"Getting cold won't hurt it, and we'd be glad to be sociable for a bit. We don't have much company."
I cleared my throat. "I hope I didn't, ah, hurt you two. Too much, I mean."
Tscharka was politely deprecatory. "We're fine, di Hoa. I had a few stitches. Tuck didn't even need that much; he has a harder head than mine, I guess. But it's all right. You did what you thought you had to do. It's over with. If I could have completed my plan—But God did not allow it. I've been praying for forgiveness—for all of us."
"Alma thinks you were all wrong in your theology, anyway," I mentioned.
That got me a glare from Alma, and worse than that from Captain Tscharka. His face froze over. He turned those deep, dark eyes on me and then on her—not angry, just icy cold.
"It's really none of my business," Alma said, trying to chicken out. He wouldn't let her. He kept that stare on her until she went on.
"Oh, I don't mean about your religious beliefs, exactly, Captain Tscharka. Everybody has the right to believe whatever they like. Matter of fact, I was once a communicant in the Penitential church myself, you know."
"I did know," Friar Tuck put in, not reproachfully, just sadly.
"What I mean," Alma went on, "is I don't think you've read the scriptures properly."
Tscharka actually smiled at that—imagine, someone telling him he'd misunderstood his faith. Friar Tuck was less amused. He said sternly, "They are the word of God, Miss Vendette. We know what they say."
"Really? Well, I don't suppose I've read the Bible as closely as you two, but I do remember some of the verses. Like, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.' That verse, and a lot of others."
"Yes?"
Alma said, "See, those same two words turn up over and over again: 'the world.'"
"I don't think I follow you."
"It's always the world, Captain Tscharka. That means the world that we call the Earth, the one where Christ was crucified on Calgary. That isn't this world. It's that other one back there."
They were both looking at her with full attention now, two gazes so intent that they almost burned. Slightly flustered, Alma said, "But, you see, this world has never had that visitation from the Savior, has it? That thousand-year clock that was supposed to go from the advent to the second coming—it just never started ticking here on Pava."
She stopped to see if they would want to say anything. They didn't. They just sat there, staring laserlike at her. I began to feel tense. These were not the kind of fanatics that I wanted to set off, and they were both big, powerful men.
"All right," Alma went on, being reasonable, "I accept that you think it's a sin to be alive on Earth—I don't accept what you wanted to do about it, of course, but as you say, that's over. But the thing is, that's a different world. You're not on Earth now. There's no sin in being alive on this planet, is there?"
There was even more silence then. A lot of it. Especially from me. Alma had surprised me more than once, but never more than she did that time.
Finally Friar Tuck stirred. He glanced at the captain, who had not moved a muscle, and then said, "You're a kind young woman, Miss Vendette. We appreciate the fact that you're trying to give us comfort, don't we, Garold?"
And Tscharka, who had been gazing into space with that rapt, thousand-kilometer stare I'd seen on him before, shook himself. "Yes," he said. "Of course. Thank you. You're very thoughtful, but now maybe we'd better get to that food while it's edible at all."
It was as polite an invitation to get lost as I'd ever had, so we did it.
And, outside, Alma saw the expression on my face and smiled. "I haven't gone back to the Millenarists, Barry, honest. You don't have to worry. It's just that I've been thinking about those two sad, sick people a lot. Trying to figure out why they did what they did. And I remembered all the Millenarist sermons I'd listened to, and then I had this idea."
"And you thought that might make them feel better."
"They're still human beings, hon, and they're hurting. Do you blame me?"
"No," I said—truthfully, because I didn't. Not then.
27
THIS is the sort of thing that is most troubling to us, Barrydihoa.
Oh, hell, Merlin, I wish you wouldn't keep interrupting. I was just getting up to speed for the dash to the finish line, and now you've made me break stride. All right; what's the troubling part, then?
You wish us to accept your view that you human persons are rational beings. That becomes even more difficult when you admit to us that all these nonrational traits exist. For example, how can you reconcile the human concept of "religion" with rationality?
Please, Merlin. Don't talk about things you don't know anything about. You may not understand why religion is important to most human beings, but it is. They need their religions. At least some of them do. The principal reason is that religion is comforting to them, I suppose, but it's more than that. It's their way of organizing a code of proper behavior.
It is not a rational way.
Oh, hell, what do you know about it? You don't understand what makes human beings tick in the first place. One of the most important human traits is that we want to know things. We're inquisitive. We want to learn everything there is to learn about everything there is.
When you keep that in mind you'll see that religious beliefs are not entirely irrational even by your own standards—well, I think so, anyway. As much as I understand what your standards are. At least, their beliefs didn't necessarily start out that way.
When religions first began they were actually more or less scientific attempts to explain the world. Those primitive people weren't stupid, Merlin. They were ignorant, yes, but they had brains. They wondered about things. They thought, quite reasonably, that there must be some reason for such phenomena as droughts and pestilences and violent storms—for all the things that threatened their lives, or even for the ones that benefited them. They wanted to understand them better, and so they formed a scientific theory to explain them.
The theory they developed was that there were supernatural beings living in every rock and river and tree, making these things happen.
