by John Brunner
“But it would be worth it for you to send the pictures to your press agency?” Receiving my nod she went on, “Then why don’t you?”
I hesitated. “It will be very expensive on your phone bill if I do it from here,” I said finally. “Shall I go find a pay phone where I can use my credit card?”
“No!” she said with sudden violence, and came over to me, laying one small hand on mine as though to reassure herself of my reality. “No, David. You must not leave me—not for a minute. Tonight I am too afraid to be alone.”
?
THREE OR four times that night she cried out in her sleep, woke herself up far enough to feel my arms around her, and as it were drew them tight like armor on her smooth supple body. My sleep was shallow, too, and stained with nightmare.
Not long after it was light, a little past six o’clock, we woke together and found it impossible to sleep again. We lay for a while in silence, each knowing that the other too was wondering whether the monster in the sky could have been no more than the figment of an evil dream. But the world was real, the clutch of hand on hand, the brush of leg against leg, the acutely perceived wrinkling of the bedsheets which our restless slumber had crumpled and folded across the mattress. Each shift in search of comfort rendered escape more impossible.
At length, as though she could read my thoughts through my skin. Carmen said without looking at me, “David, I feel that you want to go away.”
For once, she was a trifle less than perfectly correct. I wanted most of all to stay; this woman of fire and ice was a source of reassurance and
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security in a world suddenly become intolerably random. But I needed to leave. I needed to go out and find why the universe was different from yesterday—If there was anyone who could inform me.
So I said, “No, I don’t want to. I think I must."
She eeled from the bed and stood up, stretching to the tips of her fingers. Around a yawn she said, “Then I shall have to let you. But only on condition that you at once tell me whatever you learn about last night.”
I made the promise, and went into the clear warm morning.
The monster had not been a nightmare. There were screaming headlines about it on the early newspaper bills. Many of the citizens of Quito had spent the night in churches and cathedrals, praying; now they were coming out, hundreds at a time, looking nervously skyward after every step as they went to buy newspapers or hear radio news bulletins in bars and cafes, wishing to disbelieve their own memories and finding it impossible.
I kept thinking of the Chilean flsherfolk seeing what I had glibly dismissed as an aurora.
Last night, rather than drive to Carmen’s, I’d taken a cab from my hotel and had to return by the same means. The driver of the cab I found now was scared, and made me frightened too because he was driving with his eyes more on the sky than on the road. Most other drivers seemed to be doing the same. St. Christopher, whose medal hung on the dashboard, must have
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been working overtime. The man asked me one question as I got into the back seat: “Did you see it?”
I said yes.
“So did I,” he muttered and fell moodily silent until we reached my hotel.
It was too early for the morning’s mail, and anyway I wasn’t expecting anything—barring Solar Press, no one had an address for me more recent than a hotel in Caracas. But there was a message for me at the reception desk in the lobby: I was to call a certain Captain Brandt, who had been trying to contact me all yesterday afternoon, at a number which began with the same local code as the spaceport.
I wasn’t going to talk to strangers on an empty stomach, I decided. I tucked the note in my pocket and went to have breakfast in company of the papers and the stack of material Sandler had 'faxed to me, cudgeling my brains to determine whether there really could be a connection between all these snippets and the return of the starship, as I’d suggested to Acosta.
My brain had been sluggish since waking, that was obvious: a few cups of strong Colombian coffee set that right, and I abruptly realized, in the middle of biting a slice of toast, that I had a prize in my pocket I gulped down what was in my mouth and abandoned the table in search of a phone.
This early in the day, I wasn’t certain of being able to reach anyone at the local office of Prensam—Solar Press’s associate in most countries south of Mexico—but I was in luck. My old
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and good friend Manuel Segura was there, and had—as he told me when he’d finished wasting time on greetings—been there all night. One of the things he was looking for was some decent color coverage of the monster; so far he hadn't even found a still color picture and was having to make do with a batch of blurred black-and- whites taken by one of the local people. When I said I had three minutes of usable color, he practically climbed down the phone cable to get at me, and then calmed sufficiently to record a verbal agreement in respect of Latin American rights for thirty seconds of it. I had sold only a North American exclusive to Solar Press last night, with first-run Eurasian rights as a bonus, and it struck me as good sense to dispose of what additional rights I could before they came after me with a request for the whole lot.
Then we got around to other aspects of what had happened. Manuel had access to much more than what had been in the papers I’d read with breakfast, of course—he’d seen everything that came off the beams at the Prensam office and had also had several eyewitness accounts which he digested for me. None of them differed much from what I’d seen, however. Both government and church had appealed for calm, but so far people seemed more puzzled than hysterical. The monster had been reported from as far away as Lima, and. he suspected that not all the sightings had yet been listed.
I referred him to the Chilean episode of the day before yesterday, and he checked back because he hadn’t heard about it. It turned out that his agency had carried the story for only a
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few hours before it was ousted by a strike in Bogota and a landslide on the outskirts of Rio. Cursing the shortsightedness of the person responsible. he declared he was going to resurrect it.
