"He didn't even give me my own 'Rev.' Nuts.
Chamblen took the outthrust directive, folded it neatly and tucked it away very calmly in an inside pocket. Bensmiller did not want to catch his eyes. They were, as always, too blue, too level, too at peace with the inevitable.
Bensmiller felt like fighting. "This was no minor disaster. Men were killed, Why doesn't he take the best interest of this place to heart and send home for another dome."
Chamblen grinned. "That would cost fifty million dollars out of taxpayers' pockets. It would have to be legislated. Legislation takes time. Months."
Bensmiller broke away from Chamblen's ever-logical hammerlock, strolled eyes-down toward the lectern. Halfway there he turned back. "So we'll wait. Are we going to die? They fixed the other two. Does one dome out of commission mean instant destruction? I thought they would have designed this place a little better than that."
Chamblen nodded. "They did. We're not going to die."
"Then why can't I have my church?" Bensmiller tried to sound as firm and certain as Chamblen, Kreski and all the others always did. But a ghost behind the eyes of the tall minister returned every time to haunt him and knock the sticks out from under his feeble protests. Chamblen always had an answer. Kreski always had an answer. Everyone always had an answer. All but Thomas Bensmiller, who was only a pHest.
Chamblen leaned back on the railing and brought one hand up, to place a finger lightly against one cheek, as though anticipating an itch should the itch come. "I'm sure you know more or less what goes on in those domes. They grow a certain plant there in intense light on a glut of nutrients. That plant is tailor-made, in a way, to be what I would call hyperthyroid. They grow like crazy, soak up nutrients like crazy and photo-synthesize like crazy. Their rate of C02/02 conversion is unbelievable. They're also fairly tasty." Chamblen grinned. "You know, those army-green 'bugger biscuits.' It's the same stuff."
The itch came. Chamblen scratched it. The hand returned to the railing. Bensmiller was running the process hazily through his mind, trying to recall the dynamics of a system he was hardly equipped to understand. "There are ten domes. Nine, now. Does ten percent make that much of a difference?"
"Depends, Tom, depends. We could leave things as they are now and continue on nine domes. It might get a shade stuffier and we might eat a little less. But the next time a dome goes down we'd all be in bad, bad trouble."
"This has never happened before." Bensmiller was adamant, and hoped he looked it. "I don't think it will happen again."
The minister shook his head. "Always count on the unexpected. It can kill you. You know, Tom, I'm not selling out. It's a blow, I know. But we're no worse off than we were before. Honestly, do you know why they built this church here and sent you to staff it?"
The words came easily. "To allow the Gospel to follow Man as he conquers the universe."
Chamblen clucked. "Right out of one of Monsignor Garif's pamphlets. I know Garif. He's a shrewd politician. He's the one who pushed like crazy for a church up here, and he pushed you through as Catholic chaplain. You're one of his friends, from way back."
"Yes, but still. . . ."
"And that line is pure PR. The truth is, the Catholic Church is fighting a losing battle on Earth, and Garif wants to plant a pocket of orthodoxy here as precedent for future extension of the Church once we branch out beyond the Earth-Moon system. You're as orthodox as they come, and you think highly of Garif. What would you have expected him to do?"
Bensmiller, for once, allowed himself a smile. "You're being a little cynical for a minister of the Lord."
"No. I'm adapting to the environment. This is a no-nonsense place, peopled by no-nonsense men. There's no room for the extraneous. After having thought about it quite a bit, I'm still not convinced we need a church up here at all."
"I'm surprised you don't declare yourself extraneous and jump out an airlock. You do believe in God, I hope."
"I do." Chamblen nodded. "God to me is a loving Father who once cared very carefully for His newborn sons, but now, the sons having grown out of their cradle, expects them to get along more on their own."
Bensmiller refused to look at the minister. "I'm sorry we don't see God the same way."
Chamblen stood up and began to walk toward the door. He had gotten most of the way there when he stopped in the starlight, and tugged on the lapels of his black shirt, which was opened at the collar and dampened deeper black under the arms. "Tom, see it this way. You never wanted to spend the last dime in your penny loafers, did you?"
Bensmiller ignored him.
"Well, you're asking Kreski to spend our last dime up here. I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry, but I'm on his side this time." He walked the rest of the way into shadow and grasped the door handle. "I'll remove our nonstructural items. You take it easy for a while. You've got to cope, Tom."
The door closed with solemn slowness behind him. Bensmiller and the Mother of God were alone again in the almost-church. He continued to glare at the walls, not wanting to catch her smile again and feel the pain of not knowing what it was he didn't know.
What is your ace, Mother? Play it, please.
Father Bensmiller stood to the left of the cast-wide doors, watching. He watched the men rip the pastel blue tiles from the floor, their grout barely dry. He watched them hammer ragged craters in the new concrete and draw forth from the ruin snaking cables and twisting tubes, carrying electricity and water to feed the strange sorceries he had never found need study. He watched them rip his lectern from the floor, and plant in its place a blinking, multikeyed computer terminal, which drew the same power that would have illuminated the Gospel at some future Celebration.
He kept nodding to himself. They were efficient. They worked like madmen, around the clock, never pausing. They used every sliver of space in the church. Every square inch under the dome was mapped and assigned to some subtle and necessary purpose.
It seemed to him that every time he glanced at the door beside him a forklift was rumbling in, heaped with crates and bundles of copper piping and spools of spaghetti wiring. In moments the lift was emptied and gone, only to return in a handful of minutes bearing more trash to be laid at the feet of the Mother of God.
Who is their Cod, Mary? What force drives them like this?
Even Kreski was there, his hands in the chaos up to his elbows. Often he paused to give orders, but when there were no more orders to give he was back down on his knees, brazing copper fittings to a pipeline running down what should have been the main aisle. The flame hissed softly, cleanly. Drips of molten lead hit the floor and froze. In that hard face there was a tension, an urgency almost frightening. Kreski was running ahead of something greater than himself, when every impression he had ever given Bensmiller stated in solid surety that nothing on the Moon was greater than he.
Other men were bolting together skeletal tables of perforated magnesium, upon which were being laid the hydroponic garden units. When the forklift arrived carrying one of the long, narrow, coffinlike black bins sprouting with tiny green newborn shoots, work stopped. Four men lined up along the unit, positioned their hands carefully beneath it and lifted with a machinelike precision. They carried it levelly, slowly, and when they approached, all the other workers stood back. Only when the unit was positioned on its table and firmly bolted down did the welders take up their torches and the electricians their pliers. Row after row of garden units filled the church from front to rear, separated by the pipe-tangled main aisle.
Men crawled like animals beneath the rat's nest of magnesium beams, pulling plastic tubing and multicolored wires. The clink and scratch and scrape and tap of wire and tube faded into a rushed and uneasy whisper filling the dome and echoing past Bensmiller's ears until he wanted to cry out against it. The stink of sweat and ammonium flux made tangible the blasphemy, which otherwise would only come half-clear. He would look outside the dome for solace to the calm sterile wastes, but there the crawling cranes and leaping devils in metal suits were raising the new power lines and settling a new fusion plant into its yesterday-poured foundations. Blasphemy was everywhere. They were forcing him to wallow in it, and he was drowning.