Dark Benediction

by Walter M. Miller

  "Yeah, but this is different."

  "I don't see how."

  "Half the voters are women."

  "So? They didn't do anything about homosex—"

  "Relke, wise up. Listen, did you ever see a couple of Lesbians necking in a bar?"

  Relke snickered. "Sure, once or twice."

  "How did you feel about it?"

  "Well, this once was kind of funny. You see, this one babe had on—"

  "Never mind. You thought it was funny. Do you think it's funny the way MacMillian and Wickers bill and coo?"

  "That gets pretty damn nauseating, Joe."

  "Uh-huh, but the Lesbians just gave you a giggle. Why?"

  "Well, I don't know, Joe, it's—"

  "I'll tell you why. You like dames. You can understand other guys liking dames. You like dames so much that you can even understand two dames liking each other. You can see what they see in each other. But it's incongruous, so it's funny. But you can't see what two fairies see in each other, so that just gives you a bellyache. Isn't that it?"

  "Maybe, but what's that got to do with the voters?"

  "Ever think that maybe a woman would feel the same way in reverse? A dame could see what MacMillian and Wickers see in each other. The dame might morally disapprove, but at the same time she could sympathize. What's more, she'd be plenty sure that she could handle that kind of competition if she ever needed to. She's a woman, and wotthehell, Wickers is only a substitute woman. It wouldn't worry her too much. Worry her morally, but not as a personal threat. Relke, Mme. d'Annecy's racket is a personal threat to the home girl and the womenfolk."

  "I see what you mean."

  "Half the voters are women."

  Relke chuckled. "Migod, Joe, if Ellen heard about that ship ... "

  "Ellen?"

  "My older sister. Old maid. Grim."

  "You've got the idea. If Parkeson thinks of all this . . ." His voice trailed off. "When is Larkin talking about crippling that ship?"

  "About sundown, why?"

  "Somebody better warn the d'Annecy dame."

  The cosmic gunfire had diminished. The Perseid shrapnel still pelted the dusty face of the plain, but the gram-impact-per-acre-second had dropped by a significant fraction, and with it fell the statistician's estimate of dead men per square mile. There was an ion storm during the first half of B-shift, and the energized spans of high volt-age cable danced with fluttering demon light as the trace-pressure of the lunar "atmosphere" increased enough to start a glow discharge between conductors. High current surges sucked at the line, causing the breakers to hiccup. The breakers tried the line three times, then left the circuit dead and waited for the storm to pass. The storm meant nothing to the construction crews except an in-crease in headset noise.

  Parkeson's voice came drawling on the general call frequency, wading waist-deep through the interference caused by the storm. Relke leaned back against his safety strap atop the trusswork of the last tower and tried to listen. Parkeson was reading the Articles of Discipline, and listening was compulsory. All teams on the job had stopped work to hear him. Relke gazed across the plain toward the slender nacelles of the bird from Algiers in the distance. He had gotten used to the ache in his side where Kunz had kicked him, but it was good to rest for a time and watch the rocket and remember brown legs and a yellow dress. Properties of Earth. Properties belonging to the communion of humanity, from which fellowship a Looney was somehow cut off by 238,000 miles of physical separation.

  "We've got a job to finish here," Parkeson was telling the men.

  Why? What was in space that was worth the wanting? What followed from its conquest? What came of finishing the job?

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing anybody ever dreamed of or hoped for.

  Parkeson scolded on. "I know the question that's foremost in your minds," his voice continued, "but you'd better forget it. Let me tell you what happens if this line isn't finished by sundown. (But by God, it will be finished!) Listen, you wanted women. All right, now you've all been over to visit the uh—'affectionate institution'—and you got what you wanted; and now the work is behind schedule. Who gives a damn about the project, eh? I know what you're thinking. 'That's Parkeson's worry.' OK, so let's talk about what you're going to breathe for the next couple of periods. Let's talk about how many men will wind up in the psycho-respiratory ward, about the overload on the algae tanks. That's not your responsibility either, is it? You don't have to breathe and eat. Hell, let Nature take care of air and water, eh? Sure. Now look around. Take a good look. All that's between you and that hungry vacuum out there is ten pounds of man-made air and a little reinforced plastic. All that keeps you eating and drinking and breathing is that precarious life-cycle of ours at Copernicus. That plant-animal feedback loop is so delicately balanced that the biology team gets the cold shakes every time somebody sneezes or passes gas. It has to be constantly nursed. It has to be planned and kept on schedule. On Earth, Nature's a plenum. You can chop down her forests, kill of} her deer and buffalo, and fill her air with smog and hot isotopes; the worst you can do is cause a few new deserts and dust bowls, and make things a little unpleasant for a while.

