“What?” she said to Matt, who had closed his hand over hers.
“I said, are you doing anything about lunch?”
She left to prepare lunch, thinking: there isn’t room any longer for so many of us, so different, the ones who don’t really care about going into space, and who don’t want to have anything to do with the Voice of God Church. No middle ground, and what’s left over anyway now? You have to belong to one or the other group, and we don’t. I don’t.
Thinking: will Obie Cox stop Derek and the others? Day and night they keep pushing to learn the ship, and they don’t learn it, but there is so much they are doing now. Soon Derek says we’ll really be a space-sailing world. Soon? Will Obie Cox be sooner?
She looked up as an air cab beat the air outside the garden and she shrieked to Matt and Derek, “Lorna! She’s here!”
They rushed out to meet Lorna, who was still digging coins from a purse for a tip. The taxi driver was holding her credit card patiently. Lorna completed the transaction and he released the door so she could step out. Her bags had already been slid from the compartment ramp. Lorna was a blur of pink dress and golden hair as she sped to her mother and father, talking. laughing, kissing them and Derek.
“You all look great. It’s so good to be home again! Let me tell you about school. I got A’s in everything! Everything! Can you believe it! And my job. I love it. I’m counselor to thirty girls, all under thirteen. It’s a great big camp up in the mountains, with laurel forests that smell divine in April, and are so dark and mysterious and cool. And there’s a waterfall where—”
“Good God,” Matt broke in. “You haven’t changed a bit, Lorna! Chatter, chatter. Under this broiling sun. Get! Inside with you.”
Lorna laughed and kissed him quickly, then looped her arm through Lisa’s and they walked together ahead of Matt and Derek. Derek was grinning broadly. “Boy, she’s worse if anything.”
Suddenly Matt stopped, and her suitcase dropped from his hand. Quickly he grasped it again and continued before anyone even noticed. He had just realized what he was looking at: Lorna’s hair. Beautiful golden hair that caught the sun and reflected it in a thousand bursts of fiery red light, hair that bounced and was brilliant and loose and half way down her back.
Chapter Eleven
“WHY do you care what I believe? It’s none of your business!” That was Derek, to Lorna.
“It’s everyone’s business now. When the aliens return we have to present them with a solid front. We have to be united in our own beliefs. We have to be prepared to destroy them all before they have a chance to overcome Earth.” Lorna to Derek.
“You’ve gone right off your nut! You talk like a series of posters!”
“What about the Star Child? What about him?”
“What about him? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You hop around like a hungry flea in a litter of pups.”
“We were warned that he had to be given a religious education, taught about our God, our beliefs, and what have we done? We have given him to the U.N., a bunch of Communists and atheists. We were warned and we did nothing!”
“By whom? Your bearded illiterate? Good God, Lorna….”
She gasped and blanched and quickly clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to deny the words.
“Now what?” Derek was leaning across the dinner table staring at her, unmindful of the chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, unheeding of the salad bowl heaped with mixed greens and dotted lavishly with blue cheese.
“You mustn’t say that. It’s blasphemy. If anyone hears you they’ll beat you….”
“Good God! Good God! Good God! Good God….”
Lorna fled, her food untasted on her plate. Derek pushed his own plate back and stared after her. “She’s gone crazy. What did they do to her?”
Lisa, looking at the food. that she had struggled so hard to find and bring home, concentrated on not weeping.
“Young man, you go fetch your sister back to the table and if either of you starts on the Voice of God Church again, I’ll do the beating. Now scat!”
Lorna allowed herself to be brought back, but she refused to look at Derek, and she was silent through the main course. They talked of the weather, and Lorna started to speak, but bit her lips instead and picked at her salad. Obie had predicted another year of drought.
“They’ve known for twenty years or more that the cities have caused the weather changes,” Derek said. “The cloud cover, seeding with dust particles, the great heat output of the cities, that’s what it takes, you know. Everything gets sucked up and dumped out again over the cooler oceans. It isn’t a question of how to alleviate it, but rather why don’t they take the steps.”
“Break up the cities?” Lisa murmured.
“What else?”
“There was a time when we could do that, but now? I don’t think so,” Matt said. “No water inland, all crops, no industry….”
“Brother Cox says—”
“Oh, shut up,” Derek interrupted.
The talk turned to the world situation and the heavy demands of the draft to maintain the forces throughout South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Matt was bitter about it, Derek resigned, and again Lorna looked as if she would like to explain, or comment, and again she didn’t. Obie had predicted an ever increasing need for men to patrol the world in order to keep the raw materials flowing into the bottomless pit that the space programs had created, and to keep the people from whose country they flowed quiet if not happy. Obie predicted also that it was futile, that those people were God-fearing people and the day was at hand when they would rise up and slay the non-believers stripping their lands for a project foredoomed to fail. The Voice of God Church sponsored, outfitted, and supplied guerrilla missionaries all over the world; outlawed by most governments, refused travel cards and credit cards, the Church provided its own credit, its own travel facilities, and no one knew how many of the zealots it had sent out, or where they had gone.
“The trouble is,” Lisa had complained once to Matt, “that if you believe in anything that Obie had condoned, you are forced to doubt your own beliefs. Can I really believe in anything that the Voice of God Church believes in? It doesn’t seem possible.”
They had cake and champagne, there were two bottles, so they all got rather giddy and happy and took their glasses to the living room where they laughed at old times and made elaborate toasts to Derek. It turned into a birthday party after all. Until the Savers arrived at eleven.”
Lorna wanted to let them in, to prove to her family that they weren’t monsters. When she was refused, she said she would go out and join them, and Matt assumed the role that he had used only once or twice in his life, that of the heavy-handed father, lord, master of the house. He couldn’t permit her to leave. Lorna stood up and started for the door, and he got in front of it. She stopped and stared at him with unbelieving eyes.
“You always said that we had to decide for ourselves. I decided. I believe in Brother Cox and what he is doing. I am a member of the Voice of God Church, I am working for it this summer and I’ll go to its school in the fall. Let me go out. They don’t know someone is inside who belongs. They’ll go away when they know your daughter is a member of the Church.”
“Wait,” Matt said. “Listen first.”
The hymn ended and the voice of the Messenger was there in the room with them. “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”