To Open the Sky

one

The surgical amphitheater was a chilly horseshoe lit by a pale violet glow. At the north end, windows on the level of the second gallery admitted frosty New Mexico sun-light. From where he sat, overlooking the operating table, Noel Vorst could see the bluish mountains in the middle distance beyond the confines of the research center. The mountains did not interest him. Neither did what was taking place on the operating table. But he kept his lack of interest to himself.

Vorst had not needed to attend the operation in person, of course. He knew already that a successful outcome was improbable, and so did everyone else. But the Founder was 144 years old, and thought it useful to appear in public as often as his strength could sustain the effort, it did not do to have people think he had lapsed into senility.

Down below, the surgeons were clustered about a bare brain. Vorst had watched them lift the dome of a skull and thrust their scalpels of light deep into the wrinkled gray mass. There were ten billion neurons in that block of tissue, and an infinity of axonal terminals and dendritic receptors. The surgeons hoped to rearrange the synaptic nets of that brain, altering the protein-molecular switchgear to render the patient more useful to Vorst’s plan.

Folly, the old man thought. He hid his pessimism and sat quietly, listening to the pulsing of the blood in his own glossy artificial arteries.

What they were doing down there was remarkable, of course. Summoning all the resources of modem microsurgery, the leading men of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences were altering the protein-protein molecular recognition patterns within a human brain. Twist the circuits about a bit: change the transsynaptic structures to build a better link between pre- and postsynaptic membranes; shunt individual synaptic inputs from one dendritic tree to another; in short, reprogram the brain to make it capable of doing what Noel Vorst wanted it to be capable of doing.

Which was to serve as the propulsive force needed to hurl a team of explorers across the gulf of light-years to another star.

It was an extraordinary project. For some fifty years the surgeons here at Vorst’s Santa Fe research center had prepared for it by meddling with the brains of cats and monkeys and dolphins. Now they had at last begun operating on human subjects. The patient on the table was a middle-grade esper, a precog with poor timebinding ability; his life expectancy was on the order of six months, and then a burnout could be anticipated. The precog knew all about that, which was why he had volunteered to be the subject. The most skilful surgeons in the world were at work on him.

There were only two things wrong with the project, Vorst knew: It was not likely to succeed.

And it was not at all necessary in the first place.

You did not tell a group of dedicated men, however that their life’s work was pointless. Besides, there was always the faint hope that they might artificially create a pusher—a telekinetic—down there. So Vorst dutifully attended the operation. The men on the amphitheater floor knew that the Founder’s numinous presence was with them. Though they did not look up toward the gallery where Vorst sat, they knew the withered but still vigorous old man was smiling benignly down on them, cushioned against the pull of Earth by the webfoam cradle that sheltered his ancient limbs.

The lenses of his eyes were synthetic. The coils of his intestines had been fashioned from laboratory polymers. The stoutly pumping heart came from an organ bank. Little remained of the original Noel Vorst but the brain itself, which was intact though awash with the anticoagulants that preserved it from disabling strokes.

“Are you comfortable, sir?” the pale young acolyte at his side asked.

“Perfectly. Are you?”

The acolyte smiled at Vorst’s little joke. He was only twenty years old, and full of pride because it was his turn to accompany the Founder on his daily round. Vorst liked young people about him. They were tremendously in awe of him, naturally, but they managed to be warm and respectful without canonizing him. Within his body there throbbed the contributions of many a young Vorster volunteer: a film of lung tissue from one, a retina from another, kidneys from a pair of twins. He was a patchwork man, who carded the flesh of his movement about with him.

The surgeons were bending low over the exposed brain down there. Vorst could not see what they were doing. A pickup embedded in a surgical instrument relayed the scene to a lambent screen on the level of the viewing gallery, but even the enlarged image did not tell Vorst much. Baffled and bored, he retained his look of lively interest all the same.

Quietly he pushed a communicator stud on his armrest and said, “Is Coordinator Kirby going to get here soon?”

“He’s talking to Venus, sir.”

“Who’s ho speaking to? Lazarus or Mondschein?”

“Mondschein, sir. I’ll tell him to come to you as soon as he’s off.”

Vorst smiled. Protocol suggested that such high-level negotiations be carried on at the administrative level, between the executives and not between the prophets. So the second-in-commands were speaking: Hemispheric Coordinator Reynolds Kirby on behalf of the Vorsters of Earth, and Christopher Mondschein for the Harmonists who ran Venus. But in time it would be necessary to close the deal with a conference between those most closely in tune with the Eternal Oneness, and that would be the task of Vorst and Lazarus.

