Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  “Crank her up to five thousand and leave it,” said the pusher. “Let C-shift sag it in by the tables if they don’t like it.”

  “Yokay. Isn’t it quitting time?”

  “Damn near. My suit stinks like we’re on overtime. Come on down when you reel that one in. I’m going back to the sleep wagon and get blown clear.” The pusher shut off his oxygen while he transferred his hose connections from the main feeder supply to the walk-around bottles on his suit. He signaled “quitting time” at the men on the far tower, then started moon-loping his way across the shaggy terrain toward the train of rolling barracks and machinery that moved with the construction crew as the 200 kilovolt transmission line inched its way across the lunar landscape.

  The lineman glanced up absently at the star-stung emptiness of space. Motion caught his eye. He watched with a puzzled frown, then hitched himself around to call after the departing team-pusher.

  “Hey, Joe!”

  The pusher stopped on a low rise to look back.

  “Relke?” he asked, uncertain of the source of the voice.

  “Yeah. Is that a ship up there?” The lineman pointed upward toward the east.

  “I don’t see it. Where?”

  “Between Arcturus and Serpens. I thought I saw it move.”

  The pusher stood on the low tongue of lava and watched the heavens for a time. “Maybe—maybe not. So what if it is, Relke?”

  “Well…” The lineman paused, keying his mic nervously. “Looks to me like it’s headed the wrong direction for Crater City. I mean—”

  The pusher barked a short curse. “I’m just about fed up with that superstitious drivel!” he snapped. “There aren’t any non-human ships, Relke. And there aren’t any non-humans.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “No, but you had it in mind.” The pusher gave him a scornful look and hiked on toward the caterpillar train.

  “Yah. If you say so, Joe,” Relke muttered to himself. He glanced again at the creeping point of light in the blackness; he shrugged; he began cranking up the slack span again. But the creeping point kept drawing his gaze while he cranked. When he looked at the tension indicator, it read 5,600 pounds. He grunted his annoyance, reversed the jack ratchet, and began letting out the extra 600 pounds.

  The shift-change signal was already beeping in his headsets by the time he had eased it back down to 5,000, and the C-shift crewmen were standing around the foot of the tower jeering at him from below.

  “Get off it, boy. Give the men a chance.”

  “Come on down, Relke. You can let go. It ain’t gonna drop.”

  He ignored the razzing and climbed down the trainward side of the tower: Larkin and Kunz walked briskly around to meet him. He jumped the last twenty-five feet, hoping to evade them, but they were waiting for him when his boots hit the ground.

  “We want a little talk with you, Relke, my lad,” came Larkin’s rich, deceptively affable baritone.

  “Sorry, Lark, it’s late and I—” He tried to sidestep them, but they danced in and locked arms with him, one on each side.

  “Like Lark told you, we want a little talk,” grunted Kunz.

  “Sure, Harv—but not right now. Drop by my bunk tank when you’re off shift. I been in this straight jacket for seven hours. It doesn’t smell exactly fresh in here.”

  “Then, Sonny, you should learn to control yourself in your suit,” said Larkin, his voice all mellifluent with, smiles and avuncular pedagoguery. “Let’s take him, Harv.”

  They caught him in a double armlock, hoisted him off the ground, and started carrying him toward a low lava ridge that lay a hundred yards to the south of the tower. He could not kick effectively because of the stiffness of the suit. He wrenched one hand free and fumbled at the channel selector of his suit radio. Larkin jerked his stub antenna free from its mounting before Relke could put in a call for help.

  “Tch tch tch,” said Larkin, waggling his head.

  They carried him across the ridge and set him on his feet again, out of sight of the camp. “Sit down, Sonny. We have seeeerious matters to discuss with you.”

  Relke heard him faintly, even without the antenna, but he saw no reason to acknowledge. When he failed to answer, Kunz produced a set of jumper wires from his knee pocket and clipped their suit audio circuits into a three-way intercom, disconnecting the plate lead from an r.f. stage to insure privacy.

  “You guys give me a pain in the hump,” growled the lineman. “What do you want this time? You know damn well a dead radio is against safety rules.”

  “It is? You ever hear of such a rule, Kunz?”

