Dark Benediction

had that bottle of fizzling giggle water up close to his helmet that way, Joe?”

“I don’t know. Reading the label, maybe.”

“He sho’ muss have had something on his mine.”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“Yeah. BLOOIE. Man!”

Relke had led the girl out through the lock in the reactor nacelle in order to evade Brodanovitch and a possible command to return to camp. They sat in Novotny’s runabout and giggled cozily together at the fuzzy map of Earth that floated in the darkness above them. On the ship’s fuselage, the warning light over the airlock hatch began winking, indicating that the lock was in use. The girl noticed it and nudged him. She pointed at the light.

“Somebody coming out,” Relke muttered. “Maybe Suds.

We’d better get out of here.” He flipped the main switch and started the motor. He was backing onto the road when Giselle caught his arm.

“Beel! Look at the light!”

He glanced around. It was flashing red.

“Malfunction signal. Compressor trouble, probably. It’s nothing. Let’s take a ride. Joe won’t care.” He started backing again.

“Poof!” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Poof. It opened, and poof—” She puckered her lips and blew a little puff of steam in the cold air to show him. “So. Like smoke.”

He turned the car around in the road and looked back again. The hatch had closed. There was no one on the ladder. “Nobody came out.”

“Non. Just poof.”

He edged the car against the trolley rails, switched to autosteering, and let it gather speed.

“Beel?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Where you taking me?”

He caught the note of alarm in her voice and slowed down again. She had come on a dare after several drinks, and the drinks were wearing off. The landscape was frighteningly alien, and the sense of falling into bottomlessness was ever-present.

“You want to go back?” he asked gloomily.

“I don’t know. I don’t like it out here.”

“You said you wanted some ground under your feet.”

“But it doesn’t feel like ground when you walk on it.”

“Rather be inside a building?”

She nodded eagerly.

“That’s where we’re going.”

“To your camp?”

“God, no! I’m planning to keep you to myself.”

She laughed and snuggled closer to him. “You can’t. Madame d’Annecy will not permit—”

“Let’s talk about something else,” he grunted quickly. “OK. Let’s talk about Monday.”

“Which Monday?”

“Next Monday. It’s my birthday. When is it going to be Monday, Bill?”

“You said Bill.”

“Beel? That’s your name, isn’t eet? Weeliam Q. Relke, who weel not tell me what ees the Q?”

“But you said Bill.”

She was silent for a moment. “OK, I’m a phony,” she muttered. “Does the inquisition start now?”

He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. “When’s it going to be Monday?” she murmured.

“When’s it going to be Monday where?”

“Here, anywhere, silly!”

He laughed. “When will it be Monday all over the universe?”

She thought for a moment. “Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?”

“It won’t. We just have periods, hitches, and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period’s from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don’t count days. So I don’t know when it’ll be Monday.”

It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. “Don’t you even have hours?” She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.

“Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour.”

She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. “When it’s Monday on Earth, it’ll be Monday here too,” she announced flatly.

Relke laughed. “OK, we’ll call it that.”

“So when will it start being Monday on Earth?”

“Well, it’ll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It’s August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer.”

She looked really worried.

“You take birthdays pretty seriously?” he asked.

“Only this one. I’ll be—” She broke off and closed her mouth.

“Pick a time zone,” Relke offered, “and I’ll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you’d be now, maybe?”

She shook her head.

“Where you were born?”

“That would be—” She stopped again. “Never mind. Forget it.” She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.

Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.

“That’s a building?” she asked.

“That’s an entrance. The ‘building’s’ underground. Come on, let’s seal up.”

“What’s down there?”

“Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man.”

“Somebody lives down there?”

“Not yet. The line’s still being built. They’ll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving.”

“What do we want to go down there for?”

He looked at her forlornly. “You’d rather go back to the ship?”

She seemed to pull herself together professionally. She laughed and put her arms around him and whispered something in French against his ear. She kissed him hard, pressed her forehead against his, and grinned. “C’mon, babee! Let’s go downstairs.”

Relke felt suddenly cold inside. He had wanted to see what it felt like to be alone with a woman again in a quiet place, away from the shouting, howling revelry that had been going on aboard the ship. Now he knew what it was going to feel like. It was going to feel counterfeit. “Christ!” he grunted angrily. “Let’s go back!” He reached roughly around her and cut on the switch again. She recoiled suddenly and gaped at him as he started the motor and turned the bug around.

“Hey!” She was staring at him oddly, as if seeing him for ‘the first time.

Relke kept his face averted and his knuckles were white on the steering bar. She got up on her knees on the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bill. Good Lord, you’re crying!”

He choked out a curse as the bug hit the side of the cut and careened around on the approach to the road. He lost control, and the runabout went off the approach and slid slowly sideways down a gentle slope of crushed-