Dark Benediction

brings a profit is pretty hard to put a stop to. There’s only one sure way to stop it. Kill the demand.”

“For women? Are you crazy, Joe?”

“They could bring in decent women. Women to marry. That’ll stop it.”

“But the kids. They can’t have kids.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s the problem, and they’ve got to start solving it sometime. Hell, up to now, they haven’t been trying to solve it. When the problem came up, and the kids were dying, everybody got hysterical and jerked the women back to Earth. That wasn’t a solution, it was an evasion. The problem is growth-control—in low gravity. It ought to have a medical answer. If this d’Annecy dame gets a chance to keep peddling her wares under the counter, well—she’ll force them to start looking for a solution.”

“I don’t know, Joe. Everybody said homosexuality would force them to start looking for it—after Doc Reiber made his survey. The statistics looked pretty black, but they didn’t do anything about it except send us a shipful of ministers. The fairies just tried to make the ministers.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Half the voters are women.”

“So? They didn’t do anything about homosex—”

“Relke, wise up. Listen, did you ever see a couple of Lesbians necking in a bar?”

Relke snickered. “Sure, once or twice.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Well, this once was kind of funny. You see, this one babe had on—”

“Never mind. You thought it was funny. Do you think it’s funny the way MacMillian and Wickers bill and coo?”

“That gets pretty damn nauseating, Joe.”

“Uh-huh, but the Lesbians just gave you a giggle. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know, Joe, it’s—”

“I’ll tell you why. You like dames. You can understand other guys liking dames. You like dames so much that you can even understand two dames liking each other. You can see what they see in each other. But it’s incongruous, so it’s funny. But you can’t see what two fairies see in each other, so that just gives you a bellyache. Isn’t that it?”

“Maybe, but what’s that got to do with the voters?”

“Ever think that maybe a woman would feel the same way in reverse? A dame could see what MacMillian and Wickers see in each other. The dame might morally disapprove, but at the same time she could sympathize. What’s more, she’d be plenty sure that she could handle that kind of competition if she ever needed to. She’s a woman, and wotthehell, Wickers is only a substitute woman. It wouldn’t worry her too much. Worry her morally, but not as a personal threat. Relke, Mme. d’Annecy’s racket is a personal threat to the home girl and the womenfolk.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Half the voters are women.”

Relke chuckled. “Migod, Joe, if Ellen heard about that ship…”

“Ellen?”

“My older sister. Old maid. Grim.”

“You’ve got the idea. If Parkeson thinks of all this…” His voice trailed off. “When is Larkin talking about crippling that ship?”

“About sundown, why?”

“Somebody better warn the d’Annecy dame.”

The cosmic gunfire had diminished. The Perseid shrapnel still pelted the dusty face of the plain, but the gram-impact-per-acre-second had dropped by a significant fraction, and with it fell the statistician’s estimate of dead men per square mile. There was an ion storm during the first half of B-shift, and the energized spans of high volt-age cable danced with fluttering demon light as the trace-pressure of the lunar “atmosphere” increased enough to start a glow discharge between conductors. High current surges sucked at the line, causing the breakers to hiccup. The breakers tried the line three times, then left the circuit dead and waited for the storm to pass. The storm meant nothing to the construction crews except an in-crease in headset noise.

Parkeson’s voice came drawling on the general call frequency, wading waist-deep through the interference caused by the storm. Relke leaned back against his safety strap atop the trusswork of the last tower and tried to listen. Parkeson was reading the Articles of Discipline, and listening was compulsory. All teams on the job had stopped work to hear him. Relke gazed across the plain toward the slender nacelles of the bird from Algiers in the distance. He had gotten used to the ache in his side where Kunz had kicked him, but it was good to rest for a time and watch the rocket and remember brown legs and a yellow dress. Properties of Earth. Properties belonging to the communion of humanity, from which fellowship a Looney was somehow cut off by 238,000 miles of physical separation.

“We’ve got a job to finish here,” Parkeson was telling the men.

Why? What was in space that was worth the wanting? What followed from its conquest? What came of finishing the job?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing anybody ever dreamed of or hoped for.

Parkeson scolded on. “I know the question that’s foremost in your minds,” his voice continued, “but you’d better forget it. Let me tell you what happens if this line isn’t finished by sundown. (But by God, it will be finished!) Listen, you wanted women. All right, now you’ve all been over to visit the uh—‘affectionate institution’—and you got what you wanted; and now the work is behind schedule. Who gives a damn about the project, eh? I know what you’re thinking. ‘That’s Parkeson’s worry.’ OK, so let’s talk about what you’re going to breathe for the next couple of periods. Let’s talk about how many men will wind up in the psycho-respiratory ward, about the overload on the algae tanks. That’s not your responsibility either, is it? You don’t have to breathe and eat. Hell, let Nature take care of air and water, eh? Sure. Now look around. Take a good look. All that’s between you and that hungry vacuum out there is ten pounds of man-made air and a little reinforced plastic. All that keeps you eating and drinking and breathing is that precarious life-cycle of ours at Copernicus. That plant-animal feedback loop is so delicately balanced that the biology team gets the cold shakes every time somebody sneezes or passes gas. It has to be constantly nursed. It has to be planned and kept on schedule. On Earth, Nature’s a plenum. You can chop down her forests, kill of} her deer and buffalo, and fill her air with smog and hot isotopes; the worst you can do is cause a few new deserts and dust bowls, and make things a little unpleasant for a while.

“Up here, we’ve got a little, bit of Nature cooped up in a bottle, and we’re in the bottle too. We’re cultured like mold on agar. The biology team has to chart the ecology for months in advance. It has to know the construction and survey teams are going to deliver exactly what they promise to deliver, and do it on schedule. If you don’t deliver, the ecology gets sick. If the ecology gets sick, you get sick.

“Do you want another epidemic of the chokers like we had three years back? That’s what’ll happen if there’s a work slowdown while everybody goes off on a sex binge at that ship. If the line isn’t finished before sundown, the ecology gets bled for another two weeks to keep that mine colony going, and the colony can’t return wastes to our cycle. Think it over, but think fast. There’s not much time. ‘We all breathe the same air’—on Earth, that’s just a political slogan. Here, we all breathe it or we all choke in it. How do you want it, men?”

Relke shifted restlessly on the tower. He glanced down at Novotny and the others who lounged around the foot of the steel skeleton listening to Parkeson. Lije caught his eye. He waved at Relke to haul up the hoist-bucket. Relke shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. Henderson gestured insistently for him to haul it up. Relke reeled the bucket in. It was empty, but chalked on the sides and bottom was a note from Lije: “They toll me what L and K did to you and your girl. I and Joe will take care of it, right after this sermon. You can spit on my fist first if you want. Lije.”

Relke gave him a half-hearted screw-twist signal and let the bucket go. Revenge was no good, and vicarious revenge was worse than no good; it was hollow. He thought of asking Joe to forget it, but he knew Joe wouldn’t