6
WHAT is the meaning of the word "faith" as it is used in this context? It seems there are many meanings of the term.
Well, sure, "faith" means lots of different things. I can say I have "faith" in a person. That means I believe that person is decent, and trustworthy, and maybe even kind. Or I can have "faith" that a given action will produce a particular result; that kind of "faith" is based on prior experience.
Is either of those the kind of "faith" you and Garoldtscharka were discussing?
"No, of course not. We were talking about religious faith. That's powerful stuff. If a person is serious about his religious faith it takes precedence over anything else. It isn't based on any kind of evidence. It's irrelevant to such things as, say, a person's character, or the things he experiences. It transcends all that real-world stuff. It shapes what you do, in ways that an outsider can't predict, and that's why Tscharka was so good at concealing his intentions.
Whatever Tscharka's intentions were, as he was getting ready to return to Pava, he didn't communicate them to me. And certainly when I first met him I might not have known how things would go in the long run even if I'd been able to read his mind. I don't know if he even had those intentions yet.
If you want me to make a guess, I'd say probably Tscharka and his chaplain, the one he called Friar Tuck, cooked their whole plan up somewhere between the time they heard that there was talk about terminating the colony—that would have been as soon as they got within two-way radio range of Earth—and when they appeared before the Budget Congress. Maybe not, though. It could have been after that. There's no way of knowing exactly.
I didn't see Tscharka again until the actual loading, at least not in person. He did show up on the vidscreen once. Alma and I switched on the screen just before going to sleep. No particular reason; just to see what was on. What was on was Tscharka and his whole group of new colonists being interviewed about their imminent departure. Some of them were looking dedicated, some happy; and there at the end of one row was old Rannulf. Looking, I thought, mostly disgruntled. I didn't say anything. Alma didn't say anything either, though I thought I heard her sigh. And when a different news story came on we turned it off and went to sleep.
We were both busy then, dealing with Tscharka's hundred pods of stored antimatter, and the sixteen additional pods he needed to run his ship as they were filled and launched. It was about as big an order as any in my experience. Handling that kind of operation takes a lot of work. As soon as each pod was filled it was shot right up into parking orbit, where one of the permanently orbiting catchers collected it.
That's the most dangerous part of the whole procedure, but this time we had no problems. The fuelmasters on the catchers were first-class, and I was supervising the surface-to-orbit launches myself. It went without incident. Then, once all the requisitioned pods were on the catcher, it was time for me to get down to my real job, and so I took a shuttle up to Corsair.
"You," said the young woman who greeted me at the ship's lock, "are Barry di Hoa, and you're welcome here."
I said, "Thanks, and you're—?"
"Jillen Iglesias," she reminded me. "Copilot."
"Nice to see you again," I said, remembering as she shook my hand warmly that I'd met her before. I was a little startled. I hadn't expected such a warm welcome on Captain Tscharka's Corsair, but then Tscharka himself wasn't there. He was asleep in his quarters, Jillen said, catching up on his rest so he'd be fresh and alert for the fueling itself, and so she would be the one to accompany me on my final inspection.
She stuck as close to me as Tscharka ever had as I made my rounds, too. The difference was that with her I didn't mind it. She was helpful rather than interfering. As we poked through the fuel and cargo compartments one more time she answered all my questions, and when I didn't have any questions to ask she kept her mouth shut.
Everything was spic-and-span. The fuel-storage sections were ready for their pods and the cargo was loaded. The most important cargo was information—recordings of all the latest songs and plays and comedians; manufacturing programs for new machines and instruments and electronic devices; a ten-year supply of journals in all the arts and sciences. None of that took up much space, but there were also bulkier items, starting with the food and supplies to get Corsair's crew through their time-dilated, but still long, voyage to Delta Pavonis. For the colony itself there were ingots of scarce metals, seeds, frozen ova and sperm and, I guess, hundreds of other personal items that were none of my concern. And there were the freezer-sleep capsules, open and waiting for the colonists who would soon be filling them—including, I thought with pleasure, Rannulf Enderman.
When I had signed off I paused to look at Jillen Iglesias. "You're going back to Pava, then," I said.
"Yes, of course," she said, surprised, as though that were the most normal thing in the world. It wasn't. Most interstellar crews won't do more than a single voyage, because they get too disoriented.
"Won't you miss your friends?" I asked.
"But my friends are right here," she told me. "On this ship, and, yes, a few on Pava, too. Of course, they'll be a little elderly by the time I get back, but Pava's a wonderful planet, di Hoa. Actually, I think I might just stay there this trip—I mean if I can find someone else to take my place on Corsair for the voyage back. See," she said earnestly, doing her best to convince me, "the only thing Pava needs to make it just about perfect is more industry. They're bound to have that taken care of by the time I get back. Power was still kind of short when we left. They were even burning biomass to make electricity, but that's the hard way to do it—but they were starting to build a big hydroelectric plant, with a hundred-meter dam. It'll be operating by now, I'm sure. And we'll still have our orbiting factory working too, probably. I think we'll want to use some of the antimatter there to run it; solar power takes you just so far. Have you ever seen an orbiting factory? It's all computer-controlled, so we can do custom-manufacturing, short runs, building things that we need on the planet. You'd be astonished how many different little machines and devices and chips and gadgets you need to make a planet go, when you can't just call up and get them from Earth."
