Bob Shaw - Shadow of Heaven

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AN AVON BOOK

This Avon edition is the first publication of Shadow of Heaven in any form.

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

any form whatsoever. For information address

Ted White, 339^9th Street, Brooklyn 20, New York.

First Avon Printing, June, 1969 Cover illustration by Edward Soyka

4VON TRADEMARK KEG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK— MARCA

1EGISTRADA, BECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

Printed In Canada

Chapter One

Stirling's first story of the day was a routine job. The bodies of a young man and woman, hand-cuffed together, had

been fished out of the Merrimack during the night. It was worth two or three paragraphs as it stood, more when he had

established who and why—but nothing was working out that morning.

His best contacts at police control and the morgue were off for the day, and his second-best contacts really were

second-best—probably because they were getting better sweeteners from some other newspaper. Stirling had wasted

thirty minutes on futile phone calls when one of the copy girls dropped a note from the news editor, Sam McLeod,

onto his desk. McLeod was a gloomy little man who, in a lifetime in the newspaper business, had put a million slips of

copy through his hands, yet never failed to summon up a fresh look of savage hatred for each new sheet that was

handed to him. He sat within fifteen feet of Stirling and the other city reporters, but always communicated by means of

hand-written notes. This one said:

"What's the holdup on the John and Jane Doe story?"

Stirling swore despairingly and crammed paper into his machine. "Tell Sam I'm gummed up on it. I'll put through a

holding story for the noon edition." He glanced up at the copy girl and sniffed. "Nice perfume, Jean. Smells expensive.

What is it?"

Jean smiled, highlights moving on her fashionably pearl-ized skin. "It's called Roast Beef."

Stirling sniffed again, even more appreciatively, because he had once smelled real roast beef when he was a boy.

"It beats me how you can buy that sort of merchandise on a copy girl's salary." Stirling raised one eyebrow

specu-latively. "Do you work nights?"

Jean compressed her lips and stalked away haughtily on invisible, paramagnetic high heels. Stirling called after her to

wait for his copy, but she ignored him and vanished from sight among the seriate desks and screens of the long room.

Huge, oblong prisms of morning sunlight sloped from the side windows, picked out columns of cigarette smoke, and

occasionally exploded silently over the white-shirted figures.

Stirling savored the spaciousness of the Record's editorial offices. The room was about one-hundred-feet-by-forty and

housed a staff of two hundred—which meant that each member of the editorial team had a five-foot-by-four space to

himself. He guessed that a hundred years earlier, in the twentieth century, that area would have seemed impossibly

cramped; but when he compared it to the choking claustrophobia of his apartment he felt like staying in the office till

bedtime. He had actually tried it a few times, but when the place emptied in the evening it began to seem too big. At

those times he was glad he had been born after the Compression, and not before.

Stirling typed two single-sentence paragraphs giving the facts he had and carried the copy slips to the news desk

himself. McJ-eod picked up the sheets and stared at them in professional disgust.

"Is that it? Is that one hour's output for a supposedly senior and experienced reporter on the Record?" He buried his

face in cupped hands and sat waiting for an answer.

"I can't make the stuff up, Sam. That's all I've been able to get so far."

"Have you checked the files?" McLeod's voice was blurred as it filtered through his fingers.

"We haven't got the names," Stirling said patiently. "We file people under their names, and when we have no

names we can't check the files. It's an inherent flaw in the system, Sam."

"Don't try to be smart with me, Victor." McLeod raised his slightly yellowed eyes and stared at a point on Stirling's

collar. "Have you checked the latest missing-persons cards?"

Stirling felt his grip on his temper begin to slide a little. "Well, you see, Sam, there's this name business again. I hate to

bring it up since it seems to bother you, but the missing-persons cards are indexed by name as well. Names are really

catching on, you know. Nearly everybody has one now."

An unexpectedly angelic smile spread over McLeod's face, and Stirling knew the little man was going to score a point.

"I know that, Victor. And they're crow-indexed as well. If two people who are connected in some way disappear, it

shows on our cards. Doesn't it? You just might get a lead on the identities that way, Victor. That's why the Record

goes to the trouble of getting stats from police headquarters every day. Have you checked the cards from that angle?"

