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KIRBY HAD NOT expected much from the operation. He had discussed it fully with Vorst the day before; though he was no scientist himself, the Coordinator tried to keep abreast of the work being done at the research center. His own sphere of responsibility was administrative; it was Kirby’s job to oversee the far-flung secular activities of the religious cult that virtually ruled the planet. It was almost ninety years since Kirby himself had been converted, and he had watched the cult grow mighty.

  Political power, though it was useful to wield, was not supposed to be the Brotherhood’s goal. The essence of the movement was its scientific program, centering on the facilities at Santa Fe. Here, over the decades, an unsurpassable factory of miracles had been constructed, lubricated by the cash contributions of billions of tithing Vorsters on every continent. And the miracles had been forthcoming. The regeneration processes now insured a predictable life span of three or four centuries for the newborn, perhaps more, for no one could be certain that immortality had been achieved until a few millennia of testing had elapsed. The Brotherhood could offer a reasonable facsimile of life eternal, at any rate, and that was a sufficient redemption of the promissory note on which the whole movement had been founded a hundred years before.

  The other goal, though—the stars—had given the Brotherhood a harder pursuit.

  Man was locked into his solar system by the limiting velocity of light. Chemical-fueled rockets and even ion-drive ships simply took too long to get about. Mars and Venus were within easy reach, but the cheerless outer planets were not, and the round trip to the nearest star would take a few decades by current technology, nine years even at the very best. So man had transformed Mars into a habitable world, and he had transformed himself into something capable of inhabiting Venus. He mined the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, paid occasional visits to Pluto, and sent robots down to examine Mercury and the gas giants. And looked hopelessly to the stars.

  The laws of relativity governed the motions of real bodies through real space, but they did not necessarily apply to the events of the paranormal world. To Noel Vorst, it had seemed that the only route to the stars was the extrasensory one. So he had gathered espers of all varieties at Santa Fe, and for generations now had carried on breeding programs and genetic manipulations. The Brotherhood had spawned an interesting variety of espers, but none with the talent of transporting physical bodies through space. While on Venus the telekinetic mutation had happened spontaneously, an ironic byproduct of the adaptation of human life to that world.

  Venus was beyond direct Vorster control. The Harmonists of Venus had the pushers that Vorst needed to reach into the galaxy. They showed little interest, though, in collaborating with the Vorsters on an expedition. For weeks now Reynolds Kirby had been negotiating with his opposite number on Venus, attempting to bring about an agreement.

  Meanwhile the surgeons at Santa Fe had never given up their dream of creating pushers out of Earthmen, thus making the cooperation of the unpredictable Venusians unnecessary. The synaptic-rearrangement project, flowering at last, had come to the stage where a human subject would go under the beam.

  “It won’t work,” Vorst had said to Kirby. “They’re still fifty years away from anything.”

  “I don’t understand it, Noel. The Venusians have the gene for telekinesis, don’t they? Why can’t we just duplicate it? Considering all we’ve done with the nucleic acids—”

  Vorst smiled. “There’s no ‘gene for telekinesis,’ as such, you know. It’s part of a constellation of genetic patterns. We’ve been trying consciously to duplicate it for thirty years, and we aren’t even close. We’ve also been trying a random approach, since that’s how the Venusians got the ability. No luck there, either. And then there’s this synapse business: alter the brain itself, not the genes. That may get us somewhere, eventually. But I can’t wait another fifty years.”

  “You’ll live that long, certainly.”

  “Yes,” Vorst agreed, “but I still can’t wait any longer. The Venusians have the men we need. It’s time to win them to our purposes.”

  Patiently Kirby had wooed the heretics. There were signs of progress in the negotiations now. In view of the failure of the operation, the need for an agreement with Venus was more urgent.

  “Come with me,” Vorst said, as the dead patient was wheeled away. “They’re testing that gargoyle today, and I want to watch.”

  Kirby followed the Founder out of the amphitheater. Acolytes were close by in case of trouble. Vorst, these days, rarely tried to walk any more, and rolled along in his cradling net of webfoam. Kirby still preferred to use his feet, though he was nearly as ancient as Vorst. The sight of the two of them promenading through the plazas of the research center always stirred attention.

