Starman

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Watch yourself out there, man,” said Lemon as Shermin stepped out, still cradling his helmet under one arm.

  “Yeah, sure.” Useless warning, nice thought. There was nothing here to watch out for. Or was there?

  That was one of the things he’d been sent to find out.

  Air-force insignia decorated the shoulders of several men working around the edge of the crater. They wore suits similar to Shermin’s and went at their assignments with single-minded dedication and in complete silence. The Geiger counters and similar paraphernalia they were using looked right up to date, Shermin decided.

  He was wondering whether or not he should match their attire by donning his own helmet when an air-force major climbed out of the crater in front of him. The officer also wore a suit, but like Shermin, carried his helmet. Shermin breathed a sigh of relief. He suffered from slight claustrophobia. Not having to wear the helmet was the nicest thing that had happened to him in two days.

  The officer saw him standing there and swerved to meet him. That wasn’t surprising. Shermin knew he was expected.

  They shook hands. “I’m Major Bell, Cletus Bell.”

  “Mark Shermin.” The major didn’t ask what he was doing there. No one got within five miles of the impact crater unless they’d already been cleared at a much higher level than the major usually dealt with.

  Shermin started toward the ridge of earth that ringed the excavation. “It’s clean?”

  “No radioactivity, if that’s what you mean. You’d get more rads standing next to a microwave. No bacteria readings, either.”

  “That’s no surprise.” Shermin nodded toward the crater. “Even assuming there were any they would’ve been vaporized in the first flash of heat during impact.”

  Bell went silent for a moment, finally asked, “You’re attached to National Security?”

  “Not very.” He considered. Bell had a right to know more. He wasn’t a chopper radioman. “I just work for them occasionally. On loan, like a library book. Didn’t you know that we consultants really run the country? Actually, my full time interests lie with SETI.”

  Bell frowned. “You’re a whale expert?”

  Shermin smiled. “No, that’s CETI. SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

  The major’s eyebrows rose. “Things must be kind of slow between Spielberg films. So they’re sending you guys out on meteorites now, huh? I thought they’d send a geologist.” He nodded distastefully toward the crater. “I can tell you now there’s no diamonds.”

  “Diamonds?” Now it was Shermin’s turn to frown.

  “These guys think it’s a meteorite, everybody starts looking for diamonds. Heat and pressure, carbon, and slow wits.” He shook his head. “So you’re looking at meteorites now? I wouldn’t think someone with your interests would find them worth checking out.”

  “Only the ones that change course.”

  That brought Bell up short. “Change course? Can they do that?”

  “This one did. Or else some airhead at NORAD misread a glitch on his instrumentation.”

  Bell indicated the activity around the crater, the men busy in their decontamination suits, the circling helicopters, the others searching methodically through the woods for they knew not what but searching diligently nonetheless.

  “If so I’ll bet he’s sweating now. I didn’t think they could move troops this fast anymore. Something’s got somebody excited.” He stared straight at Shermin. “Do they have reason to be?”

  Shermin shrugged. “Beats me. I just got here.” He nodded toward the crater. “Let’s have a look.”

  “Sure. Not a whole lot to see.”

  They climbed the earthen berm and looked down into the hole. Lying at the bottom of the crater was a black, irregularly shaped object about the size of a dead Cadillac. A couple of silver-suited airmen stood atop it. One of them was hefting something but Shermin’s view was blocked by his companion. Hoses and thick cables coiled around the feet of both men and ran up the crater wall, then down the outside and off to parts unseen.

  They started down, Shermin moving carefully and studying the carbonized soil as he descended. A loud noise suddenly filled the excavation. Shermin identified it instantly. Now he knew what the first airman was holding. It was a drill, and a big one.

  He gaped at the airmen, then turned angrily to Bell. “What’s going on here? What the hell are they doing?”

  “I told you: diamonds. Besides, nobody’s told us what not to do, and I’ve been getting damn tired standing around watching my men picking dead birds and squirrels out of the underbrush.” He nodded toward the two men. “They’re trying to see what’s in there.”

  “No one authorized that.”

  “Like I said, no one forbade it. Besides, we checked it out with probe poles and the damn thing sounded hollow to me. We walked all over it when we started checking it for radiation. I’m not the only one who thought it sounded hollow.”

  “That’s idiotic, major. There’s no such thing as a hollow . . .”

  His words were washed out by the noise of the drill as they began to approach the object. Suddenly one of the men stumbled forward, nearly fell. His buddy steadied him as the drill broke through the object’s exterior. A thin jet of nearly colorless vapor hissed skyward. The volume diminished rapidly and there was no noticeable odor.

  Shermin froze, his eyes wide. Bell broke out in a shit-eating grin but forebore from saying anything—for about ten seconds.

  “You were about to say?”

  “Jesus H. Christ.” Shermin looked paralyzed, finally shook himself. “Nothing. I wasn’t going to say anything.” He was staring in fascination at the object lying at the bottom of the crater. His thoughts were going eighty miles a minute. The two airmen had put the drill aside and were bending over, peering intently at the spot on the surface where they’d been working. They were muttering to one another but not loudly enough for Shermin to hear what they were saying.

