The Voices of Heaven (26 page)

When I asked him about the leps he seemed glad of the change. "Oh, there are lots of them, Barry—a whole continent full. Tens of millions, anyway. Maybe a lot more than that."

"But the ones we see—"

"Are only the locals. There's a lep nest up in the hills with hundreds of them; they're the ones who come down. The funny thing about the leps, if you're interested," he said, warming to his subject, "is that they're all the same species. That's surprising, when you think of the distances involved, but even the ones on the far side of the continent seem to be genetically identical with the locals."

"We're all the same species too, and we have a lot more distance to cover."

"We're not leps, are we? Up through the fifth instar they hardly ever travel more than a few kilometers. So it has to be that some of the sixth-instar leps are wanderers. They fly long distances, so the genes get distributed."

"So they have a whole planetwide civilization?" I ventured doubtfully.

That startled him. "Good heavens, no, Barry. What gives you that idea? The six-star leps can't transmit anything but their own bodies—no customs, no information, nothing cultural. They've lost all their memories by then, you know. They're pretty much idiots—horny idiots."

"Are you saying that leps on the other side of the continent could have a completely different kind of society?"

He thought that over, pulling at his sparse hair. "I wouldn't think so. Most of their behavior seems to be genetically programmed . . . but we'll never know unless we start going out and exploring again," he said finally. "It's been thirty years since we had a working long-range aircraft. Barry? I really hope this idea of yours works out."

It stormed again on Saturday. I don't mean just rain, I'm talking about a real rouser of crashing thunder and fierce lightning and winds that took down trees in the hills. People stayed indoors as much as they could, and what they mostly did with their time was talk about getting the factory in high gear. There were some fierce arguments going on all that day, and I was in a lot of them.

I'd been pleased, if startled, to find out that Jacky Schottke was coming over to my side. He wasn't the only one, either. It began to look as though some of the returning Millenarists were tempted too—even my neighbor, the very recently bereaved widow lady from the downstairs apartment, Becky Khaim-Novello.

That was a real surprise, in more ways than one. I barely knew the woman. I'd hardly even seen her after her husband hung himself, and yet on Sunday morning, as I was coming back from breakfast, she caught me at the door and offered me a cup of real coffee.

I'd had it in mind to check the news broadcasts from Earth again, but she made the offer sound tempting. It would be, she promised, a better cup of coffee than anything the community kitchens could provide because it came out of their own private stock, brought all the way from Earth because Jubal loved coffee so much . . . but she actually preferred tea herself and now, with Jubal gone—

She was smiling and almost flirtatious as she invited me in. It seemed only neighborly to accept.

Well, there was more than a cup of coffee involved there, of course. For me there was the fact that Becky was reasonably nice looking and young and now wholly unattached. It was pleasant to sit in her kitchen while she put the coffee on and set out cups and a little dish of cakes she'd brought back from the breakfast. For Becky—

Maybe part of what she had in mind really was me myself, as a reasonably nice and clearly available male. I'd like to think that, anyway. However, I got the impression very quickly that she was also interested in picking my brains, because her conversation wasn't date talk, it was interrogation. Was I sure that this factory orbiter could use the antimatter from
Corsair
? Would it really be necessary to destroy Captain Tscharka's ship? What components of the ship, exactly, would be useful to the factory? And even if the ship were scrapped and salvaged, wouldn't there still be some elements that weren't in
Corsair
, so there'd still be serious supply problems?

I wasn't sure exactly what she was after, but I gave her all the answers I could, anyway. The most reliable answer to most of her questions was that the only way we could find those things out was by giving it a try. When the coffee was gone she thought that over for a moment, then stood up and thanked me politely for clearing up those matters for her. "Probably we do have to do something," she said, giving my hand a friendly squeeze at the door. "I guess it'll all get straightened out at the town meeting. Anyway, this has been really nice, Barry. Drop in again anytime you feel like talking. Good-bye."