…to close the deal…

A tremor pulled Vorst’s right hand into a sudden claw. The acolyte swung around attentively, ready to jab buttons until he had restored the Founder’s metabolic equilibrium. Grimly Vorst compelled the hand to relax.

“I’m all right,” he insisted.

…to open the sky…

They were so close to the end now that it had all begun to seem like a dream. A century of scheming, playing chess with unborn antagonists, rearing a fantastic edifice of theocracy on a single slender, arrogant hope—Was it madness, Vorst wondered, to wish to reshape the pattern of history?

Was it monstrous, he asked himself, to succeed? On the operating table, the patient’s leg came swimming up out of a sea of swathing and kicked fitfully and convulsively at the air. The anesthetist’s fingers played over his console, and the esper who was standing by for such an emergency went into silent action. There was a flurry of activity about the table.

In that moment a tall, weathered-looking old man entered the gallery and presented himself to Vorst.

“How’s the operation going?” Reynolds Kirby asked.

“The patient just died,” said Vorst. “Things seemed to be going so well, too.”

two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vorst smiled. “There’s no ‘gene for telekinesis,’ as such, you know. It’s part of a constellation of genetic patterns. We’ve been trying consciously to duplicate it for thirty years, and we aren’t even close. We’ve also been trying a random approach, since that’s how the Venusians got the ability. No luck there, either.

And then there’s this synapse business: alter the brain itself, not the genes. That may get us somewhere, eventually. But I can’t wait another fifty years.”

“You’ll live that long, certainly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about this gargoyle? Any hope?”

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

“Then why keep trying to develop them here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only coincidental,” said the medic.

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

“Begin the examination,” Vorst murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirby took it and jammed his thumb against the seal. The envelope popped open. The message was from Mondschein. “Lazarus is ready to talk to Vorst,” it said.

three

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

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

She said, “Shall I turn myself on?”

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

“It’s pretty scary sometimes.”

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

“Just as you told it in your book?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inter—”

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

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

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

“Espers?”

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

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

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

Capo.”

“Sir? One subversive question, please?”

“Ask it.”

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

“I don’t know,” said Vorst.

four

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

Comfortable in his nest of webfoam, Vorst said, “I think it’s time to unite our movements, David. We complement one another. There’s nothing to gain from further division.”

“There might be something to lose by union,” said Lazarus. “We’re the younger branch. If you reabsorbed us, we’d be swallowed up in your hierarchy.”

“Not so. I guarantee you that your Harmonists will remain fully autonomous. More than that, I’ll guarantee you a dominant role in policy setting.”

“What kind of guarantee can you offer?”

“Let that pass a moment,” Vorst said. “I’ve got an interstellar team ready to go. They’ll be fully equipped in a matter of months. I mean fully equipped. They’ll be able to cope with anything they meet. But they have to have a way of getting out of the solar system. Give us a push, David. You’ve got the personnel now. We’ve monitored your experiments.”

Lazarus nodded, his gill-bunches quivering. “I won’t deny what we’ve done. We can push a thousand tons from here to Pluto. We can keep the same mass going right to infinity.”

“How long to get to Pluto?”

“Fast. I won’t tell you exactly how fast. But let’s just say the stars are in reach. Have been for the past eight or ten months. We could get a ship there in—oh, let’s call it a year. Of course, we’d have no way of maintaining contact. We can push, but we can’t talk across a dozen light-years. Can you?”

“No,” said Vorst. “The expedition would be out of contact the moment it got past radio range. It would have to send back a conventional relay ship to announce its safe arrival. We wouldn’t know for decades. But we have to try. Give us your men, David.”

“You realize it would burn out dozens of our most promising youngsters?”

“I realize. Give us your men, anyway. We understand techniques for repairing burnouts. Let them push the ship to the stars, and when they drop in their tracks, we’ll try to fix them up again. That’s what Santa Fe is for.”

“First drive them to exhaustion, then patch them together?” Lazarus asked. “That’s ruthless. Are the stars that important? I’d rather see these boys develop their powers here on Venus and remain intact.”

“We need them.”

“So do we?’

Vorst made use of the interval to flood his body with stimulants. He was tingling, palpitating with vigor by the time his reply was due. He said, “David, I own you. I made you and I want you. I put you to sleep in 2090 when you were nothing, an upstart, and I brought you back to life in 2152 and gave you a world. You owe me everything. Now I’m calling in that obligation. I’ve been waiting a hundred years to reach this position. You people finally have the espers who can send my people to the stars. Whatever the personal cost at your end, I want you to send them.”

The strain of that speech left Vorst dizzy with fatigue. But he had time to recover. Time to think, to wait for the reply. He had made his gamble, and now it was up to Lazarus. Vorst did not have many cards left to play.

