“You’re a bit overweight, Mr. Morley,” Dr. Babble said.
“Hmm,” Morley said.
An elderly woman, extremely tall and straight, came out of the group, moving with the aid of a cane. “Mr. Morley,” she said, and extended a light, limp hand to Seth Morley. “I am Roberta Rockingham, the sociologist. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I do hope you had a pleasurable voyage here with not too much trouble.”
“We did fine.” Morley accepted her little hand and delicately shook it. She must be 110 years old, by the look of her, he said to himself. How can she function still? How did she get here? He could not picture her piloting a noser across interplanetary space.
“What is the purpose of this colony?” Mary asked.
“We’ll find out in a couple of hours,” Miss Berm said. “As soon as Glen—Glen Belsnor, our electronics and computer expert—is able to raise the slave satellite orbiting this planet.”
“You mean you don’t know?” Seth Morley said. “They never told you?”
“No, Mr. Morley,” Mrs. Rockingham said in her deep, elderly voice. “But we’ll know now, and we’ve waited so long. It’ll be such a delight to know why all of us are here. Don’t you think so, Mr. Morley? I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful for all of us to know our purpose?”
“Yes,” he said.
“So you do agree with me, Mr. Morley. Oh, I think that’s so nice that we can all agree.” To Seth Morley she said in a low, meaningful voice, “That’s the difficulty, I’m afraid, Mr. Morley. We have no common purpose. Interpersonal activity has been at a low ebb but of course it will pick up, now that we can—” She bent her head to cough briefly into a diminutive handkerchief. “Well, it really is so nice,” she finished at last.
“I don’t agree,” Frazer said. “My preliminary testing indicates that by and large this is an inherently ego-oriented group. As a whole, Morley, they show what appears to be an innate tendency to avoid responsibility. It’s hard for me to see why some of them were chosen.”
A grimy, tough-looking individual in work clothes said, “I notice you don’t say ‘us.’ You say ‘they.’
“Us, they.” The psychologist gestured convulsively. “You show obsessive traits. That’s another overall unusual statistic for this group: you’re all hyper-obsessive.”
“I don’t think so,” the grimy individual said in a level but firm voice. “I think what it is is that you’re nuts. Giving those tests all the time has warped your mind.
That started all of them talking. Anarchy had broken out. Going up to Miss Berm, Seth Morley said, “Who’s in charge of this colony? You?” He had to repeat it twice before she heard.
“No one has been designated,” she answered loudly, over the noise of the group quarrel. “That’s one of our problems. That’s one of the things we want to—” Her voice trailed off in the general din.
“At Betelgeuse 4 we had cucumbers, and we didn’t grow them from moonbeams, the way you hear. For one thing, Betelgeuse 4 has no moon, so that should answer that.”
“I’ve never seen him. And I hope I never will.”
“You’ll see him someday.”
“The fact that we have a linguist on our staff suggests that there’re sentient organisms here, but so far we don’t know anything because our expeditions have been informal, sort of like picnics, not in any way scientific. Of course, that’ll change when—”
“Nothing changes. Despite Specktowsky’s theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again.”
“No, you’ve got that wrong. The whole struggle before the Intercessor came took place in time, a very long time. It’s just that everything has happened so fast since then, and it’s so relatively easy, now in the Specktowsky Period, to directly contact one of the Manifestations. That’s why in a sense our time is different from even the first two thousand years since the Intercessor first appeared.”
“If you want to talk about that, talk to Maggie Walsh. Theological matters don’t interest me.” “You can say that again. Mr. Morley, have you ever had contact with any of the Manifestations?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Just the other day—I guess it was Wednesday by Tekel Upharsin time—the Walker-on-Earth approached me to inform me that I had been given a faulty noser, the result of the using of which would have cost my wife and I our lives.”
“So it saved you. Well, you must be very pleased to know that it would intercede for you that way. It must be a wonderful feeling.”
“These buildings are built lousy. They’re already ready to fall down. We can’t get it warm when we need warm; we can’t cool it when we need cool. You know what I think? I think this place was built to last only a very short time. Whatever the hell we’re here for we won’t be long; or rather, if we’re here long we’ll have to construct new installations, right down to the BX cable.”
“Some insect or plant squeaks in the night. It’ll keep you awake for the first day or so, Mr. and Mrs. Morley. Yes, I’m trying to speak to you, but it’s so hard with all the noise. By ‘day’ of course I mean the twenty-four hour period. I don’t mean ‘daytime’ because it’s not in the daytime that it squeaks. You’ll see.”
“Hey Morley, don’t get like the others and start calling Susie ‘dumb.’ If there’s one thing she’s not it’s dumb.”
“Pretty, too.”
“And do you notice how her—”
“I noticed, but—my wife, you see. She takes a dim view so perhaps we’d better drop the subject.”
“Okay, if you say so. What field are you in, Mr. Morley?”
“I’m a qualified marine biologist.”
“Pardon? Oh, were you speaking to me, Mr. Morley? I can’t quite make it out. If you could say it again.”
“Yeah, you’ll have to speak up. She’s a little deaf.”
“What I said was—”
“You’re frightening her. Don’t stand so close to her.”
“Can I get a cup of coffee or a glass of milk anywhere?”
“Ask Maggie Walsh, she’ll fix one for you. Or B.J. Berm.”
“Oh Christ, if I can just get the damn pot to shut off when it’s hot. It’s been just boiling the coffee over and over again.”
“I don’t see why our communal coffee pot won’t work, they perfected them back in the early part of the twentieth century. What’s left to know that we don’t know?”
“Think of it as being like Newton’s Color Theory. Everything about color that could be known was known by 1800.”
“Yes, you always bring that up. You’re obsessive about it.”
“And then Land came along with his two-light-source and intensity theory, and what had seemed a closed field was busted into pieces.”
“You mean there may be things about homeostatic coffee pots that we don’t know? That we just think we know?”
“Something along that order.” And so on.
Seth Morley groaned. He moved away from the group, toward a tumble of great water-smoothed rocks. A body of water had been here at some time, anyhow. Although perhaps by now it was entirely gone.
The grimy, lanky individual in work clothes broke away from the group and followed after him. “Glen Belsnor,” he said, extending his hand.
“Seth Morley.”
“We’re a friggin’ mob, Morley. It’s been like this since I got here, right after Frazer came.” Belsnor spat into nearby weeds. “You know what Frazer tried to do? Since he was the first one here he tried to set himself up as the group-leader; he even told us—told me, for example—that he ‘Understood his instructions to mean that he would be in charge.’ We almost believed him. It sort of made sense. He was the first one to arrive and he started giving those friggin’ tests to everybody and then making loud comments about our ‘statistical abnormalities,’ as the creep puts it.”
“A competent psychologist, a reliable one, would never make a public statement of his findings.” A man not yet introduced to Seth Morley came walking up, hand extended. He appeared to be in his early forties, with a slightly large jaw, ridged brows, and shiny black hair. “I’m Ben Tallchief,” he informed Morley. “I arrived just before you did.” He seemed to Seth Morley to be a little unsteady; as if, Morley reflected, he’s had a drink or three. He put out his hand and they shook. I like this man, he thought to himself. Even if he has had a couple. He has a different aura from the others. But, he thought, maybe they were all right before they got here, and something here made them change.