“And they all walked by,” Thomas groaned. “Even one that was saying his rosary. He went right on by. And then you come along—the good Samaritan.”
“Believe me,” said the Jew wryly, “if there is one thing I’m not, it’s a Samaritan. Now go to sleep again. I will try to find your robass … and the other thing.”
He had left the room before Thomas could ask him what he meant.
Later that day the Jew—Abraham, his name was—reported that the robass was safely sheltered from the weather behind the inn. Apparently it had been wise enough not to startle him by engaging in conversation.
It was not until the next day that he reported on “the other thing.”
“Believe me, Father,” he said gently, “after nursing you there’s little I don’t know about who you are and why you’re here. Now there are some Christians here I know, and they know me. We trust each other. Jews may still be hated; but no longer, God be praised, by worshipers of the same Lord. So I explained about you. One of them,” he added with a smile, “turned very red.”
“God has forgiven him,” said Thomas. “There were people near—the same people who attacked me. Could he be expected to risk his life for mine?”
“I seem to recall that that is precisely what your Messiah did expect. But who’s being particular? Now that they know who you are, they want to help you. See: they gave me this map for you. The trail is steep and tricky; it’s good you have the robass. They ask just one favor of you: When you come back will you hear their confession and say Mass? There’s a cave near here where it’s safe.”
“Of course. These friends of yours, they’ve told you about Aquin?”
The Jew hesitated a long time before he said slowly, “Yes …”
“And …?”
“Believe me, my friend, I don’t know. So it seems a miracle. It helps to keep their faith alive. My own faith … nu, it’s lived for a long time on miracles three thousand years old and more. Perhaps if I had heard Aquin himself …”
“You don’t mind,” Thomas asked, “if I pray for you, in my faith?”
Abraham grinned. “Pray in good health, Father.”
The not-quite-healed ribs ached agonizingly as he climbed into the foam saddle. The robass stood patiently while he fed in the coordinates from the map. Not until they were well away from the village did it speak.
“Anyway,” it said, “now you’re safe for good.”
“What do you mean?”
“As soon as we get down from the mountain you deliberately look up a Checker. You turn in the Jew. From then on you are down in the books as a faithful servant of the Technarchy and you have not harmed a hair of the head of one of your own flock.”
Thomas snorted. “You’re slipping, Satan. That one doesn’t even remotely tempt me. It’s inconceivable.”
“I did best did not I with the breasts. Your God has said it the spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak.”
“And right now,” said Thomas, “the flesh is too weak for even fleshly temptations. Save your breath … or whatever it is you use.”
They climbed the mountain in silence. The trail indicated by the coordinates was a winding and confused one, obviously designed deliberately to baffle any possible Checkers.
Suddenly Thomas roused himself from his button-rosary (on a coat lent by the Christian who had passed by) with a startled “Hey!” as the robass plunged directly into a heavy thicket of bushes.
“Coordinates say so,” the robass stated tersely.
For a moment Thomas felt like the man in the nursery rhyme who fell into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes. Then the bushes were gone, and they were plodding along a damp narrow passageway through solid stone, in which even the robass seemed to have some difficulty with his footing.
Then they were in a rocky chamber some four meters high and ten in diameter, and there on a sort of crude stone catafalque lay the uncorrupted body of a man.
Thomas slipped from the foam saddle, groaning as his ribs stabbed him, sank to his knees, and offered up a wordless hymn of gratitude. He smiled at the robass and hoped the psi factor could detect the elements of pity and triumph in that smile.
Then a frown of doubt crossed his face as he approached the body.
“In canonization proceedings in the old time,” he said, as much to himself as to the robass, “they used to have what they called a devil’s advocate, whose duty it was to throw every possible doubt on the evidence.”
“You would be well cast in such a role Thomas,” said the robass.
“If I were,” Thomas muttered, “I’d wonder about caves. Some of them have peculiar properties of preserving bodies by a sort of mummification …”
The robass had clumped close to the catafalque. “This body is not mummified,” he said. “Do not worry.”
“Can the psi factor tell you that much?” Thomas smiled.
“No,” said the robass. “But I will show you why Aquin could never be mummified.”
