The Voices of Heaven (28 page)

It took another couple of hours to get all the talking done. But everything ends, if you just wait long enough, and finally Jimmy Queng raised his hand.

"Let me put it like this," he said. "Is it the sense of the meeting that, first, we send Barry di Hoa up to check the orbiter; and, second, if it turns out that it is feasible and safe to do so, then to install antimatter fuel to expedite its function; and finally, if necessary, to consider scrapping
Corsair
for raw materials?"

"Not consider! Do it!" someone yelled, but Jimmy was determined.

"We can't make that decision now," he said. "Leave it as an open option. As to the rest of it—?"

The roar that answered him was pretty nearly unanimous. "So be it," he said. "I'll talk to the captain about when the shuttle will be available for you, Barry—and meanwhile the meeting is adjourned. Let's go home."

The "go home" part was easy for him to say, and he did leave the hall then, along with about half the Millenarists. It wasn't easy for me. People crowded around me. Some wanted to shake my hand. Some asked for details about my qualifications to handle antimatter fuel. Some just wanted to wish me luck. It all took time, and Theophan, Marcus, Jacky Schottke and I were almost the last ones out of the meeting hall.

Theophan paused outside the door to give me a happy hug. "We did it, Barry," she said. "God, this stuff wears me out. Talk, talk, talk—but it was worth it."

Marcus gave a faintly disapproving cough—about the hug, I supposed. "At least the rain's stopped," he pointed out. He sounded as though he wanted to be thanked for it.

Jacky Schottke didn't speak. He was gazing up at the sky, as though he were listening for something. There was nothing up there that I could see, although the clouds were beginning to break.

"Well, good night," Theophan said, yawning. "Tomorrow I'll get on Jimmy Queng's case and make sure he sets a date for you to go up in the shuttle—"

Jacky stirred. "I don't think so," he said.

At first I didn't know what he was talking about. Then I heard the sound he had been listening for—a growing roar, loud but distant. I thought for a minute it might be thunder. Then I just hoped it was.

It wasn't. "The son of a bitch!" Theophan shouted, suddenly wide-awake again. She was staring at the sky.

Then I saw it, too—off toward the downstream horizon, a moving brightness behind the thinning clouds. "What is it? Is that the shuttle?"

She snarled, "You damn bet it's the shuttle. The bastard's taken off for his ship."

Jacky said mournfully, "I was afraid of that, when I saw he took Jillen with him when he left. He's gone, Barry. I doubt he'll be coming back to us until he figures out some way to save his ship."

19

AGAIN there is a matter that is not understood. You have stated that the "town meeting" prescribed the actions for humans on Pava. Yet you also state that Garoldtscharka did not conform to the decisions that were taken at the meeting. How is that possible?

Why, that's the easiest thing in the world to understand. Yes, we have laws. But, yes, we also have people who break the laws. That's why all the laws have punishments written into them for the people who break them.

Then Garoldtscharka was "punished" in some manner?

Ah, well, no. Not exactly. In order to punish somebody you first have to catch him. Garold had taken himself out of our reach. He and Jillen flew themselves right up to
Corsair
in the shuttle, and once he was in orbit he stayed there.

He not only wouldn't come back down, he wouldn't even discuss the subject. He refused to talk on the radio to anybody but Friar Tuck, and whatever was said between them went no further. Their conversations were no one else's business, so the reverend said. All the reverend would add, benevolently smiling, was to tell us to be patient, dear ones, the captain knows what he is doing, he is acting for the best of all of us, and we just have to trust him.

I didn't, though. For that matter, it seemed that hardly anyone did but the most devoted Millenarists. Those had formed solid ranks behind Captain Tscharka after the meeting in support of his position that nobody had anything to say about
Corsair
and its cargo but himself. Very few others bought that, and so we were divided into hostile camps.

That brought a whole bunch of old problems to the fore again.

