Project Pope (3 page)

“Come in, please,” said the captain. “As you see, we have picked up another passenger. Four humans aboard on a single trip. I believe that to be a record.”

“If I am not intruding,” she said.

“You are not,” the captain told her. “We are pleased to have you. Jill Roberts, this is Dr. Tennyson. Dr. Jason Tennyson.”

She held out her hand to Tennyson. “I am glad to see another human. Where have you kept yourself?”

Tennyson froze momentarily. Turning her head, the woman had exposed her other cheek. Across it, from temple to jaw, covering almost the entire right cheek, was an angry, ugly slash of red.

“I am sorry, Doctor,” she said. “It is the way I am. It has horrified my friends for years.”

“Please forgive me,” said Tennyson. “My reaction is inexcusable. As a physician …”

“As a physician, there is nothing you can do about it. It is inoperable. No cosmetic surgery is possible. Nothing. I have to live with it; I have learned to live with it.”

“Miss Roberts,” said the captain smoothly, “is a writer. Articles for magazines. A long shelf of books.”

“If that bottle has not grown fast to your hand,” said Jill Roberts to Tennyson, “how about letting loose of it?”

“Certainly,” Tennyson said. “Let me wipe it off.” He scrubbed its neck on his shirt sleeve.

“It appears there are no glasses aboard this bucket,” said Jill Roberts. “But I don't really mind. Drinking out of a bottle after someone else is only another way to trade around some germs.”

She took the bottle and sat down in the one remaining chair.

“Where are you putting up?” she asked Tennyson. “I recollect the captain told me all the cabins are filled. He hasn't put you down in steerage with the alien cattle, has he?”

“Dr. Tennyson,” said the captain primly, “was a late show. I have nowhere to put him. He turned up unexpectedly.”

She raised the bottle to her lips, lowered it, looked inquiringly at Tennyson.

“Is that true?” she asked.

Tennyson grinned. “The captain is trying to be polite. Actually, I was a stowaway. As to accommodations, neither of you should worry about it. I can curl up anywhere. I'm just glad to be aboard.”

“That is not quite right either,” said the captain. “He did stow away, but now he offers to pay his passage. Technically, he no longer is a stowaway.”

“You must be starved,” Jill said, “unless you brought along a lunch.”

“I never thought about it,” said Tennyson. “I was in too much of a hurry. But I could do with a steak.”

“You'll get no steaks on this tub,” said Jill, “but there's guck to fill the gut. How about it, Captain?”

“Surely,” the captain agreed. “Almost immediately. I'm sure something's left.”

Jill rose and tucked the bottle underneath her arm. “Send the food to my cabin,” she told the captain, then turned to Tennyson. “Come along, you. We'll get you washed up and your hair combed and see what you really look like.”

Chapter Three

“Now for some ground rules,” said Jill. “On such short acquaintance, I'm not about to crawl into bed with you, but I will share the bed—or, I suppose, the bunk, for it's really not a bed. Like the captain and the mate, we'll take turns in it. You can use the can—on board such a ship as this, I think it's termed a head. We'll eat our meals together and we can sit and talk and play my music crystals. I'll ignore a pass or two, being naturally good-natured and more kindly than is good for me, but if you get too heavy, I'll heave you out.”

“I shall not get too heavy,” said Tennyson, “however much I may be tempted. I feel something like a stray dog someone picked up.”

He used half a slice of bread to mop up his plate, sopping up the gravy left over from the stew.

“In my ravenous hunger,” he told her, “this meal was tasty, but it had a strange tang to it. Stew, of course, but a stew of what?”

“Don't ask,” she said. “Just shut your eyes and eat. Holding your nose helps, too, if you can do that without strangling. There is a deep, dark suspicion that when one of the pilgrims die—and some of them do, of course, packed into steerage as they are.…”

He waved a helpless hand at her. “Please, Jill, desist. My body needs the food and I'd like to keep it down.”

“I would not have thought a doctor would have a queasy stomach.”

