Starman

by Alan Dean Foster

  Heads bounced. The front of the sedan crumpled and steam rushed skyward. Inside the bus, there were curses and a few yelps from startled passengers who had just settled in for the next leg of the long cross-country haul. A six year old began to bawl.

  Calm and cool, the driver reassured his charges before climbing down to the ground. He walked slowly toward the sedan. Inside the bus, faces pressed against glass as the passengers followed his progress and anticipated the forthcoming confrontation.

  Sheepish faces stared out of the car at him. He crossed behind it, peered in the driver’s window and said dangerously, “Well?”

  “It was their damn fault!” the driver, whose name was Buzz, informed him. He nodded westward, down the highway. “The ones in that Mustang. Sumbitch stole my deer and hit me, and when we tried to talk to him, his girl friend pulled a gun on us.”

  “Hmmm.” The driver considered this, turned to stare down the road. The scenario this wildman was describing didn’t seem very plausible, but then, he hadn’t seen anything until the sedan had rammed into his bus. Anyway, it wouldn’t be up to him to adjudicate. “Anybody get his number?”

  “They shouldn’t be too hard to pick up.” Buzz was feeling better already. “Seventy-seven green Mustang with Wisconsin plates. Can’t be too many of those in this part of the country.”

  “Nothing personal, bud,” the driver replied quietly, “but we’ll let the cops decide who’s at fault here.”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s fine with me,” said Buzz. “I just want to meet that guy again, that’s all.”

  Jenny kept the Mustang cruising along at the regulation fifty-five mph as they cruised down Interstate 80. She didn’t want to attract any attention. As soon as it became apparent no one was following them, she’d begun talking nonstop, as much to hear her own voice as to say anything.

  Besides, the starman was nothing if not a good listener. Just now she was rambling on about her brief married life.

  “We met last winter, Scott and I. Up at Iron Mountain. I went to go ice skating. He was up there skiing. He was good, too. See, he did construction work in the summer and taught skiing in the off season. Worked out pretty good for him.

  “Anyway, he tried to get me to give it a shot. So I said okay, I’d try skiing if he’d try skating, and he surprised the hell out of me by agreeing. Actually I think it was my outfit that intrigued him, not my Olympic potential. I used to skate competitively. Just small stuff, local contests, but I had one outfit made up, real tight, you know? I don’t think he wanted to teach me to ski any more than he wanted to learn how to skate. But he tried hard, and he did okay for a beginner. Skating and skiing are nothing alike. You use different muscles, have to balance completely differently.

  “One of the things I liked about him right away was that it didn’t bother him to fall down. You get a lot of guys try something like skating and they can’t take failing. Scott would land on his can and he’d just grin and laugh it off, then get up and try again. No macho ego problems at all. You don’t run into many guys like that, especially good-looking ones.

  “One thing led to another and a couple of months later we were on our honeymoon.”

  “Honeymoon is nice?”

  She glanced sharply at him. He’d been so quiet that she’d almost forgotten he was there. “Ours was—beautiful.”

  “Define ‘beautiful.’ ”

  Her expression turned wistful. “Beautiful like that is—better than terrific. Better than Dutch apple pie with whipped cream. Beautiful is like what you did to that deer back there in the parking lot. It’s the best of everything.”

  She was quiet, but this time not for long. Maybe it was his presence, the fact that she had someone to listen to her who wouldn’t make moral judgments or offer up false platitudes. Now that she no longer feared him she found there was something calming about being in his presence. She discovered she could replay the fatal accident in her mind without breaking down.

  “We went to California and everything was great. But honeymoons are always great. Then we got back and everything was even better and I thought, wow, this is the way it’s supposed to be.” She looked away from him for a moment. “See, I never did have much luck with men. I always seemed to go for the good-looking bastards, and I got hurt a lot. And then I met Scott and he seemed too good to be real.

