Surrounded by the nonstop hum of the compressor that kept his polychrome plastic dome inflated—three hundred meters by two hundred by ninety high—he sat alone at his desk in the nose compartment of the trailer, his tiny office, comping the take from the day’s collections. He was worried. His deal with the coley group who provided music at his services was on a percentage basis, but he had to guarantee a thousand, and attendance was falling off as the church’s novelty declined. Today only about seven hundred people had come here; there had not even been a jam as they drove back on to the highway.
Moreover, for the first time in the nine months since the church was launched, today’s collections had yielded more scrip than cash. Cash didn’t circulate much any more—at least not on this continent—except in the paid-avoidance areas, where people drew a federal grant for going without some of the twenty-first century’s more expensive gadgetry, but activating a line to the federal credit computers on a Sunday, their regular down-time day, meant a heavy surcharge, beyond the means of most churches including his. So churchgoers generally remembered to bring coins or bills or one of the little booklets of scrip vouchers issued to them when they joined.
The trouble with all this scrip, though—as he knew from sad experience—was that when he presented it to his bank tomorrow at least half of it would be returned marked void: the bigger the sum pledged, the more likely. Some would have been handed in by people already so deep in pointless debt the computers had banned expenditure on nonessentials; any new church inevitably attracted a lot of shock victims. But some would have been canceled overnight as the result of a family row: “You credded how much? My God, what did I do to deserve a twitch like you? Get that scrip deeveed this minute!”
Still, some people had been ignorantly generous. There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they’d found old saucepans in the attic of a secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard.
Riding high on the public Delphi boards right now was a prediction that the next dollar issue would be plastic with a one- or two-year life. Well, plus ça small change plus c’est biodegradable. …
He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual ingot mattered, and turned to the other task he was obliged to complete before he quit work for the day: analysis of the Delphi forms the congregation had filled out. There were many fewer than there had been back in April; then, he’d expected fourteen or fifteen hundred, whereas this week’s input was barely half that. Even seven hundred and some opinions, though, was a far wider spread than most individuals could hope to invoke, particularly while in the grip of acute depression or some other life-style crisis.
By definition, his congregation all had life-style crises.
The forms bore a series of bald statements each summarizing a personal problem, followed by blank spaces where any paid-up member of the church was invited to offer a solution. Today there were nine items, a sad contrast with those palmy days in the spring when he’d had to continue on the second side of the form. Now the word must be out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit: “Last time they only gave us nine things to delph, so next Sunday we’re going to …”
What’s the opposite of a snowball? A thawball?
Despite the failure of his old high hopes, though, he determined to go through the proper motions. He owed it to himself, to those who regularly attended his services, and above all to those whose heart-cries of agony had been eavesdropped on today.
Item A on the list he disregarded. He had invented it as a juicy lure. There was nothing like a scandal of the kind that might eventually make the media to grab people’s attention. The bait was the vague hope that one day soon they might notice a news report and be able to tell each other, “Say, that bit where the poker got shot for messing with his daughter—remember we comped that one at church?”
A link with yesterday, tenuous, but to be prized.
Wryly he re-read what he had dreamed up: I am a girl, fourteen. All the time my father is drunk and wants to plug into me but he creds so much for liquor I don’t get none to pay my piece when I go out and they repossessed my …
The responses were drearily predictable. The girl should apply to the courts and have herself declared of age, she should tell her mother at once, she should denounce her father anonymously, she should get a doc-block put on his credit, bale out of home and go live in a teener dorm—and so forth.
“Lord!” he said to the air. “If I programmed a computer to feed my confessional booth, people would get better advice than that!”
Nothing about this project was working out in the least as he had hoped.
Moreover, the next item enshrined a genuine tragedy. But how could one help a woman still young, in her thirties, a trained electronics engineer, who went to orbit on a six-month contract and discovered too late that she was subject to osteochalcolysis—loss of calcium and other minerals from her skeleton in zero-gee conditions—and had to abort the job and now was in danger of breaking bones if she so much as tripped? Without chance of appeal her guild had awarded her contract-breaker status. She couldn’t sue for reinstatement unless she worked to pay the lawyer, she couldn’t work unless the guild allowed it, she … Round and round and round.
There’s a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world!
Sighing, he shook the forms together and piled them under the scanner lens of his desk computer for consolidation and a verdict. For so few it wasn’t worth renting time on the public net. To the purr of the air compressor was added the hush-hush of the paper-sorter’s plastic fingers.
The computer was secondhand and nearly obsolete, but it still worked most of the time. So, provided it didn’t have a b-d overnight, when the shy kids and the worried parents and the healthy but inexplicably unhappy middlers and the lost despairing old ’uns came back for their ration of spiritual reassurance, each would depart clutching a paper straw, a certificate redolent of old-fashioned absolute authority: its heading printed in imitation gold leaf declaring that it was an authentic and legal Delphi assessment based on contributions from not fewer than ____* hundred consultees (* Insert number; document invalid if total fails to exceed 99) and delivered under oath/deposition in presence of adult witnesses/notary’s seal ** (** Delete as applicable) on ____ (month) _____ (day) 20_____ (year).
A shoddy little makeshift, memorial to the collapse of his plans about converting the congregation into his own tame cima pool and giving himself the place to stand from which he could move the Earth. He knew now he had picked the wrong pitch, but there was still a faint ache when he thought back to his arrival in Ohio.
At least, though, what he had done might have saved a few people from drugs, or suicide, or murder. If it achieved nothing else, a Delphi certificate did convey the subconscious impression: I matter after all, because it says right here that hundreds of people have worried about my troubles!
And he had made a couple of coups on the public boards by taking the unintentional advice of the collective.
The day’s work was over. But, moving into the trailer’s living zone, he found he did not feel at all sleepy. He considered calling up somebody to play a game at fencing, then remembered that the last of the regular local opponents he’d contacted on arrival had just moved out, and at 2300 it was too late to try and trace another player by calling the Ohio State Fencing Committee.