  "Up here, we've got a little, bit of Nature cooped up in a bottle, and we're in the bottle too. We're cultured like mold on agar. The biology team has to chart the ecology for months in advance. It has to know the construction and survey teams are going to deliver exactly what they promise to deliver, and do it on schedule. If you don't deliver, the ecology gets sick. If the ecology gets sick, you get sick.

  "Do you want another epidemic of the chokers like we had three years back? That's what'll happen if there's a work slowdown while everybody goes off on a sex binge at that ship. If the line isn't finished before sundown, the ecology gets bled for another two weeks to keep that mine colony going, and the colony can't return wastes to our cycle. Think it over, but think fast. There's not much time. 'We all breathe the same air'—on Earth, that's just a political slogan. Here, we all breathe it or we all choke in it. How do you want it, men?"

  Relke shifted restlessly on the tower. He glanced down at Novotny and the others who lounged around the foot of the steel skeleton listening to Parkeson. Lije caught his eye. He waved at Relke to haul up the hoist-bucket. Relke shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. Henderson gestured insistently for him to haul it up. Relke reeled the bucket in. It was empty, but chalked on the sides and bottom was a note from Lije: "They toll me what L and K did to you and your girl. I and Joe will take care of it, right after this sermon. You can spit on my fist first if you want. Lije."

  Relke gave him a half-hearted screw-twist signal and let the bucket go. Revenge was no good, and vicarious revenge was worse than no good; it was hollow. He thought of asking Joe to forget it, but he knew Joe wouldn't listen. The pusher felt his own integrity was involved, and a matter of jurisdictional ethics: nobody can push my men around but me. It was gang ethics, but it seemed inevitable somehow. Where there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. In the absence of the family, there had to be the gang, and fear made it quarrelsome, jealous, and proud.

  Relke leaned back against his strap and glanced up to-ward Earth. The planet was between quarter and half phase, for the sun was lower in the west. He watched it and tried to feel something more than a vague envy. Sometimes the heartsick nostalgia reached the proportions of idolatrous adoration of Gaea's orb overhead, only to subside into a grudging resentment of the gulf between worlds. Earth—it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of, suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about short-horn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.

  Watching her crescent, he felt again that vague anger of separation, that resentment against those who stayed at hom
e, who had no cause for constant fear, who could live without the tense expectancy of sudden death haunting every moment. One of them was Fran, and another was the one who had taken her from him. He looked away quickly and tried to listen to the coordinator.

  "This is no threat," Parkeson was saying. "If the line isn't finished on time, then the consequences will just happen, that's all. Nobody's going to punish you, but there are a few thousand men back at the Crater who have to breathe air with you. If they have to breathe stink next period—because you guys were out having one helluva party with Madame d'Annecy's girls—you can figure how popular you'll be. That's all I've got to say. There's still time to get the work back on schedule. Let's use it."

  Parkeson signed off. The new engineer who was replacing Brodanovitch gave them a brief pep-talk, implying that Parkeson was a skunk and would be forced to eat his own words before sundown. It was the old hard-guy-soft-guy routine: first a bawling-out and then a buttering-up. The new boss offered half of his salary to the first team to forge ahead of its own work schedule. It was not stated nor even implied that Parkeson was paying him back.

  The work was resumed. After half an hour, the safety beeper sounded on all frequencies, and men switched back to general call. Parkeson and his party were already heading back toward Copernicus.

