Clifford Simak - Project Pope

'What do you propose to do? If they have gone to Heaven, if they really find it, if they do come back —

'For one thing, I am fairly certain I know now who has been behind all this theological nonsense. John, the gardener in the clinic garden. I have a fairly good idea that he has been working for the Pope, an undercover agent for the Pope, although why the Pope should think he needs an undercover agent is more than I can figure out. But that will make no difference. I'm about to make certain that our friend the gardener becomes a piddling little monk and stays a piddling monk forever. And there are others of them….

'But you have no power structure within which to work.

'Not yet, but I will have. Once I talk with His Holiness and tell him what I've found. Once he knows that I know about his undercover agent, once he knows that Tennyson and Jill will be coming back from Heaven. If it weren't for the fact that Heaven will be unmasked, the Pope would be reluctant to take action. Once he knows, however….

'What if this story of yours, Eminence, should prove to be flat wrong? What if —

'In such a case, I will be sunk, said Theodosius, 'and so will you. If we don't act, we'll be sunk anyhow. We have nothing much to lose.

'You're right on that point, said Ecuyer. 'You are absolutely right.

'So will you go with me to see the Pope?

'Yes, said Ecuyer, rising from his chair. 'Let us see the Pope.

The cardinal also rose.

Ecuyer asked another question. 'You said that now Heaven was about to be unmasked. How can you be sure that it will be unmasked?

'Oh, that, said his Eminence. 'Well, that's a gamble too. A calculated risk. If it turns out that I am wrong, I'll probably become a piddling little monk.

'You take the gamble willingly?

'Indeed I do, said Theodosius.

'Up to a point I can remember some of it, said Decker. 'I remember being plastered against the hull of the ship, trying to dig my fingers into the metal of it, looking out and seeing the hub of this place spearing up at me and the roads that ran into the hub like so many spokes. I don't remember running for the lifeboat because it wasn't me who ran, not me, this Decker II who sits here and talks with you, but the real, the first, the original Decker who was the pattern for me.

'It all checks out, said Tennyson, 'with what little the original Decker, as you call him, told me. He didn't tell me much. He was a tight-lipped man.

'So am I, said Decker II, 'but the shock and I might say the joy in meeting people of my kind has knocked some of the reticence out of me.

They sat in a pleasant room, high in one of the many towers. Thick carpeting covered the floors and paintings hung upon the walls. Comfortable furniture stood about.

'I'm glad, said Jill, 'that you were able to find this place for us. In all the alienness, it is a touch of home.

'It took a bit of doing, said Decker, 'but the Bubbly was insistent that I find a proper place to put you up. He's gone on hospitality.

'The Bubbly?

'The bubble with the funny face, said Decker. 'He is only one of the many who are here. Out of my irreverence, I call them Bubblies. They have another name, of course, but it's well-nigh unpronounceable in the human tongue and a literal translation of it sounds ridiculous. This particular Bubbly that you met is what might be called a friend of mine, although perhaps more than an ordinary friend. It's hard to explain. I call him Smoky, from that face of his, although all of them have the same kind of faces. He doesn't know what Smoky means, although I call him it to his face. He thinks it's an affectionate human name. If he knew its human meaning, he might get sore at me. You saw the Haystack that was there with him?

'I noticed it, said Tennyson. 'It was watching us.

'He is Smoky's first friend — first because he has been with him longer. I am his second friend, second because I've not been here that long. We make up a triad. Among the Bubblies, no Bubbly stands by himself. There must be two others with him. It's a sort of brotherhood, a blood brotherhood, but that's not exactly it, either, but it's as close as I can come. Old Haystack must have given you something of a start. He's a strange-looking critter.

'He certainly is, said Jill.

'Haystack's not too bad a sort, said Decker, 'once you get to know him. For one thing, he's not the kind of slobbering horror that you meet so often here.

'You take all of it very well, said Jill.

'I have no complaint, said Decker. 'I've been treated well. At first I wondered about my position — captive, refugee, exhibit? I guess I still don't know what I am, but I don't worry about it any longer. The Bubblies have done well enough by me.

'The Bubblies took what amounted to a picture of you, out there in the ship; not of you, but of the original Decker, said Tennyson, 'and used it to recreate another Decker, which is you. From that distance, with you behind the hull of the ship-

'You have to understand, Decker told him, 'that far more than a picture, as you term it, is involved. I'm not sure about the technique. I understand the principle but not how it works. The nearest I can come to explaining it, and it's a feeble explanation, is to compare it with the body scanner that was developed on Earth a long time ago. First it was called a brain scanner because it was used principally on the brain, usually to detect tumors. But later it was used as a body scanner. It could take a picture of cross sections of the body. It sort of peeled the body, speaking photographically, which is an awkward way of saying it, taking X-ray pictures at different depths. The term «picture» is not right, either. The data was fed into a computer that put together the findings so they could be read. Well, this is what the contraption used by the Bubblies can do. But it can operate over considerable distances. Its data can be used to reconstruct any sort of matter, anything on which the data has been obtained. I was told that in my case, in addition to the data on my body, it also had data on a cross section of the ship. But they only used my body data. I suppose the specification on that cross section of the ship is still somewhere in the files and that it could be recreated if there was any point in doing it.

'But Decker, the original Decker, was two hundred years or so out of his time, said Tennyson. 'That's what he told me. The lifeboat held him in suspended animation while it searched out a planet where he could survive. The search took some two hundred years. Yet your best estimate is that you have been here only a hundred years or so.

'This is the first I've known of that, said Decker. "But I can make a guess. It probably took the Bubblies a hundred years before they got around to me. They have a lot of data piled up. Sometimes they have to pick and choose what they want to recreate. Some of the data they have here may have been in the files for several hundreds of years. Some of it they may never get around to.

'You say a hundred years. How old were you when this happened — forty years or so? You don't look a hundred and forty to me. You don't look a day older than the Decker that I knew.

'Well, the way it goes, said Decker, 'is that they improve upon the data. When they turn out an organism from the data, they try to spot the weak points. I suppose that when I was built from the data, the data provided for that useless human organ, the vermiform appendix. Noting it was useless, they'd have probably left that out. I'll make you a wager I have no appendix. A weak or malformed heart valve — they'd fix that up as well. A missing tooth would be replaced, one that had caries would be replaced as well. A bad kidney or a suspect length of gut…

'You sound as if you could be immortal.