A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  “Okay, now,” said Cecil Kelley. “You’ve just spotted it on the viewscreen. React! Don’t just stand there. You’re up against the Unknown, your lives depending on a guy you have no confidence in. Set? Action …”

  Shadows blanketed the control room with crisscrosses of anxiety. Frosted stars swam in a deep black viewscreen. Somewhere, a high-toned radar beep whistled insistently at electronic intervals that were drawing inexorably closer together. A lieutenant, his face haggard, sank down next to the pilot.

  “It’s no use,” he said flatly. “The computer doesn’t make mistakes.”

  Linda registered Fear.

  “That does it,” said the gray-haired colonel, crumpling a chart into a wad in his fist. He shot a despairing look at the pilot. “To come all this way and then to …”

  “If only we could do something,” breathed Linda Lambeth. “I don’t understand—why must we just sit here and take it? Why do we have to die?”

  “Extended parabola of the space-time coordinates,” the old colonel explained rapidly. “There’s only one man who could get us out of this alive.” He looked at the pilot. “And he doesn’t happen to be with us.”

  For a long moment, the pilot did not speak. Then, slowly, he lit a cigarette. His voice was steady in the hum of the atomics. “Stand by for turnover,” the pilot said.

  The beeps from the radar came faster and faster.

  “But the orbits,” protested the lieutenant. “It’s a collision orbit.”

  “Stand by,” the pilot said.

  “You—you haven’t got a chance,” whispered the old colonel. “He’ll do it,” gritted Linda Lambeth. “He’ll do it.”

  The radar beeps coalesced into a keening whine.

  “Steady,” said the pilot. “Look out, meteor—here we come!”

  The atomics erupted into a rising roar.

  “Cut!” yelled Cecil Kelley. “That’s fine.”

  “Come on,” said Gilbert Webster. “Let’s have another drink.” Why couldn’t they be just a little more realistic? What harm could it do?

  “The fate of the artist, my boy,” Dee Newton said, reading his mind. “The fate of the artist.”

  The ship’s forward braking jets flitted into atomic life. The cold face of the moon watched them come, impassively. Staring into the viewscreen, Gilbert Webster filled his eyes with what he saw.

  “How long?” he asked quietly.

  “Soon, my friend,” said Dee Newton. “Very soon.”

  “Just think,” gushed Linda Lambeth, “we’re going to land on the moon.”

  “Someone should really say something appropriate,” an actor said, in sepulchral tones that hinted he was just the right fellow for the job. “This is a momentous occasion in the long history of mankind, an occasion which I feel sure will …”

  Gilbert Webster nudged Newton and together they slipped away from the voice, retiring to the bar where they could not hear. Newton excused himself and headed for the control room. Webster was alone, and it was just as well. There are some moments that cannot be shared.

  Webster’s heart pounded with a clean excitement he hadn’t known since was a youngster in Vermont. They would have to land a camera crew first, of course, and then the ship would have to take off and land again, in order to get pictures of the landing. It would consume a lot of fuel, but Newton said that their supply would be sufficient.

  There was no sensation of discomfort. The moon filled the screen…. Webster tensed himself. Soon—very soon—man would be on the moon. And all because of a space opera!

  Space operas or wars, he said to himself. One or the other. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

  There was a low whine and a sudden thump.

  Silence.

  The ship had landed.

  The door of the airlock clamped shut behind him. Gilbert Webster felt the cold silence of the moon press down on him, sealing him in. It made him feel oddly heavy, despite the slight gravity. The five men of the camera crew, standing uncertainly with their equipment, were grotesque caricatures of life—living jokes stuffed in spacesuits and turned loose on the moon.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said aloud, “but I’m scared stiff.”

  “Man’s first words on the moon!” one of the cameramen chuckled. “Take that down for posterity.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Dee Newton’s voice rasped in his earphones. Newton was handling the initial landing party, while Kelley directed the actors for the ship landing, inasmuch as this end of things was purely a technical one. “Come on—we’ve got fifteen minutes to clear the blast area.”

  Webster followed the squat figure across the desolate lunar plain. He had a sudden impulse to reach up and touch the stars, so near did they seem. Stars, brushing his fingertips …

  Walking was a pleasure in the light gravity and the men had no trouble carrying equipment that would have broken their backs on Earth. Looking back, Webster could see that the ship that had carried them between the worlds had already dwindled against the close lunar horizon.

  “Okay,” said the physicist finally. “Let’s get set up—we don’t want to miss this.”

  Webster checked his special suit watch. Five minutes to go. Newton had adjusted the automatic controls to lift the ship off the moon and bring her back again after an interval of half an hour. Nothing, he said, could possibly go wrong. Still, Webster worried. It would be disconcerting, to say the least, if the ship failed to return.

