Free Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence by Frank Herbert Page B

attention on her, saw his face reflected in a gauge’s plastic cover. His questionings, doubts, and determination were all there for her to read just as surely as she read the dial beneath the plastic reflector. She had set him up—she had done that part of her job as well as could be expected, she thought. She focused now on the total console, feeling the sensory pulses of the ship reaching outward to the hull skin and beyond.
    Job routine was beginning to smooth off the harsh edges of her fear. She took a deep breath, keyed a forward exterior sensor to the overhead screen, studied the star-spangled view of what lay ahead of the Tin Egg.
    That’s our prize, she thought, looking at the stars. First, we clean out the Augean stables — then we get to be first … out there. The candy and the stick. That’s the candy, a virgin world of our own (and we have our tanks full of colonists to prove Earth’s good faith) and I … I am the stick.
    The screenview appeared suddenly repulsive to her, and she blanked it, returned her attention to the big board and its pressures.
    It’s the uncertainty that gets to us, she thought. There’s too much unknown out here — something has to go wrong. But we don’t know what it’ll be … or when it’ll hit. We only know the blow when it falls can be totally destructive, leaving not a trace. It has been before — six times.
    She heard Bickel and Timberlake leave, the hiss of the hatch expanders sealing behind them; she turned and looked at Flattery. He had a small blue smudge-stain on his cheek just below his left eye. The stain appeared suddenly as an enormous flaw in an otherwise perfect creature. It terrified her, and she turned back to the big board to hide her emotion.
    “Why … why did the other six fail?” she asked.
    “You must have faith,” Flattery said. “One ship will make it … one day. Perhaps it’ll be our ship.”
    “It seems such a … wasteful way,” she murmured.
    “Very little’s wasted. Solar energy’s cheap at Moonbase. Raw materials are plentiful.”
    “But we’re … alive!” she protested.
    “There are plenty more where we came from. They’ll be almost precisely like us … and all of them God’s children. His eye is ever on us. We should—”
    “Oh, stop that! I know why we have a chaplain—to feed us that pap when we need it. I don’t need it and I never will.”
    “How proud we are,” Flattery said.
    “You know what you can do with your metaphysical crap. There is no God, only—”
    “Shut up!” he barked. “I speak as your chaplain. I’m surprised at your stupidity, the temerity that permits you to utter such blasphemy out here.”
    “Oh, yes,” she sneered. “I forgot. You’re also our wily Indian scout sniffing the unknown terrain in front of us. You’re the hedge on our bets, the ‘what-if’ factor, the—”
    “You have no idea how much unknown we face,” he said.
    “Right out of Hamlet, she mocked him, and allowed her voice to go heavy with portentousness: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
    He felt an abrupt pang of fear for her. “I’ll pray for you, Prudence.” And he cursed inwardly at the sound of his own voice. He had come through as a fatuous ass. But I will pray for her, he thought.
    Prudence turned back to the big board, reminding herself: A stick is to beat people with … to goad them beyond themselves. Raj can’t just be a chaplain; he has to be a super-chaplain.
    Flattery took a deep, quavering breath. Her blasphemy had touched his most profound doubts. And he thought how little anyone suspected what lay beneath their veneer of science, deep in that Pandora’s box where anything was possible.
    Anything? he asked himself.
    That was the bind, of course. They were penetrating the frontiers of Anything … and Anything had always before been the prerogative of God.

Chapter 11
    Symbolic behavior of some order has to be a requisite of