Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  “No, bigod you don’t, Joe!” somebody howled. “Draw straws!”

  “OK. I can take three of you, no more.”

  They drew. Chance favored Relke, Braxton, and Henderson. Minutes later they crowded into the electric runabout and headed southeast along the line of stately steel towers that filed back toward Copernicus. The ship was in sight. Taller than the towers, the nacelles of the downed bird rose into view beyond the broken crest of a distant lava butte. She was a freight shuttle, space-constructed and not built for landing on Earth. Relke eyed the emblem on the hull of her crew nacelle while the runabout nosed onto the strip of graded roadbed that paralleled the transmission line back to Crater City. The emblem was unfamiliar.

  “That looks like the old RS Voltaire,” said the lineman. “Somebody must have bought her, Joe. Converted her to passenger service.”

  “Maybe. Now keep an eye on the telephone line.”

  The pusher edged the runabout toward the trolley rods. The overhead power transmission line had been energized by sections during the construction of it, and the line was hot as far as the road had been extended. Transformer stations fed energy from the 200 kilovolt circuit into the 1,500 volt trolley bars that ran down the center of the roadbed. Novotny stopped the vehicle at the end of the finished construction and sidled it over until the feeler arms crackled against the electrified bus rods and locked in place. He switched the batteries to “charge” and drove on again.

  “Relke, you’re supposed to be watching that talk circuit, not the ship.”

  “OK, Joe, in a minute.”

  “You horny bastard, you can’t see their bloomers through that titanium hull. Put the glasses down and watch the line.”

  “OK, just a minute. I’m trying to find out who owns her. The emblem’s—”

  “Now, dammit!”

  “No marking on her except her serial number and a picture of a rooster—and something else that’s been painted over.”

  “RELKE!”

  “Sure, Joe, OK.”

  “Girls!” marveled Lije Henderson. “Whenna lass time you touch a real girl, Brax?”

  “Don’ ass me, Lije! I sweah, if I evum touch a lady’s li’l pink fingah right now, I could—”

  “Hell, I could jus’ sittin’ heah lookin’ at that ship. Girls. God! Lemme have those glasses, Relke.”

  Novotny braked the runabout to a halt. “All right, get your helmets on,” he snapped. “Pressure your suits. I’m going to pump air out.”

  “Whatthehell! Why, Joe?”

  “So you can get out of this heap. You’re walking back. I’ll go on and find the break myself.”

  Braxton squealed like a stuck pig; a moment later all three of them were on him. “Please, Joe…. Fuh the love a heaven, Joe, have a haht…. Gawd, women!”

  “Get off my lap, you sonofabitch!” he barked at Braxton, who sat on top of him, grabbing at the controls. “Wait—I’ll tell you what. Put the damn binoculars down and watch the line. Don’t say another damn word about dames until we find the break and splice it. Swear to that, you bastards, and you can stay. I’ll stop at their ship on our way back, and then you can stare all you want to. OK?”

  “Joe, I sweah on a stack of—”

  “All right, then watch the line.”

  They drove on in silence. The ship had fired down on a flat stretch of ground about four miles from the construction train, a few hundred yards from the trolley road. They stared at it as the runabout crawled past, and Novotny let the vehicle glide to a halt.

  “The ramp’s out and the ladder’s down,” said Relke. “Somebody must have come out.”

  “Unglue your eyes from that bird and look around,” Novotny grunted. “You’ll see why the ladder’s down.” He jerked his thumb toward a row of vehicles parked near the massive ship.

  “The rescue team’s wagons. But wheah’s the rescue team?”

  No crewmen were visible in the vicinity of the ship or the parked runabouts. Novotny switched on the radio, punched the channel selector, and tried a call, reading the call code off the side of the safety runabout.

  “Double Able Niner, this is One Four William. Talk back, please.”

  They sat in silence. There was nothing but the hiss of solar interference from the radio and the sound of heavy breathing from the men.

  “Those lucky ole bastands!” Braxton moaned. “You know wheah they gone, gennlemen? I know wheah they gone. They clambered right up the ladies’ ladduh. I taya, alright—”

  “Knock it off. Let’s get moving. Tell us on the way back.”

