Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“Can’t I just remain myself?” Kirby cried.

“What you are isn’t enough. Not now. Not any more. These are hard times. A troubled world. The Martians make fun of us. The Venusians despise us. We need new organization, new strength. The sting of death is in sin, and the strength of sin is the law. Grave, where is thy victory?”

A riotous swirl of colors danced through Kirby’s mind. The surgically altered woman pirouetted, leaped and bobbed, flaunted the jewel-bedecked flamboyance of herself in his face. Kirby quivered. He clawed fitfully at the mask. For this nightmare he had paid good money? How could people let themselves become addicts of this sort of thing—this tour through the swamps of one’s own mind?

Kirby wrenched the sniffer mask away and threw it to the floor of the booth. He sucked clean air into his lungs, fluttered his eyes, returned to reality.

He was alone in the booth.

The Martian, Weiner, was gone.

The robot who ran the sniffer palace was of no help.

“Where’d he go?” Kirby demanded.

“He left,” came the rusty reply. “Eighteen dollars sixty cents. We will bill your Central.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“We did not converse. He left. Awwwrk! We did not converse. I will bill your Central. Awwwrk!”

Sputtering a curse, Kirby rushed out into the street. He glanced involuntarily at the sky. Against the darkness he saw the lemon-colored letters of the timeglow streaming in the firmament, irregularly splotched with red:

2205 Hours Eastern Standard Time

Wednesday May 8 2077

Buy Preebles—They Crunch!

Two hours to midnight. Plenty of time for that lunatic colonial to get himself in trouble. The last thing Kirby wanted was to have a drunken, perhaps hallucinated Weiner rampaging around in New York. This assignment hadn’t entirely been one of rendering hospitality. Part of Kirby’s job was to keep an eye on Weiner. Martians had come to Earth before. The libertarian society was a heady wine for them.

Where had he gone?

One place to look was the Vorster hall. Maybe Weiner had gone back to raise some more hell over there. With sweat bursting from every pore, Kirby sprinted across the street, dodging the rocketing teardrops as they turbined past, and rushed into the shabby cultist chapel. The service was still going on. It didn’t seem as tough Weiner were there, though. Everyone obediently knelt in his pew, and there were no shouts, no screams of boozy laughter. Kirby silently loped down the aisle, checking every bench. No Weiner. The girl with the surgical face was still there, and she smiled and stretched a hand toward him. For one bizarre moment Kirby was catapulted back into his sniffer hallucination, and his flesh crawled. Then he recovered himself. He managed a faint smile to be polite and got out of the Vorster place as fast as he could.

He caught the slidewalk and let it carry him three blocks in a random direction. No Weiner. Kirby got off and found himself in front of a public Nothing Chamber place, where for twenty bucks an hour you could get wafted off to luscious oblivion. Perhaps Weiner had wandered in there, eager to try every mind-sapping diversion the city had to offer. Kirby went in.

Robots weren’t in charge here. A genuine flesh-and-blood entrepreneur came forward, a four-hundred-pounder, opulent with chins, Small eyes buried in fat regarded Kirby doubtfully.

“Want an hour of rest, friend?”

“I’m looking for a Martian,” Kirby blurted. “About so high, big shoulders, sharp cheekbones.”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“Look, maybe he’s in one of your tanks. This is important. It’s

U.N. business.”

“I don’t care if it’s the business of God Almighty. I haven’t seen him.” The fat man glanced only briefly at Kirby’s identification plaque. “What do you want me to do—open my tanks for you? He didn’t come in here.”

“If he does, don’t let him rent a chamber,” Kirby begged. “Stall him and phone U.N. Security right away.”

“I got to rent him if he wants. We run a public hall here, buddy. You want to get me in trouble? Look, you’re all worked up. Why don’t you climb into a tank for a little while? It’ll do wonders for you. You’ll feel like—”

Kirby wheeled and ran out. There was nausea in the pit of his stomach, perhaps induced by the hallucinogen. There was also fright and a goodly jolt of anger. He visualized Weiner clubbed in some dark alley, his stocky body expertly vivisected for the bootleg organ banks. A worthy fate, perhaps, but it would raise hob with Kirby’s reliability rating. More likely was it that Weiner, bashing around like a Chinese bull—was that the right simile, Kirby wondered?—would stir up some kind of mess that would be blasphemously difficult to clean up.

Kirby had no idea where to look. A communibooth presented itself on the corner of the next street, and he jumped in, opaquing the screens. He rammed his identification plaque into the slot and punched for U.N. Security.

The cloudy little screen grew clear. The pudgy, bearded face of Lloyd Ridblom appeared.

“Night squad,” Ridblom said. “Hello, Ron. Where’s your Martian?”

“Lost him. He gave me the slip in a sniffer palace.”

Ridblom became instantly animated. “Want me to slap a televector on him?”

“Not yet,” Kirby said. “I’d rather he didn’t know we were upset about his disappearance. Put the vector on me, instead, and keep contact. And open up a routine net for him. If he shows, notify me right away. I’ll call back in an hour to change the instructions if nothing’s happened by then.”

“Maybe he’s been kidnapped by Vorsters,” Ridblom suggested. “They’re draining his blood for altar wine.”

“Go to hell,” Kirby said. He stepped put of the booth and put his thumbs briefly to his eyeballs. Slowly, purposelessly, he strolled toward the slidewaik and let it take him back to the Vorster hall. A few people were coming out of it now. There was the girl with the iridescent earshells; she wasn’t content to haunt his hallucinations—she had to keep intersecting his path in real life, too.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was gentle, at least. “I’m Vanna Marshak. Where’d your friend go?”

“I’m wondering that myself. He vanished a little while ago.”

“Are you supposed to be in charge of him?”

“I’m supposed to be watching him, anyhow. He’s a Martian, you know.”

‘I didn’t. He’s certainly hostile to the Brotherhood, isn’t be? That was sad, the way he erupted during the service. He must be terribly ill.”

“Terribly drunk,” Kirby said. “It happens to all the Martians who come here. The iron bars are lifted for them, and they think anything goes. Can I buy you a drink?” he added mechanically.

“I don’t drink, thanks. But I’ll accompany you if you want one.”

“I don’t want one. I need one.”

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Ron Kirby. I’m with the U.N. I’m a minor bureaucrat. No, I’ll correct that: a major bureaucrat who gets paid like a minor one. We can go in here.”

He nudged the doorstud of a bar on the corner. The sphincter whickered open and admitted them. She smiled warmly. She was about thirty, Kirby guessed. Not easy to tell, with all that hardware where her face used to be.

“Filtered rum,” he said.

Vanna Marshak leaned close to him. She wore some subtle and unfamiliar perfume. “Why did you bring him to the Brotherhood house?” she asked.

He downed his drink as though it were fruit juice. “He wanted to see what the Vorsters were like. So I took him.”

“I take it you’re unsympathetic personally?”