by John Brunner
I folded my nails hard into my palms to stop
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my hands from shaking. She had a presence like a stormcloud.
A smile lit the cloud and seemed to show me the whole world as lightning whipcracks darkness away from a landscape.
“Dear David,” she said. “Do you know why I’m so serious? It’s because I’m afraid of going mad. If it were not for you being so sane and balanced, and yet having the same thing happen to you. I’d be unable to think clearly at all.”
“Is it what happened to your nephew that frightens you?"
“His tale of having seen my brother? No. I accept the reality of second sight, as I told you yesterday. ”
“But he’s only a little boy,” I objected. “I think you said he’s six. It’s more likely to be imagination than second sight.”
“Many children are said to have the power. It was children who last saw the fairies; it was the innocence of children which turned them from cruel, capricious creatures into beings as harmless and pretty as butterflies."
“Children aren’t all that innocent,” I said. “They can be heartlessly savage. ”
“Children who are sincerely loved are innocent,” Carmen insisted. “If they’re cruel, it’s to revenge on weaker creatures wrongs done to them by stronger ones. But I didn’t want to talk about children. ” She bowed her head, wide eyes gazing at but not seeing the spotless white table top before her. “I want—I need—to talk abcut my own fears.”
I took my time over devising a reply. At length I said, “I don’t see you have any reason to be
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afraid of mental breakdown. The world itself seems to have gone crazy, but I never met anyone in my life tougher than you. You’d bend and spring right back where the average person would snap apart.”
“But the monster in the sky—”
“All Quito saw that!" 1 cut in. “It was seen at least as far away as Lima! Acosta saw it, a sober scientist with an international reputation. The man who drove me back to my hotel this morning saw it. Eveiyone saw it—just go and ask around!”
“No, you don’t understand!” she exclaimed passionately. “What I fear is to find that I imagined all Quito seeing it, and you as well. Sometimes the power—like boiling water poured into a cold glass—can shatter the mind.” She leaned forward and laid an imploring hand on top of mine. “What is happening, David? You understand about science. Is there any straightforward explanation?”
“It seems possible that it’s something to do with Starventure’s return to normal space,” I said slowly.
“That tells me nothing. How can one judge whether the monsters might not have appeared at some other time? The one in the sky over Chile was seen before the ship returned; your former boss in New York compiled his list of strange events before he knew the ship was back, and if you hadn’t come by chance to Quito you’d have heard from him before you walked into the press office here. Would you have said the same then?”
Almost embarrassed at my inability to offer
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the reassurance she craved, I could only shrug. “Right now,” I confessed, “I’ve run out of ideas.
I can only wait and try to get in touch with people who know more than I do.”
“Then do me a favor, David. I told you I’d like to find out whether anyone else who has a relative aboard Starventure had a vision like yours and mine. Make some inquiries and tell me. I think you’ll find the answer is yes. What it will mean if it is, I don’t know. But it will be another fact, and we have so desperately few.”
The Solar Press team arrived as Sandler had promised, in the middle of the afternoon. They called my hotel from the airport, and I arranged to meet them at the UN press office. Chambord was in conference again but had promised another release at six o’clock, so to use up the time I took them to a nearby bar and gave them a rundown on the situation.
Don Hapgood specialized in the transcription of recorded material; it had been said of him that he could put on a printed page everything including a tone of voice. Kaye Green, a bony redhead with a walk like a horse, was usually employed on rewrite work, where her talent for cramming gut-wrenching emotion into prosaic facts showed to best advantage. Only the biggest stories drew her from her New York desk, but this one of course was a giant. As for Brian Watchett, he knew everybody; he had contacts on all continents and at least some of the other planets and could always be relied on to find his way to the man who knew the inside story. Short of coming to Quito himself, Sandler could
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hardly have put Solar Press In a stronger position.
Over beers, I told them about my own involvement to date. When I came to the appearance of the monster in the sky, they demanded to see the complete recording, so since I still had the crystals on me we adjourned to a pay phonebooth and stuffed ourselves in while I played it over. We could scarcely breathe, but that was no great drawback—for the three minutes the job took we either didn’t want to breathe or simply forgot. The replay was almost worse than the original event. It was a reminder in broad daylight of what reason yearned to dismiss as a bad dream.
We returned quietly and soberly to our table. It was some while before Brian broke the silence, fixing me with his sharp brown eyes half buried in the rolls of fat which testified to his love of good living.
“David, there’s a rumor going around that all this has a connection with the reentiy of Star- venture. Does that make scientific sense, or is it a wild guess of Hank Sandler’s?”
“I figure it will be another couple of days before I can give you an authoritative answer,” I said. “When the top talent has arrived and had a chance to settle in. I’ll be able to ask the people whose word I’m most inclined to take. Until the ship’s in Earth-orbit, though, eveiy- one will be too busy or too excited.”
"Your brother worked on the stardrive,” Don said. “Some of it must have rubbed off. How about giving us your own answer to be going on with?”
