To Open the Sky Read online

  “I don’t see why this is really necessary,” Ridblom said. “The Vorsters can look out for themselves. I understand they’ve got some mysterious way of knocking a troublemaker out so that he doesn’t—”

  “I know, Lloyd. But Weiner’s already been knocked out once this evening. For all I know, a second jolt of the same stuff tonight might kill him. That would be very awkward all around. Just head him off.”

  Ridblom shrugged. “Thy will be done.”

  Kirby left the booth. He was cold sober again. Vanna Marshak was sitting at the bar where he had left her. At this distance and in this light there was something almost pretty about her artificial disfigurements.

  She smiled. “Well?”

  “They found him. He got to Chicago somehow, and he’s about to raise some hell in the Vorster chapel there. I’ve got to go and lasso him.”

  “Be gentle with him, Ron. He’s a troubled man. He needs help.”

  “Don’t we all?” Kirby blinked suddenly. The thought of making the trip to Chicago alone struck him abruptly as being nasty. “Vanna?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to be busy for the next couple of hours?”

  five

  THE COPTER HOVERED over Chicago’s sparkling gaiety. Below, Kirby saw the bright sheen of Lake Michigan, and the splendid mile-high towers that lined the lake. Above him blazed the local timeglow in chartreuse banded with deep blue:

  2331 HOURS CENTRAL STANDARD TIME

  WEDNESDAY MAY 8 2077

  OGLEBAY REALTY—THE FINEST!

  “Put her down,” Kirby ordered.

  The robopilot steered the copter toward a landing. It was impossible, of course, to risk the fierce wind currents in those deep canyons; they would have to land at a rooftop heliport. The landing was smooth. Kirby and Vanna rushed out. She had given him the Vorster message all the way from Manhattan, and at this point Kirby wasn’t sure whether the cult was complete nonsense or some sinister conspiracy against the general welfare or a truly profound, spiritually uplifting creed or perhaps a bit of all three.

  He thought he had the general idea. Vorst had cobbled together an eclectic religion, borrowing the confessional from Catholicism, absorbing some of the atheism of ur-Buddhism, adding a dose of Hindu reincarnation, and larding everything over with ultramodernistic trappings, nuclear reactors at every altar, and plenty of gabble about the holy electron. But there was also talk of harnessing the minds of espers to power a stardrive, of a communion even of non-esper minds, and—most startling of all, the big selling-point—personal immortality, not reincarnation, not the hope of Nirvana, but eternal life in the here-and-now present flesh. In view of Earth’s population problems, immortality was low on any sane man’s priority list. Immortality for other people, anyway; one was always willing to consider the extension of one’s own life, wasn’t one? Vorst preached the eternal life of the body, and the people were buying. In eight years the cult had gone from one cell to a thousand, from fifty followers to millions. The old religions were bankrupt. Vorst was handing out shining gold pieces, and if they were only fool’s gold, it would take a while for the faithful to find that out.

  “Come on,” Kirby said. “There isn’t much time.”

  He scrambled down the exit ramp, turning to take Vanna Marshak’s hand and help her the last few steps. They hurried across the rooftop landing area to the gravshaft, stepped in, dropped to ground level in a dizzying five-second plunge. Local police were waiting in the street. They had three teardrops.

  “He’s a block from the Vorster place, Freeman Kirby,” one of the policeman said. “The esper’s been dragging him around for half an hour, but he’s dead set on going there.”

  “What does he want there?” Kirby asked.

  “He wants the reactor. He says he’s going to take it back to Mars and put it to some worthwhile use.”

  Vanna gasped at the blasphemy. Kirby shrugged, sat back, watched the streets flashing by. The teardrop halted. Kirby saw the Martian across the street.

  The girl who was with him was sultry, full-bodied, lush-looking. She had one arm thrust through his, and she was close to Weiner’s side, cooing in his ear. Weiner laughed harshly and turned to her, pulled her close, then pushed her away. She clutched at him again. It was quite a scene, Kirby thought. The street had been cleared. Local police and a couple of Ridblom’s men were watching grimly from the sidelines.

