Project Pope

  “So I’ll understand this Heaven business better?”

  “Well, yes, but not entirely that. I can see you’re still a skeptic on what you call the Heaven business.”

  “Yes, I am. Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ecuyer. “I can’t be sure. Every fiber in me cries out against it and yet …”

  “All right,” said Tennyson. “Let’s get on with the cube.”

  “Okay,” said Ecuyer. “This way.”

  He led the way out of the stack and into a small room crowded with equipment.

  “Sit down in that chair over there,” said Ecuyer. “Take it easy. Relax.”

  A helmet arrangement was suspended over the chair. Tennyson regarded it with some suspicion.

  “Go on, sit down,” said Ecuyer. “I’ll fit the helmet on you and drop the cube into the slot and—”

  “All right,” said Tennyson. “I suppose I’ll have to trust you.”

  “You can trust me,” Ecuyer said. “It won’t hurt at all.”

  Tennyson lowered himself cautiously into the chair, squirmed around to get comfortable. Ecuyer carefully lowered the helmet on his head, fussing to get it adjusted.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “All right. I can’t see a thing.”

  “You don’t need to see. Breathing all right? No trouble breathing?”

  “None at all.”

  “All right, then. Here we go.”

  For a moment there was utter darkness, then there was light, a greenish sort of light, and a wetness. Tennyson gasped and then the gasp cut off, for everything was all right, better than all right.

  The water was warm and the mud was soft. His gut was full. For the moment there was no danger. Contentment filled him and he allowed himself to sink deeper into the yielding mud. When the mud no longer yielded, he agitated his legs, trying to sink deeper, but this gained him little, although when he ceased the effort, he could sense the mud beginning to flow over him and it was warm and an added safety factor. He settled as deeply, as compactly as he could, the contentment deepening, a lassitude spreading through him. With the mud spreading over him, in no matter how thin a layer, he was shielded from view. The likelihood was that no prowling predator would detect him, snap him up. It is good, he thought smugly to himself. There was no need to move, no necessity to invite attack by moving. He had everything he needed. He had eaten until food no longer had attraction for him. He was warm and safe. He could remain motionless, exert no effort.

  And yet there was, he found, an internal nagging that arose once he was all settled in full enjoyment of contentment. A question that never had come on him before, for up until this instant, there had been no question of any sort at all. Until now he had not been aware there was such a thing as question. He existed, that was all. He had never cared what he might be. The matter of identity had never arisen.

  He stirred uneasily, befuddled and upset that the question should arise to so disturb him. And that was not the worst of it. There was something else. It was as if he were not himself, not he who had found the question, the question not internal to him but coming from somewhere outside himself. And there was nothing outside himself—nothing but the warmth of the shallow sea, the softness of the bottom mud and the knowledge that the fearful shadow avid to gulp him down was not present now, could not see him now, that he was safe from the prowling predator that snapped up trilobites.

  “My God!” he thought in sudden fear and wonder. “I’m a trilobite!”

  With the words, the utter darkness faded and then flickered off, and he was once again sitting in the chair and Ecuyer was standing in front of him, holding the helmet in his hands. Tennyson let out his breath in a gust and stared up at Ecuyer.

  “Ecuyer, you said a random cube. That was not a random cube.”

  Ecuyer grinned at him. “No, I would think not. You recall the sensitive I told you of.”

  “Yes, the man who was a trilobite. But it was so real!”

  “Rest assured, my friend,” said Ecuyer. “This was no shadow show. No entertainment stunt. For a while there, you were a trilobite.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Tennyson returned to his suite, Jill was sitting in front of the fireplace. He hurried across the room to her. “I’ve been wondering about you. I was about to track you down.”

  “Hubert is fixing dinner,” she said. “I told him I could stay. Is that all right with you?”

  He bent to kiss her, then sat down beside her. “That’s fine,” he said. “How are things going with you?”

  She made a face. “Not well. They won’t stand still for a story. They offered me a job instead.”

