To Open the Sky

one

The Venusian boy danced nimbly around the patch of Trouble Fungus behind the chapel, avoiding the gray-green killer with practiced ease. He hop-skipped past the rubbery bole of the Limblime Tree and approached the serried row of jagged nameless stalks that lined the back garden. The boy grinned at them, and they parted for him as obligingly as the Red Sea had yielded to Moses some time earlier.

“Here I am,” he said to Nicholas Martell.

“I didn’t think you’d be back,” the Vorster missionary said.

The boy—Elwhit—looked mischievous. “Brother Christopher said I couldn’t come back. That’s why I’m here. Tell me about the Blue Fire. Can you really make atoms give light?”

“Come inside,” Martell said.

The boy represented his first triumph since coming to Venus, and a small triumph it was, so far. But Martell did not object to that. A step was a step. There was a planet to win here. A universe to win, perhaps.

Inside the chapel the boy hung back, suddenly shy. He was no more than ten, Martell guessed. Was it just wickedness that had made him come here? Or was he a spy from the chapel of heretics down the road? No matter. Martell would treat him as a potential convert. He activated the altar, and the Blue Fire welled into the small room, colors dancing against the boards of the groined wooden ceiling. Power surged from the cobalt cube, and the harmless, dramatic radiations wrung a gasp of awe from Elwhit.

“The fire is symbolic,” Martell murmured. “There’s an underlying oneness in the universe—the common building blocks, do you see? Do you know what atomic particles are? Protons, electrons, neutrons? The things everything’s made up of?”

“I can touch them,” Elwhit said. “I can push them around.”

“Will you show me how?” Martell was remembering the way the boy had parted those knifeblade-sharp plants In back. A glance, a mental shove, and they had yielded. These Venusians could teleport—he was sure of it. “How do you push things?” Martell asked.

But the boy shrugged the question aside, “Tell me more about the Blue Fire,” he said.

“Have you read the book I gave you? The one by Vorst? That tells you all you need to know.”

“Brother Christopher took it away from me.”

“You showed it to him?” Martell said, startled.

“He wanted to know why I came to you. I said you talked to me and gave me a book. He took the book. I came back. Tell me why you’re here. Tell me what you teach.

Martell hadn’t imagined that his first convert would be a child. He said carefully, “The religion we have here is very much like the one that Brother Christopher teaches. But there are some differences. His people make up a lot of stories. They’re good stories, but they’re only stories.”.

“About Lazarus, you mean?”

“That’s right. Myths, nothing more. We try not to need such things. We’re trying to get right in touch with the basics of the universe. We—”

The boy lost interest. He tugged at his tunic and nudged at a chair. The altar was what fascinated him, nothing else. The glistening eyes roved toward it.

Martell said, “The cobalt is radioactive. It’s a source of betas—electrons. They’re going through the tank and knocking photons loose. That’s where the light comes front”

“I can stop the light,” the boy said. “Will you be angry If I stop it?”

It was a kind of sacrilege, Martell knew. But he suspected that he would be forgiven. Any evidence of teleporting activity that he could gather was useful.

“Go ahead,” he said.

The boy remained motionless. But the radiance dimmed. It was as if an invisible hand reached into the reactor, intercepting the darting particles. Telekinesis on the subatomic level! Martell was elated and chilled all at once, watching the light fade. Suddenly it flared more brightly again. Beads of sweat glistened on the boy’s bluish-purple forehead.

“That is all,” Elwhit announced.

“How do you do it?”

“I reach.” He laughed. “You can’t?”

“Afraid not,” Martell said. “Listen, if I give you another book to read, will you promise not to show it to Brother Christopher? I don’t have many. I can’t afford to have the Harmonists confiscate them all.”

“Next time,” the boy said. “I don’t feel like reading things now. I’ll come again. You tell me all about it some other time.”

He danced away, out of the chapel, and went skipping through the underbrush, heedless of the perils that lurked in the deep-shadowed forest beyond. Martell watched him go, not knowing whether he was actually making his first convert or whether he was being mocked.

Perhaps both, the missionary thought.

Nicholas Martell had come to Venus ten days before, aboard a passenger ship from Mars. He had been one of thirty passengers aboard the ship, but none of the others had cared for Nicholas Martell’s company. Ten of them were Martians, who did not care to share the atmosphere Martell breathed. Martians, now that their planet had been cozily Terraformed, preferred to fill their lungs with an Earthside mix of gases. So had Martell, once, for hewas a native Earthman himself. But now he was one of the changed ones, equipped with gills in good Venusian fashion.

Not gills, truly: they would serve no function under water. They were high-density filters, to strain the molecules of decent oxygen from the Venusian air. Martell was well adapted. His metabolism had no use for helium or the other inerts, but it could draw sustenance from nitrogen and had no real objections to fueling on CO2 for short spells. The surgeons at Santa Fe had worked on him for six months. It was forty years too late to make adjustments on Martell-ovum or Martell-fetus, as was the normal practice in fitting a man for life on Venus, so they had done their work on Martell the man. The blood that flowed in his veins was no longer red. His skin had a fine cyanotic flush. He was as a Venusian born.

There had been nineteen Venusians of the true blood aboard the ship, too. But they felt no kinship for Martell and had forced him to withdraw from their presence. The crewmen had set up Martell’s cradle in a storage chamber, with gentle apologies: “You know those arrogant Venusians, Brother. Give them the wrong kind of look and they’re at you with their daggers. You’ll stay here. You’ll be safer here.” A thin laugh. “You’ll be even safer, Brother, if you head for home without ever setting foot on Venus.”

Martell had smiled. He was prepared to let Venus do its worst.

Venus had martyred several dozen members of Martell’s religious order in the past forty years. He was a Vorster, or, more formally, a member of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and he had attached himself to the missionary wing. Unlike his martyred predecessors, Martell was surgically adapted to live on Venus. The others had had to muffle themselves in breathing-suits, and perhaps that had limited their effectiveness. The Vorsters had made no headway on Venus at all, though they were the dominant religious group on Earth, and had been for more than a generation. Martell, alone and adapted, had taken upon himself the long-delayed task of founding a Venusian order of the Brotherhood.

Martell had had a chilly welcome from Venus. He had blanked out in the turbulence of the landing as the ship plunged through the cloud layer. Then he had recovered. He sat patiently, a thin man with a wedge-shaped face and pale, hooded eyes. Through the port he had his first glimpse of Venus: a flat, muddy-looking field, stretching perhaps half a mile, with a bordering fringe of thick-trunked, ugly trees whose massed bluish leaves had a sinister glint. The sky was gray, and swirling clumps of low-lying clouds formed whorling patterns against the deeper background. Robot technicians were bustling from a squat, alienlooking building to service the ship’s needs. The passengers were coming forth.

In the landing station a low-caste Venusian stared at the Vorster with blank indifference, taking his passport and saying coolly, “Religious?”

‘That’s right.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Treaty of 2128,” Martell said. “A limited quota of Earthside observers for scientific, ethical, or—”

“Spare me.” The Venusian pressed his fingertip to a page of the passport and a visa stamp appeared, glowing brilliantly. “Nicholas Martell. You’ll die here, Martell. Why don’t you go back where you came from? Men live forever there, don’t they?”

“They live a long time. But I have work here.”

“Fool!”

“Perhaps,” Martell agreed caimly. “May I go?”

“Where are you staying? We have no hotels here.”

‘The Martian Embassy will look after me until I’m established.”

“You’ll never be established,” the Venusian said.

Martell did not contradict him. He knew that even a low-caste Venusian regarded himself as superior to an Earthman, and that a contradiction might seem a mortal insult. Martell was not equipped for dagger-dueling. And, since he was not a proud man by nature, he was willing to swallow any manner of abuse for the sake of his mission.

The passport man waved him on. Martell gathered up his single suitcase and passed out of the building. A taxi now, he thought. It was many miles to town. He needed to rest and to confer with the Martian Ambassador, Weiner. The Martians were not particularly sympathetic to his aims, but at least they were willing to countenance Martell’s presence here. There was no Earth Embassy, not even a consulate. The links between the mother planet and her proud colony had been broken long ago.

Taxis waited at the far side of the field. Martell began to cross to them. The ground crunched beneath his feet, as though it were only a brittle crust. The planet looked gloomy. Not a hint of sun came through those clouds. His adapted body was functioning well, though.

The spaceport, Martell thought, had a forlorn look. Hardly anyone but robots seemed to be about. A staff of four Venusians ran the place, and there were the nineteen from his ship, and the ten Martians, but no one else. Venus was a sparsely populated planet, with hardly more than three million people in its seven widely spaced towns. The Venusians were frontiersmen, legendary for their haughtiness. They had room to be haughty, Martell thought. Let them spend a week on teeming Earth and they might change their ways.

