Night of Light

  Presently, the vessel slowed and, lightly as a balloon with a slow leak, matched its flat underside with Landing Circle Six.

  Despite the two-hour layover, Carmody did not leave the ship. He did not care to go through the decontamination process on re-entering the ship; he wanted to read the two letters in his bag, and most of all, he wished to be alone. In the cocktail lounge, he ordered a tall bourbon and then shut the door to the cubicle. After several deep swallows of his drink, he took the letters out. For several minutes, he toyed with the cylinders, his normal decisiveness missing. Which to read first, he thought, as if he had a big decision to make. Then his curiosity got the better of him, and he inserted the unidentified letter into the aperture of the 'ducer, a small box attached to the wall.

  There was also a "reader" on a hook -- a lightweight plastic hemisphere with a visor. He placed this over his head, lowered the visor over his eyes, and pressed the button that would run off the contents of the letter.

  The interior of the visor sprang into a glow. Something appeared on it that made Carmody straighten in a reflex to get away from it. A mask was before him -- a mask that looked as if it were meant to portray a face ruined by an accident.

  A man's deep voice spoke. "Carmody, this letter is from Fratt. By now, your wife will be dead. You won't know why she was killed or who did it, but I will explain why.

  "Many years ago you killed Fratt's son and blinded Fratt. You did it deliberately and maliciously, when it was not necessary, when you could have carried out your evil plans without harming either Fratt or Fratt's son.

  "Now, if you have any humanity or sense of love in you -- which is doubtful -- you will know exactly how Fratt grieved, how Fratt suffered at the death of his son.

  "And you will keep on suffering. Not only because of your wife, but because you will not know when or where you will die. Because you will die at Fratt's hands.

  "But it will not be an easy or quick death, such as your wife was lucky enough to get. You will die slowly and in much pain, and you will pay for what you did. You will experience the same agonies as those which Fratt, your innocent victim, experienced.

  "And you will know then who killed your wife and who has been thinking of nothing but your repayment for all these years.

  "You will see who has never forgiven you, you foul and loathsome thing!"

  The screen went blank, and the voice stopped. Carmody raised the visor with a trembling hand and stared at the mural on the wall. He was breathing heavily. So, his guesses had been right. Some old enemy, someone he had wronged in the old and evil days had not forgotten. And for what he had done then, he had lost his wife and his greatest happiness. Anna, poor Anna. . .

  He lowered the visor and ran the letter through again. Now he understood from the peculiar wording that the speaker might not be Fratt. Nor did he have a clue to the sex of Fratt. The letter had been designed to avoid this, as it had avoided any specifics of the time or place of the crime of which he was accused.

  " Fratt? Fratt?" he muttered. "Fratt? The name means nothing to me. I remember no Fratt, yet I should. I have an excellent memory. But those few years were so crowded, and I was so careless of the identity of my victims. I, God forgive me, killed or even tortured many whose names I did not know.

  "So it may be that I remember no Fratt because I did not know his, or her, name. Fratt's son? That should be some clue. But I may not even have known that Fratt had a son. God!"

  He took another drink and wished that it could wash away all knowledge of his past. He was not the John Carmody that Fratt had known. The name and the body might look the same but within he was not that John Carmody. That man was as dead as if he had truly died on Kareen.

  But others had not died, and they had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

  He drank another bourbon. There was nothing he could do at the moment. But, at least, he would be on his guard. Fratt would not find it easy to get at him. Nor would he find a passive victim, one weak with contrition and shame and hoping to pay for the deaths through his own, one willing to go to the sacrificial altar of his own conscience.

  He struck the top of the table with his fist and almost unbalanced the glass. To hell with Fratt! If Carmody had been evil, he had shed that evil. There was more than Fratt could say for himself. If Fratt had been an innocent victim, Fratt was no longer innocent.

  Then he thought, But I am responsible for turning Fratt to evil. If I had not done what I did, I would not have generated this hate in Fratt. Perhaps I twisted Fratt so much that he shed whatever good was in him, as I later shed my evil, and he became the monster that I was. Action and reaction. Turnabout is fair play. Whatever has happened or will happen, I am the guilty one.