  “Those lucky ole—”

  The runabout moved ahead across the glaring land. Relke: “Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Joe, on our way back, can we go over and see if they’ll let us climb aboard?”

  Novotny chuckled. “I thought you were off dames, Relke. I thought when Fran sent you the Dear John, you said dames were all a bunch of—”

  “Damn, Joe! You could have talked all day without saying ‘Fran.’”

  The lineman’s throat worked a brief spasm, and he stared out across the broken moonscape with dismal eyes.

  “Sorry I mentioned it,” Novotny grunted. “But sure, I guess one of us could walk over and ask if they mind a little more company on board.”

  Lije: “One of us! Who frinstance—you?”

  Joe: “No, you can draw for it—not now, you creep! Watch the line.”

  They watched in silence. The communication circuit was loosely strung on temporary supports beside the road-bed. The circuit was the camp’s only link with Crater City, for the horizon interposed a barrier to radio reception, such reception being possible only during the occasional overhead transits of the lunar satellite station which carried message-relaying equipment. The satellite’s orbit had been shifted to cover a Russian survey crew near Clavius, however, and its passages over the Trolley Project were rare.

  “I jus’ thought,” Lije muttered suddenly, smacking his fist in his palm.

  Relke: “Isn’t that getting a little drastic, Lije?”

  “I jus’ thought. If we fine that outage, ’less don’ fix it!”

  Joe: “What kind of crazy talk is that?”

  “Lissen, you know what ole Suds want to call Crater City fo’? He want to call ’em so’s they’ll Senn a bunch of tank wagons down heah and tote those gals back to town. Thass what he want to call ’em fo’!”

  Braxton slapped his forehead. “Luvva God! He’s right. Y’all heah that? Is he right, Joe, or is he right?”

  “I guess that’s about the size of it.”

  “We mi’not evum get a look at ’em!” Braxton wailed. “Less don’ fix it, Joe!”

  “I sweah, if I evum touch one of theah precious li’l fingahs, I’d—”

  “Shut up and watch the line.”

  Relke: “Why didn’t he use a bridge on the circuit and find out where the break was, Joe?”

  “A bridge won’t work too well on that line.”

  “How fah we gonna keep on drivin’, Joe?”

  “Until we find the break. Relke, turn up that blower a little. It’s beginning to stink in here.”

  “Fresh ayah!” sighed Braxton as the breeze hit them from the fan.

  Relke: “I wonder if it’s fresh. I keep wondering if it doesn’t come out foul from the purifier, but we’ve been living in it too long to be able to tell. I even dream about it. I dream about going back to Earth and everybody runs away from me coughing and holding their noses. I can’t get close to a girl even in a dream anymore.”

  “Ah reckon a head-shrinker could kill hisself a-laughin’ over that one.”

  “Don’t talk to me about head-shrinkers.”

  “Watch the damn line.”

  Braxton: “Talk about dreams! Listen, I had one lass sleep shift that I oughta tell y’all about. Gennlemen, if she wasn’t the ohnriest li’l—”

  Novotny cursed softly under his breath and tried to keep his eyes on both the road and the communicat
ions circuit.

  Relke: “Let ’em jabber, Joe. I’ll watch it.”

  Joe: “It’s bad enough listening to a bunch of jerks in a locker room bragging about the dames they’ve made. But Braxton! Braxton’s got to brag about his dreams. Christ! Send me back to Earth. I’m fed up.”

  “Aww, Joe, we got nothin’ else to talk about up heah.”

  They drove for nearly an hour and a half without locating the outage. Novotny pulled the runabout off the hot trolleys and coasted to a stop. “I’m deflating the cab,” he told them. “Helmets on, pressure up your suits.”

  “Joe, weah not walkin’ back from heah!” Bama said flatly.

  “Oh, blow yourself out, Brax!” the pusher said irritably. “I’m getting out for a minute. C’mon, get ready for vacuum.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t say why to me outside the sleep-tank, corn pone! Just do it.”

  “Damn! Novotny’s in a humah! Les say ‘yessah’ to him, Bama.”

  “You too, Lije!”

  “Yessah.”

  “Can it.”

