To Open the Sky

one

If Acolyte Third Level Christopher Mondschein had a weak-ness, 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.

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.”

“Sir, I’ve never had any traffic with the heretics. I—”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Langholt said heavily. “I’m simply warning you that you’re heading in an unhealthy direction. I fear for you. Look—” He thrust the incriminating letter to Kirby into a disposal unit, where it flamed and was gone instantly. “I’ll forget that this whole episode ever happened. But don’t you forget it. Walk more humbly, Mondschein. Walk more humbly, I say. Now go and pray. Dismissed.”

“Thank you, Brother,” Mondschein muttered.

His knees felt a little shaky as he made his way from the room and took the spiral slideshaft downward into the chapel proper. All things considered, he knew he had got off lightly. There could have been a public reprimand. There could have been a transfer to some not very desirable place, like Patagonia or the Aleutians. They might even have separated him from the Brotherhood entirely.

It had been a massive mistake to go over Langholt’s head, Mondschein agreed. But how could a man help it? To die a little every day, while in Santa Fe they were choosing the ones who would live forever—it was intolerable to be on the outside. Mondschein’s spirit sank at the awareness that now he had almost certainly cut himself off from Santa Fe for good.

He slipped into a rear pew and stared solemnly toward the cobalt-60 cube on the altar.

Let the Blue Fire engulf me, he begged. Let me rise purified and cleansed.

Sometimes, kneeling before the altar, Mondschein had felt the ghostly flicker of a spiritual experience. That was the most he ever felt, for, though he was an acolyte of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and was a second-generation member of the cult, at that, Mondschein was not a religious man. Let others have ecstasies before the altar, he thought. Mondschein knew the cult for what it was: a front operation masking an elaborate program of genetic research. Or so it seemed to him, though there were times when he had his doubts which was the front and which the underlying reality. So many others appeared to derive spiritual benefits from the Brotherhood—while he had no proof that the laboratories at Santa Fe were accomplishing anything at all.

He closed his eyes. His head sank forward on his breast. He visualized electrons spinning in their orbits. He silently repeated the Electromagnetic Litany, calling off the stations of the spectrum.

He thought of Christopher Mondschein living through the ages. A stab of yearning sliced into him while he was still telling off the middling frequencies. Long before he got to the softer X rays, he was in a sweat of frustration, sick with the fear of dying. Sixty, seventy more years and his number was up, while at Santa Fe—Help me. Help me. Help me. Somebody help me. I don’t want to die!

Mondschein looked to the altar. The Blue Fire flickered as though to mock him by going out altogether. Oppressed by the Gothic gloom, Mondschein sprang to his feet and rushed out into the open air.

two

He was a conspicuous figure in his indigo robe and monkish hood. People stared at him as though he had some supernatural power. They did not look closely enough to see that he was only an acolyte, and, though many of them were Vorsters themselves, they never managed to understand that the Brotherhood had no truck with the supernatural. Mondschein did not have a high regard for the intelligence of laymen.

He stepped aboard the slidewalk. The city loomed around him, towers of travertine that took on a greasy cast in the dying reddish glow of a March afternoon. New York City had spread up the Hudson like a plague, and skyscrapers were marching across the Adirondacks; Nyack, here, had long since been engulfed by the metropolis. The air was cool. There was a smoky tang in it; probably a fire raging in a forest preserve, thought Mondschein darkly. He saw death on all sides.

His modest apartment was five blocks from the chapel. He lived alone. Acolytes needed a waiver to marry and were forbidden to have transient liaisons. Celibacy did not weigh heavily on Mondschein yet, though he had hoped to shed it when he was transferred to Santa Fe. There was talk of lovely, willing young female acolytes at Santa Fe. Surely not all the breeding experiments were done through artificial insemination, Mondschein hoped.

No matter now. He could forget Santa Fe. His impulsive letter to Supervisor Kirby had smashed everything.

Now he was trapped forever on the lower rungs of the Vorster ladder. In due course they would take him into the Brotherhood, and he would wear a slightly different robe and grow a beard, perhaps, and preside over services, and minister to the needs of his congregation.

Fine. The Brotherhood was the fastest-growing religious movement on Earth, and surely it was a noble work to serve in the cause. But a man without a religious vocation would not be happy presiding over a chapel, and Mondschein had no calling at all. He had sought to fulfill his own ends by enrolling as an acolyte, and now he saw the error of that ambition.

He was caught. Just another Vorster Brother now. There were thousands of chapels all over the world. Membership in the Brotherhood was something like five hundred million today. Not bad in a single generation. The older religions were suffering. The Vorsters had something to offer that the others did not; the comforts of science, the assurance that beyond the spiritual ministry there was another that served the Oneness by probing into the deepest mysteries. A dollar contributed to your local Vorster chapel might help pay for the development of a method to assure immortality, personal immortality. That was the pitch, and it worked well. Oh,, there were imitators, lesser cults, some of them rather successful in their small way. There was even a Vorster heresy now, the Harmonists, the peddlers of the Transcendent Harmony, an offshoot of the parent cult Mondschein had chosen the Vorsters, and he had a lingering loyalty to them, for he had been raised as a worshiper of the Blue Fire. But—

“Sorry. Million pardons.”

Someone jostled him on the slidewalk. Mondschein felt a hand slap against his back, dealing him a hard jolt that almost knocked him down. Staggering a bit, he recovered and saw a broad-shoul-dered man in a simple blue business tunic moving swiftly away. Clumsy idiot, Mondschein thought. There’s room for everyone on the walk. What’s his hellish hurry?

Mondschein adjusted his robes and his dignity. A soft voice said, “Don’t go into your apartment, Mondschein.”

Just keep moving. There’s a quickboat waiting for you at the Tarrytown station.”

No one was near him. “Who said that?” he demanded tensely.

“Please relax and cooperate. You aren’t going to be harmed. This is for your benefit, Mondschein.”

He looked around. The nearest person was an elderly woman, fifty feet behind him on the slidewalk, who quickly threw him a simpering smile as though asking for a blessing. Who had spoken? For one wild moment Mondschein thought that he had turned into a telepath, some latent power breaking through in a delayed maturity. But no. It had been a voice, not a thought-mes-sage. Mondschein understood. The stumbling man must have planted a two-way Ear on him with that slap on the back. A tiny metallic transponding plaque, perhaps half a dozen molecules thick, some miracle of improbable subminiaturization—Mondschein did not bother to search for it.

He said, “Who are you?”

“Never mind that. Just go to the station and you’ll be met.”

“I’m in my robes.”

“We’ll handle that, too,” came the calm response.

Mondschein nibbled his lip. He was not supposed to leave the immediate vicinity of his chapel without permission from a superior, but there was no time for that now, and in any event he had no intention of bucking the bureaucracy so soon after his rebuke. He would take his chances.

The slidewalk sped him ahead.

Soon the Tarrytown station drew near. Mondschein’s stomach roiled with tension. He could smell the acrid fumes of quickboat fuel. The chill wind cut through his robes, so that his shivering was not entirely from uneasiness. He stepped from the slidewalk and entered the station, a gleaming yellowish-green dome with lambent plastic walls. It was not particularly crowded. The commuters from downtown had not yet begun to arrive, and the outward-bound rush would come later in the day, at the dinner hour.