“Taxi!” Martell called.

None of the robocars budged from their line. Were even the robots haughty here, he wondered? Or was there something wrong with his accent? He called again, getting no response.

Then he understood. The Venusian passengers were emerging and crossing to the taxi zone. And, naturally, they had precedence. Martell watched them. They were high-caste men, un-like the passport man. They walked with an arrogant, swaggering gait, and Martell knew they would slash him to his knees if he crossed their path.

He felt a bit of contempt for them. What were they, anyway, but blue-skinned samurai, border lairds after their proper time, childish, self-appointed princelings living a medieval fantasy? Men who were sure of themselves did not need to swagger, nor to surround themselves with elaborate codes of chivalry. If one looked upon them as uneasy, inwardly uncertain hotheads, rather than as innately superior noblemen, one could surmount the feeling of awe that a procession of them provoked.

And yet one could not entirely suppress that awe.

For they were impressive as they paraded across the field. More than custom separated the high-caste and the low-caste Venusians. They were biologically different. The high-caste ones were the first comers, the founding families of the Venus colony, and they were far more alien in body and mind than Venusians of more recent vintage. The early genetic processes had been unsubtle, and the first colonists had been transformed virtually into monsters. Close to eight feet tall, with dark blue skins pocked with giant pores, and pendulous red gill-bunches at their throats, they were alien beings who gave little sign that they were the great-great-grandchildren of Earthmen. Later in the process of colonizing Venus, it had become possible to adapt men for the second planet without varying nearly so much from the basic human model. Both strains of Venusians, since they arose from manipulation of the germ plasm, bred true; both shared the same exaggerated sense of honor and the same disdain for Earth; both were now alien strains, inwardly and outwardly, in mind and in body. But those whose ancestry went back to the most changed of the changed ones were in charge, making a virtue of their strangeness, and the planet was their playground.

Martell watched as the high-caste ones solemnly entered the waiting vehicles and drove off. No taxis remained. The ten Martian passengers of the ship could be seen getting into a cab on the other side of the depot. Martell returned to the building. The low-caste Venusian glowered at him.

Martell said, “When will I be able to get a taxi to town?”

“You won’t. They aren’t coming back today.”

“I want to call the Martian Embassy, then. They’ll send a car for me.”

“Are you sure they will? Why should they bother?”

“Perhaps so,” Martell said evenly. “I’d better walk.” The look he got from the Venusian was worth the gesture. The man stared in surprise and shock. And, possibly, admiration, mingled somewhat with patronizing confidence that Martell must be a madman. Martell left the station. He began to walk, following the narrow ribbon of a road, letting the unearthly atmosphere soak deep into his altered body.

two

It was a lonely walk. Not a sign of habitation broke the belt of vegetation on either side of the highway, nor did any vehicles pass him. The trees, somber and eerie with their bluish cast, towered over the road. Their knifeblade-like leaves glimmered in the faint, diffused light. There was an occasional rustling sound in the woods, as of beasts crashing through the thickets. Martell saw nothing there, though. He walked on. How many miles? Eight, a dozen? He was prepared to walk forever, if necessary. He had the strength.

His mind hummed with plans. He would establish a small chapel and let it be known what the Brotherhood had to offer: life eternal and the key to the stars. The Venusians might threaten to kill him, as they had killed previous missionaries of the Brotherhood, but Martell was prepared to die, if necessary, that others might have the stars. His faith was strong. Before his departure the high ones of the Brotherhood had personally wished him well: grizzled Reynolds Kirby, the Hemispheric Coordinator, had grasped his hand, and then had come an even greater surprise as Noel Vorst himself, the Founder, a legendary figure more than a century old, had come forth to tell him in a soft, feathery voice, “I know that your mission will bear fruit, Brother Martell.”

Martell still tingled with the memory of that glorious moment.

Now he strode forward, buoyed by the sight of a few habitations set back from the road. He was at the outskirts, then. On this pioneer world, pioneer habits held true, and the colonists did not build their homes close together. They spread sparsely over a radiating area surrounding the main administrative centers. The man-high walls enclosing the first houses he saw did not surprise him; these Venusians were a surly lot who would build a wall around their entire planet if they could. But soon he would be in town, and then—Martell came to a halt as he saw the Wheel hurtling toward him.

His first thought was that it had broken free from some vehicle. Then he realized what it was: no fragment of machinery, but Venusian wildlife. It surged over a crest in the road, a hundred yards in front of him, and came plunging wildly toward him at what must have been a speed of ninety miles an hour. Martell had a clear though momentary glimpse: two wheels of some horny substance, mottled orange and yellow, linked by a box-like inner structure. The wheels were nine feet across, at least; the connecting structure was smaller, so that wheel-rims projected around it. Those rims were razor-sharp. The creature moved by ceaselessly transferring its weight within that central housing, and it developed terrific momentum as it barreled toward the missionary.

Martell leaped back. The Wheel hurtled past him, missing his toes by inches. Martell saw the sharpness of the rim and felt an acrid odor sting his nostrils. If he had been a bit slower, the Wheel would have sliced him in two.

It traveled a hundred yards beyond him. Then, like a gyroscope running amok, it executed a turn in an astonishingly narrow radius and came shooting back toward Martell.

The thing’s hunting me, he thought.

He knew many Vorster combat techniques, but none of them were designed to cope with a beast like this. All he could do was keep sidestepping and hope that the Wheel could not make sudden compensations in its course. It drew near; Martell sucked in his breath and leaped back once again. This time the Wheel swerved ever so slightly.

Its leading left-hand edge sliced through the trailing end of Martell’s blue cloak, and a ribbon of cloth fluttered to the pavement Panting, Martell watched the thing swing around for another try, and knew that it could indeed correct its course. A few more passes and it would split him.

The Wheel came a third time.

Martell waited as long as he dared. With the outer blades only a few feet away, he broad-jumped—into the path of the creature. Earthborn muscles carried him twenty feet in the light gravity. He more than half expected to be bisected in mid-jump, but when his feet touched ground he was still in one piece. Whirling, Martell saw that he had indeed surprised the beast; it had turned inward, toward the place where it had expected him to be, and had passed through his suitcase. The suitcase had been sliced as though by a laser beam. His belongings were scattered on the road. The Wheel, halting once more, was coming back for another try.

What now? Climb a tree? The nearest one was void of limbs for the first twenty feet. Martell could not shinny to safety in time. All he could do was keep hopping from side to side in the road, trying to outguess the creature. He knew that he could not keep that up much longer. He would tire, and the Wheel would not, and the slashing rims would pass through him and spill his altered guts on the pavement. It did not seem right, Martell thought, to die purposelessly in this way before he had even begun his work here.

The Wheel came. Martell sidestepped it again and heard it whistle past. Was it getting angry? No, it was just an insensate brute looking for a meal, hunting in the manner some perverse nature had designed for it. Martell gasped for breath. On the next pass—Suddenly he was not alone. A boy appeared, running out from one of the stockaded buildings at the crest of the hill, and trotted alongside the Wheel for a few paces. Then—Martell did not see how it was done—the Wheel went awry and toppled, landing on one disk with the other in the air. It lay there like a huge cheese blocking the road. The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, stood by it, looking pleased with himself. He was low-caste, of course. A high-caste one would not have bothered to save him. Martell realized that probably the low-caste boy had had no interest in saving him, either, but simply had knocked the Wheel over for the sport of it.

Martell said, “I offer thanks, friend. Another moment and I’d have been cut to ribbons.”

The boy made no reply. Martell came closer to inspect the fallen Wheel. Its upper rim was rippling in frustration as it strained to right itself—clearly an impossible task. Martell looked down, saw a dark violet cyst near the center of one wheel writhe and open.

“Look out!” the boy cried, but it was much too late.

Two whip-like threads burst from the cyst. One wrapped itself around Martell’s left thigh, the other around the boy’s waist. Martell felt a blaze of pain, as tough the threads were lined with acidedged suckers. A mouth opened on the inner structure of the Wheel. Martell saw milling, grinding tooth-like projections beginning to churn in anticipation.

But this was a situation he could handie. He had no way of stopping the headlong plunge of the Wheel, for that was mere mechanical energy at work, but presumably the creature’s brain carried an electrical charge, and the Vorsters had ways of altering current flows in the brain. It was a mild form of esping, within the threshold of nearly anyone who cared to master the disci-plines involved. Ignoring the pain, Martell seized the tightening thread with his right hand and performed the act of neutralization. A moment later the thread went slack and Martell was free. So was the boy. The threads did not return to the cyst, but remained lying limp in the roadway. The milling teeth became still; the rippling horny plate of the upper wheel subsided. The thing was dead.