  Nevertheless, he felt the old vigor flow through his veins. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. But He uses all sorts of weapons with which to effect vengeance.

  "No," he said to himself, and he shook his head, "I am rationalizing. I must forgive and love my enemy as a brother. That is what I have preached all these years, all these years. And I meant it. Or thought I did."

  He struck the tabletop again. "But I hate! I hate! Oh, God, how I hate!"

  Self-hate?

  "Oh, God!" he said. "Make me see that I am wrong!"

  He emptied the glass and buzzed the waitress for another.

  After the bourbon had come, he took Fratt's letter from the 'ducer and inserted Raspold's. On the screen of the visor he saw the living room of Raspold's apartment on the sixtieth level of the city of Denver. Raspold himself was not sitting down to face the screen. As nervous and energetic as Carmody, he found it difficult to sit for any length of time.

  Raspold was a rapier clothed in flesh, a tall, very lean man with slick black hair, brown-black eyes as sharp and glittering as two tomahawks. He had a large bulbous nose, like a bloodhound's. He wore the scarlet coveralls and black neck-ruff of an employee of the Prometheus Interstellar Lines. Carmody was not surprised at this, for he had seen the detective in many disguises.

  Raspold stopped pacing long enough to wave at Carmody and say, "Greetings, John, you old reprobate! Forgive me if this is a short letter."

  He resumed walking back and forth, while he spoke loudly in his deep baritone. "I have to be off in a few minutes, and there's no telling how long I'll be on this particular scent. Also, the ship that'll be taking this letter is scheduled to leave in half an hour.

  "John, while I was on this case -- for which you see me dressed up -- I accidentally learned of something irrelevant to the case, but very grave. Believe me, very grave. A group of rich and fanatical laymen, of your religion I'm sorry to say, have determined to assassinate Yess, the god of Kareen. None of their own members will be doing this, but they've hired an assassin, maybe several, to do the deed. He's one of the really big pros. I don't know his identity. But I believe the killer will be from Earth. Anyway, if the assassin is successful, or even if he fails and is caught, the repercussions will be bad.

  "I can't do anything about this myself, because I'm tied up until this case can be completed. I've notified 3-E, and they'll undoubtedly send agents to Kareen. They'll also probably warn Yess. Then again, they may not, because they won't want it known that Earthmen are attempting this.

  "But I think you might want to go yourself, take a hand in things. I say this because the killer may be a man who has gone through the Night, become an Algulist, and is therefore a thoroughly dangerous man. It'll take another Nighter to oppose him, and an Earth Nighter would understand him better. Of course, his being an Algulist is only a supposition, actually, a rumor. Maybe it's not even possible. I don't know enough about Kareen to be sure.

  "If the killer hasn't been Nightized, he'll have to do his work before the Night starts. So he, and therefore you, don't have much time.

  "Maybe you'll choose to ignore this. Maybe Yess is well able to take care of himself. However, here are the names of some potential assassins, top pros. You won't know any of them. All the big boys of the days of
our youth are dead, imprisoned, lost, or, like yourself, transmogrified."

  Raspold gave ten names, spelled them, and added a brief description of each man. He ended, "Good luck and my blessings to you, John. Next time you get to Earth, I hope I'll be there, too. It'll be nice to see your pleasantly ugly face again, and you can derive pleasure from gazing upon my noble Roman features and listening to my scintillating wit and enormous erudition. But as of now, I'm off! Tallyho!"

  Carmody took the reader from his head and reached out for the second bourbon. Before touching it, his hand stopped. Now was not the time to get half-drunk. Not only did he have to consider Fratt -- for all he knew Fratt might be on this ship -- but he had an even more important problem. The cardinal should be informed of this turn of events. If what Raspold said was true -- and he was usually reliable -- then the Church was in even more danger than the cardinal had predicted. Assassination of Yess by members of the Church itself would cause an eruption that might be cataclysmic.

  "The fools!" Carmody swore softly. "The blind hate-filled fools!"

