by Kate Wilhelm
But there were other places his disk would also fit, and that was what made his task more difficult. The disks were everywhere, or objects just like them. In the boxes, in the engine rooms, on desks, in the various labs….
He turned it over and over, then put it back In his pocket and picked up his search where he had left off. He had gone over the entire ship hurriedly, and was in the process of going through it again, more leisurely, more thoughtfully.
There were the elevator shafts that had no elevators. Why would they have removed the elevators? They had been found, stored together in a large, otherwise empty room, filled with some of the stocks that could be expected on a long voyage: foodstuffs, supplies of clothing, utensils that seemed designed for serving foods. Blake stood near the elevator shaft and stared up and down it; well lighted along its length it remained mysterious and bothersome.
He came to one of the rope guides for the tours and he stepped over it and entered the room that appeared to be a film room. There were blank walls here and seats, but no sign of a projector, simply the seats lined up facing the blank walls. And the boxes with disks. And the carved trim.
It seemed to Blake that his greatest chances of learning anything from the ship must lie in the engine rooms and the chart rooms, and they were clustered on the fourth level. There were ninety-four floors, with seven major levels broken up by wide view windows and observation decks that jutted from the main body of the ship giving it a pagoda-like appearance from the outside. He knew that he had to be careful in those areas because he was exposed to the sight of anyone who happened to be looking that way at the right time. The ship was wired and was kept lighted day and night for the benefit of the investigators.
He had gone over the engine rooms twice already, but he felt that he had to try once more before he gave up there. It was from one of those overhangs that Matt had seen the alien walk out on air on their arrival, the topmost one. Blake stood by the door and stared at the first engine room with gaps where equipment had been at one time. This was a more functional-appearing room than the others he had given most of his attention to. There was little of the decorative trim here, for one thing, and the pale green in here was grayed. On the wall behind Blake was the box of disks. There were four island control areas, desks with panels of buttons and dials, small screens, computers, probably. The walls were lined with equipment, more computers, consoles whose purpose had not been determined, There were high chairs at each of the control panels in the islands, and more chairs along the walls for other operators. Blake glanced over them, stopped, and took note of the number of people needed to fill the chairs, to man the controls. Sixteen. He turned to the box of disks and counted them. Sixteen. For the first time he thought he had found something.
For the next two hours he searched for a box with a disk missing. When he found such a box there were many disks missing, not only one. In disappointment he stared at the box with the shallow depressions, then turned to survey the room. It was the cold sleep room where so many bodies of already dead aliens had been found when finally the men had entered the ship. Blake counted the disks, twelve to a box here, with six boxes empty completely, and one with seven disks. He tried to fit his disk into one of the empty receptacles, and it slipped out again and he caught it. What then? Unless… he tried the disk in another place, then another, and on the fourth try in the partially filled box it held. It held so tightly that he couldn’t remove it again.
He stepped back then and laughed. He had brought back a missing piece and the ship was keeping it. He saw that he had put it in shiny side down, with the dull side facing him and he grimaced at it. Let the boys with their slide rules try to figure out why one of them was in wrong side out. It bothered him, though, and he touched it again, to try one more time to get it out. It was hot.
Blake didn’t laugh this time. He stared at it hard, then sat down on the nearest coffin rail and waited. Every fifteen minutes he touched the disk again. It got hotter, never hot enough to burn him, but enough to make him move his finger. Where was the power coming from? He heard the first of the tours starting, and the disk was still in the hollow, sitting there quietly hot, held fast. He found a hiding place and waited throughout the day. The tours came through the cold sleep room, and he heard the guide’s voice:
“Here they slept for many many years while their ship hurtled through space. Chemicals replaced blood, wires with electrodes recorded their temperatures and any chemical action that took place and prepared them for revival at the end of their journey. Unfortunately for two hundred and forty-seven persons that revival never came.”
“What’s that stuff over there?” A small boy’s voice.
“Those are computers, we think, and the chemical banks. We have analyzed…”
“What’s that stuff up there?” The same voice.
“We don’t know exactly what they are for. We think a signal device that probably was lighted from within when the person took his place in the cold sleep storage unit. They are markers of some sort.”
“You said two hundred and forty-seven. Why’re there two hundred and forty-eight of them?”
“There are two hundred and forty-seven, the exact number of aliens we found….”
“There’s two hundred and forty-eight. Twelve in a box, twenty filled up boxes and one box with eight things….”
“There are seven in the last….”
“Eight!”
“In the next room we will see the dining quarters, a large room, with rather conventional tables and stools….”
“Why not look if you don’t believe—”
“This way, please. Please don’t lean over the ropes…. Son, don’t crawl under… ”
“Harry, if you don’t behave, we’ll leave right now. I’m sick and tired of having to haul you out of corners and drag you….”