  A couple of raindrops pelted his face. They were followed by a deluge. The storm seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. Moments earlier the sky had been clear and bright, with only a few isolated cumulus in sight. Now it was like the monsoon season. Shermin and Bell tried to shield themselves from the torrential and unseasonable downpour with their helmets.

  “What now?” Bell asked him.

  Shermin nodded toward the object. “Let’s get this thing out of here.”

  Three

  The music helped. The man didn’t seem to object to her listening, or to her changing the stations whenever the mood suited her. Each time the news came on she quickly switched to fresh music, and he didn’t seem to mind that either.

  What had been a lovely morning turned suddenly sour with the appearance of raindrops on the windshield. It matched her mood.

  “Rain,” she said conversationally. It produced the usual response from her passenger, which was to say, nothing at all. He just stared blankly at her as if waiting to see what she might say next. He wasn’t completely indifferent to her, however. He still kept one hand securely on the handle of the automatic.

  “Windshield wipers.” She indicated the rain, which was beginning to streak the glass and blur the view ahead. “I have to turn on the windshield wipers.”

  “Windshield wipers,” he repeated. He said it perfectly. He only had to say something once to get it right.

  She reached down and flipped them on. The road ahead reemerged from the moisture. The steady swish-swish of the blades was relaxing, like the music. Another sign of normalcy in a world that had suddenly gone topsy-turvy on her. Another sign of sanity.

  They were coming to a small town, one of hundreds of identical little communities dotting central and southern Wisconsin. It was large enough to rate a signal in the center of town, at the main intersection. As they approached, the light shifted from green to yellow.

  “Stoplight,” she told him.

  “Stoplight.” Another echo. She decided on an experi
ment.

  Instead of slowing down, she floored the accelerator. Her passenger didn’t react, didn’t yell for her to stop, didn’t so much as blink. Just sat quietly and stared as she raced the light. It went to red before she reached the intersection. She held her breath as the Mustang ran the signal, but theirs was the only vehicle in sight.

  The town was big enough to warrant the stoplight, but if there was a cop around he was conspicuous by his absence. She didn’t slow down again until they had passed the last house and were back among the trees. Repeated glances into the rearview mirror revealed only empty road behind them. There was no sign of hoped-for flashing red lights, no sound of a closing siren.

  And still he continued to ignore her. Did he know what she’d been trying to do back there and had he simply decided not to pay any attention, or was he so foreign, so ignorant of local customs that he didn’t know the difference between a yellow light and a red one? She wasn’t sure which to believe.

  Maybe she ought to give in and listen to some news. The clock on the dash said it was almost six. If her abductor was some kind of dangerous foreign agent or escaped madman or something, maybe there’d be something on the news about him. The continued not-knowing was worse than anything the broadcaster might say. She found herself wishing he was nothing more than a Russian spy on the run, or some scientist who’d gone over the edge and maybe shot a couple of his colleagues.

  That much at least she could make sense of.

  The music segued into a station signature tune, then to the sound of a rooster crowing, and finally a voice. Still no reaction from her passenger.

  “Up and at ’em, folks,” said the cheery voice of the DJ. “This is station WDUL, Duluth, Minnesota, bringing you the six A.M. news. World news, commodity index and farm prices following the weather. But first, what’s been happening in our neck o’ the woods.

  “No folks, those of you who saw that flash in the sky last night, you weren’t imagining things. It wasn’t the end of the world, neither, and it wasn’t a burning airliner. No sir.”

  Jenny found her eyes edging away from the road and back over toward her silent companion. Words continued to pour from the speaker. She was looking at him differently now, and her expression began to alter as the DJ’s voice rambled on.

  “Nope,” he continued in his folksy, bucolic fashion, “according to the AP wire, one of the biggest meteors to strike our little old planet Earth in the past eighty years hit last night right here in our own backyard, near Ashland and not far from Chequamegon Bay, right over the border. So for you folks who called in to say that you saw a flying saucer land over there, this ought to take care of . . .”

  Jenny didn’t want to hear any more. She reached out and turned the radio off. The road bent sharply to the left. Between her need to shut off the flow of reportage and simultaneously keep an eye on her passenger she nearly drove off the pavement. The car’s wild gyrations didn’t faze him in the least. Why should they, she thought? She stifled the laughter that was building inside her because she recognized it as the incipient hysteria it was.

  Foreign? Oh, that was funny, that was! He was a foreigner all right. It didn’t explain what he was doing with Scott’s face and body, but it explained a helluva lot of other things. Like his silence, and that unnaturally direct stare, and his ignorance of things as commonplace as red lights and windshield wipers. It explained what she’d seen in the living room and on her front porch last night. It explained just about everything—except what they were doing together driving a souped-up ’77 Mustang south toward Arizona.

  She looked from the radio to him and back again, hoping he—it, whatever—at least had enough sense to make the connection. “That was about you, wasn’t it? That flash, that meteor, that was you coming down. You really are some kind of Martian or something, aren’t you?”

  Silence and indifference.

