by Wil C. Fry
After three or four grand hymns, with beautiful music and wonderful three and four-part harmonies, Cochran would stand to give some announcements about the ship's schedule for the next week, or discuss briefly any problems that were present among the crew. Then I would return and preach a short sermon. I will admit that I am inclined to short sermons. Perhaps it stems from my childhood back in the Dohr Habitat, when I was forced to attend the Assemblies of God Church in our tube, and the preachers who visited there, as well as the pastor, all seemed to believe that the longer a sermon was, the greater your chance of getting into Heaven. I remember being disgusted by their ignorance of the Scriptures, or their inability to stick to a central theme - I guess I'm a purist of some sort. Anyway, after I had defected to Armstrong, and went through the militia training there, I began to feel my Christian roots again, and attended the seminary on the "college bonus" from the militia. Even though this seminary was not Assemblies of God (it was "Independent Calvinistic Baptist"), there was still the tendency toward long, rambling, meandering sermons that did little or nothing for my spirit.
When the time first came for me to mount the pulpit in the seminary chapel, it was already well known that I was intending to get my credentials through the new and still-struggling New Revised Interplanetary Calvinist Pentecostal denomination, so everyone was wary enough as it was. Then when my sermon was only seventeen minutes long, I was almost expelled. The meeting I had with the board of directors did not discourage me though. They tried to explain how a sermon that short could not contain enough "meat" for the congregation. There was not enough time to fully expound the scriptures. Church would be over before lunch.
When allowed to speak, I explained that my sermon was only a copy. I told them how I had taken the most responded-to sermon from the year before, both transcript and recording, and doctored it. From seventy-one minutes, I had pulled everything that related to the scriptures and to the central theme, and copied it. They had not recognized the sermon, because it was organized, powerful, void of vague reminisces about past revivals, empty of cute but meaningless jokes about organized religion in general (but of course not about the Ind. Calv. Bapt. Church), clean of references to holovision shows or computer news services. When they grudgingly allowed me to show recordings of both sermons, my point was made, or so I thought.
The recording of last year's sermon was by a dignified but extremely aged professor. All throughout there been smatterings of applause, very unusual at that seminary. Then, during the recording of my sermon, it was breath taking to watch the other students gasp with delight, or intensely scribble down pertinent notes from what I had said. Toward the end, when entire rows of students and professors alike were jumping and shouting with tears streaming down their faces, the board member in charge of playing the recordings shut it off with a grimace. "That ain't the kind of religion I'm int'r'st'd in. Hype! Crowd Manipulation! It looked like a circus to me," he had growled.
But a few of the others, who still had tears in their eyes from watching, reminded the angry one about his past as a revival preacher, and how that God's presence needed to be felt again in the school - indeed in the whole city of Armstrong. After that I have never preached longer than twenty-five minutes.
Anyway, with the crowd that I had on the Nadyozhda, I could not go on for too long since they were not "religious people". So I took basic themes from the Bible, illustrated if possible with a crisp retelling of a First Testament story, and grounded solidly in a few other passages, to be sure to explain the subject, then applied the moral to a current life situation. Other times, I addressed popular misconceptions about the Church, the Bible, God, etc. For instance, many non-Church-goers use this excuse not to attend: "Why should I go to Church when the Christians can't even figure out what they believe? There's hundreds of different denominations, who all think they're right, and the rest are going to hell!"
This is not true. There are of course, some groups who insist that only the small number of people in their membership will be saved, but for the most part, Christians are accepting of their brethren from other Churches. And many of these churches maintain their distance from one another, not over doctrinal differences, but over how to run the Church, or other secular matters.
Still, I had plenty to go over, throughout those nine months of deceleration, and my crowd grew from three the first day to 118 the Sunday before we arrived. The Captains of Crews #2 and #5 had reluctantly given a small number of their people permission to adjust their Sunday schedules so they could attend our service.
What else can I tell of our descent into the gravity well of Banard's Star? We saw pictures of the two outer planets we passed, and a rough map of the asteroid belt. We worked, and slept and ate.
And I should not record what happened between Marie and I, in order to protect her reputation. No sin was committed. No harm; no foul.
V - The Arrival
For a century and a half the hundred-odd viewports around the ship had been solidly covered with metal plates that fitted flush into the hull, keeping the windows safe from incoming rocks. Instruments and computers had done all the sightings; not even the Captain had opened the covers on the control room's windows. But once we were in orbit around BS-3, Cochran announced that it was safe. Hope had scanned the surrounding skies during three consecutive orbits, and reported that any meteors headed our way would be taken care of. And so, at 12:00 hours on a Sunday in August, Time Zone #1, the covers opened.