Blake darted from the small storage room where he had been hiding and tried the disk again. It was perceptibly cooler, but still wouldn’t budge. If the guide had paid any attention to the kid and came back, or reported the addition… he hurried back to his little room when the next tour came through.
Three tours later the disk was cool again and it slid out into his hand as if it never had resisted at all. Blake hurried back to the hideaway and examined it carefully, but as far as he could see there was nothing different about it. He rubbed it, feeling foolish, like Aladdin, tried to push it in, tried to turn the two halves from each other. It was still a black disk, shiny on one side, dull on the other, with no powers to do anything that he could detect.
Between the tours he left that area and made his way higher in the ship well away from the various tours that crawled through endlessly, like a procession of worms through an apple. He passed the wardroom where clothing was issued, apparently, and went on to the general stores room. There was little left in it. Most of the portable goods had been taken from the ship long ago, to be studied in laboratories around the world where they were cut apart, analyzed, X-rayed, subjected to electron microscopic examination, irradiated….
Mostly he wanted a place where no one would come for a while so he could think. The disk puzzled him more than anything else had so far. The woman had owned it; she had taken it with her when she left the ship; then when she realized that she was dying she had given it to Matt. His reasoning had been right, probably. She had meant it for her child. But why? For what reason. Where had the power come from that heated it, and why heat it? Blake turned it over and over and was as blank after he thought through it as he had been before. There was something missing still. He recalled Matt’s words: “…and when she took off the tunic the disc fell to the floor. I picked it up and she motioned for me to keep it.” Not in her hand then, but in the tunic. He went back to the wardroom and examined a tunic. There were no pockets, no place for the disk to have been. He narrowed his eyes recalling every detail of the dressed dummies that had been positioned in the first room of the guided tour. The aliens had worn hip-length tunics over pant
s that were loose and comfortable. The tunics were without pockets, but were belted and things hung from the belts. Instruments of various sorts, they differed from one figure to the next, according to occupation, so said the cards that described the outfits. But there was something in common. Each belt had a loop that dangled odds and ends. Curious odds and ends, and some of them with nothing. Just loops. Blake hunted until he had found a belt and he looked closely at the fittings on it. This one would hold six different objects, each one fitted into a slot and held securely. The belt was wide and heavy, plastic, or hide of some sort. It was held together by self-fastening studs that clung tightly, and couldn’t be pulled apart no matter how hard he pulled, but slid apart easily when he tried to raise one side and lower the other. He put the belt on, too big. He tried another, then another until he found one that fastened securely on his waist and was a comfortable fit. He fitted the disk into the loop, and he knew that it belonged there. That solved one problem, where they carried them, but not the other, why? He started to slide the two halves of the belt apart, and he shot upward. He straightened the belt hurriedly, and hovered with his head touching the ceiling. Very cautiously he touched the belt again, nothing. He tried to lean over enough to see it, but he couldn’t get a close enough look to see any details that way. He ran his fingers over the front of the belt, near the fasteners, and he could feel depressions in it then. He touched the bottom one very lightly and started to settle. When his feet were again on the floor he touched the center hollow, and he felt reasonably steady again. He remembered a high-ceilinged room that had no discernible purpose for being and he headed toward it. He needed practice.
Chapter Twenty-four
HE’S in there, and I want him out. Take a dozen of your men and get inside that ship and don’t come out until you find him.”
Merton watched his lieutenant walk out stiffly, and he knew that Blake had eluded them again. No one could have stayed inside the ship for two weeks without being found, or running out of food, or making his presence known somehow. His spies among the UNEF reported nothing untoward had occurred aboard. He went to find Obie.
“It was your job to keep him,” Obie said. “And it’s your job to find him now and put him in a cage. Get that, Merton. If you don’t get the job done this week, I’ll find someone who will.”
“Oh, shut up,” Merton said.
Obie started from the deep chair that was massaging his back. There were fatty deposits over Obie’s hips, around his rib cage. No jiggling chair would take them away. Hard work, less food might, but even that was doubtful. Obie was destined to put on weight. Merton scowled at him and motioned for him to sit down again. He draped a leg over Obie’s desk and said, “Let’s get this out in the open, Obie. You aren’t going to fire me now, or ever. If I get tired, I’ll leave. Period. I have enough on you, on Dee Dee, on Wanda, Billy, everyone you ever hired for any little nose-picking job you wanted done to put all of you away for the rest of your lives. So forget it.”
Obie turned very red. Where his hair was thinning on top, his scalp showed through, cherry bright. “You think I don’t have the same kind of stuff on you?”
“I know what you got. So we’d all go together. Forget it, Obie. We’ve got things to decide.” Obie glared at him, but he sat back again and the chair shook him gently. “First, you go ahead with the Son of God routine that you started. I’m putting everyone I have on this. We’ll find him, and by the end of next year we’ll be ready for the resurrection, just like we planned. Tell your writers to bear down on that.”
