“After making an attempt to seduce you from your faith.”
“Naturally. May I leave now?”
“It’ll be a few moments until I can arrange for the car. Would you like to wait outside?”
Martell bowed and made a grateful escape from the heretical chapel. Passing through the building, he emerged into the yard, a cleared space some fifty feet square bordered by scaly, grayish-green shrubbery whose thick-petaled black flowers had an oddly carnivorous look. Four Venusian boys, including Martell’s rescuer, were at work on an excavation. They were using manual tools—shovels and picks—which gave Martell the uncomfortable sensation of having slid back into the nineteenth century. Earth’s gaudy array of gadgetry, so conspicuous and so familiar, could not be found here.
The boys glared coldly at him and went on with their work. Martell watched. They were lean and supple, and he guessed that their ages ranged from about nine to fourteen, though it was hard to tell. They looked enough alike to be brothers. Their movements were graceful, almost elegant, and their bluish skins gleamed lightly with perspiration. It seemed to Martell that the bony structure of their bodies was even more alien than he had thought; they did improbable things with their joints as they worked.
Abruptly, they tossed their picks and shovels aside and joined hands. The bright eyes closed a moment. Martell saw the loose dirt rise from the excavation pit and collect itself in a neat mound some twenty feet behind it. They’re pushers, Martell thought in wonder. Look at them! Brother Mondschein appeared at that precise moment “The car is waiting, Brother,” he said smoothly.
four
As he entered the Venusian city, Martell could not take his mind from the casual feat of the four boys. They had scooped a few hundred pounds of loose soil from a pit, using esp abilities, and had smugly deposited it just where they wanted it to go.
Pushers! Martell trembled with barely suppressed excitement. The espers of Earth were a numerous tribe now, but their talents were mainly telepathic, not extending in the direction of telekinesis to any significant degree. Nor could the development of the powers be controlled. A program of scheduled breeding, now in its fourth or fifth generation, was intensifying the existing esp powers. It was possible for a gifted esper to reach into a man’s mind and rearrange its contents, or to probe for the deepest secrets. There were a few precogs, too, who ranged up and down the time sequence as though all points along it were one point, but they usually burned out in adolescence, and their genes were lost to the pool. Pushers—teleports—who could move physical objects from place to place were as rare as phoenixes on Earth. And here were four of them in a Harmonist chapel’s back yard on Venus!
New tensions quivered in Martell. He had made two unexpected discoveries on his first day: the presence of Harmonists on Venus, and the presence of pushers among the Harmonists. His mission had taken on devastating new urgency, suddenly. It was no longer merely a matter of gaining a foothold in an unfriendly world. It was a matter of being outstripped and surpassed by a heresy thought to be in decline.
The car Mondschein had provided dropped Martell off at the Martian Embassy, a blocky little building fronting on the wide plaza that seemed to be the entire town. The Martians had been instrumental in getting Martell to Venus in the first place, and a call on the Ambassador was of priority importance.
The Martians breathed Earth-type air, and they did not care to adapt themselves to Venusian conditions. Once he entered the building, therefore, Martell had to accept a breathing-hood that would protect him against the atmosphere of the planet of his birth.
The Ambassador, Freeman Nat Weiner, was about twice Martell’s age, perhaps even older—close to ninety, even. His frame was powerful, with shoulders so wide they seemed out of proportion to his hips and legs.
Weiner said, “So you’re here. I really thought you had more sense.”
“We’re determined people, Freeman Weiner.”
“So I know. I’ve been studying your ways for a long time.” Weiner’s eyes became remote. “More than sixty years, in fact. I knew your Coordinator Kirby before his conversion—did he ever tell you that?”
“He didn’t mention it,” Martell said. His flesh crept Kirby had joined the Vorster Brotherhood about twenty years before Martell had been born. To live a century was nothing unusual these days, and Vorst himself was surely into his twelfth or thirteenth decade, but it was chilling all the same to think of such a span of years.
Weiner smiled. “I came to Earth to negotiate a trade deal, and Kirby was my chaperon. He was with the U.N. then. I gave him a hard time. I was a drinker then. Somehow I don’t think he’ll ever forget that night.” His gaze riveted on Martell’s unblinking eyes. “I want you to know, Brother, that I can’t provide any protection for you if you’re attacked. My responsibility extends only to Martian nationals.”
“I understand.”
“My advice is the same as it’s been from the start. Go back to Earth and live to a ripe old age.”
“I can’t do that, Freeman Weiner. I’ve come with a mission to accomplish.”
“Ah, dedication! Wonderful! Where will you build your chapel?”
“On the road leading to town. Perhaps closer to town than the Harmonist place.”
“And where will you stay until it’s built?”
“I’ll sleep in the open.”
“There’s a bird here,” Weiner said. “They call it a shrike. It’s as big as a dog, and its wings look like old leather, and it has a beak like a spear. I once saw it dive from five hundred feet at a man taking a nap in an open field. The beak pinned him to the ground.”
Unperturbed, Martell said, “I survived an encounter with a Wheel today. Perhaps I can dodge a shrike, too. I don’t intend to be frightened away.”
Weiner nodded. “I wish you luck,” he said.
Luck was about all Martell was going to get from the Ambassador, but he was grateful even for that. The Martians were cool toward Earth and all it produced, including its religions. They did not actually hate Earthmen, as the Venusians of both castes appeared to do; the Martians were still Earth-like themselves, and not changed creatures whose bond with the mother world was tenuous at best. But the Martians were tough, aggressive frontiersmen who looked out only for themselves. They served as go-betweens for Earth and Venus because there was profit in it; they accepted missionaries from Earth because there was no harm in it. They were tolerant, in their way, but aloof.
Martell left the Martian Embassy and set about his tasks. He had money and he had energy. He could not hire Venusian labor directly, because it would be an act of pollution for a Venusian even of the low caste to work for an Earthman, but it was possible to commission workmen through Weiner. The Martians, naturally, received a fee for serving as agents.
Workmen were hired and a modest chapel was erected. Martell set up his pocket-size reactor and readied it for use. Alone in the chapel, he stood in silence as the Blue Fire flickered into glowing life.
Martell had not lost his capacity for awe. He was a worldly man, no mystic, yet the sight of the radiation streaming from the water-shielded reactor worked its magic on him, and he dropped to his knees, touching his forehead in the gesture of submission. He could not carry his religious feeling to the stage of idolatry, as the Harmonists did, but he was not without a sense of the might of the movement to which he had pledged his life.
The first day Martell simply carried out the ceremonies of dedication. On the second and third and fourth he waited hopefully for some low-caster who might be curious enough to enter the chapel. None came.