Case of Conscience Read Free Page B

exchanged glances of frank curiosity, but there were not many Lithians abroad now. They kept to their houses at night, doing Ruiz-Sanchez knew not what. He could see them frequently, alone or by twos or threes, moving behind the oval windows of the houses he passed. Sometimes they seemed to be talking.
    What about?
    It was a nice question. The Lithians had no crime, no newspapers, no house-to-house communications systems, no arts that could be differentiated clearly from their crafts, no political parties, no public amusements, no nations, no games, no religions, no sports, no cults, no celebrations. Surely they didn't spend every waking minute of their lives exchanging knowledge, making things go, discussing philosophy or history, or planning for tomorrow! Or did they? Perhaps, Ruiz-Sanchez thought suddenly, they simply went inert once they were inside their jugs, like so many pickles! But even as the thought came, the priest passed another house, and saw their silhouettes moving to and fro…
    A puff of wind scattered cool droplets in his face. Automatically, he quickened his step. If the night were to turn out to be especially windy, there would doubtless be many voices coming and going in the Message Tree. It loomed ahead of him now, a sequoialike giant, standing at the mouth of the valley of the River Sfath-the valley which led in great serpentine folds into the heart of the continent, where Gleshchtehk Sfath, or Blood Lake in English, poured out its massive torrents.
    As the winds came and went along the valley, the tree nodded and swayed-only a little, but that little was enough. With every movement, the tree's root system, which underlay the entire city, tugged and distorted the buried crystalline cliff upon which the city had been founded, as long ago in Lithian pre-history as was the founding of Rome on Earth. At every such pressure, the buried cliff responded with a vast heart-pulse of radio waves-a pulse detectable not only all over Lithia, but far out in space as well. The four Commission members had heard those pulses first on shipboard, when Alpha Arietis, Lithia's sun, was still only a point of light ahead of them, and had looked into each other's faces with eyes gleaming with conjecture.
    The bursts, however, were sheer noise. How the Lithians modulated them to carry information-not only messages, but the amazing navigational grid, the planet-wide time-signal system, and much more-was something as remote from Ruiz-Sanchez' understanding as affine theory, although Cleaver said it was all perfectly simple once you understood it. It had something to do with semi-conduction and solid-state physics, which (again according to Cleaver) the Lithians understood better than any Earthman.
    A free-association jump which startled him momentarily reminded him of the current doyen of Earthly affine theory, a man who signed his papers "H. O. Petard," though his real (if scarcely more likely) name was Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne. Nor was the association as free as it appeared on the surface, Ruiz-Sanchez realized, for the count was a striking example of the now almost total alienation of modern physics from the common physical experiences of mankind. His title was not a patent of nobility, but merely a part of his name which had been maintained in his family long after the political system which had granted the patent had vanished away, a victim of the dividing up of Earth under the Shelter economy. There was more honor appertaining to the name itself than to the title, for the count had pretensions to hereditary grandeur which reached all the way back into thirteenth-century England, to the author of Lucien Wycham His Boke of Magick.
    A high ecclesiastic heritage to be sure, but the latter-day Lucien, a lapsed Catholic, was a political figure, insofar as the Shelter economy sheltered any such thing: he carried the additional title of Procurator of Canarsie-a title which a moment's examination would also show to be