What I'm talking about now is religious problems, which are the kind I hate most. There were protest meetings in most of the churches; there were bitter arguments between Millenarists and their supposedly heretical next-door neighbors, and sometimes the arguments got violent.

Of course, not all the squabbles were serious, or at least I didn't think they were. The one that struck me as funniest was when our tiny band of Wiccas, the old witch-cult people, organized a protest demonstration against Tscharka in the square outside the meeting house.

No one really minded them demonstrating, at least in principle; that was their right. Besides, there only were about six of the Wiccas altogether, and their demonstration wasn't particularly noisy. What made a problem was that, for religious reasons, they announced they could only demonstrate effectively while they were "skyclad." What they actually meant by "skyclad" turned out to be "naked."

Even that was no particular problem for most of us—who cared if the Wiccas wanted to display their generally not-very-exciting nude bodies?—but our equally tiny group of hard-shell Baptists got really upset. The Baptists weren't defending Tscharka. They were as mad at him as anybody else, but they also firmly believed that all that bare flesh was inciting to sin. That offended them deeply. They made so much noise about it that cooler heads had to arbitrate. When the Wiccas finally agreed to confine their future skyclad activities to remote areas of the woods that one simmered down.

But the colony was still seriously divided, and that wasn't funny at all.

I didn't think so, anyway. I was frustrated and angry. I'd finally got myself started on what I thought was going to be a productive course of action. I wanted to charge ahead with it . . . and that bastard Tscharka had foreclosed it on me without warning.

Was I going through the beginning of those mood swings that meant trouble was on its way? I don't know. It didn't occur to me at the time. I knew I was in an up-and-down state, but I accounted for that by objective factors.

But there it was. I don't handle frustration very well, at least not when my medication's running thin. I found the situation depressing. And, as you know, I don't like to be depressed. It scares me.

The best antidote I know for depression is work, and I made a lot of it for myself.

The community kept finding jobs for me at its own regular chores, but when those were done I added another job of my own. If I couldn't go up to the orbiter just then I could do the next best thing. So I spent long hours over the screen in Jacky Schottke's apartment, going over and over the specs on the factory orbiter.

I know you keep saying that you want me to tell you everything, but that includes a lot. Should I mention that the weather stayed bad, cold, wet and windy? Or that a pack of goobers got into one of the riverside farm plots and sucked the juice out of every single tomato and green pepper on the vines? Or that we had a sudden cluster of those little quakes that I thought I had been getting used to, but hadn't? I noticed all those things, of course. You couldn't help it. But my thoughts were all on the orbiter.

The schematics told me a lot. The factory certainly had been designed to make use of any energy source that came along, including antimatter; there was an antimatter-fueled magnetohydrodynamic power generator built in, just like the ones on spaceships—at least, it had been built in, as part of the original plan.

But that brought up the question the screen couldn't answer for me. Was that system still there?

That was the worrisome unknown. I knew that over the years the orbiter had scrounged materials wherever it could find them. I knew it had eaten up parts of itself when its programming allowed it to make the assumption that the scrapped systems were of a lower priority than the new goods it was programmed to make.

Had some of those recycled parts been in the standby fuel system?

I could find no way of answering that question—until Madeleine Hartly offered to help me find one.

We had both been set to checking food stored in the warehouse to make sure none of it was spoiled. When I complained about my problem to her she volunteered to show me how to interrogate the factory itself, so between work and supper we went to her apartment to use her screen—she didn't want to make the trek over to mine.

Naturally Geronimo trailed along after me, but Madeleine didn't mind. She even rustled through her cupboards and found some raisins to give him—well, I don't suppose they were really raisins. I don't think they'd originally been actual grapes, anyway, but they were little dried fruits that were sweet enough to please Geronimo. Then she sat down at her screen to access the orbiter.

A moment later she looked up, frowning. "That's funny, Barry. It's asking me for a password," she said. "It never did that before. Wait a minute—"

And she tried another combination, and this time she did get a response. The legend on the screen said:

Entrance code required. Access to operating programs is temporarily restricted, pending resolution of new manufacturing instructions.