  “And you accepted?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m not sure I will. I hear you are staying on.”

  “For a time at least. A good place to hunker down.”

  She gestured at the single rose in the vase standing on the coffee table. “Where did you get that?”

  “A gardener gave it to me. I found the garden this morning. I’d like to show it to you.”

  “They offered me a place to stay,” said Jill, “and I moved in this afternoon. Four doors away from you. The robot who moved me told me you were here. You have a drink around?”

  “I think there is,” he said. “But first let’s look at the garden.”

  “Well, all right,” she said.

  “You’ll like it,” he assured her.

  When they reached the garden, she asked, “What’s all this uproar about the garden? It’s just an ordinary garden. What’s going on?”

  “It’s not the garden,” he told her. “I imagine Hubert, in the kitchen, had his ears stretched out a foot or so. Do anything in this place and in ten minutes everyone has heard about it. I won’t bet they can’t hear us in the garden, but at least we have a chance. We have things to talk about.”

  “It’s your Gutshot conditioning,” she said. “The cloak-and-dagger business.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right.”

  “You jumped at the chance, apparently, to stay here. So there can’t be too much wrong.”

  “Maybe nothing wrong,” he said. “But strange. Damn strange. There’s a woman here—she’s the one Ecuyer came to get me to treat. She claims she has found Heaven.”

  “Heaven?”

  “That’s right. Heaven. You see, they have this program going on. People going out in their minds to other places, bringing back the data to be fed into the Pope. Although I have a feeling it may be for other reasons than the feeding of the Pope. From something Ecuyer said the other night, it sounds if there may be some differences of opinion between the Search Program and Vatican.”

  “Heaven?” she asked. “You mean the honest-to-God Bible Heaven with the golden stairs and the trumpets blaring and the angels flying?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But, Jason, that’s impossible.”

  “Perhaps, but Mary thinks she’s found it. Ecuyer half believes in it.”

  “Ecuyer’s a fool.”

  “No, not a fool,” he said. “Jill, tell me. Did they use muscle on you?”

  “Muscle?”

  “Yes, muscle. Ecuyer hinted rather broadly I might not be allowed to leave the planet.”

  “No. No one mentioned that. I talked with a cardinal. Purple robes and scarlet skullcap. A single candle burning. Now, wait a minute. Is that why you’re staying? Because they won’t let you leave?”

  “No, not that. They might even let us go. But the threat is there. This place is run by Vatican and what Vatican says is law. But I’m staying because I want to—for the moment. I have no place else to go. Besides, it’s comfortable. And I might as well confess it—I’m considerably intrigued.”

  “So am I,” said Jill. “The cardinal wouldn’t listen to my writing articles or a book about this place. He said nothing about not allowing me to leave. As a matter of fact, I thought that he would throw me out. Then he offered me a job.”


  “The iron fist in the velvet glove.”

  “That could be it. He’s a pleasant-enough robot—I almost said a pleasant-enough old man. Pleasant enough, but stubborn. I argued with him and he didn’t budge an inch.”

  “This job?”

  “They want a history of Vatican written. The cardinal claims they have no one who can do it; hinted that a robot could not be trained to do it. Would you believe it—they have a complete record of everything that’s happened here, all that’s been done here, since the first ship arrived. All stored and waiting for retrieval. I said no, of course. Maybe, come to think of it, I didn’t say a flat-out no. Actually, I think I said I’d have to think about it. I probably gave the impression I was going to say no.”

  “And are you?”

  “Jason, I honestly don’t know. Think of it! The story is all there. Waiting for someone to dig it out. It’s been there all these years and not been touched by anyone.”

  “But what good will it do you if you can’t get it out?”

  “That’s right. No good at all. Jason, do I look like a dirty sneak?”

  “Well, yes, now that I think of it.”

  “I’d never be able to live with myself,” said Jill, “if I didn’t have a shot at it.”