  “Anyways, we made plans, had everything worked out. We were going to have a couple of kids and everything. Working two jobs, Scott made good money, and he already had that cabin he’d built himself out on the lake.” She gave him a wan smile.

  “Three months later he was dead. Just like that. It was an accident. That’s what’s been so hard to handle, you know? I mean, you walk into a bank and there’s a robbery in progress and you catch a stray bullet, that’s one thing. Or you’re stuck in a plane crash. But a crummy little ‘industrial accident?’

  “Scott was a contractor, mostly did painting. He was working on a new apartment building when the damn scaffolding broke. Died right there. He was gone before a doctor could get a look at him. Broke his neck. He was twenty-six goddamn lousy years old.

  “And you want to know the part that kills me? We’d had a fight that morning. Our first real fight. I was yelling at him for acting like a dumbbell and he banged out of the house mad. You want to know the crazy part, what we were fighting about? Not us, not how we were going to live together, not even money. No, we were fighting about some damn monkey.”

  “Monkey?”

  “An animal. Like the deer, only a lot more like us humans. It was on some TV show. The monkey had a plate in its head with wires attached to it so they could study its brainwaves or something. Scott thought it was awful that they should do that.”

  “What about you, Jennyhayden? You thought it was all right to do that?”

  She hesitated before replying. “Well, yeah, sort of. The whole idea of the experiment was to save lives.”

  “What kinds of lives?”

  “Our lives. Human lives.”

  “Ah, I see. Because human life is more valuable than monkey life. Or deer life.”

  “Well, naturally.”

  “Because humans are more intelligent? Superior species?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A question. What if even more intelligent species comes here to this planet. Superior to you. As superior to you as you are to monkey life. Is it all right for them to put a plate and wires in your head? To help save their kind of life?”

  She stared at him uncertainly. “Is that what you’re really here for? To put plates in our heads?”

  He smiled at her. A gentle, reassuring expression that somehow conveyed something more than a human face was capable of. “I am here to observe and to study, Jennyhayden. Not to victimize. One can learn without damaging, study without victimizing.”

  “I tried to explain to Scott, about the show, that the issues at stake were complex. That it wasn’t as simple as he made it out to be.”

  “Such issues are never simple.” There was quiet between them for a while. “I think I would have liked Scott.”

  “You said you came here to learn. Are you learning?”

  He nodded, staring through the windshield. “A great deal, and more with each moment that passes. Not as I planned to learn. In some ways this is better. Except for the danger, of course.”

  “You’ve learned something about me. What do you think? Do you see me as . . . as a monkey, or a deer?”

  Again the comforting smile, this time without turning to look at her. “I have learned much about you, Jennyhayden, but if you have to ask such a question it is clear that you have not learned very much about me.”

  She opened her mouth, decided better of it, closed it and turned her full attention to her driving. Better maybe to think for a change before opening her big, fat mouth.

  She concentrated on the road and so did not see the police cruiser that was hiding behind the billboard and the city limits sign. The two men inside were wat
ching for speeders. The radio set on the dash mumbled officiously. The volume had been turned way down and the dispatcher’s words were barely intelligible.

  One of the men, whose name was Dusseau, sat up and squinted at the Mustang as it sailed past. “Hey, that Mustang the state boys want. Wasn’t that a green seventy-seven with Wisconsin plates?”

  His sidekick sat up. “Yep. What about it?”

  Dusseau scrambled to get his feet off the dash. “Kick ’er in the ass. I think we’ve got the bastard.”

  “No shit?” Officer Tripp jammed the car into gear and sent them bouncing out onto the highway.

  “Stay back but keep ’em in sight.” Dusseau’s head was alive with visions of promotions and awards. “We want to make sure we handle this one right. No screw-ups.”

  “Check.” Tripp was a man of fewer words. “Get on the horn and patch us through to somebody who knows what this is all about.”

  “Gotcha.”