He raised his articulated foreleg and brought its hoof down hard on the hand of the body. Thomas cried out with horror at the sacrilege—then stared hard at the crushed hand.
There was no blood, no ichor of embalming, no bruised flesh. Nothing but a shredded skin and beneath it an intricate mass of plastic tubes and metal wires.
The silence was long. Finally the robass said, “It was well that you should know. Only you of course.”
“And all the time,” Thomas gasped, “my sought-for saint was only your dream … the one perfect robot in man’s form.”
“His maker died and his secrets were lost,” the robass said. “No matter we will find them again.”
“All for nothing. For less than nothing. The ‘miracle’ was wrought by the Technarchy.”
“When Aquin died,” the robass went on, “and put died in quotation marks it was because he suffered some mechanical defects and did not dare have himself repaired because that would reveal his nature. This is for you only to know. Your report of course will be that you found the body of Aquin it was unimpaired and indeed incorruptible. That is the truth and nothing but the truth if it is not the whole truth who is to care. Let your infallible friend use the report and you will not find him ungrateful I assure you.”
“Holy Spirit, give me grace and wisdom,” Thomas muttered.
“Your mission has been successful. We will return now the Church will grow and your God will gain many more worshipers to hymn His praise into His nonexistent ears.”
“Damn you!” Thomas exclaimed. “And that would be indeed a curse if you had a soul to damn.”
“You are certain that I have not,” said the robass. “Question mark.”
“I know what you are. You are in very truth the devil, prowling about the world seeking the destruction of men. You are the business that prowls in the dark. You are a purely functional robot constructed and fed to tempt me, and the tape of your data is the tape of Screwtape.”
“Not to tempt you,” said the robass. “Not to destroy you. To guide and save you. Our best calculators indicate a probability of 51.5 per cent that within twenty years you will be the next Pope. If I can teach you wisdom and practicality in your actions the probability can rise as high as 97.2 or very nearly to certainty. Do not you wish to see the Church governed as you know you can govern it. If you report failure on this mission you will be out of favor with your friend who is as even you admit fallible at most times. You will lose the advantages of position and contact that can lead you to the cardinal’s red hat even though you may never wear it under the Technarchy and from there to—”
“Stop!” Thomas’ face was alight and his eyes aglow with something the psi factor had never detected there before. “It’s all the other way round, don’t you see? This is the triumph! This is the perfect ending to the quest!”
The articulated foreleg brushed the injured hand. “This question mark.”
“This is your dream. This is your perfection. And what came of th
is perfection? This perfect logical brain—this all-purpose brain, not functionally specialized like yours—knew that it was made by man, and its reason forced it to believe that man was made by God. And it saw that its duty lay to man its maker, and beyond him to his Maker, God. Its duty was to convert man, to augment the glory of God. And it converted by the pure force of its perfect brain!
“Now I understand the name Aquin,” he went on to himself. “We’ve known of Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, the perfect reasoner of the church. His writings are lost, but surely somewhere in the world we can find a copy. We can train our young men to develop his reasoning still further. We have trusted too long in faith alone; this is not an age of faith. We must call reason into our service—and Aquin has shown us that perfect reason can lead only to God!”
“Then it is all the more necessary that you increase the probabilities of becoming Pope to carry out this program. Get in the foam saddle we will go back and on the way I will teach you little things that will be useful in making certain—”
“No,” said Thomas. “I am not so strong as St. Paul, who could glory in his imperfections and rejoice that he had been given an imp of Satan to buffet him. No; I will rather pray with the Saviour, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ I know myself a little. I am weak and full of uncertainties and you are very clever. Go. I’ll find my way back alone.”
“You are a sick man. Your ribs are broken and they ache. You can never make the trip by yourself you need my help. If you wish you can order me to be silent. It is most necessary to the Church that you get back safely to the Pope with your report you cannot put yourself before the Church.”
“Go!” Thomas cried. “Go back to Nicodemus … or Judas! That is an order. Obey!”
“You do not think do you that I was really conditioned to obey your orders. I will wait in the village. If you get that far you will rejoice at the sight of me.”
The legs of the robass clumped off down the stone passageway. As their sound died away, Thomas fell to his knees beside the body of that which he could hardly help thinking of as St. Aquin the Robot.