  “Jill, it doesn’t track. First they refuse to let you write about this place, then they hand the story to you on a silver platter. Unless, of course, they do badly want the history written and are convinced they can keep you here.”

  “If so,” she said, “they must be awfully sure of themselves.”

  “That’s what Ecuyer said the other night. That they are sure of themselves.”

  “Jason, we may have been a pair of fools to come here. If Vatican wants nothing to leak out, the one sure way to do it would be to make sure that no one, once they got here, could leave.”

  “But there are all the pilgrims. The pilgrims come and go.”

  “The cardinal half-explained that to me. The pilgrims, it seems, don’t count. They come from scattered planets, only a few from each one. Apparently they are tied up with screwball cults that have little standing. No one would pay attention to what any cult member said, even to the cult, perhaps, if it was said collectively. Whatever word the pilgrims carry back would be put down as religious ravings.”

  “Vatican has a lot to hide,” Tennyson said thoughtfully. “There is Ecuyer’s Search Program, which the pilgrims might not know about, might have no inkling of. Maybe it’s the Search Program, not Vatican itself, that is important. The searchers are milking knowledge from the universe, from all of space and time—and maybe other places outside of space and time. If there’s any such place.”

  “Heaven could be. If there’s a place like Heaven.”

  “The point is that no one else has anything like it. The Search people have miles of files crammed with the information they’ve pilfered. It’s all there. What are they going to do with it?”

  “Maybe they really are feeding it to the Pope.”

  “Some Pope,” Tennyson remarked. “No, I can’t think that’s entirely it. Ecuyer said something else. I’m trying to remember exactly what. I think it was that Project Pope had become, over the years, no more than an excuse for keeping on with the Search Program. I think that was it. He suggested that I not mention it to Vatican. Gave the impression that some of the old Vatican crowd might be stuffy.”

  “Vatican has its worries,” said Jill. “The cardinal let some of them out. Sort of talking the worries out to me, although I doubt he thought of it that way. He, and possibly some of the other cardinals, think someone is stealing from Vatican. ‘Nibbling away’ was the way he put it. What seemed to worry him the most was no one knows who or what it is that is doing the nibbling.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Enoch Cardinal Theodosius hunted up his bosom pal, Cecil Cardinal Roberts.

  “Eminence,” he said, “it seems to me that you and I should have a talk.”

  “You are upset,” said Roberts. “What is going on?”

  “These two new arrivals. The human man and woman.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “Nothing about the man. Ecuyer has installed him as Vatican physician. I understand he came here fleeing justice.”

  “Have you spoken to Ecuyer of it?”

  “No, Your Eminence. Of late, Ecuyer has become impossible to talk with.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Roberts. “One gains the impression that he believes the Search Program has become our paramount concern. If you ask me, the man has gotten bigger than his britches.”

  Theodosius sighed. “Much as we may admire the human race,” he said, “there are some of them one finds very hard to live with.”

  “And the woman, Eminence?”

  “I talked with her this morning. She is a writer. Imagine that, a writer! She was the one who wrote us all the letters. I told you about them?”

  “Yes, I believe you did.”

  “She wants to write about us.”

  “Write about us?”

  “Yes, it was all in the letters. You read them, did you not?”

  “Of course I did. And put them quite out of mind. It’s impossible, of course. The impudence of it.”

  “Exactly,” Theodosius said.

  “You told her it was unthinkable.”

  “Yes, but she refused to accept the refusal. She is a most persistent human. Finally I offered her a job.”

  “You’ll pardon me, Your Eminence, but there is no job.…”

  “Yes, there is,” said Theodosius. “All these years we have been talking about writing a history of Vatican. We have said how fine it would be to get it down on paper so that all might read and wonder. We have even talked about developing a new species of robot to do the work. We robots, it seems, are not cut out for writing chores. And it would be a vast amount of trouble to develop another strain capable of so limited an ability as writing. But here is one, come to us of her own free will, who can do the writing for us.”

