A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  He went out to the Weston home, out by the causeway where the old men still sat fishing in the afternoon sun.

  Jo opened the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked coldly. “Get out”

  “Let him in,” Donald Weston said over her shoulder. “Let him in, you fool.”

  Jo stepped aside and Quinton walked in. The living room was just as he had left it. The volume from the Reader’s Digest was still ajar in the bookcase. But Donald Weston had changed. Quinton sat down and lit a cigarette. He didn’t look at Jo’s eyes.

  “A tough break about the election,” he said. “I was sorry to hear it, Don.”

  Donald Weston smiled, but only with his mouth. His deep green eyes bored through Quinton like an ice drill. Quinton felt centipedes crawling up his spine.

  “Our offer is still open, Don,” he said pleasantly. “How about it?”

  Donald Weston sat down, his face blank, his straw-colored hair neatly combed as always. He was breathing too fast. “Suppose I say no,” he said, his voice a little too high. “Suppose I decide to stay here.”

  Quinton took a drag on his cigarette, feeling death all around him in the little room. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “The decision, of course, is up to you.”

  “Is it?” Weston asked, his voice tightly under control. “Is it?”

  Quinton shrugged.

  “Still playing games, Mr. Quinton?” Jo asked. Her hand curled tensely on her chair arm, making her white scar stand out against her white skin. Quinton smoked his cigarette. She might have been queen of the world, he thought.

  “Cards on the table, Quinton,” Donald Weston said. His green eyes were narrowed to slits. “Quickly.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinton said.

  Donald Weston stood up, fast.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Quinton went on, every nerve alert and screaming. “I don’t think you’d do very well on Earth, Don. You never would be able to do yourself justice. On the other hand, we can always use you on Mars. Our company can always use men like you. You’d be comfortable there, and you’d get considerably more than your share of things. We’d want you to be happy, you understand. On Mars, you’d be set for life—though, of course, it wouldn’t be feasible for you to come back to Earth. If you should stay here … well, it’s a gamble, isn’t it?”

  Weston clenched his fists, breathing hard. “I don’t have any choice,” he said flatly, keeping a steel vice in his voice. “Is that it?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you,” Quinton said, listening to the blood race in his ears. “I’m just offering you a job, that’s all.”

  Weston stared.

  Jo laughed, unpleasantly.

  Quinton waited, his cigarette burning down short against his fingers.

  There was a long silence, filled with the hoarse breathing of the man who had called Robert Quinton light-years across the galaxy.

  “I’ll take your job,” Weston said finally. “I’ll take it.”

  Robert Quinton smiled broadly and inserted his cigarette butt into the ashdisposer. “Mighty glad to hear that, Don,” he said, getting to his feet and extending his hand

  Weston ignored the hand. “When do I leave?” he asked shortly.

  “I think tomorrow would be excellent,” Quinton told him.

  “One time’s as good as another,” Weston said. A small muscle twitched in the side of his jaw.

  “Fine. If you’ll drop by my office in the morning, we’ll fix things up. A ship will shuttle you to New York tomorrow afternoon, and by ten tomorrow night you’ll be Marsbound.”

  Jo sat very still, her eyes closed.

  “I’d like to say, Don,” Quinton said, “that I think you’ve made a very wise decision, We’ll do the best we can for you, and that’s straight.”

  “Get out of here,” Donald Weston whispered, his voice shaking. “Get out of here.”

  “See you in the morning, then,” Quinton said. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Weston.”

  He walked out the door and headed for his copter. He was wet with sweat and he needed a drink. This was all wrong, he knew that. He had seen worlds saved before, on the tri-di. He had read books. He had had his own dreams. Worlds were saved by heroes, in a blaze of glory, saved cleanly out among the stars, man to man.

  Not like this.

  Not by an old man, down in the dirt, cold with sweat.

  He walked to his copter and he didn’t look back. He didn’t have to. He felt them behind him, boring into him. Eyes. Icy green eyes, and blue ones lined with red. Eyes that had looked upon a world—full, deep eyes.

  Empty, now.

  It was the next night, and the lights were low.

  The election had caused some local flurry, but not much. No one even knew that Donald Weston was gone. The post-election remarks of Wiley Carruthers Pond were back on the second page of the Galveston Daily News, the big headlines having gone to the space games. It all was moderately interesting to native Galvestonians, but not exactly hot copy now that it was over. The wire services, of course, didn’t even bother to pick it up.

  The music throbbed across the dance floor, and Lynn was in the silver gown he liked so well. In Quinton’s pocket was a gram from Siringo that told him that Conway was improving, and had a chance to live.

  “This is nice,” Quinton said, holding his wife’s hand across the little table.

  Lynn smiled at him—the private smile. “We’ll never grow up,” she said. “We should be past this stage by now.”

  “We’re too smart,” Quinton said. “We know better.”

  A ship flashed by overhead—only a rumble and a murmur in the night outside. You could hardly hear it over the music. Quinton closed his eyes, watching the ship in his mind. He saw it climb past the planets, out to the crystal stars. To far Centaurus and to Procyon beyond.

  The stars called to him, and one day he knew he would have to answer them again.