Figures approached him. The voice coming from the device on his back said, “Don’t stare at them, but just follow behind them casually.”

Mondschein obeyed. There were three of them, two men and a slim, angular-faced woman. They led him on a sauntering stroll past the chattering newsfax booth, past the bootblack stands, past the row of storage lockers. One of the men, short and square-headed, with thick, stubby yellow hair, slapped his palm against a locker to open it. He drew out a bulky package and tucked it under one arm. As he cut diagonally across the station toward the men’s washroom, the voice said to Mondschein, “Wait thirty seconds and follow him.”

The acolyte pretended to study the newsfax ticker. He did not feel enthusiastic about his present predicament, but he sensed that it would be useless and possibly harmful to resist. When the thirty seconds were up. he moved toward the washroom. The scanner decided that he was suitably male, and the ADMIT sign flashed. Mondschein entered.

“Third booth,” the voice murmured.

The blond man was not in sight. Mondschein entered the booth and found the package from the locker propped against the seat. On an order, he picked it up and opened the clasps. The wrapper fell away. Mondschein found himself holding the green robe of a Harmonist Brother.

The heretics? What in the world—“Put it on, Mondschein.”

“I can’t. If I’m seen in it—”

“You won’t be. Put it on. We’ll guard your own robe until you get back.”

He felt like a puppet. He shrugged out of his robe, put it on a hook, and donned the unfamiliar uniform, it fitted well. There was something clipped to the inner surface: a thermoplastic mask, Mondschein realized. He was grateful for that. Unfolding it, he pressed it to his face and held it there until it took hold. The mask would disguise his features just enough so that he need not fear recognition.

Carefully Mondschein put his own robe within the wrapper and sealed it.

“Leave it on the seat,” he was told.

“I don’t dare. If it’s lost, how will I ever explain?”

“It will not be lost, Mondschein. Hurry now. The quickboat’s about to leave.”

Unhappily, Mondschein stepped from the booth. He viewed himself in the mirror. His face, normally plump, now looked gross: bulging cheeks, stubbly jowls, moist and thickened lips. Unnatural dark circles rimmed his eyes as though he had caroused for a week. The green robe was strange, too. Wearing the ouffit of heresy made him feel closer to his own organization than ever before.

The slim woman came forward as he emerged into the waiting room. Her cheekbones were like hatchet blades, and her eyelids had been surgically replaced by shutters of fine platinum foil. It was an outmoded fashion of the previous generation; Mondschein could remember his mother coming from the cosmetic surgeon’s office with her face transformed into a grotesque mask. No one did that any more. This woman had to be at least forty, Mondschein thought, though she looked much younger.

“Eternal harmony, Brother,” she said huskily.

Mondschein fumbled for the proper Harmonist response. Improvising, he said, “May the Oneness smile upon you.”

“I’m grateful for your blessing. Your ticket’s in order, Brother. Will you come with me?”

She was his guide, he realized. He had shed the Ear with his own robe. Queasily, he hoped he would get to see that garment again before long. He followed the slim woman to the loading platform. They might be taking him anywhere—Chicago, Honolulu, Montreal—

The quickboat sparkled in the floodlit station, graceful, elegant, its skin a burnished bluish-green. As they filed aboard, Mondschein asked the woman, “Where are we going?”

“Rome,” she said.

three

Mondschein’s eyes were wide as the monuments of antiquity flashed by. The Forum, the Colosseum, the Theater of Marcellus, the gaudy Victor Emmanuel Monument, the Mussolini Column—their route took them through the heart of the ancient city. He saw also the blue glow of a Vorster chapel as he whizzed down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and that struck him as harshly incongruous here in this city of an older religion. The Brotherhood had a solid foothold here, though. When Gregory XVIII appeared in the window at his Vatican palace, he could still draw a crowd of hundreds of thousands of cheering Romans, but many of those same Romans would melt from the square after viewing the Pope and head for the nearest chapel of the Brotherhood.

Evidently the Harmonists were making headway here, too, Mondschein thought. But he kept his peace as the car sped north-ward out of the city.

“This is the Via Flaminia,” his guide announced. “The old route was followed when the electronic roadbed was installed. They have a deep sense of tradition here.”

“I’m sure they do,” said Mondschein wearily. It Was mid-evening by his time, and he had had nothing to eat but a snack aboard the quickboat. The ninety-minute journey had dumped him in Rome in the hours before dawn. A wintry mist hung over the city; spring was late. Mondschein’s face itched fiercely beneath his mask. Fear chilled his fingers.

They halted in front of a drab brick building some where a few dozen miles north of Rome. Mondschein shivered as he hurried within. The woman with platinum eyelids led him up the stairs and into a warm, brightly lit room occupied by three men in green Harmonist robes. That confirmed it, Mondschein thought: I’m in a den of heretics.

They did not offer their names. One was short and squat, with a sallow face and bulbous nose. One was tall and spectrally thin, arms and legs like spider’s limbs. The third was unremarkable, with pale skin and narrow, bland eyes. The squat one was the oldest and seemed to be in charge.

Without preamble he said, “So they turned you down, did they?”

“How—”

“Never mind how. We’ve been watching you, Mondschein. We hoped you’d make it. We want a man in Santa Fe just as much as you want to be there.”

“Are you Harmonists?”

“Yes. What about some wine, Mondschein?”

The acolyte shrugged. The tall heretic gestured, and the slim woman, who had not left the room, came forward with a flask of golden wine. Mondschein accepted a glass, thinking dourly that it was almost certainly drugged. The wine was chilled and faintly sweet, like a middling-dry Graves. The others took wine with him.

“What do you want from me?” Mondschein asked.

“Your help,” said the squat one. “There’s a war going on, and we want you to join our side.”

“I don’t know of any wars.”

“A war between darkness and light,” said the tall heretic in a mild voice. “We are the warriors of light. Don’t think we’re fanatics, Mondschein. Actually, we’re quite reasonable men.”

“Perhaps you know,” said the third of the Harmonists, “that our creed is derived from yours. We respect the teachings of Vorst, and we follow most of his ways. In fact, we regard ourselves as closer to the original teachings than the present hierarchy of the Brotherhood. We’re a purifying body. Every religion needs its reformers.”

Mondschein sipped his wine. He allowed his eyes to twinkle maliciously as he remarked, “Usually it takes a thousand years for the reformers to put in their appearance. This is only 2095. The Brotherhood’s hardly thirty years old.”

The squat heretic nodded. “The pace of our times Is a fast one. It took the Christians three hundred years to get political control of Rome—from the time of Augustus to that of Constantine. The Vorsters didn’t need that long. You know the story: there are Brotherhood men in every legislative body in the world. In some countries they’ve organized their own political parties. I don’t need to tell you about the financial growth of the organization, either.”

“And you purifiers urge a return to the old, simple ways of thirty years ago?” Mondschein asked. “The ramshackle buildings, the persecutions, and all the rest? Is that it?”

“Not really. We appreciate the uses of power. We simply feel that the movement’s become sidetracked in irrelevancies. Power for its own sake has become more important than power for the sake of larger goals.”