"Of course, I have," Stirling lied. "I'll go over them again though, if it'll make you happy."

McLeod's smile grew even more seraphic, showing he had not been deceived. "That's my boy," he murmured. "Well

make a reporter of you yet." He raised a white cup of synthejuice to his lips and stared over the rim with jaundiced

eyes as Stirling threaded his way across to the file bank.

Stirling checked himself from swearing as he squeezed his huge and rather overweight body through the crowded

aisles. He treated swearing as being like antibiotics: indiscriminate use produced a tolerance which left the patient

stranded when a real emergency cropped up. And he had a feeling he was going to need some reserves before the day

was over.

Technically speaking, McLeod was right about the cards. They were cross-referenced to show up the connections

between two or more missing persons, but usually

only when they were related to each other, worked for the same business, or were members of the same organization.

Stirling had not bothered to check the cards because his instincts told him the only connection between the two pitiful

human shells taken from the river was that they had once looked on each other with love. In spite of the conditioning,

some people still wanted to set up house together and bring up their children together—the way it had been before the

Compression—and they were not prepared to settle for anything less. Feelings like these were not recorded in the

stat-computers; so, Stirling had not checked the cards. He had to admit, however, that John and Jane Doe might have

met each other while working in the same plant, in which case there was a chance of getting something on them.

As the card sorter went through that week's heavy crop of missing persons, Stirling wondered how anybody's

emotions could get so much out of control that they would jump into a river. The choice of method was significant, of

course. Just as the ancient Roman aristocracy had regarded it as a privilege to run onto their swords when they found

circumstances intolerable, so a citizen of the Twenty-first Century could slip quietly away from life, peacefully, almost

pleasantly, with the aid of a handful of pills. And hardly anyone would notice his departure. But this couple must have

wanted to make a protest—and so they had done it the old-fashioned way, the hard way—choking as the black,

stinking waters slopped into their lungs.

The fools, Stirling thought, angry at himself for getting involved even to this extent. All that their big, dramatic protest

was going to get them was a few column-inches on a middle page of that day's Record. J^ess than that if he failed to

get a lead on their identities before McJ-eod handed him a bigger story.

As he waited for the sorter to nominate any likely couples it might have, Stirling absent-mindedly lifted a bundle of the

rejected cards and riffled through them. The undistinguished names flickered under his thumb, each name representing

an undistinguished life, or death. Feeling himself sink further into depression, Stirling squared the cards

up and dropped them back in the tray. As he did so, one of the names registered, belatedly, on the part of his mind that

was always alert for such things. John Considine.

My mother is called Cbnsidine now, he thought mechanically. And my half-brother is called John—but it couldn't be.

Considine is a common enough name; besides, somebody would have been in touch with me. He hesitated for a

moment, then picked up the cards, and went through them again.

The card was four days old, and it contained very little information. John Considine, aged 31, unemployed

mathematician, reported missing by family, no criminal record, no reason to suspect foul play. Stirling skipped the

vague description and read the address: Fam-apt 126-46, Flat-block 353, Res-area 93N-54W.

When Johnny and he were boys, they had joked about that string of numerals and butchered words. (It isn't much, but

we call it home. I always think a good address is so important, don't you?) Now they served to confirm that the missing

person was a flesh-and-blood reality, not just a few magnetic ink marks on a comp-card, but the only human being

Stirling had ever really known.

He worked his way back to his desk, lifted a phone, and rang his mother's number. The fluffy ringing tone dragged on

for a couple of minutes before he accepted there was going to be no reply. Stirling set the phone down and began

struggling through the ant-heap activity of the editorial office to reach the door. McLeod looked up in surprise.

"Victor?" "Can't stop. I'm going out."

"I want to talk to you, Victor." McLeod's voice had developed a metallic edge.

"Send me a note. I'll read it when I get back." Stirling went out through the doorway and thumbed the elevator button,

wondering if he had pushed McLeod too far. It was more than a year since a reporter had been sacked from the

Record, and McLeod never allowed the big axe to get too rusty.