“Doctors, my dear,” he said, “are not total brutes.”

“Put the plate away,” she told him. “You've mopped it shining clean. I still have the captain's bottle—”

“I noticed. You just marched off with it.”

“It's not the captain's bottle. He simply pilfers it and the consignee looks the other way. He hauls in several cases on every trip, I understand. Special-order shipments for the gnomes at Project Pope.”

“Gnomes at Project Pope? What in hell have gnomes to do with it, and what is Project Pope?”

“You mean you don't know?”

“Not at all,” he said.

“Well, I guess they're not really gnomes, although it's a term that is often used for them. Some of them are humans, but the most of them are robots.”

“That's no real answer,” said Tennyson. “Tell me what you're talking about. It sounds mysterious and—”

“What about you, my friend?” she asked. “What's all your mystery? The captain said you stowed away and then you paid your passage. And if you don't know about Project Pope, why are you heading out for End of Nothing? There's no reason to go there except for Project Pope.”

“So help me,” said Tennyson, “before I set foot on this ship, I had never heard of End of Nothing or of Project Pope. What is this End of Nothing?”

“In due time,” she said, “I shall be glad to give you all the details that I have. But you give first. I took you in, remember. I am sharing with you. Now, let's each have a drink, then you start.”

They each had a drink. He wrested the bottle from her and took another one, then handed it back.

“You know,” he said, “that stuff has authority.”

“Give,” she said.

“Well, first of all, I really am a doctor.”

“I never doubted that. I had a peek into your bag.”

“You know about Gutshot, the planet that we took off from.”

She shivered. “A horrid little place, although I was glad enough to get there. It was the last stop on the way to End of Nothing and, working my way out, there've been too many stops. I never dreamed, of course, that I'd have to put up with such a filthy ship to get there. I asked around. Would you believe it, this is the only ship between Gutshot and End of Nothing. This captain of ours has the pilgrim trade tied up.”

“About the pilgrims …”

“Nothing doing. First you talk of Gutshot, then I'll talk of gnomes and popes and pilgrims.”

“It's simply told,” said Tennyson. “Gutshot, as you may know, is a feudal planet. A lot of nasty little fiefs headed by crews of dirty people—some of them human, but a lot of them not. I was court physician to the margrave of Daventry. Human, as you may have guessed. A human doctor trained in human medicine would be of little use to aliens. It was not the job I would have picked, but at the time I considered myself lucky to get it. A young physician fresh out of medical school ordinarily finds it hard to get started in his profession unless he has some money. I had no money, of course, and there didn't seem to be too many clinics that were looking around for fresh new talent; besides, it costs a fortune to set up a practice of your own, after which you'd sit around for several years, slowly starving, until people began coming to you. Once the initial shock of Gutshot wore off, I became somewhat accustomed to it. Like you can grow accustomed, after a time, to an aching tooth. So I stayed on. The fees were good. In fact, to me, they seemed princely. The margrave was not a bad guy. Not good, but not bad either. We got along together. Then the bastard up and died on me. Nothing wrong with him. Just tipped over. Heart attack, I'd guess, although there hadn't been any indication he was heading for one. I didn't really have a chance to determine cause of death and—”

“But no one could blame you. It was not your—”

“What you can't comprehend,” he said, “is the kind of politics there are in any feudal setup. A pack of wolves held in restraint by one man. Loose the leash and they're at one another's throats. I'd not consciously been involved in any politics, but I had sort of been the margrave's lieutenant and advisor, unofficially of course, so considerable resentment was aimed at me. Almost immediately the rumor sprang up that the margrave had been poisoned, and before it got well started, I was on my way. I had no real power base and knew it. I would have been a pigeon for almost anyone. I gathered up most of my ill-got earnings, which I had been careful to keep in a handy place and in highly transportable form, stole a flier, and was out of there as fast as I could manage. Night was coming on and I flew low and crooked to keep out of any radar range. I knew there was no place on the planet where I'd be safe—”

“So you headed for the spaceport.”