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“All right,” I sighed. “My opinion is—yes, there probably is a link with the ship’s return. As you must know, during the operation of the drive Starventure ceases to exist in our normal universe, but the crew remain aware—their hearts beat, their clocks continue to tick away time. Any relativistic effects observable at the moment of switching on the drive . . . hell, it gets abstruse at that point, and anyway it’s irrelevant. What matters is that in our universe only the potential of Starventure continues to exist, and as it were trickles to a point nearer Alpha Centauri, but subjectively a ‘real’ ship and a ‘real’ crew must go on existing because that’s what comes out again at the destination. The problem is—”
“Where?” suggested Brian softly.
“Exactly. For convenience, because ‘existence’ implies some kind of space to exist in, we invented the name hyperspace and defined it as non-Einsteinian. But this is only sticking on labels. My guess is that the label ’hyperspace’ has a real referent, and that hyperphotonic velocity is also real, so that when the ship slows to reenter normal space you may get a surging front of—of ripples in the continuum, with accompanying energies, like Cherenkov radiation.”
I’d always been glad I took up science reporting after they started to teach Einsteinian rather than Newtonian principles in schools. Even Kaye seemed to be following me, though she was woefully unscientific because she was in a line of business dependent on thick-clotted emotion and for her, rationed logic was sometimes an actual handicap.
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But it was that which carried her over a jump that no one else I knew had yet attempted. She said, “Did Starventure bring something back from this other universe she’s been traveling in?”
An automatically contemptuous retort died on my lips as I realized I’d been subconsciously wondering the same
thing. I still hadn’t replied when Brian grunted and spoke up.
‘They ran a robot ship all mound the solar system first,” he pointed out. “And I don’t recall hearing that anything like this happened as a result. ’’
The cases weren’t comparable, and I said so. “For one thing, the robot ship was tiny compared to Starventure—barely big enough for one man to ride. Statistical uncertainty prevents us from moving large masses over short distances with any accuracy. In fact Alpha Centauri is barely far enough away to offer a convenient journey for a ship of Starventure’s size. Paradoxically, it would have been easier to go about twenty-five light-years.”
“Some kind of exponential relationship?” frowned Don. keeping up manfully.
“I have a note of it somewhere,” I said, nodding. “All the indices are irrationals, and there are lots of them."
At that point Kaye made it obvious that she hadn’t heard a word since she last spoke up, for she said to the air, ‘Things from another universe! My God, what a story!”
“Don’t write it," I said. “In heaven’s namel Isn’t one universe enough for you to be going on with?"
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• * •
For a short answer: no. Oh, there was plenty of excitement on the surface. Quito was coming to a boil. The airport, the streets, the rail terminal, the hotels, all crammed to bursting-point as the visitors poured in—reporters, sensation- seekers, the crew’s relatives, scientists, UN high brass—creating masses of minor detail for Don to tape, Kaye to edit and cable to New York. Optimistic city officials ordered the municipal banners hung out in the streets as they had been for Starventure’s departure. Prices doubled.
In the midst of all this, Carmen had to maintain her usual daily round of work, friends and family. It wasn’t so bad for me; I could find moments to close my eyes and picture Leon to myself and think a burning question: Leon, has it changed you to go among the stars? Are we still good friends as well as brothers?
But Carmen’s face showed a distant pain.
It made me feel dreadfully guilty when, eveiy time she begged me for information, I had to say that I’d learned nothing. I had no alternative, though, because that was the simple ugly truth. Somewhere someone had built a wall.
And it wasn’t someone who’d taken offense at me personally, either, who had clamped down on the supply of solid factual news. Virtually every science correspondent and science writer on Earth had converged on Quito by now, and all day long I was being greeted by old acquaintances in twenty different versions of highly accented English. When I pinned my colleagues down long enough to compare notes, their experience confirmed mine.
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Not since ancient Athens had such a dazzling display of intellect assembled in a single city. Every Nobel Prize winner in science for the last decade had flown in. Could I get to talk to any of them? Not on the bottom of the Pacific. I met people I was anxious to interview walking down the street or waiting on corners looking for cabs; I said, “Professor, I’m David Drummond. I wonder if—” And I got a headshake on the instant. On the phone, the answer was stereotyped almost to the point of being a cliche: “He’s in conference right now, at the starship base. Suppose you try again tomorrow?”
There was no hope of getting into the spaceport itself. I’d tried, but their security was unbelievable. Oh, maybe if I’d tried a little harder. . . . Yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to that point, not only because of the risk to my future career if I got caught sneaking through one of their fences, but because the people there were genuinely very damned busy. Once or twice a day at least there were takeoffs and landings, with rather more of the former than the latter, and knowing how complicated it still was to launch a ship into orbit I had to admit they must be working under phenomenal pressure to keep up such a schedule. I watched a couple of the takeoffs through my high-power binoculars, sitting o,n a nearby mountain and wondering why so many scientific notables should be spending so long in conference down there. No matter how hard I hauled on the grapevine, I couldn't find an answer.