Every room that bordered the hull of the ship had a viewport, including the forward offices. The designers had arranged the living areas so that most of the cabins were adjacent to the hull, for optimum viewing, with the clinics, dining areas, and other rooms taking up the inner spaces. The cabins on the port and starboard sides each had a port above the bunk. The cabins on the top and bottom of the ship had viewports on the ceilings and floors, respectively. The five Captain's suites had two ports each. Only the cabins further inside the ship - on the middle decks - had no port holes, but there were not too many of these - mostly single cabins.
Hope had put us into a tight parking orbit around BS-3 - necessary because of our great speed entering the system - then bumped us out a little further with her retrorockets, to give us a six hour orbit. Then, she fired short, exact blasts from certain steering rockets, giving the ship a slight rotation about her central axis, causing the ship to roll over every two hours, allowing every viewport a chance to face every part of the planet's surface every few hours.
Suddenly, just after Church, every speaker in the parts of the ship where people were awake blared into life: "This is your Captain speaking. For all of you in a compartment with a viewport, you will notice that the covers are slowly moving back from the windows. The rest of you should know that we arrived in orbit around The Third Planet from Banard's Star just over two hours ago. We are now in a six hour orbit, and the ship is rotating every two hours." There were surprised looks on several faces around the dining room where I was. The Captain continued, "The reason you did not feel the rotation start is that the ship's artificial gravity field has remained steady, making void all motions from outside.
"So now I would like to announce that everyone on the ship has been granted a twenty-four hour vacation, to enjoy the view and relax before our landing effort begins. If you wish, I would advise you to go to your cabins unless your cabin has no view ports. In that case..."
People were already leaving the dining room while the Captain's voice continued to list compartments that had viewports besides cabins. I was watching the people dissipate when Elizabeth grabbed my hand, and yanked me away from the podium where I had been standing. Through her hand I could sense her excitement, without even seeing her face. I let my wife drag me through the passageways until we collapsed onto our bunk, breathing heavily.
Sure enough, the port cover was nearly out of sight, and I held my breath. Elizabeth gasped and squeezed my hand more tightly, if that were possible. We pressed our cheeks toge
ther so we could both see at the same time. I felt her excitement course through my body by osmosis, and I knew that adrenaline rush would be normal for all of us for the next several weeks, even months. Our new home!
For my entire life I had watched Terra - the planetoid of my ancestors - from viewports in the Dohr habitat, and later from Armstrong, admiring the colorful beauty, but always afraid to visit because of the violence, pollution, disease and the crowds that packed Terra so fully.
This was different. This was wonderful. For those first beautiful moments while we watched BS-3 for the first time, I felt no fear. A completely alien world floated before our eyes: blue oceans, white clouds, green plains and forests, majestic snow-capped mountain ranges - a world void of man. Of course we expected new diseases, untold dangers and unforeseeable difficulties, but - OUR MISSION HAD SUCCEEDED!
"It's beautiful!"
I was startled out of my reverie by Elizabeth's emphatic whisper. "Yes, my darling wife, it is. It is the frontier we have been so diligently seeking for all our lives."
I looked into her eyes as she turned to me. The blue-green I saw there reminded me of the oceans of our new world, and suddenly she blurred in front of me as tears dimmed my eyes. She leaned into my arms and I held her tightly. As I smelled the sweet fragrance of her hair and felt the softness of her cheek on my shoulder, I was suddenly more euphoric than ever that I had never given in to Marie's advances.
Elizabeth raised her head off my shoulder and brushed her lips against my cheek on the way to my lips. As we kissed, it all came back to me. She pulled me down on the bunk, closing her eyes, and I began to unzip her jumpsuit.
Within hours, Hope had produced a map of the new planet. There were four small continents and uncountable islands, with most of the planet being covered by water. Two of the continents were relatively flat, and sat gracefully on the poles. The other two formed distinctly alien shapes in between, covered by mountains, jungles, lakes, and even desert belts near the equator.
While Hope's first two probes continued their exploration of the solar system, two more descended into the atmosphere of BS-3 for a closer exploration. First, they just hovered arbitrarily over the surface, sending back hundreds of photographs. Then, during our second day in orbit, the probes took many temperature readings, atmosphere samples, soil samples, mineral samples, water samples; located the magnetic poles; measured the gravity at many different surface points; and performed other various scientific observations that could be done by an automatic unmanned probe properly equipped with a-grav motors.
As all this went on, and with our one day vacation finished, the crew stepped up to the mighty task of preparing for manned exploration. Elizabeth, with the help of the other engineers and mechanics and several of Hope's robots, worked to equip our small shuttles with the new a-grav technology. Mr. Davidson and his crew began stocking the shuttlecraft with foodstuffs. Others made sure that the craft were fueled (in case of a-grav failure, the chemical rockets would be needed, and frankly, we were not really ready to trust the new propulsion systems, since none of us had ever used them.) Still others stocked the landing craft with p/r suits (pressure/radiation), scientific measuring and recording devices, and the other various tools necessary for exploration.