The tall one said, “The Vorster high command quibbles about political appointments and agitates for changes in the income tax structure. It’s wasting time and energy fooling around with domestic affairs. Meanwhile the movement’s drawn a total blank on Mars and Venus—not one chapel among the colonists, not even a start there, total rejection. And where are the great results of the esper breeding program? Where are the dramatic new leaps?”

“Ifs only the second generation,” Mondschein said. “You have to be patient” He smiled at that—counseling patience to others—and added, “I think the Brotherhood is heading in the right direction.”

“We don’t, obviously,” said the pale one. “When we failed to reform from within, we had to leave and begin our own campaign, parallel to the original one. The long-range goals are the same. Personal immortality through bodily regeneration. And fail development of extrasensory powers, loading to new methods of communication and transportation. That’s what we want—not the right to decide local tax issues.”

Mondschein said, “First you get control of the governments.

Then you concentrate on the long-range goals.”

“Not necessary,” snapped the squat Harmonist. “Direct action is what we’re interested in. We’re confident of success, too. One way or another, we’ll achieve our purposes.”

The slim woman gave Mondschein more wine. He tried to shake her away, but she insisted on filling his glass, and he drank. Then he said, “I presume you didn’t waft me off to Rome just to tell me your opinion of the Brotherhood. What do you need me for?”

“Suppose we were to get you transferred to Santa Fe,” the squat one said.

Mondschein sat bolt upright. His hand tightened on the wineglass, nearly breaking it.

“How could you do that?”

“Suppose we could. Would you be willing to obtain certain information from the laboratories there and transmit it to us?”

“Spy for you?”

“You could call it that.”

“It sounds ugly,” Mondschein said.

“You’d have a reward for it.”

“It better be a good one.”

The heretic leaned forward and said quietly, “Well offer you a tenth-level post in our organization. You’d have to wait fifteen years to get that high in the Brotherhood. We’re a much smaller operation; you can rise in our hierarchy much faster than where you are. An ambitious man like you could be very close to the top before he was fifty.”

“But what good is it?” Mondschein asked. “To get close to the top in the second-best hierarchy?”

“Ah, but we won’t be second-best! Not with the information you’ll provide for us. That will allow us to grow. Millions of people will desert the Brotherhood for us when they see what we have to offer—all that they have, plus our own values. We’ll expand rapidly. And you’ll have a position of high rank, because you threw your lot in with us at the beginning.”

Mondschein saw the logic of that. The Brotherhood was swollen already, wealthy, powerful, top-heavy with entrenched bureaucrats. There was no room for advancement there. But if he were to transfer his allegiance to a small but dynamic group with ambitions that rivaled his own—

“It won’t work,” he said sadly.

“Why?”

“Assuming you can wangle me into Santa Fe, I’ll be screened by espers long before I get there. They’ll know I’m coming as a spy, and they’ll screen me out. My memories of this conversation will give me away.”

The squat man smiled broadly. “Why do you think you’ll remember this conversation? We have our espers, too, Acolyte Mondschein!”

four

The room in which Christopher Mondschein found himself was eerily empty. It was a perfect square, probably built within a tolerance of hundredths of a millimeter, and there was nothing at all in it but Mondschein himself. No furniture, no windows, not so much as a cobweb. Shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, he stared up at the high ceiling, searching without success for the source of the steady, even illumination. He did not even know what city he was in. They had taken him out of Rome just as the sun was rising, and he might be in Jakarta now, or Benares, or perhaps Akron.

He bad profound misgivings about all this. The Harmonists had assured him that there would be no risks, but Mondschein was not so sure. The Brotherhood had not attained its eminence without developing ways of protecting itself. For all the assurances to the contrary, he might well be detected long before he got into those secret laboratories at Santa Fe, and it would not go happily for him afterward.

The Brotherhood had its way of punishing those who betrayed it. Behind the benevolence was a certain streak of necessary cruelty. Mondschein had heard the stories: the one about the regional supervisor in the Philippines who had let himself be beguiled into providing minutes of the high councils to certain anti-Vorsterite police officials, for example.

Perhaps it was apocryphal. Mondschein had heard that the man had been taken to Santa Fe to undergo the loss of his pain receptors. A pleasant fate, never to feel pain again? Hardly. Pain was the measure of safety. Without pain, how did one know whether something was too hot or too cold to touch? A thousand little injuries resulted: burns, cuts, abrasions. The body eroded away. A finger here, a nose there, an eyeball, a swatch of skin—why, someone could devour his own tongue and not realize it.

Mondschein shuddered. The seamless wall in front of him abruptly telescoped and a man entered the room. The wall closed behind him.

“Are you the esper?” Mondschein blurted nervously.

The man nodded. He was without unusual features. His face had a vaguely Eurasian cast, Mondschein imagined. His lips were thin, his hair glossily dark, his complexion almost olive., There was something of a fragile look to him.

“Lie down on the floor,” the esper said in a soft, tarry voice. “Please relax. You are afraid of me, and you should not be afraid.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You’re going to meddle with my mind!”

“Please. Relax.”

Mondschein gave it a try. He settled on the yielding, rubbery floor and put his hands by his sides. The esper sank into the lotus position in one corner of the room, not looking at Mondschein. The acolyte waited uncertainly.

He had seen a few espers before. There were a goad many of them now; after years of doubt and confusion, their traits had been isolated and recognized more than a century ago, and a fair amount of deliberate esper-to-esper mating had increased their number. The talents were still unpredictable, though. Most of the espers had little control over their abilities. They were unstable individuals, besides, generally high-strung, often lapsing into psychosis under stress. Mondschein did not like the idea of being locked in a windowless room with a psychotic esper.

And what if the esper had a malicious streak? What if, instead of simply inducing selective amnesia in Mondschein, he decided to make wholesale alterations in his memory patterns? It might happen that—“You can get up now,” the esper said brusquely. “It’s done.”

“What’s done?” Mondschein asked.

The esper laughed triumphantly. “You don’t need to know, fool. It’s done, that’s all.”

The wall opened a second time. The esper left. Mondschein stood up, feeling strangely empty, wondering somberly where he was and what was happening to him. He had been going home on the slidewalk, and a man had jostled him, and then—

A slim woman with improbable cheekbones and eyelids of glittering platinum foil said, “Come this way, please.”

“Why should I?”

‘Trust me. Come this way.”

Mondschein sighed and let her lead him down a narrow corridor into another room, brightly painted and lit. A coffin-sized metal tank stood in one corner of the room. Mondschein recognized it, of course. It was a sensory deprivation chamber, a Nothing Chamber, in which one floated in a warm nutrient bath, sight and hearing cut off, gravity’s pull negated. The Nothing Chamber was an instrument for total relaxation. It could also have more sinister uses: a man who spent too much time in a Nothing Chamber became pliant, easily indoctrinated.

“Strip and get in,” the woman said.

“And if I don’t?”

“You will.”

“How long a setting?”

“Two and a half hours.”

“Too long,” Mondschein said. “Sorry. I don’t feel that tense. will you show me the way out of here?”

