by Anthology
Is it, God grant, that the rotation rocket is arriving a week early?”
“No, damn it,” Fassbander grunted. (He seemed to take a certain pride, Malloy had observed, in carefully not tempering his language for the ears of clergymen.) “Then I’d have a German detachment instead of your Israelis, and I’d know where I stood. I suppose it’s all very advisable politically for every state in the UW to contribute a detachment in rotation; but I’d sooner either have my regular legion garrison doubled, or two German detachments regularly rotating. That time I had the pride of Pakistan here . . . Damn it, you new states haven’t had time to develop a military tradition!”
“Father Malloy,” the Rabbi asked gently, “are you acquainted with the sixth book of what you term the Old Testament?”
“Thought you fellows were tired of talking shop,” Fassbander objected.
“Rabbi Acosta refers to the Book of Joshua, Captain. And I’m afraid, God help us, that there isn’t a state or a tribe that hasn’t a tradition of war. Even your Prussian ancestors might have learned a trick or two from the campaigns of Joshua—or for that matter, from the Cattle Raid on Cooley, when the Hound of Cullen beat off the armies of Queen Maeve. And I’ve often thought, too, that it’d do your strategists no harm to spend a season or two at quarterback, if they had the wind. Did you know that Eisenhower played football, and against Jim Thorpe once at that? And . . .”
“But I don’t imagine,” Acosta interposed, “that you came here to talk shop either, Captain?”
“Yes,” said Captain Fassbander, sharply and unexpectedly. “My shop and, damn it, yours. Never thought I’d see the day when I . . .” He broke off and tried another approach. “I mean, of course, a chaplain is part of an army. You’re both army officers, technically speaking, one of the Martian Legion, one in the Israeli forces; but it’s highly unusual to ask a man of the cloth to . . .”
“To praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, as the folk legend has it? There are precedents among my people, and among Father Malloy’s as well, though rather different ideas are attributed to the founder of his church. What is it, Captain? Or wait, I know: We are besieged by alien invaders and Mars needs every able-bodied man to defend her sacred sands. Is that it?”
“Well . . . God damn it . . .” Captain Fassbander’s cheeks grew purple . . . yes!” he exploded.
The situation was so hackneyed in 3V and microcomics that it was less a matter of explaining it than of making it seem real. Dietrich Fassbander’s powers of exposition were not great, but his sincerity was evident and in itself convincing.
“Didn’t believe it myself at first,” he admitted. “But he was right. Our patrol ran into a patrol of . . . of them. There was a skirmish; we lost two men but killed one of the things. Their small arms use explosive propulsion of metal much like ours; God knows what they might have in that ship to counter our A-warheads. But we’ve got to put up a fight for Mars; and that’s where you come in.”
The two priests looked at him wordlessly, Acosta with a faint air of puzzled withdrawal, Malloy almost as if he expected the captain to start diagraming the play on a blackboard.
“You especially, Rabbi. I’m not worried about your boys, Father. We’ve got a Catholic chaplain on this rotation because this bunch of legionnaires is largely Poles and Irish-Americans. They’ll fight all right, and we’ll expect you to say a field Mass beforehand, and that’s about all. Oh, and that fool gunner Olszewski has some idea he’d like his A-cannon sprinkled with holy water; I guess you can handle that without any trouble.
“But your Israelis are a different problem, Acosta. They don’t know the meaning of discipline—not what we call discipline in the legion; and Mars doesn’t mean to them what it does to a legionnaire. And besides a lot of them have got a . . . hell, guess I shouldn’t call it superstition, but a kind of . . . well, reverence—awe, you might say—about you, Rabbi. They say you’re a miracle-worker.”
“He is,” said Mule Malloy simply. “He saved my life.”