The blue-faced figure in the screen was motionless; Vorst’s words had not even reached Venus yet. Lazarus’s reply was a long time in coming.

He said, “I didn’t think you’d be so blunt, Vorst. Why should I be grateful to you for reviving me, when you jammed me into that hole in the first place? Oh, I know. Because my movement was insignificant when you took me away from it and a major force when you brought me back. Do you take credit for that too?” A pause. “Never mind. I don’t want to give you my espers. Breed your own, if you want to get to the stars.”

“You’re talking foolishness. You want the stars, too, David. But you don’t have the technical facilities, up there in the backwoods, to equip an expedition. I do. Let’s join forces. It’s what you your-self want to do, no matter how tough you talk now. Let me tell you what’s holding you back from agreeing to join me, David. You’re afraid of what your own people will do to you when they find out you’ve agreed to cooperate. They’ll say you’ve sold out to the Vorsters. You’re frozen in a position you don’t believe, just because you don’t have real independence. Assert yourself, David. Use your powers. I put that planet into your hands. Now I want you to repay me.”

“How can I go to Mondschein and Martell and the others and tell them that I’ve meekly agreed to submit to you?” Lazarus asked. “They’re restless enough at having had a resurrected martyr slapped down on top of them. There are times when I expect them to martyr me again, and this time for good. I need a bargaining point.”

Vorst smiled. Victory was in his grasp now. He said, “Tell them, David. that I offer you supreme authority over both worlds. Tell them that the Brotherhood not only will welcome the Harmonists back, but that you’ll be made the sole head of both branches of the faith.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

“And what becomes of you?”

Vorst told him. And once the words were past his lips, the Founder sank back, limp with relief, knowing that he had made the final move in a game a century old, and that it had all come out in the right way.

five

Reynolds Kirby was with his therapist when the summons came to go to Vorst. The Hemispheric Coordinator lay in a nutrient bath, an adapted Nothing Chamber whose purpose was not oblivion but revivification. If Kirby had chosen to escape into temporary nothingness, he could have sealed himself off from the universe and entered complete suspension. He had long since outgrown the need for such amusements, though. Now he was content to loll in the nutrient bath, restoring the vital substances after a fatiguing day, while an esper therapist combed the snags from his soul.

Ordinarily, Kirby did not tolerate interruptions of such sessions. At his age he needed all the peace he could get. He had been born too early to share the quasi-immortality of the younger generations; his body could not snap back to vitality the way a twenty-second-century man’s body could, for he had not had the benefit of a century of Vorster research when he was born. There was one exception to Kirby’s rule, however: a summons from Vorst took precedence over everything, even a session of needed therapy.

The therapist knew it. Deftly he brought the session to a premature close and fortified Kirby for his return to the tensions of the world. In less than half an hour the Coordinator was on his way to the white dome-roofed building where Vorst made his headquarters.

Vorst looked shaky. Kirby had never seen the Founder look so drained of strength. The vault of Vorst’s forehead was like the roof of a skull, and the dark eyes blazed with a peculiarly dis-comfiting intensity. A low pumping sound was evident in the room: Vorst’s machinery, feeding strength to the ancient body. Kirby took the seat toward which Vorst beckoned him. Strong fingers in the upholstery grasped him and began to knead the tension out of him.

Vorst said, “I’ll be calling a council meeting in a little while to ratify the steps I’ve just taken. But before the entire group gathers. I want to discuss things with you, run them through once or twice.”

Kirby’s expression was guarded. After decades with Vorst, he could supply an instant translation: I’ve done something authoritarian, Vorst was saying, and I’m going to call in everybody to rubber-stamp an okay on it, but first I’m going to force a rubber-stamping out of you. Kirby was prepared to acquiesce in what-ever Vorst had done. He was not a weak man by nature, but one did not dispute the doings of Vorst. The last one who had seriously attempted to try was Lazarus, who had slept in a box on Mars for sixty years as a result.

Into Kirby’s wary silence Vorst murmured, “I’ve talked to Lazarus and closed the deal. He’s agreed to supply us with pushers, as many as we need. It’s possible we’ll have an interstellar expedition on its way by the end of the year.”

“I feel a little numb at that, Noel.”

“Anticlimactic, isn’t it? For a hundred years you move an inch at a time toward that goal, and suddenly you find yourself staring at the finish line, and the thrill of pursuit becomes the boredom of accomplishment.”

“We haven’t landed that expedition on another solar system yet,” Kirby reminded the Founder quietly.

“We will We will. That’s beyond doubt. We’re at the finish line now. Capodimonte’s already running personnel checks for the expedition. We’ll be outfitting the capsule soon. Lazarus’s bunch will cooperate, and off we’ll go. That much is certain.”