The woman beckoned. A robot rolled into the room, blunt-nosed, painted an ugly dull black. Mondachein had never wrestled with a robot, and he did not intend to try it now. The woman indicated the Nothing Chamber once more.

This is some sort of dream, Mondschein told himself. A very bad dream.

He began to strip. The Nothing Chamber hummed its readiness. Mondschein stepped into it and allowed it to engulf him. He could not see. He could not hear. A tube fed him air. Mondschein slipped into total passivity, into a fetal comfort. The bundle of ambitions, confficts, dreams, guilts, lusts, and ideas that constituted the mind of Christopher Mondschein was temporarily dissolved.

In time, he woke. They took him from the Chamber—he was wobbly on his legs, and they had to steady him—and gave him his clothing. His robe, he noticed, was the wrong color: green, the heretic color. How had that happened? Was he being forcibly impressed into the Harmonist movement? He knew better than to ask questions. They were putting a thermoplastic mask on his face now. I’m to travel incognito, it seems.

In a short while Mondschein was at a quickboat station. He was appalled to see Arabic lettering on the signs. Cairo, he wondered? Algiers? Beirut? Mecca?

They had reserved a private compartment for him. The woman with the altered eyelids sat with him during the swift flight. Several times Mondschein attempted to ask questions, but she gave him no reply other than a shrug.

The quickboat landed at the Tarrytown station. Familjar territory at last. A timesign told Mondschein that this was Wednesday, March 13, 2095, 0705 hours Eastern Standard Time. It had been late Tuesday afternoon, he remembered distinctly, when he crept home in disgrace from the chapel after getting his come-uppance over the matter of a transfer to Santa Fe. Say, 1630 hours. Somewhere he had lost all of Tuesday night and a chunk of Wednesday morning, about fifteen hours in all.

As they entered the main waiting room, the slim woman at his side whispered, “Go into the washroom. Third booth. Change your clothes.”

Greatly troubled, Mondschein obeyed. There was a package resting on the seat. He opened it and found that it contained his indigo acolyte’s robe. Hurriedly he peeled off the green robe and donned his own. Remembering the face mask, he stripped that off, too, and flushed it away. He packed up the green robe and, not knowing what else to do with it, left it in the booth.

As he came out, a dark-haired man of middle years approached him, holding out his hand.

“Acolyte Mondschein?”

“Yes?” Mondschein said, not recognizing him, but taking the hand anyway.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I—yes,” Mondschein said. “Very well.” There was an exchange of glances, and suddenly Mondschein did not remember why he had gone into the washroom, nor what he had done in there, nor that he had worn a green robe and a thermoplastic mask on his flight from a country where Arabic was the main language, nor that he had been in any other country at all, nor, for that matter, that he had stepped bewildered from a Nothing Chamber not too many hours ago.

He now believed that he had spent a comfortable night at home, in his own modest dwelling. He was not sure what he was doing at the Tarrytown quickboat station at this hour of the morning, but that was only a minor mystery and not worth detailed exploration.

Finding himself unusually hungry, Mondschein bought a hearty breakfast at the food console on the lower level of the station. He bolted it briskly. By eight, he was at the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, ready to aid in the morning service.

Brother Langholt greeted him warmly. “Did yesterday’s little talk upset you too much, Mondschein?”

“I’m settling down now.”

“Good, good. You mustn’t let your ambitions engulf you, Mondschein. Everything comes in due time. Will you check the gamma level on the reactor, please?”

“Certainly, Brother.”

Mondschein stepped toward the altar. The Blue Fire seemed like a beacon of security in an uncertain world. The acolyte removed the gamma detector from its case and set about his morning tasks.

five

The message summoning him to Santa Fe arrived three weeks later. It landed on the Nyack chapel like a thunderbolt, striking down through layer after layer of authority before it finally reached the lowly acolyte.

One of Mondschein’s fellow acolytes brought him the news, in an indirect way. “You’re wanted in Brother Langholt’s office, Chris. Supervisor Kirby’s there.”

Mondschein felt alarm. “What is it? I haven’t done anything wrong—not that I know of, anyway.”

“I don’t think you’re in trouble. It’s something big, Chris. They’re all shaken up. It’s some kind of order out of Santa Fe.” Mondschein received a curious stare. “What I think they said was that you’re being shipped out there on a transfer.”

“Very funny,” Mondschein said.

He hurried to Langholt’s office. Supervisor Kirby stood against the bookshelf on the left He was a man enough like Langholt to be his brother. Both were tall, lean men in early middle age, with an ascetic look about them.

Mondschein had never seen the Supervisor at such close range before. The story was that Kirby had been a U.N. man, pretty high in the international bureaucracy, until his conversion fifteen or twenty years ago. Now he was a key man in the hierarchy, possibly one of the dozen most important in the entire organization. His hair was clipped short, and his eyes were an odd shade of green. Mondschein had difficulty meeting those eyes. Facing Kirby in the flesh, he wondered how he had ever found the nerve to write that letter to him, requesting a transfer to the Santa Fe labs.

Kirby smiled faintly. “Mondschein?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call me Brother, Mondschein. Brother Langholt here has said some good things about you.”

He has? Mondschein thought in surprise.

Langholt said, “I’ve told the Supervisor that you’re ambitious, eager, and enthusiastic. I’ve also pointed out that you’ve got those qualities to an excessive degree, in some ways. Perhaps you’ll learn some moderation at Santa Fe.”

Stunned, Mondschein said, “Brother Langholt, I thought my application for a transfer had been turned down.”

Kirby nodded. “It’s been opened again. We need some control subjects, you see. Non-espers. A few dozen acolytes have been requisitioned, and the computer tossed your name up. You fit the needs. I take it you still want to go to Santa Fe?”

“Of course, sir—Brother Kirby.”

“Good. You’ll have a week to wrap up your affairs here.” The green eyes were suddenly piercing. “I hope you’ll prove useful out there, Brother Mondschein.”

Mondschein could not make up his mind whether he was being sent to Santa Fe as a belated yielding to his request or to get rid of him at Nyack. It seemed incomprehensible to him tat Langholt would approve the transfer after having rejected it so scathingly a few weeks before. But the Vorster high ones moved in mysterious ways, Mondschein decided. He accepted the puzzling decision in good grace, asking no questions. When his week was up, he knelt in the Nyack chapel one last time, said good-bye to Brother Langholt, and went to the quickboat station for the noon flight westward.

He was in Santa Fe by mid-morning local time. The station there, he noticed, was thronged with blue-robed ones, more than he had ever seen in a public place at any one time. Mondschein waited at the station, uneasily eying the immensity of the New Mexican landscape. The sky was a strangely bright shade of blue, and visibility seemed unlimited. Miles away Mondschein saw bare sandstone mountains rising. A tawny desert dotted with grayish-green sagebrush surrounded the station. Mondschein had never seen so much open space before.

“Brother Mondschein?” a pudgy acolyte asked.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Brother Capodimonte. I’m your escort. Got your luggage? Good. Let’s go, then.”

A teardrop was parked in back. Capodimonte took Mondschein’s lone suitcase and racked it. He was about forty, Mondschein guessed. A little old to be an acolyte. A roll of fat bulged over his collar at the back of his neck.