He could still feel that extraordinary invisible power (a “force-field,” one of the technicians later called it, as he cursed the shots that had destroyed the machine past all analysis) which had bound him helpless there in that narrow pass, too far from the dome for rescue by any patrol. It was his first week on Mars, and he had hiked too long, enjoying the easy strides of low gravity and alternately meditating on the versatility of the Creator of planets and on that Year Day long ago when he had blocked out the most famous of All-American line-backers to bring about the most impressive of Rose Bowl upsets. Sibiryakov’s touchdown made the headlines; but he and Sibiryakov knew why that touchdown happened, and he felt his own inner warmth . . . and was that sinful pride or just self-recognition? And then he was held as no line had ever held him and the hours passed and no one on Mars could know where he was and when the patrol arrived they said, “The Israeli chaplain sent us.” And later Chaim Acosta, laconic for the first and only time, said simply, “I knew where you were. It happens to me sometimes.” Now Acosta shrugged and his graceful hands waved deprecation. “Scientifically speaking, Captain, I believe that I have, on occasion, a certain amount of extrasensory perception and conceivably a touch of some of the other psi faculties. The Rhinists at Tel Aviv are quite interested in me; but my faculties too often refuse to perform on laboratory command. But ‘miracle-working’ is a strong word. Remind me to tell you some time the story of the guaranteed genuine miracleworking rabbi from Lwow.”
“Call it miracles, call it ESP, you’ve got something, Acosta . . .”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned Joshua,” the rabbi smiled. “Surely you aren’t suggesting that I try a miracle to win your battle for you?”
“Hell with that,” snorted Fassbander. “It’s your men. They’ve got it fixed in their minds that you’re a . . . a saint No, you Jews don’t have saints, do you?”
“A nice question in semantics,” Chaim Acosta observed quietly.
“Well, a prophet. Whatever you people call it. And we’ve got to make men out of your boys. Stiffen their backbones, send ’em in there knowing they’re going to win.”
“Are they?” Acosta asked flatly.
“God knows. But they sure as hell won’t if they don’t think so. So it’s up to you.”
“What is?”
“They may pull a sneak attack on us, but I don’t think so. Way I see it, they’re as surprised and puzzled as we are; and they need time to think the situation over. We’ll attack before dawn tomorrow; and to make sure your Israelis go in there with fighting spirit, you’re going to curse them.”
“Curse my men?”
“Potztausend Sapperment noch einmal!” Captain Fassbander’s English was flawless, but not adequate to such a situation as this. “Curse them! The things, the aliens, the invaders, whatever the urverdammt bloody hell you want to call them!”
He could have used far stronger language without offending either chaplain. Both had suddenly realized that he was perfectly serious.
“A formal curse, Captain?” Chaim Acosta asked. “Anathema maranatha? Perhaps Father Malloy would lend me bell, book, and candle?”
Mule Malloy looked uncomfortable. “You read about such things, Captain,” he admitted. “They were done, a long time ago . . .”
“There’s nothing in your religion against it, is there, Acosta?”
“There is . . . precedent,” the Rabbi confessed softly.
“Then it’s an order, from your superior officer. I’ll leave the mechanics up to you. You know how it’s done. If you need anything . . . what kind of bell?”
“I’m afraid that was meant as a joke, Captain.”
“Well, these things are no joke. And you’ll curse them tomorrow morning before all your men.”
“I shall pray,” said Rabbi Chaim Acosta, “for guidance . . .” But the captain was already gone. He turned to his fellow priest. “Mule, you’ll pray for me too?” The normally agile hands hung limp at his side.
M
ule Malloy nodded. He groped for his rosary as Acosta silently left the room.
Now entertain conjecture of a time when two infinitesimal forces of men—one half-forgotten outpost garrison, one small scouting fleet—spend the night in readying themselves against the unknown, in preparing to meet on the morrow to determine, perhaps, the course of centuries for a galaxy.
Two men are feeding sample range-finding problems into the computer.
“That God-damned Fassbander,” says one. “I heard him talking to our commander. ‘You and your men who have never understood the meaning of discipline . . .”
“Prussians,” the other grunts. He has an Irish face and an American accent. “Think they own the earth. When we get through here, let’s dump all the Prussians into Texas and let ’em fight it out. Then we can call the state Kilkenny.”
“What did you get on that last? . . . Check. Fassbander’s ‘discipline’ is for peace—spit-and-polish to look pretty here in our sandy pink nowhere. What’s the pay-off? Fassbander’s great-grandfathers were losing two world wars while mine were creating a new nation out of nothing. Ask the Arabs if we have no discipline. Ask the British . . .”
