THE OUTER DOOR OF THE MIDSHIPS AIRLOCK OPENED ON THE HIJACKED surface lander hidden in the valley two hundred miles north of Padua city, and the suited figures of Zambendorf and Andy Schwartz, the lander’s captain, came out onto the extended stair-head platform and descended to join Drew West and Clarissa, who were already waiting on the ground. Then, walking two abreast and guided by hand-held flashlamps in the darkness, the melancholy little procession made its way through the labyrinth of steel and concrete shapes to the crude shanty-camp that the Taloids had made for themselves. Abaquaan, Fellburg, and Price, who had gone on ahead a while earlier, were waiting at the camp with Lord Nelson and Abraham, the leader of the Druids, and the rest of the Taloids gathered around on all sides. The time had come for Zambendorf to tell the cast officially that the show was wound up and they were being paid off, to wish them good luck, and send them back home.
“We’ve told them they won’t be going to Padua,” Abaquaan said. The team had agreed on the storyline that Moses, his main task of preventing the invasion of Genoa now successfully accomplished, had been called elsewhere to attend to other things. It was hardly a satisfying end to their venture, but nobody had been able to suggest anything better.
Zambendorf nodded inside his helmet. “How are they taking it?” he asked.
“Not as badly as we thought they might,” Abaquaan replied. “They’re disappointed all right, but not disillusioned. They seem to have rationalized some way of coming to terms with the situation in their own minds.”
“I don’t know...A true believer is a true believer anywhere, it seems,” Zambendorf sighed. “Oh well, bring the transmogrifier here, would you, Otto. I’d like to say a few words to them before they go.” The plan was that the surface lander crew, having ostensibly been released from forcible detainment, would fly to the Terran base at Genoa to return themselves and the vehicle to the authorities, and take the Taloid contingent home at the same time. As to what should happen after that, opinions were divided; Abaquaan, Fellburg, and Clarissa felt that the team had no alternative but to follow in the flyer and turn itself in, whereas Zambendorf and Drew West wondered if there might be some way of extricating Moses from his predicament first.
Indeed this was modesty and graciousness of spirit that was truly worthy of noble beings, the Renamer—formerly Captain Horazzorgio—thought to himself as he listened to the enchanted plant speaking the Archangel’s thoughts. So much had been accomplished in so little time—a new faith founded; a village saved; the whole sect of Waskorians at peace now with Carthogia; the Kroaxian tyrant checked and his army scattered—and yet here the Archangel was, expressing regret that the chosen ones who had descended over the desert on billowy wings would not be present to witness the Coming at Pergassos. For it was clear that the Enlightener had asked their assistance in the Meracasine merely as a precaution while he tested the powers that the Lifemaker had bestowed upon him. The powers had proved so awesome that he had elected to go on alone and complete the conversion of Pergassos single-handed, leaving his followers free to attend to other matters back in Carthogia.
“Wish them good luck, and tell them I’m sure we’ll meet again sometime, I hope in happier circumstances,” Zambendorf said to Abaquaan.
“Hear how the Archangel promiseth that he will return!” Ezimbial, the Druid prophet, told the assembled followers. As a prophet Ezimbial had always been holy and therefore hadn’t needed renaming. “And let it be written that the time will be one of great rejoicing. Thus hath it been prophesied.”
“It has been a privilege to work with them. Their help will never be forgotten,” Zambendorf said.
“This collaboration with angels hath brought great blessings. Our place in eternity is assured,” Ezimbial interpreted.
“They must return to Genoa now, and help Arthur to found institutions of true learning. That is the way to acquire the knowledge that will allow them to fly beyond the sky. Then—who knows? -- perhaps one day we’ll be able to welcome them at our world.”
“It is revealed that Carthogia is the Land promised in the Scribings. There shall the Enlightener’s followers erect a Great Temple, and Kleippur shall direct them. And they who heed no false teachings before those that shall be preached in the Temple will be redeemed, and then will they arise and rejoin the angels in the shining land that floats beyond the sky.”
“I guess that’s it, Otto.”
“And here endeth the lesson.”