"Whatever that means," I said. The operating system in Freehold's computers was pretty ancient, naturally enough, and one that was unfamiliar to me.

She looked annoyed. "I guess what it means is what it says. We're blocked out. Maybe Jimmy Queng was afraid somebody would sneak in a manufacturing order before we made sure you can fuel it, so he embargoed the system. Or Captain Tscharka did it from his ship."

"Can he do that?"

"I guess he can, Barry, because it looks like he—or somebody—did." She tried a couple other combinations without success, then gave up.

"Well, we're not doing any good here. I'm sorry, Barry. Let's go eat." And then, as we were walking toward the mess, Geronimo loping silently along beside us, she was silent, as though she had something else on her mind. Then she looked up at me quizzically. "Mind if I ask you a question? How're you doing with your problem?"

"Which problem is that?"

"The medical one, Barry."

I stopped short. Geronimo stopped too, staring up at both of us with those immense eyes. "How did you know I had a medical problem?"

She shrugged, looking apologetic. "Everybody knows that, Barry. People have been talking about it for days. They say you're unstable, except if you have medication, and Bill Goethe doesn't have the right medication for you."

I flared up at her. "Damn the man! He's got no right to be spreading that kind of information around. Doctors are supposed to keep their mouths shut about their patients' problems!"

"Don't blame Billy. It might not be him. Anybody can access his files," she reminded me, and waited for an answer to her question.

I didn't see any way out of it, so I said unwillingly, "All right. I do have—I used to have—serious mood swings."

"Bad ones?"

"Damn bad ones. Incapacitating ones, in fact; I did some pretty crazy things. If they were to come back I'd be in real trouble. I'm in remission right now, though, so it's not an immediate problem. I ought to be good for a couple of months, anyway, and Goethe says he's trying to work up some treatment for me before it gets critical."

She squeezed my arm. "Let's hope, Barry," she said, and that was the end of the conversation.

It was not, of course, the end of my thinking about it. Although my head had been full of other things, I had not forgotten how little hope Goethe had offered for his "treatments."

I wondered if the sudden flare of anger I'd felt when Madeleine told me the news meant anything. It wasn't a good sign; I was supposed to avoid losing my temper as much as possible. Then there was the unexpected new responsibility that had been thrust on me; that was a new stress, too, added to all the other stresses that were working on me.

I didn't think there was immediate danger. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going off the deep end just then. However, there was no doubt that sooner or later I certainly would . . . unless, against the odds, Goethe came through with what I needed. If he didn't—

If he didn't, I did not like to think of what my life would be like then.

Madeleine excused herself to sit with her great-granddaughter at supper. When I'd filled my tray—the cooks were serving something that resembled meat loaf that day—I looked around for a place to sit, and saw Becky Khaim-Novello waving at me.

I hadn't seen much of Becky, after that one cup of coffee in her apartment. Now and then I'd caught sight of her as our paths crossed, of course, and I'd noticed that she went about the town looking as proud and pleased as the widow of a successful Millenarist suicide should. I didn't know how deep that went. Once or twice in the still night hours I had heard, through the thin flooring, the sound of her uncontrolled weeping.

She wasn't weeping now. She seemed chipper and inviting, and there was one other thing about her just then that struck me as interesting. She wasn't alone. She was sitting next to Marcus Wendt, and the annoyed look he gave me suggested that the conversation had been personal. And what that suggested was that maybe things hadn't been going very well between him and Theophan Sperlie.

Between the time I spotted them and the time I was getting ready to sit down across from them, my active imagination went through a whole scenario: Theo and Marcus breaking up; Theo available again; Theo taking a new interest in me; Theo and me maybe making it after all. I know how foolish that sounds. Just remember how many weeks I'd had to get horny, though; I'm really a reasonably serious person, but my glands don't always know that.

"You've made yourself a stranger," Becky chided me as I started to sit down. "Don't forget that I still have some of that good coffee."