  But this was for now.

  He looked around him, at the soft lights, the dancers. He heard the tinkling of glasses and the relaxed laugher of men at play. They didn’t know. They had never felt the stars burning inside them. For them, there was only the night and the whispers and the music.

  For Robert Quinton, too—for now.

  He stood up, smiling. “Let’s dance,” he said, and held out his arms to his wife.

  ARTIFACT

  Late August, 1971.

  Far above a field in New Mexico, above the blue sky itself, a ship decelerated and floated down toward the Earth. The close star that had seared through blackness lost its nakedness and became the golden sun. White clouds touched the ship that had come from emptiness.

  Hundreds of miles away, across half the state of Texas, Dr. Dixon Sanders sat in his university office and looked out the window. The cool breeze felt good after a hot summer, and the August rains had stroked green across the land.

  He did not know that man had landed on Mars for the first time.

  He did not know what men had found there.

  Three days later, Sanders got the call from Washington.

  One hour after he had received the call, he climbed into a jet and was flown to a field in New Mexico. There was no spaceship in sight. He saw only a thick concrete blockhouse, two spidery structures that looked like radio towers, anti-aircraft missiles and sheds. There were jets patrolling the skies.

  A copter lifted him four miles to a neat new settlement in the desert. The houses were white and compact, and concealed irrigation channels had turned the area into an oasis with green trees, grasses, vines and flowers. A big lettered roof sign read:WELCOME TO GILA MONSTER SINKHOLE. a smaller sign was more official: GREENACRE, NEW MEXICO. U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. LANDING PROHIBITED.

  They landed.

  A shaded roof path carried them across six houses, and at the seventh there were three military policemen guarding the roof door. They walked inside and a cool stairway led down into a rustic reception
room. Two more MPs opened a side door for them.

  Sanders stepped inside. He still knew a general when he saw one, and the impulse to salute was almost uncontrollable.

  “You’re Sanders?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir. Have a chair, won’t you?”

  Sanders sat down, slightly stunned at being addressed as sir by a general.

  “I’m General Ransom, Sanders. Intelligence. I want you to know how much we appreciate your coming up here like this.”

  “No trouble at all.” Sanders wanted a cigarette. The general was a big, pleasantly ugly man with gray hair and sharp blue eyes. Sanders rather liked him.

  “You realize, naturally, that what you see and hear in this place must be treated as top secret information. We’re counting on your discretion.”

  “I understand that, General Ransom.”

  “Okay.” The general paced across the room and then sat down behind his desk. He unlocked a drawer and took out a small box. The box was three inches on a side. It was ordinary enough in appearance, although it was metallic. The general drummed his fingers on his desk. Then, abruptly, he slid the top off the box and handed the box to Sanders. “In your opinion, Dr. Sanders, what is that?”

  Sanders took the box and looked inside. “Can I take it out?”

  “Certainly.”

  He took the object out and held it in his hand. It was a piece of brown rock two and a half inches long by two inches wide. He examined it carefully. The top of the rock was smooth and worn. The bottom had been neatly chipped by pressure flaking to make a V-shaped edge. The flake scars were clearly visible. Looked at from the side, the object was slightly concave on its worked edge. He gripped it, holding it with the smooth top surface in the palm of his hand.

  “Well, Doctor?”

  “I assume this is important, for some reason?”

  “Very important.”

  He picked his words with care. “It’s made out of flint or chert, or something closely resembling it. The bottom edge has definitely been worked—I’d say by means of indirect pressure flaking. In my opinion, it’s an artifact—a tool made by man. It may be a scraper; that’s a common tool used to flesh hides and that sort of thing. Hard to tell what it was used for, though. It’s a fairly crude implement, but it’s well made of its type. Nothing too unusual, I’m afraid.”

  The general leaned forward. “How old is it?”

  Sanders shrugged. “Sorry, but I can’t tell that from the scraper alone. Most of them are pretty much alike, and you’ll find them all over the world and from the early Pleistocene right on down to the present. If it was found in association with bones or charcoal or pottery or projectile points—damn near anything—or if it was found eroding out of a datable geological stratum, I might be able to take a stab at it.”

  “It was found all by itself, on the surface of a desert,” General Ransom said, smiling.

  “Then dating would be just guesswork, really.”

  “But it is an artifact?”

  “I’d say so, yes. I didn’t know you boys were so interested in primitive cultures.”

  “That,” said the general, “would depend on where the primitives are.”

  “Apaches on the warpath again?”

  “No—though we do have one over at the field who’s a first class rocket engineer. I wish the Apaches were all we had to worry about. Tell me, Doctor: if you, as an archeologist, had to find out more about this little gadget—who made it, how old it is, that sort of thing—how would you go about it?”

  Sanders frowned. “I’d go back to where it was found and try to find another one in place. If we could get one in a dig—excavate it, that is, in association with some other stuff—we should be able to give you more information on it.”

  “Would you be willing to undertake such a search, Doctor, if the government asked you to do so?”

  “Certainly, if it’s important. I have classes to think of, of course. Where did it come from, anyway—somewhere around here?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, Dr. Sanders. It came from Mars.”

