Upon a Sea of Stars (29 page)

“You will realize, sir, that it would have been out of the question for any of our own Elect to imperil his immortal soul by tampering with such powerful, unseen and unseeable forces, but—”

“But,” said Grimes, “Clarisse Lane has already demonstrated that she is damned, so you don’t mind using her as your cat’s-paw.”

“You put it very concisely, sir,” agreed Smith.

“I could say more, but I won’t. I just might lose my temper. But go on.”

“Sister Lane is not entirely human. She is descended from that Raul, the Stone Age savage who was brought to Earth from Kinsolving’s Planet. Many factors were involved in his appearance. It could be that the very fabric of the Continuum is worn thin, here on the Rim, and that lines of force, or fault lines, intersect at that world. It could be, as the Rhine Institute claimed at the time, that the loneliness and the fear of all the dwellers on the colonized Rim Worlds are somehow focused on Kinsolving. Be that as it may, it happened. And it happened too that, in the fullness of time, this Raul was accepted into the bosom of our Church.

“Raul, as you may know, was more than a mere telepath. Much more. He was a wizard, one of those who, in his own age, drew animals to the hunters’ spears by limning their likenesses on rock.”

Grimes interrupted. “Doesn’t the Bible say, somewhere, that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?”

“Yes. It is so written. But we did not know of the full extent of Raul’s talents when he was admitted into our Fold. We did not know of them until after his death, when his papers came into our possession.”

“But what are you playing at?” demanded Grimes. “Just what you are playing at in
our
back garden?” He had the bottle out again, and the little phial of cognac-flavored essence, and was mixing two more drinks. He held out one of them, the stronger, to Smith, who absentmindedly took it and raised it to his lips.

The Rector said, “Sir, I do not approve of your choice of words. Life is not a game. Life, death and the hereafter are not a game. We are not playing. We are working. Is it not written. ‘Work, for the night is coming?’ And you, sir, and I, as spacemen, know that the night is coming—the inevitable heat death of the Universe. . . .” He gulped more of his drink.

“You should visit Darsha some time,” said Grimes, “and their Tower of Darkness. You should see the huge clock that is the symbol of
their
God.” He added softly, “The clock is running down.”

“Yes, the clock is running down, the sands of time are running out. And there is much to be done, so much to be done. . . .”

“Such as?”

“To reestablish the eternal verities. To build a new Sinai, to see the Commandments graven afresh on imperishable stone. And then, perhaps, the heathen, the idolators, will take heed and tremble. And then, surely, the rule of Jehovah will come again, before the End.”

Grimes said reasonably enough, “But you people believe in predestination, don’t you? Either we’re damned or we aren’t, and nothing we do makes any difference.”

“I have learned by bitter experience,” Smith told him, “that it is impossible to argue with a heretic—especially one who is foredoomed to eternal damnation. But even you must see that if the Commandments are given anew to Man then we, the Elect, shall be elevated to our rightful place in the Universe.”

“Then God save us all,” said Grimes.

Smith looked at him suspiciously, but went on. “It is perhaps necessary that there should be a sacrifice, and, if that be so, the Lord has already delivered her into our hands. No, sir, do not look at me like that.
We
shall not kill her, neither by knife nor fire shall we slay her. But, inevitably, she will be the plaything of supernal powers when she, on the planet of her ancestral origin, her inherited talents intensified by drugs, calls to Jehovah, the true God, the God of the Old Testament, to make Himself known again to sinful men.”

There were flecks of white froth on Smith’s beard around his lips, a dribble of saliva down the hair on his chin. His eyes were glaring and bloodshot. Grimes thought,
in vino veritas.
He said, with a gentleness he did not feel, actuated only by self-interest, “Don’t you think that you’ve had enough, Rector? Isn’t it time that we both turned in?”

“Eh, what? When’m ready. But you understand now that you must not interfere.
You must not interfere.
”

“I understand,” said Grimes, thinking,
Too much and, not enough.
He found a tube of tablets in his suitcase, shook one into the palm of his hand. “Here,” he said, offering it. “You’d better take this.”