They entered the teardrop. Capodimonte activated it and it shot away.

“First time here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mondschein said. “I’m impressed by the countryside.”

“It’s marvelous stuff, isn’t it? Life-enhancing. You get a sense of space here. And of history. Prehistoric ruins scattered all over the place. After you’re settled, perhaps we can go up to Frijoles Canyon for a look at the cave dwellings. Does that kind of thing interest you, Mondschein?”

“I don’t know much about it,” he admitted. “But I’ll be glad to look, anyway.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“Nucleonics,” Mondschein said. “I’m a furnace tender.”

“I was an anthropologist until I joined the Brotherhood. I spend my spare time out at the pueblos. It’s good to step back into the past occasionally. Especially out here, when you see the future erupting with such speed all around you.”

“They’re really making progress, are they?”

Capodimonte nodded. “Coming along quite well, they tell me. Of course, I’m not an insider. Insiders don’t get to leave the center much. But from what I hear, they’re accomplishing great things. Look out there, Brother—that’s the city of Santa Fe we’re passing right now.”

Mondschein looked. Quaint was the word that occurred to him. The city was small, both in area and in the size of its buildings, which seemed to be no higher than three or four stories anywhere. Even at this distance Mondschein could make out the dusky reddish-brown of adobe.

“I expected it to be much bigger,” Mondschein said.

“Zoning. Historical monument and all that. They’ve kept it pretty well as it was a hundred years ago. No new construction’s allowed.”

Mondschein frowned. “What about the laboratory center, though?”

“Oh, that’s not really in Santa Fe. Santa Fe’s just the nearest big city. We’re actually about forty miles north,” said Capodimonte. “Up near the Picuris country. Still plenty of Indians there, you know.”

They were beginning to climb now. The teardrop surged up hillside roads, and the vegetation began to change, the twisted, gnarled junipers and piñon pines giving way to dark stands of Douglas fir and ponderosas. Mondschein still found it hard to believe that he was soon to arrive at the genetic center. It goes to show, he told himself. The only way to get anywhere in the world was to stand up and yell.

He had yelled. They had scolded him for it—but they had sent him to Santa Fe anyhow.

To live forever! To surrender his body to the experimenters who were learning how to replace cell with cell, how to regenerate organs, how to restore youth. Mondschein knew what they were working on here. Of course, there were risks, but what of that? At the very worst, he’d die—but in the ordinary scheme of events that would happen anyway. On the other hand, he might be one of the chosen, one of the elect.

A gate loomed before them. Sunlight gleamed furiously from the metal shield.

“We’re here,” Capodimonte announced.

The gate began to open.

Mondschein said, “Won’t I be given some kind of esper scanning before they let me in?”

Capodimonte laughed. “Brother Mondschein, you’ve been getting a scanning for the last fifteen minutes. If there were any reason to turn you back, that gate wouldn’t be opening now. Relax. And welcome. You’ve made it.”

six

The official name of the place was the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences. It sprawled over some fifteen square miles of plateau country, every last inch of it ringed by a well-bugged fence. Within were dozens of buildings—dormitories, laboratories, other structures of less obvious purpose. The entire enterprise was underwritten by the contributions of the faithful, who gave according to their means—a dollar here, a thousand dollars there.

The center was heart and core of the Vorster operation. Here the research was carried out that served to improve the lives of Vorsters everywhere. The essence of the Brotherhood’s appeal was that it offered not merely spiritual counseling—which the old religions could provide just as well—but also the most advanced scientific benefits. Vorster hospitals existed now in every major population center. Vorster medics were at the fore-front of their profession. The Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance healed both body and soul.

And, as the Brotherhood did not attempt to conceal, the greater goal of the organization was the conquest of death. Not merely the overthrow of disease, but the downfall of age itself. Even before the Vorster movement had begun, men had been making great progress in that direction. The mean life expectancy was up to ninety-odd, above one hundred in some countries. That was why the Earth teemed with people, despite the stringent birth-control regulations that were in effect almost everywhere. Close to eleven billion people now, and the birth rate, though dropping sharply, was still greater than the death rate.

The Vorsters hoped to push the life expectancy still higher for those who wanted longer lives. A hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty years—that was the immediate goal. Why not two hundred, three hundred, a thousand later on? “Give us everlasting life,” the multitudes cried, and flocked to the chapels to make sure they were among the elect.

Of course, that prolongation of life would make the population problem all the more complex. The Brotherhood was aware of that it had other goals designed to alleviate that problem. To open the galaxy to man—that was the real aim.

The colonization of the universe by humankind had already began several generations before Noel Vorst founded his movement. Mars and Venus both had been settled, in differing ways. Neither planet had been hospitable to man, to begin with, so Mars had been changed to accommodate man, and man had been changed to survive on Venus. Both colonies were thriving now. Yet little had been accomplished toward solving the population crisis; ships would have to leave Earth day and night for hundreds of years in order to transport enough people to the colonies to make a dent in the multitudes on the home world, and that was economically impossible.

But if the extrasolar worlds could be reached, and if they did not need to be expensively Terraformed before they could be occupied, and if some new and reasonably economical means of transportation could be devised—

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Mondschein said.

Capodimonte nodded. “I don’t deny that. But that’s no reason not to try.”

“You seriously think that there’ll be a way to shoot people off to the stars on esper power?” Mondschein asked. “You don’t think that that’s a wild and fantastic dream?”

Smiling, Capodimonte said, “Wild and fantastic dreams keep men moving around. Chasing Prester John, chasing the North-west Passage, chasing unicorns—well, this is our unicorn, Mondschein. Why all the skepticism? Look about you. Don’t you see what’s going on?”

Mondschein had been at the research center for a week. He still did not know his way around the place with any degree of confidence, but he had learned a great deal. He knew, for example, that an entire town of espers had been built on the far side of the dry wash that cut the center in half. Six thousand people lived there, none of them oldcr than forty, all of them breeding like rabbits. Fertility Row, they called the place. It had special government dispensation for unlimited childbearing. Some of the families had five or six children.

That was the slow way of evolving a new kind of man. Take a bunch of people with unusual talents, throw them into a closed environment, let them pick their own mates and multiply the genetic pool—well, that was one way. Another was to work di-rectly on the germ plasm. They were doing that here, too, in a variety of ways. Tectogenetic microsurgery, polynuclear molding, DNA manipulation—they were trying everything. Cut and carve the genes, push the chromosomes around, get the tiny replicators to produce something slightly different from what had gone before—that was the aim.

How well was it working? That was hard to tell, so far. It would take five or six generations to evaluate the results. Mondschein, as a mere acolyte, did not have the equipment to judge for himself. Neither did most of those he had contact with—technicians, mainly. But they could speculate, and they did, far into the night.

What interested Mondschein, far more than the experiments in esper genetics, was the work on life span prolongation. Here, too, the Vorsters were building on an established body of technique. The organ banks provided replacements for most forms of bodily tissue; lungs, eyes, hearts, intestines, pancreases, kidneys, all could be implanted now, using the irradiation techniques to destroy the graft-rejecting immune reaction. But such piecemeal rejuvenation was not true immortality. The Vorsters Sought a way to make the cells of the body regenerate lost tissue, so that the impulse toward continued life came from within, not through external grafts.