“No,” Obie said firmly. “Not unless we have him in our hands. Too risky.”
“Listen, you fool,” Merton said. “We need him now. I got a ringer for him. With the gas, and the buildup, they’ll accept it. For the climax, we’ll have him. Leave it to me.”
“Let me see the ringer first.”
Merton had the boy brought in. He did look like Blake. Fair, with intense eyes, good build. But he was incredibly stupid. Which probably was a good thing. He would follow any orders that he could remember. Obie grunted and the boy was led away.
“He’s an idiot!”
“So what? You want him to sit on the stage and look at them. That’s all. You do the rest anyway.”
The buildup started. Blake would appear henceforth along with Obie; the God-given healing powers had been restored in full. Bring forth the halt and the lame, bring the blind and the dumb, bring you small ones whose bodies are twisted, your old One whose legs stumble and falter. Bring them all. Let Obie and His Son heal. them, with the power and the strength and the might of God that abides in them.
The next show was scheduled for Miami, a tough city, filled with money men and bought women and hedonists of all ages and bents. If Obie and the ringer got through to them, anything was possible.
The billboards read: They give you water where there was none. Power where there was no power. Wine where there was no wine. Health where health has failed. Come feel the power of God that shines forth through Obie Cox and his son Blake.
The auditorium seated two hundred thousand, and it was filled. The MM’s were out in full force, most of them in plainclothes, all of them armed and alert for the Barbers, and for Blake Daniels.
Obie glowed and was beautiful, his beard gleamed, with peroxide and a luminous dye, and his eyes shone with the power of God. He paced in his dressing room smoking furiously, waiting for Merton’s report that all was clear. Billy chewed on a fingernail and looked fat. Dee Dee in her white robe was lovely, but she, like Obie, was smoking hard.
“I wish you hadn’t let him talk you into this,” Billy said, spitting out a bit of his thumbnail. “It isn’t going to take many of those scenes like Chicago to make a fool out of you. If those kids show up with their voice distorter and their scissors…”
“If Merton bitches this one,” Obie muttered, “I have just the guys for him. They have orders….”
Dee Dee gasped. “You’re kidding!”
“You too, if you think it’s time to take sides,” Obie said.
Dee Dee shrugged. If she had to take sides, she would stand pat. Obie knew that. Merton without Obie was just another ex-F.B.I. man.
Merton came in then, looking satisfied and very matter of fact. “Time,” he said. “I gave the word to get started.”
“You’re sure about the audience?”
“Absolutely. We used the scanners on everyone who came in, no electronic devices, no scissors, nothing. We had to take a hundred seventy-four aside and escort them back out, but they weren’t Barbers. Blackjacks and knives and a few stun guns. That’s all.” The sound of the choir drifted in. They were very good, three hundred voices, each girl good enough to solo.
“The kid? Is he set?”
“He knows what he’s supposed to do. As long as he doesn’t have to speak, he’ll be fine. Calm down Obie. This one is fixed down the line.”
Billy. turned on the 3D and they saw the choir, miniaturized, but there in the room with them. A camera did a slow sweep of the audience, and again they were there, seeing the individuals in person. Dee Dee stubbed out her cigarette, and left for her solo. Billy waddled out, still unhappy, to watch from behind stage and to take charge of the money when it came in. Presently it was rime for Obie to go on. Obie straightened his shoulders and left Merton alone in the dressing room. Only then did Merton allow some of the worry he was feeling to show on his face. He drank a quick scotch and water, then concentrated on the 3D. It was going out all over the world; everywhere people were watching to see if the Barbers would break up yet another of the rallies held by Obie. Riots, fires, National Guards had repaid their diligence the last three times Brother Cox had held open revivals, and they were hopeful that this would be as exciting. Obie had been forced to go to closed meetings with only the broadcasts to take the message to the people, and it had cost him; at the rate of half a million dollars a meeting, it had cost him. Now they would regain lost ground. But Merton worried.
The
lights went out slowly, the flickering tapers relieving the dark very little, and when the spot came on, Obie was there, looking handsome and very sure of himself. He could feel the excitement from the crowds, and their fear of being caught up in something that could get dangerous. Obie prayed, getting the full feeling of his audience, and when the prayer was over the collection was taken. Billy managed that part of it. He would be jubilant; there were many bills of credit, many dollars, the jingle of coins. Obie had the feel now: he knew what he would preach. He never really knew until he felt with the audience. Actually what he said didn’t vary all that much, but his delivery did, and tonight he would be happy, hopeful, excited. This was the beginning of the end. The power of God had been contested and had not been found wanting. The forces of evil had been driven out once more. God was triumphant. Obie Cox was triumphant. The hallelujah chorus started and Blake’s stand-in came forward. For a second Obie’s stomach churned; the kid looked legitimate as hell. Blake had always come out reluctantly, closed in on himself somehow. The boy took his seat and Obie started: