Twenty

I decided not to confront Mike (who hadn't seen us) then and there, but to wait until we got together at the ship, because it was our period to be awake at the same time. I didn't feel much like talking to St. Peter afterwards, least of all about sports, and after some expressions of sympathy on his part and some attempts at politeness on mine, he took me back. It was nearly time for me to come in anyway.

Michele got in shortly before Mike, and asked what I had seen, and I told her a little about the game I had witnessed. She expressed mild amazement, but was dead tired, not having had much sleep while she was watching over me, and so went straight to bed without even recording her report.

I thought of ways of broaching the subject of his companion to Mike, none of them satisfactory; and when he did come in, I simply said, "I saw you off at a distance today with somebody."

"I've been meaning to tell you about him, Paul. I call him Galileo."

"Why Galileo?"

"Well, he's one of the ones they call unfortunate people, and--"

"My God, Mike, do you realize what you're doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"Getting involved with those people! How did you meet him?"

"Oh, come off it, Paul! Everybody acts as if the unfortunate people were something sinister, waving cloaks in front of their faces and twirling their moustaches! All they are are people who want to know things that the rest of these clowns won't have anything to do with, that's all. I met him because I went looking for him.

"In fact, if it's any comfort to you, I asked Newton about these people, and if I could meet one of them, and he didn't stand in my way at all. He said that they didn't share the faith that most of the people have, and I said I knew that, and I didn't either. Then he told me about this guy, and said he might not have anything to do with me, but he was probably the most intelligent of all of them, and would be my best bet if I wanted find out 'the other side of the issues we disagree on,' was the way he put it. Then he gave me his address--this was four or five days ago, and I went over.

"He wasn't outside; apparently they never are, so I just went in, and there he was. He's a beautiful dark maroon--oh, I forgot, you saw him. Anyway, he looked at me, and I handed him our coin. He seemed a little surprised that I wasn't some kind of animal he'd never seen before, and when he'd read the coin, he came back and said to me, 'Should I be bothered with you?'"

"I said, 'Suit yourself. I'm just trying to find out all the sides of what's going on up here.' He laughed, and then said, 'I think I just might. It would be interesting to see if lower forms of life can actually learn something worth knowing. Besides, if your name means anything, then you've come to the right place; I can give you some "doubts and questions" instead of all the answers I'm sure you've been getting. But I warn you, everyone here thinks I'm evil, and is certain to believe that I'll be a bad influence on you.'"

"Well, don't you think that they just might be right?" I said. "Mike, these people could be terribly dangerous!"

"How? What'd he do, brainwash me? Hell, when it comes to that, I'm already brainwashed, from your point of view. You all swallow all of that crap about immortality and stopping changing and the Awesome Friend and you never bothered to find out if there were any facts or not on the other side. Well, suppose he convinces me; then we're in the same position we're in now, and what difference does it make? It's just that I'll have some data you couldn't have got any other way, and we'll know that much more, whether you agree with it or not. Look, I'm not blaming you--or St. Peter or Cleopatra or Newton or anybody. They have their faith, and you respect it. Fine. So do I; I just don't buy into it the way you two seem to have, that's all. I'm not going to do them any harm--and if they're right, I can't anyway. What's the problem?"

"I don't know, Mike; but it makes me nervous as hell! And if Michi hears about it, there'd be a storm like you wouldn't believe!"

"Well, she'll have to hear about it sooner or later, I hope--but maybe I'd better leave that up to you. For now--"

"Well, what's done is done, I suppose."

"Anyway, what I've found out is plenty! First of all, this Galileo has a completely different approach to physics, which I'm trying to get a handle on. Newton's is really fascinating, but this is--I can't describe it. The guy's really brilliant, even for these people.

"But more than that, he's skeptical about all this immortality stuff, and he's done some testing to find out about it. Did it ever strike you as odd that there's only one artificially lighted place on the planet, that it's lit with white light, and that this is the place everyone goes when they decide to 'stop changing'? And the only thing anybody knows, really, is that anybody who goes in there never comes out again."

I looked at him aghast. When you put all those things together in that way, it did look as if there was something wrong here.

"Now put that together with what we happen to know about plastic, and how some plastics are harmed by light. These people are made of a very complicated and almost certainly a chemically very delicate plastic; and they go into a room full of a brilliant white light, which for all we know has a lot of ultraviolet in it, and possibly even X-rays. And they never come out again. Now tell me; if you had any doubts about whether what they believed was true, would you be anxious to go into that room?"

"I see your point."