  “Naah. Or maybe I did, at that. It’s to make things easy for work spies, psych checkers, and time-and-motion men, ain’t that it?”

  “Yeah. You a psych checker or a time-and-motion man, Relke?”

  “Hell, you guys known damn well I’m not—”

  “Then what are you stalling about?” Larkin’s baritone lost its mellowness and became an ominous growl. “You came nosing around, asking questions about the Party. So we let you in on it. We took you to a cell meeting. You said you wanted to join. So we let you in on two more meetings. Then you chickened out. We don’t like that, Relke. It smells. It smells like a dirty informing rat!”

  “I’m no damn informer!”

  “Then why did you welsh?”

  “I didn’t welsh. I never said I’d join. You asked me if I was in favor of getting the Schneider-Volkov Act repealed. I said ‘yes.’ I still say ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean I want to join the Party.”

  “Why not, Relke?”

  “Well, there’s the fifty bucks, for one thing.”

  “Wh-a-a-at! One shift’s wages? Hell, if that’s all that’s stopping you—Kunz, let’s pay his fifty bucks for him, okay?”

  “Sure. We’ll pay your way in, Relke. I don’t hold it against a man if he’s a natural born tightwad.”

  “Yeah,” said Larkin. “All you gotta do is sign up, Sonny. Fifty bucks, hell—that’s less than union dues. If you can call that yellow-bellied obscenity a union. Now how about it, Relke?”

  Behind the dark lenses of his glare goggles, Relke’s eyes scanned the ground for a weapon. He spotted a jagged shard of volcanic glass and edged toward it.

  “Well, Relke?”

  “No deal.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s easy. I plan on getting back to Earth someday. Conspiracy to commit mutiny rates the death penalty.”

  “Hear what he said, Lark? He calls it mutiny.”

  “Yeah. Teacher’s little monitor.”

  “C’mere, informer.”

  They approached him slowly, wearing tight smiles. Relke dived for the shard of glass. The jumper wires jerked tight and broke loose, throwing them off balance for a moment. He came up with the glass shard in one fist and backed away. They stopped. The weapon was as good as a gun. A slit suit was the ultimate threat. Relke tore the dangling wires loose from his radio and backed toward the top of the ridge. They watched him somberly, not speaking. Larkin waved the lineman’s stub antenna and looked at him questioningly. Relke held out a glove and waited for him to toss it. Larkin threw it over his shoulder in the opposite direction. They turned their backs on him. He loped on back toward the gravy train, knowing that the showdown had been no more than postponed. Next time would be worse. They meant to incriminate him, as a kind of insurance against his informing. He had no desire to be incriminated, nor to inform—but try to make them believe that.

  Before entering the clean-up tank, he stopped to glance up at the heavens between Arcturus and Serpens. The creeping spot of light had vanished—or moved far from where he had seen it. He did not pause to search. He checked his urine bottle in the airlock, connected his hoses to the wall valves, and blew the barn-smell out of his suit. The blast of fresh air was like icy wine in his throat. He enjoyed it for a moment, then went inside the tank for a bath.

  Novotny was waiting for him in the B-shift line crew’s bunkroom. The s
mall pusher looked sore. He stopped pacing when Relke entered.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  Novotny didn’t answer. He watched while Relke stowed his gear, got out an electric razor, and went to the wall mirror to grind off the blond bristles.

  “Where you been?” Novotny grunted.

  “On the line where you saw me. I jacked that last span up tighter than you told me. I had to let her back down a little. Made me late getting in.”

  The pusher’s big hand hit him like a club between the shoulder blades, grabbed a handful of coverall, and jerked him roughly around. The razor fell to the end of the cord. Novotny let go in back and grabbed a handful in front. He shoved the lineman back against the wall, Relke gaped at him blankly.

  “Don’t give me that wide blue-eyed dumb stare, you sonofabitch!” the pusher snapped. “I saw you go over the hill with Kunz and Larkin.”

  Relke’s Adam’s apple did a quick genuflection. “If you saw me go, you musta seen how I went.”

  Novotny shook him. “What’d they want with you?” he barked.

  “Nothing.”