Martell glanced at the boy.

“Fair enough,” he said. ‘I’ve saved you and you’ve saved me. So now we’re even.”

“The debit is still yours,” replied the boy with strange solemnity. “If I had not rescued you first, you never would have lived to rescue me. And it would not have been necessary to rescue me, anyway, since I would not have come out onto the road, and therefore—”

Martell’s eyes widened. “Who taught you to reason like that?” he asked in amusement. “You sound like a theology professor.”

“I am Brother Christopher’s pupil.”

“And he is—”

“You’ll find out. He wants to see you. He sent me out here to fetch you.”

“And where will I find him?”

“Come with me.”

Martell followed the boy toward one of the buildings. They left the dead Wheel in the road. Martell wondered what would happen if a carload of high-casters came along and had to shove the carcass out of the way with their own aristocratic hands.

Martell and the boy passed through a burnished coppery gate that slid open at the boy’s approach. Martell found himself approaching a simple wooden A-frame building. When he saw the sign mounted above the door, he was so amazed that he released his grip on his sundered suitcase, and for the second time in ten minutes his belongings went spilling to the ground.

The sign said:

Martell’s knees felt watery. Harmonists? Here?

The green-robed heretics, offshoots of the original Vorster movement, had made some progress on Earth for a while, and had even seemed to threaten the parent organization. But for more than twenty years now they had been nothing but an absurd little splinter group of no significance. It was inconceivable that these heretics, who had failed so utterly on Earth, could have established a church here on Venus—something that the Vorsters themselves had been unable to do. It was impossible. It was unthinkable.

A figure appeared in the doorway—a stocky man in early middle age, about sixty or so, his hair beginning to gray, his features thickening. Like Martell, he had been surgically adapted to Venusian conditions. He looked calm and self-assured. His hands rested lightly on a comfortable priestly paunch.

He said, “I’m Christopher Mondschein. I heard of your arrival, Brother Martell. Won’t you come in?”

Martell hesitated.

Mondschein smiled. “Come, come, Brother. There’s no peril in breaking bread with a Harmonist, is there? You’d be mince-meat now but for the lad’s bravery, and I sent him to save you. You owe me the courtesy of a visit. Come in. Come in. I won’t meddle with your soul, Brother. That’s a promise.”

three

The Harmonist place was unassuming but obviously permanent. There was a shrine, festooned with the statuettes and claptrap of the heresy, and a library, and dwelling quarters. Martell caught sight of several Venusian boys at work in the rear of the building, digging what might be the foundations of an extension. Martell followed the older man into the library. A familiar row of books caught his eye: the works of Noel Vorst, handsomely bound, the expensive Founder’s Edition.

Mondschein said, “Are you surprised? Don’t forget that we accept the supremacy of Vorst, too, even if he spurns us. Sit down. Wine? They make a fine dry white here.”

“What are you doing here?” Martell asked.

“Me? That’s a terribly long story, and not entirely creditable to me. The essence of it is that I was a young fool and let myself get maneuvered into being sent here. That was forty years ago, and I’ve stopped resenting what happened by now. It was the finest thing that could have happened to me in my life, I’ve come to realize, and I suppose it’s a mark of maturity that I was able to see—”

Mondschein’s garrulity irritated the precise-minded Martell. He cut in: “I don’t want your personal history, Brother Mondschein. I meant how long has your order been here?”

“Close to fifty years.”

“Uninterruptedly?”

“Yes. We have eight shrines here and about four thousand communicants, all of them low-caste. The high-casters don’t deign to notice us.”

“They don’t deign to wipe you out either,” Martell observed.

“True,” said Mondschein. “Perhaps we’re beneath their contempt.”

“But they’ve killed every Vorster missionary who’s ever come here,” Martell said. “Us they devour, you they tolerate. Why is that?”

“Perhaps they see a strength in us that they don’t find in the parent organization,” suggested the heretic. “They admire strength, of course. You must know that, or you’d never have tried to walk from the landing station. You were demonstrating your strength under stress. But of course it would rather have spoiled your demonstration if that Wheel had slashed you to death.”

“As it very nearly did.”

“As it certainly would have done,” said Mondschein, “if I had not happened to notice your predicament. That would have terminated your mission here rather prematurely. Do you like the wine?”

Martell had barely tasted it. “It’s not bad. Tell me, Mondschein, have they really let themselves be converted here?”

“A few. A few.”

“Hard to believe. What do you people know that we don’t?”

“It isn’t what we know,” Mondschein said. “It’s what we have to offer. Come with me into the chapel.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Please. It won’t give you a disease.”

Reluctantly, Martell allowed himself to be led right into the sanctum sanctorum. He looked around with distaste at the ikons, the images, and all the rest of the Harmonist rubbish. At the altar, where a Vorster chapel would have had the tiny reactor emitting blue Cerenkov radiation, there was mounted a gleaming atom-symbol model along which electron-simulacra pulsed in blinding, ceaseless motion. Martell did not think of himself as a bigoted man, but he was loyal to his faith, and the sight of all this childish paraphernalia sickened him.

Mondschein said, “Noel Vorst’s the most brilliant man of our times, and his accomplishments mustn’t be underrated. He saw the culture of Earth fragmented and decadent, saw people everywhere escaping into drug addictions and Nothing Chambers and a hundred other deplorable things. And he saw that the old religions had lost their grip, that the time was ripe for an eclectic, synthetic new creed that dispensed with the mysticism of the former religions and replaced it with a new kind of mysticism, a scientific mysticism. That Blue Fire of his—a wonderful symbol, something to capture the imagination and dazzle the eye, as good as the Cross and the Crescent, even better, because it was modern, it was scientific, it could be comprehended even while it bewildered. Vorst had the insight to establish his cult and the administrative ability to put it across. But has thinking was incomplete.”

“That’s a lofty dismissal, isn’t it? When you consider that we control Earth in a way that no single religious movement of the past has ever—”

Mondschein smiled. “The achievement on Earth is very imposing, I agree. Earth was ready for Vorst’s doctrines. Why did he fail on the other planets, though? Because his thinking was too advanced. He didn’t offer anything that colonists could surrender their hearts and souls to.”

“He offers physical immortality in the present body,” Martell said crisply. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No. He doesn’t offer a mythos. Just a cold quid-pro-quo, come to the chapel and pay your tithe and you can live forever, maybe. It’s a secular religion, despite all the litanies and rituals that have been creeping in. It lacks poetry. There’s no Christ-child in the manger, no Abraham sacrificing Isaac, no spark of humanity, no—”

“No simplistic fairy tales,” said Martell in a brusque tone. “Agreed. That’s the whole point of our teaching. We came into a world no longer capable of believing the old stories, and instead of spinning new ones we offered simplicity, strength, the power of scientific achievement—”

“And took political control of most of the planet, while also establishing magnificent laboratories that carried on advanced research in longevity and esping. Fine. Fine. Admirable. But you failed here. We are succeeding. We have a story to tell, the story of Noel Vorst, the First Immortal, his redemption in the atomic fire, his awakening from sin. We offer our people a chance to be redeemed in Vorst and in the later prophet of Transcendent Harmony, David Lazarus. What we have is something that captures the fancy of the low-casters, and in another generation we’ll have the high-casters, too. These are pioneers, Brother Martell. They’ve cut all ties with Earth, and they’re starting over on their own, in a society just a few generations old. They need myths. They’re shaping myths of their own here. Don’t you think that in another century the first colonists of Venus will be regarded as supernatural beings, Martell? Don’t you think that they’ll be Harmonist saints by then?”

Martell was genuinely startled. “Is that your game?”

“Part of it.”

“All you’re doing is returning to fifth-century Christianity.”

“Not exactly. We’re continuing the scientific work, too.”

“And you believe your own teachings?” Martell asked.

Mondschein smiled strangely. “When I was young,” he said, “I was a Vorster acolyte, at the Nyack chapel. I went into the Brotherhood because it was a job. I needed a structure for my life, and I had a wild hope of being sent out to Santa Fe to become a subject in the immortality experiments, and so I enrolled. For the most unworthy of motives. Do you know, Martell, that I didn’t feel a shred of a religious calling? Not even the Vorster stuff—stripped down, secular—could get to me. Through a series of confusions that I still don’t fully understand and that I won’t even begin to explain to you, I left the Brotherhood and Joined the Harmonist movement and came here as a missionary. The most successful missionary ever sent to Venus, as it happens. Do you think the Harmonist mythologies can move me if I was too ratio-nal to accept Vorster thinking?”

