Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

Martell watched as the high-caste ones solemnly entered the waiting vehicles and drove off. No taxis remained. The ten Martian passengers of the ship could be seen getting into a cab on the other side of the depot. Martell returned to the building. The low-caste Venusian glowered at him.

Martell said, “When will I be able to get a taxi to town?”

“You won’t. They aren’t coming back today.”

“I want to call the Martian Embassy, then. They’ll send a car for me.”

“Are you sure they will? Why should they bother?”

“Perhaps so,” Martell said evenly. “I’d better walk.” The look he got from the Venusian was worth the gesture. The man stared in surprise and shock. And, possibly, admiration, mingled somewhat with patronizing confidence that Martell must be a madman. Martell left the station. He began to walk, following the narrow ribbon of a road, letting the unearthly atmosphere soak deep into his altered body.

It was a lonely walk. Not a sign of habitation broke the belt of vegetation on either side of the highway, nor did any vehicles pass him. The trees, somber and eerie with their bluish cast, towered over the road. Their knifeblade-like leaves glimmered in the faint, diffused light. There was an occasional rustling sound in the woods, as of beasts crashing through the thickets. Martell saw nothing there, though. He walked on. How many miles? Eight, a dozen? He was prepared to walk forever, if necessary. He had the strength.

His mind hummed with plans. He would establish a small chapel and let it be known what the Brotherhood had to offer: life eternal and the key to the stars. The Venusians might threaten to kill him, as they had killed previous missionaries of the Brotherhood, but Martell was prepared to die, if necessary, that others might have the stars. His faith was strong. Before his departure the high ones of the Brotherhood had personally wished him well: grizzled Reynolds Kirby, the Hemispheric Coordinator, had grasped his hand, and then had come an even greater surprise as Noel Vorst himself, the Founder, a legendary figure more than a century old, had come forth to tell him in a soft, feathery voice, “I know that your mission will bear fruit, Brother Martell.”

Martell still tingled with the memory of that glorious moment.

Now he strode forward, buoyed by the sight of a few habitations set back from the road. He was at the outskirts, then. On this pioneer world, pioneer habits held true, and the colonists did not build their homes close together. They spread sparsely over a radiating area surrounding the main administrative centers. The man-high walls enclosing the first houses he saw did not surprise him; these Venusians were a surly lot who would build a wall around their entire planet if they could. But soon he would be in town, and then—Martell came to a halt as he saw the Wheel hurtling toward him.

His first thought was that it had broken free from some vehicle. Then he realized what it was: no fragment of machinery, but Venusian wildlife. It surged over a crest in the road, a hundred yards in front of him, and came plunging wildly toward him at what must have been a speed of ninety miles an hour. Martell had a clear though momentary glimpse: two wheels of some horny substance, mottled orange and yellow, linked by a box-like inner structure. The wheels were nine feet across, at least; the connecting structure was smaller, so that wheel-rims projected around it. Those rims were razor-sharp. The creature moved by ceaselessly transferring its weight within that central housing, and it developed terrific momentum as it barreled toward the missionary.

Martell leaped back. The Wheel hurtled past him, missing his toes by inches. Martell saw the sharpness of the rim and felt an acrid odor sting his nostrils. If he had been a bit slower, the Wheel would have sliced him in two.

It traveled a hundred yards beyond him. Then, like a gyroscope running amok, it executed a turn in an astonishingly narrow radius and came shooting back toward Martell.

The thing’s hunting me, he thought.

He knew many Vorster combat techniques, but none of them were designed to cope with a beast like this. All he could do was keep sidestepping and hope that the Wheel could not make sudden compensations in its course. It drew near; Martell sucked in his breath and leaped back once again. This time the Wheel swerved ever so slightly.

Its leading left-hand edge sliced through the trailing end of Martell’s blue cloak, and a ribbon of cloth fluttered to the pavement Panting, Martell watched the thing swing around for another try, and knew that it could indeed correct its course. A few more passes and it would split him.

The Wheel came a third time.

Martell waited as long as he dared. With the outer blades only a few feet away, he broad-jumped—into the path of the creature. Earthborn muscles carried him twenty feet in the light gravity. He more than half expected to be bisected in mid-jump, but when his feet touched ground he was still in one piece. Whirling, Martell saw that he had indeed surprised the beast; it had turned inward, toward the place where it had expected him to be, and had passed through his suitcase. The suitcase had been sliced as though by a laser beam. His belongings were scattered on the road. The Wheel, halting once more, was coming back for another try.

What now? Climb a tree? The nearest one was void of limbs for the first twenty feet. Martell could not shinny to safety in time. All he could do was keep hopping from side to side in the road, trying to outguess the creature. He knew that he could not keep that up much longer. He would tire, and the Wheel would not, and the slashing rims would pass through him and spill his altered guts on the pavement. It did not seem right, Martell thought, to die purposelessly in this way before he had even begun his work here.

The Wheel came. Martell sidestepped it again and heard it whistle past. Was it getting angry? No, it was just an insensate brute looking for a meal, hunting in the manner some perverse nature had designed for it. Martell gasped for breath. On the next pass—Suddenly he was not alone. A boy appeared, running out from one of the stockaded buildings at the crest of the hill, and trotted alongside the Wheel for a few paces. Then—Martell did not see how it was done—the Wheel went awry and toppled, landing on one disk with the other in the air. It lay there like a huge cheese blocking the road. The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, stood by it, looking pleased with himself. He was low-caste, of course. A high-caste one would not have bothered to save him. Martell realized that probably the low-caste boy had had no interest in saving him, either, but simply had knocked the Wheel over for the sport of it.

Martell said, “I offer thanks, friend. Another moment and I’d have been cut to ribbons.”

The boy made no reply. Martell came closer to inspect the fallen Wheel. Its upper rim was rippling in frustration as it strained to right itself—clearly an impossible task. Martell looked down, saw a dark violet cyst near the center of one wheel writhe and open.

“Look out!” the boy cried, but it was much too late.

Two whip-like threads burst from the cyst. One wrapped itself around Martell’s left thigh, the other around the boy’s waist. Martell felt a blaze of pain, as tough the threads were lined with acidedged suckers. A mouth opened on the inner structure of the Wheel. Martell saw milling, grinding tooth-like projections beginning to churn in anticipation.

But this was a situation he could handie. He had no way of stopping the headlong plunge of the Wheel, for that was mere mechanical energy at work, but presumably the creature’s brain carried an electrical charge, and the Vorsters had ways of altering current flows in the brain. It was a mild form of esping, within the threshold of nearly anyone who cared to master the disci-plines involved. Ignoring the pain, Martell seized the tightening thread with his right hand and performed the act of neutralization. A moment later the thread went slack and Martell was free. So was the boy. The threads did not return to the cyst, but remained lying limp in the roadway. The milling teeth became still; the rippling horny plate of the upper wheel subsided. The thing was dead.