Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

In the course of our talk it emerged that George had been a rocket pilot, but was grounded now — not, one would judge, for reasons of health, so I did not inquire further….

The second course was an excellent coupe of fruits I never heard of, and, over all, iced passion-fruit juice. It was when the coffee came that he said, rather wistfully I thought:

“I had hoped you might be able to help me, Mr. Myford, but it now seems to me that you are not a man of faith.”

“Surely everyone has to be very much a man of faith,” I protested. “For everything a man cannot do for himself he has to have faith in others.”

“True,” he conceded. “I should have said ‘spiritual faith.’ You do not speak as one who is interested in the nature and destiny of his soul — nor of anyone else’s soul — I fear?”

I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However, if he was interested in saving my soul he had at least begun the operation by looking after my bodily needs with a generously good meal.

“When I was young,” I told him, “I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.”

“There is also vanity in thinking oneself self-sufficient,” he said.

“Certainly,” I agreed. “It is chiefly with the conception of the soul as a separate entity that I find myself out of sympathy. For me it is a manifestation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modified by the external environment, and influenced more directly by the glands.”

He looked saddened, and shook his head reprovingly. “You are so wrong — so very wrong. Some are always conscious of their souls, others, like yourself, are unaware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he understands its value.”

It was not an observation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us continue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embarrassment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, however, showed no embarrassment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beautifully laundered handkerchief, and dealt with them.

“I hope you will never learn what a dreadful thing it is to have no soul,” he told me, with a shake of his head. “It is to hold the emptiness of space in one’s heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one’s life.”

Lamely I said: “I’m afraid this is out of my range. I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. No one understands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come somebody who does understand, and can help.”

“But the soul is a manifestation of the self,” I said. “I don’t see how that can be lost — it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost”

“Mine is,” he said, still looking up into the vasty blue. “Lost — adrift somewhere out there…. Without it I am a sham…. A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing — nothing — nothing….”

“Perhaps a psychiatrist—” I started to suggest, uncertainly.

That stirred him, and checked the tears. “Psychiatrist!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Damned frauds! Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche! — why they even deny its existence…!”

There was a pause.

“I wish I could help--”

“There was a chance. You might have been one who could. There’s always the chance…” Whether he was consoling himself, or me, seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host’s mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

“I have to go now,” he told me. “I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.”

I watched him make his way along the Place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit, and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently unconcerned about payment

The dusky waitress arrived by my table, and stood looking after him.

“O, le pauvre monsieur Georges,” she said, sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the remnant of his fruit and remove his hat to enter. “Il va faire la prière,” she explained. “Tous les jours ‘e make pray for ‘is soul. In ze morning, in ze afternoon. C’est si triste.”

I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I misjudged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

“ Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous êtes convive. C’est d’accord. Alors, monsieur Georges ‘e sign bill tomorrow. S’arrange. C’est okay,” she insisted, and stuck to it.

The elderly man whom I had noticed before broke in: “It’s all right — quite in order,” he assured me. Then he added: “Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?”

There seemed to be a fine open-handedness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

“I’m afraid no one can have briefed you about poor George,” he said.

I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

“Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. One doesn’t like that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”

“It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he’s improving. I doubt whether he knows it himself, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner. — Rather depressing until one got used to it.”

“He lives here in Lahua, then?” I asked.

“He exists. He spends most of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand-daughter’s place. She sees that he’s decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”

I thought I must have misheard.

“His grand-daughter!” I exclaimed. “But he’s a young man. He can’t be much over thirty years old…”

He looked at me.

“You’ll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn’t the sort of thing the family likes to publicize, but there’s no secret about it.”

The café-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:

About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger asteroids — the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis, working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accommodation forward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the outward journeys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assignment was simply to pick up a load of uranium ore— Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was necessary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course — but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of outfliers of all sizes that you couldn’t hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objective as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velocity, and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands — hundreds of thousands, maybe — of miles. Fellows get bored and inattentive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don’t know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course deflector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there’s so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensitive enough to react to it you’d have your ship shying off everything the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mechanism with only a limited range of operation— say, a hundred miles — but no one does. So, as I say, it’s tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they’ve lost half-a-dozen ships in there, and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all… On the other hand, uranium is uranium….