  The big army helicopter looked as out of place in the roadhouse parking lot as a power lifter at a crocheting competition. In addition to the chopper’s lights, the parking lot was brightly lit by spots atop the roofs of a couple of Nebraska state police cars.

  The cross-country bus had departed long ago, having suffered only a dent in its side. Parked off to one side was the hunter’s totalled sedan. Mark Shermin stood next to the helicopter, chatting amiably with the waitress from the cafe.

  That was where the state trooper was heading when Buzz reached out to draw him aside.

  “Dammit, sergeant, we been here since six-thirty this evening. When can we go?”

  “Yeah,” said Donnie-Bob petulantly. “My Arleen’s gonna kill me when I get home.”

  The sergeant eyed all three of them with obvious distaste. Under that frankly disapproving gaze the trio milled about uneasily, convinced they’d done nothing wrong but feeling guilty nonetheless.

  “You can leave as soon as the Federals say so and not a minute before.”

  “But we’ve already told him everything,” Buzz protested. “Listen, man, we—” but the sergeant had broken away and resumed his march toward the idling helicopter.

  Shermin had just finished thanking the waitress for her help. She was heading back toward the cafe as the sergeant approached. The scientist turned to him.

  “Find out anything new, Mister Shermin?” the trooper asked.

  Shermin shook his head. “ ’Fraid not. They all tell it pretty much the same. The girl had a half dozen opportunities to get away from him and didn’t use any of ’em. Not only that, she helped him get away from those three jerks over there. Then the two of them left together, her driving and holding the gun. That sound like any kind of kidnapping you ever heard of, sergeant?”

  The trooper shook his head solemnly. Lemon appeared, framed in the open chopper doorway. “Mister Shermin! They’ve spotted one green Mustang, Wisconsin plates, going west on Interstate 80! They’re pretty sure it’s the right year, too.”

  “What are they doing about it?”

  “Hanging back and waiting for further instructions.”

  Shermin muttered under his breath as he bade the sergeant a hasty farewell and ran for the chopper. “Don’t tell me somebody’s finally acting sensibly. I may go into shock.” Then, louder, toward the nose of the craft, “Let’s move it, Lieutenant!”

  Someone in the forward compartment nodded and the big copter was lifting off before Shermin was completely inside. A very confused sergeant of the Nebraska state police watched until it had been swallowed up by the night.

  Now what the hell, he asked himself, is going on?

  Six

  Jenny had been blinking and shaking her head, trying to stay awake, for the past hour. Now even the head shakes were failing to clear her vision. Her passenger remarked on it.

  “Is something wrong, Jennyhayden?”

  “Yeah something’s wrong. I’m pooped is what’s wrong. Tired. It’s time to rest. Remember, I told you about it?”

  He nodded. “I remember. What do we do?”

  “The same thing my people do whenever they need something and they’re out traveling like this. When you need gas you find a gas station. Food, you find a food station.” She was scanning the highway ahead. “There’s a small town coming up. Should be something out on the freeway exit. We need to find a motel. A sleep station, I guess you’d call it.”

  She eased the Mustang down the off-ramp, flanked by several large, well-lit signs. There were several places to chose from but she wasn’t in any mood to go bargain hunting. The first motel they came to was big and clean and she turned into the parking lot. It was full of cars and she hoped it wasn’t full. Shouldn’t be, she thought. Not this time of the week.

  Even if she wasn’t exhausted it’s doubtful she would have noticed the lights of the police cruiser following a hundred yards back.

  In addition to the large number of cars there were a couple of big yellow buses parked in the lot. BEAT IOWA banners were draped across the sides. Pasted to the inside of several windows were smaller pieces of cardboard and paper inscribed with less courteous sentiments. Jenny barely noticed the buses as she located an empty parking space and pulled in.

  “Gotta have a couple hours sleep,” she declared to no one in particular. “Just a couple of hours. Okay?”

