The reactor was on and glowing—a cube of cobalt-60, shielded by water, the dangerous radiations gobbled up before they could sear through flesh. In the darkness Kirby saw a faint blue glow, rising slowly in brightness, growing more intense. Now the lattice of the tiny reactor was masked in whitish-blue light, and around it swirled a weird greenish-blue glow that seemed almost purple at its core. It was the Blue Fire, the eerie cold light of the Cerenkov radiation, spreading outward to envelop the entire room.
It was nothing mystical, Kirby knew. Electrons were surging through that tank of water, moving at a velocity greater than light in that medium, and as they moved they hurled forth a stream of photons. There were neat equations to explain the source of the Blue Fire. Give the Vorsters credit: they didn’t say it was anything supernatural. But it made a useful symbolic instrument, a focus for religious emotions, more colorful than a crucifix, more dramatic than the Tables of the Law.
The Vorster up front said quietly, “There is a Oneness from which all life stems. The infinite variety of the universe we owe to the motion of the electrons. Atoms meet; their particles entwine. Electrons leap from orbit to orbit, and chemical changes are worked.”
“Listen to the pious bastard,” Weiner snorted. “A chemistry lecture, yet!”
Kirby bit his lip in anguish. A girl in the pew just in front of theirs turned around and said in a low, urgent voice, “Please. Please—just listen.”
She was such a numbing sight that even Weiner was struck dumb for once. The Martian gasped in shock. Kirby, who had seen surgically altered women before, scarcely reacted at all. Iridescent cups covered the openings where her ears had been. An opal was mounted in the bone of her forehead. Her eyelids were of gleaming foil. The surgeons had done things to her nostrils, to her lips. Perhaps she had been in some terrible accident. More likely she had had herself maimed for cosmetic purposes.
Madness. Madness.
The Vorster said, “The energy of the sun—the green life surging in plants—the bursting wonder of growth—for this we thank the electron. The enzymes of our body—the sparking synapses of our brains—the beating of our hearts—for this we thank the electron. Fuel and food, light and heat, warmth and nourishment, everything and all, rising from the Oneness, rising from the Immanent Radiance—”
It was a litany, Kirby realized. All around him people were swaying in rhythm with the half-chanted words, were nodding, even weeping. The Blue Fire swelled and reached to the sagging ceiling. The man at the altar raised his long, spidery arms in a kind of benediction.
“Come forward,” he cried. “Come kneel and join in praise! Lock arms, bow heads, give thanks for the underlying unity of all things!”
The Vorsters began to shamble toward the altar. It woke memories of an Episcopalian childhood for Kirby:
going forward to take communion, the wafer on the tongue, the quick sip of wine, the smell of incense, the rustle of priestly robes. He hadn’t been to a service in twenty-five years. It was a long way from the vaulted magnificence of the cathedral to the dilapidated ugliness of this improvised shrine, but for a moment Kirby felt a flicker of religious feeling, felt just the faintest urge to move forward with the others and kneel before the glowing reactor.
The thought stunned and shocked him.
How had it stolen upon him? This was no religion. This was cultism, a wildfire movement, the latest fad, here today, gone tomorrow. Ten million converts overnight? What of it? Tomorrow or the next day would come the newest prophet, exhorting the faithful to plunge their hands into a scintillation counter’s sparkling bath, and the Vorster halls would be deserted. This was no Rock. This was quicksand.
And yet there had been that momentary pull—Kirby tightened his lips. It was the strain, he thought, of shepherding this wild Martian around all evening. He didn’t give a damn for the supernal Oneness. The underlying unity of all things meant nothing to him. This was a place for the tired, the neurotic, the novelty-hungry, for the kind of person that would cheerfully pay good money to have her ears cut off and her nostrils slit. lit was a measure of his own desperation that he had been almost ready to join the communicants at the altar.
He relaxed.
And in the same moment Nat Weiner burst to his feet and went careening down the aisle.
“Save me!” the Martian cried. “Heal my goddam soul! Show me the Oneness!”
“Kneel with us, Brother,” the Vorster leader said smoothly.
“I’m a sinner!” Weiner howled. “I’m full of booze and corruption! I got to be saved! I embrace the electron! I yield!”
Kirby hurried after him down the aisle. Was Weiner serious? The Martians were notorious for their resistance to any and all religious movements, including the established and legitimate ones. Had he somehow succumbed to that hellish blue glow?
“Take the hands of your brethren,” the leader murmured. “Bow your head and let the glow enfold you.”
Weiner looked to his left. The girl with the surgical alterations knelt beside him. She held out her hand. Four fingers of flesh, one of some turquoise-hued metal.
“It’s a monster!” Weiner shrieked. “Take it away! I won’t let you cut me up!”
“Be calm, Brother—”
“You’re a bunch of phonies! Phonies! Phonies! Phonies! Nothing but a pack of—”
Kirby got to him. He dug his fingertips into the ridged muscles of Weiner’s back in a way that the Martian was likely to notice, drunk as he was.
In a low, intense voice Kirby said, “Let’s go, Nat. We’re getting out of here.”
“Take your stinking hands off me, Earther!”
“Nat, please—this is a house of worship—”
“This is a bughouse! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Look at them! Down on their knees like stinking maniacs!” Weiner struggled to his feet. His booming voice seemed to batter at the walls. “I’m a free man from Mars! I dug in the desert with these hands! I watched the oceans fill! What did any of you do? You cut your eyelids off and wallowed in muck! And you—you fake priest, you take their money and love it!”
The Martian grabbed the altar rail and vaulted over it, coming perilously close to the glowing reactor. He clawed at the towering, bearded Vorster.
Calmly the cultist reached out and slipped one long arm through the pinwheeling chaos of Weiner’s threshing limbs. He touched his fingertips to the Martian’s throat for a fraction of a second.
Weiner fell like a dead man.
three
“Are you all right now?” Kirby asked, dry-throated.
Weiner stirred. “Where’s that girl?”
“The one with the surgery?”
“No,” he rasped. “The esper. I want her near me again.”
Kirby glanced at the slender, blue-haired girl. She nodded tensely and took Weiner’s hand. The Martian’s face was bright with sweat, and his eyes were still wild. He lay back, head propped on pillows, cheeks hollow.
They were in a sniffer palace across the street from the Vorster hail. Kirby had had to carry the Martian out of the place himself, slung across his shoulders; the Vorsters did not let robots in. The sniffer palace seemed as good a place as any to take him.
The esper girl had come over to them as Kirby staggered into the place. She was a Vorster, too—the blue hair was the tip-off—but apparently she had finished her worship for the day and was topping things off with a quick inhalation. With instant sympathy she had bent to peer at Weiner’s flushed, sweat-flecked face. She had asked Kirby if his friend had had a stroke.
“I’m not sure what happened to him,” Kirby said. “He was drunk and began to make trouble in the Vorster place. The leader of the service touched his throat.”