All right, we know better now—about most of those things, anyway. Still, when you consider the state of human knowledge at that time, that wasn't an indefensible theory. It turned out to be wrong, sure. I'll grant you that, but so do a lot of scientific theories.
And, you know, there's still a lot out there that we don't know. We don't know exactly how the universe was born. We certainly don't know why. We don't even know if there is a why. There are a good many very logical and sensible people who still believe that there must have been some kind of god, sometime, that somehow started the whole thing going at the very beginning of tune, and who's to say they're crazy?
I know none of this means much to you, because you've never troubled yourself with any of those deep questions about things like Ultimate Causes—but don't kid yourself. That doesn't make you better than we are. The way I look at it, it makes you just a little bit worse.
Let me get back to the story—we're coming pretty close to the end.
Alma and I didn't stay housebound any longer than we had to. There was work to do and we were needed. Everybody was; so we reported for duty.
The person we reported to was Byram Tanner. Jimmy Queng wasn't handing out work assignments anymore, because he had been discreetly relieved of his straw-boss job. No one actually blamed him for what Tscharka and Tuchman had done, exactly, but Jimmy had been really close to them. So now Byram was the general work coordinator.
Neither Alma nor I was quite up to a whole lot of heavy lifting yet, but Byram found us work within our capabilities; he put us to driving the big-wheeled cars down to the farm plots to pick up what was being harvested. Some of the crops were dead ripe and the pickers got to them just barely in time. That was part of our general lepless labor shortage; if the new help from Buccaneer hadn't arrived when it did, a lot wouldn't have been worth p
icking. Driving the cars there and back wasn't hard work, and we were content to go right on doing it indefinitely. Alma liked it because she got to see something of the countryside. I liked it because Alma liked it, but also for another reason.
I kept being hopeful that somehow Geronimo might show up somewhere along the way.
I didn't have any convincing evidence, but I was still optimistic enough to think it was possible that maybe, just maybe, Geronimo would have finished his phase change and just might be lurking around somewhere in my vicinity. Not willing to go so far as to pursue me into town, no. But with enough of our friendship left to—perhaps—want to get a look to see how I was doing.
I began carrying hard candies in my pockets again. I even formed the habit, when we were away from the town, of strolling off into the brush and leaving a few candies here and there, to show Geronimo—if he really was anywhere around—that I was still thinking of him.
That wasn't the total of my ambitions. Sooner or later, I was firmly determined, I would get back to the lep nest somehow and try to straighten things out, but not right then. It would have to wait awhile, because physically I still wasn't quite up to it . . . and the other people in Freehold just weren't interested.
That was a symptom of injured pride, I think.
Everybody in Freehold missed our lep helpers, sure. Nobody would have denied that. But with the new blood from Buccaneer, and especially now that it seemed to have been firmly decided that, yes, we would go ahead with the plan to reenergize the factory orbiter, morale in the colony was surging higher every day. People even began talking about that other scheme, of moving Freehold to some more hospitable spot on Pava, where we wouldn't have those damned earthquakes bothering us all the time.
Do you understand what I mean by "morale"? I don't know if leps have anything of that sort, but it's a fact that human beings can do wonders when they see a chance of something really good coming out of it. People were even smiling again.
I guess the whole colony had been through a kind of shock therapy. They say that in the old days, when some machine just obstinately refused to work, the old-timers would sometimes try a simple cure.
They would haul back and give their recalcitrant sump pump or lawn mower or Model T a good, hard kick. As often as not that would jolt the thing into working again.
I think that might be a true story. I even think something like that began happening with the Pava colony, after the shock of seeing Tscharka and Tuchman come so scarily close to genocide. There was hope again. Maybe the best news came from the factory orbiter, because about the first thing Captain Bennetton did when Buccaneer was in parking orbit was to send a party over to check it out, and, yes, they reported that the antimatter power systems were intact.
Well, I'd wanted to do that myself, but the important thing was that it had been done. We were in business as soon as the transfers could be arranged, and the signs were visible. Overhead in the evenings, when the light from Delta Pavonis struck them just right, we could see the glints of reflection from dead Corsair and its shepherd, Buccaneer, high in the sky as Captain Bennetton slowly towed the old ship toward the factory and its destiny as scrap.
I haven't said much about Captain Vernon Bennetton of the interstellar ship Buccaneer, but he was a good man. Alma assured me of that, because she owed him: He'd immediately made a place for her in his deep-freeze as soon as she told him her story. So I owed him, too.
When, one day at supper, he sat down across from us and said, "Mind if I join you?"—well, Alma almost reached over and kissed him.
After we'd shaken hands, I said, "I thought you'd be busy jockeying Corsair into position."
"I am—I mean we are. I'll go back up for the docking, but the ship's in good hands for now. I left Jillen Iglesias and my number two, Martine Grossman, in charge. They're both fully qualified, and I wanted to come down to talk to you."
"Ah," I said. "About Jillen, you mean." I had been wondering when her name would come up.