  He nodded, watched as she pushed the forty-five under her seat. They exited the car together, he following close on her heels as she headed for the main building. On the walkway they passed a couple of very large young men wearing red lettermen’s sweaters. They were blasting out the Nebraska fight song enthusiastically and off key.

  The starman was pleased. “More singing.”

  “Sort of,” she admitted.

  Their passage didn’t escape notice. One of the football players turned and yelled at them. “Yeah, Cornhuskers!”

  “Yeah, Cornhuskers!” the starman responded, always willing to please.

  The second lineman raised a hand, palm facing outward, and declaimed with mock solemnity, “Pass, friend.”

  Jenny pushed open a glass door. “I think the office must be through here, if that sign outside was right.”

  “What is Cornhusker?” her companion inquired curiously. “Has it to do with food?”

  “Depends on what side of the field you’re on,” she replied obliquely.

  “What side of field food grows on?”

  “Never mind. It’s getting more complicated than it needs to be and I’m too tired for word games right now.” She sighed. “Let’s just find the front desk, okay?”

  Unsatisfied but compliant, he nodded. “Okay, Jennyhayden.”

  Keeping well away from the green Mustang, the police cruiser crawled into the parking lot. Dusseau kept his eyes on the target vehicle as he addressed the radio mike.

  “Looks like they’ve stopped, maybe going to spend the night here. We could take ’em easy if they’ve rented a room.”

  “No.” The reply from the speaker was firm. “You are not, repeat not, to approach them. Under any circumstances. Just keep them under close surveillance until the Federals get there.”

  Tripp made a disgusted sound out of range of the mike’s pickup, then leaned over again so he could be heard. “What if they approach us?”

  There was a pause. They could envision the dispatcher waiting for instructions, listening to someone unseen and unheard.

  “If you’re in some kind of life-threatening situation, defend yourselves accordingly. But otherwise, wait for the Federals. Out.”

  A disappointed Dusseau returned the mike to its holder and found a place to park. Tripp was complaining before the engine died. “Wait for the Federals, wait for the Federals. They get the six o’clock news and we get the shit end of the stick. We follow these two practically to the damn state line. And for what? A nice pat on the butt when it’s all over. Nice doggy cop, good boy. Here’s a nice gold star for your record. Well I don’t like it. The whole deal sucks.”

  “Tha
t’s the way it is.” Dusseau shrugged. He was watching the green Mustang and the motel beyond, doing his job. Stoic as hell. But he wasn’t any happier about their instructions than was his partner.

  “Doesn’t have to be.” A sly smile slid over Tripp’s face.

  Dusseau frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”

  The other officer unsnapped the riot gun from its holder, removed it from the rack and checked the chamber. The twelve-gauge pump was full and ready for action, and so was he.

  “Maybe nothing, but I got this hunch that this just might develop into a life-threatening situation.”

  A blast of sound washed over Jenny and the starman when they entered the coffee-shop annex. Tables and chairs had been shoved aside to create a big open area in the middle of the room. The noise came from a stereo with the bass turned up too far and from the crowd of college students who occupied the makeshift dance floor. Male and female, black and white, all were strenuously doing their best to celebrate their team’s forthcoming victory over their interstate rival.

  Nondancers sat on chairs or cuddled in corners, generating their own private festivities. Spectators stood on tabletops and clapped, urging on the more active celebrants. A bunch of guys clustered around a beer keg while others slaked their thirst from bottles and cans. Several members of the Big Red marching band, uniforms and hats askew, were warming up in a corner and adding the blare of their instruments to the general din.

  A girl in a cheerleader’s outfit came running past the two newcomers. She was being ardently pursued by a young man clad in white shorts and an open-necked shirt. His tie was fastened around his forehead instead of his neck.

  “Wait a minute, Betty! I just want to show you something.”

  She yelled back over her shoulder. “I know, I know. Why do you think I’m running?”

  They disappeared outside. The starman followed their progress with interest. He found the sights and sounds surrounding him fascinating.