A Case of Conscience Read online

  “I would be most indebted. It is for our colleagues Agronski and Michelis; they are at Xoredeshch Gton on the northeast continent, at about thirty-two degrees east, thirty-two degrees north—”

  “Yes, the second bench mark at the outlet of the Lesser Lakes; that is the city of the potters, I know it well. And you would say?”

  “That they are to join us now, here, at Xoredeshch Sfath. And that our time on Lithia is almost up.”

  “That me regards,” Chtexa said. “But I will bear it.”

  The Lithian leapt into the whirling cloud, and Ruiz-Sanchez was left behind, considering again his thankfulness that he had been moved to study the painfully difficult Lithian language. Two of the four commission members had shown a regrettable lack of interest in that world-wide tongue: “Let 'em learn English” had been Cleaver's unknowingly classic formulation. Ruiz-Sanchez had been all the less likely to view this notion sympathetically for the facts that his own native language was Spanish, and that, of the five foreign languages in which he was really fluent, the one he liked best was West High German.

  Agronski had taken a slightly more sophisticated stand. It was not, he said, that Lithian was too difficult to pronounce-certainly it wasn't any harder on the soft palate than Arabic or Russian-but, after all, “it's hopeless to attempt to grasp the concepts that lie behind a really alien language, isn't it? At least in the time we have to spend here?”

  To both views, Michelis had said nothing; he had simply set out to learn to read the language first, and if he found his way from there into speaking it, he would not be surprised and neither would his confreres. That was Michelis' way of doing things, thorough and untheoretical at the same time. As for the other two approaches, Ruiz-Sanchez thought privately that it was close to criminal to allow any contact man for a new planet ever to leave Earth with such parochial notions. In understanding a new culture, language is of the essence; if one doesn't start there, where under God does one start?

  Of Cleaver's penchant for referring to the Lithians themselves as “the Snakes,” Ruiz-Sanchez' opinion was of a color admissible only to his remote confessor.

  And in view of what lay before him now in this egg-shaped hollow, what was Ruiz-Sanchez to think of Cleaver's conduct as communications officer for the commission? Surely he could never have transmitted or received a single message through the Tree, as he had claimed to have done. Probably he had never been closer to the Tree than Ruiz-Sanchez was now.

  Of course, it went without saying that he had been in contact with Agronski and Michelis by some method, but that method had evidently been something private-a transmitter concealed in his luggage, or… No, that wouldn't do. Physicist though he most definitely was not, Ruiz-Sanchez rejected that solution on the spot; he had some idea of the practical difficulties of operating a ham radio on a world like Lithia, swamped as that world was on all wave-lengths by the tremendous pulses which the Tree wrung from the buried crystalline cliff. The problem was beginning to make him feel decidedly uncomfortable.

  Then Chtexa was back, recognizable not so much by any physical detail-for his wattles were now the same ambiguous royal purple as those of most of the other Lithians in the crowd-as by the fact that he was bearing down upon the Earthman.

  “I have sent your message,” he said at once. “It is recorded at Xoredeshch Gton. But the other Earthmen are not there. They have not been in the city for some days.”

  That was impossible. Cleaver had said he had spoken to Michelis only a day ago. “Are you sure?” Ruiz-Sanchez said cautiously.

  “It admits of no uncertainty. The house which we gave them stands empty. The many things which they brought with them to the house are gone.” The tall shape raised its four-fingered hands in a gesture which might have been solicitous. “I think this is an ill word. I dislike to bring it you. The words you brought me when first we met were full of good.”

  “Thank you. Don't worry,” Ruiz-Sanchez said distractedly. “No man could hold the bearer responsible for the word, surely.”

  “The bearer also has responsibilities; at least, that is our custom,” Chtexa said. “No act is wholly free. And as we see it, you have lost by our exchange. Your words on iron have been shown to contain great good. I would take pleasure in showing you how we have used them, especially since I have brought you in return an ill message. If you could share my house tonight, without prejudice to your work, I could expose this matter. Is that possible?”

