To Follow a Star

by Terry Carr

  “Now, son,” he said, returning to Greg. “I can’t tell you how to find Santa Claus exactly, but maybe we could do a trade. You tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Richard thought the big man was very nice and he told Greg to find out all he could from him, then he broke away. It was time he checked on Buster again.

  His brother was just on the point of revealing himself to a man sitting in a small room with lots of colored lights around the walls. There was a big glass screen on one wall with a white line going around and around on it, and the man was bent forward in his chair holding his knees tightly with his hands. He was chewing.

  “Feeties . . . ?” asked Buster hopefully.

  The man swung around. One hand went to the gun at his belt and the other shot out to stop with one finger on a big red button on his panel, but he didn’t push it. He stared at Buster with his face white and shiny and his mouth open. There was a little piece of chewing gum showing on his teeth.

  Buster was disappointed; he had thought the man might have been eating cakes or toffee. Chewing gum wasn’t much good when you were hungry. Still, maybe if he was polite, the man might give him some anyway, and even tell him where Santa Claus was.

  “How do’oo doe,” he said carefully.

  “F-fine, thanks,” said the man, and shook his head. He took his finger off the big red button and pushed another one. He began talking to somebody:

  “Unauthorized person in the Firing . . . No, no, I don’t have to push the button . . . I know the orders, dammit, but this is a kid! About three, w-wearing pajamas . . .

  A few minutes later two men ran in. One was thin and young and he told the man at the panel to keep his blasted eyes on the screen in case there was a blip instead of gawking at the kid. The other one was big and broad and very like the man who had asked Greg questions—except he had on a tie instead of a high, tight collar. The second man looked at Buster for a long time, then got down on one knee.

  “What are you doing here, sonny?” he said in a funny voice.

  “Looking for Santa,” said Buster, looking at the man’s pockets. They looked empty, not even a hanky in them. Then, on Richard’s prompting, he added, “What’s a . . . a blip?”

  The man who was standing began to speak rapidly. He said that this was some sort of diversion, that guards at bases all over had been reporting kids, that the other side was working up to some sort of sneak punch. And just when everybody thought relations were improving, too. Maybe this wasn’t a kid, maybe this was a child impersonator . . .

  “Impersonating a three-year-old?” asked the big man, straightening up again.

  All the talk had not helped Richard much and he was getting impatient. He thought for a minute, then made Buster say, “What’s a blip . . . please!”

  The old man went to the one who was sitting in front of the screen. They whispered together, then he walked toward Buster.

  “Maybe we should T-I-E his H-A-N-D-S,” said the thin man.

  In a quiet voice the big man said, “Contact the General. Tell him that until further notice I consider it advisable that all launching bases be placed in Condition Red. Meanwhile I’ll see what I can find out. And call Doc, we might as well check on your child-impersonation theory.”

  He turned away from the now open locker with a candy bar in his hand, stripping off the wrapping as he added, “Don’t they teach you psychology these days?” And to Buster he said, “A blip is a teeny white mark on a screen like that man is watching.”

  Buster’s mind was so full of thinking about the candy that it was hard for Richard to make him ask the proper questions. Ask him what makes a blip, he thought furiously at his brother—why were the minds of grown-ups impossible to get into!—and eventually he got through.

  “A rocket going up,” said the big man; then added crossly, “This is ridiculous!”

  “What makes a rocket go up?” prompted Richard.

  The man who was watching for blips was holding his knees tightly again. Nobody was talking to him but he said, “One way is to push a big red button . . .” His voice sounded very hoarse.

  Watching and listening through his brother’s mind, Richard decided that he had heard and seen enough. For some time he had been worried about the safety of Greg and Liam and Buster—all the talk of shooting, and the way the guards looked so cross at just a few children who weren’t doing any harm. Richard had seen people get shot lots of times on television, and while he hadn’t thought much about what being dead meant, getting shot had looked like a very sore thing. He didn’t want it happening to any of his gang, especially now when he was sure that there was no reason to go on with the search.

  Santa had hid out somewhere, and if what Richard suspected was true, he couldn’t blame him. Poor Santa, he thought.

  Quickly Richard called off the search. He thought he knew what was going on now, but he wanted to think about it some more before deciding what to do. Almost before he had finished, Buster was back in his cot, still working on the candy bar. Richard made his brother give him half of it, then he got into bed himself. But not to sleep.

  Mub and Loo had never seen any of the caverns yet, so he had to attend to that chore first. Using the data available in the three boys’ minds, he was able to direct the girls to all forty-seven places with no trouble at all. The girls were seen a couple of times but nothing happened—they were just looking, not asking questions. When he was sure they understood what they had to do, Richard let them go home, but told them to start practicing on rocks and things outside his window. After that he lay on his side and looked out at the moonlit desert.

  Small rocks and big boulders began to move about. They arranged themselves into circles and squares and stars, or built themselves into cairns. But mostly they just changed places with each other too fast for Richard to see. Fence posts disappeared, leaving the wire sagging but unbroken, and bushes rose into the air with the ground undisturbed beneath them and every root intact. After an hour of it Richard told them to stop and asked them if they were sure it didn’t make their heads tired.