Whatever her motives, widowhood seemed to sit lightly on Becky Khaim-Novello. As I headed for the receiver station—the antenna had taken some serious hits from the winds in yesterday's storm, and I was concerned about whether it was still functioning properly—I thought I probably would take her up on her invitation to come again before long. It wasn't that I particularly liked the woman; it was my glands, which were quite urgently suggesting that I ought at least to find out whether I liked her—or anyone female, for that matter.

I was thinking further along those lines when I noticed that Geronimo had joined me. He plopped himself directly in front of me and raised himself to full height. "Candy today?" he inquired.

I was prepared for him; I'd formed the habit of keeping a couple of hard sugar balls in my pocket for him. Though I urged him to suck on the one I gave him to make it last longer, I could hear it scraping against the grinding surfaces in his mouthpart. When he had it swallowed he announced, "The God person is back, Barrydihoa."

"Which one?"

"The old one. White hair on head and face. He is over by river, with children."

I decided that checking out the receiver could wait. If Jacky Schottke was leaning toward my side and Becky Khaim-Novello seemed, anyway, more or less neutral, I wondered if I couldn't try a little persuading on Friar Tuck.

I wasn't particularly confident of success.
Corsair
was more or less Tuchman's ship, too—Tscharka called him his chaplain—and he was certainly friendly with the captain. But revitalizing the factory wasn't a religious matter, as far as I could see. And, I admit, I was curious to see what Geronimo had meant about "children."

There were five or six of them gathered around him, waiting for a boat that was coming to take them downstream for some fruit gathering. The old man was doing conjuring tricks for them. They seemed to like it. So did he. They squealed with pleasure when he took pebbles out of their ears and made them vanish again, and when the boat pulled up and they got ready to board, he seemed regretful. He gave them all a good-bye hug before turning to me.

"Well, Barry," he said, cordially enough, "it's nice to see you. You look surprised. What is it?"

I tried to say it as politely as I could. "I didn't think Millenarists had much to do with children."

"Why would you think that? We love children, Barry. We're a church of love. You should come to our services someday."

I gave him a firmly noncommittal shrug for an answer, which made him smile. Then he sat down on a bench overlooking the water and beckoned me to join him. "I've been hoping we could have a chance to talk about some of the things you've been saying. Do you think it's really essential that you destroy
Corsair
?"

By then I'd had a lot of practice answering that sort of question, so I gave him the spiel. It wasn't a matter of losing the ship but of gaining more of the things we needed. More equipment. A better power supply. Maybe a space tug. Maybe, in the long run, a whole new lease on life for the Pavan colony. He listened gravely, only interrupting to ask for clarification on a point or two. Then he said, "I can see that you've got the interests of all of us at heart, Barry. I truly appreciate that. I can't help worrying about some of the dangers involved, though."

That was a new one. "What kind of dangers?"

"We're dealing with antimatter here. A lot of it. You're the closest thing we've got to an expert on the subject, and maybe you've thought it all through, but what would happen if something went wrong and it all exploded?"

"Well—" It was a fair enough question and I thought about it for a moment. "If it happened while the orbiter was overhead it would produce a lot of radiation, that's true. But it would be just as likely to happen when it's on the other side of Pava, and then we probably wouldn't feel any effects at all. Except, of course, there wouldn't be anything left of the factory. But it won't happen."

"You're sure of that?"

"Certain sure. I've done a lot of transshipping, Friar. I don't make mistakes like that."

"I'm sure you'd exercise all possible care, but still—Well, suppose it didn't explode in orbit. What if Jillen or Garold miscalculated and the whole two hundred pods fell to the surface of Pava?"

"They wouldn't!"

"We certainly hope not," he agreed, "but none of us are more than human, and human beings do sometimes make mistakes. Wouldn't it explode?"

"Well, I suppose so, sure, but—"

"And then what? Could two hundred pods of antimatter destroy the planet?"

