Clifford Simak - Project Pope

'So you have no objection if I let him into my mind? If I tell him to stay out, I'm sure he will stay out.

'No objection, said Decker. 'I think you should let him in, if you have no objection, if you're not too queasy about it. Maybe he'll tell you things when he's inside your mind that both of us should know. He's been on this planet for a long time. He must have been here even before Vatican. Maybe he can shed some light on Vatican. I know he's interested; he's forever poking around over there. I have the impression, though, that he doesn't find out much.

He got out of his chair. 'Would you have a drink with me if I can find a jug?

'Yes, of course I would.

'You stay here, then. I'll go up to the shack and get it. It's too nice a day to be sitting in a house.

'It is that, said Tennyson.

After Decker left, Tennyson sat quietly in his chair. Before him stretched the garden patch and a small open wood. Far off, the mountains reared into the blueness. Over all lay a sense of peace and quiet. Far off, a bird made half-hearted song, and at times a tiny breeze made a small, whispering rustle in the leaves. Even the sunshine was a quiet sunshine.

Off to the left he could see the gray and white of Vatican, the buildings blending into the background unobtrusive, almost apologetic for intruding on the world. A quiet institution in a quiet world, thought Tennyson; no bad place to be. Over there, Jill was working in the library. He tried to separate the buildings in order to distinguish the library, but was unable to tell one building from another. At this distance, they made up a single huddle.

Jill worked too hard, he told himself; she was spending too many hours going through the records. The whole business had become an obsession with her. No longer did she mention leaving End of Nothing. Sitting there, he called her up in mind again — the intense face in the lamplight, telling him what she'd found that day, talking it out with him, trying out ideas on him — and all the time that ugly scarlet slash across one side of her face, a stigma that he scarcely ever noticed now, but it was, he thought, a pity just the same.

So deep was he in his thoughts of Jill that he was startled when Decker returned to thump down a bottle and two glasses on the table.

'Drink up, he said. 'This is the last of the bottle that you brought me, but Charley is due in another day or two. He'll bring me more.

'You don't have to depend on Charley, said Tennyson. 'I'll fetch you a couple or three bottles. Ecuyer has a cache of it. More than the two of us possibly can use.

Decker grunted. 'I said Charley would be showing up in a day or two and I got no flicker of interest out of you. Does that mean you're not going to try to arrange a deal to go back with him?

'It's too soon, said Tennyson. 'Gutshot will still remember me. There might be someone hanging around on the watch for me. Even if that weren't so, I don't think I want to leave. Not quite yet, anyhow.

'How about Jill?

'She'll probably stay on for a while as well. She's all caught up in her history project.

'Both of you, said Decker, 'are learning what I learned. End of Nothing is a fairly tolerable planet. Good climate. Productive land. No one pushing other people around. That's the best of it. There is no pushing around.

'That's why you stayed?

'That's part of it. The other part of it is that I am a couple of hundred years out of my time. I'll tell you the whole story someday, when the time comes and you have a lot of leisure to listen. But the gist of it is that I had to abandon ship. My crew ran off and left me, but somehow, in panic and by oversight, perhaps, they left one lifeboat. Not for me, not intentionally for me, I am sure; they probably just overlooked it in their mad rush to escape. I got into it and went into suspended animation. The ship got me here safe and sound, sniffing out a planet that would support me, but by the time it got me here a couple of centuries had passed. I am an anachronism, a man two centuries out of his world. I can't go back to the galaxy again; I'd be out of my depth. Here it doesn't matter. Most of the humans here are more outdated than I am. And the robots, God knows. In a lot of ways, they haven't advanced an inch beyond the time they came here a millennium ago. In other ways, they may be a million years ahead. They're brain-picking the galaxy, perhaps the universe.

'You have any idea what they really have?

'No inkling at all. Whatever they have, they keep it bottled up.

'And yet they are afraid. Jill found a memo one of the cardinals wrote. Undated, so there's no telling when it was written. It tells of a bunch of aliens, riding in bubble ships, that came here. On a survey, more than likely. They stayed only a short time, less than an hour. But this cardinal was scared pink with purple spots.

'There's a legend of the visit, Decker said. 'It must have happened years ago. The Day the Bubbles Came. It has all the markings of an ancient folktale, but the memo probably means that it has some historic basis.

'Why should the robots be so upset about it? The visiting aliens offered no harm; they didn't hang around.

'You must realize, said Decker, 'that the robot never is an adventurer. He always plays the averages. He never takes a chance. He is always cautious. That's the true measure between a robot and a human. Men take chances, plunge ahead, go for broke. A robot never does. It may be a reflection of his inferiority complex. He talks big, acts big at times, but he's never really big. He hunkers down a lot. He jumps at his own shadow. Vatican robots have been fairly successful here; there's not much here to spook them.

John, the gardener, went down the many long flights of stone stairs beneath Vatican and finally came to Pope country. He went along a corridor until he reached a small door. From a compartment in his waist, he took out a key and opened the door that led into a tiny room with only one chair in it. The lock snicked when he pushed the door closed behind him. On the wall facing the chair a metallic plate was set into the solid stone.

The gardener sat in the chair. 'Your Holiness, he said. 'John is here to make a report.

The cross-hatched face appeared slowly, deliberately on the plate.

'It is good to see you, John, said His Holiness. 'What brings you here this time?

'I am here, Your Holiness, said John, 'to tell you some of the facts of life. I hope this time that you pay attention to me. I'm not out there playing the fool for nothing, putting on my act as a silly gardener mumbling to his roses. I am doing your work, your personal work that you can't trust to your stupid cardinals. I'm out there spying for you, listening for you, gathering information for you, starting rumors for you. The least you can do, Your Holiness, is listen.

'I always listen, John.

'Not always, John said grumpily.

'I'll listen this time, John.

'There is a rumor, said John. 'No more than a rumor, but a good strong rumor, that the Listener Mary went back to Heaven for the second time and was thrown out.

'I haven't heard that, said the Pope.

'No, of course you haven't. The cardinals wouldn't tell you. They'd pussyfoot around-

'In time, said His Holiness, 'they would have gotten around to telling me.

'In time, yes. After they had stumbled around a lot and talked it over among themselves, viewing it from all angles and trying to figure out how best to break it to you, to tell you so it went down easy.

'They are good and faithful servants. They only do what they do out of their thoughtfulness for me.

'They do what they do, said the gardener, 'to twist your direction and your purpose. When Vatican first was established, Your Holiness, its aim was to seek out a true religion. Unlike the humans of Earth, we had the honesty to admit we were hunting for a better faith than the one we had known on Earth. Do you still, Your Holiness, seek a true religion?