  They told him no, that moving dead things was easy.

  “But you’ll have to work awful fast . . .” Richard began.

  Apparently it didn’t matter. Just so long as they know where everything was, they could move it just like that, and Mub sent a thought of her daddy snapping his fingers. Relieved, Richard told them to put everything out on the desert back the way it had been and to start getting to know the other places he had told them about. They went off joyfully to mix the gang’s business with their own pleasure.

  Richard became aware of movements downstairs. It was nearly breakfast time.

  Since the early hours of the morning, Richard had been sure he knew what had gone wrong with the Christmas business, and the steps the gang must take to put matters right again—or as near right as it was possible to put them. It was a terrific responsibility for a six-year-old, and the trouble was that he hadn’t heard the grown-ups’ side of it. What he intended doing could get him into bad trouble if his daddy found out—he might even get beaten. Richard’s parents had taught him to respect other people’s property.

  But his daddy was usually a bit dopy at breakfast time. Maybe he would be able to ask some questions without his daddy’s asking too many back.

  “Daddy,” he said as he was finished his cereal, “d’you know all those rockets Santa has in his secret caverns at the North Pole? And the stuff in the nose of them that you’re not allowed to go near . . .?”

  His daddy choked and got cross and began talking to his mother. He said that he would never have taken this out-of-the-way job if he hadn’t been sure that Richard’s mother, being an ex-schoolteacher, could look after the children’s education. But it was quite obvious that she was forcing Richard far too much and he was too young to be told about things like rocket bases. To which his mother replied that his daddy didn’t believe her when she told him that Richard could read the Nationa
l Geographic—and not just pretend to read it—and even an odd whodunit. Sure she had taught him more than a normal six-year-old but that was because he could take it—she wasn’t doing a doting mother act, Richard really was an exceptionally bright boy. And she hadn’t told him about rocket bases, he must have got it from a magazine or something . . .

  And so it went on. Richard sighed, thinking that every time he asked a complicated question his mother and father started arguing about him between themselves and ignoring his question completely.

  “Daddy,” said Richard during a lull, “they’re big people’s toys, aren’t they?”

  “Yes!” his father snapped. “But the big people don’t want to play with them. In fact, we’d be better off without them!” Then he turned and went back to arguing with their mother. Richard excused himself and left, thinking at Buster to follow him as soon as he could.

  So the big people didn’t want their toys, Richard thought with grim satisfaction. That meant the gang was free to go ahead.

  All that day Richard listened in on Loo and Mub. The girls were fast, but there was an awful lot to do, so he set Greg and Liam to helping them—the boys could move things, too, but not as fast as the girls. But everybody had been awake for so long, they began to fall asleep one by one. When it happened to Buster and Richard, their mother thought they were taking sick and was worried, but both of them were up as fresh as ever when their father came home, so she didn’t mention it. And that night there was another meeting of the gang in the bedroom.

  “Well dispense with the Minutes of the last Meeting,” Richard began formally, then opened his mind to all of them. Up until then the gang had been acting on orders, although from the things they had been doing they must have guessed what he intended, but now they knew. He gave them all the pieces of the puzzle and showed them how it fitted together.

  The evasions of their parents, the overflowing toy stores, and the computers which could direct a rocket to any spot in the world. A strangely uncomfortable deputy Santa—they must have had some kind of hold over him at the store—and secret caverns guarded by angry soldiers and storekeepers who were robbers. And juvenile delinquents, and a Santa Claus who couldn’t be found because he must have run away and hidden himself because he was ashamed to face the children and tell them that their toys had been stolen.

  Obviously the juvenile delinquents had raided Santa’s toy caverns and cleaned them out, leaving only big people’s toys which the adults themselves no longer wanted—this explained why Santa’s guards were so mad at everybody. Then the stolen toys had been sent to the storekeepers, who were probably in cahoots with the delinquents. It was as simple as that. Santa just would not be coming around this Christmas and nobody would get any toys, unless the gang did something about it . . .

  “. . . We’re going to see that the children get something Richard went on grimly. “But none of us is going to get what we asked for. There is no way of telling which one of all those hundreds of rockets is meant for any one of us. So we’ll just have to take what comes. The only good thing is that we’re going to make Christmas come three days early.

  “All right, gang, let’s get started.”

  Buster returned to the room where he had been given candy the night before, the room with the man who watched a screen with a white line going around on it. But he stayed hidden this time—he was merely acting as the gang’s eyes. Then Mub and Loo linked to the distant room through Buster and Richard’s mind, began to move the grown-up who sat before the screen. More precisely, they moved his hand and arm in the direction of the big red button.

  But the grown-up didn’t want to push the button and make blips. He struggled to pull back his hand so hard that Loo complained that it was hurting her head. Then they all got together—Liam, Greg, Buster and the girls—and concentrated. The man’s finger started moving toward the button again and he began to shout to somebody on the radio. Then he drew his gun with the other hand and hit his arm with it, knocking it away from the button. He was being very, very naughty.