  Sternly Ruiz-Sanchez stifled his sudden excitement. Here was the first chance, at long last, to see something of the private life of Lithia, and through that, perhaps, to gain some inkling of the moral life, the role in which God had cast the Lithians in the ancient drama of good and evil, in the past and in the times to come. Until that was known, the Lithians in their Eden might be only spuriously good: all reason, all organic thinking machines, ULTIMACs with tails-and without souls.

  But there remained the hard fact that he had left behind in his house a sick man. There was not much chance that Cleaver would awaken before morning. He had been given nearly fifteen milligrams of sedative per kilogram of body weight. But sick men are like children, whose schedules persistently defy all rules. If Cleaver's burly frame should somehow throw that dose off, driven perhaps by some anaphylactic crisis impossible to rule out this early in his illness, he would need prompt attention. At the very least, he would want badly for the sound of a human voice on this planet which he hated, and which had struck him down almost without noticing that he existed.

  Still, the danger to Cleaver was not great. He most certainly did not require a minute-by-minute vigil; he was, after all, not a child, but an almost ostentatiously strong man.

  And there was such a thing as an excess of devotion, a form of pride among the pious which the Church had long found peculiarly difficult to make clear to them. At its worst, it produced the hospital saints, whose attraction to noisome-ness so peculiarly resembled the vermin-worship of the Hindi sects-or a St. Simon Stylites, who though undoubtedly acceptable to God had been for centuries very bad public relations for the Church. And had Cleaver really earned the kind of devotion Ruiz-Sanchez had been proposing, up to now, to tender him as a creature of God-or, to come closer to the mark, a godly creature?

  And with a whole planet at stake, a whole people-no, more than that, a whole problem in theology, an imminent solution to the vast, tragic riddle of original sin… What a gift to bring to the Holy Father in a jubilee year-a grander and more solemn thing than the proclamation of the conquest of Everest had been at the coronation of Elizabeth II of England ! Always providing, of course, that this would be the ultimate outcome of the study of Lithia. The planet was not lacking in hints that something quite different, and fearful beyond all else, might emerge under Ruiz-Sanchez' prolonged attention. Not even prayer had yet resolved that doubt. But should he sacrifice even the possibility of this, for Cleaver?

  A lifetime of meditation over just such cases of conscience had made Ruiz-Sanchez, like most other gifted members of his order, quick to find his way to a decision through all but the most complicated of ethical labyrinths. All Catholics must be devout; but a Jesuit must be, in addition, agile.

  “Thank you,” he said to Chtexa, a little shakily. “I will share your house very gladly.”

  III

  (A voice): “Cleaver? Cleaver! Wake up, you big slob. Cleaver! Where the hell have you been?”

  Cleaver groaned and tried to turn over. At his first motion, the world began to rock, gently, sickeningly. He was awash in fever. His mouth, seemed to be filled with burning pitch.

  “Cleaver, turn out. It's me-Agronski. Where's the Father? What's wrong? Why didn't we ever hear from you? Look out, you'll—”

  The warning came too late, and Cleaver could not have understood it anyhow. He had been profoundly asleep, and had no notion of his situation in space or time. At his convulsive twist away from the nagging voice, the hammock rotated on its hooks and dumped him.

  He struc
k the floor stunningly, taking the main blow across his right shoulder, though he hardly felt it yet. His feet, not yet part of him at all, still remained far aloft, twisted in the hammock webbing.

  “What the hell—”

  There was a brief chain of footsteps, like chestnuts dropping on a roof, and then a hollow noise of something hitting the floor near his head.

  “Cleaver, are you sick? Here, lie still a minute and let me get your feet free. Mike-Mike, can't you turn the gas up in this jug? Something's wrong back here.”

  After a moment, yellow light began to pour from the glistening walls, and then the white glare of the mantles. Cleaver dragged an arm across his eyes, but it did him no good; it tired too quickly. Agronski's mild face, plump and anxious, floated directly above him like a captive balloon. He could not see Michelis anywhere, and at the moment he was just as glad he couldn't. Agronski's presence was hard enough to understand.