  Thirty seconds.

  “Okay,” said Dee Newton. “Start the cameras.”

  The special cameras went into action as the crews activated the tracking mechanisms. A spot of white flame flickered around the ship’s tail and a brief shudder shook the ground. The ship hesitated uncertainly for a moment, and then lifted on a column of fire. The complete absence of any sound at all gave Webster the creeps; it was like watching a silent film of Niagara, with tons upon tons of foaming water crashing down on the black rocks below, without a murmur, without a sound.

  “What a picture,” murmured Gilbert Webster.

  “They’re tracking her perfectly,” said a cameraman’s voice.

  “Fine,” said Dee Newton, and whistled three times into his suit mike. The whistles hurt Webster’s ears, and he opened his mouth to protest. Or, rather, he tried to.

  His mouth wouldn’t open.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the cameramen, too, had frozen into immobility. Dee Newton, smiling cheerfully and evidently quite in command of the situation, balanced himself comfortably in his bulky spacesuit and began to hum “How High the Moon,” with bop interpolations.

  Somewhere in space, the ship from Earth began her slow turnover for the return to the moon.

  Within minutes, circular vehicles running on tractor treads came crunching over the rocks and whisked silently up to their position. Gilbert Webster just stared, unable to move a muscle, feeling like the man who casually dug up a live dinosaur out of his backyard. The machines stopped and spacesuited figures clambered out briskly. Webster could see distinctly red features on the faces behind the plastiglass helmets. His stomach took a long dive into nowhere.

  It just couldn’t be, his mind illogically insisted. Not his own plot, the oldest chestnut in the business, really happening. It was like finding a banker actually trying to poison a waterhole in Texas. It couldn’t be—

  But it emphatically was.

  What was it that Newton had said so long ago? “Martians, of course.”

  A confused jumble of thoughts chimed through his brain. So the Martians were telepathic—naturally. They would be. Webster wasn’t surprised. Nothing surprised him any more.

  Congratulations, Dee!

  Stupid fools, most of them. Never suspected….

  Wonderful!

  Newton waved at Webster and grinned. “Degrading business, this space opera,” he said aloud. “But think of it—a really new twist at last! A space opera with real live Earthmen in it!” />
  Webster felt very ill.

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” Newton said, reading his thoughts again. “I have plans for you, lad—big plans. I want accuracy in my pictures, and I like you. You’ve spent your whole life on Earth, while I only skimmed the surface. I want you for my technical advisor later—you won’t be harmed, I assure you. We’ll do ’em up brown together!”

  Here she comes, the telepathy resumed. Remember, no killing; we want no trouble with the SPCA. Stick to the paralysis, and we can use them all over again in other pictures.

  Linda Lambeth would be in heaven, Webster thought irrelevantly. One of the seven human women on Mars …

  The ship from Earth eased down on her stern jets and settled on the lunar plain. The airlock door swung open. As indicated by Webster’s own script, spacesuited figures clambered down a metal ladder, brandishing phony ray pistols in their gloved hands.

  The Martian cameras worked feverishly. Webster wanted to groan, but couldn’t.

  “Rich, rich!” bubbled Dee Newton. “This is rich!”

  Webster had to admit that it was. The Martian actors launched themselves from the rocks and advanced across the moon’s surface, their paralysis beams mowing down the Earthmen like scythes going through wheat.

  It was beautiful.

  Webster took it all in, and was surprised to find that he felt quite good. Happy, even. It wouldn’t be so bad, really. Technical advisor for a Martian film company, working under a stickler for accuracy like Newton! What if he was a Martian—Webster wasn’t prejudiced, and it might even be a chance to do the job right at last. Webster didn’t much care who the job was done for. Idly, he wondered how Ray Bradbury would go over with the Martians, and the more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea.

  “They can’t be any worse than people,” he thought cheerfully, and when they released him to walk he followed the Martians willingly to their ship.

  It was one year later and it felt like ten.

  Gilbert Webster surveyed the set of Down to Earth with a feeling of horror. Dee waddled up, a rather globular mass of reddish protoplasm in his native state, and Webster grabbed him in dismay.

  “But my God, Dee!” he exploded. “You say you want accuracy, and then you have your women going around New York with bare breasts. Civilized women haven’t done that since Crete!”

  The thing that had been Dee Newton smiled sadly. “I know, dear boy, he said with infinite patience. “It isn’t quite, strictly accurate, but what can I do? The audience knows that these people are supposed to be mammals and how else call I show it in dramatic visual terms?”