When the elevator had carried him up to the sixth level, 9

Stirling went out onto the street and signaled for a cab. It was a clean, jewel-bright morning in May and—as there was

only one street level above the sixth—sunlight was flooding freely over the shuttling traffic. It gave him a feeling of

airy warmth.

A cab obligingly slowed down, but at that moment three men in the immaculate white uniforms of Food Technologists

emerged from another entrance. The cab speeded up again to pass Stirling and picked up the three Techs.

"Hold it," Stirling shouted angrily. "That's my cab."

He ran a few paces towards the waiting automobile, but the men got in and were whisked away. One of therri was

grinning as he glanced back. Halting his ungainly run, Stirling squandered most of the day's ration of swear serum,

although he knew the cab driver had only been looking out for his own interest. The Food Techs were flush with

money and could be big tippers; they were also flush with power and a complaint from one of them, no matter how

groundless, would be enough to deprive a hack of Ms license. About once a month Stirling gave up some of his spare

time to write feature articles about this sort of occurrence but, not surprisingly, the Record never printed them. The

East Coast Government kept a pretty tight hold over what appeared in the newspapers1—and the Food Technologists

kept a pretty tight hold over the Government.

A few minutes later another cab appeared and Stirling got in. When he had given the driver his mother's address, he

settled down in the back seat and stared morosely through the bubble's sides at the unfolding vistas of multi-layered

cityscape. The cab was skimming along two thousand feet above what had once been the smallish manufacturing

center of Newburyport at the mouth of the Merri-mack River. Now the original city was buried in the massive East

Coast conurbation, which was effectively a single building stretching from above Boston right down to Miami, and

which included New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore in its basement layer.

Roughly one-third of the population of the United States had lived there since the Compression.

Stirling tried to visualize the region as it had been in the bright, brave past when the whole country had been available

for living space, but his mind balked at the task. In 1992. almost a century ago, World War III had come and gone, and

none of the theoreticians had been able to predict the form it would take. It had always been assumed that the Big War

would annihilate most of the population and turn the major countries into vast uninhabited areas similar to what they

had been in pre-history. That had been the first misconception. Humanity had survived practically unscathed—the

only real casualty had been the land itself.

The second mistake had been in the assumption that—if war came—America, Russia and China would fight it out

among themselves in one or another of the few simple permutations possible. In the real event, America, Russia, and

China had found themselves on the same side; and they never did find out for certain who the opposition was. The

enemy had assembled his forces, struck, and retired to safety before any of the Big Three discovered the war had

started.

The first indications had come when the soil began to die.

Soil sterility occurred in great swathes from coast to coast and removed traditional agriculture from the tally of

meaningful human activities in a matter of months. In the beginning, China had seemed a possible culprit because she

was suffering slightly less than Russia and the States; but it was quickly established that this was a lucky accident

due solely to the fact that her airline services were underdeveloped in comparison to those of the other two powers

concerned—for the unknown enemy had used each country's civil aircraft as weapons carriers.

The annihilation of the soil had been accomplished by widespread dissemination of one of the bipyridylium herbicides,

paraquat dichloride, modified to protect its characteristic flat molecules from becoming inactivated through interaction

with clay minerals. The beauty of the technique—or the ugliness, depending on how one looked at it —was that the

modification enabled the chemical entity to

perpetuate itself, even in the harshly inimical environment of jet fuel. At some time in the early part of 1992, the

herbicide had been introduced into major fuel depots; and the big jets had obligingly dusted whole continents with it

as their exhaust trails drifted downwards in gigantic, invisible, rolling clouds of death.

Only massive technological resources had prevented the extinction of the multitudes the soil supported. When it had

become apparent that the work of reclaiming the land would take centuries, the big powers turned to the sea for their

food. Whole populations had been transferred to the coastal regions, partly so that they could be more efficiently

suckled by the mother of all life, mainly because human existence had become too difficult to maintain under the

seething ocher blankets of continent-wide dust bowls.