Mondschein did his bit. Like most of the bottom-grade people at the center, he was required to surrender a morsel of flesh every few days as experimental material. The biopsies were a nuisance, but they were part of the routine. He was a regular contributor to the sperm bank, too. As a non-esper, he was a good control subject for the work going on. How did you find the gene for teleportation? For telepathy? For any of the paranormal phenomena that were lumped under the blanket term of “esp”?

Mondschein cooperated. He played his humble part in the great campaign, aware that he was no more than an infantryman in the struggle. He went from laboratory to laboratory, submitting to tests and needles, and when he was not taking part in such enterprises, he carried out his own specialty, which was to serve as a maintenance man on the nuclear power plant that ran the entire center.

It was quite a different life from that in the Nyack chapel. No members of the public came here—no worshipers—and it was easy to forget that he was part of a religious movement. They held services here regularly, of course, but there was a professionalism about the worship that made it all seem rather perfunctory. Without some laymen in the house, it was hard to remain really dedicated to the cult of the Blue Fire.

In this more rarefied climate, Mondschein felt some of his seething impatience ebb away. Now he no longer could dream of going to Santa Fe, for he was there, on the spot, part of the experiments. Now he could only wait, and tick off the moments of progress, and hope.

He made new friends. He developed new interests. He went with Capodimonte to see the ancient ruins, and he went hunting in the Picuris Range with a lanky acolyte named Weber, and he joined the choral society and sang a lusty tenor.

He was happy here.

He did not know, of course, that he was here as a spy for heretics. All that had been deftly erased from his memory. In its place had been left a triggering mechanism, which went off one night in early September, and abruptly Mondschein felt a strange compulsion take hold.

It was the night of the Meson Sacrament, a feast that heralded the autumn solstice. Mondschein, wearing his blue robe, stood between Capodimonte and Weber in the chapel, watching the reactor glare on the altar, listening to the voice intoning, “The world turns and the configurations change. There is a quantum jump in the lives of men, when doubts and fears are left behind and certainty is born. There is a flash as of light—a surge of inward radiation, a sense of Oneness with—”

Mondschein stiffened. They were Vorst’s words, words he had heard an infinity of times, so familiar to him that they had cut grooves in his brain. Yet now he seemed to be hearing them for the first time. When the words “a sense of Oneness” were pronounced, Mondschein gasped, gripped the seat in front of him, nearly doubled up in agony. He felt a sensation as of a blazing knife twisting in ins bowels.

“Are you all right?” Capodimonte whispered.

Mondschein nodded. “Just—cramps—”

He forced himself to straighten up. But he was not all right, he knew. Something was wrong, and he did not know what. He was possessed. He was no longer his own master. Willy-nilly, he would obey an inner command whose nature he did not at the moment know, but which he sensed would be revealed to him at the proper time, and which he would not resist.

seven

Seven hours later, at the darkest hour of night, Mondschein knew that the time had come.

He woke, sweat-soaked, and slipped into his robe. The dormitory was silent. He left his room, glided quietly down the hail, entered the dropshaft. Moments later he emerged in the plaza fronting the dormitory buildings.

The night was cold. Here on the plateau the day’s warmth fled swiftly once darkness descended. Shivering a little, Mondschein made his way through the streets of the center. No guards were on duty; there was no one to fear in this carefully selected, rigorously scanned colony of the faithful. Somewhere a watchful esper might be awake, seeking to detect hostile thoughts, but Mondschein was emanating nothing that might seem hostile. He did not know where he was going, nor what he was about to do. The forces that drove him welled from deep within his brain, beyond the fumbling reach of any esper. They guided his motor responses, not his cerebral centers.

He came to one of the information-retrieval centers, a stubby brick building with a blank windowless facade. Pressing his hand against the doorscanner, Mondschein waited to be identified; in a moment his pattern was checked against the master list of personnel, and he was admitted.

There flowered in his brain the knowledge of what he had come to find: a holographic camera.

They kept such equipment on the second level. Mondschein went to the storeroom, opened a cabinet, removed a compact object six inches square. Unhurriedly, he left the building, sliding the camera into his sleeve.

Crossing another plaza, Mondschein approached Lab XXIa, the longevity building. He had been there during the day, to give a biopsy. Now he moved briskly through the irising doorway, down a level into the basement, entered the small room just to his left. A rack of photomicrographs lay on a workbench along the rear wall. Mondschein touched a knuckle to the scanner-activator, and a conveyor belt dumped the photomicrographs into the hopper of a projector. They began to appear in the objective of the viewer.

Mondschein aimed his camera and made a hologram of each photomicrograph as it appeared. It was quick work. The camera’s laser beam flicked out, bouncing off the subjects, rebounding and intersecting a second beam at 45 degrees. The holograms would be unrecognizable without the proper equipment for viewing; only a second laser beam, set at the same angle as the one with which the holograms had been taken, could transform the unrecognizable patterns of intersecting circles on the plates into images. Those images, Mondachein knew, would be three-di-mensional and of extraordinarily fine resolution. But he did not stop to ponder on the use to which they might be put.

He moved through the laboratory, photographing everything that might be of some value. The camera could take hundreds of shots without recharging. Mondschein thumbed it again and again. Within two hours he had made a three-dimensional record of virtually the entire laboratory.

Shivering a little, he stepped out into the morning chill. Dawn was breaking. Mondschein put the camera back where he had found it, after removing the capsule of holographic plates. They were tiny; the whole capsule was not much bigger than a thumb-nail. He slid it into his breast pocket and returned to the dormitory.

The moment his head touched the pillow, he forgot that he had left his room at all that night.

In the morning Mondschein said to Capodimonte, “Let’s go to Frijoles today.”

“You’re really getting the bug, aren’t you?” Capodimonte said, grinning.

Mondachein shrugged. “It’s just a passing mood. I want to look at ruins, that’s all.”

“We could go to Puye, then. You haven’t been there. It’s pretty impressive, and quite different from—”

“No. Frijoles,” Mondschein said. “All right?”

They got a permit to leave the center—it wasn’t too difficult for lower-grade technicians to go out—and in the early part of the afternoon they headed westward toward the Indian ruins. The teardrop hummed along the road to Los Alamos, a secret scientific city of an earlier era, but they turned left into Bandelier National Monument before they reached Los Alamos, and bumped down an old asphalt road for a dozen miles until they came to the main center of the park.

It was never very crowded here, but now, with summer over, the place was all but deserted. The two acolytes strolled down the main path, past the circular canyon-bottom pueblo ruin known as Tyuonyi, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff, and up the winding little road that took them to the cave dwellings. When they reached the kiva, the hollowed-out chamber that once had been a ceremonial room for prehistoric Indians, Mondschein said, “Wait a minute. I want to have a look.”

He scrambled up the wooden ladder and pulled himself into the kiva. Its walls were blackened by the smoke of ancient fires. Niches lined the wall where once had been stored objects of the highest ritual importance. Calmly and without really understanding what he was doing, Mondschein drew the tiny capsule of holograms from his pocket and placed it in an inconspicuous corner of the farthest left-hand niche. He spent another moment looking around the kiva, and emerged.

