He found Doctor Cors in the mobile unit in the courtyard.

The doctor was wiring a yellow ticket to the lapel of an old man’s jacket, while telling him that he should go to a rest camp for a while and mind the nurses, but that he’d be all right if he took care of himself.

Zerchi stood with folded arms, munching at the edge of his lips and coldly watching the physician When the old man was gone, Cors looked up warily.

“Yes?” His eyes took note of the binoculars and reexamined Zerchi’s face. “Oh,” he granted. “Well, I have nothing to do with that end of it, nothing at all.”

The abbot gazed at him for a few seconds, then turned and stalked out. He went to his office and had Brother Patrick call the highest Green Star official…

“I want it moved out of our vicinity.”

“I’m afraid the answer is emphatically no.”

“Brother Pat, call the workshop and get Brother Lufter up here.”

“He’s not there, Domne.”

“Then have them send me a carpenter and a painter. Anybody will do.”

Minutes later, two monks arrived.

“I want five lightweight signs made at once,” he told them. “I want them with good long handles. They’re to be big enough to be read from a block away, but light enough for a man to carry for several hours without getting dog-tired. Can you do that?”

“Surely, milord. What do you want them to say?”

Abbot Zerchi wrote it for them. “Make it big and make it bright,” he told them. “Make it scream at the eye. That’s all.”

When they were gone, he called Brother Patrick again.

“Brother Pat, go find me five good, young, healthy novices, preferably with martyr complexes. Tell them they may get what Saint Stephen got.”

And I may get even worse, he thought, when New Rome hears about it..

28

Compline had been sung, but the abbot stayed on in the church, kneeling alone in the gloom of evening.

Domine, mundorum omnium Factor, parsurus esto imprimis eis filiis aviantibus ad sideria caeli quorum victus dificilior…

He prayed for Brother Joshua’s group — for the men who had gone to take a starship and climb the heavens into a vaster uncertainty than any uncertainty faced by Man on Earth. They’d want much praying for; none was more susceptible than the wanderer to the ills that afflict the spirit to torture faith and nag a belief, harrowing the mind with doubts. At home, on Earth, conscience had its overseers and its exterior taskmasters, but abroad the conscience was alone, torn between Lord and Foe. Let them he incorruptible, he prayed, let them hold true to the way of the Order.

Doctor Cors found him in the church at midnight and beckoned him quietly outside. The physician looked haggard and wholly unnerved.

“I just broke my promise!” he stated challengingly.

The abbot was silent. “Proud of it?” he asked at last.

“Not especially.”

They walked toward the mobile unit and stopped in the bath of bluish light that spilled out its entrance. The medic’s lab-jacket was soaked with sweat, and he dried his forehead on his sleeve. Zerchi watched him with that pity one might feel for the lost.

“We’ll leave at once, of course,” said Cors. “I thought I’d tell you.” He turned to enter the mobile unit.

“Wait a minute,” the priest said. “You’ll tell me the rest.”

“Will I?” The challenging tone once again. “Why? So you can go threaten hell-fire? She’s sick enough now, and so’s the child. I’ll tell you nothing.”

“You already have. I know who you mean. The child, too, I suppose?”

Cors hesitated. “Radiation sickness. Flash burns. The woman has a broken hip. The father’s dead. The fillings in the woman’s teeth are radioactive. The child almost glows in the dark. Vomiting shortly after the blast. Nausea, anemia, rotten follicles. Blind in one eye. The child cries constantly because of the burns. How they survived the shock wave is hard to understand. I can’t do anything for them except the Eucrem team.”

“I’ve seen them.”

“Then you know why I broke the promise. I have to live with myself afterwards, man! I don’t want to live as the torturer of that woman and that child.”

“Pleasanter to live as their murderer instead?”

“You’re beyond reasonable argument.”

“What did you tell her?”

“‘If you love your child, spare her the agony. Go to sleep mercifully as quick as you can.’ That’s all. We’ll leave immediately. We’ve finished with the radiation eases and the worst of the others. It won’t hurt the rest of them to walk a couple of miles. There aren’t any more critical-dosage cases.

Zerchi stalked away, then stopped and called back. “Finish,” he croaked. “Finish and then get out. If I see you again — I’m afraid of what I’ll do.”

Cors spat. “I don’t like being here any better than you like having me. We’ll go now, thanks.”

He found the woman lying on a cot with the child in the corridor of the overcrowded guesthouse. They huddled together under a blanket and both were crying. The building smelled of death and antiseptic. She looked up at his vague silhouette against the light.

“Father?” Her voice was frightened.

“Yes.”

“We’re done for. See? See what they gave me?”

He could see nothing, but he heard her fingers pick at the edge of paper. The red ticket. He could find no voice to speak to her. He came to stand over the cot. He fished in his pocket and brought out a rosary. She heard the rattle of the beads and groped for it.

“You know what it is?”

“Certainly, Father.

“Then keep it. Use it.”

“Thank you.”

“Bear it and pray.”

“I know what I have to do.”

“Don’t be an accomplice. For the love of God, child, don’t—”

“The doctor said—”

She broke off. He waited for her to finish; she kept silent.

“Don’t be an accomplice.”

She still said nothing. He blessed them and left as quickly as possible. The woman had handled the beads with fingers that knew them; there was nothing he could say to her that she didn’t already know.

“The conference of foreign ministers on Guam has just ended. No joint policy statement has yet been issued; the ministers are returning to their capitals. The importance of this conference, and the suspense with which the world awaits the results, cause this commentator to believe that the conference is not yet ended, but only recessed so that the foreign ministers many confer with their governments for a few days. An earlier report which alleged that the conference was breaking up amid bitter invective has been denied by the ministries. First Minister Rekol had only one statement for the press: “I’m going back to talk to the Regency Council. But the weather’s been pleasant here; I may come back later to fish.”

“The ten-day waiting period ends today, but it is generally held that the cease-fire agreement will continue to be observed. Mutual annihilation is the alternative. Two cities have died, but it is to be remembered that neither side answered with a saturation attack. The Asian rulers contend that an eye was taken for an eye. Our government insists that the explosion in Itu Wan was not an Atlantic missile. But for the most part, there is a weird and brooding silence from both capitals. There has been little waving of the bloody shirt, few cries for wholesale vengeance. A kind of dumb fury, because murder has been done, because lunacy reigns, prevails, but neither side wants total war. Defense remains at battle alert. The General Staff has issued an announcement, almost an appeal, to the effect that we will not use the worst if Asia likewise refrains. But the announcement says further: ‘If they use dirty fallout, we shall reply in kind, and in such force that no creature will live in Asia for a thousand years.”

“strangely, the least hopeful note of all comes not from Guam but from the Vatican at New Rome. After the Guam conference ended, it was reported that Pope Gregory ceased to pray for peace in the world. Two special Masses were sung in the basilica: the Exsurge quare obdormis, Mass against the Heathen, and the Reminiscere, Mass in Time of War; then, the report says His Holiness retired to the mountains to meditate and pray for justice.