  “Why don’t we push the button,” Greg asked suddenly, “instead of making the grown-up push it?”

  Richard felt his face going red; he should have thought of that. Within a second the big red button drove down into the bottom of its socket.

  The Early Warning systems were efficient on both sides. Within three minutes all forty-seven missile bases had launched or were launching their rockets. It was an automatic process, there were no last-minute checks, the missiles being maintained in constant readiness. In those same three minutes orders went out to missile-carrying submarines to take up previously assigned positions off enemy coasts, and giant bombers screamed away from airfields which expected total annihilation before the last one was off. Like two vast, opposing shoals of fish the missiles slid spaceward, their numbers thinned—but only slightly—by the suicidal frenzy of the antimissiles. The shoals dispersed and curved groundward again, dead on course, to strike dead on target. The casualty and damage reports began coming in.

  Seventeen people injured by falling plaster or masonry; impact craters twenty feet across in the middle of city streets; tens of thousands of dollars and pounds and rubles worth of damage. It was not long before urgent messages were going out to recall the subs and bombers. Before anything else was tried, the authorities had to know why every missile that had been sent against the enemy, and every missile that the enemy had sent against them, had failed to explode.

  They also wanted to know who or what had been making rocket-base personnel on both sides do and see things which they didn’t want to. And why an examination of the dud missiles revealed the shattered and fused remains of train sets and toy six-shooters, and if this could have any possible connection with the robberies of large toy stores in such widely separate places as Salt Lake City, Irkutsk, Londonderry and Tokyo. Tentatively at first both sides came together to compare notes, their intense curiosity to know what the blazes had happened being one thing they had in common. Later, of course, they discovered other things . . .

  That year Christmas came with the beginnings of a lasting peace on Earth, although six members of a young and very talented gang did not appreciate this. The toys which they had put in the noses of the rockets to replace the sparkly stuff—which they had dumped in the ocean because the grown-ups didn’t want it—had failed to reach them. They had been worrying in case they had done something very wrong or been very bad. They couldn’t have been very bad, however, because Santa came just as they had been told he would, on a sleigh with reindeer.

  They were asleep at the time, though, and didn’t see it.

  The

  New

  Father Christmas

  BY BRIAN W. ALDISS

  Earth is becoming increasingly mechanized. What if the machines were to take over, and human beings were threatened with extinction? Perhaps the machines would adopt our traditions, like that of Christmas, and transform them in frightening ways.

  Brian Aldiss has written many fine novels and short stories of science fiction; he is also well known as an anthologist and science-fiction historian, author of Billion Year Spree.

  Little old Roberta took the clock down off the shelf and put it on the hotpoint; then she picked up the kettle and tried to wind it. The clock was almost on the boil before she realized what she had done. Shrieking quietly, so as not to wake old Robin, she snatched up the clock with a duster and dropped it onto the table. It ticked furiously. She looked at it.

  Although Roberta wound the clock every morning when she got up, she had neglected to look at it for months. Now she looked and saw it was seven-thirty on Christmas Day, 2388.

  “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed. “It’s Christmas Day already! It seems to have come very soon after Lent this year.”

  She had not even realized it was 2388. She and Robin had lived in the factory so long. The idea of Christmas excited her, for she liked surprises—but it also frightened her, because she thought about the New Father Chr
istmas and that was something she preferred not to think about. The New Father Christmas was reputed to make his rounds on Christmas morning-

  “I must tell Robin,” she said. But poor Robin had been very touchy lately; it was conceivable that having Christmas suddenly forced upon him would make him cross. Roberta was unable to keep anything to herself, so she would have to go down and tell the tramps. Apart from Robin, there were only the tramps.

  Putting the kettle onto the stove, she left her living quarters and went into the factory, like a little mouse emerging from its mincepie-smelling nest. Roberta and Robin lived right at the top of the factory and the tramps had their illegal home right at the bottom. Roberta began tiptoeing down many, many steel stairs.

  The factory was full of the sort of sounds Robin called “silent noise.” It continued day and night, and the two humans had long ago ceased to hear it; it would continue when they had become incapable of hearing anything. This morning, the machines were as busy as ever, and looked not at all Christmasy. Roberta noticed in particular the two machines she hated most: the one with loomlike movements which packed impossibly thin wire into impossibly small boxes, and the one which threshed about as if it were struggling with an invisible enemy and did not seem to be producing anything.

  The old lady walked delicately past them and down into the basement. She came to a gray door and knocked at it. At once she heard the three tramps fling themselves against the inside of the door and press against it, shouting hoarsely across to each other.

  Roberta was unable to shout, but she waited until they were silent and then called through the door as loudly as she could, “It’s only me, boys.”

  After a moment’s hush, the door opened a crack. Then it opened wide. Three seedy figures stood there, their faces anguished: Jerry, the ex-writer, and Tony and Dusty, who had never been and never would be anything but tramps. Jerry, the youngest, was forty, and so still had half his life to drowse through, Tony was fifty-five and Dusty had sweat rash.