“Wha’s it for?”

“It’ll sweeten the breath and sober you up. It’ll be too bad for you if the Presbyter sees the state you’re in.”
And too bad for me,
he thought.

“ ’M not drunk.”

“Of course not. Just a little—unsteady.”

“Don’t really need . . . But jus’ to oblige, y’un-derstan’.”

Smith swallowed the tablet, his Adam’s apple working convulsively. Grimes handed him a glass of cold water to wash it down. It acted almost immediately. The bearded man shuddered, then got steadily to his feet. He glared at Grimes, but it was no longer a fanatical glare. “Good night, sir,” he snapped.

“Good night, Rector,” Grimes replied.

When he was alone he thought of playing back the record of the evening’s conversations, but thought better of it. For all he knew, Smith might be able to switch the hidden microphone and scanner back on from his own quarters—and the less he knew of the tiny device hidden in the starboard epaulet of his white mess jacket, the better.

He got out of his clothes and into his bunk, switched off the light; but, unusually for him, his sleep was uneasy and nightmare-ridden. He supposed that it was Clarisse Lane’s fault that she played a leading part in most of the dreams.

The voyage wore on, and on, and even as the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive tumbled and receded down the dark infinities, so did the good ship
Piety
fall through the twisted Continuum. On one hand was the warped convoluted Galactic Lens and ahead, a pulsating spiral of iridescent light against the ultimate darkness, was the Kinsolving sun.

And this ship, unlike other ships of Grimes’s wide experience, was no little man-made oasis of light and warmth in the vast, empty desert of the night. She was cold, cold, and her atmosphere carried always the faint acridity of disinfectant, and men and women talked in grave, low voices and did not mingle, and never was there the merest hint of laughter.

Clarisse Lane was not being maltreated—Grimes made sure of that—and was even allowed to meet the Commodore for a daily conversation, but always heavily chaperoned. She was the only telepath in the ship, which, while the interstellar drive was in operation, depended entirely upon the Carlotti equipment for deep space communication. But the Rector and the Presbyter did not doubt that she was in constant touch with Mayhew back at Port Forlorn—and Grimes did not doubt it either. She told him much during their meetings—things about which she could not possibly have known if there had not been a continual interchange of signals. Some of this intelligence was confirmed by messages addressed to Grimes and received, in the normal way, by the ship’s electronic radio officer.

So they were obliged to be careful, these Neo-Calvinists. The chosen instrument for their experiment in practical theology was now also an agent for the Rim Worlds Confederacy. “But what does it matter?” Smith said to Grimes on one of the rare occasions that he spoke at length to him. “What does it matter? Perhaps it was ordained this way. Your friend Mayhew will be the witness to the truth, a witness who is not one of us. He will see through her eyes, hear with her ears, feel with every fiber of her being. The Word propagated by ourselves alone would be scoffed at. But there will be credence given it when it is propagated by an unbeliever.”

“If anything happens,” said Grimes.

But he couldn’t argue with these people, and they couldn’t argue with him. There was just no meeting of minds. He remembered a theory that he had once heard advanced by a ship’s doctor. “Long ago,” the man had said, “very long ago, there was a mutation. It wasn’t a physically obvious one, but as a result of it Homo Sapiens was divided into two separate species:
Homo credulens
, those capable of blind faith in the unprovable, and
Homo incredulens
, those who aren’t. The vast majority of people are, of course, hybrids.”

Grimes had said, “And I suppose that all the pure
Homo incredulens
stock is either atheist or agnostic.”

“Not so.” The doctor had laughed. “Not so. Agnostic—yes. But don’t forget that the atheist, like the theist, makes a definite statement for which he can produce no proof whatsoever.”

An atheist would have been far less unhappy aboard this ship than a tolerant agnostic like Grimes.

But even the longest, unhappiest voyage comes to an end. A good planetfall was made—whatever they believed,
Piety’s
people were excellent navigators—and, the Mannschenn Drive switched off, the Inertial Drive ticking over just enough to produce minimal gravitational field, the ship was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the blue and green mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness.