“Right. I knew I didn't have much time. I figured there were people about three jumps behind me. So I had to find a ship and find it fast. One that would be out in space before the posse hit the port.”

“So that's it?”

“That's it,” he said. “What worries me most is the captain. I had to tell him some of it. I should have lied, of course, but had little time to think up a lie and …”

She shook her head. “You don't need to worry about our precious captain. If he's questioned, he'll swear he knows nothing of you. He's not looking for trouble. He's got this End of Nothing monopoly all tied up and doesn't want to lose it. It's a gold mine for him. He hauls a load of pilgrims out, dumps them off, packs in the ones he hauled on the previous trip and takes them back to Gutshot.”

“They all come from Gutshot? I never heard of any pilgrims there.”

“Probably none from Gutshot, which is just the port of entry to End of Nothing. They come from all over this sector of the galaxy, flying in from everywhere, gathering and waiting for the ship to End of Nothing. Then our captain herds them aboard and flies them out to Project Pope.”

“You're not a pilgrim?”

“Do I look like one?”

“No, you don't. How about the loan of that bottle for a moment?”

She handed him the bottle.

“I don't know the entire story,” she said. “I'm going out to have a look at it. It should provide material for several articles. Perhaps even a book.”

“But you must have some idea, which is more than I have.”

“Just the basic rumor. Just the tangled stories that one hears. Actually rumor may be all, but I think not. There must be something out there, with all this pilgrim traffic. I tried first to track down where the pilgrims were coming from, but that proved a dead end. There is no concentration of them. A few come from one planet, a few from still another, one or two from yet a third. All of them non-human—maybe specific kinds of aliens, although of that I'm not sure. Apparently all members of obscure cults or sects. Maybe each sect has a different faith—if you can call what they have a faith—but all of them are somehow tied in with this Pope project. That doesn't necessarily mean they know anything about it. It may just be something on which they can base a shaky faith. Creatures of all kinds reaching for a faith, willing to grab at almost anything just so it's mysterious or spectacular, preferably both. The thing that bothers me, the thing that sends me out, is that the whole business has a human ring to it. The site of Project Pope, as I understand it, is called Vatican-17 and—”

“Hold up a minute,” said Tennyson. “That
does
have a human ring. There was a Vatican on Earth …”

“There still is,” she said. “The center of the Roman Catholic faith, which still exists on Earth and on several other human planets, is still headed by a pope and is still as strong as ever, perhaps stronger, its people still as devout as ever. But I doubt that this Vatican-17 has anything to do with the one on Old Earth. It sounds like some sort of take-off. For one thing, there are robots—”

“What would robots have to do with an Old Earth religion?”

“I don't know and I don't think it
is
an Earth religion. Someone, perhaps the robots, borrowed the terminology …”

“But robots?”

“I know. I know. That's what I'm trying to find out.”

“And End of Nothing?”

“End of Nothing,” she said, “is out on the Rim. Among the Rim stars, of which there are not many. A lot of space. Not much of anything else. At the very edge of intergalactic space. So far as the planet is concerned, I know nothing except that it is Earthlike. No trouble for humans to live there. This ship, I am told, gets there in a standard month or less. How many times the speed of light that is, I have no idea. The old crate is equipped with an inertial drive, which one would not suspect in such a wreck. No great danger involved. It mostly crosses empty space. The ship makes six round trips a year, which spells out to an awful lot of pilgrims hauled. The captain is an enigma. He probably could have command of one of the proudest interstellar liners; he has the required status. But here he is, running pilgrims he despises.”

“But making a barrel of money. Told me five more years and he can retire to a planet named Apple Blossom.”

“Yes, he told me that, too. Apparently he tells everyone. I don't know how much to believe.”

“Perhaps all of it,” said Tennyson. “Men do strange things to cash in on their dreams.”

“Jason,” said Jill, “I like you. Do you know why I like you?”

“My honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. “My humanity, my compassion, my integrity …”