  Kirby went forward and gestured to the girl. She sensed instantly who he was, withdrew her arm from Weiner, and stepped away. The Martian swung around.

  “Found me, did you?”

  “I didn’t want you to do anything you’d regret later on.”

  “Very loyal of you, Kirby. Well, as long as you’re here, you can be my accomplice. I’m on my way to the Vorster place. They’re wasting good fissionables in those reactors. You distract the priest, and I’m going to grab the blue blinker, and we’ll all live happily ever after. Just don’t let him shock you. That isn’t fun.”

  “Nat—”

  “Are you with me or aren’t you, pal?” Weiner pointed toward the chapel, diagonally across the street a block away, in a building almost as shabby as the one in Manhattan. He started toward it.

  Kirby glanced uncertainly at Vanna. Then he crossed the street behind Weiner. He realized that the altered girl was following, too.

  Just as Weiner reached the entrance to the Vorster place, Vanna dashed forward and cut in front of him.

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t go in there to make trouble.”

  “Get out of my way, you phony-faced bitch!”

  “Please,” she said softly. “You’re a troubled man. You aren’t in harmony with yourself, let alone with the world around you. Come inside with me, and let me show you how to pray. There’s much for you to gain in there. If you’d only open your mind, open your heart—instead of standing there so smug in your hatred, in your drunken unwillingness to see—”

  Weiner hit her.

  It was a backhand slap across the face. Surgical alteration jobs are fragile, and they aren’t meant to be slapped. Vanna fell to her knees, whimpering, and pressed her hands over her face. She still blocked the Martian’s way. Weiner drew his foot back as though he were going to kick her, and that was when Reynolds Kirby forgot he was paid to be a diplomat.

  Kirby strode forward, caught Weiner by the elbow, swung him around. The Martian was off balance. He clawed at Kirby for support. Kirby struck his hand down, brought a fist up, landed it solidly in Weiner’s muscular belly. Weiner made a small oofing sound and began to rock backward. Kirby had not struck a human being in anger in thirty years, and he did not realize until that moment what a savage pleasure there could be in something so primordial. Adrenalin flooded his body. He hit Weiner again, just below the heart. The Martian, looking very surprised, sagged and went over backward, sprawling in the street.

  “Get up,” Kirby said, almost dizzy with rage.

  Vanna plucked at his sleeve. “Don’t hit him again,” she murmured. Her metallic lips looked crumpled. Her cheeks glistened with tears. “Please don’t hit him any more.”

  Weiner remained where he was, shaking his head vaguely. A new figure came forward: a small leathery-faced man, in late middle age. The Martian consul. Kirby felt his belly churn with apprehension.

  The consul said, “I’m terribly sorry, Freeman Kirby. He’s really been running amok, hasn’t he? Well, we’ll take jurisdiction now. What he needs is to have some of his own people tell him what a fool he’s been.”

  Kirby stammered, “It was my fault. I lost sight of him. He shouldn’t be blamed. He—”

  “We understand perfectly, Freeman Kirby.” The consul smiled benignly, gestured, nodded as three aides came forward and gathered the fallen Weiner into their arms.

  Very suddenly the street was empty. Kirby stood, drained and stupefied, in front of the Vorster chapel, and Vanna was with him, and all the others were gone, Weiner vanishing like an ogre in a bad dream. It had
not, Kirby thought, been a very successful evening. But now it was over.

  Home, now.

  An hour and a half would see him in Tortola. A quick, lonely swim in the warm ocean—then half an hour in the Nothing Chamber tomorrow. No, an hour, Kirby decided. It would take that much to undo this night’s damage. An hour of disassociation, an hour of drifting on the amniotic tide, sheltered, warm, unbothered by the pressures of the world, an hour of blissful if cowardly escape. Fine. Wonderful.

  Vanna said, “Will you come in now?”

  “Into the chapel?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “It’s late. I’ll get you back to New York right away. We’ll pay for any repairs that—that your face will need. The copter’s waiting.”

  “Let it wait,” Vanna said. “Come inside.”

  “I want to get home.”

