To Open the Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And if I don’t?”

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

  “It’s a question.”

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

  He went out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t close,” he said.

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

  “What?”

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

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

  “Is it something you were taught to do?”

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

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

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

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

  “A little. I can move them more.”

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

  “The first time I did it.”

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

  “Sing me the song,” Elwhit prodded.

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

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

  “Get him!” the police chief roared.

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

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

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

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

  “Elwhit!” Martell screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Go and do it.”

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

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

  “Didn’t last long.”

  “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Look out! He’s electric!”

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

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

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

  five

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s right.”

  “Infiltrating, Martell? Spying?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “We warned you of it.”

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

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

  “Are you esping me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “His grandnephew. I never knew the man.”

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

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

  “Like Vorst,” Martell said.

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

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

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


  The crust was pierced.

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

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

  “The Vorster!” came a roar from outside.

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

  “High-casters!” Martell gasped.

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

  “They’ll kill you.”

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

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

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

  Mondschein’s hands were upraised now. Imploringly, Martell wondered, or was he simply trying to keep the Venusians at bay? Martell thought of praying. But it seemed a hollow, futile gesture. One did not pray for direct reward, in the Brotherhood. One lived well and served the cause, and reward came. Martell felt tranquil. He slipped into his robe and went outside.