  Joe’s eyes turned to dark slits. “Relke, I told you, I told the rest of my men. I told you what I’d do to any sonofabitch on my team that got mixed up with the Party. Pappy don’t allow that crap. Now shall I do it to you here, or do you want to go down to the dayroom?”

  “Honest, Joe, I’m not mixed up in it. I got interested in what Larkin had to say—back maybe six months ago. But I never signed up. I never even meant to.”

  “Six months? Was that about the time you got your Dear John letter from Fran?”

  “Right after that, Joe.”

  “Well, that figures. So what’s Larkin after you about now?”

  “I guess he wonders why I asked questions but never joined.”

  “I don’t want your guesses. What did he say out there, and what did you say to him?”

  “He wanted to know why I didn’t sign up, that’s all.”

  “And you told him what?”

  “No deal.”

  “So?”

  “So, I came on back and took a shower.”

  Novotny stared at him for a few seconds. “You’re lying,” he grunted, but released him anyway. “OK, Relke, but you better listen to this. You’re a good lineman. You’ve stayed out of trouble. You get along with the rest of the team. If you got out of line in some other way, I’d figure it was about time you let off some steam. I’d stick up for you. But get mixed up with the Party—and I’ll stomp you. When I’m through stomping you, I’ll report you off my team. Understand?”

  “Sure, Joe.”

  Novotny grunted and stepped away from him. “No hard feelings, Relke.”

  “Naah.” The lineman went back to the mirror and started shaving again. That his hand remained steady was a surprise to him. Novotny had never before laid a hand on him, and Relke hoped the first time would be the last. He had watched Joe mop up the dayroom with Benet for playing fast and loose with safety rules while working a hotstick job, and it put Benet in sick bay for three days. Novotny was small, but he was built like a bunker. He was a fair overseer, but he handled his men in the only way he knew how to handle them on such a job. He expected self-discipline and self-imposed obedience, and when he didn’t get it, he took it as a personal insult and a challenge to a duel. Out on the lava, men were pressure-packed, hermetically sealed charges of high explosive blood and bone; one man’s folly could mean the death of several others, and there was no recourse to higher authority or admonitions from the dean, with a team on the lava.

  “What’s your grudge against the Party, Joe?” Relke asked while he scraped under his neck.

  “No grudge. Not as long as Benet, Braxton, Relke, Henderson, Beasley, Tremini, and Novotny stay out of it. No grudge at all. I’m for free love and nickel beer as much as the next guy. But I’m not for getting my ass shot off. I’m not for fouling up the whole Lunar project just to get the Schneider-Volkov Act repealed, when you can’t get it repealed that way anyhow. I’m not for facing a General Space Court and getting sentenced to blowout. That’s all. No grudge.”

  “What makes you think a general strike couldn’t force repeal, Joe?”

  The pusher spat contemptuously at the disposal chute and missed. “A general strike on the Lunar Project? Hell, Relke, use your head. It’d never work. A strike against the government is rough to pull off, even on Earth. Out here, it’d be suicide. The Party’s so busy yelling about who’s right and who’s wrong and who’s getting a raw deal—and what they ought to do about it—that they forget the important point: who’s in the driver’s seat. So what if we shut down Copernicus and all the projects like this one? Copernicus has a closed ecology, its own plant animal cycle, sure. We don’t need much from Earth to keep it running—but there’s the hitch: don’t need much. The ecology slips out of balance now and then. Every month or two it has to get a transfusion from Earth. Compost bacteria, or a new strain of algae because our strain starts mutating—it’s always something like that. If a general strike cut us off from Earth, the World Parliament could just sit passing solemn gas through their waffle-bottom chairs and wait. They could debate us to death in two months.”

  “But world opinion—”

  “Hell, they make world opinion, not us.”

  Relke stopped shaving and looked around. “Joe?”

  “Yah.”

  “Kunz and Larkin’d kill me for telling you. Promise not to say anything?”

  The pusher glowered at him for a moment. “Look, Relke, nobody brutalizes Joe Novotny’s men. I’ll handle Kunz and Larkin. You’d better spill. You think it’s informing if you tell me?”

  Relke shook his head. “Guess not. OK, Joe. It’s this: I’ve been to three cell meetings. I heard some stuff. I think the strike’s supposed to start come sundown.”