  "Blasting operation at the next tower site will occur in ten minutes,"came the announcement. "Demol team requests safety clearance over all of zones two and three, from four forty to five hundred hours. There will be scatter-glass in both zones. Zone two is to be evacuated immediately, and all personnel in zone three take line-of-sight cover from the red marker. I repeat: there will be scatter-glass . . ."

  "That's us," said Novotny when it was over. "Everybody come on. Brax, Relke, climb down."

  Braxton swore softly in a honeysuckle drawl. It never sounded like cursing, which it wasn't, but like a man marveling at the variety of vicissitudes invented by an ingenious universe for the bedevilment of men. "I sweah, when the angels ahn't shootin' at us from up in Perseus, it's the demol boys. Demol says froggie, and eve'body jumps. It gives 'em that suhtain feelin' of impohtance. Y'all know what I think? I got a thee-orry. I think weah all really dead, and they don' tell us it's hell weah in, because not tellin' us is paht of the tohture."

  "Get off the damn frequency, Brax, and stay off!" Novotny snapped when the Alabaman released his mic button. "I've told you and Henderson before—either learn to talk fast, or don't talk on the job. If somebody had a slow leak, he'd be boiling blood before he could scream —with you using the frequency for five minutes to say 'yeah.' "

  "Mistuh Novotny! My mothuh always taught me to speak slowly and de-stinct-ly. If you think that yo' Yankee upbringin' ..."

  Joe rapped on his helmet until he shut up, then beck-oned to Henderson. "Lije, we got twenty minutes."

  "Yeah, Joe, want to go see a couple of guys now?" He flashed white teeth and stared back toward the barrack train.

  "Think we can handle it in twenty minutes?"

  "I don' know. It seem like a short time to do a real good job of it, but maybe if we don't waste any on preliminary fisticuffin' . . ."

  "Hell, they didn't waste any ceremony on Relke."

  "Less go, then!" He grinned at Relke and held out his fist. "Spit on it?"

  Relke shook his head. Henderson laughed. "Wanted to see if you'd go ptooey in your helmet."

  "Come on, Lije. The rest of you guys find cover."

  Relke watched the two of them lope off toward the rolling barracks. "Hey, Joe," he called after a few seconds.

  The lopers stopped to look back. "Relke?"

  "Yeah. Don't lose."

  "What?"

  "They'll say I sicced you. Don't lose."

  "Don't worry." They loped again. The longer Relke watched them, the less he liked the idea. If they didn't do a pretty thorough job on Kunz and Larkin, things would be worse for Relke than if they did nothing at all. Then there was the movement to think about; he didn't know to what extent they looked out for their own.

  Relke walked out of the danger zone and hiked across the hill where he could get a clear view of the rocket. He stopped for a while on the slope and watched four distant figures moving around on the ground beneath the towering ship. For a moment, he thought they were women, but then he saw that one of them was coiling mooring cable, and he knew they were ship's crew. What sort of men had the d'Annecy women been able to hire for such a job? he wondered.

  He saw that they were getting ready to lift ship. Lift ship!

  Relke was suddenly running toward them without knowing why. Whenever he topped a rise of ground and could see them, he tried calling them, but they were not using the project's suit frequency. Finally he found their voices on the seldom used private charter band, but they were speaking French.

  One of the men looped a coil of cable over his shoulder and started up the ladder toward the lock. Relke stopped atop an outcropping. He was still two or three miles from the ship. The "isobar" valve system for the left knee of his suit had jammed, and it refused to take up the increased pressure caused by flexure. It was like trying to bend a fully inflated rubber tire, and he hobbled about for a moment with one leg stiff as a crutch.

  "Listen!" he called on the p.c. frequency. "You guys at the ship. Can you hear me?" He was panting, and he felt a little panicky. The man on the ladder stopped climbing and looked around.

  There was a staccato exchange in French.

  "No, no! Over here. On the rock." He waved at them and jumped a few times. "Look toward the camp. On the rock."

  They conversed heatedly among themselves for a time. "Don't any of you speak English?" he begged.