“How did you get him to agree, Noel?”

“By showing him how it will be after the expedition has set out. Tell me, have you given much thought to the goals of the Brotherhood once we’ve sent that first expedition?”

Kirby hesitated. “Well—sending more expeditions, I guess. And consolidating our position. Continuing the medical research. Carrying on with all our current work.”

“Exactly. A long smooth slide toward utopia. No longer an uphill climb. That’s why I won’t stay around to run things any longer.”

“What?”

“I’m going on the expedition,” Vorst said.

If Vorst had ripped off one of his limbs and clubbed him to the floor with it, Kirby would not have been more amazed. The Founder’s words hit him with an almost physical jolt, making him recoil. Kirby seized the arms of his chair, and in response the chair seized him, cradling him gently until his spasm of shock abated.

“You’re going?” Kirby blurted. “No. No. It’s beyond belief, Noel. It’s madness.”

“My mind’s made up. My work on Earth is done. I’ve guided the Brotherhood for a century, and that’s long enough. I’ve seen it take control of Earth, and by proxy I have Venus, too, and I have the cooperation if not exactly the support of the Martians. I’ve done all I’ve intended to do here. With the departure of the first interstellar expedition, I will have fulfilled what I’ll be so gaudy as to call my mission on Earth. It’s time to be moving along. I’ll try another solar system.”

“We won’t let you go,” Kirby said, astounded by his own words. “You can’t go! At your age—to get aboard a capsule bound for—”

“If I don’t go,” said Vorst, “there will be no capsule bound for anywhere.”

“Don’t talk that way, Noel. You sound like a spoiled child threatening to call the party off if we don’t play the game your way. There are others bound up in the Brotherhood, too.”

To Kirby’s surprise, Vorst looked merely amused at the harsh accusation. “I think you’re misinterpreting my words,” he said. “I don’t mean to say that unless I go along, I’ll halt the expedition. I mean that the use of Lazarus’s espers is contingent on my leaving. If I’m not aboard that capsule, he won’t lend his pushers.”

For the second time in ten Mondschein Kirby was rocked by amazement. This time there was pain, too, for he was aware that there had been a betrayal.

“Is that the deal you made, Noel?”

“It was a fair price to pay. A shift of power is long overdue. I step out of the picture; Lazarus becomes supreme head of the movement; you can be his vicar on Earth. We get the espers. We open the sky. It works well for everybody concerned.”

“No, Noel.”

“I’m weary of being here. I want to leave. Lazarus wants me to leave, too. I’m too big, I overtop the entire movement. It’s time for mortals to move in. You and Lazarus can divide the authority. He’ll have the spiritual supremacy, but you’ll run Earth. The two of you will work out some kind of communicant relation between the Harmonists and the Brotherhood. It won’t be too hard; the rituals are similar enough. Ten years and any lingering bitterness will be gone. And I’ll be a dozen light-years away, safely out of your path, unable to meddle, living in retirement. Out to pasture on World XI of System Y. Yes?”

“I don’t believe any of this, Noel. That you’d abdicate after a century, go swooshing off to nowhere with a bunch of pioneers, live in a log cabin on an unknown planet at the age of nearly a hundred and fifty, drop the reins—”

“Start believing it,” said Vorst. For the first time in the conversation the old whiplash tone returned to his voice. “I’m going. It’s decided. In a sense, I have gone.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know I’m a very low-order floater. That I plan things by hitchhiking with precogs.”

“Yes”

“I’ve seen the outcome. I know how it was, and so I know how it’s going to be. I leave. I’ve followed the plan this far—followed and led, all in one, heels over head through time. Everything I’ve done I’ve had a hint of beforehand. From founding the Brotherhood right to this moment. So it’s settled. I go.”

Kirby closed his eyes. He struggled for balance.

Vorst said, “Look back on the path I’ve traveled. Was there a false step anywhere? The Brotherhood prospered. It took Earth. When we were strong enough to afford a schism, I encouraged the Harmonist heresy.”

“You encouraged—”

“I chose Lazarus for what he had to do and filled him full of ideas. He was just an insignificant acolyte, clay in my hands. That’s why you never knew him in the early days. But he was there. I took him. I molded him. I got his movement going in opposition to ours.”

“Why, Noel?”

“It didn’t pay to be monolithic. I was hedging my bets. The Brotherhood was designed to win Earth, and it did, but the same principles didn’t—couldn’t—appeal to Venus, So I started a second cult. I tailored that one for Venus and gave them Lazarus. Later I gave them Mondschein, too. Do you remember that, in 2095? He was only a greedy little acolyte, but I saw the strength in him, and I nudged him around until he found himself a changed one on Venus. I built that entire organization.”