“Ah, the British. Now my great-grandfather was in the IRA . . .”
Two men are integrating the electrodes of the wave-hurler.
“It isn’t bad enough we get drafted for this expedition to nowhere; we have to have an egg-eating Nangurian in command.”
“And a Tryldian scout to bring the first report What’s your reading there? . . . Check.”
“ ‘A Tryldian to tell a lie and a Nangurian to force it into truth,’ ” the first quotes.
“Now, brothers,” says the man adjusting the microvernier on the telelens, “the Goodman assures us these monsters are true. We must unite in love for each other, even Tryldians and Nangurians, and wipe them out. The Goodman has promised us his blessing before battle . . .”
“The Goodman,” says the first, “can eat the egg he was hatched from.”
“The Rabbi,” says a man checking the oxyhelms, “can take his blessing and shove it up Fassbander. I’m no Jew in his sense. I’m a sensible, rational atheist who happens to be an Israeli.”
“And I,” says his companion, “am a Romanian who believes in the God of my fathers and therefore gives allegiance to His state of Israel. What is a Jew who denies the God of Moses? To call him still a Jew is to think like Fassbander.”
“They’ve got an edge on us,” says the first. “They can breathe here. These oxyhelms run out in three hours. What do we do then? Rely on the Rabbi’s blessing?”
“I said the God of my fathers, and yet my greatgrandfather thought as you do and still fought to make Israel live anew. It was his son who, like so many others, learned that he must return to Jerusalem in spirit as well as body.”
“Sure, we had the Great Revival of orthodox religion. So where did it get us? Troops that need a Rabbi’s blessing before a commander’s orders.”
“Many men have died from orders. How many from blessings?”
“I fear that few die well who die in battle . . .” the man reads in Valkram’s great epic of the siege of Tolnishri.
“. . . for how [the man is reading of the eve of Agincourt in his micro-Shakespeare] can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?”
“. . . and if these do not die well [so Valkram wrote] how grievously must their bad deaths be charged against the Goodman who blesses them into battle . . .”
“And why not?” Chaim Acosta flicked the question away with a wave of his long fingers.
The bleep (even Acosta was not so linguistically formal as to call it a bubble jeep) bounced along over the sand toward the rise which overlooked the invaders’ ship. Mule Malloy handled the wheel with solid efficiency and said nothing.
“I did pray for guidance last night,” the rabbi asserted, almost as if in self-defense. “I . . . I had some strange thoughts for a while; but they make very little sense this morning. After all, I am an officer in the army. I do have a certain obligation to my superior officer and to my men. And when I became a rabbi, a teacher, I was specifically ordained to decide questions of law and ritual. Surely this case falls within that authority of mine.”
Abruptly the bleep stopped.
“What’s the matter, Mule?”
“Nothing . . . Wanted to rest my eyes a minute . . . Why did you become ordained, Chaim?”
“Why did you? Which of us understands all the infinite factors of heredity and environment which lead us to such a choice? Or even, if you will, to such a being chosen? Twenty years ago it seemed the only road I could possibly take; now . . . We’d better get going, Mule.”
The bleep started up again.
“A curse sounds so melodramatic and medieval; but is it in essence any different from a prayer for victory, which chaplains offer up regularly? As I imagine you did in your field Mass. Certainly all of your communicants are praying for victory to the Lord of Hosts—and as Captain Fassbander would point out, it makes them better fighting men. I will confess that even as a teacher of the law, I have no marked doctrinal confidence in the efficacy of a curse. I do not expect the spaceship of the invaders to be blasted by the forked lightning of Yahveh. But my men have an exaggerated sort of faith in me, and I owe it to them to do anything possible to strengthen their morale. Which is all the legion or any other army expects of chaplains anyway; we are no longer priests of the Lord, but boosters of morale—a type of sublimated YMCA secretary. Well, in my case, say YMHA.”
The bleep stopped again.
“I never knew your eyes to be so sensitive before,” Acosta observed tartly.
