“All right. Noel. Whatever you say.”
“Trust me.”
“What else can I do?”
Kirby wheeled himself out of the room. Vorst, relaxing, fed hormones to his bloodstream and closed his eyes. The world wavered. For an instant he found himself drifting, and it was 2071 all over again, and he was building cobalt-60 reactors in a sordid basement and renting little rooms as chapels for his cult. He recoiled, and was whirled forward, dizzyingly, toward the border of now and a little beyond it. Vorst was a low-grade esper, his skills humble indeed, but occasionally his mind did strange things. He looked toward the brink of tomorrow and desperately anchored himself.
With a decisive jab of his fingers Vorst opened his desk-communicator and spoke briefly to an intern in the burnout ward, without identifying himself. Yes, the Founder was told, there was an esper on the verge of burnout. No, she wasn’t likely to survive.
“Get her ready,” Vorst said. “The Founder’s going to visit her.”
Vorst’s assistants clustered around, readying him for his journey. The old man refused to accept immobility and insisted on leading the most active kind of existence possible. A dropshaft took him to ground level, and then, sheltered by the cavalcade of flunkies that accompanied him everywhere, the Founder crossed the main plaza of the compound and entered the burn-out ward.
Half a dozen sick espers, segregated by thick walls and shielded by protective members of their own kind, lay at the verge of death. There were always those for whom the powers proved overwhelming, those who eventually seized more voltage than they could handle and were destroyed. From the very beginning Vorst had concentrated on saving them, for these were the espers he needed most badly. The salvage record was good nowadays. But not good enough.
Vorst knew why the burnouts happened. The ones who went were the floaters, insecurely anchored in their own time. They drifted back, forth, seesawing from past to present, unable to control their movements, building up a charge of temporal force that ultimately blasted their minds. It was a dizziness of the time-sense, a deadly vertigo. Vorst himself had felt flashes of it. For ten years, nearly a century ago, he had considered himself insane, until he understood. He had seen the edges of time, a vision of futurity that had shattered him and remade him, and that he knew, had been only a hint of what the real espers experienced.
The burnout case was young and female and Orientaclass="underline" a fatal combination, it seemed. A good eighty percent of the burnouts were of Mongoloid stock, generally adolescent girls. Those who had the trait didn’t last far into adulthood. This one must have been about sixteen, though it was hard to tell; she could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-five. She lay twisting on the bed, her body almost bare, clawing at the bedclothes in her agony. Sweat gleamed on her yellow-brown skin. She arched her back, grimaced, fell back. Her breasts, revealed by the dis-array of her robe, were like a child’s.
Blue-clad Vorsters, awed by the presence of the Founder, flanked the bed. Vorst said, “She’ll be gone in an hour, won’t she?”
Someone nodded. Vorst moved himself closer to the bed. He seized the girl’s arm in his wizened fingers. Another esper stepped in, placed one hand on Vorst, the other on the girl, providing the link that Vorst required. Suddenly he was in contact with the dying girl.
Her brain was on fire. She jolted backward and forward in time, and Vorst jolted with her, drawn along as a hitchhiker. Light flared in his mind, as though lightning danced about him. Yesterday and tomorrow became one. His thin body quivered like a buffeted reed. Images danced like demons, shadowy figures out of the past, dark avatars of tomorrow. Tell me, tell me, tell me, Vorst implored. Show me the path! He stood at the threshold of knowledge. For seventy years he had moved step by step this way, using the contorted and tortured bodies of these burnouts as his bridges to tomorrow, pulling himself forward by his own bootstraps along the world-line of his great plan.
Let me see, Vorst begged.
The figure of David Lazarus bestrode the pattern of tomorrow, Vorst knew it would. Lazarus stood like a colossus, come forth to an unexpected resurrection, holding his arms out to the green-robed brethren of his heresy. Vorst shivered. The image wavered and was gone. The frail hand of the Founder relaxed its grip.
“She’s dead,” Vorst said. “Take me away.”
four
One old man had given the word, and another obeyed, and a third was approached for a favor. Nat Weiner of the Martian Presidium was always willing to oblige his old friend Reynolds Kirby. They had known one another for more years then they cared to admit.
Weiner, like nearly all Martians, was neither Vorster nor Harmonist. Martians had little use for the cults, and steered a neutral and profitable course. On Earth, by now, the Vorsters amounted to a planetary government since their influence was felt everywhere; it was simple good sense for Mars to retain open lines to the Vorster high command, since Mars had business to do with Earth. Venus, the planet of adapted men, was a different case. No one could be too sure what went on there, except that the Harmonist heresy had established itself pretty securely in the last thirty or forty years, and might one day speak for Venus as the Vorsters spoke for Earth. Weiner had served a tour of duty as Martian Ambassador to Venus, and he thought he understood the blueskins fairly well. He didn’t like them very much. But he was past feeling any strong emotion. He had left that behind with his hundredth birthday.
At staggering cost, Reynolds Kirby in Santa Fe spoke face-to-face with Weiner, and begged a favor of him. It was twelve years since they had last met—not since Weiner’s last visit to the rejuvenation centers at Santa Fe. It wasn’t customary for unbelievers to be granted the use of the rejuvenation facilities there, but Kirby had arranged for Weiner and a select few of his Martian friends to come down for periodic treatments, as a favor.
Weiner understood quite dearly that Kirby was silently accepting promissory notes for those favors, and that the notes would be taken down for repayment one of these days. That was all right; the important thing was to survive. Weiner might even have been willing to become a Vorster, if he had to, in order to have access to Santa Fe. But of course that would have hurt him politically on Mars, where both Vorsters and Harmonists were generally looked upon as subversives. This way he had the benefits, without the risks, and he owed it to his old friend Kirby. Weiner would go quite a distance to repay Kirby for that service.
The Vorster said, “Have you seen the alleged Lazarus vault yet Nat?”
“I was out there two days ago. We’ve got a tight security guard on it. It was my nephew who found it, you know. I’d like to kill him.”
“Why?”
“All we need is finding the Harmonist muck-a-muck out by Beltran Lakes. Why couldn’t you people have buried him on Venus, where his own people are?”
“What makes you think we buried him, Nat?”
“Aren’t you the ones who killed him? Or put him into a freeze, or whatever you did to him?”
“It all happened before my time,” Kirby said. “Only Vorst knows the real story, and maybe not even he. But surely it’s Lazarus’s own supporters who tucked him away in that vault, don’t you think?”