To Open the Sky (25 page)

Lazarus watched them: appearing, disappearing, lifting, throwing. Only children, not yet in full command of their powers. What strengths would be theirs when they were fully mature, he wondered?

And how many would die to send mankind beyond his present boundaries?

A saw-winged bird, faintly luminous in the midday dusk, shot diagonally across the sky just above the treetop canopy. One of the young pushers looked up, grinned, caught the bird and sent it whirling half a mile through the clouds. A squawk of rage, distant but audible, filtered back.

Lazarus said, "The deal is closed. We help Vorst, and Vorst goes. Done?"

"Done," said Mondschein quickly.

"Done," Martell murmured, scuffing at the grayish moss that festooned the ground.

"Claude?" Lazarus asked.

Emory scowled. He peered at a long-limbed boy, returning from a jaunt to some other continent, who materialized no more than six yards away. Emory's narrow- featured face looked dark with tension.

"Done," he said.

Seven

The capsule was an obelisk of beryllium steel, fifty feet high, an uncertain ark to send across the sea of stars. It contained living quarters for eleven, a computer of uncomfortably awe-inspiring abilities, and a subminiaturized treasury of all that was worth salvaging from two billion years of life on Earth.

"Prepare the capsule," Vorst had instructed Brother Capodimonte, "as though the sun were going nova next month and we had to save what was important."

As a former anthropologist, Capodimonte had his own ideas about the contents of such an ark, but he kept them separate from his concept of what Vorst required. Quietly, a subcommittee of Brothers had planned the interstellar expedition on a someday-far-away basis decades ago, and had replanned it several times, so that Capodimonte had the benefit of the thinking of other men. That was a comfort to him.

There were troublesome elements of mystery about the project. He did not, for example, know the nature of the world to which the pioneers were bound. No one did. There was no telling, at this distance, whether it really could harbor Terran-style life.

Astronomers had found hundreds of planets scattered through other systems. Some could dimly be picked up by telescopic sensors; others could only be inferred from computations of disturbed stellar orbits. But the planets were there. Would they welcome Earthmen?

Only one planet out of nine in Earth's own system was naturally habitable—not a cheering prognosis for other systems. It had taken two generations of hard work to Terraform Mars; the eleven pioneers would hardly be able to do that. It had taken the highest genetic skills to convert men into Venusians; that, too, would be beyond the range of the voyagers. They would have to find a suitable world, or fail.

Espers in the Santa Fe retinue said that suitable worlds existed. They had peered into the heavens, reached forth their minds, made contact with tangible and habitable planets out there. Illusion? Deception? Capodimonte was in no position to determine that.

Reynolds Kirby, troubled by the project from first to last, said to Capodimonte, "Is it true that they don't even know what star they'll be aiming for?"

"That's true. They've detected some kind of emanations coming from somewhere. Don't ask me how. The way this thing is planned, our espers will supply the guidance and their pushers will supply the propulsion. We find, they heave."

"A voyage to anywhere?"

"To anywhere," Capodimonte agreed. "They rip a hole in the sky and shove the capsule through. It doesn't travel through normal space, whatever normal space is. It lands on this world that our espers claim to have connected with out there, and they send a message back, telling us where they are. We get the message about a generation from now. But meanwhile we'll have sent other expeditions. A one-way journey to nowhere. And Vorst is the first to take it."

Kirby shook his head. "It's hard to believe, isn't it? But evidently it's going to be a success."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Vorst's had his floaters out there looking, you see. They tell him that he arrived safely. So he's willing to step out into the dark, because he knows in advance that he's not running any risks."

"Do you believe that?" asked Capodimonte, shuffling through his inventory sheets.

"No."

Neither did Brother Capodimonte. But he did not quarrel with the role assigned to him. He had been at the council meeting where Vorst had announced his stunning intention, and he had heard Reynolds Kirby rise and eloquently argue the case for allowing the Founder to depart. Kirby's thesis had been a sound one, within the context of nightmare that this whole project embraced. And so the capsule would leave, powered by the joint efforts of some blue-skinned boys, and guided on a thread through the heavens by the roving minds of Brotherhood espers, and Noel Vorst would never walk the Earth again.

Capodimonte checked his lists.

Food.

Clothing.

Books.

Tools.

Medical equipment.

Communication devices.

Weapons.

Power sources.

The expedition, Capodimonte thought, would be adequately furnished for its adventure. The whole thing might be madness, or it might be the grandest enterprise ever attempted by man; Brother Capodimonte could not tell which. But one thing was certain: the expedition would be adequately furnished. He had seen to that.

Eight

It was the day of departure. Chill winter winds raked New Mexico on this late-December day. The capsule stood in a desert flat a dozen miles from the inner compound of the Santa Fe research center. From here to the horizon it was a wilderness of sagebrush and jumper and piñon pine, and in the distance the bowl of mountains rose. Though he was well insulated, Reynolds Kirby shivered as the wind assailed the plateau. In another few days the year 2165 would be dawning, but Noel Vorst would not be here to welcome it. Kirby was not accustomed to that idea yet.

The pushers from Venus had arrived a week ago. There were twenty of them, and since it was inconvenient for them to live in breathing-suits all their time on Earth, the Vorsters had erected a little bit of Venus for them. A domed building not far from the capsule housed them; it was pumped full of the poisonous muck that they were accustomed to breathing. Lazarus and Mondschein had come with them and were under the dome now, getting everything prepared.

