To Open the Sky (8 page)

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

Five

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

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

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

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

"Very funny," Mondschein said.

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

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

Kirby smiled faintly. "Mondschein?"

"Yes, sir."

"Call me Brother, Mondschein. Brother Langholt here
i
has said some good things about you."

He has?
Mondschein thought in surprise.

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

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

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

"Of course, sir—Brother Kirby."

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

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

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

"Brother Mondschein?" a pudgy acolyte asked.

"That's right."

"I'm Brother Capodimonte. I'm your escort. Got your luggage? Good. Let's go, then."

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

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

"First time here?" he asked.

"Yes," Mondschein said. "I'm impressed by the countryside."

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

"I don't know much about it," he admitted. "But I'll be glad to look, anyway."

"What's your specialty?"

"Nucleonics," Mondschein said. "I'm a furnace tender."

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

"They're really making progress, are they?"

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

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

"I expected it to be much bigger," Mondschein said.

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

Mondschein frowned. "What about the laboratory center, though?"

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

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

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

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

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

"We're here," Capodimonte announced.

The gate began to open.

Mondschein said, "Won't I be given some kind of esper scanning before they let me in?"

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

Six

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

The center was heart and core of the Vorster operation. Here the research was carried out that served to improve the lives of Vorsters everywhere. The essence of the Brotherhood's appeal was that it offered not merely spiritual counseling—which the old religions could provide just as well—but also the most advanced scientific benefits. Vorster hospitals existed now in every major population center. Vorster medics were at the 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. Tecto-genetic 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 teleporta- tion? For telepathy? For any of the paranormal phenomena that were lumped under the blanket term of "esp"?