The Hopeful’s laundry fell on everybody.
Pandemonium. Achum and Malya and the congregation all struggled and fought their way out from under the laundry. “Achum!” the worshipers cried. “Achum, what’s happening?”
“A sign!” Achum shouted, spitting out socks. “A sign!”
A worshiper with a greasy work glove rakishly atilt across his forehead cried, “Achum! What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure exactly what it means,” Achum answered, looking around at this imitation of a rummage sale, “but it sure is a sign.”
A worshiper pointed upward. “Achum, look! From the sky! Something huge is coming!”
“As I understand it, Ensign Benson, these are a religious people.”
Councilman Morton Luthguster, stout and pompous, representative of the Galactic Council on this journey of discovery and reunion, sat in his stateroom in prelanding conference with Ensign Kybee Benson, social engineer, the saturnine, impatient man whose job it was to study the lost colonies as they were found and prepare reports on what they had become in the half millennium of their isolation.
“Well, Councilman,” Ensign Benson said, “they were a religious people five hundred years ago. The colony here was founded by the Sanctarians, a peaceful, pious community determined to get away from the strife of the modern world. Well, I mean, what was then the modern world. They named their colony Heaven.”
“Charming name,” Luthguster said, nodding slowly, creating and destroying any number of chins. “And, from what you say, a simple, charming people. I look forward to their acquaintance.”
“Landing procedure complete,” said the loud-speaker system in Billy Shelby’s animated voice.
“Ah, good,” Luthguster said, heaving himself to his feet. “Come along, Ensign Benson. I wonder if I recall the Lord’s Prayer.”
The Hopeful’s automatic pilot had set the ship gently down on a wide, barren, rocky plain, similar in appearance to several unpopulated islands of the coast of Norway. A door in the side of the ship opened, a ladder protruded itself slowly from within, like a worm from an apple, and once it had pinged solidly onto the stony scree, Councilman Luthguster emerged and paused at the platform at the ladder’s top. Captain Standforth, Billy Shelby and Ensign Benson followed, and all four stared down at the welcoming committee below.
Who were Achum, his unsacrificed daughter Malya and all the worshipers, every last one of them decked out in the Hopeful’s laundry. And when Achum looked up at that fat figure atop the ladder and recalled the god statue in his church, hope became certainty: Prostrating himself, with his forehead on the ground, he cried out, in a voice of terror and awe, “Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!”
The other worshipers, quick on the uptake, also prostrated themselves, and the cry went up from one and alclass="underline" “Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!”
“Not very much like my religion,” Luthguster said and led the group down the ladder to the ground, where the worshipers continued to lie on their faces and shout out the same name. The instant Luthguster’s foot touched rock, Achum scrabbled forward on knees and elbows to embrace the councilman’s ankles. “Here! Here!” cried Luthguster, not at all pleased.
Achum half rose. “Hear, hear!” he shouted. “Hip, hip—”
“Hooray!” yelled the worshipers.
“Hip, hip—”
“Hooray!”
“Hip, hip—”
“Hooray!”
Ensign Benson had approached one of the prostrate worshipers, and now he attracted the fellow’s attention with a prodding boot in the ribs. “Say, you. What’s going on around here?”
“Juju-Kuxtil!” answered the wide-eyed worshiper and nodded in awe at Luthguster. “God! It’s God!”
Achum was on his feet, prancing around, crying, “A feast for Juju-Kuxtil! A feast! A feast!”
Luthguster, beginning to get the idea, looked around and visibly became more enamored of it. Frowning at him, Ensign, Benson said, “That’s God?”
“He’s shorter in person, isn’t he” said the worshiper.
The feast was outdoors and vaguely Polynesian in effect, with the visitors and the natives all sitting in a great oval. At the head of the oval, at Councilman Luthguster’s right hand, the priest Achum stood and began the feast with a speech: “The time foretold by the sacred writings has come! Juju-Kuxtil is here to save us, as it was written! We have put on the sacred raiment, and we shall be saved from the yellow rain!”
Sotto voce, while the speech went on, Councilman Luthguster asked Ensign Benson, beside him at his other hand, “What’s happening here?”
“Apparently,” Ensign Benson murmured, “some physical disaster struck this colony quite some time ago and drove these people from an advanced society, with modern religion, back to primitive paganism.”
“But what should we do?”
“Go along with them, at least for a while. Until we learn more.”
“But what’s this yellow rain he’s going on and on about?”
“We can’t ask questions,” Ensign Benson said. “We’ll find out later.”
Achum was finishing his speech: “Soon the great Juju-Kuxtil shall begin his mighty work; but first, we shall feast. A feast of welcome to Juju-Kuxtil and his angels!”
Cheers rose from the assembled natives. Achum took his seat, and platters of food — lumpy, anonymous brown stuff that smelled rather like mildew — were distributed. Hospitably, Achum said to Luthguster, “I hope you like dilbump.”
Luthguster blinked at his plate. “It looks quite, um, filling.”
Billy Shelby had seated himself next to the prettiest girl at the feast, who happened to be Achum’s daughter Malya. Smiling at her, he said, “Hi. My name’s Billy.”
“Malya.”
“What’s the matter? You aren’t eating.”
“I wasn’t planning on dinner today,” Malya explained, “so I had a big lunch.”
“No dinner? Why not?”
“I was about to be sacrificed when you all got here.”
Billy stared. “Sacrificed! Why?”
Wondering but not quite suspicious, Malya said, “For Juju-Kuxtil, of course. Don’t you know that?”
“Oh! Um. Well, I’m glad it worked out this way, and now you don’t have to be sacrificed, after all.”
She pouted prettily. “Don’t you want me to live forever with you on the Great Cloud?”
Sincerely, he said, “I’d like you anywhere.”
She gave him a sidelong look. “You don’t seem very much like an angel.”
“I can be surprisingly human,” he told her.
The fourth voyager on the Hopeful also at the feast was Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, a 40ish, blunt-featured, blunt-talking person who was much happier with her engines than at any social occasion, including religious feasts. She kept her eyes firmly down and did little more than poke at her soup and her dilbump until the native on her left said, “Excuse me.”
Hester looked at him. He was middle-aged, with a keen look about the eyes and the gnarled hands of a worker. “Yeah?”
“I was looking at that cloud you all fly around in.”
“I hope you didn’t mess it up,” Hester said.
“It’s hard to the touch. I thought clouds were soft and fluffy.”
“It isn’t a cloud,” said Hester, who didn’t believe in going along with other people’s misconceptions. “It’s a ship.”
“Make a nice lamp.”
Hester stared. “What?”
“I’m a carpenter,” the native said. “Name of Keech.”