  He was a little slow on the uptake. Then it hit him. “But that means—”

  “Exactly,” said General Ransom.

  He was a little surprised at his own calm acceptance of the fact that men had landed on Mars, but then he had been expecting it, really, along with everybody else.

  But an artifact was something else again.

  An artifact was a tool made by man.

  Or by something like a man?

  “Why me?” he asked. “I’m no spaceman. I like it here.”

  “I’ll be perfectly frank with you. Our expedition was made on a strictly hush-hush basis; that isn’t necessarily the way I would have preferred it, but with the world situation the way it is, that’s the way it had to be. Sooner or later, the news has got to be released. We’ve got a knotty little job ahead of us at the United Nations. We have no right to keep that artifact quiet, and when we talk about it there are some questions that have to be answered. Do you understand me?”

  “Well, I see why you need an archeologist. Why me?”

  “We can’t force you to go.”

  “I realize that. I just want the reasons.”

  Ransom ticked them off. “One, you can be trusted. Two, we feel you’re the man for the job—well trained, but with a shot or two of imagination. Three, you’re in good shape physically—though an examination will have to clear you officially, of course. Finally … may I be blunt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your wife divorced you, I understand.”

  The old pain stabbed at him, but he kept his face expressionless. “That’s right.”

  “Your parents are dead. You have one son in the oil business. You don’t get on with him too well.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve chosen to work at a small private college. Your absence can be covered.”

  “In other words, I won’t be missed if I don’t come back.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

  Sanders looked at the artifact in his hand. He put it back in the box and handed it to Ransom. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “We’re grateful, Sanders. You can pick your medal if you want one. And don’t worry: we’ll get you there and we’ll get you back. That ship can carry three men. Your pilot will be Colonel Ben Cooper—he made the first flight, so he’s the best we’ve got. You pick the other man. You know what we want, and you know who you can work with best.”

  Sanders didn’t hesitate. “That’ll be Ralph Charteris over at Santa Fe. He’s thirty-eight, he knows his stuff, and he’s technically unmarried. He’s a research man, so nobody’ll think it’s funny if he disappears for a spell.”

  “Got you. Takeoff will be in ten days. You’ll want to get things in shape.”

  “Okay.”

  The two men shook hands.

  The ten days went by in a hurry.

  He made out a will, a job he had been postponing for years, and managed to spend a day fishing with two friends in Matagorda Bay.

  He phoned his son Mark in Houston. Their talk was unsatisfactory as usual, full of forced heartiness. He couldn’t tell him where he was going, and he was glad when the call was over.

  He didn’t call Ellen.

  The ship lifted on schedule.

  Within an hour, there was no blue sky.

  He thought briefly of himself: forty-two years old, on the thin side, horn-rimmed glasses. He probably looked a lot like a professor. He felt singularly out of place in a spaceship.

  He looked at the screen. He saw cold stars and a frozen sun. He saw black distances and long, long silences. He saw his own life far away and lost: a life that had been too lonely, and too fast.

  He stopped looking.

  The atomic drive was soundless except for a high, irritating vibration that seemed part of the ship. Magnets kept him anchored and after an initial vertigo the weightlessness
meant an annoying indigestion and little else.

  They had some good bourbon, and it helped.

  They were neither hot nor cold.

  Ralph Charteris was a big blond giant of a man, and little Ben Cooper always referred to him as the biggest mass on the ship. “Let’s talk about rocks, Sanders,” he said. “Tell me what the devil that scraper was doing on Mars—figure it out in true Boy Scientist fashion so we can turn around and go home.”

  Sanders smiled, sipping his bourbon. He liked to talk, although he knew it was just a device for getting outside himself. “I’ll give you six fast answers, Ralph.”

  “Fire,” Ralph said, chewing on an empty pipe.

  “Here’s the deal. A ship—the first one, mind you—lands on a supposedly uninhabited planet. It’s mostly all desert and a yard wide, as I understand it, and the air is shy on oxygen. We’ve all been solemnly assured by our astronomical colleagues that people like ourselves couldn’t exist on Mars. Oh, maybe some outlandish freak without any carbon molecules in his carcass, but not people. So what do they run right smack into? An artifact. Nothing queer or strange or alien. Nothing to make them swat their helmets and holler, ‘There’s Martians, by gum!’ Just a perfectly ordinary scraper—it’s a miracle that botanist spotted it at all. So what’s the most logical explanation, the one that strains the credulity the least?”

  “It’s a hoax,” Ralph said quietly.

  “You thought of it too, hmmmm? The simplest way for that scraper to get there would be for one of the men to have picked it up on Earth, carried it to Mars, tossed it on the sand, and then ‘discovered’ it. The botanist could have done it.”

  “I don’t much think Schlicter was a dishonest man, Sanders,” Ben Cooper said.

  “Remember Piltdown,” Ralph said.

  “Exactly. I don’t say that Schlicter planted that scraper—I just say that’s the simplest explanation.”

  “Let’s have some more ideas.”

  “Here’s another: the artifact is not native to Mars, but was left there by a party of interstellar travellers. In that case, the catch is why they would leave a flint scraper behind. I can’t figure a culture with spaceships and scrapers.”