I was as convinced as I wanted to be, but I was polite. I said, "And you'll need fuel for those short-range interplanetary exploration ships, too, of course."
"I guess so. I hope so, anyway. Personally, I'm not so much using them for exploring the other planets in the system as getting some tugs to bring in raw materials from Delta Pavonis's asteroid belt—you need more than energy to make a factory go, you know." She looked wistful. "Of course," she admitted, "there are problems. The quakes can be pretty bad, sometimes."
"I imagine so," I told her. What I was thinking about was what life was going to be like for her in a place where you had constant earthquakes, and shortages of all kinds, and all the troubles that people who lived in civilization never even gave a thought to. I thought she was a brave woman. I also thought she was a fairly foolish one; but that was none of my business, after all.
Then it was time for me to drop back to the Moon, and I did.
What little free time I had in those days I tried to spend with Alma, and so I headed for her rooms. I thought she might still be sleeping, and so I let myself in quietly. She was actually in her bathroom, washing her hair. "Want to go out and get something to eat?" I called.
"Not right away," she called back, and there was the sound of water running, and a minute later she came out, toweling her hair. "I'm waiting for a call," she said. "Remember Renate beha Nard?" I did; Renate was a friend of Alma's, a big, dark woman who the last time I'd seen her had had a belly the size of a watermelon. "Well, she's delivering about now. I'll want to go see the baby when it's born."
"Ah," I said. "Uh-huh." It wasn't very articulate conversation, but that was because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to say. Then I remembered something about Renate. "She must've quit the Millenarists, too," I said, making a logical deduction from the fact that she and Alma had met at Millenarist services, and now she was having a baby.
"Right," said Alma. She finished turbaning the towel around her head and sat down to look at me. "She knew when she'd made a mistake. Being alive wasn't really a sin, and so having babies couldn't be, either."
"Absolutely," I said, to show how much I agreed with her, and then quickly changed the subject to show that I wasn't attaching any particular importance to it. "Well," I said, "if you don't want to go out, should we call up and have something sent in?"
"I'm not that hungry, actually. Are you?"
I wasn't, and the conversation began to drag. I was pleased when her phone sounded, a little less so when the face on the screen turned out not to belong to a nurse from the birthing center but to the man who seemed to me to be taking an unconscionable amount of time to get out of our lives, Rannulf Enderman.
"Hi," he said brightly to Alma. Then, when he saw my face in the background, a little less enthusiastically, "Hi to you, too, Barry. I just called up to say good-bye."
Alma looked concerned. "You're not leaving right away, are you?"
"No, but pretty soon. I just finished my course for my work on the ship. It was freezing techniques. I'm going to help tend the stiffs, freezing and thawing out."
I had known that he'd quit his job on the launch station when he volunteered for Pava; I hadn't known exactly what he'd been doing instead. I was, as a matter of fact, not sorry to hear he'd been busy; I'd had some concerns, now and then, about his having too much free time to hang around Alma. So I said, making friendly conversation, "That didn't take long, did it?"
He shrugged. "What's to learn? You put them in the freezer, then you wake them up. The cycling is automatic, anyway; all the technician has to do is stand by and make sure the machine does what it does." He went on about the course, about how the automatic systems perfused the freezees with buffers and filled them with the chemicals that slowed down ice nucleation, and I nodded encouragingly.
Alma gave me a quizzical look. "That's nice, Rannulf," she said, interrupting his discussion of how cells that lacked nucleation survived low temperatures, "but I'm going to want to kiss you good-bye. Let's have a drink together—say in a couple of hours? Fine. Let me give you a call when I'm free, all right?"
That was that. She hadn't said when we were free.
The call from the birthing center came a minute or two later. Renate's new offspring was a boy, it was healthy, and it was available for inspection any time. "Hey, wonderful," she said to the nurse. Then, to me, "I bet Renate's happy. What about walking me over there, Barry? We can stop and get a sandwich on the way."
"How do you know I don't want to see the baby, too?"
"Do you?"
I didn't answer that, but I thought about it for a while. And when we were eating our sandwiches I cleared my throat and took the plunge. "I really like babies, you know," I said.
"That's nice."
"I guess you do, too."
"Well, how can you help it? They're soft and smelly and helpless, and they need you. If what you're asking me is whether I want to have some of my own, yes. I definitely do. Sometime."
That was the most explicit statement Alma had ever made on the subject. I chewed for a moment, thinking. Then I said, hypothetically, "What if you married, say, someone who couldn't be a father straight-out because he carried some genetic defects?"
