Dark Benediction

listen. The pusher felt his own integrity was involved, and a matter of jurisdictional ethics: nobody can push my men around but me. It was gang ethics, but it seemed inevitable somehow. Where there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. In the absence of the family, there had to be the gang, and fear made it quarrelsome, jealous, and proud.

Relke leaned back against his strap and glanced up to-ward Earth. The planet was between quarter and half phase, for the sun was lower in the west. He watched it and tried to feel something more than a vague envy. Sometimes the heartsick nostalgia reached the proportions of idolatrous adoration of Gaea’s orb overhead, only to subside into a grudging resentment of the gulf between worlds. Earth—it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of_, suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about short-horn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.

Watching her crescent, he felt again that vague anger of separation, that resentment against those who stayed at home, who had no cause for constant fear, who could live without the tense expectancy of sudden death haunting every moment. One of them was Fran, and another was the one who had taken her from him. He looked away quickly and tried to listen to the coordinator.

“This is no threat,” Parkeson was saying. “If the line isn’t finished on time, then the consequences will just happen, that’s all. Nobody’s going to punish you, but there are a few thousand men back at the Crater who have to breathe air with you. If they have to breathe stink next period—because you guys were out having one helluva party with Madame d’Annecy’s girls—you can figure how popular you’ll be. That’s all I’ve got to say. There’s still time to get the work back on schedule. Let’s use it.”

Parkeson signed off. The new engineer who was replacing Brodanovitch gave them a brief pep-talk, implying that Parkeson was a skunk and would be forced to eat his own words before sundown. It was the old hard-guy- soft-guy routine: first a bawling-out and then a buttering-up. The new boss offered half of his salary to the first team to forge ahead of its own work schedule. It was not stated nor even implied that Parkeson was paying him back.

The work was resumed. After half an hour, the safety beeper sounded on all frequencies, and men switched back to general call. Parkeson and his party were already heading back toward Copernicus.

“Blasting operation at the next tower site will occur in ten minutes,” came the announcement. “Demol team requests safety clearance over all of zones two and three, from four forty to five hundred hours. There will be scatter-glass in both zones. Zone two is to be evacuated immediately, and all personnel in zone three take line-of-sight cover from the red marker. I repeat: there will be scatter- glass…”

“That’s us,” said Novotny when it was over. “Everybody come on. Brax, Relke, climb down.”

Braxton swore softly in a honeysuckle drawl. It never sounded like cursing, which it wasn’t, but like a man marveling at the variety of vicissitudes invented by an ingenious universe for the bedevilment of men. “I sweah, when the angels ahn’t shootin’ at us from up in Perseus, it’s the demol boys. Demol says froggie, and eve’body jumps. It gives ‘em that suhtain feelin’ of impohtance. Y’all know what I think? I got a thee-orry. I think weah all really dead, and they don’ tell us it’s hell weah in, because not tellin’ us is paht of the tohture.”

“Get off the damn frequency, Brax, and stay off!” Novotny snapped when the Alabaman released his mic button. “I’ve told you and Henderson before—either learn to talk fast, or don’t talk on the job. If somebody had a slow leak, he’d be boiling blood before he could scream—with you using the frequency for five minutes to say ‘yeah.’”

“Mistuh Novotny! My mothuh always taught me to speak slowly and de-stinct-ly. If you think that yo’ Yankee upbringin’…”

Joe rapped on his helmet until he shut up, then beck-oned to Henderson. “Lije, we got twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, Joe, want to go see a couple of guys now?” He flashed white teeth and stared back toward the barrack train.

“Think we can handle it in twenty minutes?”

“I don’ know. It seem like a short time to do a real good job of it, but maybe if we don’t waste any on preliminary fisticuffin’…”

“Hell, they didn’t waste any ceremony on Relke.”

“Less go, then!” He grinned at Relke and held out his fist. “Spit on it?”

Relke shook his head. Henderson laughed. “Wanted to see if you’d go ptooey in your helmet.”

“Come on, Lije. The rest of you guys find cover.”

Relke watched the two of them lope off toward the rolling barracks. “Hey, Joe,” he called after a few seconds.

The lopers stopped to look back. “Relke?”

“Yeah. Don’t lose.”

“What?”

“They’ll say I sicced you. Don’t lose.”

“Don’t worry.” They loped again. The longer Relke watched them, the less he liked the idea. If they didn’t do a pretty thorough job on Kunz and Larkin, things would be worse for Relke than if they did nothing at all. Then there was the movement to think about; he didn’t know to what extent they looked out for their own.

Relke walked out of the danger zone and hiked across the hill where he could get a clear view of the rocket. He stopped for a while on the slope and watched four distant figures moving around on the ground beneath the towering ship. For a moment, he thought they were women, but then he saw that one of them was coiling mooring cable, and he knew they were ship’s crew. What sort of men had the d’Annecy women been able to hire for such a job? he wondered.

He saw that they were getting ready to lift ship. Lift ship!

Relke was suddenly running toward them without knowing why. Whenever he topped a rise of ground and could see them, he tried calling them, but they were not using the project’s suit frequency. Finally he found their voices on the seldom used private charter band, but they were speaking French.

One of the men looped a coil of cable over his shoulder and started up the ladder toward the lock. Relke stopped atop an outcropping. He was still two or three miles from the ship. The “isobar” valve system for the left knee of his suit had jammed, and it refused to take up the increased pressure caused by flexure. It was like trying to bend a fully inflated rubber tire, and he hobbled about for a moment with one leg stiff as a crutch.

“Listen!” he called on the p.c. frequency. “You guys at the ship. Can you hear me?” He was panting, and he felt a little panicky. The man on the ladder stopped climbing and looked around.

There was a staccato exchange in French.

“No, no! Over here. On the rock.” He waved at them and jumped a few times. “Look toward the camp. On the rock.”

They conversed heatedly among themselves for a time. “Don’t any of you speak English?” he begged.

They were silent for a moment. “Whoevair ees?” one of them ventured. “You conversation with wrong radio, M’sieur. Switch a button.”

“No, no. I’m trying to call you…”

A carrier drowned him out.

“We close for business,” the man said. “We go now.” He started climbing again.

“Listen!” Relke yelled. “Ten thousand dollars. Everything.”

“You crazy man.”

“Look, it won’t get you in any trouble. I’ve got plenty in the bank. I’ll pay—”

The carrier cut him off again.

“You crazy. Get off the air. We do not go to Earth now.”

“Wait! Listen! Tell Giselle… No, let me talk to her. Get her to use the radio. It’s important.”

“I tell you, we close for business now.” The man climbed in the airlock. The others climbed up behind. They were, jeering at him. This time it sounded like Arabic. He watched until they were all inside.

White fury lanced the ground and spread in a white sheet beneath the ship and roiled up in a tumult of dust and expanding gasses. It climbed on a white fan, gathering velocity. Relke could still make it out as a ship when its course began arcing away from the vertical. It was beginning a trajectory in the direction of Copernicus. When it