This was the world in which Victor Stirling had grown up. He had never known any other. But that did not prevent him

from occasionally feeling nostalgia for a way of life he was scarcely able to comprehend.

"Oh, it's you. What do you want?"

Mrs. Mary Considine glanced up briefly, saw her older son for the first time in two years, and returned her eyes,

unimpressed, to a bouquet of artificial ferns she was build- , ing from a kit. She was a big woman, heavy-boned, with

red forearms and slightly thinning brown hair. Her fifty-five years, the last thirty-five of them in Fam-apt 126-46, had

left her practically unmarked on the outside. But sometimes, as she looked out of the apartment's single window and

down through the clouds drifting in the street canyons below, her eyes were like those of a sniper, sorrowful and yet

intent.

"What do I want?" Stirling squeezed his way into the living room and closed the door behind him. "What do you

mean, what do I want?"

"We don't see much of you these days. Or should I say these years?"

"I've been busy," Stirling said inadequately, aware of his guilt. "Why didn't you send me word about Johnny?"

"Didn't know you'd be interested."

"No, mother, don't talk that way. I want to know about Johnny. Have you any idea where he is?"

Mrs. Considine gave a sharp laugh. "That'd be a new departure."

Stirling knew she was referring to the fact that his father had vanished after two years of marriage, her second husband

after four, and now Johnny was gone. He resisted an irresponsible impulse to point out that she had made a pun. The

matter was too serious. There was nothing particularly unusual about men being unable to stand the psychological

erosion of family life in the glove-tight box of a fam-apt. But there was no way of telling if they had managed to evade

the immigration barriers thrown up against the Big Three by the other—naturally overcrowded— countries of the

world, or if they had chosen to exit from life altogether.

He folded a chair down from the wall and sat on it uncomfortably while his mother brewed coffee. As she moved

about, her broad, solid figure almost filling the miniature kitchen, she told him that Johnny had left home exactly a week

earlier. He had not said good-by, nor even left a note; but she discovered later that he had taken all his money and a

few personal possessions. The police, when she contacted them, had not been noticeably interested.

Although he could not imagine Johnny ever committing suicide, Stirling was relieved to hear about the money and

belongings.

"At least," he said as he accepted a cup of the scalding synthetic, "you know he's still alive somewhere."

"Of course, he's alive. The only thing wrong with Johnny is ... claustrophobia."

Stirling noticed the slight pause before she uttered the near-taboo word. It had taken a lot of psychologists many

years to convince people that the Compression was acceptable, if not enjoyable—but they had just about succeeded.

The ability, literally, to rub shoulders with one's fellow man all day and then enjoy a sound sleep in a casket-sized

bedroom, had become the most prized of the so-

cial virtues. Logically, claustrophobia had taken the place of epilepsy or tuberculosis as a disease which mothers

hesitated to acknowledge in their children.

"Did the police give you the impression they'd be able to find him?"

"They gave me the impression they weren't going to look."

"Then I'll have to try." Stirling sipped the black, bitter drink. "Have you no idea where he might be? Nothing at all to

go on?"

"All I know is, he went."

Stirling finished the coffee and lit a cigarette. The age difference between him and his half-brother was only four years,

but he found it difficult to accept the idea that Johnny had developed into an adult capable of thinking and acting like

a grown man. He kept seeing him as the fair-haired, gap-toothed kid with whom he had shared not only the same bed,

but the same pillow, during the timeless dream-years of childhood. At night they had lain in the tiny room, imagining

they could feel the two-thousand-foot tower rocking in the night winds outside and telling stories about how they

would grow up tall some day and go off in search of their fathers. Sometimes they would imagine discovering them at

the North Pole or in Africa, but the usual climax to the boyish fantasies was the finding of their fathers in Heaven.

On an impulse, Stirling crossed to the door of his old bedroom and slid it aside. The room was two-paces long by

one-pace wide. The floor space was completely filled by the bed—but it had seemed bigger when they were children.

Everything had seemed bigger then. He leaned on the doorframe and smoked thoughtfully, aware that his mother had

stopped work on the ferns and was watching him hungrily.

"Do you get enough money?" He asked the question to discharge the emotional potential that was building up.

