Dark Benediction

The clerk snorted and resumed what he had been doing when Relke entered: he was carefully taping his share of stock in Mme. d’Annecy’s venture up on the wall among a display of pin-ups. “You know who I mean,” he muttered.

“No, I don’t.”

“The ones that dug that mine, that’s who.”

“Aliens? Oh, bullspit.”

“Yeah? You’ll see. They’re keeping an eye on us, all right. There’s a guy on the African team that even talked to some of them.”

“Nuts. He’s not the first guy that ever talked to spooks. Or demons. Or saucer pilots. You don’t have to be a Looney to be a lunatic.”

That made the clerk sore, and he stomped off to his sanctum to brood. Relke finished getting into the suit and stepped into the airlock. Some guys had to personify their fear. If there was danger, somebody must be responsible. They had to have an Enemy. Maybe it helped, believing in gremlins from beyond Pluto. It gave you something to hate when your luck was bad.

He met Joe just outside the lock. The pusher was waiting to get in.

“Hey, Pappy, I own up. I was goofing off awhile ago. If you want to be sore—” Relke stopped. Something was wrong. Joe was breathing hard, and he looked sick.

“Christ, I’m not sore! Not now!”

“What’s wrong, Joe?”

The pusher paused in the hatchway. “Run on back to the line. Keep an eye on Braxton. I’m getting a jeep. Back in a minute.” He went on inside and closed the hatch.

Relke trotted toward the last tower. After a while he could hear Braxton talking in spasms on the frequency. It sounded like sobbing. He decided it was sobbing.

“Theah just isn’t any God,” Bama was moaning. “Theah just couldn’t be a God and be so mean. He was the bes’ frien’ a man evah had, and he nevah did nothin’ to de-serve it. Oh, God, oh, God, why did it have to be him? Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven, to treat a man that way, when he been so…” Braxton’s voice broke down into incoherent sobbing.

There was a man lying on the ground beside the tower. Relke could see Benet bending over him. Benet was clutching a fistful of the man’s suit. He crossed himself slowly and stood up. A safety team runabout skidded to a halt beside the tower, and three men piled out. Benet spread his hands at them in a wide shrug and turned his back.

“What happened?” Relke asked as he loped up to Beasley.

“Kama was welding. Lije walked over to ask him for a wrench or something. Bama turned around to get it, and Lije sat down on the strut with the hot weld.”

“Blow out?”

“He wasn’t that lucky. Call it a fast slowout.”

Novotny drove up, saw the safety jeep, and started bellowing furiously at them.

“Take it easy, chum. We got here as quick as we could.”

“Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven…”

They got Henderson in the safety runabout. Novotny manufactured a hasty excuse to send Braxton off with them, for grief had obviously finished his usefulness for awhile. Everybody stood around in sickly silence and stared after the jeep.

“Genet, you know how to pray,” Novotny muttered. “Say something, altar boy.”

“Aw, Joe, that was fifteen years ago. I haven’t lived right.”

“Hell, who has? Go ahead.”

Benet muttered for a moment and turned his back. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…” He paused. “Can’t you pray in English?” Joe asked.

“We always said it in Latin. I only served at a few masses.”

“Go ahead.”

Benet prayed solemnly while they stood around with bowed heads and shuffled their boots in the dust. Nobody understood the words, not even Benet, but somehow it seemed important to listen.

“Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat…”

Relke looked up slowly and let his eyes wander slowly across the horizon. There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation. Relke decided Braxton was wrong. There was a God, all right, maybe personal, maybe not, but there was a God, and He wasn’t mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn’t any way to build a universe that wasn’t a deadly contraption—like a square circle.

He made the contrapation, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn’t a damn thing the universe could do to a man that a man wasn’t built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it. It was the consistency of matched qualities—random mercilessness and human endurance—and it wasn’t mean, it was a fair match.

“Poor Lije. God help him.”

“All right,” Novotny called. “Let’s pull cable, men.”

“Yeah, you know what?” said Beasley. “Those dames went to Crater City. The quicker we get the line finished, the quicker we get back. Damn Parkeson anyhow!”