The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl Page B

residents—without remembering a name. It struck me that, although the people who had lived here for a while all seemed to have reasonably useful skills, the newcomers were not the kind of prospects I would have chosen to build a new frontier. Two of them described themselves as poets, one was an actor, a couple were so young they were nothing in particular, being just out of school. The young ones, at least, I could see potentially developing into something Pava might need. The others struck me as a good sample of the kind of people who couldn't make it back home and had headed for Pava to change their luck.
    I wondered if their luck was really that likely to change. It seemed a good bet to me that the would-be returnees clamoring for a freezer locker in the next ship home would include at least a few of those who had just got here . . . including, of course, myself.
    Captain Garold Tscharka had detached himself from the cluster of Millenarists by then and left Friar Tuck behind to lead them in a hymn. When I looked around I saw that Tscharka was in what looked like a fairly acrimonious conversation with somebody I recognized; his name was Schottke, and he was one of the people who had come out to meet us. Then Tscharka saw me, and pointed, and Schottke came hurrying over to where I was. "Barry di Hoa? I'm Jacky Schottke—"
    "We met."
    "Right, at the shuttle," he said, being agreeable. He looked a little ruffled, though, and glanced apprehensively back at Tscharka now and then. "Well, Barry, we're a little short of housing here—I guess you can see that—so Garold Tscharka says you're to room with me until we can finish building some more living space. Somehow. So when your stuff comes down from the shuttle—"
    "I don't have any stuff," I told him, and then had to explain that my visit hadn't been premeditated.
    "Oh, hell," he said, "what a lousy deal for you! Still, you'll be all right. This isn't a bad planet. I find it pretty exciting, but then it's my work that makes it interesting, you know. What do you do?"
    "Fuelmaster. Or was. I worked on the Moon, handling antimatter fuel."
    "Oh." He looked pleased. "I imagine Garold is happy about that; he's brought back tons of the stuff, I hear. I'm a taxonomist, with a special interest in trophic food chains—that is, when they'll let me spare the time—though as a matter of fact I used to be—"
    He stopped there, looking quickly again at Captain Tscharka. Then he finished. "I used to be something else, actually. But that was nearly fifty years ago, and I'm not that anymore. I just happened to get interested in taxonomy—you know, scientific ways of describing organisms? Seeing how they relate to each other? And fifty years is a long time, Barry, and I wanted to be here for Garold when he came back, but—well, people change."
    That was about as muddled an explanation as I'd ever heard, especially since I hadn't asked him for any. The man was double-talking me, for what reason I could not guess. "Now," he said briskly, "I'm sure you're hungry, so let's eat. You can meet some of the others—if you're not too tired?"
    Well, I wasn't too tired. Not exactly. What I was was confused. My life had changed too drastically in too short a time, and I was having trouble figuring out where I was going with it.
    I wasn't particularly hungry, either, in spite of what Schottke had said—you don't work up much of an appetite in the deep freeze—but they'd put plates and dishes out on long trestle tables, in the shade of some of those bamboo-like trees, and I was willing to try to eat. I found a seat between Theophan and Jillen and investigated the food.
    We didn't begin eating right away. Before we were allowed to start eating Captain Tscharka climbed on a bench and Reverend Tuchman pounded the table for attention. When the babble dwindled Tscharka gave us all a little speech:
    "It's wonderful to be back on Pava again. In deference to our various differing beliefs I will not ask the