  “Home can wait, too. Give me two hours with you, Ron. Just sit and listen to what they have to say in there. Come to the altar with me. You don’t have to do anything but listen. It’ll relax you, I promise that.”

  Kirby stared at her distorted, artificial face. Beneath the grotesque eyelids were real eyes—shining, imploring. Why was she so eager? Did they pay a finder’s fee of salvation for every lost soul dragged into the Blue Fire? Or could it be, Kirby wondered, that she really and truly believed, that her heart and soul were bound up in this movement, that she was sincere in her conviction that the followers of Vorst would live through eternity, would live to see men ride to the distant stars?

  He was so very tired.

  He wondered how the security officers of the Secretariat would regard it if a high official like himself began to dabble in Vorsterism.

  He wondered, too, if he had any career at all left to salvage, after tonight’s fiasco with the Martian. What was there to lose? He could rest for a while. His head was splitting. Perhaps some esper in there would massage his frontal lobes for a while. Espers tended to be drawn to the Vorster chapels, didn’t they?

  The place seemed to have a pull. He had made his job his religion, but was that really good enough now, he asked himself? Perhaps it was time to unbend, time to shed the mask of aloofness, time to find out what it was that the multitudes were buying so eagerly in these chapels. Or perhaps it was just time to give in and let himself be pulled under by the tide of the new creed.

  The sign over the door said:

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE IMMANENT RADIANCE

  COME YE ALL

  YE WHO MAY NEVER DIE

  HARMONIZE WITH THE ALL

  “Will you?” Vanna said.

  “All right,” Kirby muttered. “I’m willing. Let’s go harmonize with the All.”

  She took his hand. They stepped through the door. About a dozen people were kneeling in the pews. Up front the chapel leader was nudging the moderator rods out of the little reactor, and the first faint bluish glow was beginning to suffuse the room. Vanna guided Kirby into the last row. He looked toward the altar. The glow was deepening, casting a strange radiance on the plump, dogged-looking man at the front of the room. Now greenish-white, now purplish, now the Blue Fire of the Vorsters.

  The opium of the masses, Kirby thought, and the hackneyed phrase sounded foolishly cynical as it echoed through his brain. What was the Nothing Chamber, after all, but the opium of the elite? And the sniffer palaces, what were they? At least here they went for the mind and soul, not for the body. It was worth an hour of his time to listen, at any rate.

  “My brothers,” said the man at the altar in a soft, fog-smooth voice, “we celebrate the underlying Oneness here. Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird, all consist of atoms, and those atoms contain particles moving at wondrous speeds. They are the electrons, my brothers. They show us the way to peace, as I will make clear to you. They—”

  Reynolds Kirby bowed his head. He could not bear to look at that glowing reactor, suddenly. There was a throbbing in his skull. He was distantly aware of Vanna beside him, smiling, warm, close.

  I’m listening, Kirby thought. Go on. Tell me! Tell me! I want to hear. God and the almighty electron help me—I want to hear!

  TWO

  The Warriors of Light

  2095

  one

  IF ACOLYTE Third Level Christopher Mondschein had a weakness, it was that he wanted very badly to live forever. The yearning for everlasting life was a common enough human desire, and not really reprehensible. But Acolyte Mondschein carried it a little too far.

  “After all,” one of his superiors found it necessary to remind him, “your function in the Brotherhood is to look after the well-being of others. Not to feather your own nest, Acolyte Mondschein. Do I make that clear?”

  “Perfectly clear, Brother,” said Mondschein tautly. He felt ready to explode with shame, guilt, and anger. “I see my error. I ask forgiveness.”

  “It isn’t a matter of forgiveness, Acolyte Mondschein,” the older man replied. “It’s a matter of understanding. I don’t give a damn for forgiveness. What are your goals, Mondschein? What are you after?”

  The acolyte hesitated a moment before answering—both because it was always good policy to weigh one’s words before saying anything to a higher member of the Brotherhood, and because he knew he was on very thin ice. He tugged nervously at the pleats of his robe and let his eyes wander through the Gothic magnificence of the chapel.