  Novotny got the pressure pumped down to two pounds, and then let the rest of the air spew out slowly into vacuum. He climbed out of the runabout and loped over to the low-hanging spans of the communication circuit. He tapped into it with the suit audio and listened for a moment. Relke saw his lips moving as he tried a call, but nothing came through the lineman’s suit radio.

  After about five minutes, he quit talking and beckoned the rest of them back to the runabout.

  “That was Brodanovitch,” he said after they were inside and the pressure came up again. “So the circuit break must be on up ahead.”

  “Oh, hell, we’ll nevah get a look at those ladies!”

  “Calm down. We’re going back—” He paused a moment until the elated whooping died down. “Suds says let them send a crew out of Copernicus to fix it. I guess there’s no hurry about moving those people out of there.”

  “The less hurry, the bettuh… hot dawg! C’mon, Joe, roll it!” Bama and Lije sat rubbing their hands. Only Relke seemed detached, his enthusiasm apparently cooled. He sat staring out at the meteor display on the dust-flats. He kept rubbing absently at the ring finger of his left hand. There was no ring there, nor even a mark on the skin. The pusher’s eye fell on the slow nervous movement.

  “Fran again?” Joe grunted.

  The lineman nodded.

  “I got my Dear John note three years ago, Relke.”

  Relke looked around at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you were married, Joe.”

  “I guess I wasn’t as married as I thought I was.”

  Relke stared outside again for awhile. “How do you get over it?”

  “You don’t. Not up here on Luna. The necessary and sometimes sufficient condition for getting over a dame is the availability of other dames. So, you don’t.”

  “Hell, Joe!”

  “Yeah.”

  “The movement’s not such a bad idea.”

  “Can it!” the pusher snapped.

  “It’s true. Let women come to Crater City, or send us home. It makes sense.”

  “You’re only looking at the free love and nickel beer end of it, Relke. You can’t raise kids in low gravity. There are five graves back in Crater City to prove it. Kids’ graves. Six feet long. They grow themselves to death.”

  “I know but…” He shrugged uncomfortably and watched the meteor display again.

  “When do we draw?” said Lije. “Come on Joe, less draw for who goes to talk ouah way onto the ship.”

  Relke: “Say, Joe, how come they let dames in an entertainment troupe come to the moon, but they won’t let our wives come? I thought the Schneider-Volkov Act was supposed to keep all women out of space, period.”

  “No, they couldn’t get away with putting it like that. Against the WP constitution. The law just says that all personnel on any member country’s lunar project must be of a single sex. Theoretically some country—Russia, maybe—could start an all-girl lunar mine project, say. Theoretically. But how many lady muckers do you know? Even in Russia.”

  Lije: “When do we draw? Come on, Joe, less draw.”

  “Go ahead and draw. Deal me out.”

  Chance favored Henderson. “Fastuh, Joe. Hell, less go fastuh, befo’ the whole camp move over theah.”

  Novotny upped the current to the redline and left it there. The long spans of transmission line, some of them a mile or more from tower to tower, swooped past in stately cadence.

  “There she is! Man!”

  “You guys are building up for a big kick in the rump. They’ll never let us aboard.”

  “Theah’s two more cabs pahked over theah.”

  “Yeah, and still nobody in sight on the ground.”

  Novotny pulled the feelers off the trolleys again. “OK, Lije, go play John Alden. Tell ’em we just want to look, not touch.”

  Henderson was bounding off across the flats moments after the cabin had been depressurized to let him climb out. They watched him enviously while the pressure came up again. His face flashed with sweat in the sunlight as he looked back to wave at them from the foot of the ladder.

  Relke glanced down the road toward the rolling construction camp. “You going to call in, Joe? Ought to be able to reach their antenna from here.”

  “If I do, Brodanovitch is sure to say ‘haul ass on back to camp.’”

  “Never mind, then! Forget I said it!”

  The pusher chuckled. “Getting interested, Relke?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I am.” He looked quickly toward the towering rocket.

  “Mostly you want to know how close you are to being rid of her, maybe?”

  “I guess—Hey, they’re letting him in.”

  “That lucky ole bastuhd!” Bama moaned.

