Could Johnny, somehow, have made his way up there?
If a road existed Johnny might have found it. He had always had a reckless, burning discontent with life in the Compression which could have driven him anywhere. Stirling remembered how, as a boy, Johnny Considine had been unable to accept the fact that, although mankind was all dressed up with spaceships, there was nowhere to go. In the context of billions of hungry humans to be transported, established, and fed, the other planets of the Solar System were of about as much value as their gaseous, counterparts in the cosmodromes. Later, Johnny had tried all the various arms of the Space Service, but the academic standards had shut him out. By that time Stirling had moved away, seeking his own escape in the world of newspapers; and he had done nothing to prevent his brother’s life closing up on itself. Was that why he now had this need to trace Johnny? Was he, belatedly, trying to make amends for his own failings?
Depressed with the rare venture into self-analysis, Stirling stopped pushing his way through the crowds on the sidewalks and began looking for cabs again. He got one on the third attempt and directed the driver to take him to the docks. Getting out near the headquarters of the longshoremen’s union, he had to scan the block closely to find the meeting room used by the Receders. It was on the second floor of a shabby sandstone building, above a rundown office-supply store. A photo-printed notice at the foot of the narrow stairs said:
NEWBURYPORT RECEDERS CHAPEL
Nightly Readings—All Invited.
Stirling went up the stairs and into a long room filled with people listening to a speaker on a low platform at the far end. An undulating slab of cigarette smoke hung in the choking air, just below the main ties of the exposed roof trusses. Finding a seat near the back, Stirling covertly examined the people nearest to him.
All he knew about the Receders was what he had gained from stray references in the papers: that they were a religious, semi-left wing group who seemed to be against just about every feature of present-day life. They had a loose organization under a shadowy figure called Mason Third, who—according to some rumors Stirling had heard—was supposed to have political aspirations, although his platform had never been defined. Stirling had automatically filed the odd facts away in his reporter’s memory, and instinctively had categorized Third as one of the army of religious crackpots who helped fill the news columns during the silly season.
Consequently, he expected to find himself sitting among an assortment of human wrecks, misfits, and mooncalves who made up the bulk of the attendance at dockside missions. Instead, those nearest him seemed to be solid, normal citizens—with a sprinkling of sophomores and housewives thrown in. Several were making notes of the speaker’s remarks.
Stirling turned his attention to the platform. The speaker, a conservatively dressed man with white hair and a let-me-be-your-father face, was arguing against enforced birth control by giving a detailed account of the failure of the Chinese Experiment. Stirling, who had thought the experiment was a success, listened closely as the speaker described the difficulties the Kuomintang had run into in their massive program of using estrogens to make the menstrual cycles of all Chinese women coincide, then forbidding sexual intercourse on a national scale on the maximum fertility days. The experiment, the speaker concluded, was an awesome attempt to bring not only thought but emotion into the sphere of state control, and as such was bound to be rejected.
When the white-haired man went off and was followed by another who discussed the deficiency diseases likely to be brought about by the processed foods issued by the Food Technology Authority, Stirling began to realize he had completely misjudged the Receders. He had been mistaken in thinking them religion-orientated—but what had caused the mistake? Was it deliberately fostered by the organization itself? They called their meeting places “chapels”, a word which usually had religious connotations; and the name, “Receders,” was the essence of harmless negation. It was suggestive of noise abaters, flat-Earthers, and complete abstention societies. Had an expert functional semanticist chosen those words?
Stirling decided to check the organization’s file in the Record’s office at the first opportunity and see what he turned up. Probably nothing, but any information at all might be useful at this stage—assuming he was not following a false trail. He glanced around the seedy decor of the room and noted the darkened paintwork, the cluttered notice-boards, the worn floor tiles. What was he supposed to do now? Start buttonholing people and asking if they knew where he could find his brother?
Suddenly aware that it might have been better to think about hiring a private investigator, Stirling began methodically scanning as many faces as he could with the faint hope of recognizing someone and perhaps taking things one step further. He barely noticed the appearance of a third speaker, introduced as Duke Bennett, a gray-uniformed man of
about fifty, with thick sloping shoulders and slightly bowed legs that suggested a kind of inhuman strength. Stirling was feeling for his cigarettes, and at the same time wishing for a cold beer, when he realized the new speaker was talking about Heaven.
“… The whole concept of the International Land Extensions was a product of the hysteria which followed in the wake of the events of 1992. But we must not be too contemptuous. The incongruity of the idea is a measure, not of the impracticability of the people who built the lies, but of their desperation.
“After all, any legislative body would have to be in a pretty bad way before it would approve the expenditure required to build huge rafts, boost them three miles into the sky, and import tons of soil to cover them—simply to produce a few mustard greens!”
The speaker paused to allow several of the audience to titter appreciatively, then continued in his overloud voice, which hurled the words out like metal ingots.
“We can forgive the builders of the lies, but we cannot —on any grounds—justify them. The maintenance of the anti-gravity units alone uses up enough hard cash each year to finance the reclamation of a hundred square miles of prairie. In terms of this nation’s long range program, this means …”
Stirling, recognizing the familiar argumentative patterns, let his attention wander. He could appreciate intellectually that the lies were not a sound investment, but his emotional response was a different story altogether. It had been a wonderful thing for two fatherless boys, born into a world where magic was less than a memory, to be able to look into the sky and actually see Heaven; to share the same cramped bed in a boxlike room; and to feel at peace because up there, high in the east where they could look at it, was that ethereal yet tangible Avalon to which they would both find their way and. someday, join hands with the half-forgotten giants who had been their fathers. And in the long nights they had sometimes seen minute, transient flickers of light which might have been signals.
Stirling, the adult, could look bad, with some amusement at Stirling the child; yet Heaven had never quite lost its aura, even though the mysteries of its name, nature, and purpose were long vanished from his mind. Its official designation was International Land Extension, U.S. 23; but in the fam-apts and dormitories in its shadow it was known, simply, as Heaven. The name was left over from the early days of the Compression when that He’s open green spaces were tantalizing reminders of the past. Nobody lived on Heaven, or on any of the other lies, largely because the government psychologists had made it clear they could make life in the Compression seem acceptable only if everybody was in it together. So the thin clean air of Heaven, high above the winds that carried the herbicidal dusts, was reserved for the agricultural robots which tilled its soil.