“And you knew that they’d come up with pushers?” Kirby asked incredulously.

“I didn’t know. I hoped. All I knew was that setting up the Harmonists was a good idea, because I saw that it had been a good idea. Follow? For the same reason I took Lazarus away and hid him in a crypt for sixty years. I didn’t know why at the time. But I knew it might be useful to keep the Harmonist martyr in my pocket for a while, as a card to play in the future. I played that card twelve years ago, and since then the Harmonists have been mine. Today I played my last card: myself. I have to leave.

My work is done, anyway. I’m bored with running out the skein. I’ve juggled everything for a hundred years, setting up my own opposition, creating conflicts designed to lead to an ultimate synthesis, and that synthesis is here, and I’m leaving.”

After a long silence Kirby said, “You humiliate me, Noel, by asking me to ratify a decision that’s already as immutable as the tides and the sunrise.”

“You’re free to oppose it at the council meeting.”

“But you’ll go, anyway?”

“Yes. I’d like your support, though. It won’t matter to the eventual outcome, but I’d still rather have you on my side than not I’d like to think that you of all people understand what I’ve been doing all these years. Do you believe there’s any reason for me to stay on Earth any longer?”

“We need you, Noel. That’s the only reason.”

“Now you’re the one who’s being childish. You don’t need me. The plan is fulfilled. It’s time to clear out and turn the job over to others. You’re too dependent on me, Ron. You can’t get used to the idea that I’m not going to be pulling the strings forever.”

“Perhaps that’s it,” admitted Kirby. “But whose fault is that? You’ve surrounded yourself with yes-men. You’ve made yourself indispensable. Here you sit at the heart of the movement like a sacred fire, and none of us can get close enough to be singed. Now you’re taking the fire away.”

“Transferring it,” said Vorst. “Here, I’ve got a job for you. The members of the council will be arriving in six hours. I’m going to make my announcement, and I suppose it’ll shake everybody else the way it shook you. Go off by yourself for the next six hours and think about all I’ve just said. Reconcile yourself to it. More, don’t just accept it, but approve of it. At the meeting stand up and explain not simply why it’s all right if I go, but why it’s necessary and vital to the future of the Brotherhood that I go.”

“You mean—”

“Don’t say anything now. You’re still hostile. You won’t be after you’ve examined the dynamics of it. Keep your mouth closed till then.”

Kirby smiled. “You’re still pulling strings, aren’t you?”

“It’s an old habit by now. But this is the last one I’ll ever pull. And I promise you, your mind will change. You’ll see my point of view in an hour or two. By nightfall you’ll be willing to stuff me in that capsule yourself. I know you will. I know you.”

six

In a leafy glade on Venus, the pushers were at their sport.

An avenue of vast trees unrolled toward the pearly horizon. Their jagged leaves met overhead to form a thick canopy. Below, on the muddy, fungus-dotted ground, a dozen Venusian boys with bluish skins and green robes exercised their abilities. At a distance several larger figures watched them. David Lazarus stood in the center of the group. About him were the Harmonist leaders: Christopher Mondschein, Nicholas Martell, Claude Emory.

Lazarus had been through a great deal at the hands of these men. To them, he had been only a name in a martyrology, a revered and unreal figure by whose absent power they governed a creed. They had had to adjust to his return, and it had not been easy. There had been a time when Lazarus thought they would put him to death. That time was past now, and they abided by his wishes. But because he had slept so long, he was at once younger and older than his lieutenants, and sometimes that interfered with the exercising of his full authority.

He said, “It’s settled. Vorst will leave and the schism will end. I’ll work something out with Kirby.”

“It’s a trap,” said Emory gloomily. “Keep away from it, David. Vorst can’t be trusted.”

“Vorst brought me back to life.”

“Vorst put you in that crypt in the first place,” Emory insisted. “You said so yourself.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” Lazarus replied, though it was true that Vorst himself had admitted the act to him in a their last conversation. “We’re only guessing. There’s no evidence that—”

Mondschein broke in, “We don’t have any reason to trust Vorst, Claude. But if he’s really and verifiably aboard that capsule, what do we have to lose by pushing him to Betelgeuse or Procyon? We’re rid of him, and we’ll be dealing with Kirby. Kirby’s a reasonable man. None of that damnable superdeviousness about him.”

“It’s too pat,” Emory insisted. “Why should a man with Vorst’s power just step down voluntarily?”