The old charts—or copies of them—were out, and Grimes was called up to the control room. “Yes,” he told Smith, stabbing a finger down on the paper, “that’s where the spaceport was. Probably even now the apron’s not too overgrown for a safe landing. Captain Spence, when he came down in
Epsilon Eridani
, reported creepers over everything, but nothing heavy.”

“It is a hundred and fifty standard years since he was here,” said Smith. “At least. I would suggest one of the beaches.”

“Risky,” Grimes told him. “They shelve very steeply and according to our records violent storms are more frequent than otherwise.” He turned to the big screen upon which a magnification of the planet was appearing. “There, just to the east of the sunrise terminator. That’s the major continent—Farland, it was called—where the capital city and the spaceport were situated. You see that river, with the S bend? Step up the magnification, somebody. . . .”

Now there was only the glowing picture of the island continent, filling all the screen, and that expanded, so that there was only the sprawling, silvery S, and toward the middle of it, on either bank, a straggle of buildings was visible.

“The spaceport should be about ten miles to the west,” said Grimes.

“Yes,” agreed Smith, taking a long pointer to the screen. “I think that’s it.”

“Then make it Landing Stations, Rector,” ordered Presbyter Cannan.

“Sir,” demurred Smith, “you cannot put a big ship down as though she were a dinghy.”

“Lord, oh Lord,” almost prayed the Presbyter. “To have come so far, and then to be plagued by the dilatoriness of spacemen!”

I wish that this were my control room,
thought Grimes.

But
Piety’s
crew worked well and efficiently, and in a very short space of time the intercom speakers were blatting strings of orders: “Secure all for landing stations!” “All idlers to their quarters!” and the like. Gyroscopes hummed and whined and the ship tilted relative to the planet until its surface was directly beneath her, and the first of the sounding rockets, standard equipment for a survey expedition but not for landing on a world with spaceport control functioning, were fixed.

Parachutes blossomed in the upper atmosphere and the flares, each emitting a great steamer of smoke, ignited. Somebody was singing. It was the Presbyter.

“Let the fiery, cloudy pillar
Guide me all my journey through. . . .”

Even Grimes was touched by the spirit of the occasion. What if this crazy, this impious (for so he was beginning to think of it) experiment did work? What would happen? What would be unleashed upon the worlds of men? Who was it—the Gnostics?—who had said that the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New? He shivered as he sat in his acceleration chair.

She was dropping steadily, was
Piety
, following the first of her flares. But there was drift down there—perhaps a gale in the upper atmosphere, or a jet stream. The Inertial Drive generators grumbled suddenly as Smith applied lateral thrust. Down she dropped, and down, almost falling free, but under the full control of her captain. On the target screen, right in the center, highly magnified, the cluster of ruins that had been a spaceport was clearly visible, tilting like tombstones in a deserted graveyard, ghastly in the blue light of the rising sun.

Down she dropped, plunging through the wisps of cirrus, and there was a slight but appreciable rise of temperature as skin friction heated the metal of her hull. Smith slowed the rate of descent. The Presbyter started muttering irritably to himself.

There was no longer need for magnification on the screen. The great rectangle of the landing field was clearly visible, the vegetation that covered it lighter in color—eau de Nile against the surrounding indigo—than the brush outside the area. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning there, its column of smoke rising almost vertically. The growth among which it had fallen was slowly smoldering.

Grimes looked at Smith. The man was concentrating hard. Beads of perspiration were forming on his upper cheeks, running down into his beard. But this was more important than an ordinary landing. So much hinged upon it. And, perhaps, malign (or benign) forces might be gathering their strength to overset the ship before her massive tripedal landing gear reached the safety of the planetary surface.

But she was down.

There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creakings, the softest sighing of shock-absorbers. She was down, and the Inertial Drive generators muttered to themselves and then were quiet. She was down, and the soughing of the fans seemed to make the silence all the more silent.

Presbyter Cannan broke it. He turned in his chair to address Grimes. “Commodore,” he asked as he pointed toward a distant peak, a black, truncated cone against the blue sky, “Commodore Grimes, what is the name of that mountain?”