"Then why aren't you locked in your room like a good boy?" Bensmiller was sweating.
"I was looking for you. When the sirens began, everyone came running. But you."
"My ears haven't popped."
"The sirens are for a reason. Let's go."
With a weird whining snap the inner lock door yielded and hissed into its sheath. Both men stopped. Among the confused noises from Lock Six was the sound of a man in pain.
Bensmillers' breath left him in a short sigh. He turned and ran back around the corner to the lock. Chamblen said nothing, merely continued to walk, slowly, almost hesitantly, back toward the tiny cubicle to which the sirens called him.
Three men had been brought in. Dusty anonymous suited figures milled around them, tearing at resistant half-metal suit cloth with fingers and knives and sheet metal shears. Even as Bensmiller was about to reach them several men in clean pressure suits pushed by him pulling two surgical carts. They had the red cross on the white band around their arms. He flattened himself against the wall to let them pass, then continued to press forward.
Kreski was shrieking orders and shouting into a wireless microphone. Disembodied voices crackled reply from speakers in the walls. Father Bensmiller elbowed his way between two of the dusty-suited men and looked down on the first body.
It was in several pieces, crusted with melting blood-slush. Bensmiller glanced away, then steeled himself and looked again. The medics were roughly piling the fragments into an opaque bag. The head and shoulders and one arm were still intact, although blackened and the faceplate opaque. Bensmiller was regretfully glad of that.
Eternal rest grant unto him. . . .
The other two were at least mostly intact. Both had been brought in inside emergency pressure bags for suit-puncture accidents, and both were still alive. One, his name Monahan, the priest had met briefly at the first Mass held in his little room. Monahan's left leg below the knee was a bloody ruin, his foot nearly sheared off at the ankle. He moaned softly. The other man was not familiar to Bensmiller, and was breathing noisily and spitting up blood. His eyes were closed and he did not move his limbs.
The speakers began to shout the story for the benefit of the rest of the station. "Hydrogen leak in feed tubes to unfinished fusion plant leading to explosion Garden Four destroyed Cardens Two and Three damaged slightly H-culture team injured no atomics involved repeat no atomics involved. . . ."
That seemed to be what separated a minor disaster from a major one. Whether atomics were involved. Human life didn't seem to enter into it. Bensmiller watched the medics lift Monahan onto one of the carts, bereft of his suit and all but tatters of his blue longjohns. A tourniquet had been crudely twisted around his left leg above the knee. He continued to emit low sounds of pain and occasional muttered obscenities. Blood was everywhere, on the hands of the medics, soaking into the padding of the cart, still oozing from the ruin of his leg. Bensmiller pressed forward, reached out and put his hand on the man's forehead.
Cod; Father, Son, and Spirit, he was a good man. He came to Mass once. He worked hard. I know him. He worked . . . hard.
The Sacrament was in his cubicle. Time, time, that was all ... He started making the sign of the cross on Monahan's forehead when Kreski grabbed him by the shoulder and roughly pulled him back.
"Get that man to surgery. Bensmiller, stand back or I'll club you." The station commander held a heavy sheet-metal shears in one hand. Bensmiller stepped back while the medics pulled the muttering man away.
Kreski tossed his shears to the floor next to his discarded helmet. He faced the priest, sweat-drops dotting his thin sideburns. "What the hell's the matter with you?"
The ruddy face was furious, the man still breathing deeply and quickly. It was not an easy face to confront. Bensmiller licked his lips. "I'm a priest. These men are my spiritual responsibility. If they feel depressed, I encourage them. If they feel guilty, I hear their confession. If they're about to die, I give them the last sacraments. That's my job. This is my parish."
It did not seem the right thing to say at all, somehow, but Bensmiller could not harden before Kreski's sweating fury. Kreski turned away for a moment, wiped some of the grime from his face and turned back, his anger dampened.
"You want to make mumbo-jumbo over Odner, go ahead. He won't hear you, but it might make you feel better." Kreski pointed with a gloved hand to the other injured man, still lying on a makeshift pallet on the floor. The medics had thrown a sheet over him. Bensmiller, flushed with a sinking bottomless dread, bent down over the body and pulled the sheet back. The face was ashen, the mouth closed. Dried and drying blood discolored the cheeks and neck. The chest held no pulse. "A ten-ton heat exchanger fell on him. Slowly. His insides are smashed to pulp."
"But..." Bensmiller pulled the sheet farther back. He felt like a ghoul at an opened grave. The body was whole. It had not seemed very damaged, was not twisted or torn out of shape. But where the skin showed through the ripped material of the longjohns, the flesh was purple and black. Crushed. The priest pulled the sheet forward quickly as though to replace it over the head, then paused. He looked up at Kreski. The name was circling like a hawk in his mind. Odner . . . Odner . . . Odner. It did not seem Jewish, nor conspicuously Catholic, nor conspicuously anything. It was only a name and a pain-whitened face attached to a crushed body. "What was he?" Bensmiller asked the commander. .
Kreski glared at the question. "A human being." He pulled off his large gray gloves and tucked them under his wide pressure suit belt. "That, and a damned good farmer. That's all I know about him."
The priest dropped his eyes to the corpse. He moistened his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and made the sign of the cross on the gray forehead.
"I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." Father, find a place for your son Odner. He was a damned good farmer.
"He can't do it."
Chamblen shifted and looked at the floor. "He can. I'm sorry, Tom, but he can."
Bensmiller leaned against the railing protecting the statue of the Mother of God, and looked angrily around the church. There were no pews, but the pews were to have come almost last. All of the statues were in place, at that moment unhidden by the discreet curtains which would at the push of a button bring the church into concordance with the Lutheran doctrine on icons. There was the lectern, stern and simple. Only the pews and the large cross still remained in the storage dome, soon to be uncrated and put in their places.
Mary looked down at the priest and minister, card-shark smile warm and strange.
"This isn't his. It was paid for out of church pockets. Your church and my church, and a lot of other churches. What about the other ministers who were to come after us when all this was finished? What gives him the right?"
The Reverend Arthur Chamblen blinked, and made a gesture of obviousness. "Clause 70. That's all he needs."
Thomas Bensmiller tightened inside, glanced up past Mary's outstretched arms to infinity. He was caught in a corner a third million kilometers deep and as high as the endless sky. He held the directive in his hand.
TO: INTERFAITH COUNCIL LUNAR MISSION,
REVS. CHAMBLEN & BENSMILLER
FROM: THE OFFICE OF THE COMMANDER
OFFICIAL: AS OF NINETEEN MAY 2029 INVOKING CLAUSE 70 REINSTATING GARDEN FOUR INDEFINITELY AT AREA EW9D. REMOVE ALL NONSTRUCTURAL ITEMS IMMEDIATELY.