  “How… the hell…” he said. At the words, his lips split painfully at both corners. He realized for the first time that they had become gummed together, somehow, while he was asleep. He had no idea how long he had been out of the picture.

  Agronski seemed to understand the aborted question. “We came in from the Lakes in the 'copter,” he said. “We didn't like the silence down here, and we figured we'd better come in under our own power, instead of registering in on the regular jet liner and tipping the Lithians off-just in case there'd been any dirty work afloat—”

  “Stop jawing him,” Michelis said, appearing suddenly, magically in the doorway. “He's got a bug, that's obvious. I don't like to feel pleased about misery, but I'm glad it's that instead of the Lithians.”

  The rangy, long-jawed chemist helped Agronski lift Cleaver to his feet. Tentatively, despite the pain, Cleaver got his mouth open again. Nothing came out but a hoarse croak.

  “Shut up,” Michelis said, not unkindly. “Let's get him back into the hammock. Where's the Father, I wonder? He's the only one capable of dealing with sickness here.”

  “I'll bet he's dead,” Agronski burst out suddenly, his face glistening with alarm. “He'd be here if he could. It must be catching, Mike.”

  “I didn't bring my mitt,” Michelis said drily. “Cleaver, lie still or I'll have to clobber you. Agronski, you seem to have dumped his water bottle; better go get him some more, he needs it. And see if the Father left anything in the lab that looks like medicine.”

  Agronski went out, and, maddeningly, so did Michelis- at least out of Cleaver's field of vision. Setting his every muscle against the pain, Cleaver pulled his lips apart once more.

  “Mike.”

  Instantly, Michelis was there. He had a pad of cotton between thumb and forefinger, wet with some solution, with which he gently cleaned Cleaver's lips and chin.

  “Easy. Agronski's getting you a drink. We'll let you talk in a little while, Paul. Don't rush it.”

  Cleaver relaxed a little. He could trust Michelis. Nevertheless, the vivid and absurd insult of having to be swabbed like a baby was more than he could bear; he felt tears of helpless rage swelling on either side of his nose. With two deft, non-committal swipes, Michelis removed them.

  Agronski came back, holding out one hand tentatively, palm up.

  “I found these,” he said. “There's more in the lab, and the Father's pill press is still out. So are his mortar and pestle, though they've been cleaned.”

  “All right, let's have 'em,” Michelis said. “Anything else?”

  “No. Well, there's a syringe cooking in the sterilizer, if that means anything.”

  Michelis swore briefly and to the point.

  “It means that there's a pertinent antitoxin in the shop someplace,” he added. “But unless Ramon left notes, we'll not have a prayer of figuring out which one it is.”

  As he spoke, he lifted Cleaver's head and tipped the pills into his mouth, onto his tongue. The water which followed was cold at the first contact, but a split second later it was liquid fire. Cleaver choked, and at that precise instant Michelis pinched his nostrils shut. The pills went down with a gulp.

  “There's no sign of the Father?” Michelis said.

  “Not a one, Mike. Everything's in good order, and his gear's still here. Both jungle suits are in the locker.”

  “Maybe he went visiting,” Michelis said thoughtfully. “He must have gotten to know quite a few of the Lithians by now. He liked them.”

  “With a sick man on his hands? That's not like him, Mike. Not unless there was some kind of emergency. Or maybe he went on a routine errand, expected to be back in just a few minutes, and—”

  “And was set upon by trolls, for forgetting to stamp his foot three times before crossing a bridge.”

  “All right, laugh.”

  “I'm not laughing, believe me. That's just the kind of damn fool thing that can kill a man in a strange culture. But somehow I can't see it happening to Ramon.”

  “Mike…”

  Michelis took a step and looked down at Cleaver. His face was drifting as if detached through a haze of tears. He said: “All right, Paul. Tell us what it is. We're listening.”

  But it was too late. The doubled sedative dose had gotten to Cleaver first. He could only shake his head, and with the motion Michelis seemed to go reeling away into a whirlpool of fuzzy rainbows.