  The airlock opened as Lije scaled the ladder. A helmet containing a head of unidentifiable gender looked out and down, watching the man climb. Lije paused to wave. After a moment’s hesitancy, the space-suited figure waved back.

  “Hey, up theah, y’all mind a little company?”

  The party who watched him made no answer. Lije shook his head and climbed on. When he reached the lock, he held out a glove for an assist, but the figure stepped back quickly. Lije stared inside. The figure was holding a gun. Lije stepped down a rung. The gun beckoned impatiently for him to get inside. Reluctantly Lije obeyed.

  The hatch closed. A valve spat a jet of frost, and they watched the pressure dial slowly creep to ten psi. Lije watched the stranger unfasten his helmet, then undid his own. The stranger was male, and the white goggle marks about his eyes betrayed him as a spacer. His thin dark features suggested Semitic or Arabic origins.

  “Parlez-vous français?”

  “Naw,” said Lije. “Sho’ don’t. Sorry.”

  The man tossed his head and gave a knowing snort. “It is necessaire that we find out who you are,” he explained, and brandished the weapon under Lije’s nose. He grinned a flash of white teeth. “Who send you here?”

  “Nobody send me. I come unduh my own steam. Some fell as in my moonjeep pulled cands, and I—”

  “Whup! You are—ah ein Unteroffizier? Mais non, wrong sprach—you l’officiale? Officer? Company man?”

  “Who, me? Land, no. I’m juss a hot-stick man on B-shif’. You muss be lookin’ fo’ Suds Brodanovitch.”

  “Why you come to this ship?”

  “Well, the fellas and I heard tell theah was some gals, and we—”

  The man waved the gun impatiently and pressed a button near the inner hatch. A red indicator light went on.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice, rather hoarse. Lije’s chest heaved with sudden emotion, and his sigh came out a bleat…

  The man spoke in a flood of French. The woman did not reply at once. Lije noticed the movement of a viewing lens beside the hatch; it was scanning him from head to toe.

  The woman’s voice shifted to an intimate contralto. “OK, dearie, you come right in here where it�
�s nice and warm.”

  The inner hatch slid open. It took Lije a few seconds to realize that she had been talking to him. She stood there smiling at him like a middle-aged schoolmarm. “Why don’t you come on in and meet the girls?” Eyes popping, Lije Henderson stumbled inside.

  He was gone a long time.

  When he finally came out, the men in Novotny’s runabout took turns cursing at him over the suit frequency. “Fa chrissake, Henderson, we’ve been sitting here using up oxy for over an hour while you been horsing around…” They waited for him with the runabout, cabin depressurized.

  Lije was panting wildly as he ran toward them. “Lissen to the bahstud giggle,” Bama said disgustedly.

  “Y’all juss don’ know, y’all juss don’ KNOW!” Lije was chanting between pants.

  “Get in here, you damn traitor!”

  “Hones’, I couldn’ help myself. I juss couldn’.”

  “Well, do the rest of us get aboard her, or not?” Joe snapped.

  “Hell, go ahead, man! It’s wide open. Evahthing’s wide open.”

  “Girls?” Relke grunted.

  “Girls, God yes! Girls.”

  “You coming with us?” Joe asked.

  Lije shook his head and fell back on the seat, still panting. “Lawd, no! I couldn’t stand it. I juss want to lie heah and look up at ole Mamma Earth and feel like a human again.” He grinned beatifically. “Y’all go on.”

  Braxton was staring at his crony with curious suspicion.

  “Man, those must be some entuhtainuhs! Whass the mattah with you, Lije?”

  Henderson whooped and pounded his leg. “Woo hoo! Hooeee! You mean y’all still don’ know what that ship is?”

  They had already climbed out of the tractor. Novotny glared back in at Lije. “We’ve been waiting to hear it from you, Henderson,” he snapped.

  Lije sat up grinning. “That’s no stage show troupe! That ship, so help me Hannah, is a—hoo hoo hooee—is a goddam flyin’ HO-house.” He rolled over on the seat and surrendered to laughter.

  Novotny looked around for his men and found himself standing alone. Braxton was already on the ladder, and Relke was just starting up behind.

  “Hey, you guys come back here!”