"No. Of course not. It would certainly do a lot of damage, even as an air burst—if it were anywhere in this hemisphere it would kill a lot of organisms. But it would be a lot more likely to fall into sea, and then—" I stopped there, thinking. I was remembering some of the theoretical problems they gave us in training: what would happen if some lunatic diverted a catcherload to Earth. And then we had been talking only about a dozen pods or so.

"Well," I admitted, "an ocean impact would be serious, no doubt of that. An undersea explosion would certainly produce some giant tsunamis, at least. I suppose anything anywhere near a shore would be destroyed, and then there would be radioactive water vapor that would spread over a large area—I don't know if it would reach here. But if it did, we'd probably die."

He nodded soberly.

I thought I knew what was in his mind. I assumed he was trying to prepare arguments against using the antimatter in the factory, probably to bring up in the meeting. (I was wrong about that, of course, but I didn't find that out until a good deal later.) So I gave him truthful but cautious answers, winding up with, "Anyway, the antimatter's there in orbit now. There's a hundred pods of it sitting in
Corsair
's hold, not counting what the next ship will bring. If it's a danger at all—and I don't think it is—those hundred pods are a danger already. All I'm suggesting is that we put it to a good use."

"Ah," he said, "but that's a question itself, isn't it? What's a 'good use,' Barry?"

"Come on, Friar. A good use is making things better for everyone on Pava."

He nodded. "So we'd be more prosperous and better fed and equipped; so the colony would increase and thrive. Is that a given, Barry? Is making it possible for more and more people to be born necessarily a good thing?"

That was when I began to get really uncomfortable. "I guess," I said, "that now we're getting into the area of religious belief, aren't we?"

"No, Barry," he said gently. "We've been there all along. It's all a matter of religion, and it doesn't really matter what you would like or what I would like. It's what God would like that's important."

18

THE term "factory" is not completely understood by us. What is a "factory" ?

A factory is a place where we make things. Don't you people ever make things?

Of course. We make items that are needed, such as shelters for protection against storms. In the old days we made them from broad leaves; now we make them more frequently from discarded bits of your parafoil textiles. No "factory" is involved in such work; they are made by persons.

Home handicrafts, sure. We have that too.

But you also have the "factory" machine. We conceive that this machine operates like a fruit vine, producing useful things without the labor of a person, except that it can "manufacture" whatever sort of fruit you desire. Yet this cannot be correct for, if it were true, why does your "factory" not make your "medicine"?

Oh, hell, you expect too much. No factory can make everything. The orbiters come pretty close, I admit; they tell me that this one's program stores contain the manufacturing doctrines for hundreds of thousands of different items. It has built-in instructions that tell it how to do everything from smelting and annealing the metals and just how and where to sputter dopant onto the electronic parts, to the kind of decorative finish to put on the cabinet. If you happened to need a hundred dozen pop-up toasters you just picked the model you preferred out of the catalogue and the factory would start pumping them out—taking the sheet metal from stock, winding the heating coils, fabricating the power lines; if it didn't have any of those things in stock it would make them out of raw materials. It would even make you one toaster if that was all you wanted; it didn't have to be mass production.

The factory orbiter isn't magic, though. It has very limited biochemical capabilities. It can't grow living tissues. Not even single cells.

There are lots of other things the factory can't do. It can't transmute elements. If an alloy calls for—I don't know, say it requires a little bit of bismuth—and if there doesn't happen to be any bismuth in stock—well, then it has to substitute some other element or try to replace it with whatever else it can find that will work. It might even cannibalize some bismuth from some other thing that it has already manufactured, but has a lower priority, if it has anything like that on hand. The factory is quite resourceful. All the same, its resources are not infinite, and if the factory can't do any of those things, it just can't fill that order.

It has other limitations. Add to what I've already said were the headaches of transporting stuff to and from orbit, add in the problem of getting raw materials to it, add in the fact that the thing was now just about a hundred years old. Even self-repairing machines don't last forever, do they?