  “You aren’t disturbed over the failure just now?” Kirby asked.

  “Why should I be? I told you it was too soon for success.”

  “What about this gargoyle? Any hope?”

  “Our hope,” Vorst said quietly, “is Venus. They already have the pushers.”

  “Then why keep trying to develop them here?”

  “Momentum. The Brotherhood hasn’t slowed down in a hundred years. I’m not closing any avenues now. Not even the hopeless ones. It’s all a matter of momentum.”

  Kirby shrugged. For all the power he held in the organization—and his powers were immense—he had never felt that he held any real initiative. The plans of the movement were generated, as they had been from the first, by Noel Vorst. He and only he knew what game he was playing. And if Vorst died this afternoon, with the game unfinished? What would happen to the movement then? Run on its own momentum? To what end, Kirby wondered.

  They entered a squat, glittering little building of irradiated green foamglass. An awed hush preceded them: Vorst was coming! Men in blue robes came out to greet the Founder. They led him to the room in the rear where the gargoyle was kept. Kirby kept pace, ignoring the acolytes who were ready to catch him if he stumbled.

  The gargoyle was sitting enmeshed in lacy restraining ribbons. He was not a pretty sight. Thirteen years old, three feet tall, grotesquely deformed, deaf, crippled, his corneas clouded, his skin pebbled and granulated. A mutant, though not one produced by any laboratory; this was Hurler’s Syndrome, a natural and congenital error of metabolism, first identified scientifically two and a half centuries before. The unlucky parents had brought the hapless monster to a chapel of the Brotherhood in Stockholm, hoping that by bathing him in the Blue Fire of the cobalt reactor his defects would be cured. The defects had not been cured, but an esper at the chapel had detected latent talents in the gargoyle, and so he was here to be probed and tested. Kirby felt a shiver of revulsion.

  “What causes such a thing?” he asked the medic at his elbow.

  “Abnormal genes. They produce metabolic error that results in an accumulation of mucopolysaccharides in the tissues of the body.”

  Kirby nodded solemnly. “And is there supposed to be a direct link with esping?”

  “Only coincidental,” said the medic.

  Vorst had moved up to study the creature at close range. The Founder’s eye-shutters clicked as he peered forward. The gargoyle was humped and folded, virtually unable to move its limbs. The milky eyes held a look of pure misery. To the euthanasia heap with this one, Kirby thought. Yet Vorst hoped that such a monster would take him to the stars!

  “Begin the examination,” Vorst murmured.

  A pair of espers came forward, general-purpose types: a slick young woman with frizzy hair, and a plump, sad-faced man. Kirby, whose own esping facilities were deficient to the point of nonexistence, watched in silence as the wordless examination commenced. What were they doing? What shafts were they aiming at the huddled creature before them? Kirby did not know, and he took comfort in the fact that Vorst probably did not know himself. The Founder wasn’t much of an esper, either.

  Ten minutes passed. Then the girl looked up and said, “Low-order pyrotic, mainly.”

  “He can push mole
cules about?” Vorst said. “Then he’s got a shred of telekinesis.”

  “Only a shred,” the second esper said. “Nothing that others don’t have. Also low-order communication abilities. He sits there telling us to kill him.”

  “I’d recommend dissection,” said the girl. “The subject wouldn’t mind.”

  Kirby shuddered. These two bland espers had peered within the mind of that crippled thing, and that in itself should have been enough to shrivel their souls. To see, for an empathic moment, what it was like to be a thirteen-year-old human gargoyle, to look out upon the world through those clouded eyes—! But they were all business, these two. They had merged minds with monstrosities before.

  Vorst waved his hand. “Keep him for further study. Maybe he can be guided toward usefulness. If he’s really a pyrotic, take the usual precautions.”

  The Founder whirled his chair around and started to leave the ward. At that same moment an acolyte came hurrying in, bearing a message. He froze at the unexpected sight of Vorst wheeling toward a collision with him. Vorst smiled paternally and guided himself around the boy, who went limp with relief.

