Walter Miller - Dark Benediction

“What? Oh! I suppose it is.” He gulped his brandy and poured another.

Mme. d’Annecy spoke briefly to the girl, who, after a hasty merci and a nod at Suds went off to join Relke outside. When they were gone, Madame smilingly offered her pen to the engineer. Suds stared at it briefly, shook his head, and helped himself to another brandy. He gulped it and reached for his helmet. Mme. d’Annecy snapped her fingers suddenly and went to a locker near the bulkhead. She came back with a quart bottle.

“M’sieur’ will surely accept a small token?” She offered the bottle for his inspection. “It is Mumms 2064, a fine year. Take it, M’sieur. Or do you not care for champagne? It is our only bottle, and what is one bottle of wine for such a crowd? Take it—or would you prefer the brandy?”

Suds blinked at the gift while he fastened his helmet and clamped it. He seemed dazed. She held the bottle out to him and smiled hopefully. Suds accepted it absent-mindedly, nodded at her, and stepped into the airlock. The hatch slid closed.

Mme. d’Annecy started back toward her counting table. The alarm bell burst into a sudden brazen clamor. She looked back. A red warning signal flashed balefully. Henriburst in from the corridor, eyed the bell and the light, then charged toward the airlock. The gauge by the hatch showed zero pressure. He pressed a starter button, and a meter hummed to life. The pressure needle crept upward. The bell and the light continued a frenetic complaint. The motor stopped. Henri glanced at the gauge, then swung open the hatch. “ Allons! Ma foi, quelle merde!”

Mme. d’Annecy came to peer around him into the small cubicle. Her subsequent shriek penetrated to the farthest corridors. Suds Brodanovitch had missed his last chance to become a stockholder.

“It wasn’t yo’ fault, Ma’am,” said Lije Henderson a few minutes later as they half-led, half-carried her to her compartment. “He know bettuh than to step outside with that bottle of booze. You didn’t know. You couldn’ be ’spected to know. But he been heah long enough to know—a man make one mistake, thass all. BLOOIE.”

Blooie was too graphic to suit Madame; she sagged and began retching.

“C’mon, Ma’am, less get you in yo hammock.” They carried her into her quarters, eased her into bed, and stepped back out on the catwalk.

Lije mopped his face, leaned against a tension member, and glanced at Joe. “Now how come you s’pose he had that bottle of fizzling giggle water up close to his helmet that way, Joe?”

“I don’t know. Reading the label, maybe.”

“He sho’ muss have had something on his mine.”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“Yeah. BLOOIE. Man!”

Relke had led the girl out through the lock in the reactor nacelle in order to evade Brodanovitch and a possible command to return to camp. They sat in Novotny’s runabout and giggled cozily together at the fuzzy map of Earth that floated in the darkness above them. On the ship’s fuselage, the warning light over the airlock hatch began winking, indicating that the lock was in use. The girl noticed it and nudged him. She pointed at the light.

“Somebody coming out,” Relke muttered. “Maybe Suds. We’d better get out of here.”

He flipped the main switch and started the motor. He was backing onto the road when Giselle caught his arm.

“Beel! Look at the light!”

He glanced around. It was flashing red.

“Malfunction signal. Compressor trouble, probably. It’s nothing. Let’s take a ride. Joe won’t care.” He started backing again.

“Poof!” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Poof. It opened, and poof—” She puckered her lips and blew a little puff of steam in the cold air to show him. “So. Like smoke.”

He turned the car around in the road and looked back again. The hatch had closed. There was no one on the ladder. “Nobody came out.”

“Non. Just poof.”

He edged the car against the trolley rails, switched to autosteering, and let it gather speed.

“Beel?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Where you taking me?”

He caught the note of alarm in her voice and slowed down again. She had come on a dare after several drinks, and the drinks were wearing off. The landscape was frighteningly alien, and the sense of falling into bottomlessness was ever-present.

“You want to go back?” he asked gloomily.

“I don’t know. I don’t like it out here.”

“You said you wanted some ground under your feet.”

“But it doesn’t feel like ground when you walk on it.”

“Rather be inside a building?”

She nodded eagerly.

“That’s where we’re going.”

“To your camp?”

“God, no! I’m planning to keep you to myself.”

She laughed and snuggled closer to him. “You can’t. Madame d’Annecy will not permit—”

“Let’s talk about something else,” he grunted quickly. “OK. Let’s talk about Monday.”

“Which Monday?”

“Next Monday. It’s my birthday. When is it going to be Monday, Bill?”

“You said Bill.”

“Beel? That’s your name, isn’t eet? Weeliam Q. Relke, who weel not tell me what ees the Q?”

“But you said Bill.”

She was silent for a moment. “OK, I’m a phony,” she muttered. “Does the inquisition start now?”

He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. “When’s it going to be Monday?” she murmured.

“When’s it going to be Monday where?”

“Here, anywhere, silly!”

He laughed. “When will it be Monday all over the universe?”

She thought for a moment. “Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?”

“It won’t. We just have periods, hitches, and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period’s from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don’t count days. So I don’t know when it’ll be Monday.”

It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. “Don’t you even have hours?” She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.

“Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour.”

She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. “When it’s Monday on Earth, it’ll be Monday here too,” she announced flatly.

Relke laughed. “OK, we’ll call it that.”

“So when will it start being Monday on Earth?”

“Well, it’ll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It’s August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer.”

She looked really worried.

“You take birthdays pretty seriously?” he asked.

“Only this one. I’ll be—” She broke off and closed her mouth.

“Pick a time zone,” Relke offered, “and I’ll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you’d be now, maybe?”

She shook her head.

“Where you were born?”

“That would be—” She stopped again. “Never mind. Forget it.” She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.

Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.

“That’s a building?” she asked.

“That’s an entrance. The ‘building’s’ underground. Come on, let’s seal up.”

“What’s down there?”

“Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man.”

“Somebody lives down there?”

“Not yet. The line’s still being built. They’ll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving.”