Not, I thought privately, that anyone would be much the wiser . . .
When I was through talking to Manuel. I called the number I’d been given by the reception clerk. As I’d anticipated, I found myself being answered from the switchboard at the starship base, and the extension I was put through to proved to belong to a fresh-faced young officer of the UN Space Force.
“Ah, Mr. Drummond!” he exclaimed. “I’m so glad to make your acquaintance—I’ve been an admirer of your writing for many years! My name’s Brandt, of course, assistant chief of personnel.”
I nodded and waited for him to explain why he’d been so eager to get in touch.
“Part of my job is to notify the relatives of Staruenture’s crew about the arrangements for the landing. Not a very easy task. I’m afraid, because right now everything’s so vague. We don’t even have a date for their Earthfall. let alone any idea how long it will take to process them through debriefing and quarantine and so on. But when the press department told me you were right here in Quito I thought I’d call you anyway, because as I say 1 really do enjoy your work very much. By the way, I hear you were first with the news again!"
I said grumpily, “Sheer chance.”
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He smiled conspiratorially, as though certain he had seen through my modest disclaimer of super-reportorial sixth sense. “Well, that’s as it may be. But what I really wanted to say was that—ah—well, naturally having a brother in the crew will entitle you to all the facilities for family contact we can offer after the landing, and you can be assured that your professional status won’t make the least bit of difference. To us, I mean. I imagine it may not be quite
the same among your colleagues!”
There and then I decided I didn’t like Brandt. I Couldn’t recollect that at the time of the launching anyone had needed to excuse me for being Leon’s brother, nor that any of my fellow reporters had regarded the relationship as giving me unfair advantages. I cut short what he had gone on to say—something about looking forward to meeting me in person as soon as things were a bit quieter at the base—and the moment his image faded from the screen was annoyed with myself. Likable or not, Brandt might well have been offended by my curtness, and 1 was obviously going to need all the help I could get from people in positions of influence.
Still, it was done now. 1 sighed, wondering whether before I left the phonebooth I ought to make any more calls, and realized that by this time Professor Acosta might well be available at the observatory. Before Starventure entered orbit this city was bound to be crawling with top scientific talent, but right now Acosta was about as top as came handy. I called the outside number of the observatory.
Busy line. I wasn’t at all surprised. I stayed
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patiently at the phone, calling one time after another, for a good five minutes before I hit a break in the flow and a harassed switchboard operator answered on a voice-only circuit.
I identified myself and asked to speak to Acosta, and she told me sharply that he was far too busy to talk to anybody. Before she could cut the connection, though, I quoted to her what Acosta had said the previous afternoon about being happier to make an exception for me than for most other people, and persuaded her to remind him of his own words. Then 1 waited.
Eventually Acosta’s face appeared on the screen, with a fixed expression of annoyance; his voice, however, was reasonably level as he addressed me.
“Good morning, Mr. Drummond. I’m sure you’re going to ask what I think of the strange apparition in the sky last night.”
“I am indeed," I said. “Can you—?”
I got no further. He leaned toward the phone just in time for the picture-melt to catch him and spoke with passionate emphasis.
“No, Mr. Drummond! I saw this thing in the sky last night. All my preconceptions—all my common sense—told me, ‘It’s impossible!’ Yet I recall that I saw it. There was a picture in my morning paper to show it was no mere hallucination. Yesterday I was a sober scientist. Today I feel like an ignorant child. Because there is no room in my science for monsters in the heavens! Yesterday I could agree with you that those fishermen in Chile were naive, and mistook the Aurora Australis for an enormous face.
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Today I will keep my mouth shut. Sony, Mr. Drummond. But—goodbye.”
The screen blanked. 1 was still staring at it in dismay when the hotel's own operator cut in to tell me there was an outside call for me; I agreed to take it, and Carmen appeared. She looked and sounded even more troubled than Acosta.
“David, you are Leon’s only close relative, no?" she said without preamble.
“Yes, of course I am. Why?”
“I called my home, and everyone was joyful about the ship returning. But my father said that my nephew Hermanos—the one who is six years old and was named for my brother because he was bom the same day of the year— little Hermanos came home from school yesterday and said he had seen his namesake-uncle on his way there in the morning. They are all saying it is a good omen, that it means he is safe, except my grandmother who says it shows he is in danger. David, what am I to think?”
“I was just talking to Professor Acosta,” I said after a brief pause. “His view is that it’s best to try not to think about it at all at the moment, and I guess I’m inclined to agree with him." “You have learned nothing new, then?” "Nothing of any importance. I spoke to my friend Manuel Segura at Prensam, and to someone at the starship base I took an immediate dislike to, but right now my brain feels numb and I can barely dream up the right kind of questions. I do intend to call New York, though, and I guess I’ll probably drop in to see Chambord at the UN press office. Ah . . . Suppose I meet you for lunch again, same place as yesterday?”