Capodimonte was sitting on the soft white rock at the base of the cliff, looking up at the high reddish wall on the far side of the canyon. Mondschein said, “Feel like taking a real hike today?”

“Where to? Frijolito Ruin?”

“No,” Mondschein said. He pointed to the top of the canyon wall. “Out toward Yapashi. Or to the Stone Lions.”

“That’s a dozen miles,” Capodimonte said. “And we hiked there in the middle of July. I’m not up to it again, Chris.”

“Let’s go back, then.”

“You don’t need to get angry,” Capodimonte said. “Look, we can go to Ceremonial Cave instead. That’s only a short hike. Enough’s enough, Chris.”

“All right,” Mondschein said. “Ceremonial Cave it is.

He set the pace for the hike, and it was a brisk one. They had not gone a quarter of a mile before the pudgy Capodimonte was out of breath. Grimly, Mondschein forged on, Capodimonte straggling after him. They reached the ruin, viewed it briefly, and turned back. When they came to park headquarters, Capodimonte said that he wanted to rest awhile, to have a snack before returning to the research center.

“Go ahead,” Mondschein said. “I’ll browse in the curio shop.”

He waited until Capodimonte was out of sight Then, entering the curio shop, Mondschein went to the communibooth. A number popped into his brain, planted there hypnotically months before as he lay slumbering in the Nothing Chamber. He put money in the slot and punched out the number.

“Eternal Harmony,” a voice answered.

“This is Mondschein. Let me talk to anybody in Section Thirteen.”

“One moment, please.”

Mondschein waited. His mind felt blank. He was a sleepwalker now.

A purring, breathy voice said, “Go ahead, Mondschein… Give us the details.”

With great economy of words Mondschein told where he had hidden the capsule of holograms. The purring voice thanked him. Mondachein broke the contact and stepped from the booth. A few moments later Capodimonte entered the curio shop, looking fed and rested.

“See anything you want to buy?” he asked.

“No,” Mondschein said. “Let’s go.”

Capodimonte drove. Mondschein eyed the scenery as it whizzed past, and drifted into deep contemplation. Why did I come here today? he wondered. He had no idea. He did not remember a thing—not a single detail of his espionage. The erasure had been complete.

eight

They came for him a week later, at midnight. A ponderous robot rumbled into his room without warning and took up a station beside his bed, the huge grips ready to seize him if he bolted. Accompanying the robot was a hatchet-faced little man named Magnus, one of the supervising Brothers of the center.

“What’s happening?” Mondschein asked.

“Get dressed, spy. Come for interrogation.”

“I’m no spy. There’s a mistake, Brother Magnus.”

“Save the arguments, Mondschein. Up. Get up. Don’t attempt any violence.”

Mondschein was mystified. But he knew better than to debate the matter with Magnus, especially with eight hundred pounds of lightning-fast metallic intelligence in the room. Puzzled, the acolyte quit his bed and slipped on a robe. He followed Magnus out. In the hallway others appeared and stared at him. There were guarded whispers.

Ten minutes later Mondschein found himself in a circular room on the fifth floor of the research center’s main administration building, surrounded by more Brotherhood brass than he had ever expected to see in one room. There were eight of them, all high in councils. A knot of tension coiled in Mondschein’s belly. Light glared into his eyes.

“The esper’s here,” someone muttered.

They had sent a girl, no more than sixteen, pasty-faced and plain. Her skin was flecked with small red blotches. Her eyes were alert, unpleasantly gleaming, never still.

Mondschein despised her on sight, and he tried desperately to keep the emotion under rein, knowing that she could seal his fate with a word. It was no use: she detected his contempt for her the moment she came into the room, and the fleshy lips moved in a quick twitching smile. She drew her dumpy body erect.

Supervisor Magnus said, “This is the man. What do you read in him?”

“Fear. Hatred. Defiance.”

“How about disloyalty?”

“His highest loyalty is to himself,” the esper said, clasping her hands complacently over her belly.

“Has he betrayed us?” Magnus demanded.

“No. I don’t see anything that says he has.”

Mondschein said, “If I could ask the meaning of—”

“Quiet,” Magnus said witheringly.

Another of the Supervisors said, “The evidence is incontrovertible. Perhaps the girl’s making a mistake.”

“Scan him more closely,” Magnus directed. “Go back, day by day, through his memory. Don’t miss a thing. You know what you’re looking for.”

Baffled, Mondschein looked in appeal at the steely faces about him. The girl seemed to be gloating. Stinking voyeur, he thought. Have a good scan!

The girl said thinly, “He thinks I’m going to enjoy this. He ought to try swimming through a cesspool sometime, if he wants to know what it’s like.”

“Scan him,” Magnus said. “It’s late and we have many questions to answer.”

She nodded. Mondschein waited for some sensation telling him that his memories were being probed, some feeling as of invisible fingers going through his brain. There was no such awareness. Long moments passed in silence, and then the girl looked up in triumph.

“The night of March thirteenth’s been erased.”

“Can you get beneath the erasure?” Magnus asked.

“Impossible. It’s an expert job. They’ve cut the whole night right out of him. And they’ve loaded him with countermnemonics all the way down the track. He doesn’t know a thing about what he’s been up to,” the girl said.

The Supervisors exchanged glances. Mondschein felt perspiration soaking through his robe. The smell of it stung his nostrils. A muscle throbbed in his cheek, and his forehead itched murderously, but he did not move.

“She can go,” Magnus said.

With the esper out of the room, the atmosphere grew a little less tense, but Mondschein did not relax. In a bleak, hopeless way, he felt that he had been tried and condemned in advance for a crime whose nature he did not even know. He thought of some of the perhaps apocryphal stories of Brotherhood vindictiveness: the man with the pain centers removed, the esper staked out to endure an overload, the lobotomized biologist, the renegade Supervisor who was left in a Nothing Chamber for ninety-six consecutive hours. He realized that he might find out very shortly just how apocryphal those stories were.

Magnus said, “For your information, Mondschein, someone broke into the longevity lab and shot the whole place up with a holograph. It was a very neat job, except that we’ve got an alarm system in there, and you happened to trip it.”

“Sir, I swear, I never set foot inside—”

“Save it, Mondschein, The morning after, we ran a neutron activation analysis in there, just as a matter of routine. We turned up traces of tungsten and molybdenum that brushed off you while you were taking those holograms. They match your skin pattern. It took us awhile to track them to you. There’s no doubt—same neutron pattern on the camera, on the lab equipment, and on your hand. You were sent in here as a spy, whether you know it or not.”

Another Supervisor said, “Kirby’s here.”

“I’d like to know what he’s got to say about this,” Magnus muttered darkly.

Mondschein saw the lean, long-limbed figure of Reynolds Kirby enter the room. His thin lips were clamped tightly together. He seemed to have aged at least ten years since Mondschein had seen him in Langholt’s office.

Magnus whirled and said with open irritation, “Here’s your man, Kirby. What do you think of him now?”

“He’s not my man,” said Kirby.