"Yes. I've a production contract for these ferns and flowers. Then there's the money you send me, and with what

Johnny gave in I was even able to save."

"That's good."

Stirling's gaze roved the walls of the bedroom, taking in the miniature pennants and the old photographs. In the center

of the end wall was an empty hook above a brighter path of color of the sort that is left when a picture has been

removed, but irregular in shape. He tried for a moment to remember what had hung there; then he began to feel the first

gentle stirrings of alarm.

"Mother, what happened to Dad Considine's boots?"

"Aren't they still in there? I don't know. They were there till a few days ago. Johnny must have taken them with him."

"But they were fur-lined flying boots. He wouldn't want to wear something like that, for God's sake."

"What's the matter, Victor? Did you want those boots yourself?"

Shaking his head slowly, Stirling sank down onto the edge of the bed and sat staring across the apartment towards the

single window. The old, crinkled, leather boots had been the most tangible souvenir Johnny's father had left him; but

they had played another, and very important, role in both their childhoods. Having grown up in the Compression they

had never been able to visualize clearly what it would be like up in Heaven; but they had been, pretty sure it would be

cold, and it was agreed that they would wear big boots when they went there to find their fathers. And now Johnny

had vanished and taken the boots with him.

Stirling narrowed his eyes against the mid-morning sunlight, focusing them into the eastern sky. He was almost two

thousand feet above sea level; but thirteen thousand feet further up he could just discern the pale silhouette of

Heaven, drifting in the thin air high above the Atlantic— cold, serene and utterly remote.

Chapter Two

Stirling lounged in the soft warmth of the space cruiser's control chair. He adjusted the view screen's filters so that

space appeared the color of summer skies on Earth; and far ahead was the slowly expanding disc of Saturn, a spot of

creamy light in the gentle blueness. He moved a finger; and, in response to his command, the music that had been

whispering around him swelled in dreamy, intangible billows. Silver-sad voices mingled with the drifting chords,

creating laceworks of memory, evoking old and almost forgotten thoughts of other times and other places— of the

twinkling and tumbling flight of butterflies in orchard shadows, of raindrops patterning the surface of dim lakes. Each

impact creating a transient crystal crown.

As Saturn bloomed in the view screen and unfolded its misty rings, Stirling eased the cruiser into a near-perfect

circular orbit over the poles. He relaxed again, giving his mind up to the music, and let time itself recede into pictorial

abstractions like triangular green flashes strung on a starry helix, every sixtieth one ruby red. This was good. This was

living as no one had ever done it before—except that, somewhere far back in his consciousness, was one splinter of

worry which seemed to be driving itself deeper and deeper. He ignored it, overlaying the tiny wound with soothing

balms of womb-comfort generated by the warmth

of the cruiser's control room, the gyrating star meadows in the view screen, and the pulsing nostalgia of the music.

On Stirling's eighth orbit of the planet, his eyes detected a flicker of movement ahead and slightly below his own

course. Another ship. He had been watching the mote of light for several minutes before he realized the other pilot was

matching velocities and closing in on him. Stirling sighed; he had not wanted company. His cruiser lifted its nose, as

he manipulated the sensor-stick, and arced up and away from the plane of the ecliptic. He brought it out of the lazy

curve, centered the destination cross-hairs on the distant brilliance of Sol, and increased his speed. Relaxing again as

the cruiser slid down the long gravity gradient to the sun, he tried to get back into the music but something had

changed. A point of light adjusted its position slightly against the star fields in the aft screen, and he knew the other

ship was following him. It must be a joy-rider! Stirling instinctively demanded full speed and, tense with annoyance,

watched the disc of Sol flower in his screen while the other ship jockeyed for position behind him. He waited until the

last possible second, then threw on maximum lateral acceleration. The flaming disc shifted to one side, almost too late;

and for three nightmarish seconds he was skimming over boiling hell-scapes while the garish palm trees of solar flares

reared up ahead. When the sun had reluctantly dropped away beneath, Stirling looked around and saw no sign of the

other ship. It must have gone in. He began to laugh, and the sound was vastly unreal in his ears.