  They were silent for a moment. "Whoevair ees?" one of them ventured. "You conversation with wrong radio, M'sieur. Switch a button."

  "No, no. I'm trying to call you ..."

  A carrier drowned him out.

  "We close for business," the man said. "We go now." He started climbing again.

  "Listen!" Relke yelled. "Ten thousand dollars. Everything."

  "You crazy man."

  "Look, it won't get you in any trouble. I've got plenty in the bank. I'll pay—"

  The carrier cut him off again.

  "You crazy. Get off the air. We do not go to Earth now."

  "Wait! Listen! Tell Giselle . . . No, let me talk to her. Get her to use the radio. It's important."

  "I tell you, we close for business now." The man climbed in the airlock. The others climbed up behind. They were, jeering at him. This time it sounded like Arabic. He watched until they were all inside.

  White fury lanced the ground and spread in a white sheet beneath the ship and roiled up in a tumult of dust and expanding gasses. It climbed on a white fan, gathering velocity. Relke could still make it out as a ship when its course began arcing away from the vertical. It was beginning a trajectory in the direction of Copernicus. When it was out of sight, he began trudging back toward the work site. He was nearly an hour overdue.

  "Where you been?" Novotny asked him quietly after watching him hobble the last quarter of a mile in stony silence. He was squinting at the lineman with that faintly puzzled look that Relke recognized as a most ominous omen. The squint was lopsided because of a cut under one eye, and it looked like a chip was missing from a tooth.

  Relke showed his stiff leg and bounced the heel against the ground a couple of times. "I walked too far, and the c.p. valves got jammed. Sorry, Joe."

  "You don't have to be sorry. Let's see."

  The pusher satisfied himself that the suit was malfunctioning. He waved the lineman toward the barrack train. "Go to supply and get it fixed. Get back on the double. You've slowed us down."

  Relke paused. "You sore, Joe?"

  "We're on duty. I don't get sore on duty. I save it up. Now—haul ass!"

  Relke hobbled off. "What about . . . what you went for, Joe?" he called back. "What happened?"

  "I told you to keep your nose out of politics!" the pusher s
napped. "Never mind what happened."

  Joe, Relke decided, was plenty sore. About something. Maybe about a beating that backfired. Maybe about Relke taking an hour awol. Either way, he was in trouble. He thought it over and decided that paying a bootleg ship ten thousand to take him back to Earth with them hadn't been such a hysterical whim after all.

  But then he met Larkin in the supply wagon. Larkin was stretched out flat on his back, and a medic kept saying, "Who did it to you? Who did it to you?" and Larkin kept telling him to go to hell out of a mouth that looked like a piece of singed stew meat. Kunz was curled up on a blanket and looked even worse. He spat in his sleep and a bit of tooth rattled across the deck.

  "Meanest bunch of bastards I ever saw," the clerk told Relke while he checked in the suit. "They don't even give you .a chance. Here were these two guys sleeping in their bunks and not bothering anybody, and what do you think?"

  "I quit thinking. What?"

  "Somebody starts working them over. Wham. Don't even wake them up first. Just wham. You ever see anything like it? Mean, John, just mean. You can't even get a shift's sleep anymore. You better go to bed with a knife in your boot, John."

  "It's Bill."

  "Oh. What do you suppose makes a guy that mean anyway?"

  "I don't know. Everybody's jumpy, I guess."

  The clerk looked at him wisely. "There you have put your finger on it, John. Looney nerves. The jitters. Everybody's suit-happy." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "You know how I tell when the camp's getting jittery?"

  "Listen, check me out a suit. I've got to get back to the line."

  "Now wait, this'll surprise you. I can tell better than the psych checkers when everybody's going on a slow panic. It's the sleeping bag liners."

  "What?"

  "The bed wetters, John. You'd be surprised how many grown men turn bed wetters about the middle of a hitch. At first, nobody. Then somebody gets killed on the line. The bag liners start coming in for cleaning. By the end of the hitch, the wash tank smells like a public lavatory, John. Not just the men, either. Some of the engineers. You know what I'm doing?"