“You approved his transfer here,” Magnus snapped. “Maybe we ought to run a scan on you, eh? Somebody worked a loaded bomb into this place, and the bomb’s gone off. He handed a whole laboratory away.”

“Maybe not,” Kirby said. “Maybe he’s still got the data on him somewhere.”

“He was out of the center the day after the laboratory was entered. He and another acolyte went to visit some ancient Indian ruins. It’s a safe bet that he disposed of the holograms while he was out there.”

“Have you tracked the courier?” Kirby asked.

“We’re getting away from the point,” said Magnus. “The point is that this man came to the center on your recommendation. You picked him out of nowhere and put him here. What we’d all like to know is where you found him and why you sent him here. Eh?”

Kirby’s fleshless face worked wordlessly for a moment He glowered at Mondschein, then stared in even greater hostility at Magnus. At length he said, “I can’t take responsibility for shipping this man here. It happens that he wrote to me in February, asking to be transferred out of normal chapel duties and sent here. He was going over the heads of his local administrators, so I sent the letter back suggesting that he be disciplined a little. A few weeks later I received instructions that he be transferred out here. I was startled, to say the least, but I approved them. That’s all I know about Christopher Mondschein.”

Magnus extended a forefinger and tapped the air. “Wait one moment, Kirby. You’re a Supervisor. Who gives you instructions, anyway? How can you be pressured into making a transfer when you’re in high authority?”

“The instructions came from higher authority.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Magnus said.

Mondschein sat stock-still, enthralled dcspite his own predicament by this battle between Supervisors. He had never understood how he had managed to get that transfer, and now it began to seem as though no one else understood it, either.

Kirby said, “The instructions came from a source I’m reluctant to name.”

“Covering up for yourself, Kirby?”

“You’re taking liberties with my patience, Supervisor Magnus,” said Kirby tightly.

“I want to know who put this spy among us.”

Kirby took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. All of you be my witness to this. The order came from Vorst. Noel Vorst called me and said he wanted this man sent here. Vorst sent him. Vorst! What do you make of that?”

nine

They were not finished interrogating Mondschein. Waves of espers worked him over, trying to get beneath the erasure, without success. Organic methods were employed, too; Mondschein was shot full of truth serums old and new, everything from sodium pentothal on up, and batteries of hard-faced Brothers questioned him rigorously. Mondschein let them strip his soul bare, so that every bit of nastiness, every self-seeking moment, everything that made him a human being stood out in bold relief. They found nothing useful. Nor did a four-hour immersion in a Nothing Chamber yield results; Mondschein was too wobbly-brained to be able to answer questions for three days afterward, that was all.

He was as puzzled as they were. He would gladly have confessed the most heinous of sins; in fact, several times during the long interrogation he did confess, simply to have it over with, but the espers read his motives plainly and laughed his confessions to scorn. Somehow, he knew, he had fallen into the hands of the enemies of the Brotherhood and had concluded a pact with them, a pact which he had fulfilled. But he had no inner knowledge of any of that. Whole segments of his memory were gone, and that was terrifying to him.

Mondschein knew that he was finished. They would not let him remain at Santa Fe, naturally. His dream of being on hand when immortality was achieved now was ended. They would cast him out with flaming swords, and he would wither and grow old, cursing his lost opportunity. That is, if they did not kill him outright or work some subtle form of slow destruction on him.

A light December snow was falling on the day that Supervisor Kirby came to tell him his fate.

“You can go, Mondschein,” the tall man said somberly.

“Go? Where?”

“Wherever you like. Your case has been decided. You’re guilty, but there’s reasonable doubt of your volition. You’re being expelled from the Brotherhood, but otherwise no action will be taken against you.”

“Does that mean I’m expelled from the church as a communicant, too?”

“Not necessarily. That’s up to you. If you want to come to wor-ship, we won’t deny our comfort to you,” Kirby said. “But there’s no possibility of your holding a position within the church. You’ve been tampered with, and we can’t take further chances with you. I’m sorry, Mondschein.”

Mondschein was sorry, too, but relieved, as well. They would not take revenge on him. He would lose nothing but his chance at life everlasting—and perhaps he would even retain that, just as any other common worshiper did.

He had forfeited, of course, his chance to rise in the Vorster hierarchy. But there was another hierarchy, too, Mondschein thought, where a man might move more swiftly.

The Brotherhood took him to the city of Santa Fe proper, gave him some money, and turned him loose. Mondschein headed immediately for the nearest chapel of the Transcendent Harmony, which turned out to be in Albuquerque, twenty minutes away.

“We’ve been expecting you,” a Harmonist in flowing green robes told him. “I’ve got instructions to contact my superiors the moment you show up.”

Mondachein was not surprised at that. Nor was he greatly astonished to be told, a short while later, that he was to leave by quickboat for Rome right away. The Harmonists would pay his expenses, he was informed.

A slim woman with surgically-altered eyellds met him at the station in Rome. She did not look familiar to him, but she smiled at him as though they were old friends. She conveyed him to a house on the Via Flaminia, a few dozen miles north of Rome, where a squat, sallow-faced Harmonist Brother with a bulbous nose awaited him.

“Welcome,” the Harmonist said. “Do you remember me?”

“No, I—yes. Yes!”

Recollection flooded back, dizzying him, staggering him. There had been three heretics in the room that other time, not just one, and they had given him wine and promised him a place in the Harmonist hierarchy, arid he had agreed to let himself be smuggled into Santa Fe, a soldier in the great crusade, a warrior of light, a Harmonist spy.

“You did very well, Mondschein,” the heretic said unctuously. “We didn’t think you’d be caught so fast, but we weren’t sure of all their detection methods. We could only guard against the espers, and we did a fair enough job of that. At any rate, the information you provided was extremely useful.”

“And you’ll keep your end of the bargain? I’m to get a tenth-level job?”

“Of course. You didn’t think we’d cheat you, did you? You’ll have a three-month indoctrination course so you can attain in-sight into our movement. Then you’ll assume your new duties in our organization. Which would you prefer, Mondschein—Mars or Venus?”

“Mars or Venus? I don’t follow you.”

“We’re going to attach you to our missionary division. You’ll be leaving Earth by next summer, to carry on our work in one of the colonies. You’re free to choose the one you prefer.”

Mondachein was aghast. He had never bargained for this. Selling out to these heretics, only to get shipped off to an alien world and likely martyrdom—no, he had never expected anything like that

Faust didn’t expect his troubles, either, Mondschein thought coldly.

He said, “What kind of trick is this? You’ve got no right to ask me to become a missionary!”

“We offered you a tenth-level job,” the Harmonist said quietly. “The option of choosing the division it would be remained with us.”

Mondschein was silent. There was a fierce throbbing in his skull. The face of the Harmonist seemed to blur and waver. He was free to leave—to step out the door and merge into the multitudes. To become nothing. Or he could submit and be—what? Anything. Anything.

Dead in six weeks, as likely as not.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Venus. I’ll go to Venus.” His words sounded like a cage clanging shut.

The Harmonist nodded. “I thought you would,” he said. He turned to leave, then paused and stared curiously at Mondschein. “Did you really think you could name your own position—spy?”