“Andy, you’d better stay here and work out a schedule with them for getting packed up and loaded aboard,” Zambendorf said to Schwartz. “Otto will stay with you to handle the translating. We’ll see you both back in the ship when you’re through.”
“Sure,” Schwartz answered.
Vernon watched Zambendorf and the others turn to leave, and then wheeled himself around in his suit to look at Nelson and Abraham. “I’d like to stay back too,” he said, “...for the last few minutes.” He couldn’t help feeling guilty about what had happened to Moses—he had started the whole thing with the ice slab he’d given Moses on the mountain. Now he instinctively put off what he felt subconsciously would amount to desertion of the remaining Taloids as well.
“As you wish,” Zambendorf said. “We’ll see you later, Vernon.” His party began to walk back to the ship, the probing, flitting beams of their flashlamps growing fainter and more distant in the darkness.
Schwartz turned back toward Abaquaan. “Tell them I’d like to be ready for takeoif not later than three hours from now, but it’d help a lot if they could get all their personal stuff loaded right away. We can take all the animals they brought with them, but they’ll have to let go the ones they’ve been collecting since...the big rock-crushers with the caterpillar tracks, anyhow.”
Abaquaan conveyed the message, and Abraham responded with a question that appeared on the screen as DESTINATION IN GENOA?
“The Terran base just outside the city,” Abaquaan replied.
DRUIDS’ ASSIGNMENT AFTER THAT? the screen asked.
And Abaquaan answered, “We have no specific instructions to give. You’ll be on your own then. Talk to Arthur’s scientists at Camelot. That’s where the most useful work is being done.”
Ezimbial puzzled over the plant’s reply for a moment. “Kleippur’s inquirers?” he said to the Renamer. “The Lifemaker will make known His wishes through them? But knowest thou which among them? Whom are we to approach?”
The Renamer stared thoughtfully at the trees in the background. “Perhaps,” he answered slowly. “There is a one called Thirg, whose steps the Lifemaker directed out of Kroaxia to enter the service of Kleippur. The workings of the Lifemaker’s plan are clearer to me now. It was I who in blindness would have frustrated the Maker’s design, and for that it has been my penance to bear the afflictions that you see.”
“How knowest thou it is this Thirg whom we should seek?” Ezimbial asked. “Does he carry some special qualification of eminence among Kleippur’s inquirers that sets him apart as the object of our quest?”
“None less than that of being the Enlightener’s brother,” the Renamer replied.
“The Enlightener has a brother in Carthogia!” Ezimbial’s eyes widened. “Indeed Kleippur’s realm is the Promised Land of the Scribings, and artisans have been congregating thither from the corners of the world to build the Temple that was prophesied.”
Just to be sure, the Renamer activated the enchanted plant and said into it, “Is it our quest to seek Thirg, Asker-of-Questions, who was born brother to the holy Enlightener?”
The plant replied, “Unclear hiss-buzz what-mean ‘brother.’ Want-say alternative hoo-whoo-bonk-bonk. Else obtain new word.”
The Renamer couldn’t bring an alternative to mind immediately, and instructed, “Obtain new word.”
“EQUIVALENT ENGLISH WORD-FORM BEING REQUESTED,” the screen advised Abaquaan.
“Oh hell, can’t we wrap this up?” Andy Schwartz said. “I’ve gotta get the ship up to flight readiness. There’s a lot to do.”
“Give them a few more minutes,” Vernon said. “How often do you get a chance to talk to people like these?”
Abaquaan eyed Vernon through his faceplate, nodded with a sigh, and instructed the transmogrifier, “Okay.”
“Pray describe,” the plant invited the Renamer.
“Male child born of common parenthood,” the Renamer said after a few seconds’ thought. “The relationship thereof to either another male child, or to a female child.”
The screen presented:
FUNCTION SUBJECT ADDITIONAL DATA
Personal relationship Male child, same To another male/female child
parents
Abaquaan told the machine simply, “Brother.”