  He inserted two Stanleys into a slot; a blank letter sheet issued from the hole beneath it. Carmody turned on the screen on the wall by the table, inserted the blank into the 'ducer, dropped three Stanleys into its slot, and punched the DIC button. After dictating the letter to the cardinal, he called the waitress and asked her if the letter would be sent out to be shipped on the next vessel to Wildenwooly. She brought a charger for him to sign and fingerprint, since letters were very expensive and he did not have enough money on him to pay for it.

  Carmody then went to the men's room and took an oxidizer to burn up the alcohol in his blood. The only other tenant was Abdu, the import-export businessman who had gotten on at Wildenwooly.

  Abdu did not respond to Carmody's maneuvers to engage him in conversation. Beyond "Yeah," or "Is that so?" and several grunts, he was silent. Carmody gave up and returned to his seat in the passenger room.

  He had been seated no more than ten minutes, his eyes half-shut and ignoring the movie on the screen, when he was interrupted.

  "Father, is this seat taken?"

  A young priest of the Jesuit order was standing by him, smiling somewhat long-toothedly at him. Tall and thin, he had an ascetic face, light-blue eyes, dark hair, and a pale skin. His accent was Irish, and a moment later he identified himself as Father Paul O'Grady from Lower Dublin. He had served in the parish of Mexico City, Western Middle Level, for only a year after graduation from the seminary. Then he had been sent to Springboard to help with the situation there.

  O'Grady was frank about his extreme nervousness. "I feel lost, not only from Earth but from myself. I seem to be breaking into many little pieces. I feel tiny, very tiny; everything seems so big."

  "Hang on," Carmody said. He did not want to talk, but he could not ignore the poor young fellow."Many people feel just as you do, about half the passengers in this ship, I'd bet. You want a drink? There's still time before take off."

  O'Grady shook his head. "No. I don't want to depend upon a crutch."

  "Crutch, hell!" Carmody said. "Don't be ridiculous, son. If you need it, you need it. This'll soon be over; your feet'll be on solid earth again and the blue skies, just like Earth's, will be over you. Stewardess!"

  "You must think I'm an awful baby," O'Grady said.

  "Yes, I do," Carmody replied. He chuckled as the young priest looked disconcerted. "But I don't think you're a coward. If you'd refused to go on after getting here, you would be. But you're not. So, you'll grow up."

  O'Grady was silent for a while, chewing the cud of Carmody's remarks. He said, "By the way, I was so nervous I forgot to inquire your name, Father."

  Carmody told him.

  O'Grady's eyes widened. "You're not the Father Carmody who's the. . . the father of. . ."

  "Say it."

  "Of the false god Yess of Kareen?"

  Carmody nodded.

  "They say you're going on a mission to Kareen!" O'Grady burst out. "They say you're going to denounce Yess and expose Boontism as false!"

  "Who's they?" Carmody said softly. "And keep your voice down."

  "Oh, everybody knows," O'Grady said, waving his hand to indicate, apparently, the entire universe.

  "The Vatican will be pleased to know how well their deepest secrets are kept," Carmody said."Well, for your information, I am not going to Kareen to denounce Yess."

  O'Grady seized Carmody's arm and said, "You're not going to renounce our faith for Boontism?"

  Carmody pulled his arm away. "Is that another rumor?" he said coldly. "No. I'll admit there are some unsettling aspects about Boontism. But my faith is unshaken. Confused, perhaps, and questioning, but unshaken. And you may tell everybody that, also."

  "We're having much trouble on Springboard," O'Grady said. "The number of our flock lost to Boontism is alarming. I'm not at liberty to tell even you how high the figure is, but I can say that it's alarming."

  "You said it twice," Carmody replied.

  "Father, perhaps you could stay long enough on Springboard to preach a while. We need a man such as you, a man who's been to Kareen and who can expose their so-called miracles and their so-called god as lies."

  "I haven't time to stay," Carmody replied. "Moreover, I'd be a big disappointment to you. The so-called miracles are real, and whether or not Yess is a true savior of his planet is a question even the Holy Father himself does not care to answer. Not yet."