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“Yes. Yes, please, David. But earlier than yesterday. A half hour earlier.”
Sandler looked haggard. He paid me an absent-minded compliment about getting such a good-quality recording of the monster in the sky, and then demanded to know whether I’d drawn any conclusions from the material he’d sent me.
I told him no, which wasn’t more than half a lie, and said that furthermore I still hadn’t fathomed the connection he himself must have seen between the ill-assorted items.
“It’s hard to describe,” he sighed. “It wasn’t thinking so much as feeling. There comes a time when coincidences—say, do you cook?”
I knew cookery was a hobby of his; to me it’s something you hire to have done. I said, “Not any more often than I can help. Why?”
“Never made a white sauce? It's mainly milk, butter, flour. You stir it over the heat and the flour cooks. There comes a moment when it’s cooked through, and instead of flour and milk you have a blended sauce. You can’t see the change—you feel it through the way your spoon moves. Well, I got that same kind of impression from the bunch of stories I picked on. I worked two or three of my staff half to death over them; then I had the bright idea of asking you to scratch the itch for me.”
"You sound as though it's still bothering you." I said.
“I’m afraid it is. I don’t suppose you’ve had any time to follow the matter up, have you?”
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I gave him a bald summary of what Acosta had told me yesterday, and he grunted.
“Pretty much what scientists up here have been saying—those that believe something has actually happened, like an unexpected effect of the starship’s reentry. But most of the people I’ve tried to talk to have shrugged me off: Starventure is back and I’m busy.”
He became brisk. “Well, was there anything else?”
“Just one point. Are you sending anyone down here from Solar to cover the landing?”
“Are we not!” He snorted. “Granted, you’re an ace in the hole and worth your weight in uranium, but should we risk you falling down a mountain? Kaye Green, Brian Watchett and Don Hapgood will be in Quito this afternoon; they have your hotel address and will get in touch when they arrive. If you chance across anything —anything at all—which you don't have time to follow up yourself, let them have it, won’t you? Don’t forget you’re on a ten thousand per week retainer as of yesterday, and we’d like something to show for the investment.”
“You’ll get it,” I said. “If it’s there to be had.” I cut the connection thoughtfully. Kaye, Brian and Don, all old friends of mine, were the top trio on the Solar Press staff. Aside from the purely scientific angle, I was going to be a fifth wheel when they showed up—and of course, aside from having a brother in the crew, I amended with a scowl due to remembering Brandt’s earlier remark.
That state of affairs would suit me fine; I was out of the habit of meeting twice-daily deadlines.
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I dropped by at the UN press office on the way to my lunch date and found—as I’d expected— that the foyer was full of hopeful cubs camping out on the benches, some asleep, some trying to sleep, some trying to stay awake. They’d probably been here all night.
Well, they’d learn. Henri Chambord was as good a PR man as you could find and scrupulously honest about his news releases. I’d got a beat by turning up in his office yesterday, but if I’d gone down on bended knee and begged him to delay preparation of the full release, he’d have spat in my face and withdrawn my press pass.
I didn’t get in to see him this morning; Ramona told me he was tied up in a conference, planning interview facilities with the crew when they were checked out of quarantine. It made sense to have everything ready to roll beforehand, even thoug
h no date could yet be fixed for the end of their quarantine, because the lowest odds any expert had ever quoted me against the risk of Centaurian bacteria surviving in a human body were a million to one, and the chances were that they’d be able to undergo their full-scale debriefing right here on Earth . . . where naturally every reporter in the hemisphere would want to get at them.
Accordingly I contented myself with picking up the morning poopsheet. From it I learned that the tugs were matching velocities with Starventure, that the ship was still transmitting code-groups only but that when the range shortened enough there was going to be a planetwide broadcast of personal messages from ev
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eryone aboard, and that everything was proceeding normally.
I didn’t even bother to take the sheet with me. I balled it up and dropped it in the wastebasket beside Ramona's desk, apologizing for the scare I’d given her yesterday when I stormed in. She smiled charmingly and giggled not so charmingly and I went to lunch with Carmen.
m
I HAD many things in mind to say to her when we took our places opposite each other at the table. But, unexpectedly, there followed a long period of silence: on her part, because she was preoccupied, and on mine because, on glancing toward her, I felt as though I was seeing her for the first time. When I did find words to utter, they came of their own accord.
“I’ve been thinking that I know you pretty well because I met you more than two years ago,” I said. “But I’ve seen you—what?—on not more than fifty days out of seven hundred plus. And I just realized that I don’t know you at all, because I never saw you so serious as you are now.”
She didn’t answer.
“It suits you,” I said, fumbling for the reason why and suddenly getting it. “It exalts you, that’s the word. I can see a volcano of personality behind your face—the glow which always flickers there and makes men look at you twice without knowing why. But today it’s turned on full, and . . . my God, you’re almost terrifying!”