“Perhaps he’s bored,” said Lazarus. “There’s something about absolute power that can’t be understood except by someone who holds it. It’s dull. You can enjoy moving and shaking the world for twenty years, thirty, fifty—but Vorst’s been on top for a hundred. He wants to move along. I say take the offer. We’re well rid of him, and we can handle Kirby. Besides, he’s got a good point: neither his side nor ours can get to the stars without the help of the other. I’m for it. It’s worth the try.”

Nicholas Martell gestured toward the pushers. “We’ll lose some of them, don’t forget. You can’t push a capsule to the stars without overloading the pushers.”

“Vorst has offered rehabilitation services,” said Lazarus.

“One other point,” Mondschein remarked. “Under the new agreement, we’d have access to Vorster hospitals ourselves. Just as a purely selfish matter, I’d like that. I think the time has come to turn away from haughtiness and give in to Vorst. He’s willing to cheek out. All right. Let him go, and look for our own advantage with Kirby.”

Lazarus smiled. He had not hoped to win Mondschein’s support that easily. But Mondschein was old, past ninety, and he was hungry for the care that Vorster medics could give him, care that was not to be had on rugged Venus. Monschein had seen the Santa Fe hospitals himself when he was a young man, and he knew what miracles they could perform. It was not a terribly worthy motive, thought Lazarus. But it was a human motive, at least, and Mondschein was human behind his gills and blued skin. So are we all, Lazarus realized. Though they aren’t.

He looked toward the pushers. They were fifth- and sixth-generation Venusians. The seed of Earth was in them, but they were far removed from the original stock. The genetic manipulations that had first adapted mankind for life on Venus bred true; these boys were something other than human by this time. They were intent on their games. It was little effort for them to transport objects great distances now. They could send each other around Venus virtually instantaneously, or hurl a boulder to Earth in an hour or two. What they could not do was transport themselves, for they needed a fulcrum to do their pushing with. But that was minor. They could not flit from place to place on the strength of their own powers, but they could thrust each other about.

Lazarus watched them: appearing, disappearing, lifting, throwing. Only children, not yet in full command of their powers. What strengths would be theirs when they were fully mature, he wondered?

And how many would die to send mankind beyond his present boundaries?

A saw-winged bird, faintly luminous in the midday dusk, shot diagonally across the sky just above the treetop canopy. One of the young pushers looked up, grinned, caught the bird and sent it whirling half a mile through the clouds. A squawk of rage, distant but audible, filtered back.

Lazarus said, “The deal is closed. We help Vorst, and Vorst goes. Done?”

“Done,” said Mondschein quickly.

“Done,” Martell murmured, scuffing at the grayish moss that festooned the ground.

“Claude?” Lazarus asked.

Emory scowled. He peered at a long-limbed boy, returning from a jaunt to some other continent, who materialized no more than six yards away. Emory’s narrow-featured face looked dark with tension.

“Done,” he said.

seven

The capsule was an obelisk of beryllium steel, fifty feet high, an uncertain ark to send across the sea of stars. It contained living quarters for eleven, a computer of uncomfortably awe-inspiring abilities, and a subminiaturized treasury of all that was worth salvaging from two billion years of life on Earth.

“Prepare the capsule,” Vorst had instructed Brother Capodimonte, “as though the sun were going nova next month and we had to save what was important.”

As a former anthropologist, Capodimonte had his own ideas about the contents of such an ark, but he kept them separate from his concept of what Vorst required. Quietly, a subcommittee of Brothers had planned the interstellar expedition on a someday-far-away basis decades ago, and had replanned it several times, so that Capodimonte had the benefit of the thinking of other men. That was a comfort to him.

There were troublesome elements of mystery about the project. He did not, for example, know the nature of the world to which the pioneers were bound. No one did. There was no telling, at this distance, whether it really could harbor Terran-style life.

Astronomers had found hundreds of planets scattered through other systems. Some could dimly be picked up by telescopic sensors; others could only be inferred from computations of disturbed stellar orbits. But the planets were there. Would they welcome Earthmen?

Only one planet out of nine in Earth’s own system was naturally habitable—not a cheering prognosis for other systems. It had taken two generations of hard work to Terrafonn Mars; the eleven pioneers would hardly be able to do that It had taken the highest genetic skills to convert men into Venusians; that, too, would be beyond the range of the voyagers. They would have to find a suitable world, or fail.

Espers in the Santa Fe retinue said that suitable worlds existed. They had peered into the heavens, reached forth their Mondschein, made contact with tangible and habitable planets out there. Illusion? Deception? Capodimonte was in no position to determine that

Reynolds Kirby, troubled by the project from first to last, said to Capodimonte, “Is it true that they don’t even know what star they’ll be aiming for?”

