Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“What about our guidance people?” Kirby asked.

“They’ve been ready for an hour.”

Kirby looked toward the gleaming capsule. “Might as well get it over with, then.”

“Yes,” Capodimonte said. “Might as well.”

Lazarus, Kirby knew, was waiting for a signal from him. From now on, all signals would come from him, at least on Earth. But that thought no longer disturbed him. He had adjusted to the situation. He was in command.

Symbolic regalia cluttered the field—Harmonist ikons, a big cobalt reactor, the paraphernalia of both the cults that now were merging. Kirby gestured to an acolyte, and moderator rods were withdrawn. The reactor surged into life.

The Blue Fire danced high above the reactor, and its glow stained the hull of the capsule. Cold light, Cerenkov radiation, the Vorster symbol, sparkled on the plateau, and all through the watching multitude ran the sounds of devotion, the whispered litanies, the murmured recapitulatons of the stations of the spectrum. While the man who had devised those words sat hidden within the walls of that teardrop of steel in the center of the gathering.

The flare of the Blue Fire was the signal to the Venusians in their nearby dome. Now was their moment to gather their power and hurl the capsule outward, planting man’s hand on a new world in the stars.

“What are they waiting for?” Magnus asked querulously.

“Maybe it won’t happen,” said Capodimonte.

Kirby said nothing. And then it began to happen.

Kirby had not quite known what to expect. In his fantasies of the scene he had pictured a dozen capering Venusians dancing around the capsule, holding hands, their foreheads bulging with the effort of lifting the vehicle and hurling it out of the world. But the Venusians were nowhere to be seen; they were off in their dome, several hundred yards away, and Kirby suspected that they were neither holding hands nor showing outward signs of strain.

In his reveries, too, he had imagined the capsule taking off the way a rocket would, rising a few feet from the ground, wobbling a bit, rising a little more, suddenly soaring up, crossing the sky on a potent trajectory, dwindling, vanishing from sight at last. But that was not the way it was really to be, either.

He waited. A long moment passed.

He thought of Vorst, making landfall on same other world. An inhabited world, perhaps? What would be Vorst’s impact when he came to that virgin territory? Vorst was an irresistible force, terrifying and unique. Wherever he went, he would transform all that was about him. Kirby felt sorry for the ten hapless pioneers who would have the benefit of Vorst’s immediate guidance. He wondered what kind of colony they would build.

Whatever it was, it would succeed. Success was in Vorst’s nature. He was hideously old, but he had frightening vitality still locked within him. The Founder seemed to relish the challenge of beginning anew. Kirby wished him well.

“There they go,” Capodimonte whispered.

It was true. The capsule was still on the ground, but now the air about it wavered, as though stirred by heat waves rising from the parched, sandy soil.

Then the capsule was gone.

That was all. Kirby stared at the empty place where it had been. Vorst had been taken up into the heavens, and a gateway to somewhere had been opened.

“There is a Oneness from which all life stems,” someone said gently behind Kirby. “The infinite variety of the universe we owe to—”

Another voice said, “Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird—”

Another said, “In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum, and the holy angstrom—”

Kirby did not remain to listen to the familiar prayers, nor did he pray himself. He looked briefly at the bareness in the desert once more, and then upward at the harsh blue sky, already deepening toward nightfall. It was done. Vorst was gone, his scheming ended so far as Earth was concerned, and now it was the turn of lesser men. The way was open. Humanity could spill out across the heavens. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Alone in this great assembly of the faithful, Kirby turned his back on the now sacred spot from which Vorst had made his ascent. Very slowly, a tall figure whose late-afternoon shadow stretched for yards, Kirby walked away from the place where Noel Vorst had been, and toward the place where David Lazarus was waiting to speak with him.