  Carmody hitched himself forward, stared at the screen without seeing the figures upon it, and said, "I warn you that you had best keep quiet about meeting or about our conversation. This mission is supposed to be secret. Only myself and certain powers of the Church presumably know about it, although I can see that the grapevine has been busy again. It's the only thing in the universe faster than the speed of light. But if you breathe one word about this, you'll get an exceedingly severe reprimand and a check in your career that'll set you back twenty years. So keep your mouth shut!"

  O'Grady blinked, and his face became both red and hurt. To Carmody's relief, the takoff warning buzzed, and the captain began his pitch. The rest of the way to Springboard, O'Grady was too concerned with controlling his fear to talk.

  When the White Mule had landed, Carmody decided to leave it for a while. He needed to stretch his legs, to look again at a place with which he had once more been familiar. It would also be the last "normal" planet he would see for some time.

  The port had changed much in ten years, as had the city beyond it. The white Brobdingnagian cones fashioned by the almost extinct beavites -- warm-blooded animals which emulated the termites of Earth in eating wood and constructing buildings of cementoid excrement -- were still numerous. The first colonists had killed the beavites and moved into the ready-made skyscrapers. Then houses made of logs or artificial foamstone had filled in the places between the cones. But the original human constructions were all gone now, replaced by large structures of stone and plastic beams.

  There were many more ships in the landing circles than when he had last been here. Carmody thanked God that he had been privileged to see the planets when they were relatively untouched by human beings. Not that there weren't many more to be discovered and explored yet. But his ways lately had been confined to much-trodden paths.

  He walked around the buildings of the port for a half-hour, then went back to his terminus for the decontamination process. A large crowd in the main lobby barred his path. For a moment, he could not determine what was causing the angry shouts, red faces, threatening fists. Then he saw that a group, some of whom carried signs: Christian Protective Society, had surrounded a dozen men and women. These, aside from their defensive attitudes, seemed no different in appearance than their persecutors.

  It was only when he managed to push through the crowd that he got close enough to see the broad gold rings on the index fingers of the besieged group. The rings were incised with a circle beneath which were two crossed phallic-looking spears. He had seen severa
l of these on Wildenwooly and knew then that the attacked people were converts to Boontism. They were gathered by the customs desk and doing their best to ignore the taunts and insults howled at them. Facing the ranks of the Christian Protective Society was a beefy, thick-browed, big-nosed priest. Carmody recognized him at once, although he had not seen him in twelve years. He was Father Christopher Bakeling, and he had entered the priesthood and the Order of St. Jairus the same year as Carmody.

  Carmody made his way toward him, the crowd dividing at sight of the clerical garments. Carmody placed himself between the giant priest and the Boontists.

  "Father Bakeling, what's going on?"

  Bakeling's eyes widened.

  "John Carmody! What are you doing here?"

  "Not making trouble, I can tell you that! What's your beef with those people?"

  "Beef!" the giant priest shouted. "Beef! Carmody, I know you well! You're here to make trouble, sure as 'Needlenose' is your nickname!"

  He waved his arms and sputtered for a moment, then succeeded in gaining self-control. He pointed at a tall handsome man standing at the admission desk.

  "See him! That's Father Gideon! He became a worshiper of the foul idol Boonta, and now he's taking three of his own parish with him, to Hell! And what's more, two of my own flock!"

  A woman in the crowd yelled, "Gideon's an anti-Christ, that's what he is, an anti-Christ! And him my own confessor! He ought to be put in jail and locked up where he can't go spilling all his secrets."

  "He ought to be stoned!" Bakeling cried."Stoned! Or hung in a field, like Judas! He's betrayed his own sweet Lord for a devil, and he's lured. . ."

  "Shut up, Bakeling," Carmody said harshly. "You're making a bad situation worse by your big mouth and public antics! I'd think you'd want to keep this quiet. This kind of advertisement for them, and for us, is best avoided."

  Bakeling, his fists clenched, thrust himself against Carmody and forced the little priest back. "You taking their side? I know you, Carmody! You aren't free of the Boontist taint, yourself! I've even heard that you fornicated with the priestess of Boonta or did something equally wicked, and that the son of Boonta is also your son! I didn't believe it; no man of the cloth could be so evil, not even a freak like you! But now I'm not so sure!"