood around with bowed heads and shuffled their boots in the dust. Nobody understood the words, not even Benet, but somehow it seemed important to listen.

  “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat…”

  Relke looked up slowly and let his eyes wander slowly across the horizon. There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation. Relke decided Braxton was wrong. There was a God, all right, maybe personal, maybe not, but there was a God, and He wasn’t mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn’t any way to build a universe that wasn’t a deadly contraption—like a square circle.

  He made the contrapation, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn’t a damn thing the universe could do to a man that a man wasn’t built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it. It was the consistency of matched qualities—random mercilessness and human endurance—and it wasn’t mean, it was a fair match.

  “Poor Lije. God help him.”

  “All right,” Novotny called. “Let’s pull cable, men.”

  “Yeah, you know what?” said Beasley. “Those dames went to Crater City. The quicker we get the line finished, the quicker we get back. Damn Parkeson anyhow!”

  “Hell, why do you think he let them go there, Beeze?” Tremini jeered. “So we’d work our butts off to finish quick, that’s why. Parkeson’s no idiot. If he’d sent them packing for somewhere else, maybe we’d finish, maybe we wouldn’t.”

  “Cut the jawing. Somebody run down and get the twist out of that span before she kinks. Relke, start taking up slack.”

  Atop the steel truss that supported’ the pendulous insulators, the lineman began jacking up the slack line. He glanced toward the landing site where the ship had been, and it was hard to believe it had ever been there at all. A sudden improbable dream that had come and gone and left nothing behind. Nothing? Well, there was a share of stock…

  “Hey, we’re all capitalists!” Relke called.

  Benet hooted. “Take your dividends out in trade.”

  “Listen, someday they’ll let dames come here again and get married. That’s one piece of community property you better burn first.”

  “That d’Annecy dame thought of everything.”

  “Listen, that d’Annecy dame is going to force an issue. She’ll clean up, and a lot of guys will throw away small fortunes,
but before it’s over, they’ll let women in space again. Now quit jawing, and let’s get to work.”

  Relke glanced at the transformer station where he had taken the girl. He tried to remember what she looked like, but he got Fran’s face instead. He tried to transmute the image into Giselle’s, but it stayed Fran. Maybe he hadn’t really seen Giselle at all. Maybe he had looked at her and seen Fran all along, but it had been a poor substitution. It had accomplished one thing, though. He felt sorry for Fran now. He no longer hated her. She had stuck it out a long time before there had been another guy. And it was harder for a wife on Earth than it was for a husband on Luna. She had to starve in the midst of plenty. He had only to deny himself what he couldn’t get anyhow, or even see. She was the little girl with her nose against the bakery window. He was only fasting in the desert. It was easy; it put one beyond temptation. To fast in a banquet hall, one had to be holy. Fran wasn’t holy. Relke doubted he’d want a wife who was holy. It could get damnably dull.

  A quick glance at Earth told him it was still in the skyless vault. Maybe she’ll come, if they ever let them come, he thought wistfully. Maybe the guy’ll be a poor substitute, and she’ll figure out who she’s really married to, legal instruments notwithstanding. Maybe… O God, let her come!… women had no business on Luna, but if they didn’t then neither did men, nor Man, who had to be a twosome in order to be recognizably human.

  “Damn it, Relke, work that jack!” Joe yelled. “We got to build that line!”

  Relke started cranking again, rocking his body to the rhythm of the jack, to the rhythm of echoes of thought. Got to build the line. Damn it, build the line. Got to build the line. Build the damn line. The line was part of a living thing that had to grow. The line was yet another creeping of life across a barrier, a lungfish flopping from pool to pool, an ape trying to walk erect across still another treeless space. Got to build the line. Even when it kills you, got to build the line, the bloody endless line. The lineman labored on in silence. The men were rather quiet that shift.

  1957

  VENGEANCE FOR NIKOLAI