A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [110]
“Hey, Brother Pat!”
He turned off the machine in disgust. Holy Leibowitz! Did we labor for this? He could not see that it was any improvement over a carefully trimmed goose-quill and a pot of mulberry ink.
“Hey, Pat!”
There was no immediate response from the outer office, but after a few seconds a monk with a red beard opened the door, and, after glancing at the open cabinets, the littered floor, and the abbot’s expression, he had the gall to smile.
“What’s the matter, Magister meus? Don’t you like our modem technology?”
“Not particularly, no!” Zerchi snapped. “Hey, Pat!”
“He’s out, m’Lord.”
“Brother Joshua, can’t you fix this thing? Really.”
“Really?-No, I can’t.”
“I’ve got to send a radiogram.”
“That’s too bad, Father Abbot. Can’t do that either. They Just took our crystal and padlocked the shack.”
“They?”
“Zone Defense Interior. All private transmitters have been ordered off the air”
Zerchi wandered to his chair and sank into it. “A defense alert. Why?”
Joshua shrugged. “There’s talk about an ultimatum. That’s all I know, except what I hear from the radiation counters.”
“Still rising?”
“Still rising.”
“Call Spokane.”
By midafternoon the dusty wind had come. The wind came over the mesa and over the small city of Sanly Bowitts. It washed over the surrounding countryside, noisily through the tall corn in the irrigated fields, tearing streamers of blowing sand from the sterile ridges. It moaned about the stone walls of the ancient abbey and about the aluminum and glass walls of the modern additions to the abbey. It besmirched the reddening sun with the dirt of the land, and sent dust devils scurrying across the pavement of the six-lane highway that separated the ancient abbey from its modern additions,
On the side road which at one point flanked the highway and led from the monastery by way of a residential suburb into the city, an old beggar clad in burlap paused to listen to the wind. The wind brought the throb of practice rocketry explosively from the south. Ground-to-space interceptor missiles were being fired toward target orbits from a launching range far across the desert. The old man gazed at the faint red disk of the sun while he leaned on his staff and muttered to himself or to the sun, “Omens, omens-”
A group of children were playing in the weed-filled yard of a hovel just across the side road, their games proceeding under the mute but all-seeing auspices of a gnarled black woman who smoked a weed-filled pipe on the porch and offered an occasional word of solace or remonstrance to one or another tearful player who came as plaintiff before the grandmotherly court of her hovel porch.
One of the children soon noticed the old tramp who stood across the roadway, and presently a shout went up: “Lookit, lookit! It’s old Lazar! Auntie say, he be old Lazar, same one ‘ut the Lor’ Hesus raise up! Lookit! Lazar! Lazar!”
The children thronged to the broken fence. The old tramp regarded them grumpily for a moment, then wandered on along the road. A pebble skipped across the ground at his feet.
“Hey, Lazar…!”
“Auntie say, what the Lor’ Hesus raise up, it stay up! Lookit him! Ya! Still huntin’ for the Lor’ ‘ut raise him. Auntie say-”
Another rock skipped after the old man, but he did not look back. The old woman nodded sleepily. The children returned to their games. The dust storm thickened.
Across the highway from the ancient abbey, atop one of the new aluminum and glass buildings, a monk