  “And, pray, what was her reaction?”

  “I gained the impression she was not enchanted with the offer. But that’s not entirely what I came to talk about.”

  “I thought you said that was what you wished to talk about—the new human man and woman.”

  “Well, yes, of course. But not of them alone. There is another factor. There are, in recent years, three disturbing human factors that have come upon us.”

  “Three?”

  “Decker is the third. He is the third unknown. What do we really know about him?”

  “Why, I guess,” said Roberts, “we know very little. We do not know how he got here. He did not come on Wayfarer, and I know of no other way that a human could get here. Perhaps you, Your Eminence, know more of him than I do. You have talked with him.”

  “Some years ago,” said Theodosius. “Shortly after he showed up. I donned the habit of a monk and went calling on him, in the pretense of extending welcome. A meddlesome, inquisitive, footloose little cleric. I thought that perhaps he would talk to such a monk whereas he might be hesitant of talking with a cardinal. I learned precisely nothing. He told me not a thing. Pleasant enough, but a distant man. And now these two—the woman and the doctor. Will you tell me, Eminence, why we must have a human doctor? We could, in a short time, train one of our robots to be physician to the humans. Fully as knowledgeable, as efficient, as capable, as any human doctor. Perhaps even more so, for we have access to certain new medical knowledge that might be adaptable to humans.”

  “Yes,” said Roberts. “I know. We have talked about it often. Periodically we must import an outsider to be physician to the humans. It’s not desirable. No outsider is desirable. The old doctor who died, as all humans must, was quite acceptable, although, if you remember, we had doubts concerning him at first. The one who replaced him was impossible. The humans in the town and those in Vatican—except for the Listeners, of whom we do import a few—are old-time residents. They are descendants of
people who have been here for centuries. Of them we need have no concern or fear. They are almost one with us. But outsiders have no real ties to us. They are not accustomed to us, nor are we to them.”

  “And yet,” said Theodosius, “our own people, descendants of those who have been here for ages, probably would not accept a robotic doctor. This perturbs me. It points to a cultural gap that still exists between the robot and the human. I would have hoped that after all the years the gap would have been closed. Certainly there is a difference between robot and human, but—”

  “I think, Your Eminence,” said Roberts, “that in the subconscious human mind, we still may be tainted, that we still smell faintly of machines. They, if charged with it, would piously deny such a thing, and believe their own denial, but it still is there. I am sure of that. On this matter of a robot doctor, it is true, of course, that we could readily supply them one, but I don’t think we should. Here on End of Nothing we could have supplied our humans with many luxury services, but we have refrained from doing so because of the fear that it would seem we were taking them over. We must never seem to do that. It would be simpler, naturally, if we could make pets of them, watching closely after them, shielding them from harm, supplying all their needs. But this we must not do. We must not tamper with them. We must let them go their way and preserve their dignity.”

  “We face a dilemma,” said Theodosius. “We battle with ourselves. We are continually haunted by the regard, the respect, almost the worship that we feel for humans. It is a response to them, I am certain, that we can’t root out. Surely not such as you and I, who were forged by humans. We stand too close to them. Some of the second and third-generation robots, created not by humans but by robots, might be able to root out some of this feeling for the humans. We try to comfort ourselves by saying we are no more than an extension of the human race. I suppose we would like to think so—we must, for we say it often, almost as if by rote. But the bitter truth is that we are a human product.”

  “Your Eminence,” said Roberts, speaking kindly, “you are too hard upon yourself, too hard on all of us. Products we may be, but surely our thousand years of effort has raised us above the level of a product. The thing that bothers us, I think, is that our attitude toward humanity smacks too much of worship. But if you think of it correctly, you’ll see the fallacy in that. For centuries we have worked to discover a universal principle that would apply to all—not to robots alone, but to every thinking thing, each speck of intelligence. Eminence, we have paid our dues. We have earned the right to be ourselves.”