"Why," she said, taking the question in stride, "I'd go to the clinic and I'd talk things over with them. There are plenty of things that can be done about that. For one, there's in vitro fertilization, so they comb out the bad recessives—"
I swallowed. Alma was playing back to me just about exactly what the doctor told me, almost word for word.
She had been doing some research. Not about genetic defects in general. About me.
I didn't go with her to see the new baby after all, and I didn't try to get myself invited along for the farewell with Rannulf. I was making up my mind, and I wanted to do it on my own time, to be sure.
Isn't it funny how often taking the time to make sure a decision is right can turn out to mean you don't really have to make that decision at all?
By the time I'd finished catching a little sleep—not as much as they had given me time off to do, but enough to get me through the job—it was time for me to go back to Corsair for the final loading of its operating fuel supplies. Tscharka watched me at it for a while, but there wasn't much to watch. Actually that was an easier job than dealing with the pods in the cargo hold, because there were only sixteen pods for the ship's drive. Still, it made me a little nervous simply because there was so unusually much antimatter in one place. A hundred and sixteen pods of antimatter is no small amount. It was enough to screw up a whole planet if anything went wrong, so I made damn sure nothing did.
There weren't any real problems in the fueling, except for Rannulf Enderman. I had reconciled myself, very easily, to the thought that I would never see the man again, but he showed up on the last shuttle and he wanted to see me. He chased around until he found where I was, then hailed me. "I'd like to talk to you, Barry."
I gave him a suspicious look. "What about?"
"About Alma," he said, looking somber and self-righteous. "Barry? Alma and I had a little talk. She's a good woman, you know. She wants to be a good mother. I think she ought to get married pretty soon, don't you? Her clock's ticking away, and if she's going to start a family there's no better time than now."
For one nasty, in fact unpardonable, moment I wondered just how he and Alma had said good-bye, but I got that thought out of my head pretty fast. Still, I didn't like the idea of Rannulf giving me advice on whether I should marry his ex-girl. I started to tell him I was too busy, and then I changed my mind. I don't know what made me agree—maybe just good sportsmanship, the winner gracious to the loser—but I said gruffly, "All right, I'll come see you when I'm through."
That didn't mean that I liked the man. I didn't. I especially didn't like his butting in, but what he said about Alma stuck in my mind because it was true. And besides, by then I'd actually made up my mind; as soon as I got back to the lunar surface I would find Alma and ask her to marry me.
All that was a major decision. It filled my thoughts. Rannulf s request for a talk hardly entered my mind. In fact, I might have skipped my date with Rannulf entirely, except that when I was finished I had just missed one possible drop point and had plenty of time before the next one.
So I went to the freezer chambers to look for him, and there he was.
Most of the capsules were already occupied, because all the other volunteers had already been numbed and canned and were in the process of slowly cooling to the liquid-gas temperature that would keep them fresh for their arrival on Pava. Rannulf seemed to be the last one left out. He was hanging to a wall strap with one hand as he waited for me, gazing at a screen that showed the surface of the Moon as it rolled beneath us. His expression was mournful, almost as though he were sentimentally attached to that bleak and gloomy place.
It was a little late, I thought, for Rannulf to be having second thoughts. I interrupted his reverie. "All right," I said. "What was it you wanted to tell me about Alma?"
He sighed and turned toward me. "Have a drink," he said.
"I don't much want a drink," I told him.
"Sure you do," he said, taking two bulbs from a wall rack. "Call it a farewell toast. You're off duty now, aren't you?"
I was. I did what he asked, not for any good reason, just because he'd already filled the bulbs and because I felt sorry for the poor wimp. When I had swallowed most of mine I gave him a get-on-with-it look. "I can't stay here forever," I mentioned.
"I know. I appreciate your taking the time. The thing is, Barry," he said, swallowing the last of his drink, "until you came along Alma was my girl."
"Yes?"
"So if you weren't around," he said, "she probably would be again, don't you think?"
It was around then that I realized the question wasn't entirely hypothetical, because it was around then that I began to feel so very sleepy. Too sleepy to ask him what he was talking about. Too sleepy, in fact, to do anything except go right off to sleep.
I don't know what the little rat put in my drink. I don't remember being prepped, or being lifted into the capsule, or being frozen. The first thing I remember after that was waking up to the sound of Captain Garold Tscharka's angry voice. "Damn," he said. "One more thing gone wrong. What are you doing here, di Hoa?"
When I saw him staring in bafflement down at me, and realized that what I was waking up in was a freezer-thawer capsule and a long time had passed, I got the picture fast.
It was a whole new picture, because it was a whole new life; it was a life that was no longer ever again likely to include Alma or my job or my comfortable existence as a fuelmaster on the Moon, because if I ever saw any of those things again, which I very likely would not, nearly half a century would have passed and I would no longer be involved. "Shit," I said, peering up at Captain Tscharka. "What the hell am I going to be doing on Pava?"