"Well, partly about Jillen. You know she's in Buccaneer now—"
"Yes." Everybody knew that. Jillen hadn't come out of the business entirely unscarred. There were a lot of people in Freehold who had wanted her locked up with Tscharka and the reverend, and when Bennetton mentioned he could use another hand on Buccaneer she'd jumped at the chance to get out of everybody's way.
"Well, Jillen's decided she doesn't want to stay here. She wants to go back with me and raise her baby on Earth."
"Probably that would be the best thing," I agreed.
"For her, yes. What's the best thing for the colony? You people are going to need pilots."
"For transshipping the fuel to the factory?"
Captain Bennetton shook his head. "After that. For the short-haul spaceship. It'll be a sort of a combination of explorer, and asteroid-spotter, and tug. They'll be using it to mine the asteroid belt, after the metals from salvaging Corsair run out."
I stared at him. "When did the colony decide to build that?"
"Well, they haven't yet, because they haven't had a meeting, but they will. It's the only thing that makes sense. The only problem is that Martine doesn't really want to stay here, either." He cleared his throat, studying me appraisingly, and added, "I understand you used to be a spotter-ship pilot in the Belt."
"Well, hell," I said, surprised that he'd even bother to ask, "of course I'll—"
Then I stopped, looking at Alma.
Staying on in Freehold wasn't entirely my decision to make anymore, I thought. I was remembering what life in the Belt had been like: getting into the suit, living in it for weeks at a time, all by yourself. That kind of existence tended to get lonesome, even there.
Here around Delta Pavonis it would be even more so. When I went out it wouldn't be for just a matter of weeks. Delta Pavonis's Belt wouldn't have any central smelter station to return to after a spotter flight, with all the (actually, fairly spartan) comforts the central station could provide. The only base for operations would be Pava itself, and if I were that ship's pilot I would be gone for months at a time.
Gone, that is to say, from the company of my lost and unbelievably restored love.
I thought about what that would mean. I would miss Alma, there was no doubt of that. Of course, missing her for a short period—even a period of months—would be a good deal easier to take than the kind of missing her that had been dampening my mood for all the months when I thought I'd never see her again.
On the other hand, how would Alma feel about that?
I felt Alma's hand closing over mine, as though she were thinking the same thoughts in parallel. Probably she was. I sighed. "Can I think it over?" I asked.
Bennetton grinned at me—he was in no doubt which way I would decide, I could see that. "Take all the time you like," he said generously, "only if you decide to do it you probably ought to get in some practice now. Take a few turns as copilot, with me or Jillen, or Marline Grossman."
I'd met Marline, Bennetton's second-in-command; she was a sharp, middle-aged lady who seemed to know what she was doing. "That makes sense," I agreed, carefully staying on the safe side of an outright promise.
"And we probably ought to try to train one or two other pilots while we're here. The way the designs look, the tug would take a crew of two, anyway."
"Ah," I said stupidly, "oh. Right." For I had been thinking in terms of the way it had been in the Belt, and the thought of a two-person spacecraft had never occurred to me.
Alma began lo laugh. "Damn you, Vernon," she said, "why didn't you say thag in the first place? I think I'd make a fine copilot. I volunteer. We both do."
Well, Merlin, I guess we're coming pretty close to the end now, aren't we? I've said just about everything I can say. I hope it's enough. Now it's just a matter of filling in some of the details.
Like about the town meeting, for instance. I'm sure I should tell you about that, although, speaking for myself personally, what happened at the meeting wasn't as important as what
happened on the way to it. That's when Alma stopped me on the way there and looked up into my face and said, "Am I taking too much for granted, Barry?"
"Like what?"
"Well . . ." She looked a little uncomfortable. "I sort of jumped in for both of us. We haven't really talked much about plans for the future, have we? And if you wanted to back out or anything—"
"Not a bit of it," I said immediately and look a deep breath. Then it all came out al once: "I love you, Alma. I've loved you for a long lime. I've been afraid lo say it, but what I want to do is get married. Soon as we can. Here."
It was astonishing how easy the impossible turned out to be, once I'd made up my mind to say it. Alma didn't hesitate. She said crossly, "Well, what the hell took you so long? I accept your proposal!"
I held up my hand. "It's not that easy. I don't want lo be unfair to you, Alma. What about children?"
"What about them? We'll have them." She let me hang there for a minute, before she added, "Did you forget that I've studied up on the subject? And then before I left the Moon I spent a lot of time with Helga—you remember Helga? Your doctor at Lederman? Well, she explained what we'll have to do all over again. She gave me all the datafiles and I've already turned them over to Dr. Goethe. I know," she said, "you're not too crazy about him, but all the procedures are in the files. Anybody could follow them. He says it's no problem. We can have all the babies we want, and we can be sure they won't inherit any nasties. So all we need to do," she finished, "is set a date for the wedding."
I said, "How about tonight?"
"Tonight's good," she said. "Right after the town meeting would be fine. Now, who do we get to do the job for us?"
So we had a word with Byram Tanner before the meeting began—neither of us wanted a religious ceremony, and he was just about Freehold's chief magistrate. There was no problem there. "I would be pleased and honored to perform the ceremony," he said agreeably, "especially if I get to kiss the bride. We'll do it right after the meeting, so let's gel started—"