Dark Benediction

“Uh-uh! You’re nothing to me, fellow. I don’t care who I haul, as long as it’s legal. Now do you want a ride, or don’t you?”

He nodded curtly and stalked back to find quarters. “Stay outa my cabin,” she bellowed after him.

Roki grunted disgustedly. The pilot was typical of Daleth civilization. It was still a rough, uncouth planet with a thinly scattered population, a wild frontier, and growing pains. The girl was the product of a wildly expanding tough-fisted culture with little respect for authority. It occurred to him immediately that she might be thinking of selling him to the Solarian officials—as the man who blasted the mercy ship.

“Prepare to lift,” came the voice of the intercom. “Two minutes before blast-off.”

Roki suppressed an urge to scramble out of the ship and call the whole thing off. The rockets belched, coughed, and then hissed faintly, idling in wait for a command. Roki stretched out on his bunk, for some of these older ships were rather rough on blast-off. The hiss became a thunder, and the Idiot moved skyward—first slowly, then with a spurt of speed. When it cleared the atmosphere, there was a sudden lurch as it shed the now empty booster burners. There was a moment of dead silence, as the ship hovered without power. Then the faint shriek of the ion streams came to his ears—as the ion drive became useful in the vacuum of space. He glanced out the port to watch the faint streak of luminescence focus into a slender needle of high-speed particles, pushing the Idiot ever higher in a rush of acceleration.

He punched the intercom button. “Not bad, for a Dalethian,” he called admiringly.

“Keep your opinions to yourself,” growled Daleth Incorporated.

The penetration to higher C-levels came without subjective sensation. Roki knew it was happening when the purr from the reactor room went deep-throated and when the cabin lights went dimmer. He stared calmly out the port, for the phenomenon of penetration never ceased to thrill him.

The transition to high-C began as a blue-shift in the starlight. Distant, dull-red stars came slowly brighter, whiter—until they burned like myriad welding arcs in the black vault. They were not identical with the stars of the home continuum, but rather, projections of the same star-masses at higher C-levels of five-space, where the velocity of light was gradually increasing as the Idiot climbed higher in the C- component.

At last he had to close the port, for the starlight was becoming unbearable as its wave-length moved into the ultra-violet and the X-ray bands. He watched on a fluorescent viewing screen. The projective star-masses were flaring into supernovae, and the changing continuums seemed to be collapsing toward the ship in the blue-shift of the cosmos. As the radiant energy increased, the cabin became warmer, and the pilot set up a partial radiation screen.

At last the penetration stopped. Roki punched the intercom again. “What level are we on, Daleth?”

“Ninety thousand,” she replied curtly.

Roki made a wry mouth. She had pushed it up to the red line without a blink. It was O.K.—if the radiation screens held out. If they failed to hold it, the ship would be blistered into a drifting dust cloud.

“Want me to navigate for you?” he called.

“I’m capable of handling my own ship,” she barked.

“I’m aware of that. But I have nothing else to do. You might as well put me to work.”

She paused, then softened a little. “O.K., come on forward.”

She swung around in her chair as he entered the cabin, and for the first time, he noticed that, despite the close-cropped hair and the dungarees and the cigar-smoking, she was quite a handsome girl—handsome, proud, and highly capable. Daleth, the frontier planet, bred a healthy if somewhat unscrupulous species.

“The C-maps are in that case,” she said, jerking her thumb toward a filing cabinet. “Work out a course for maximum radiant thrust.”

Roki frowned. “Why not a least-time course?”

She shook her head. “My reactors aren’t too efficient. We need all the boost we can get from external energy. Otherwise we’ll have to dive back down for fuel.”

Worse and worse!—Roki thought as he dragged out the C-maps. Flying this boat to Sol would have been a feat of daring two centuries ago. Now, in an age of finer ships, it was a feat of idiocy.

Half an hour later, he handed her a course plan that would allow the Idiot to derive about half of its thrust from the variations in radiation pressure from the roaring inferno of the high-level cosmos. She looked it over without change of expression, then glanced at him curiously, after noting the time.

“You’re pretty quick,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You’re hardly stupid. Why did you pull such a stupid boner?”

Roki stiffened. “I thought you planned to regard that as none of your business.”

She shrugged and began punching course-settings into the courser. “Sorry, I forgot.”

Still angry, he said, “I don’t regard it as a boner. I’d do it again.”

She shrugged again and pretended a lack of interest.

“Space-smuggling could be the death of the galaxy,” he went on. “That’s been proven. A billion people once died on Tau II because somebody smuggled in a load of non-Tauian animals—for house pets. I did only what history has proven best.”

“I’m trying to mind my own business,” she growled, eyeing him sourly.

Roki fell silent and watched her reshape the radiation screen to catch a maximum of force from the flare of energy that blazed behind them. Roki was not sure that he wanted her to mind her own business. They would have to bear each other’s presence for several months, and it would be nice to know how things stood.

“So you think it was a stupid boner,” he continued at last. “So does everyone else. It hasn’t been very pleasant.”

She snorted scornfully as she worked. “Where I come from, we don’t condemn fools. We don’t need to. They just don’t live very long, not on Daleth.”

“And I am a fool, by your code?”

“How should I know? If you live to a ripe old age and get what you want, you probably aren’t a fool.”

And that, thought Roki, was the Dalethian golden rule. If the universe lets you live, then you’re doing all right. And there was truth in it, perhaps. Man was born with only one right—the right to a chance at proving his fitness. And that right was the foundation of every culture, even though most civilized worlds tried to define “fitness” in terms of cultural values. Where life was rough, it was rated in terms of survival.

“I really don’t mind talking about it,” he said with some embarrassment. “I have nothing to hide.”

“That’s nice.”

“Do you have a name—other than your firm name?”

“As far as you’re concerned, I’m Daleth Incorporated.” She gave him a suspicious look that lingered a while and became contemplative. “There’s only one thing I’m curious about—why are you going to Sol?”

He smiled wryly. “If I told a Dalethian that, she would indeed think me a fool.”

Slowly the girl nodded. “I see. I know of Cophian ethics. If an officer’s blunder results in someone’s death, he either proves that it was not a blunder or he cuts his throat—ceremonially, I believe. Will you do that?”

Roki shrugged. He had been away from Coph a long time. He didn’t know.

“A stupid custom,” she said.

“It manages to drain off the fools, doesn’t it? It’s better than having society try them and execute them forcibly for their crimes. On Coph, a man doesn’t need to be afraid of society. He needs only to be afraid of his own weakness. Society’s function is to protect individuals against unfortunate accidents, but not against their own blunders. And when a man blunders, Coph simply excludes him from the protectorate. As an outcast, he sacrifices himself. It’s not too bad a system.”

“You can have it.”

“Dalethian?”

“Yeah?”

“You have no personal anger against what I did?”

She frowned at him contemptuously. “Uh-uh! I judge no one. I judge no one unless I’m personally involved. Why are you worried about what others think?”

“In our more highly developed society,” he said stiffly, “a man inevitably grows a set of thinking-habits called