  The acolyte said, “Message for you, Coordinator Kirby.”

  Kirby took it and jammed his thumb against the seal. The envelope popped open.

  The message was from Mondschein.

  “LAZARUS IS READY TO TALK TO VORST,” it said.

  three

  VORST SAID, “I was insane, you know. For something like ten years. Later I discovered what the trouble was. I was suffering from time-float.”

  The pallid esper girl’s eyes were very round as she gazed at him. They were alone in the Founder’s personal quarters. She was thin, loose-limbed, thirty years old. Strands of black hair dangled like painted straw down the sides of her face. Her name was Delphine, and in all the months that she had served Vorst’s needs she had never become accustomed to his frankness. She had little chance to; when she left his office after each session, other espers erased her recollections of the visit.

  She said, “Shall I turn myself on?”

  “Not yet, Delphine. Do you ever think of yourself as insane? In the difficult moments, the moments when you start ranging along the time-line and don’t think you’ll ever get back to now?”

  “It’s pretty scary sometimes.”

  “But you get back. That’s the miraculous thing. You know how many floaters I’ve seen burn out?” Vorst asked. “Hundreds. I’d have burned out myself, except that I’m a lousy precog. Back then, though, I kept breaking loose, drifting along the time-line. I saw the whole Brotherhood spread out before me. Call it a vision, call it a dream. I saw it, Delphine. Blurred around the edges,”

  “Just as you told it in your book?”

  “More or less,” said the Founder. “The years between 2055 and 2063—those were the years I had the visions worst. When I was thirty-five, it started. I was just an ordinary technician, a nobody, and then I got what could be called divine inspiration, except all it was was a peek at my own future. I thought I was going crazy. Later I understood.”

  The esper was silent. Vorst shuttered his eyes. The memories glowed in him: after years of internal chaos and collapse he had come from the crucible of madness purified, aware of his purpose. He saw how he could reshape the world. More than that, he saw how he had reshaped the world. After that it was just a matter of making the beginning, of founding the first chapels, dreaming up the rituals of the cult, surrounding himself with the scientific talent necessary to realize his goals. Was there a touch of paranoia in his purpose, a bit of Hitler, a tinge of Napoleon, a tincture of Genghis Khan? Perhaps. Vorst complacently viewed himself as a fanatic and even as a megalomaniac. But a cool, rational megalomaniac, and a successful one. He had been willing to stop at nothing to gain his ends, and he was just enough of a precog to know that he was going to gain them.

  He said, “It’s a big responsibility, setting out to transform the world. A man has to be a little daft to attempt it or even to think he can attempt it. But it helps to know what the outcome must be. One doesn’t feel so idiotic, knowing that he’s simply acting out the inevitable.”

  “It takes the challenge out of life,” said the esper.

  “Ah, Delphine, you touch the gaping wound! But you’d know, of course. How dreary it is to be playing out your own script, aware of what’s ahead. At least I’ve had the mercy of uncertainty in the small things. I can’t see very much myself, so I have to hitchhike with floaters like you, and the visions aren’t clear. But you see clearly, don’t you, Delphine? You’ve been along your own world-line. Have you seen your own burnout yet, Delphine?”

  The esper’s cheeks colored. She looked at the floor and did not answer.

  “I’m sorry, Delphine,” Vorst said. “I had no right to ask that. I retract it. Turn on for me, Delphine. Do your trick. Take me along. I’ve said too much today.”

  Shyly, the girl composed herself for her great effort. She had more control than most of her kind, Vorst knew. Whereas most of the precogs eventually slipped their moorings, Delphine had clung to her powers and her life and had reached what was, for her kind of esper, a ripe old age. She would burn out, too, one day, when she overreached herself. But up to now she had been invaluable to Vorst, his crystal ball, the most helpful of all the floaters who had aided him in plotting his course. And if she could hold out just a while longer, until he saw his route past the final obstacles, the long journey would end and they both could rest.

  She released her grip on the present and moved into that realm where all moments are now.

