“But I think you might want to go yourself, take a hand in things. I say this because the killer may be a man who has gone through the Night, become an Algulist, and is therefore a thoroughly dangerous man. It’ll take another Nighter to oppose him, and an Earth Nighter would understand him better. Of course, his being an Algulist is only a supposition, actually, a rumor. Maybe it’s not even possible. I don’t know enough about Kareen to be sure.
“If the killer hasn’t been Nightized, he’ll have to do his work before the Night starts. So he, and therefore you, don’t have much time.
“Maybe you’ll choose to ignore this. Maybe Yess is well able to take care of himself. However, here are the names of some potential assassins, top pros. You won’t know any of them. All the big boys of the days of our youth are dead, imprisoned, lost, or, like yourself, transmogrified.”
Raspold gave ten names, spelled them, and added a brief description of each man. He ended, “Good luck and my blessings to you, John. Next time you get to Earth, I hope I’ll be there, too. It’ll be nice to see your pleasantly ugly face again, and you can derive pleasure from gazing upon my noble Roman features and listening to my scintillating wit and enormous erudition. But as of now, I’m off! Tallyho!”
Carmody took the reader from his head and reached out for the second bourbon. Before touching it, his hand stopped. Now was not the time to get half-drunk. Not only did he have to consider Fratt—for all he knew Fratt might be on this ship—but he had an even more important problem. The cardinal should be informed of this turn of events. If what Raspold said was true—and he was usually reliable—then the Church was in even more danger than the cardinal had predicted. Assassination of Yess by members of the Church itself would cause an eruption that might be cataclysmic.
“The fools!” Carmody swore softly. “The blind hate-filled fools!”
He inserted two Stanleys into a slot; a blank letter sheet issued from the hole beneath it. Carmody turned on the screen on the wall by the table, inserted the blank into the ‘ducer, dropped three Stanleys into its slot, and punched the DIC button. After dictating the letter to the cardinal, he called the waitress and asked her if the letter would be sent out to be shipped on the next vessel to Wildenwooly. She brought a charger for him to sign and fingerprint, since letters were very expensive and he did not have enough money on him to pay for it.
Carmody then went to the men’s room and took an oxidizer to burn up the alcohol in his blood. The only other tenant was Abdu, the import-export businessman who had gotten on at Wildenwooly.
Abdu did not respond to Carmody’s maneuvers to engage him in conversation. Beyond “Yeah,” or “Is that so?” and several grunts, he was silent. Carmody gave up and returned to his seat in the passenger room.
He had been seated no more than ten minutes, his eyes half-shut and ignoring the movie on the screen, when he was interrupted.
“Father, is this seat taken?”
A young priest of the Jesuit order was standing by him, smiling somewhat long- toothedly at him. Tall and thin, he had an ascetic face, light-blue eyes, dark hair, and a pale skin. His accent was Irish, and a moment later he identified himself as Father Paul
O’Grady from Lower Dublin. He had served in the parish of Mexico City, Western Middle Level, for only a year after graduation from the seminary. Then he had been sent to Springboard to help with the situation there.
O’Grady was frank about his extreme nervousness. “I feel lost, not only from Earth but from myself. I seem to be breaking into many little pieces. I feel tiny, very tiny; everything seems so big.”
“Hang on,” Carmody said. He did not want to talk, but he could not ignore the poor young fellow.”Many people feel just as you do, about half the passengers in this ship, I’d bet. You want a drink? There’s still time before take off.”
O’Grady shook his head. “No. I don’t want to depend upon a crutch.”
“Crutch, hell!” Carmody said. “Don’t be ridiculous, son. If you need it, you need it. This’ll soon be over; your feet’ll be on solid earth again and the blue skies, just like Earth’s, will be over you. Stewardess!”
“You must think I’m an awful baby,” O’Grady said.
“Yes, I do,” Carmody replied. He chuckled as the young priest looked disconcerted. “But I don’t think you’re a coward. If you’d refused to go on after getting here, you would be. But you’re not. So, you’ll grow up.”
O’Grady was silent for a while, chewing the cud of Carmody’s remarks. He said, “By the way, I was so nervous I forgot to inquire your name, Father.”
Carmody told him.
O’Grady’s eyes widened. “You’re not the Father Carmody who’s the... the father of. . .”
“Say it.”
“Of the false god Yess of Kareen?”
Carmody nodded.
“They say you’re going on a mission to Kareen!” O’Grady burst out. “They say you’re going to denounce Yess and expose Boontism as false!”
“Who’s they?” Carmody said softly. “And keep your voice down.”
“Oh, everybody knows,” O’Grady said, waving his hand to indicate, apparently, the entire universe.
“The Vatican will be pleased to know how well their deepest secrets are kept,” Carmody said.”Well, for your information, I am not going to Kareen to denounce Yess.”
O’Grady seized Carmody’s arm and said, “You’re not going to renounce our faith for Boontism?”
Carmody pulled his arm away. “Is that another rumor?” he said coldly. “No. I’ll admit there are some unsettling aspects about Boontism. But my faith is unshaken. Confused, perhaps, and questioning, but unshaken. And you may tell everybody that, also.”
“We’re having much trouble on Springboard,” O’Grady said. “The number of our flock lost to Boontism is alarming. I’m not at liberty to tell even you how high the figure is, but I can say that it’s alarming.”
“You said it twice,” Carmody replied.
“Father, perhaps you could stay long enough on Springboard to preach a while. We need a man such as you, a man who’s been to Kareen and who can expose their so-called miracles and their so-called god as lies.”
“I haven’t time to stay,” Carmody replied. “Moreover, I’d be a big disappointment to you. The so-called miracles are real, and whether or not Yess is a true savior of his planet is a question even the Holy Father himself does not care to answer. Not yet.”
Carmody hitched himself forward, stared at the screen without seeing the figures upon it, and said, “I warn you that you had best keep quiet about meeting or about our conversation. This mission is supposed to be secret. Only myself and certain powers of the Church presumably know about it, although I can see that the grapevine has been busy again. It’s the only thing in the universe faster than the speed of light. But if you breathe one word about this, you’ll get an exceedingly severe reprimand and a check in your career that’ll set you back twenty years. So keep your mouth shut!”
O’Grady blinked, and his face became both red and hurt. To Carmody’s relief, the takoff warning buzzed, and the captain began his pitch. The rest of the way to Springboard, O’Grady was too concerned with controlling his fear to talk.
When the White Mule had landed, Carmody decided to leave it for a while. He needed to stretch his legs, to look again at a place with which he had once more been familiar. It would also be the last “normal” planet he would see for some time.
The port had changed much in ten years, as had the city beyond it. The white Brobdingnagian cones fashioned by the almost extinct beavites—warm-blooded animals which emulated the termites of Earth in eating wood and constructing buildings of cementoid excrement—were still numerous. The first colonists had killed the beavites and moved into the ready-made skyscrapers. Then houses made of logs or artificial foamstone had filled in the places between the cones. But the original human constructions were all gone now, replaced by large structures of stone and plastic beams.