His ribs hurt more excruciatingly than ever. The trip alone would be a terrible one …
His prayers arose, as the text has it, like clouds of incense, and as shapeless as those clouds. But through all his thoughts ran the cry of the father of the epileptic in Caesarea Philippi:
I believe, O Lord; help thou mine unbelief!
SURFACE TENSION
by James Blish
Dr. Chatvieux took a long time over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look out at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. The new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.
The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds, and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.
“If I were a religious man,” the pilot said suddenly, “I’d call this a plain case of divine vengeance.”
Chatvieux said: “Hmn?”
“It’s as if we’ve been struck down for—is it hubris, arrogant pride?”
“Well, is it?” Chatvieux said, looking up at last. “I don’t feel exactly swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?”
“I’m not exactly proud of my piloting,” la Ventura admitted. “But that isn’t quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes arrogant pride to think that you can scatter men, or at least things like men, all over the face of the Galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men suitable for every place you touch.”
“I suppose it does,” Chatvieux said. “But we’re only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the Galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners.” He smiled drily. “If they had, maybe they’d have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Earthlike planets, nothing more. We’ve sense enough—humility enough, if you like—to know that we can’t adapt men to Jupiter or to Tau Ceti.”
“Anyhow, we’re here,” la Ventura said grimly. “And we aren’t going to get off. Phil tells me that we don’t even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can’t seed this place in the usual way. We’ve been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the panatropes going to do—provide built-in waterwings?”
“No,” Chatvieux said calmly. “You and I and the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Panatropic techniques don’t work on the body, only on the inheritance-carrying factors. We can’t give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we’ll be able to populate this world with men, but we won’t live to see it.”
The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold collecting gradually in his stomach. “How long do you give us?” he said at last.
“Who knows? A month, perhaps.”
The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salty, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, but it did not appear to bother him. He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt into which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges.
“More samples, Doc,” he said. “All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?”
“A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?”
Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors were crowding into the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux’s senior assistant; Eunice Wagner, the only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura’s and Strasvogel’s, were now without meaning.
Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which standing room meant treading water.
They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners.
Venezuelos said: “What’s the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?”
“This place isn’t dead,” Chatvieux said. “There’s life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea; the most advanced form I’ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with protozoa and small metazoans, right up to a wonderfully variegated rotifer population—including a castle-building rotifer like Earth’s Floscularidae. The plants run from simple algae to the thalluslike species.”
“The sea is about the same,” Eunice said, “I’ve found some of the larger simple metazoans—jellyfish and so on—and some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it’s normal to find salt-water species running larger than fresh-water.”
“In short,” Chatvieux said, “We’ll survive here—if we fight.”
“Wait a minute,” la Ventura said. “You’ve just finished telling me that we wouldn’t survive. And you were talking about us, not about the species, because we don’t have our germ-cell banks any more. What’s—”
“I’ll get to that again in a moment,” Chatvieux said. “Saltonstall, what would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once; maybe we could come out of it again.”
“No good,” Saltonstall said immediately. “I like the idea, but I don’t think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either. Looking at it as a colonization problem, as if we weren’t involved ourselves, I wouldn’t give you a credit for epi oinopa pon
ton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn’t have a chance to learn a thing before they were destroyed.”
“Why?” la Ventura said. The death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.
“Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?”
The ecologist nodded.
“There’s your answer, Paul,” Saltonstall said. “The sea is out. It’s got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures are less formidable and there are more places to hide.”
“We can’t compete with a jellyfish?” la Ventura asked, swallowing.
“No, Paul,” Chatvieux said. “The panatropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells—in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash—and modify them toward creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike and intelligent. It usually shows the donor’s personality pattern, too.
“But we can’t transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. Ordinarily the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet, but we won’t survive long enough for that. We’ll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least some of them will survive the learning process.”
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. “One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won’t be able to remember being me. Is that right?”
“That’s it. There may be just the faintest of residuums—panatropy’s given us some data which seem to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we’re all going to die on Hydrot, Paul. There’s no avoiding that. Somewhere we’ll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won’t remember la Ventura, or Chatvieux, or Joan Heath—or Earth.”
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964--The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America Page 52
