Dark Benediction

Novotny came to look. He pinched the thick corded plastic until the incision opened like a mouth. “Knife,” he grunted.

“Those sons of—”

“Yah.” He fingered the cut. “They meant for you to find it, though. It’s too conspicuous. It’s a threat.”

“Well, I’m fed up with their threats. I’m going to—”

“You’re not going to do anything, Relke. I’m going to do it. Larkin and Kunz have messed around with my men one time too often.”

“What have you got in mind, Joe?”

“Henderson and I will handle it. We’ll go over and have a little conference with them, that’s all.”

“Why Henderson? Look, Joe, if you’re going to stomp them, it’s my grudge, not Lije’s.”

“That’s just it. If I take you, it’s a grudge. If Lije and I do it, it’s just politics. I’ve told you guys before—leave the politics to me. Come on, we’ll get you a suit from the emergency locker.”

They went out into the transformer vault. Two men wearing blue armbands were bending over Brodanovitch’s corpse. One of them was fluently cursing unknown parties who had brought the body to a warm place and allowed it to thaw.

“Investigating team,” Novotny muttered. “Means Parkeson is already here.” He hiked off toward the emergency lockers.

“Hey, are you the guy that left this stiff near a stove?” one of the investigators called out to Relke.

“No, but I’ll be glad to rat on the guys that did, if it’ll get them in trouble,” the lineman told him.

“Never mind. You can’t hang them for being stupid.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Relke asked, nodding at the corpse.

“Promote him to supervisory engineer and give him a raise.”

“Christ but they hire smart boys for the snooper team, don’t they? What’s your I.Q., friend? I bet they had to breed you to get smart.”

The checker grinned. “You looking for an argument, Slim?”

Relke shook his head. “No, I just asked a question.”

“We’re going to take him back to Copernicus and bury him, friend. It takes a lot of imagination to figure that out, doesn’t it?”

“If he was a class three laborer, you wouldn’t take him back to Copernicus. You wouldn’t even bury him. You’d just chuck him in a fissure and dynamite the lip.”

The man smiled. Patient cynicism was in his tone. “But he’s not a class three laborer, Slim. He’s Mister S.K. Brodanovitch. Does that make everything nice and clear?”

“Sure. Is Parkeson around?”

The checker glanced up and snickered. “You’re a chum of his, I guess? Hear that, Clyde? We’re talking to a wheel.”

Relke reddened. “Shove it, chum. I just wondered if he’s here.”

“Sure, he’s out here. He went over to see that flying bordello you guys have been hiding out here.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

“Couldn’t say, friend.”

Novotny came back with an extra suit.

“Joe, I just remembered something.”

“Tell me about it on the way back.”

They suited up and went out to the runabout. Relke told what he could remember about the cell meeting.

“It sounds crazy in a way,” Novotny said thoughtfully. “Or maybe it doesn’t. It could mess up the Party’s strike plans if Parkeson brought those women back before sundown. The men want women back on the moon project. If they can get women bootlegged in, they won’t be quite so ready to start a riot on the No Work Without a Wife theme.”

“But Parkeson’d get fired in a flash if—”

“If Parliament got wind of it, sure. Unless he raised the squawk later himself. UCOJE doesn’t mention prostitution. Parkeson could point out that some national codes on Earth tolerate it. Nations with delegates in the Parliament, and with work teams on the moon. Take the African team at Tycho. And the Japanese team. Parkeson himself is an Aussie. Whose law is he supposed to enforce?”

“You mean maybe they can’t keep ships like that from visiting us?”

“Don’t kid yourself. It won’t last long. But maybe long enough. If it goes on long enough, and builds up, the general public will find out. You think that wouldn’t cause some screaming back home?”

“Yeah. That’ll be the end.”

“I’m wondering. If there turns out to be a profit in it for whoever’s backing d’Annecy, well—anything that 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.”