  Curiously, he did not quite go to sleep. He had had nearly a normal night's sleep, and he had started out his enormously long day a powerful and healthy man. The conversation of the two commissioners, and an obsessive consciousness of his need to speak to them before Ruiz-Sanchez returned, helped to keep him, if not totally awake, at least not far below a state of light trance. In addition, the presence in his system of thirty grains of acetylsalicylic acid had seriously raised his oxygen consumption, bringing with it not only dizziness but also a precarious, emotionally untethered alertness. That the fuel which was being burned to maintain it was in part the protein substrate of his own cells he did not know, and it could not have alarmed him had he known it. The voices continued to reach him, and to convey a little meaning. With them were mixed fleeting, fragmentary dreams, so slightly removed from the surface of his waking life as to seem peculiarly real, yet at the same time peculiarly pointless and depressing. In the semiconscious intervals there came plans, a whole succession of them, all simple and grandiose at once, for taking command of the expedition, for communicating with the authorities on Earth, for bringing forward secret papers proving that Lithia was uninhabitable, for digging a tunnel under Mexico to Peru, for detonating Lithia in one single mighty fusion of all its lightweight atoms into one single atom of cleaverium, the element of which the monobloc had been made, whose cardinal number was Aleph-Null…

  AGRONSKI: Mike, come here and look at this; you read Lithian.

  There's a mark on the front door, on the message tablet.

  (Footsteps.)

  MICHELIS: It says “Sickness inside.” The strokes aren't casual or deft enough to be the work of the natives. Ideograms are hard to write rapidly without long practice. Ramon must have written it there.

  AGRONSKI: I wish we knew where he went afterwards. Funny we didn't see it when we came in.

  MICHELIS: I don't think so. It was dark, and we weren't looking for it.

  (Footsteps. Door shutting, not loudly. Footsteps. Hassock creaking.)

  AGRONSKI: Well, we'd better start thinking about getting up a report. Unless this damn twenty-hour day has me thrown completely off, our time's just about up. Are you still set on opening up the planet?

  MICHELIS: Yes. I've seen nothing to convince me that there's anything on Lithia that's dangerous to us. Except maybe Cleaver in there, and I'm not prepared to say that the Father would have left him if he were in any serious danger. And I don't see how Earthmen could harm this society; it's too stable emotionally, economically, in every other way.

  (Danger, danger, said somebody in Cleaver's dream. It will explode. It's all a popish plot. Then he was marginally awake again, and cons
cious of how much his mouth hurt.)

  AGRONSKI: Why do you suppose those two jokers never called us after we went north?

  MICHELIS: I don't have any answer. I won't even guess until I talk to Ramon. Or until Paul's able to sit up and take notice.

  AGRONSKI: I don't like it, Mike. It smells bad to me. This town's right at the heart of the communications system of the planet-that's why we picked it, for Crisake! And yet-no messages, Cleaver sick, the Father not here… There's a hell of a lot we don't know about Lithia, that's for damn sure.

  MICHELIS: There's a hell of a lot we don't know about central Brazil-let alone Mars, or the Moon.

  AORONSKI: Nothing essential, Mike. What we know about the periphery of Brazil gives us all the clues we need about the interior-even to those fish that eat people, the what-are-they, the piranhas. That's not true on Lithia. We don't know whether our peripheral clues about Lithia are germane or just incidental. Something enormous could be hidden under the surface without our being able to detect it.

  MICHELIS: Agronski, stop sounding like a Sunday supplement. You underestimate your own intelligence. What kind of enormous secret could that be? That the Lithians eat people? That they're cattle for unknown gods that live in the jungle? That they're actually mind-wrenching, soul-twisting, heart-stopping, blood-freezing, bowel-moving superbeings in disguise? The moment you state any such proposition, you'll deflate it yourself; it's only in the abstract that it's able to scare you. I wouldn't even take the trouble of examining it, or discussing how we might meet it if it were true.

  AORONSKI: All right, all right. I'll reserve judgment for the time being, anyhow. If everything turns out to be all right here, with the Father and Cleaver I mean, I'll probably go along with you. I don't have any reason I could defend for voting against the planet, I admit that.