  “What do you want here?” The questions came pouring out of her. “What are you doing? What do you want with me? Where did you learn to speak English?” A car was coming toward them. She ignored it. “Come on, damn you. Say something! I know you can talk a little bit, anyway. Where’d you learn English?”

  Now he did look at her, but when he opened his mouth it was a different voice from the one that had spoken to her before which emerged. Not that it was unfamiliar, and the words were understandable. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese, and it wasn’t the old man’s voice.

  It was Mick Jagger’s, or a remarkable facsimile. “I can’t get no, satisfaction,” the man sang to her. He was as straight-faced as if he were serenading a high-school sweetheart.

  “That does it,” she muttered grimly. She closed her eyes, hit the brakes with both feet, and threw the wheel hard left, sending the Mustang skidding crazily toward the approaching vehicle. Caught off guard, her passenger went tumbling into the dashboard.

  The driver of the van locked up his own brakes, sending the bigger vehicle into a wild skid as he fought to miss the oncoming Mustang. The end result was that both of them ended up sliding sideways toward each other. There was a metallic bang as doors contacted, slid apart, and caught again on rear fenders. The van’s left taillight exploded in a shower of red plastic. Metal crumpled. The Mustang skewed around in a full three-sixty before coming to a stop on the shoulder.

  The van was owned by a young and presently extremely upset man named Heinmuller. As soon as he managed to get both his breath and his bus under control he locked the parking brake. Then he reached under the front seat and brought out a big lug wrench. Piling out of the van, he paused to check his custom paint job. His blood pressure rose steadily as he noted the gouges in the lacquer, the marks on one mag wheel, and the missing curb indicator. That much he could have lived with, but the twisted rear fender and busted taillight were something else again. It wasn’t just the broken red plastic cover, either. The metal had been punched in and wires were showing. Between that and the fender he had a major project on his hands.

  One thing for sure: he wasn’t going to pay for it.

  He turned and shouted angrily toward the Mustang, which still rested where it had skidded to a halt on the shoulder behind him.

  “You crazy sons of bitches! What’s the matter with you? Look what you did to my van. You want to play chicken on the highway, why don’t you find somebody else to pick on?” He gestured at the damaged fender. “You see this? Who’s gonna pay for this?” When no response was forthcoming from his assailant, he picked up a rock lying by the side of the road and threw it at the other car. “Come on, own up to it, and you damn well better have insurance!”

  The explorer blinked, shook his head. He’d been stunned by the collision with the dash. Now he turned to see Jenny trying to scramble out the door. The gun had tumbled to the floor and lay somewhere out of sight beneath the seat. There was no time to go hunting for it. He grabbed at her, still unbalanced by the concussion he’d suffered.

  Heinmuller had started toward the Mustang, holding the big lug wrench tightly in his right hand. If they wouldn’t come to him, he’d sure as hell go to them. He could understand the reason for their continued silence, but if they thought he was going to shine it on they had another thing coming. He was prepared for just about anything: a fight, confrontation with somebody strung out on dope, a bunch of frightened, drunken teenagers.

  The one thing he wasn’t prepared for was to see the door of the Mustang burst open and an attractive young woman come staggering out. She saw him and instead of offering an apology or trying to run away, she took a step toward him and started screaming at the top of her lungs.

  An attack he could have coped with. An injury from within the car he could have coped with. The one thing he wasn’t ready to deal with was a wild cry for help. He stopped in his tracks.

  A man followed her out of the car and locked his arms around her. They started scrambling around, kind of wrestling and yet not quite fighting. Heinmuller stared at them and they both stared back.

  “Help me, pl
ease!” the woman was shouting.

  “I send greetings!” the guy yelled, with equal intensity. He smiled even as he continued to tussle with the woman who, Heinmuller noted absently, wasn’t bad looking at all.

  The near collision and the damage to his precious van temporarily shoved to the back of his thoughts by this new situation, he stood watching them while trying to decide what to do next.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” he finally asked them. “What’s with you two?” The last thing he wanted to do was insert himself into the middle of some serious domestic quarrel.

  “I’m being kidnapped!” the woman insisted.

  “Greetings!” said her companion again.

  Heinmuller frowned. They were fighting, that was for sure, but not as husband and wife. But the guy neither looked nor acted like a kidnapper. Something mighty cockeyed was happening here and he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of it.

  But if she was telling the truth . . .

  He raised the lug wrench and started toward them, keeping his eyes fixed on the man. He was still wary of both of them. This might be some kind of scam, a show designed to lull his suspicions so they could steal his van. But the more he watched the woman struggle the less he thought that was the case.

  “Let her go, pal, or I’ll give you greetings,” he finally said.

  As he drew near, the man reached into a pocket of his windbreaker. Heinmuller dropped to a cautionary crouch, but the guy didn’t have a gun. It was only some kind of ball bearing or something. As soon as he saw that his would-be opponent wasn’t armed he resumed his advance. The man held the hand holding the gray sphere out toward him.

  “All right, buddy, you asked for it. I told you to let go of her.” Heinmuller decided to hit the guy on the arm. That ought to make him loosen his grasp.