"So one day when nobody was around--which isn't easy, as you know, because there's almost always somebody floating around that church--Galileo decided to try the obvious experiment. He says he got one of the little animals, and put it into the room, and it never came out. I asked him if he was sure the animal just vanished in there, and he said he waited a long time, in fact until somebody else came into the building, and it didn't come out; but he wasn't about to go in looking for it. He says it could have been hiding in there or have gone to sleep; but he doesn't believe it. In that sense, of course, he didn't prove anything, but it was enough for him--especially when I explained about plastic on earth and light.

"One thing's sure; it didn't stop changing, because animals die. There's got to be some high-frequency radiation in there that just disintegrates plastic to dust."

"Good God!"

"You see how it helps to get the other side of a story? Of course, Galileo could be lying, but why would he lie to me? And if he was lying, why didn't he make it more convincing, like telling me that he put the animal in there, and saw it melt or something."

"But that means that when a person decides to stop changing, he just goes up to that room and commits suicide without realizing it until it's too late!"

"You're getting the idea."

"But why doesn't he tell them, for God's sake!"

"He has. He's tried and tried. But of course they won't listen, because they don't believe it."

"But why doesn't he tell them repeat the experiment for themselves?"

"He has, of course. But they won't do it. First of all, this would be to cast doubt on what they believe, and secondly, it would possibly harm an animal; but most of all, it might be an indirect way of exploring the constitution of their bodies, and that's forbidden. And then he says that they claim that animals are different from people and what happens to an animal proves nothing about what happens to the people who stop changing. You see how hopeless it is when you're determined not to let evidence bother you."

"But that's terrible! Terrible!" I pictured St. Peter swimming innocently into that room and suddenly finding himself melted into nothingness by the radiation. "Terrible!"

"And imagine how Galileo feels. Imagine what it's like to have some knowledge that could save the whole population from a horrible fate, and no one will listen to you, no matter how hard you try to convince them. The harder you try, the more they think of you as evil and to be avoided. No wonder they call them unfortunate!"

" . . . I can't get over it!"

"And he wants to help them, Paul. They just refuse to be helped, and there's nothing he can do. And he knows a lot more, too; but nobody will listen to him, no matter what he says. He's one of the unfortunate people, and even the harmless knowledge he has they won't pay attention to, for fear it might somehow be contaminated by his forbidden investigations."

"Say, wait a minute! How about the darkness? How does he explain that, if there's no Awesome Friend and all that?"

"Believe it or not, there's a simple explanation even of that. I was there when the darkness started, and he said 'I had a feeling this was going to happen. They're afraid someone might leave with you, and might learn forbidden things on earth; so they've issued their "call," and it will be a prohibition not to leave the planet.'

"And that's what happened, of course. Then I asked him how they made it dark, and afterwards he showed me a chemical he'd discovered that you get from some plants that don't grow around this area. He poured a little of it out; it forms a black precipitate when it reacts with hydrogen, and if it's concentrated, it just spreads out as it falls, and darkens everything above it until it gets so far down that the shadow goes away. The little that he spilled made a shadow around his whole house for a minute or so--but of course it was only a few drops."

"But who are they?"

"The priests, of course. And they did it because they thought it might be dangerous for anyone to know too much. Galileo is convinced they're all sincere, even the ones who're in on the secret. He says they probably figure that life is so comfortable here, why foul it up with the knowledge that it's not really all roses.

"I agree with him on this. I mean, life certainly wouldn't be easier for the people here if everybody knew what he knows, because they'd have to face death just like we do. But personally, I'd rather live a hard life that was consistent with the truth than be comfortable and ignorant. Everybody's well-intentioned here, and Galileo's the first to admit it. That's one of the things I admire him for; he has absolutely no bitterness toward them, just a great sadness. But well-intentioned or not, what they believe is lies."

"The poor guy," I said. "I wish we could do something for him."

"But we can, Paul! We can give him some people who need help and are willing to accept help from him!"

"Who, us?"

"Us and everyone else on earth."

"Now wait a minute! He can't come."

"What do you mean, he can't come? Because they're forbidden to come? He doesn't believe in those prohibitions. He wants to come, I know; he kind of hinted at it, but he never came right out and asked me, so I finally asked him, and he said Yes, if we'd all agree to take him.

"He could do so much good on earth, Paul! You should see the mind he has! If there's anybody who can get us out of the messes we've gotten into, he's the one. I mean it."

"But he'd die in an atmosphere of oxygen."

"No he won't. We thought he might at first, but we tried it with an animal, and the animal went into convulsions at first, but recovered, more or less. After a while we took him out, and he was a little sick, but he seems okay now. Anyway, the next day Galileo said he'd try it himself. I didn't like the idea, but he has real courage, Paul. He said, 'If I die, I die, and you can use my body to prove to them we do die,' and he went right in.