  They stood on the balcony, looking down at the nave. No service was in progress, but a few worshipers occupied the pews anyway, kneeling before the blue radiance of the small cobalt reactor on the front dais. It was the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, third largest in the New York area, and Mondschein had joined it six months before, the day he turned twenty-two. He had hoped, at the time, that it was genuine religious feeling that had impelled him to pledge his fortunes to the Vorsters. Now he was not so sure.

  He grasped the balcony rail and said in a low voice, “I want to help people, Brother. People in general and people in particular. I want to help them find the way. And I want mankind to realize its larger goals. As Vorst says—”

  “Spare me the scriptures, Mondschein.”

  “I’m only trying to show you—”

  “I know. Look, don’t you understand that you’ve got to move upward in orderly stages? You can’t go leapfrogging over your superiors, Mondschein, no matter how impatient you are to get to the top. Come into my office a moment.”

  “Yes, Brother Langholt. Whatever you say.”

  Mondschein followed the older man along the balcony and into the administrative wing of the chapel. The building was fairly new and strikingly handsome—a far cry from the shabby slum-area storefronts of the first Vorster chapels a quarter of a century before. Langholt touched a bony hand to the stud, and the door of his office irised quickly. They stepped through.

  It was a small, austere room, dark and somber, its ceiling groined in good Gothic manner. Bookshelves lined the side walls. The desk was a polished ebony slab on which there glowed a miniature blue light, the Brotherhood’s symbol. Mondschein saw something else on the desk: the letter he had written to District Supervisor Kirby, requesting a transfer to the Brotherhood’s genetic center at Santa Fe.

  Mondschein reddened. He reddened easily; his cheeks were plump and given to blushing. He was a man of slightly more than medium height, a little on the fleshy side, with dark coarse hair and close-set, earnest features. Mondschein felt absurdly immature by comparison with the gaunt, ascetic-looking man more than twice his age who was giving him this dressing-down.

  Langholt said, “As you see, we’ve got your letter to Supervisor Kirby.”

  “Sir, that letter was confidential. I—”

  “There are no confidential letters in this order, Mondschein! It happens that Supervisor Kirby turned this letter over to me himself. As you can see, he’s added a memorandum.”

  Mondschein took the letter. A brief note had been scrawled across its upper left-hand corner: “He’s awfully in a hurry, isn’t
he? Take him down a couple of pegs. R.K.”

  The acolyte put the letter down and waited for the withering blast of scorn. Instead, he found the older man smiling gently.

  “Why did you want to go to Santa Fe, Mondschein?”

  “To take part in the research there. And the—the breeding program.”

  “You’re not an esper.”

  “Perhaps I’ve got latent genes, though. Or at least maybe some manipulation could be managed so my genes would be important to the pool. Sir, you’ve got to understand that I wasn’t being purely selfish about this. I want to contribute to the larger effort.”

  “You can contribute, Mondschein, by doing your maintenance work, by prayer, by seeking converts. If it’s in the cards for you to be called to Santa Fe, you’ll be called in due time. Don’t you think there are others much older than you who’d like to go there? Myself? Brother Ashton? Supervisor Kirby himself? You walk in off the street, so to speak, and after a few months you want a ticket to Utopia. Sorry. You can’t have one that easily, Acolyte Mondschein.”

  “What shall I do now?”

  “Purify yourself. Rid yourself of pride and ambition. Get down and pray. Do your daily work. Don’t look for rapid preferment. It’s the best way not to get what you want.”

  “Perhaps if I applied for missionary service,” Mondschein suggested. “To join the group going to Venus—”

  Langholt sighed. “There you go again! Curb your ambition, Mondschein!”

  “I meant it as a penance.”

  “Of course. You imagine that those missionaries are likely to become martyrs. You also imagine that if by some fluke you go to Venus and don’t get skinned alive, you’ll come back here as a man of great influence in the Brotherhood, who’ll be sent to Santa Fe like a warrior going to Valhalla. Mondschein, Mondschein, you’re so transparent! You’re verging on heresy, Mondschein, when you refuse to accept your lot.”