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The same evening we first saw Stawenture again with the naked eye, glittering in the light of the exhausts of the rocket-driven tugs gentling her into orbit on the night side of Earth, a blue-dripping monster with claws as big as itself appeared over a rock called Santadonna Island in the South Pacific.
On the island was a satellite tracking station, and the staff there recorded so many data that although by now monsters were coming thick and fast, this one became a standard of reference. It spanned forty degrees of sky from tip to tip, moving irregularly like a spastic crab. Its brightness was not much higher than that of the Milky Way, and the patches of its body which seemed black proved to be radiating in the ultraviolet.
And its mass, apparently, was nil. For the sake of calculation someone assumed that it had a density close to that of protoplasm (which was absurd anyway; protoplasm on that scale would imply a paper-thin amoeba) and worked out that at the limits of the atmosphere it ought to have noticeable gravitational effects. None were recorded. Moreover, it had no detectable orbital velocity. Consequently it ought to have come crashing down like the Arizona Meteorite. It stayed right where it was until it began to fade.
On the increasingly rare occasions when I did see Quito’s famous scientific visitors coming from or going to the starship base, they looked uniformly depressed. Grimly, I wondered if it was the weighing and measuring of the Santadonna monster which had affected them—
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because weighing and measuring lent an air of authenticity to the reports—or whether it was something else. Something directly to do with Starventure.
Maybe to do with Leon.
Hell and damnation, what was shutting their mouths?
VII
I RESPECTED—more, I trusted—Henri Cham bord. I was certain he was doing his job as efficiently and as . . . well, as kindly as he was permitted to. But he was giving out information drop by drop, and over the next few days it turned into a kind of Chinese water torture.
Drip: Alpha Centauri has planets, but none of them are habitable by man.
Next day—drip: experts have gone up to Star- venture's orbit, to examine the crew for possible infection. They landed on two planets and fourteen moons and asteroids.
The day after—drip: personal messages from the crewmen to their families. Mine was very short, but that was typical of Leon and therefore reassuring. When Leon was about fourteen or so he used to accuse me of being a Big Brother in the Orwellian sense as well as literally, having just read 1984 as background to a school history class. So it was appropriate for his message to run: “Don’t look now, but I think Big Brother is watching us.”
It wasn't until an hour or two after I first read it that I started wondering whether by
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“Big Brother" he meant the creatures in the sky. ...
But there was no way of finding out whether that absurd-seeming suspicion was justified. Hammer as I might on the intangible barriers surrounding the spacecraft. I received what my colleagues did: today a drip, the next day another. No pictures of the crew. No film of the Centaurian planets. No interviews by radio, even on a voice-only circuit.
Little by little 1 grew aware that I was horribly afraid.
On the evening of the seventh day after the return Brian Watchett walked into my hotel’s dining room just as Carmen and I were taking our places for dinner. I hadn’t seen him in two days, but that wasn’t surprising. There were other important people currently in Quito than the scientists, and he was probably better able to get the politicians to open their mouths.
Looking very upset, he marched up to our table without ceremony. “David! I’ve got to have a word with you,” he muttered with a sidelong glance at Carmen. I introduced him to her, and she gave a nod.
“Is it something about—up there?” she demanded.
“Yes,” Brian said.
“Then perhaps you’d like me to leave you, David?” She made to rise, but I put out my hand to stop her.
“Carmen also has a brother aboard Starven- ture, ” I told Brian. “Anything you say to me, I think she’s entitled to hear as well, and if you
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don’t want it to go any further, you only need to ask.”
He hesitated, but agreed. I had the waiter show us to a larger table In a more secluded comer of the room, and the moment he had taken our orders Brian plunged ahead.
“David, something must have gone extremely wrong with Starventure. ”
Carmen put her hand to her mouth. I pressed my knee against hers under the table and answered in a level voice.
“I’ve been suspecting as much. But what makes you so sure?”
“Did you know that the Chairman of the General Assembly is in Quito? Or that the Secretary- General was here yesterday and left again this morning? Of course you didn’t. Practically no one was told. Can you think of any other reason for keeping the movements of top UN officials a secret, other than a ghastly emergency? And can you think of any other reason why old friends of mine should have called off appointments they’d made with me on the orders of the UN staff at the spaceport?”
“Orders? Are you sure?”
“I wasn’t at first—I took my friends’ word that they’d been delayed by unexpected commitments. But in the end I bribed a few hotel clerks, and there’s no room for doubt. They were lying. They were actually warned off talking to the press.”
I glanced at Carmen. Her face was pale as death. I said, “I’ve had the same kind of trouble. Most of the major scientists whoVe come here are personal friends of mine; they’ll nor
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mally talk to me even if they insist on it being off the record. This time I can’t even get a civil hello out of them."