  Vorst watched and waited and felt the girl taking him along as she began her time-shuttling. He could not initiate the journey himself, but he could follow. Mists enfolded him, and he swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here and here, and saw others, shadow-figures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time.

  Lazarus? Yes, Lazarus was there. Kirby, too. Mondschein. All of them, the pawns in the game. Vorst saw the glow of otherness and looked out upon a landscape that was neither Earth nor Mars nor Venus. He trembled. He looked up at a tree eight hundred feet high, with a corona of azure leaves against a foggy sky. Then he was ripped away, and hurled into the stinking confusion of a rain-spattered city street, and stood before one of his early chapels. The building was on fire in the rain, and the smell of scorched wet wood assailed his nostrils. And then, smiling into the stunned, parched face of Reynolds Kirby. And then—

  The sense of motion left him. He slipped back into his own matrix of time, making the adrenal adjustments that compensated for his exertions. The floater lay slumped in her chair, sweat-flecked, dazed. Vorst summoned an acolyte.

  “Take her to her ward,” he said. “Have them work on her until she comes back to her strength.”

  The acolyte nodded and lifted the girl. Vorst sat motionless until they were gone. He was satisfied with the session. It had confirmed his own intuitive ideas of his immediate direction, and that was always comforting.

  “Send me Capodimonte,” Vorst said into the communicator.

  The chubby blue-robed figure entered a few minutes later. When Vorst was in Santa Fe, one did not waste time in getting to his quarters after a summons. Capodimonte was the District Supervisor for the Santa Fe region, and was customarily in charge here except when such figures as Vorst or Kirby were in residence. Capodimonte was stolid, loyal, useful. Vorst trusted him for delicate assignments. They exchanged quick, casual benedictions now.

  Then Vorst said, “Capo, how long would it take you to pick the personnel for an interstellar expedition?”

  “Inter—”

  “Say, for departure later this year. Run the specs off at Archives and get together a few possible teams.”

  Capodimonte had recovered his aplomb. “What size teams?”

  “All sizes. From two persons to about a dozen. Start with an Adam-and-Eve pair, and work up to, say, six couples. Matched for health, ada
ptability, compatibility, skills, and fertility.”

  “Espers?”

  “With caution. You can throw in a couple of empaths, a couple of healers. Stay away from the exotics, though. And remember that these people are supposed to be pioneers. They’ve got to be flexible. We can do without geniuses on this trip, Capo.”

  “You want me to report to you or to Kirby when I’ve made the lists?”

  “To me, Capo. I don’t want you to utter a syllable about this to Kirby or anyone else. Just get in there and run off the groups as we’ve already programmed them. I’m not sure what size expedition we’ll be sending, and I want to have a group ready that’ll be self-sufficient at any level—two, four, eight, whatever it turns out to be. Take two or three days. When you’ve done that, put half a dozen of your best men to work on the logistics of the trip. Assume an esper-powered capsule and go over the optimum designs. We’ve had decades to plan it; we must have a whole arsenal full of blueprints. Look them over. This is your baby, Capo.”

  “Sir? One subversive question, please?”

  “Ask it.”

  “Is this a hypothetical exercise I’m doing, or is this the real thing?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vorst.

  four

  THE BLUE FACE of a Venusian looked out of the screen, alien and forbidding, but its owner had been born an Earthman, and the terrestrial heritage betrayed itself in the shape of the skull, the set of the lips, the thrust of the chin. The face was that of David Lazarus, founder and resurrected head of the cult of Transcendent Harmony. Vorst had conferred often with Lazarus in the twelve years since the arch-heresiarch’s resurrection. And always the two prophets had allowed themselves the luxury of full visual contact. It was monumentally expensive to bounce not only voices but images down the chain of relay stations that led from Venus to Earth, but expense meant little to these men. Vorst insisted. He liked to see Lazarus’s transformed face as they spoke. It gave him something to focus on during the long, dull time-lags in their conversations. Even at the speed of light it took a while for a message to get from planet to planet. Even a simple exchange of views required more than an hour.