Those of us not directly involved with the preparation of the landing effort worked mainly in the kitchens and the farm, and tried to stay out of the way of those going to and from the hangars. The medical staff from Crew #5 was kept busy doing last-minute physicals on their select landing crew.
I was stuck in the kitchen, which was fine, since I was becoming quite a chef. Forrest was with me, and a few different people who switched on and off the shift as they were needed in the hangar from time to time. We made sure that all of the workers had food available all day, whenever they could break free. The other kitchens did the same, overlapping with us to cover the rest of the hours in our day.
Time after time, I pushed carts down the passages, laden with hot food, cold food, snacks, drinks, cigarettes, to the hangar bay and back, but did have some free time to chat with those in the kitchen and dining room. That is how I finally found the time and opportunity to confront Forrest.
We were sitting by ourselves at a small table near the kitchen door, waiting for the next food rush or call from the hangar. I was idly munching on some toast and drinking from a glass of simulated milk, while Forrest gulped down about sixteen scrambled eggs - also simulated, toast, sausage, bacon, waffles, and four glasses of orange juice - freshly squeezed.
When we were both done eating, and still sitting there sipping our drinks, I decided I should at least ask. "Forrest-" he looked up sharply "-I simply must ask. You were not always a mineralogist, were you?"
With solemn eyes he gazed back at me, and I noticed his huge bulk tensing, then relaxing again. "Rev'ren', I think I see what you're driving at." He glanced around the empty room, then looked back at me. "I trust you, as I think everyone does, so I'll tell you. I need to get it off my chest.
"I'm on this ship because the Cap'n owed me a favor. He pulled more strings than his position allows, getting me here. Now I'm in his debt."
"What do you mean, debt? For what, if I may ask, did he owe you?"
"Well, here's the story. As you may know, when the first space city was populated back in 2041, the mob went with it. In fact, what you may not know, is that the mob paid for a lot of it. And that first city, Boyd, is still run by organized crime syndicates, in the biggest cooperation they've ever had. Well, I come into the story in 2129, when I was born in New York City."
My eyes widened. I couldn't imagine someone as polite and friendly as Forrest being born in the cesspool that used to be North America's greatest city. Ever since the United Nations moved their headquarters to Buenos Aires in 2022, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were completely destroyed a few years later, the city had degenerated into a war zone between organized crime groups and smaller street gangs, to the point where many decent industries and businesses had left. And when the Stock Market had moved from Wall Street to Dallas, the "Big Apple" was no more.
Forrest saw my surprised expression and smiled. "Yes, I was born there. Because of my size, I was inducted into my first teenage gang at the age of ten. By the time I was eighteen, I ran the most powerful posse in the city. No, I wasn't the leader, I was the head sniper. I refused leadership because I wanted to be where the action was. But Jayson, the leader, let me in on all the big decisions.
"Anyway, we were about to decimate the second largest gang in our district, when Hugo Marxa, head of the Marxa clan contacted Jayson and me. It turned out that he was the supplier for the other gang, and wasn't going to let us wipe them out. He paid us big bucks to leave them alone. Then the family that supplied our chemicals found out about the deal, and decided to cut us off. So we took them on. Fifty-two teenagers against one of the largest families the mob has ever known. We lost, but we crippled their operations, and Hugo Marxa took us in as a second subsidy, even though only eighteen of us were left.
"Within two years, I had moved up to the Marxa clan and they moved me to Boyd to protect me from retaliation by our former suppliers. It didn't work. So I went undercover, moving from station to habitat to city, doing dirty work for Marxa until I met Cochran on Armstrong. The next day I got the message that he was my next hit. Why? Well, surely you remember the 'pirate' vessel his cruiser captured in 2150? It was a Marxa cargo ship. Yeah, so I was supposed to wax him. But I had already made friends with him, and respected him. When I got the word that he was my next mark, I refused, and resigned from the Marxa Clan, automatically signing up to be the next hit. But I was beginning to rethink my life's work, and I broke down and told the Cap'n everything. He believed me, and thanked me.
"Then I realized that the hit was still out on Cochran. He was stuck on Armstrong for two months at the time, between flights, so I protected him. By the time he finally shipped out, I had taken out four snipers that were after me, and six t
hat were gunning for him. I managed to let Marxa be convinced that I was dead, and so he gave up on me. But I had to do something to fight against my troubled conscience, so I kept ahead of the mob, not just Marxa, but the others too. Every time I found out who the mark was, I took out the hit man. And especially, I watched out for Cochran. Whenever he came to port, I tried to be at that port first, to shadow him, and keep him safe. By 2160, I had taken out over three hundred expert hit men, and all the mobs were figuring out who I was and that I was still alive and kickin'."