"As we let out the hydrogen, he began to feel sick, and then when we got inside, he zoomed up to the ceiling and threw up all over it. I should have expected something like that, because he was still half full of hydrogen gas; but my heart stopped, I can tell you."

"So that's where that stain came from."

"Right. Anyway, when the hydrogen got replaced with oxygen, he came down again--but he was drunk! You should have seen him! He was laughing and going all up and down in waves--there's no way to describe it--and doing really stupid things. He didn't even know where he was for the first fifteen minutes or so, but he sure seemed to be having a good time--and for once I was smarter than he was."

I was shocked. "But my God, Mike! We can't take him if he's going to be perpetually drunk! Anyway, he must not want to come now, does he?"

"Oh, he likes it--and he says it wears off in a while. He had a--I suppose you'd call it a headache--afterwards, except they're all head in a sense. He's been pestering me to get back in here, in fact. He claims it's the changes that make him feel bad. But you should have seen him, Paul! He reminded me at first of that blouse of Janice's on the ceiling, remember--except that I was so scared he'd killed himself."

I decided to seize the opportunity. "By the way, did you ever know Janice before that?"

"Janice? Yeah, I'd been out with her a couple of times. Well anyway, Galileo and I spent an hour or so inside here, and I let him examine me. He'd never seen me without my space suit on, of course, and he was interested in what we were like."

"When was this?"

"The day before you said Wordsworth wanted to come with us. I thought that that might throw a monkey wrench into everything, but--"

"No, I mean about Janice. When was it you first met her?"

"What's with Janice?"

"I'm just curious. She seemed to know you pretty well."

"She thought she did. But she thought she knew everyone pretty well. Let's see . . . I met her at whatsisname's house, the wheel that used to be the head of NASA, what was his name? Carlisle, somebody Carlisle. Anyway, I was there at one of his parties, and she came up and claimed that she was a big friend of his. I was new in Washington at the time--it was just after we first got there--and I was impressed. Later, I found that he didn't even know her; I imagine she'd crashed the party. She was stupid, but she knew how to push, all right! She talked me into getting her the job with us, in fact, now that I think of it."

"Oh, she did."

"Wait just a minute here. There's more than just curiosity in all of this."

"Well, it turns out that she knew some other interesting people, according to Keith."

"I wouldn't put it past her; she'd get to more than just know anybody who'd let himself within ten feet of her. I suppose they think she was a spy. Paul, all she was was stupid. You saw her. I mean, she wasn't playing stupid, she was stupid. She was a refreshing change from the intellectual atmosphere around the lab for a couple of days, but a couple of days was all anybody could take of Janice. If she was a spy, she'd have been looking for information, and that would mean she'd have let you get a word in edgewise every hour or so."

"It seems that at least one of the people she knew was the guy that inspected the skin of the first stage, and that 'asteroid' that hit us was apparently some kind of heat-activated plastic explosive."

"My God!"

"But you don't really think that she had anything to do with all of that?"

"I don't see her recruiting anybody, if that's what you mean, and anybody who'd use her for anything that wasn't absolutely elementary would be an idiot. I don't think she'd be too dumb to stick that explosive on the ship without blowing herself up, because she had a very well-developed sense of self-preservation; but beyond that, it would've been hopeless. Maybe they did get her to try to steal one of those reducers; but you saw what happened as soon as her blouse did something funny. If she deliberately took it, then the first thing she does is lose it, and the next thing she does is call me to get her blouse down off the ceiling so she can watch her program.

"In a way, it'd be neat if this was what happened, because I'd like to see the face of the guy that got her to take the thing in the first place when she told him--and she'd have told him, all right!"

"What I can't understand is how you could've gotten yourself mixed up with somebody like that."

"Oh, well, you know how those things are. I was feeling pretty low at the time, and she was all full of life and bounce, and if there was one thing she didn't have, it was wit."

He suddenly reddened, and then said, "But like I say, a little of Janice is enough for a lifetime. I couldn't wish a better fate on Keith than to have him cultivating her, trying to find out what's on her mind." And he burst into laughter at the thought.

I let on that I didn't notice his little lapse into candor, and let the conversation revert to Galileo. I must say that Mike made a very convincing advocate, the more so now that I was relieved of my suspicions about him, if for no other reason than his touching attempt to conceal his real reason for being acquainted with Janice.

We agreed, however, that Michele would have to be brought into the discussion, and would have to be approached very carefully.