“So you’re completely cynical in handing out this nonsense about saints and images. You do it for the sake of preserving your power. A peddler of nostrums, a quack preacher in the back-woods of Venus—”

“Easy,” Mondschein warned. “I’m getting results. And, as I think Noel Vorst himself might tell you, we deal in ends, not in means. Would you like to kneel here and pray awhile?”

“Of course not.”

“May I pray for you, then?”

“You just told me you don’t believe your own creed.”

Smiling, Mondschein said, “Even the prayers of an unbeliever may be heard. Who knows? Only one thing is certain: you’ll die here, Martell. So I’ll pray for you, that you may pass through the purifying flame of the higher frequencies.”

“Spare me. Why are you so sure I’ll die here? It’s a fallacy to assume that, simply because all previous Vorster missionaries have been martyred here, I’ll be martyred, too.”

“Our own position is uneasy enough on Venus. Yours will be impossible. Venus doesn’t want you. Shall I tell you the only way you’ll possibly live more than a month here?”

“Do.”

“Join us. Trade in that blue tunic for a green one. We have need for all the capable men we can get.”

“Don’t be absurd. Do you really think I’d do any such thing?”

“It isn’t beyond possibility. Many men have left your order for mine—myself included.”

“I prefer martyrdom,” Martell said.

“In what way will that benefit anybody? Be reasonable, Brother. Venus is a fascinating place. Wouldn’t you like to live to see a little of it? Join us. You’ll learn the rituals soon enough. You’ll see that we aren’t such ogres. And—”

“Thank you,” said Martell. “Will you excuse me now?”

“I had hoped you would be our guest for dinner.”

“That won’t be possible. I’m expected at the Martian Embassy, if I don’t meet any more local beasts in the road.”

Mondschein looked unruffled by Martell’s rejection of his offer—an offer that could not have been made, Martell thought, in any great degree of seriousness. The older man said gravely, “Allow me, at least, to offer you transportation to town. Surely your pride in your own sanctity will permit you to accept that.”

Martell smiled. “Gladly. It’ll make a good story to tell Coordinator Kirby—how the heretics saved my life and gave me a ride into town.”

“After making an attempt to seduce you from your faith.”

“Naturally. May I leave now?”

“It’ll be a few moments until I can arrange for the car. Would you like to wait outside?”

Martell bowed and made a grateful escape from the heretical chapel. Passing through the building, he emerged into the yard, a cleared space some fifty feet square bordered by scaly, grayish-green shrubbery whose thick-petaled black flowers had an oddly carnivorous look. Four Venusian boys, including Martell’s rescuer, were at work on an excavation. They were using manual tools—shovels and picks—which gave Martell the uncomfortable sensation of having slid back into the nineteenth century. Earth’s gaudy array of gadgetry, so conspicuous and so familiar, could not be found here.

The boys glared coldly at him and went on with their work. Martell watched. They were lean and supple, and he guessed that their ages ranged from about nine to fourteen, though it was hard to tell. They looked enough alike to be brothers. Their movements were graceful, almost elegant, and their bluish skins gleamed lightly with perspiration. It seemed to Martell that the bony structure of their bodies was even more alien than he had thought; they did improbable things with their joints as they worked.

Abruptly, they tossed their picks and shovels aside and joined hands. The bright eyes closed a moment. Martell saw the loose dirt rise from the excavation pit and collect itself in a neat mound some twenty feet behind it. They’re pushers, Martell thought in wonder. Look at them! Brother Mondschein appeared at that precise moment “The car is waiting, Brother,” he said smoothly.

four

As he entered the Venusian city, Martell could not take his mind from the casual feat of the four boys. They had scooped a few hundred pounds of loose soil from a pit, using esp abilities, and had smugly deposited it just where they wanted it to go.

Pushers! Martell trembled with barely suppressed excitement. The espers of Earth were a numerous tribe now, but their talents were mainly telepathic, not extending in the direction of telekinesis to any significant degree. Nor could the development of the powers be controlled. A program of scheduled breeding, now in its fourth or fifth generation, was intensifying the existing esp powers. It was possible for a gifted esper to reach into a man’s mind and rearrange its contents, or to probe for the deepest secrets. There were a few precogs, too, who ranged up and down the time sequence as though all points along it were one point, but they usually burned out in adolescence, and their genes were lost to the pool. Pushers—teleports—who could move physical objects from place to place were as rare as phoenixes on Earth. And here were four of them in a Harmonist chapel’s back yard on Venus!

New tensions quivered in Martell. He had made two unexpected discoveries on his first day: the presence of Harmonists on Venus, and the presence of pushers among the Harmonists. His mission had taken on devastating new urgency, suddenly. It was no longer merely a matter of gaining a foothold in an unfriendly world. It was a matter of being outstripped and surpassed by a heresy thought to be in decline.

The car Mondschein had provided dropped Martell off at the Martian Embassy, a blocky little building fronting on the wide plaza that seemed to be the entire town. The Martians had been instrumental in getting Martell to Venus in the first place, and a call on the Ambassador was of priority importance.

The Martians breathed Earth-type air, and they did not care to adapt themselves to Venusian conditions. Once he entered the building, therefore, Martell had to accept a breathing-hood that would protect him against the atmosphere of the planet of his birth.

The Ambassador, Freeman Nat Weiner, was about twice Martell’s age, perhaps even older—close to ninety, even. His frame was powerful, with shoulders so wide they seemed out of proportion to his hips and legs.

Weiner said, “So you’re here. I really thought you had more sense.”

“We’re determined people, Freeman Weiner.”

“So I know. I’ve been studying your ways for a long time.” Weiner’s eyes became remote. “More than sixty years, in fact. I knew your Coordinator Kirby before his conversion—did he ever tell you that?”

“He didn’t mention it,” Martell said. His flesh crept Kirby had joined the Vorster Brotherhood about twenty years before Martell had been born. To live a century was nothing unusual these days, and Vorst himself was surely into his twelfth or thirteenth decade, but it was chilling all the same to think of such a span of years.

Weiner smiled. “I came to Earth to negotiate a trade deal, and Kirby was my chaperon. He was with the U.N. then. I gave him a hard time. I was a drinker then. Somehow I don’t think he’ll ever forget that night.” His gaze riveted on Martell’s unblinking eyes. “I want you to know, Brother, that I can’t provide any protection for you if you’re attacked. My responsibility extends only to Martian nationals.”

“I understand.”

“My advice is the same as it’s been from the start. Go back to Earth and live to a ripe old age.”

“I can’t do that, Freeman Weiner. I’ve come with a mission to accomplish.”

“Ah, dedication! Wonderful! Where will you build your chapel?”

“On the road leading to town. Perhaps closer to town than the Harmonist place.”

“And where will you stay until it’s built?”

“I’ll sleep in the open.”

“There’s a bird here,” Weiner said. “They call it a shrike. It’s as big as a dog, and its wings look like old leather, and it has a beak like a spear. I once saw it dive from five hundred feet at a man taking a nap in an open field. The beak pinned him to the ground.”

Unperturbed, Martell said, “I survived an encounter with a Wheel today. Perhaps I can dodge a shrike, too. I don’t intend to be frightened away.”

Weiner nodded. “I wish you luck,” he said.

Luck was about all Martell was going to get from the Ambassador, but he was grateful even for that. The Martians were cool toward Earth and all it produced, including its religions. They did not actually hate Earthmen, as the Venusians of both castes appeared to do; the Martians were still Earth-like themselves, and not changed creatures whose bond with the mother world was tenuous at best. But the Martians were tough, aggressive frontiersmen who looked out only for themselves. They served as go-betweens for Earth and Venus because there was profit in it; they accepted missionaries from Earth because there was no harm in it. They were tolerant, in their way, but aloof.

Martell left the Martian Embassy and set about his tasks. He had money and he had energy. He could not hire Venusian labor directly, because it would be an act of pollution for a Venusian even of the low caste to work for an Earthman, but it was possible to commission workmen through Weiner. The Martians, naturally, received a fee for serving as agents.

Workmen were hired and a modest chapel was erected. Martell set up his pocket-size reactor and readied it for use. Alone in the chapel, he stood in silence as the Blue Fire flickered into glowing life.

Martell had not lost his capacity for awe. He was a worldly man, no mystic, yet the sight of the radiation streaming from the water-shielded reactor worked its magic on him, and he dropped to his knees, touching his forehead in the gesture of submission. He could not carry his religious feeling to the stage of idolatry, as the Harmonists did, but he was not without a sense of the might of the movement to which he had pledged his life.