“I thought you might want a little time to think it over,” Malloy ventured.
“I’ve thought it over. What else have I been telling you? Now please, Mule. Everything’s all set. Fassbander will explode completely if I don’t speak my curse into this mike in two minutes.”
Silently Mule Malloy started up the bleep.
“Why did I become ordained?” Acosta backtracked. “That’s no question really. The question is why have I remained in a profession to which I am so little suited. I will confess to you, Mule, and to you only, that I have not the spiritual humility and patience that I might desire, I itch for something beyond the humdrum problems of a congregation or an army detachment. Sometimes I have felt that I should drop everything else and concentrate on my psi faculties, that they might lead me to this goal I seek without understanding. But they are too erratic. I know the law, I love the ritual, but I am not good as a rabbi, a teacher, because . . .”
For the third time the bleep stopped, and Mule Malloy said, “Because you are a saint.”
And before Chaim Acosta could protest, he went on, “Or a prophet, if you want Fassbander’s distinction. There are all kinds of saints and prophets. There are the gentle, humble, patient ones like Francis of Assisi and Job and Ruth—or do you count women? And there are God’s firebrands, the ones of fierce intellect and dreadful determination, who shake the history of God’s elect, the saints who have reached through sin to salvation with a confident power that is the reverse of the pride of the Lucifer, cast from the same ringing metal.”
“Mule . . .!” Acosta protested. “This isn’t you. These aren’t your words. And you didn’t learn these in parochial school . . .”
Malloy seemed not to hear him. “Paul, Thomas More, Catherine of Siena, Augustine,” he recited in rich cadence. “Elijah, Ezekiel, Judas Maccabaeus, Moses, David . . . You are a prophet, Chaim. Forget the rationalizing double talk of the Rhinists and recognize whence your powers come, how you were guided to save me, what the ‘strange thoughts’ were that you had during last night’s vigil of prayer. You are a prophet—and you are not going to curse men, the children of God.”
Abruptly Malloy slumped forward over the wheel. There was silence in the bleep. Chaim Acosta stared at his hands as if he knew no gesture for the situation.
“Gentlemen!” Capt
ain Fassbander’s voice was even more rasping than usual over the telecom. “Will you please get the blessed lead out and get up that rise? It’s two minutes, twenty seconds, past zero!”
Automatically Acosta depressed the switch and said, “Right away, Captain.”
Mule Malloy stirred and opened his eyes. “Was that Fassbander?”
“Yes . . . But there’s no hurry, Mule. I can’t understand it. What made you . . .?”
“I don’t understand it, either. Never passed out like that before. Doctor used to say that head injury in the Wisconsin game might—but after thirty years . . .”
Chaim Acosta sighed. “You sound like my Mule again. But before . . .”
“Why? Did I say something? Seems to me like there was something important I wanted to say to you.”
“I wonder what they’d say at Tel Aviv. Telepathic communication of subconscious minds? Externalization of thoughts that I was afraid to acknowledge consciously? Yes, you said something, Mule; and I was as astonished as Balaam when his ass spoke to him on his journey to . . . Mule!”
Acosta’s eyes were blackly alight as never before, and his hands flickered eagerly. “Mule, do you remember the story of Balaam? It’s in the fourth book of Moses . . .”
“Numbers? All I remember is he had a talking ass. I suppose there’s a pun on Mule?”
“Balaam, son of Beor,” said the Rabbi with quiet intensity, “was a prophet in Moab. The Israelites were invading Moab, and King Balak ordered Balaam to curse them. His ass not only spoke to him; more important, it halted and refused to budge on the journey until Balaam had listened to a message from the Lord . . .
“You were right, Mule. Whether you remember what you said or not, whether your description of me was God’s truth or the telepathic projection of my own ego, you were right in one thing: These invaders are men, by all the standards that we debated yesterday. Moreover they are men suited to Mars; our patrol reported them as naked and unprotected in this cold and this atmosphere. I wonder if they have scouted this planet before and selected it as suitable; that could have been some observation device left by them that trapped you in the pass, since we’ve never found traces of an earlier Martian civilization.