What am I doing? I'm supposed to be looking for Johnny.

With a surge of revulsion Stirling released the sensor-stick and immediately found himself sprawled in the padded

chair of a cosmodrome. He was sweating under 'the face mask and earphones. He snatched off the mask and released

himself from its hallucinogenic breath. The dimness of the circular theater was alive with the moans and sighs of the

occupants of the seriate chairs. Overhead, filling the auditorium, a huge model of the Solar System drifted in its

anti-grav field, while bead-sized spaceships—one for

each patron of the cosmodrome—flitted invisibly among the plowing orbs.

Stirling looked at his watch. He had spent nearly an hour in the dream continuum inhaling drugs, radio-guiding a

plastic pellet among the shimmering spheres, seeing through the pin-point lenses of its eyes. Angry at the waste of

time, he stood up and moved along the aisle towards an exit; he was uncomfortably aware that he had overestimated

himself when he decided to pass a few minutes clinically observing the cosmodrome techniques. He had gotten

sucked in and it had been so real that his knees still felt weak. An indication of how much muscle tone he had lost

during the trip.

At the exit he paused in front of a bored-looking attendant, who was monitoring the sensor-stick outputs at a low

console.

"You still have ten minutes," the attendant said, looking up.

"I know. I decided to skip it." Hearing the surprise in the man's voice, Stirling felt a little better. It must have been

unusual for anyone to emerge before the monitoring system threw the switches on him.

"Well, was anything wrong with the trip? Your signals were coming through on both . . ."

"Nothing wrong," Stirling interrupted. "I'm looking for somebody. Has Lou Grossmann come on duty yet?"

"Yeah. I think he came in a while ago. He works in the ops level—right at the top of the house."

"Thanks." Stirling went up the stairs on rubbery legs and passed through double doors onto a wide gallery which

encircled the auditorium. The spheres of the model planetary system slowly gyrated below the level of the handrail;

and here and there groups of technicians worked at equipment banks while others peered over the edge through

long-range microscopes. At this level the central sun was unbearably brilliant; and Stirling realized much of its light

was screened off from the lower reaches of the theater where the patrons gorged on twilight illusions. Several of the

technicians glanced curiously at Stirling as he moved along the gallery; but years as a reporter had

taught him how to project an air of disinterested confidence when invading private premises, and no one questioned

his presence. He found Lou Grossmann leaning on the handrail and sipping coffee.

"Hello, Lou."

Grossmann turned, pushed his sunglasses onto his freckled forehead, and looked up at Stirling without recognition for

a few seconds.

"Victor Stirling," he finally said. "What are you doing here? I thought you were on the West Coast."

"No. I've been busy lately and haven't had much chance to visit the family." Stirling hesitated, wondering if

Grossmann knew about Johnny's disappearance. "This is the first time I've seen anything like this." He gestured

towards the yawning blackness beyond the rail.

"I guess it must be quite a sight the first time," Grossmann said tiredly, "but it's just a job like any other. A joy-rider

went right through the sun a few minutes ago. That's the third this week. Disrupts the surface field for an instant and

diffuses the gas; then we have to send in a servo-vac to gather it up—which means closing everything down for an

hour in case the machine sucks up a couple of ships and scares hell out of the customers." Grossmann smoothed his

red hair and gazed at Stirling with frank curiosity.

"I'm trying to find Johnny," Stirling said. "Have you any idea where he is?"

"Sorry. I haven't seen him in three months."

"Oh! My mother said you and Johnny usually had a few beers on Saturdays, and I thought . . ."

"We used to, but he stopped coming round. Like I said, about three months ago."

Stirling nodded and turned away. This was the story he had been getting everywhere. Johnny Considine had never

been a steady worker; but since his teens he had been as regular as clockwork in visiting his chosen playgrounds,

which were the bars, multi-houses and thrill palaces of First Avenue. Until three months ago, that is, when a change

seemed to have come over his life. Was it something to do with his disappearance? Stirling was walking

back along the gallery when Grossman called his name and he turned.