The first day Martell simply carried out the ceremonies of dedication. On the second and third and fourth he waited hopefully for some low-caster who might be curious enough to enter the chapel. None came.

Martell did not care to seek worshipers, not just yet. He preferred that his converts be voluntary, if possible. The chapel remained empty. On the fifth day it was entered—but only by a frog-like creature ten inches long, armed with wicked little horns on its forehead and delicate, deadly-looking spines that sprouted from its shoulders. Were there no life-forms on this planet that went without armor or weaponry, Martell wondered? He shooed the frog out. It growled at him and lunged at his foot with its horns. Martell drew his foot back barely in time, interposing a chair. The frog stabbed at the wood, sank inch-deep with the left horn; when it withdrew, an iridescent fluid trickled down the leg of the chair, burning a pathway through the wood. Martell had never been attacked by a frog before. On the second try he got the animal out the door without suffering harm. A pretty planet, he thought.

The next day came a more cheering visitor: the boy Elwhit. Martell recognized him as one of the boys who had been teleporting dirt behind the Harmonist place. He appeared from nowhere and said to Martell, “You’ve got Trouble Fungus out there.”

“Is that bad?”

“It kills people. Eats them. Don’t step in it. Are you really a religious?”

“I like to think so.”

“Brother Christopher says you shouldn’t be trusted, that you’re a heretic. What’s a heretic?”

“A heretic is a man who disagrees with another man’s religion,” Martell said. “I happen to think Brother Christopher’s the heretic, as a matter of fact. Would you like to come inside?”

The boy was wide-eyed, endlessly curious, restless. Martell longed to question him about his apparent telekinetic powers, but he knew it was more important at the moment to snare him as a convert. Questions at this point might only frighten him away. Patiently, elaborately, Martell explained what the Vorsters had to offer. It was hard to gauge the boy’s reaction. Did abstract concepts mean anything to a ten-year-old? Martell gave him Vorst’s book, the simple text. The boy promised to come back.

“Watch out for the Trouble Fungus,” he said as he left.

A few days passed. Then the boy returned, with the news that Mondschein had confiscated his book. Martell was pleased at that, in a way. It was a sign of panic among the Harmonists. Let them turn Vorster teachings into something forbidden, and he’d win all of Mondschein’s four thousand converts away.

Two days after Elwhit’s second visit, Martell had a different caller—a broad-faced man in Harmonist robes. Without introducing himself, he said, “You’re trying to steal that boy, Martell. Don’t do it.”

“He came of his own free will. You can tell Mondschein—”

“The child has curiosity. But he’s the one who’ll suffer. If you keep allowing him to come here. Turn him away the next time, Martell. For his own sake.”

“I’m trying to take him away from you for his own sake,” the Vorster replied quietly. “And any others who’ll come to me. I’m ready to battle with you to have him.”

“You’ll destroy him,” said the Harmonist. “He’ll be pulled apart in the struggle. Let him be. Turn him away.”

Martell did not intend to yield. Elwhit was his opening wedge into Venus, and it would be madness to turn him away.

Later that same day there came another visitor, no friendlier than the horned frog. He was a burly Venusian of the lower caste, with armpit-daggers bristling on both sides of his chest He had not come to worship. He pointed to the reactor and said, “Shut that thing off and dispose of the fissionables within ten hours.”

Martell frowned. “It’s necessary to our religious observance.”

“It’s fissionables. Not allowed to run a private reactor here.”

“There was no objection at customs,” Martell pointed out. “I declared the cobalt-60 for what it was and explained the purpose. It was allowed through.”

“Customs is customs. You’re in town now, and I say no fissionables. You need a permit to do what you’re doing.”

“Where do I get a permit?” asked Martell mildly.

“From the police. I’m the police. Request denied. Shut that thing off.”

“And if I don’t?”

For an instant Martell thought the sell-styled policeman would stab him on the spot The man drew back as though Martell had spat in his face. After an ugly silence he said, “Is that a challenge?”

“It’s a question.”

“I ask you on my authority to get rid of that reactor. If you defy my authority, you’re challenging me. Clear? You don’t look like a fighting man. Be smart and do as I say. Ten hours. You hear?”

He went out.

Martell shook his head sadly. Law enforcement a matter of personal pride? Well, it was only to be expected. More to the point: they wanted his reactor off, and without the reactor his chapel would not be a chapel. Could he appeal? To whom? If he dueled with the intruder and slew him, would that give him the right to run the reactor? He could hardly take such a step, anyway.

Martell decided not to give up without a struggle. He sought the authorities, or what passed for authorities here, and after spending four hours waiting to be admitted to the office of a minor official, he was told clearly and coldly to dismantle his reactor at once. His protests were dismissed.

Weiner was no help, either. “Shut the reactor down,” the Martian advised.

“I can’t function without it,” said Martell. “Where’d they get this law about private operation of reactors?”

“They probably invented it to take care of you,” Weiner suggested amiably. “There’s no help for it, Brother. You’ll have to shut down.”

Martell returned to the chapel. He found Elwhit waiting on the steps. The boy looked disturbed.

“Don’t close,” he said.

“I won’t.” Martell beckoned him inside. “Help me, Elwhit. Teach me. I need to know.”

“What?”

“How do you move things around with your mind?”

“I reach into them,” the boy said. “I catch hold of what’s inside. There’s a strength. It’s hard to say.”

“Is it something you were taught to do?”

“It’s like walking. What makes your legs move? What makes them stand up underneath you?”

Martell simmered with frustration. “Can you tell me what it feels like when you do it?”

“Warm. On top of my head. I don’t know. I don’t feel much. Tell me about the electron, Brother Nicholas. Sing the song of photons to me.”

“In a moment,” Martell said. He crouched down to get on the boy’s eye level. “Can your mother and father move things?”

“A little. I can move them more.”

“When did you find out you could do it?”

“The first time I did it.”

“And you don’t know how you—” Martell paused. What was the use? Could a ten-year-old boy find words to describe a telekinetic function? He did it, as naturally as he breathed. The thing to do was to ship him to Earth, to Santa Fe, and let the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences have a look at him. Obviously, that was impossible. The boy would never go, and it would hardly be proper to spirit him away.

“Sing me the song,” Elwhit prodded.

“In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum, and the holy angstrom—”

The chapel door flew open and three Venusians entered: the police chief and two deputies. The boy pivoted instantly and skittered past them, out the back way.

“Get him!” the police chief roared.

Martell shouted a protest. It was useless. The two deputies pounded after the boy, into the yard. Martell and the police chief followed.

The deputies closed in on the boy. Abruptly, the meatier one was flipping through the air, legs kicking violently as he headed for the deadly patch of Trouble Fungus in the underbrush. He landed hard. There was a muffled groan. Trouble Fungus, Martell had learned by watching it, moved quickly. The carnivorous mold would devour anything organic; its sticky filaments, triggering with awesome speed, went to work instantly. The deputy was trapped in a network of loops whose adhesive enzymes immediately began to operate. Struggling only made it worse. The man thrashed and tugged, but the loops multiplied, stapling him to the ground. And now the digestive enzymes were coming into play. A sweet, sickly odor rose from the Trouble Fungus clump.

Martell had no time to study the process of dissolution. The man caught in his fatal collars of slime was close to death, and the surviving deputy, his face almost black with fear and rage, had drawn a knife on the boy.

Elwhit knocked it out of his hand. He tried to gather strength for another cast into the fungus patch, but his face was sweat-speckled, and bunching muscles in his cheeks told of the inward struggle. The deputy rocked and swayed, resisting the telekinesis. Martell stood frozen. The police chief bounded forward, knife on high.

“Elwhit!” Martell screamed.

Even a telekinetic has no way of defending himself against a stab in the back. The blade went deep. The boy dropped. In the same moment, with the pressure withdrawn, the deputy slipped and fell on his face. The chief seized the wounded, convulsing boy and hurled him into the Trouble Fungus. He landed beside the soft mass of the dead deputy, and Martell watched in honor as the sinister loops locked into place. Sickness assailed him. He ran halfway through the disciplinary techniques before his mind would work properly again.

By then the police chief and his deputy had recovered their calmness. With scarcely a look at the two dissolving corpses, they seized Martell and hauled him back into the chapel.

“You killed a boy,” Martell said, breaking loose. “Stabbed him in the back. Where’s your honor?”

“I’ll settle that before our court, priest. The boy was a murderer. And under the spell of dangerous doctrines. He knew we were closing you down. It was a violation to be here. Why isn’t that reactor off?”