“That’s true. They’ve detected some kind of emanations coming from somewhere. Don’t ask me how. The way this thing is planned, our espers will supply the guidance and their pushers will supply the propulsion. We find, they heave.”

“A voyage to anywhere?”

“To anywhere,” Capodimonte agreed. “They rip a hole in the sky and shove the capsule through. It doesn’t travel through normal space, whatever normal space is. It lands on this world that our espers claim to have connected with out there, and they send a message back, telling us where they are. We get the message about a generation from now. But meanwhile we’ll have sent other expeditions. A oneway journey to nowhere. And Vorst is the first to take it.”

Kirby shook his head. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? But evidently it’s going to be a success.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Vorst’s had his floaters out there looking, you see. They tell him that he arrived safely. So he’s willing to step out into the dark, because he knows in advance that he’s not running any risks.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Capodimonte, shuffling through his inventory sheets.

“No.”

Neither did Brother Capodimonte. But he did net quarrel with the role assigned to him. He had been at the council meeting where Vorst had announced his stunning intention, and he had heard Reynolds Kirby rise and eloquently argue the case for allowing the Founder to depart. Kirby’s thesis had been a sound one, within the context of nightmare that this whole project embraced. And so the capsule would leave, powered by the joint efforts of some blue-skinned boys, and guided on a thread through the heavens by the roving Mondschein of Brotherhood capers, and Noel Vorst would never walk the Earth again.

Capodimonte checked his lists.

Food.

Clothing.

Books.

Tools.

Medical equipment

Communication devices.

Weapons.

Power sources.

The expedition, Capodimonte thought would be adequately furnished for its adventure. The whole thing might be madness, or it might be the grandest enterprise ever attempted by man; Brother Capodimonte could not tell which. But one thing was certain: the expedition would be adequately furnished. He had seen to that.

eight

It was the day of departure. Chill winter winds raked New Mexico on this late-December day. The capsule stood in a desert flat a dozen miles from the inner compound of the Santa Fe research center. From here to the horizon it was a wilderness of sagebrush and juniper and piñon pine, and in the distance the bowl of mountains rose. Though he was well insulated, Reynolds Kirby shivered as the wind assailed the plateau. In another few days the year 2165 would be dawning, but Noel Vorst would not be here to welcome it. Kirby was not accustomed to that idea yet.

The pushers from Venus had arrived a week ago. There were twenty of them, and since it was inconvenient for them to live in breathing-suits all their time on Earth, the Vorsters had erected a little bit of Venus for them. A domed building not far from the capsule housed them; it was pumped full of the poisonous muck that they were accustomed to breathing. Lazarus and Mondschein had come with them and were under the dome now, getting everything prepared.

Mondschein would remain after the event, to undergo an overhauling in Santa Fe, Lazarus was going back to Venus in a couple of days. But first he and Kirby would face each other across a conference table and hammer out the basic clauses of the new entente. They had met once, twelve years ago, but not for long. Since Lazarus’s arrival on Earth, Kirby had spoken briefly to him and had come away with the feeling that the Harmonist prophet, though strong-willed and purposeful, would not be difficult ultimately to reach understandings with. He hoped not.

Now, on the wintry plateau, the high leaders of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance were gathering to watch their leader vanish. Kirby, glancing around, saw Capodimonte and Magnus and Ashton and Langholt and all the others, dozens of them, spiraling down the echelons into the middle levels of the organization. They were all watching him. They could not watch Vorst, for Vorst was in the capsule already, along with the other members of the expedition. Five men, five women, and Vorst. All of the others under forty, healthy, capable, resilient. And Vorst. The Founder’s quarters aboard the capsule were comfortable, but it was lunacy to think of that old man plunging into the universe like this.

Supervisor Magnus, the European Coordinator, stepped to Kirby’s side. He was a small, sharp-featured man who, like most of the other leaders of the Brotherhood, had served in its ranks for more than seventy years.

“He’s actually going,” Magnus said.

“Soon. Yes. No doubt of it.”

“Did you speak to him this morning?”

“Briefly,” Kirby said. “He seems very calm.”

“He seemed very calm when he blessed us last night,” said Magnus. “Almost joyful.”

“He’s putting down a great burden. You’d be joyful, too, if you could be translated into the sky and shrug off your responsibilities.”

Magnus said, “I wish we could prevent this.”

Kirby turned and looked bluntly at the little man. “This is a necessary thing,” he said. “It must happen, or the movement will founder of its own success.”

“I heard your speech before the council, yes, but—”

“We’ve reached the fulfillment level of our first evolutionary stage,” said Kirby. “Now we need to extend our mythology. Symbolically, Vorst’s departure is invaluable to us. He ascends into the sky, leaving us to carry on his work and go on to new purposes. If he remained, we’d begin to mark time. Now we can use his glorious example to inspire us. With Vorst leading the way to the new worlds, we who remain can build on the foundation he bequeaths us.”

