Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Two

Stirling lounged in the soft warmth of the space cruiser’s control chair. He adjusted the view screen’s filters so that space appeared the color of summer skies on Earth; and far ahead was the slowly expanding disc of Saturn, a spot of creamy light in the gentle blueness. He moved a finger; and, in response to his command, the music that had been whispering around him swelled in dreamy, intangible billows. Silver-sad voices mingled with the drifting chords, creating laceworks of memory, evoking old and almost forgotten thoughts of other times and other places— of the twinkling and tumbling flight of butterflies in orchard shadows, of raindrops patterning the surface of dim lakes. Each impact creating a transient crystal crown.

As Saturn bloomed in the view screen and unfolded its misty rings, Stirling eased the cruiser into a near-perfect circular orbit over the poles. He relaxed again, giving his mind up to the music, and let time itself recede into pictorial abstractions like triangular green flashes strung on a starry helix, every sixtieth one ruby red. This was good. This was living as no one had ever done it before—except that, somewhere far back in his consciousness, was one splinter of worry which seemed to be driving itself deeper and deeper. He ignored it, overlaying the tiny wound with soothing balms of womb-comfort generated by the warmth of the cruiser’s control room, the gyrating star meadows in the view screen, and the pulsing nostalgia of the music.

On Stirling’s eighth orbit of the planet, his eyes detected a flicker of movement ahead and slightly below his own course. Another ship. He had been watching the mote of light for several minutes before he realized the other pilot was matching velocities and closing in on him. Stirling sighed; he had not wanted company. His cruiser lifted its nose, as

he manipulated the sensor-stick, and arced up and away from the plane of the ecliptic. He brought it out of the lazy curve, centered the destination cross-hairs on the distant brilliance of Sol, and increased his speed. Relaxing again as the cruiser slid down the long gravity gradient to the sun, he tried to get back into the music but something had changed. A point of light adjusted its position slightly against the star fields in the aft screen, and he knew the other ship was following him. It must be a joy-rider! Stirling instinctively demanded full speed and, tense with annoyance, watched the disc of Sol flower in his screen while the other ship jockeyed for position behind him. He waited until the last possible second, then threw on maximum lateral acceleration. The flaming disc shifted to one side, almost too late; and for three nightmarish seconds he was skimming over boiling hell-scapes while the garish palm trees of solar flares reared up ahead. When the sun had reluctantly dropped away beneath, Stirling looked around and saw no sign of the other ship. It must have gone in. He began to laugh, and the sound was vastly unreal in his ears.

What am I doing? I’m supposed to be looking for Johnny.

With a surge of revulsion Stirling released the sensor-stick and immediately found himself sprawled in the padded chair of a cosmodrome. He was sweating under ‘the face mask and earphones. He snatched off the mask and released himself from its hallucinogenic breath. The dimness of the circular theater was alive with the moans and sighs of the occupants of the seriate chairs. Overhead, filling the auditorium, a huge model of the Solar System drifted in its anti-grav field, while bead-sized spaceships—one for each patron of the cosmodrome—flitted invisibly among the plowing orbs.

Stirling looked at his watch. He had spent nearly an hour in the dream continuum inhaling drugs, radio-guiding a plastic pellet among the shimmering spheres, seeing through the pin-point lenses of its eyes. Angry at the waste of time, he stood up and moved along the aisle towards an exit; he was uncomfortably aware that he had overestimated himself when he decided to pass a few minutes clinically observing the cosmodrome techniques. He had gotten sucked in and it had been so real that his knees still felt weak. An indication of how much muscle tone he had lost during the trip.

At the exit he paused in front of a bored-looking attendant, who was monitoring the sensor-stick outputs at a low console.

“You still have ten minutes,” the attendant said, looking up.

“I know. I decided to skip it.” Hearing the surprise in the man’s voice, Stirling felt a little better. It must have been unusual for anyone to emerge before the monitoring system threw the switches on him.

“Well, was anything wrong with the trip? Your signals were coming through on both …”

“Nothing wrong,” Stirling interrupted. “I’m looking for somebody. Has Lou Grossmann come on duty yet?”