  “I heard that too. If it does, we’ll all be—” He broke off. The cabin’s intercom was suddenly blaring.

  Attention, all personnel, attention. Unidentified bird at thirty degrees over horizon, south-southwest, braking fire for landing in our vicinity. All men on the line take cover. Safety team to the ready room on the double. Rescue team scramble, rescue team scramble.

  Relke rolled the cord neatly around the razor and stared at it. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “It was a ship I saw. What ship would be landing way the hell out here?” He glanced around at Novotny.

  The pusher was already at the periscope viewer, his face buried in the sponge rubber eyepieces. He cranked it around in a search pattern toward the south-southwest.

  “See anything?”

  “Not yet… yeah, there she is. Braking in fast—now what the hell!”

  “Give me a look.”

  They traded turns at the viewer.

  “She’s a fusion furnace job. Cold fusion. Look at that blue tail.”

  “Why land way out here?”

  The hatch burst open and the rest of the men spilled in from the dayroom. A confused babble filled the cabin. “I tole ya and I tole ya!” said Bama Braxton. “That theah mine shaff at Tycho is the play-yun evvy-dance. Gennlemen, weah about to have stranjuhs in ouah midst.”

  “Cut that superstitious bullspit, Brax,” Novotny grunted. “There aren’t any aliens. We got enough bogeys around here without you scaring the whoop out of yourself with that line of crap.”

  “Theah ahn’t no aliens!” Braxton howled. “Theah ahn’t no aliens? Joe, you blind?”

  “He right, Joe,” said Lije Henderson, Bama’s chief crony. “That mine shaff speak fo’ itself.”

  “That mine’s a million years old,” Joe snorted, “and they’re not even sure it’s a mine. I said drop it.”

  “That ship speak fo’ itself!”

  “Drop it! This isn’t the first time a ship overshot Crater City and had to set down someplace else. Ten to one it’s full of Parliament waffle-bottoms, all complaining their heads off. Maybe they’ve got a meteor puncture and need help quick.”

  The closed
-circuit intercom suddenly buzzed, and Novotny turned to see the project engineer’s face on the small viewer.

  “Are all your men up and dressed, Joe?” he asked when Novotny had answered the call.

  “EVERYBODY PIPE DOWN! Sorry, Suds. No—well, except for Beasley, they’re up. Beasley’s logging sack time.”

  “The hell Beasley is!” complained Beasley from his bunk. “With you verbing nouns of a noun all yapping like—”

  “Shut up, Bee; Go on, Suds.”

  “We got contact with that ship. They’ve got reactor troubles. I tried to get Crater City on the line, but there’s an outage on the circuit somewhere. I need some men to take a tractor and backtrack toward Copernicus. Look for a break in the circuit.”

  “Why call me?”

  “The communication team is tied up, Joe.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not a communic—”

  “Hell!” Brodanovitch exploded. “It doesn’t take an electronics engineer to splice a broken wire, does it?”

  “OK, Suds, we’ll go. Take it easy. What about that ship?”

  The engineer paused to mop his face. He looked rather bleak suddenly. “I don’t know if it’s safe to tell you. But you’ll find out anyhow. Watch out for a riot.”

  “Not a runaway reactor—”

  “Worse, Joe. Women.”

  “WOMEN!” It was a high piping scream from Beasley. “Did he say women?” Beasley was out of bed and into his boots.

  “WOMEN!” They came crowding around the intercom screen.

  “Back off!” Novotny barked. “Go on, Suds.”

  “It’s a troupe of entertainers, Joe. Clearance out of Algiers. They say they’re scheduled for a performance in Crater City, come nightfall. That’s all I know, except they’re mostly women.”

  “Algiers! Jeez! Belly dancers…” The room was a confused babble.

  “Wait a minute,” said Suds. His face slid off the screen as he talked to somebody in the boss tank. Moments later he was back. “Their ship just put down, Joe. Looks like a safe landing. The rescue team is out there. You’ll pass the ship on the way up the line. Get moving.”

  “Sure, Suds.” Novotny switched off and looked around at the sudden scramble. “I’ll be damned if you do!” he yelled. “You can’t all go. Beasley, Henderson—”