Martell groped for words. He wanted to say that he did not intend to accept defeat, that he was staying on here, determined to fight even to the point of martyrdom, despite their order that he shut up shop. But the brutal killing of his only convert had smashed his will.

“I’ll shut the reactor down,” he said hollowly.

“Go and do it.”

Martell dismantled it. They waited, exchanging pleased glances when the light flickered out. The deputy said, “It isn’t a real chapel without the light burning, is it, priest?”

“No,” Martell replied. “I’m closing the chapel, too, I guess.”

“Didn’t last long.”

“No.”

The chief said, “Look at him with his gills flapping. All tricked out to look like one of us, and who’s he fooling? We’ll teach him.”

They moved in on him. They were burly, powerful men. Martell was unarmed, but he had no fear of them. He could defend himself. They neared him, two nightmare figures, grotesquely inhuman, their eyes bright and slitted, inner lids sliding tensely up and down, small nostrils flickering, gills atremble. Martell had to force himself to remember that he was a monster as much as they; he was a changed one now. Their brother.

“Let’s give him a farewell party,” the deputy said.

“You’ve made your point,” said Martell. “I’m closing the chapel Do you need to attack me, too? What are you afraid of? Are ideas that dangerous to you?”

A fist crashed into the pit of his stomach. Martell swayed. caught his breath, forced himself to remain cool. The edge of a hand chopped at his throat. Martell slapped at it, deflected it, and seized the wrist. There was a momentary exchange of ions and the deputy fell back, cursing.

“Look out! He’s electric!”

“I mean no harm,” said Martell mildly. “Let me go in peace.

Hands went to daggers. Martell waited. Then, slowly, the tension ebbed. The Venusians moved away, apparently willing to let the matter end here. They had, after all, succeeded in throttling the Vorster mission, and now they appeared to have qualms about dealing with the defeated missionary.

“Get yourself out of town, Earthman,” the police chief grumbled. “Go where you belong. Don’t come mucking around here with your phony religion. We aren’t buying any. Go!”

five

There was no blackness quite like the black of the night sky of Venus, Martell thought. It was like a layer of wool swathing the vault of the heavens. Not a hint of a star, not a flicker of a moon-beam cut through that arch of darkness overhead. Yet there was light, occasional and intermittent: great predatory birds, hellishly luminous, skewered the darkness at unpredictable moments. Standing on the rear veranda of the Harmonist chapel, Martell watched a glowing creature soar past, no higher than a hundred feet up, near enough for Martell to see the row of hooked claws that studded the leading edges of the curved, back-swept wings.

“Our birds have teeth as well,” said Christopher Mondschein.

“And the frogs have horns,” Martell remarked. “Why is this planet so vicious?”

Mondachein chuckled. “Ask Darwin, my friend. It just happened that way. You’ve met our frogs, then? Deadly little beasts. And you’ve seen a Wheel. We have amusing fish, too. And carnivorous fauna. But we are without insects. Can you imagine that? No land arthropods at all. Of course, there are some delightful ones in the sea—a kind of scorpion bigger than a man, a son of lobster with disturbingly large claws—but no one goes into the sea here.”

“I understand why,” Martell said. Another luminescent bird swooped down, skimmed the trees, and rocketed away. From its flat head jutted a glowing fleshy organ the size of a melon, wobbling on a thick stem.

Mondschein said, “You wish to join us, after all?”

“That’s right.”

“Infiltrating, Martell? Spying?”

Color came to Martell’s checks. The surgeons had left him with the flush reaction, although he turned a dull gray when affected now. “Why do you accuse me?” he asked.

“Why else would you want to join us? You were haughty about it last week.”

“That was last week. My chapel is closed. I saw a boy who trusted me killed before my eyes. I have no wish to see more such murders.”

“So you admit that you were guilty in his death?”

“I admit that I allowed him to jeopardize his life,” Martell said.

“We warned you of it.”

“But I had no idea of the cruelty of the forces that would strike at me. Now I do. I can’t stand alone. Let me join you, Mondschein.”

“Too transparent, Martell. You came here bristling with the urge to be a martyr. You gave up too soon. Obviously you want to spy on our movement. Conversions are never that simple, and you’re not an easily swayed man. I suspect you, Brother.”

“Are you esping me?”

“Me? I don’t have a shred of ability. Not a shred. But I have common sense. I know a bit about spying, too. You’re here to sniff.”

Martell studied a gleaming bird high against the dark backdrop. “You refuse to accept me, then?”

“You can have shelter for the night. In the morning you’ll have to go. Sorry, Martell.”

No amount of persuasion would alter the Harmonist’s decision. Martell was not surprised, nor greatly distressed; joining the Harmonists had been a strategy of doubtful success, and he had more than half expected Mondschein to reject him. Perhaps if he had waited six months before applying, the response would have been different.

He remained aloof while the little group of Harmonists performed evening vespers. They were not called “vespers,” of course, but Martell could not avoid identifying the heretics with the older religion. Three altered Earthmen were stationed at the mission, and the voices of the two subordinates joined with Mondschein’s in hymns that seemed offensive in their religiosity and yet faintly moving at the same time. Seven low-caste Venusians took part in the service. Afterward Martell shared a dinner of unknown meat and acrid wine with the three Harmonists. They seemed comfortable enough in his presence, almost smug. One, Bradlaugh, was slim and fragile-looking, with elongated arms and comically blunt features. The other, Lazarus, was robust and athletic, his eyes oddly blank, his skin stretched mask-tight over his broad face. He was the one who had visited Martell’s ill-fated chapel. Martell suspected that Lazarus was an esper. His last name aroused the missionary’s curiosity.

“Are you related to the Lazarus?” Martell asked.

“His grandnephew. I never knew the man.”

“No one seems to have known him,” said Martell. “It often occurs to me that the esteemed founder of your heresy may have been a myth.”

Faces stiffened around the table. Mondschein said, “I met someone who knew him once. An impressive man, they say he was tall and commanding, with an air of majesty.”

“Like Vorst,” Martell said.

“Very much like Vorst. Natural leaders, both of them,” said Mondschein. He rose. “Brothers, good night.”

Martell was left alone with Bradlaugh and Lazarus. An uncomfortable silence followed; after a while Bradlaugh rose and said coolly, “I’ll show you to your room.”

The room was small, with a simple cot. Martell was content. Fewer religious symbols decorated the room than there might have been, and it was a place to sleep. He took care of his devotions quickly and closed his eyes. After a while sleep came—a thin crust of slumber over an abyss of turmoil.

The crust was pierced.

There came the sound of laughter, booming and harsh. Something thumped against the chapel walls. Martell struggled to wakefulness in time to hear a thick voice cry, “Give us the Vorster!”

He sat up. Someone entered his room: Mondschein, he realized. “They’re drunk,” the Harmonist whispered. “They’ve been roistering all over the countryside all night, and now they’re here to make trouble.”

“The Vorster!” came a roar from outside.

Martell peered through his window. At first he saw nothing; then, by the gleam of the light-cells studding the chapel’s outer walls, he picked out seven or eight titanic figures, striding unsteadily back and forth in the courtyard.

“High-casters!” Martell gasped.

“One of our espers brought the word an hour ago,” said Mondschein. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ll go out and calm them.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“It’s not me they’re after,” said Mondschein, and left.

Martell saw him emerge from the building. He was dwarfed by the ring of drunken Venusians, and from the way they closed in on him, Martell was certain that they would do him some harm. But they hesitated. Mondschein faced them squarely. At this distance Martell could not hear what they were saying. A parley of some sort, perhaps. The big men were armed and reeling. Some glowing creature shot past the knot of figures, giving Martell a sudden glimpse of the faces of the high-caste men: alien, distorted, terrifying. Their cheekbones were like knifeblades; their eyes mere silts. Mondschein, his back to the window now, was gesticulating, no doubt talking rapidly and earnestly.

One of the Venusians scooped up a twenty-pound boulder and lobbed it against the mission’s whitewashed wall. Martell nibbled a knuckle. Fragments of conversation came to him, ugly words: “Let us have him…We could take you all…Time we crushed all you toads…”

Mondschein’s hands were upraised now. Imploringly, Martell wondered, or was he simply trying to keep the Venusians at bay?

Martell thought of praying. But it seemed a hollow, futile gesture. One did not pray for direct reward, in the Brotherhood. One lived well and served the cause, and reward came. Martell felt tranquil. He slipped into his robe and went outside.

Never before had he been this close to a group of high-casters. There was a rank odor about them, an odor that reminded Martell of the scent of the Wheel. They stared in disbelief as the Vorster emerged.

“What do they want?” Martell asked.

Mondachein gaped at him. “Go back inside! I’m negotiating with them!”