Mondschein would remain after the event, to undergo an overhauling in Santa Fe. Lazarus was going back to Venus in a couple of days. But first he and Kirby would face each other across a conference table and hammer out the basic clauses of the new entente. They had met once, twelve years ago, but not for long. Since Lazarus's arrival on Earth, Kirby had spoken briefly to him and had come away with the feeling that the Harmonist prophet, though strong-willed and purposeful, would not be difficult ultimately to reach understandings with. He hoped not.

Now, on the wintry plateau, the high leaders of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance were gathering to watch their leader vanish. Kirby, glancing around, saw Capodimonte and Magnus and Ashton and Langholt and all the others, dozens of them, spiraling down the echelons into the middle levels of the organization. They were all watching him. They could not watch Vorst, for Vorst was in the capsule already, along with the other members of the expedition. Five men, five women, and Vorst. All of the others under forty, healthy, capable, resilient. And Vorst. The Founder's quarters aboard the capsule were comfortable, but it was lunacy to think of that old man plunging into the universe like this.

Supervisor Magnus, the European Coordinator, stepped to Kirby's side. He was a small, sharp-featured man who, like most of the other leaders of the Brotherhood, had served in its ranks for more than seventy years.

"He's actually going," Magnus said.

"Soon. Yes. No doubt of it."

"Did you speak to him this morning?"

''Briefly," Kirby said. "He seems very calm."

"He seemed very calm when he blessed us last night," said Magnus. "Almost joyful."

"He's putting down a great burden. You'd be joyful, too, if you could be translated into the sky and shrug off your responsibilities."

Magnus said, "I wish we could prevent this."

Kirby turned and looked bluntly at the little man. "This is a necessary thing," he said. "It must happen, or the movement will founder of its own success."

"I heard your speech before the council, yes, but—"

"We've reached the fulfillment level of our first evolutionary stage," said Kirby. "Now we need to extend our mythology. Symbolically, Vorst's departure is invaluable to us. He ascends into the sky, leaving us to carry on his work and go on to new purposes. If he remained, we'd begin to mark time. Now we can use his glorious example to inspire us. With Vorst leading the way to the new worlds, we who remain can build on the foundation he bequeaths us."

"You sound as though you believed it."

"I do," said Kirby. "I didn't at first. But Vorst was right. He said I'd understand why he was going, and I came to see it. He's ten times as valuable to the movement doing this as he would be if he remained."

Magnus murmured, "He isn't content to be Christ and Mohammed. He has to be Moses, too, and also Elijah."

"I never thought I'd hear you speak of him so coarsely," said Kirby.

"I never did either," Magnus replied. "Damn it, I don't want him to go!"

Kirby was astonished to see tears glistening in Magnus's pale eyes.

"That's precisely why he's leaving," Kirby said, and then both men were silent.

Capodimonte moved toward them. "Everything's ready," he announced. "I've got the word from Lazarus that the pushers are in series."

"What about our guidance people?" Kirby asked.

"They've been ready for an hour."

Kirby looked toward the gleaming capsule. "Might as well get it over with, then."

"Yes," Capodimonte said. "Might as well."

Lazarus, Kirby knew, was waiting for a signal from him. From now on,
all
signals would come from him, at least on Earth. But that thought no longer disturbed him. He had adjusted to the situation. He was in command.

Symbolic regalia cluttered the field—Harmonist ikons, a big cobalt reactor, the paraphernalia of both the cults that now were merging. Kirby gestured to an acolyte, and moderator rods were withdrawn. The reactor surged into life.

The Blue Fire danced high above the reactor, and its glow stained the hull of the capsule. Cold light, Cerenkov radiation, the Vorster symbol, sparkled on the plateau, and all through the watching multitude ran the sounds of devotion, the whispered litanies, the murmured recapitulations of the stations of the spectrum. While the man who had devised those words sat hidden within the walls of that teardrop of steel in the center of the gathering.

The flare of the Blue Fire was the signal to the Venusians in their nearby dome. Now was their moment to gather their power and hurl the capsule outward, planting man's hand on a new world in the stars.

"What are they waiting for?" Magnus asked querulously.

"Maybe it won't happen," said Capodimonte.

Kirby said nothing. And then it began to happen.

Nine

Kirby had not quite known what to expect. In his fantasies of the scene he had pictured a dozen capering Venusians dancing around the capsule, holding hands, their foreheads bulging with the effort of lifting die vehicle and hurling it out of the world. But the Venusians were nowhere to be seen; they were off in their dome, several hundred yards away, and Kirby suspected that they were neither holding hands nor showing outward signs of strain.

In his reveries, too, he had imagined the capsule taking off the way a rocket would, rising a few feet from the ground, wobbling a bit, rising a little more, suddenly soaring up, crossing the sky on a potent trajectory, dwindling, vanishing from sight at last. But that was not the way it was really to be, either.

He waited. A long moment passed.

He thought of Vorst, making landfall on some other world. An inhabited world, perhaps? What would be Vorst's impact when he came to that virgin territory? Vorst was an irresistible force, terrifying and unique. Wherever he went, he would transform all that was about him. Kirby felt sorry for the ten hapless pioneers who would have the benefit of Vorst's immediate guidance. He wondered what kind of colony they would build.

Whatever it was, it would succeed. Success was in Vorst's nature. He was hideously old, but he had frightening vitality still locked within him. The Founder seemed to relish the challenge of beginning anew. Kirby wished him well.

"There they go," Capodimonte whispered.

It was true. The capsule was still on the ground, but now the air about it wavered, as though stirred by heat waves rising from the parched, sandy soil.