“Yeah. I think he came in a while ago. He works in the ops level—right at the top of the house.”

“Thanks.” Stirling went up the stairs on rubbery legs and passed through double doors onto a wide gallery which encircled the auditorium. The spheres of the model planetary system slowly gyrated below the level of the handrail; and here and there groups of technicians worked at equipment banks while others peered over the edge through long-range microscopes. At this level the central sun was unbearably brilliant; and Stirling realized much of its light was screened off from the lower reaches of the theater where the patrons gorged on twilight illusions. Several of the technicians glanced curiously at Stirling as he moved along the gallery; but years as a reporter had taught him how to project an air of disinterested confidence when invading private premises, and no one questioned his presence. He found Lou Grossmann leaning on the handrail and sipping coffee.

“Hello, Lou.”

Grossmann turned, pushed his sunglasses onto his freckled forehead, and looked up at Stirling without recognition for a few seconds.

“Victor Stirling,” he finally said. “What are you doing here? I thought you were on the West Coast.”

“No. I’ve been busy lately and haven’t had much chance to visit the family.” Stirling hesitated, wondering if Grossmann knew about Johnny’s disappearance. “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this.” He gestured towards the yawning blackness beyond the rail.

“I guess it must be quite a sight the first time,” Grossmann said tiredly, “but it’s just a job like any other. A joy-rider went right through the sun a few minutes ago. That’s the third this week. Disrupts the surface field for an instant and diffuses the gas; then we have to send in a servo-vac to gather it up—which means closing everything down for an hour in case the machine sucks up a couple of ships and scares hell out of the customers.” Grossmann smoothed his red hair and gazed at Stirling with frank curiosity.

“I’m trying to find Johnny,” Stirling said. “Have you any idea where he is?” “Sorry. I haven’t seen him in three months.”

“Oh! My mother said you and Johnny usually had a few beers on Saturdays, and I thought …” “We used to, but he stopped coming round. Like I said, about three months ago.”

Stirling nodded and turned away. This was the story he had been getting everywhere. Johnny Considine had never been a steady worker; but since his teens he had been as regular as clockwork in visiting his chosen playgrounds, which were the bars, multi-houses and thrill palaces of First Avenue. Until three months ago, that is, when a change seemed to have come over his life. Was it something to do with his disappearance? Stirling was walking back along the gallery when Grossman called his name and he turned.

“Johnny’s vanished, hasn’t he?” The little redhead sounded almost sympathetic.

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Mrs. Considine worried?”

“What do you think?”

Grossmann looked vaguely guilty. “He’s been seen going into that Receders meeting place near the longshoremen’s office.”

“The Receders!” Stirling’s voice was incredulous. “But Johnny’s never been to church in his life.”

Lou Grossmann shrugged and looked back into the pit, where shadow worlds rolled their slow courses and the minds of men flitted among them like gnats on the surface of a pond. It was obvious he was sorry he had said as much as he had, and suddenly Stirling realized he had just been given his first real lead in two weeks of searching. He muttered his thanks, went down to the street, and was slightly shocked to discover there was still daylight outside. The visit to the cosmodrome had taken only an hour, but it seemed much longer.

At the nearest corner he waited a few minutes for a taxi, but saw only two, each of which had a white-uniformed Food Tech hi the rear seat. Lighting a cigarette, he began walking east towards the harbor area, trying to convince himself he was glad of the exercise. The mid-evening traffic was relatively light, and the lowering sun was bathing the buildings hi a warm reddish glow which Stirling found unexpectedly pleasant even though he knew what was causing it. Since the death of the soil, dust storms constantly strode across the country west of the static screens which offered partial protection to the coastal conurbation. The splendid Wagnerian sunsets which resulted were a poor consolation for living on plankton steaks, sea porridge, and the other forms of nutriment wrested from the ocean by the Food Technology Authority. There was always the fresh vegetable food sent down from Heaven, but it had traditionally been rare; and it seemed to Stirling the supplies had been growing even more meager for several years. As he walked, he searched the segments of eastern sky which could be seen beyond the banked apartment buildings. And finally he found the rose-pale silhouette of Heaven, riding in its serene security high above the Atlantic. He thought he detected a glimmer of movement at one point on its upper edge, but at that distance it was impossible to be certain.