One of the Venusians unfurled a sword. He drove it a foot into the spongy earth, leaned on it, and said, “There’s the priestling now! What are we waiting for?”

Mondschein said helplessly to Martell, “You shouldn’t have come out. There might have been a chance to quiet them down.”

“Not a chance. They’ll destroy your whole mission here if I don’t pacify them. I’ve got no right to bring that on you.”

“You’re our guest,” Mondschein reminded him.

Martell did not care to accept the charity of heretics. He had come to the Harmonists, as they had guessed, in the hope of spying; that had failed, as had the rest of his mission here, and he would not hide behind Mondschein’s green robe. He caught the older man’s arm and said, “Go inside. Fast!”

Mondschein shrugged and disappeared. Martell swung around to face thc Venusians.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

A gob of spittle caught him in the face. Without speaking di-rectly to him, one Venusian said, “We’ll skewer him and throw him in Ludlow Pond, eh?”

“Hack him! Spit him!”

“Stake him out for a Wheel!”

Martell said, “I came here in peace. I bring you the gift of life. Why won’t you listen? What are you afraid of?”

They were big children, he saw, reveling in their power to crush an ant. “Let’s all sit down by that tree, Allow me to talk to you for a while. I’ll take the drunkenness out of you. If you’ll only give me your hand—”

“Watch out!” a Venusian roared. “He stings!”

Martell reacted for the nearest of the giants. The man leaped back with a most ungallant display of edginess. An instant later, as though to atone for bolting that way, his sword was out, a glittering anachronism nearly as long as Martell himself. Two Venusians drew their daggers. They strutted forward, and Martell filled his altered lungs with alien air and waited for the shedding of his no-longer-red blood, and then suddenly he was no longer there.

“How did you get here?” Ambassador Nat Weiner asked.

“I wish I knew,” said Martell.

The sudden brightness of the Martian’s office stabbed at Martell’s eyes. He still could see the descending blades of the fearsome swords, and he was rocked by a sensation of unreality, as though he had left one dream to enter another in which he was dreaming yet a different thread.

“This is a maximum-security building,” said Weiner. “You have no right to be here.”

“I have no right even to be alive,” replied the missionary flatly.

six

Broodingly, Martell considered retreating to Earth to tell Santa Fe what he knew. He could go to the Vorst Center—where, less than a year ago, he had gone into a room as an Earthman, to be turned by whirling knives and lashing lasers into an alien thing. He could request an interview with Reynolds Kirby and let that grizzled, thin-lipped centenarian know that the Venusians had telekinesis, that they could deflect a Wheel or throw an attacker into Trouble Fungus or speed a living human figure safely across five miles and pass him through walls.

Santa Fe would have to know. The situation looked bad. Harmonists snugly established on Venus, and the place chock-full of teleports—it could mean a disastrous blow to Vorst’s master plan. Of course, the Vorsters on Earth had made great gains, too. They were masters of the planet. Their laboratories had run simulated life spans that showed a tally of from three to four hundred years, without organ replacement—simple regeneration from within, amounting to a kind of immortality. But immortality was only one Vorster goal. The other was transport to the unreachable stars.

And there the Harmonists had their big lead. They had teleports who already could work miracles. Given a few generations of genetic work, they might be sending expeditions to other solar systems. Once you could move a man five miles in safety, it was only a quantitative jump, not qualitative, to get him to Procyon. Martell had to tell them. Santa Fe called to him—that vast sprawl of buildings where technicians split genes and laboriously pasted them back together, where esper families submitted to an endless round of tests, where bionics men performed wonders beyond comprehension.

But he did not go. A personal report seemed unnecessary. A message cube would do just as well. Earth now was an alien world to Martell, and he was uneasy about returning to it, living in breathing-suits. He balked at making the return journey.

Through the good offices of Nat Weiner, Martell recorded a cube and had it shipped to Kirby at Santa Fe. He remained at the Martian Embassy while waiting for his reply. He had set forth the situation on Venus as he understood it, expressing his great fear that the Harmonists were too far ahead and would have the stars. In time Kirby’s reply arrived. He thanked Martell for his invaluable data. And he expressed a calming note: the Harmonists, he said, were men. If they were to reach the stars, it would be a human achievement. Not theirs, not ours, but everyone’s, for the way would be opened. Did Brother Martell follow that reasoning, Kirby asked?

Martell felt quicksand beneath him. What was Kirby saying? Means and ends were hopelessly jumbled. Was the purpose of the order fulfilled if heretics conquered the universe? In distress, he stood before the improvised altar in the room Weiner had given him, seeking answers to unaskable questions.

A few days later he returned to the Harmonists.

seven

Martell stood with Christopher Mondschein by the edge of a sparkling lake. Through the clouds came the dull glow of the masked sun, imparting a faint gleam to the water-that-wasnot-water. It was not that trickle of sunlight that made the water sparkle, though; it teemed with luminous coelenterates that lined its shallow bottom. Their tentacles, waving in the currents, emitted a gentle greenish radiance.

There were other creatures in the lake, too. Martell saw them gliding beneath the surface, ribbed and bony, with gnashing jaws and metallic fins. Now and then a snout split the water and a slim, ugly creature whipped twenty yards through the air before subsiding. From the depths came writhing, sucker-tipped tendrils that belonged to monsters Martell did not care to know.

Mondschein said, “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“When I went out to face the Venusians?”

“No. Afterward, when you holed up with the Martians. I thought you were making arrangements to go back to Earth. You know it’s hopeless to try to plant a Vorster chapel here.”

“I know,” Martell said. “But I’ve got that boy’s death on my conscience. I can’t leave. I lured him into visiting me, and he died for it. He’d be alive if I had turned him away. And I’d be dead if you hadn’t had one of your other little Venusians teleport me to safety.”

“Elwhit was one of our finest prospects,” Mondschein said sadly. “But he had this streak of wildness—the thing that brought him to us in the first place. A restless boy’ he was. I wish you had left him alone.”

“I did what I had to do,” Martell replied. ‘I’m sorry it worked out so awfully.” He followed the path of a sinuous black serpent that swept from right to left across the lake. It extended telescoping arms in a sudden terrifying gesture and enveloped a low-flying bird. Martell said carefully, “I didn’t came back here to spy on you. I came back to join your order.”

Moudschein’s domed blue forehead wrinided a little. “Please. We’ve been through all this already.”

“Test me! Have one of your espers read me! I swear it, Mondschein. I’m sincere.”

“They’ve embedded a pack of hypnotic commands in you in Santa Fe. I know. I’ve been through it myself. They sent you here to be a spy, but you don’t know it yourself, and if we probed you, we might have trouble finding out the truth.You’ll soak up all you can about us, and then you’ll return to Santa Fe, and they’ll toss you to a debriefing esper who’ll pump it all out of you. Eh?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Listen,” said Martell, “I don’t think they did anything to my mind in Santa Fe. I came to you because I belong on Venus. I’ve been changed.” He held out his hands. “My skin is blue. My metabolism is a biologist’s night-mare. I’ve got gills. I’m a Venusian, and this is where the changed ones go. But I can’t be a Vorster here, because the natives won’t have it. Therefore I’ve got to join you. Do you see?”

Mondachein nodded. “I still think you’re a spy.”

“I tell you—”

“Stay calm,” said the Harinonist. “Be a spy. That’s quite all right. You can stay. You can join us. You’ll be our bridge, Brother. You’ll be the link that will span the Vorsters and the Harmonists. Play both sides if you like. That’s exactly what we want.”

Once again Martell felt the foundations giving way beneath his feet He imagined himself in a dropshaft with the gravity field suddenly gone—falling, falling, endlessly falling. He peered into the mild eyes of the older man and perceived that Mondschein must be in the grip of some crazy ecumenical scheme, some private fantasy that—

He said, “Are you trying to put the orders back together?”

“Not personally. It’s part of the plan of Lazarus.” Marteil thought Mondschein was referring to his own assistant. He said, “Is he in charge here or are you?”

Smiling, Mondschein replied, “I don’t mean my Lazarus here. I mean David Lazarus, the founder of our order.”

“He’s dead.”

“Certainly. But we still follow the course he mapped for us half a century ago. And that course envisages the eventual reuniting of the orders. It has to come, Martell. We each have something the other wants. You have Earth and immortality. We have Venus and teleportation. There’s bound to be a pooling of interests, and possibly you’ll be one of the men who’ll help to bring it about.”

“You aren’t serious!”

“As serious as I know how to be,” said Mondschein. Martell saw the darkening of his expression; the amiable mask dropped away. “Do you want to live forever, Martell?”

“Tm not eager to die. Except for some overriding purpose, of course.”

