He said, “It’s settled. Vorst will leave and the schism will end. I’ll work something out with Kirby.”
“It’s a trap,” said Emory gloomily. “Keep away from it, David. Vorst can’t be trusted.”
“Vorst brought me back to life.”
“Vorst put you in that crypt in the first place,” Emory insisted. “You said so yourself.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Lazarus replied, though it was true that Vorst himself had admitted the act to him in a their last conversation. “We’re only guessing. There’s no evidence that—”
Mondschein broke in, “We don’t have any reason to trust Vorst, Claude. But if he’s really and verifiably aboard that capsule, what do we have to lose by pushing him to Betelgeuse or Procyon? We’re rid of him, and we’ll be dealing with Kirby. Kirby’s a reasonable man. None of that damnable superdeviousness about him.”
“It’s too pat,” Emory insisted. “Why should a man with Vorst’s power just step down voluntarily?”
“Perhaps he’s bored,” said Lazarus. “There’s something about absolute power that can’t be understood except by someone who holds it. It’s dull. You can enjoy moving and shaking the world for twenty years, thirty, fifty—but Vorst’s been on top for a hundred. He wants to move along. I say take the offer. We’re well rid of him, and we can handle Kirby. Besides, he’s got a good point: neither his side nor ours can get to the stars without the help of the other. I’m for it. It’s worth the try.”
Nicholas Martell gestured toward the pushers. “We’ll lose some of them, don’t forget. You can’t push a capsule to the stars without overloading the pushers.”
“Vorst has offered rehabilitation services,” said Lazarus.
“One other point,” Mondschein remarked. “Under the new agreement, we’d have access to Vorster hospitals ourselves. Just as a purely selfish matter, I’d like that. I think the time has come to turn away from haughtiness and give in to Vorst. He’s willing to cheek out. All right. Let him go, and look for our own advantage with Kirby.”
Lazarus smiled. He had not hoped to win Mondschein’s support that easily. But Mondschein was old, past ninety, and he was hungry for the care that Vorster medics could give him, care that was not to be had on rugged Venus. Monschein had seen the Santa Fe hospitals himself when he was a young man, and he knew what miracles they could perform. It was not a terribly worthy motive, thought Lazarus. But it was a human motive, at least, and Mondschein was human behind his gills and blued skin. So are we all, Lazarus realized. Though they aren’t.
He looked toward the pushers. They were fifth- and sixth-generation Venusians. The seed of Earth was in them, but they were far removed from the original stock. The genetic manipulations that had first adapted mankind for life on Venus bred true; these boys were something other than human by this time. They were intent on their games. It was little effort for them to transport objects great distances now. They could send each other around Venus virtually instantaneously, or hurl a boulder to Earth in an hour or two. What they could not do was transport themselves, for they needed a fulcrum to do their pushing with. But that was minor. They could not flit from place to place on the strength of their own powers, but they could thrust each other about.
Lazarus watched them: appearing, disappearing, lifting, throwing. Only children, not yet in full command of their powers. What strengths would be theirs when they were fully mature, he wondered?
And how many would die to send mankind beyond his present boundaries?
A saw-winged bird, faintly luminous in the midday dusk, shot diagonally across the sky just above the treetop canopy. One of the young pushers looked up, grinned, caught the bird and sent it whirling half a mile through the clouds. A squawk of rage, distant but audible, filtered back.
Lazarus said, “The deal is closed. We help Vorst, and Vorst goes. Done?”
“Done,” said Mondschein quickly.
“Done,” Martell murmured, scuffing at the grayish moss that festooned the ground.
“Claude?” Lazarus asked.
Emory scowled. He peered at a long-limbed boy, returning from a jaunt to some other continent, who materialized no more than six yards away. Emory’s narrow-featured face looked dark with tension.
“Done,” he said.
seven
The capsule was an obelisk of beryllium steel, fifty feet high, an uncertain ark to send across the sea of stars. It contained living quarters for eleven, a computer of uncomfortably awe-inspiring abilities, and a subminiaturized treasury of all that was worth salvaging from two billion years of life on Earth.
“Prepare the capsule,” Vorst had instructed Brother Capodimonte, “as though the sun were going nova next month and we had to save what was important.”
As a former anthropologist, Capodimonte had his own ideas about the contents of such an ark, but he kept them separate from his concept of what Vorst required. Quietly, a subcommittee of Brothers had planned the interstellar expedition on a someday-far-away basis decades ago, and had replanned it several times, so that Capodimonte had the benefit of the thinking of other men. That was a comfort to him.
There were troublesome elements of mystery about the project. He did not, for example, know the nature of the world to which the pioneers were bound. No one did. There was no telling, at this distance, whether it really could harbor Terran-style life.
Astronomers had found hundreds of planets scattered through other systems. Some could dimly be picked up by telescopic sensors; others could only be inferred from computations of disturbed stellar orbits. But the planets were there. Would they welcome Earthmen?
Only one planet out of nine in Earth’s own system was naturally habitable—not a cheering prognosis for other systems. It had taken two generations of hard work to Terrafonn Mars; the eleven pioneers would hardly be able to do that It had taken the highest genetic skills to convert men into Venusians; that, too, would be beyond the range of the voyagers. They would have to find a suitable world, or fail.
Espers in the Santa Fe retinue said that suitable worlds existed. They had peered into the heavens, reached forth their Mondschein, made contact with tangible and habitable planets out there. Illusion? Deception? Capodimonte was in no position to determine that
Reynolds Kirby, troubled by the project from first to last, said to Capodimonte, “Is it true that they don’t even know what star they’ll be aiming for?”
“That’s true. They’ve detected some kind of emanations coming from somewhere. Don’t ask me how. The way this thing is planned, our espers will supply the guidance and their pushers will supply the propulsion. We find, they heave.”
“A voyage to anywhere?”
“To anywhere,” Capodimonte agreed. “They rip a hole in the sky and shove the capsule through. It doesn’t travel through normal space, whatever normal space is. It lands on this world that our espers claim to have connected with out there, and they send a message back, telling us where they are. We get the message about a generation from now. But meanwhile we’ll have sent other expeditions. A oneway journey to nowhere. And Vorst is the first to take it.”
Kirby shook his head. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? But evidently it’s going to be a success.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Vorst’s had his floaters out there looking, you see. They tell him that he arrived safely. So he’s willing to step out into the dark, because he knows in advance that he’s not running any risks.”