Dark Benediction

“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