“The translation is that you want to live as long as you can, with honor.”

“Right”

“The Vorsters are getting nearer to that goal every day. We have some idea of what’s going on in Santa Fe. Once, about forty years ago, we stole the contents of an entire longevity lab. It helped us, but not enough. We didn’t have the substratum of knowledge. On the other hand, we’ve made some strides, too, as I think you’ve discovered. Will it be worth a reunion, do you think? We’ll have the stars—you’ll have eternity. Stay here and spy, Brother. I think—and I know Lazarus thought—that the fewer secrets we have, the faster our progress will be.”

Martell did not reply. A boy emerged from the woods—a Venusian boy, possibly the one who had saved him from the Wheel, perhaps the dead Elwhit’s brother. They looked so interchangeable in their strangeness. Instantly Mondschein’s manner changed. He donned a bland smile; cosmic matters receded.

“Bring us a fish,” he told the boy.

“Yes, Brother Christopher.”

There was silence. Veins throbbed on the boy’s forehead. In the center of the lake the water boiled, white foam splashing upward. A creature appeared, scaly and dull gold in color. It hovered in the air, ten feet of frustrated fury, its great underslung jaw opening and closing impotently. The beast soared toward the group on the shore.

“Not that one!” Mondschein gasped.

The boy laughed. The huge fish slipped back into the lake. An instant later something opalescent throbbed on the ground at Martell’s feet—a toothy, snapping thing a foot and a half long, with fins that nearly were legs, and a fan-like tall in which wicked spikes stirred and quivered. Martell leaped away, but he was in no danger, he realized. The fish’s skull caved in as though smitten by an invisible fist, and it lay still. Martell knew terror in that moment. The slender, laughing boy, who had so mischievously pulled that monster from the waters and then this equally deadly little thing, could kill with a flicker of his frontal lobes.

Martell stared at Mondschein. “Your pushers—are they all Venusians?”

“All.”

“I hope you can keep them under control.”

“I hope so, too,” Mondschein replied. He seized the dead fish carefully by a stubby fin, holding it so the tail-spikes pointed away from him. “A great delicacy,” he said. “Once we remove the poison sacs, of course. We’ll catch two or three more and have a devilfish dinner tonight to celebrate your conversion, Brother Martell.”

eight

They gave him a room, and they gave him menial jobs to do, and in their spare time they instructed him in the tenets of Transcendent Harmony. Martell found the room sufficient and the labor unobjectionable, but it was a more difficult matter to swallow the theology. He could not pretend, to himself or to them, that it had any meaning for him. Warmed-over Christianity, a dollop of Islam, a tinge of latter-day Buddhism—all spread over a structure borrowed shamelessly from Vorst—it was an unpalatable mixture for Martell. There was syncretism enough in the Vorster teachings, but Martell accepted those because he had been born to them. Schooling himself in heresy was a different matter.

They began with Vorst, accepting him as a prophet just as Christianity respected Moses and Islam honored Jesus. But, of course, there was the later dispensation, represented by the figure of David Lazarus. Vorster writings made no mention of Lazarus. Martell knew of him only from his studies in the history of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, which mentioned Lazarus in passing as a tangential figure, an early supporter of Vorst’s and then an early dissenter.

But Vorst lived, and, so said both groups, he would live forever, in tune with the cosmos, the First Immortal. Lazarus was dead, a martyr to honesty, cruelly betrayed and slain by the domineering Vorsters in their moment of triumph on Earth.

The Book of Lazarus told the sad story. Martell twitched beneath his skin as he read it: Lazarus was trusting and without guile. But the men whose hearts were hard came upon him and slew him in the night, and fed his body to the converter so that not even a molecule remained. And when Vorst learned of their deed, he wept and said, “I wish you had slain me instead, for now you have given him an immortality he can never lose…”

Martell could find nothing in the Harmonist scriptures that was actually discreditable to Vorst. Even the assassination of

Lazarus itself clearly was shown to be the work of underlings, carried out without Vorst’s knowledge or desire. And through the writings ran an expression of hope that one day the faith would be reunited, though it was stressed that the Harmonists must submit to unity only out of a position of strength, and in complete equality.

A few months before, Martell would have regarded their pretensions as absurd. On Earth they were a pip-squeak movement losing members from year to year. Now, among them if not entirely of them, he saw that he had badly underestimated their power. Venus was theirs. The high-caste natives might boast and swagger, but they were no longer the masters. There were espers among the downtrodden lower-caste Venusians—pushers, no less—and they had given their destinies into Harmonist hands.

Martell worked. He learned. He listened. And he feared.

The stormy season came. From the eternal clouds there burst tongues of lightning that set all Venus ablaze. Torrents of bitter rain flailed the flat plains. Trees five hundred feet tall were ripped from the ground and hurled great distances. From time to time, high-casters arrived at the chapel to sneer or to threaten, and in the shrieking gales they roared their blustering defiance, while within the building grinning low-caste boys waited to defend their teachers if necessary. Once Martell saw three high-caste men thrown twenty yards back from the entrance as they tried to break in. “A stroke of lightning,” they told one another. “We’re lucky to be alive.”

In the spring came warmth. Stripping to his alien skin, Martell worked in the fields, Bradlaugh and Lazarus beside him. He did not yet teach at all. He was well versed by now in the Harmonist teachings, but it was all from the outside in, and a seemingly impermeable barrier of skepticism prevented it from getting deeper.

Then, on a steamy day when sweat rolled in rivers from the altered pores of the four former Earthmen at the Harmonist chapel, Brother Leon Bradlaugh joined the blessed company of martyrs. It happened swiftly. They were in the fields, and a shadow crossed above them, and a silent voice within Martell screamed, “Watch out!”

He could not move. But this was not his day to die. Something plummeted from the sky, something heavy and leather-winged, and Martell saw a beak a yard long plunge into Bradlaugh’s chest, and there was the fountaining of coppery blood. Bradlaugh lay outstretched with the shrike on him, and the great beak was withdrawn, and Martell heard a sound of rending and tearing.

They gave the last rites to what was left of Bradlaugh. Brother Christopher Mondschein presided, and called Martell to his side afterward.

“There are only three of us now,” he said. “Will you teach, Brother Martell?”

“I’m not one of you.”

“You wear a green tunic. You know our creed. Do you still think of yourself as a Vorster, Brother?”

“I don’t know what I am,” answered Martell. “I need to think about this.”

“Give me your answer soon. There’s much to be done here, Brother.”

Martell did not realize that he would know within a day where he really stood. A day after Bradlaugh’s funeral the regular thrice-weekly passenger ship from Mars arrived. Martell knew nothing of it until Mondschein came to him and said, “Take one of the boys in the car, and do it quickly. A man needs saving!”

Martell did not ask questions. Somehow, news had traveled down a chain of espers, and it was his task simply to obey. He entered the car. One of the little Venusian acolytes slipped in beside him.

“Which way?” Martell asked.

The boy gestured. Martell thumbed the starter. The car sped down the road, toward the airport. When they had gone two and a half miles, the boy grunted a command to halt. The car stopped.

A figure in a blue tunic stood by the side of the road, his back to the bole of a mighty tree. Two suitcases lay open on the high-way, and a razor-backed beast with a flattened snout and boar-like tusks was rooting through them, while its mate charged the newly arrived Vorster. The beleaguered man was kicking and lashing at the beast.

The boy hopped from the car. Without sign of strain, he caused the two animals to rise and slam into trees on the far side of the road. They dropped to the ground, looking dazed but determined. The boy levitated them again and struck their heads together. When they fell this time, they swung around and fled into the underbrush.

Martell said, “Venus always seems to welcome new-corners like that. My greeting committee was a thing called a Wheel, which I hope you never meet. I’d be in ribbons now except that a Venusian boy was kind enough to teleport it over on its side. Are you a missionary?”

The man seemed too dazed to reply immediately. He knotted his hands together, released them, adjusted his tunic. Finally he said, “Yes—yes, I am. From Earth.”

“Surgically changed, then?”

“That’s right.”

“So am I. I’m Nicholas Martell. How are things in Santa Fe, Brother?”

The newcomer’s lips tightened. He was a fleshless little man, a year or two younger than Martell. He said, “How can that matter to you if you’re Martell? Martell the heretic? Martell the renegade?”

“No,” Martell said. “That is—I—”

He fell silent His hands tensely smoothed the fabric of his Harmonist green tunic. His cheeks were burning. He realized painfully the truth about himself—that the change in him had worked inward from without—and suddenly he could not meet the gaze of his altered successor in the Venus mission, and he turned, staring into the thicket of the no longer very alien forest.