Could Johnny, somehow, have made his way up there?

If a road existed Johnny might have found it. He had always had a reckless, burning discontent with life in the Compression which could have driven him anywhere. Stirling remembered how, as a boy, Johnny Considine had been unable to accept the fact that, although mankind was all dressed up with spaceships, there was nowhere to go. In the context of billions of hungry humans to be transported, established, and fed, the other planets of the Solar System were of about as much value as their gaseous, counterparts in the cosmodromes. Later, Johnny had tried all the various arms of the Space Service, but the academic standards had shut him out. By that time Stirling had moved away, seeking his own escape in the world of newspapers; and he had done nothing to prevent his brother’s life closing up on itself. Was that why he now had this need to trace Johnny? Was he, belatedly, trying to make amends for his own failings?

Depressed with the rare venture into self-analysis, Stirling stopped pushing his way through the crowds on the sidewalks and began looking for cabs again. He got one on the third attempt and directed the driver to take him to the docks. Getting out near the headquarters of the longshoremen’s union, he had to scan the block closely to find the meeting room used by the Receders. It was on the second floor of a shabby sandstone building, above a rundown office-supply store. A photo-printed notice at the foot of the narrow stairs said:

NEWBURYPORT RECEDERS CHAPEL

Nightly Readings—All Invited.

Stirling went up the stairs and into a long room filled with people listening to a speaker on a low platform at the far end. An undulating slab of cigarette smoke hung in the choking air, just below the main ties of the exposed roof trusses. Finding a seat near the back, Stirling covertly examined the people nearest to him.

All he knew about the Receders was what he had gained from stray references in the papers: that they were a religious, semi-left wing group who seemed to be against just about every feature of present-day life. They had a loose organization under a shadowy figure called Mason Third, who—according to some rumors Stirling had heard—was supposed to have political aspirations, although his platform had never been defined. Stirling had automatically filed the odd facts away in his reporter’s memory, and instinctively had categorized Third as one of the army of religious crackpots who helped fill the news columns during the silly season.

Consequently, he expected to find himself sitting among an assortment of human wrecks, misfits, and mooncalves who made up the bulk of the attendance at dockside missions. Instead, those nearest him seemed to be solid, normal citizens—with a sprinkling of sophomores and housewives thrown in. Several were making notes of the speaker’s remarks.

Stirling turned his attention to the platform. The speaker, a conservatively dressed man with white hair and a let-me-be-your-father face, was arguing against enforced birth control by giving a detailed account of the failure of the Chinese Experiment. Stirling, who had thought the experiment was a success, listened closely as the speaker described the difficulties the Kuomintang had run into in their massive program of using estrogens to make the menstrual cycles of all Chinese women coincide, then forbidding sexual intercourse on a national scale on the maximum fertility days. The experiment, the speaker concluded, was an awesome attempt to bring not only thought but emotion into the sphere of state control, and as such was bound to be rejected.

When the white-haired man went off and was followed by another who discussed the deficiency diseases likely to be brought about by the processed foods issued by the Food Technology Authority, Stirling began to realize he had completely misjudged the Receders. He had been mistaken in thinking them religion-orientated—but what had caused the mistake? Was it deliberately fostered by the organization itself? They called their meeting places “chapels”, a word which usually had religious connotations; and the name, “Receders,” was the essence of harmless negation. It was suggestive of noise abaters, flat-Earthers, and complete abstention societies. Had an expert functional semanticist chosen those words?

Stirling decided to check the organization’s file in the Record’s office at the first opportunity and see what he turned up. Probably nothing, but any information at all might be useful at this stage—assuming he was not following a false trail. He glanced around the seedy decor of the room and noted the darkened paintwork, the cluttered notice-boards, the worn floor tiles. What was he supposed to do now? Start buttonholing people and asking if they knew where he could find his brother?