“You sound as though you believed it.”

“I do,” said Kirby. “I didn’t at first. But Vorst was right. He said I’d understand why he was going, and I came to see it. He’s ten times as valuable to the movement doing this as he would be if he remained.”

Magnus murmured, “He isn’t content to be Christ and Mohammed. He has to be Moses, too, and also Elijah.”

“I never thought I’d hear you speak of him so coarsely,” said Kirby.

“I never did either,” Magnus replied. “Damn it, I don’t want him to go!”

Kirby was astonished to see tears glistening in Magnus’s pale eyes.

“That’s precisely why he’s leaving,” Kirby said, and then both men were silent

Capodimonte moved toward them. “Everything’s ready,” he announced. “I’ve got the word from Lazarus that the pushers are in series.”

“What about our guidance people?” Kirby asked.

“They’ve been ready for an hour.”

Kirby looked toward the gleaming capsule. “Might as well get it over with, then.”

“Yes,” Capodimonte said. “Might as well.”

Lazarus, Kirby knew, was waiting for a signal from him. From now on, all signals would come from him, at least on Earth. But that thought no longer disturbed him. He had adjusted to the situation. He was in command.

Symbolic regalia cluttered the field—Harmonist ikons, a big cobalt reactor, the paraphernalia of both the cults that now were merging. Kirby gestured to an acolyte, and moderator rods were withdrawn. The reactor surged into life.

The Blue Fire danced high above the reactor, and its glow stained the hull of the capsule. Cold light, Cerenkov radiation, the Vorster symbol, sparkled on the plateau, and all through the watching multitude ran the sounds of devotion, the whispered litanies, the murmured recapitulatons of the stations of the spectrum. While the man who had devised those words sat hidden within the walls of that teardrop of steel in the center of the gathering.

The flare of the Blue Fire was the signal to the Venusians in their nearby dome. Now was their moment to gather their power and hurl the capsule outward, planting man’s hand on a new world in the stars.

“What are they waiting for?” Magnus asked querulously.

“Maybe it won’t happen,” said Capodimonte.

Kirby said nothing. And then it began to happen.

nine

Kirby had not quite known what to expect. In his fantasies of the scene he had pictured a dozen capering Venusians dancing around the capsule, holding hands, their foreheads bulging with the effort of lifting the vehicle and hurling it out of the world. But the Venusians were nowhere to be seen; they were off in their dome, several hundred yards away, and Kirby suspected that they were neither holding hands nor showing outward signs of strain.

In his reveries, too, he had imagined the capsule taking off the way a rocket would, rising a few feet from the ground, wobbling a bit, rising a little more, suddenly soaring up, crossing the sky on a potent trajectory, dwindling, vanishing from sight at last. But that was not the way it was really to be, either.

He waited. A long moment passed.

He thought of Vorst, making landfall on same other world. An inhabited world, perhaps? What would be Vorst’s impact when he came to that virgin territory? Vorst was an irresistible force, terrifying and unique. Wherever he went, he would transform all that was about him. Kirby felt sorry for the ten hapless pioneers who would have the benefit of Vorst’s immediate guidance. He wondered what kind of colony they would build.

Whatever it was, it would succeed. Success was in Vorst’s nature. He was hideously old, but he had frightening vitality still locked within him. The Founder seemed to relish the challenge of beginning anew. Kirby wished him well.

“There they go,” Capodimonte whispered.

It was true. The capsule was still on the ground, but now the air about it wavered, as though stirred by heat waves rising from the parched, sandy soil.

Then the capsule was gone.

That was all. Kirby stared at the empty place where it had been. Vorst had been taken up into the heavens, and a gateway to somewhere had been opened.

“There is a Oneness from which all life stems,” someone said gently behind Kirby. “The infinite variety of the universe we owe to—”

Another voice said, “Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird—”

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

Kirby did not remain to listen to the familiar prayers, nor did he pray himself. He looked briefly at the bareness in the desert once more, and then upward at the harsh blue sky, already deepening toward nightfall. It was done. Vorst was gone, his scheming ended so far as Earth was concerned, and now it was the turn of lesser men. The way was open. Humanity could spill out across the heavens. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Alone in this great assembly of the faithful, Kirby turned his back on the now sacred spot from which Vorst had made his ascent. Very slowly, a tall figure whose late-afternoon shadow stretched for yards, Kirby walked away from the place where Noel Vorst had been, and toward the place where David Lazarus was waiting to speak with him.