Back at the ship, the others had just arrived below the stair-head platform outside the midships lock. “I’ve got a hunch that Caspar still doesn’t realize we’ve got the flyer too,” Zambendorf was saying. “Certainly there’s no question that the lander would have been a sitting duck over Padua, but the flyer’s a lot smaller and more maneuverable. When the lander’s picked people on radar up flying back to Genoa, everyone will be off their guard and not expecting us to show up anywhere else. I think there’s an excellent chance we’d be able to pull off a quick dash in and out at rooftop level in the flyer.”
“I go along with Karl,” Drew West said as he began climbing up to the platform. “We sent Moses in there. Trying to get him out again is the least we can do. It’s worth a try.”
“Sure, but it’s not the sentiment I’m arguing with, it’s the practicality.” Clarissa answered. “It’s all right to talk about excellent chances, but you’ve never tried dodging those missiles, and I have. I’m telling you it’s not a piece of cake.”
“We don’t know what’s happening in Padua—if anything is, or when, or even where Moses is,” Joe Fellburg pointed out. “Exactly what would we be supposed to do—at what place, and at what time?”
“I don’t know either, but we can find out,” Zambendorf said. “There has to have been a lot of talking going on between Leaherney’s people and Henry. There might be records of the dialogues stored in the files where Dave Crookes or somebody could get at them. Maybe we’d pick up some clues that way. Or possibly we could find out who the transmogrifier operators are at Padua. They might have heard something. I don’t know—All I’m saying is that we should give it a try rather than just quit.”
“Mmm, maybe...” Fellburg murmured. He didn’t sound wildly enthusiastic. He’d had some experience with smart missiles too.
At that moment there was a click on the circuit as somebody switched through to a medium-range channel, and Vernon’s voice came through excitedly from back at the Taloid camp. “Hey, Karl, everybody, don’t go away—listen to this. We’ve just learned something from Nelson that maybe changes everything. He assumed we already knew about it because these guys think we know everything. Anyway...it seems that Moses is Galileo’s brother!”
Fifteen minutes later, back inside the ship, Zambendorf called Thelma in the Orion and asked her to beam the call back down to the surface to connect to the communications set hidden in Arthur’s conference room at Camelot. One of Arthur’s knights answered, and went to fetch Arthur. Zambendorf transmitted some stills over the link from recordings showing Moses, but Arthur was unable either to confirm or deny that the figure shown was Galileo’s brother. Galileo himself was elsewhere, but Arthur promised to send for him at once. Galileo called back over an hour later, after Arthur’s staff eventually found him locked away in a workroom where he was constructing a model of the Saturnian system of planet, rings, and moons from information that Massey and Thelma had sent him several days previously. Zambendorf showed Galileo the pictures and asked if the Taloid shown in them was his brother.
Thirg, utterly bewildered at seeing for the first time the face of the fabulous Enlightener that the whole country was talking about—who had pacified the Waskorians, saved Carthogia from invasion, and now, allegedly, departed to put a permanent end to further Kroaxian mischief—confirmed to the Wearer that it was.
“He is the brother of whom you spoke?” Kleippur asked incredulously as Thirg gaped at the Lumian long-distance seeing device. “The hearer who came to warn you when the Kroaxian Council ordered your arrest?”
“It is he!” Dornvald exclaimed, having also just arrived. “Behold—the mystic we last saw praying to the skies with the villagers of Xerxeon.”
“He was convinced that his voices had led him there to see the fulfillment of some momentous destiny,” Thirg said weakly, still staring at the viewing window. “It appears his inspiration was more substantially founded than I had credited.”
“How comes Thirg’s brother, Groork, to this exalted station in which we now find him?” Kleippur inquired, pressing the button that would open the viewing vegetable’s ears.
Several hundred miles away across darkened deserts of rock-strewn hydrocarbon sands and mountains of naked ice, Zambendorf read the words that appeared on the screen in front of him. “I’ll explain it all later. We may not have a lot of time,” he said gruffly, and cut the connection.