Suddenly aware that it might have been better to think about hiring a private investigator, Stirling began methodically scanning as many faces as he could with the faint hope of recognizing someone and perhaps taking things one step further. He barely noticed the appearance of a third speaker, introduced as Duke Bennett, a gray-uniformed man of

about fifty, with thick sloping shoulders and slightly bowed legs that suggested a kind of inhuman strength. Stirling was feeling for his cigarettes, and at the same time wishing for a cold beer, when he realized the new speaker was talking about Heaven.

“… The whole concept of the International Land Extensions was a product of the hysteria which followed in the wake of the events of 1992. But we must not be too contemptuous. The incongruity of the idea is a measure, not of the impracticability of the people who built the lies, but of their desperation.

“After all, any legislative body would have to be in a pretty bad way before it would approve the expenditure required to build huge rafts, boost them three miles into the sky, and import tons of soil to cover them—simply to produce a few mustard greens!”

The speaker paused to allow several of the audience to titter appreciatively, then continued in his overloud voice, which hurled the words out like metal ingots.

“We can forgive the builders of the lies, but we cannot —on any grounds—justify them. The maintenance of the anti-gravity units alone uses up enough hard cash each year to finance the reclamation of a hundred square miles of prairie. In terms of this nation’s long range program, this means …”

Stirling, recognizing the familiar argumentative patterns, let his attention wander. He could appreciate intellectually that the lies were not a sound investment, but his emotional response was a different story altogether. It had been a wonderful thing for two fatherless boys, born into a world where magic was less than a memory, to be able to look into the sky and actually see Heaven; to share the same cramped bed in a boxlike room; and to feel at peace because up there, high in the east where they could look at it, was that ethereal yet tangible Avalon to which they would both find their way and. someday, join hands with the half-forgotten giants who had been their fathers. And in the long nights they had sometimes seen minute, transient flickers of light which might have been signals.

Stirling, the adult, could look bad, with some amusement at Stirling the child; yet Heaven had never quite lost its aura, even though the mysteries of its name, nature, and purpose were long vanished from his mind. Its official designation was International Land Extension, U.S. 23; but in the fam-apts and dormitories in its shadow it was known, simply, as Heaven. The name was left over from the early days of the Compression when that He’s open green spaces were tantalizing reminders of the past. Nobody lived on Heaven, or on any of the other lies, largely because the government psychologists had made it clear they could make life in the Compression seem acceptable only if everybody was in it together. So the thin clean air of Heaven, high above the winds that carried the herbicidal dusts, was reserved for the agricultural robots which tilled its soil.

The flickers of light, which could sometimes be seen on its upper edge, were reflections from polished machine casings or flashes from the welding arcs of the maintenance robots. Unless, of course, one happened to be a small boy with somber, searching eyes. In which case they were signals.

A ragged spatter of applause announced to Stirling that the speaker had finished. The audience seemed to know, without being told, that there was nobody to follow. Many of them stood up and immediately began to file out, while others near the front determinedly continued to clap. The uniformed man who had given the talk bowed slightly, looked embarrassed, and gave Stirling the impression he was not a professional speaker. He seemed to have been brought in specially to make a point, like a police sergeant roped into addressing a sewing circle on road safety.

Frowning a little, Stirling tried to remember where he had seen a uniform like that before. He got to his feet, wondered how much he had achieved by coming to the chapel, and was beginning to drift out uncertainly with the crowd, when the speaker turned to leave the platform. A triangular, yellow flash at his shoulder caught the smoky light—and suddenly Stirling was able to place the severe gray uniform. The speaker worked in the freight transfer organization responsible for operating Jacob’s Ladder—the “elevator” connecting Heaven and Earth.

Stirling sat down again. Making a token effort to look small and inconspicuous, he gnawed patiently on a thumbnail while the last of the audience shuffled out past him, In theory, nothing except fertilizer and maintenance spares ever went up in the elevator. But neither could a man vanish as Johnny Considine had done—in theory.

When he was sure nobody was looking at him, Stirling took out a little square case similar to those in which jewelers supply diamond rings. Inside was a silver lapel badge graved with a simple helical design. He put the badge in his buttonhole and snap-fastened onto the back of it a hair-fine wire, which ran down through the lining of his suit to a tiny machine in his left-hand pocket. The weeks of searching had exhausted his limited capability for gentle, patient probing. He had decided on a frontal attack.