To Open the Sky

by Robert Silverberg

  six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He was happy here.

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

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

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

  “Are you all right?” Capodimonte whispered.

  Mondschein nodded. “Just—cramps—”

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

  seven

  SEVEN HOURS LATER, at the darkest hour of night, Mondschein knew that the time had come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where to? Frijolito Ruin?”

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

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

  “Let’s go back, then.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Eternal Harmony,” a voice answered.

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

  “One moment, please.”

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

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

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

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

  “No,” Mondschein said. “Let’s go.”

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

  eight

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

  “What’s happening?” Mondschein asked.

  “Get dressed, spy. Come for interrogation.”

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

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

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

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

  “The esper’s here,” someone muttered.

  They had sent a girl, no more than sixteen, pasty-faced and plain. Her skin was flecked with small red blotches. Her eyes were alert, unpleasantly gleaming, never still. Mondschein despised her on sight, and he tried desperately to keep the emotion under rein, knowing that she could seal his fate with a word. It was no use: she detected his contempt for her the moment she came into the room, and the fleshy lips moved in a quick twitching smile. She drew her dumpy body erect.