At one of the consoles across the aisle behind Zambendorf in the Lander’s aft communications cabin, Hank Frazer was taking a return call from Dave Crookes. “I found out which operator had the most recent slot down there,” Crookes said. “It was Sharon Beatty—one of our people from Leon Keyhoe’s section. I talked to her about ten minutes ago. She said that the Taloids are staging a big public execution in Padua, and Henry got all excited and went galloping off to be sure not to miss it. All she knew apart from that, she said, was that it concerned a miracle-worker who’s been causing Henry a lot of trouble lately. Is that enough for you to figure out the rest?”
“It sure is,” Frazer said. “Oh, and Dave, one more thing—did she have any idea when this was supposed to happen? Did you ask her that?”
“Yes I did. She said about twenty hours from when Henry heard about it—that’s something like ten hours from now.”
Back at the Taloid camp, Zambendorf, Vernon, and Abaquaan told Nelson that they had received word from the sky that a public execution was being arranged in Padua city, and it was Moses’ desire that the intended victim should be saved—which they felt safe in presuming to be the case. They didn’t say who the intended victim was, and Nelson assumed they were referring to someone that Moses had learned about after his arrival at the city. In response to their further questioning Nelson informed them that the customary place for conducting executions of major criminals and heretics was a high cliff located just outside the city. Here, before a natural public amphitheater, the victims were pushed from a wide rock ledge halfway up the face at the top of a long, ceremonial staircase, to fall two hundred feet into an open tank containing some kind of corrosive liquid. This was the usual method of executing heretics, Nelson explained, because the procedure also embodied the elements of a trial, permitting a higher justice the opportunity to intervene in the event of wrongful conviction: According to doctrine, any innocent cast from the ledge would be snatched from death by the Taloid god before completing the fall. Apparently nobody had ever been snatched yet, which the Taloid priests contended was proof that they’d never issued a wrong verdict.
Clarissa located the cliff on a series of reconnaissance pictures of Padua and its vicinity which she retrieved from the Orion’s databank. It formed the end face of a ridge of craggy hills that descended almost to the city from a more distant range of higher mountains. Even more interesting was that the geography of the area seemed to make its own weather; Every set of pictures taken since the Orion’s arrival, along with the accompanying sets of meteorological data, had shown a formation of apparently permanent low-altitude methane clouds only a thousand feet or so above the clifftop. That changed Clarissa’s assessment of the odds considerably. “We could come in low along the ridgeline from the mountains in the rear, and probably get up inside those clouds right over the cliff without even the Taloids knowing we were there,” she said. “They’d obviously be restricted to visual sighting since they don’t have anything like radar. If the chance presented itself, yeah—maybe we could pull a quick grab and be back up again before they could react. Okay, you’ve sold me, Karl. I’ll give it a try.”
“But no stunts or miracles, right?” Abaquaan said. “We just go straight down and straight up again.”
“Too right,” Clarissa agreed. Her tone left no room for dissent. “Just a quick grab—no tricks and no clowning.”
“I agree, I agree,” Zambendorf said, nodding. “All I’m interested in is getting Moses out if we can. I’m not asking for anything else to be changed. The operation is still scrubbed, and the lander goes back to Genoa with its crew and the Druids as agreed...except that we time it to coincide with our going in at Padua. Okay?” He cast his eyes anxiously over the faces around him.
“Okay, boss—I’ll buy it,” Fellburg said resignedly.
“I’m already in,” Drew West reminded them.
Abaquaan nodded his assent. “Aw, what the hell...We’ve scraped through everything else so far. Okay, let’s do it.”
“Let’s do it,” Vernon repeated.
Zambendorf looked at Vernon uncertainly for a second. “You don’t have to get involved, you know. There’s still plenty of room in the lander going back to Genoa.”
“I gave Moses his tablet, so it’s my fault as much as anyone’s that he’s where he is.” Vernon shook his head. “No, if there’s a chance we might be able to get him out again, that’s where I want to be.”
Zambendorf, apparently having half expected it, nodded briefly, and left the matter at that. “Fine. So let’s get our things moved into the flyer and let Andy and his crew get on with whatever needs doing in the lander. Then let’s get together again one hour from now and have another look at the layout around that cliff. There won’t be any chance for an actual rehearsal for this performance, I’m afraid, so we’ll have to make do with the next best thing—a lot of imaginary ones.”