"Johnny's vanished, hasn't he?" The little redhead sounded almost sympathetic.

"I guess so. Yes."

"Mrs. Considine worried?"

"What do you think?"

Grossmann looked vaguely guilty. "He's been seen going into that Receders meeting place near the longshoremen's

office."

"The Receders!" Stirling's voice was incredulous. "But Johnny's never been to church in his life."

Lou Grossmann shrugged and looked back into the pit, where shadow worlds rolled their slow courses and the minds

of men flitted among them like gnats on the surface of a pond. It was obvious he was sorry he had said as much as he

had, and suddenly Stirling realized he had just been given his first real lead in two weeks of searching. He muttered his

thanks, went down to the street, and was slightly shocked to discover there was still daylight outside. The visit to the

cosmodrome had taken only an hour, but it seemed much longer.

At the nearest corner he waited a few minutes for a taxi, but saw only two, each of which had a white-uniformed Food

Tech hi the rear seat. Lighting a cigarette, he began walking east towards the harbor area, trying to convince himself he

was glad of the exercise. The mid-evening traffic was relatively light, and the lowering sun was bathing the buildings hi

a warm reddish glow which Stirling found unexpectedly pleasant even though he knew what was causing it. Since the

death of the soil, dust storms constantly strode across the country west of the static screens which offered partial

protection to the coastal conurbation. The splendid Wagnerian sunsets which resulted were a poor consolation for

living on plankton steaks, sea porridge, and the other forms of nutriment wrested from the ocean by the Food

Technology Authority. There was always the fresh vegetable food sent down from Heaven, but it had traditionally

been rare; and it seemed to Stirling the supplies had been growing even

more meager for several years. As he walked, he searched the segments of eastern sky which could be seen beyond

the banked apartment buildings. And finally he found the rose-pale silhouette of Heaven, riding in its serene security

high above the Atlantic. He thought he detected a glimmer of movement at one point on its upper edge, but at that

distance it was impossible to be certain.

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 21

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 se-manticist

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 herbici-

dal dusts, was reserved for the agricultural robots which tilled its soil.

The flickers of light, which could sometimes be seen on its upper edge, were reflections from polished machine casings

or flashes from the welding arcs of the maintenance robots. Unless, of course, one happened to be a small boy with

somber, searching eyes. In which case they were signals.

A ragged spatter of applause announced to Stirling that the speaker had finished. The audience seemed to know,

without being told, that there was nobody to follow. Many of them stood up and immediately began to file out, while

others near the front determinedly continued to clap. The uniformed man who had given the talk bowed slightly,

looked embarrassed, and gave Stirling the impression he was not a professional speaker. He seemed to have been

brought in specially to make a point, like a police sergeant roped into addressing a sewing circle on road safety.

Frowning a little, Stirling tried to remember where he had seen a uniform like that before. He got to his feet, wondered

how much he had achieved by coming to the chapel, and was beginning to drift out uncertainly with the crowd, when

the speaker turned to leave the platform. A triangular, yellow flash at his shoulder caught the smoky light—and

suddenly Stirling was able to place the severe gray uniform. The speaker worked in the freight transfer organization

responsible for operating Jacob's Ladder—the "elevator" connecting Heaven and Earth.

Stirling sat down again. Making a token effort to look small and inconspicuous, he gnawed patiently on a thumbnail

while the last of the audience shuffled out past him, In theory, nothing except fertilizer and maintenance spares ever

went up in the elevator. But neither could a man vanish as Johnny Considine had done—in theory.

When he was sure nobody was looking at him, Stirling took out a little square case similar to those in which jewelers

supply diamond rings. Inside was a silver lapel badge graved with a simple helical design. He put the badge in his

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SDDQUIBOBsmuiANAVONBOOKThisAvoneditionisthefirstpublicationofShadowofHeaveninanyform.AVONBOOKSAdivisionofTheHearstCorporation959EighthAvenueNewYork,NewYork10019Copyright©1969byBobShaw.Publishedbyarrangementwiththeauthor.Allrightsreserved,whichincludestherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinany...

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Bob Shaw - Shadow of Heaven

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