  BETWEEN THE THUNDER AND THE SUN

  And least of all he holds the human swarm—

  Unwitting now that envious men prepare

  To make their dream and its fulfillment one.

  When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,

  Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare

  His roads between the thunder and the sun.

  —George Sterling

  I

  It began as a perfectly ordinary day.

  Evan Schaefer woke up a little after nine in the morning, which meant that he was a few minutes behind schedule and would have to hustle to make his first class on time. That was normal; it happened to him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday were better, because he had no classes before noon.

  He piled out of bed, noted that his wife Lee was still asleep, and stumbled blearily into the kitchen where he punched the preset breakfast button. He yawned, decided that the house was a little on the cool side, and glanced into the scope. No one was below him. He flicked on the warning beam and lowered the house down to three thousand feet. Then he readjusted the window pattern for the prevailing wind system. A warm, balmy breeze drifted into the house. Golden sunlight touched the imitation redwood surfaces.

  “Much better,” Evan Schaefer muttered. He was proud of his house. They had had to cut corners on his professor’s salary, but with the children gone—

  He shut off the thought before the pain came.

  He showered, dressed in his blue coverall, and did hurried justice to three poached eggs on toast, sausage links, and two cups of steaming fragrant coffee.

  He glanced at his watch. It was going to be close. He knew he was forgetting something, but for a moment he couldn’t place it. Something Bill had wanted …

  Snapping his fingers, he ran up the curving ramp to his skylight study. His eyes ran over the shelves of books, tapes, and films.

  “Boas, Boas,” he said to himself. “Kwakiutl, Annual Report—”

  The book should have been in the old Bureau of American Ethnology series, back around 1920. He found it finally, on the wrong shelf, in a microfilm edition.

  He hurried back down the ramp and into the garage. The roof slid aside when he climbed into the copter cabin. He jetted up into the open sky and cut in the blades. The copter was too small for an antigravity unit, but he usually enjoyed the flight to the university.

  Not when he was this late, however.

  He took her up to the fast traffic lane and eased into the stream. He flew for five minutes over the rich green forest and then landed on the roof of his university office. He ducked down into it, snatched up his notes from his cluttered desk, and rode the elevator down into the underground lecture hall.

  He was three minutes late when he mounted the platform and faced the five hundred students and the TV pickup.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Where were we, anyhow?”

  The blonde in the front row made a big occasion out of checking her notes. “Something about the Oedipus transfer,” she said.

  She pronounced it Eddie-puss, of course.

  Schaefer nodded.

  “We were talking about the shift in the locus of authority to the mother’s brother in some societies with matrilineal descent,” he said. “Now, you’ll remember that when Malinowski …”

  The rest was routine.

  There was nothing at all to indicate that this day was different from any other day.

  When the class was over and he had disposed of last-minute questions from the eager-beavers, he took the elevator back up to his office. He felt drained, as he always did after a lecture. It was precisely the same feeling an actor had after giving a performance.

  The word was limp.

  He needed a few minutes with his pipe, and then some coffee with Bill. After that, he could face his advanced class on multilinear cultural evolution—tougher than his introductory sections, but more stimulating for him.

  He stuck his key in the lock, opened the door to his office, and stepped inside.

  He stopped.

  There was a man in his office. Schaefer had never seen him before. He didn’t took like a student. The man was tall, with a face that might have been handsome had it not been for the lines of strain around the full mouth, He was around 50 years old. There was an ashtray filled with cigarette butts by his right hand.

  “Dr. Schaefer?” The voice was tense, as though the man was controlling it with difficulty.

  “Well?” Schaefer was not alarmed, but he was annoyed.

  “I would appreciate it if you locked the door,” the man said. “How did you get in here?”

  “With a key.”

  Schaefer frowned, then checked the door. “It’s locked.”

  The man relaxed, just a little. “My name is Benito Moravia,” he said, and waited.

  The name rang a vague bell, but Schaefer couldn’t quite place it. He was reasonably sure that he had no Moravia in any of his classes, but then this man didn’t have the took of a worried parent about him.

  Moravia took a deep breath. “I’m head of the UN Extraterrestrial Division,” he said. “I thought you might have heard of me; I hope you’ll excuse the vanity.”

  Schaefer snapped his fingers. “Of course!” He shook hands with Moravia. “You took me by surprise, sir.”

  “I meant to.”


  Schaefer eyed the man. He was worried about something. “What can I do for you?”

  Moravia laughed, shortly. “First of all, you can swear to me that what I tell you in this room will never be passed on to a living soul without my permission.” He spread his hands helplessly. “This damned melodrama, this secrecy, it makes me sick. I have no choice, do you see?”

  Schaefer felt a tiny electric thrill tingling through him. He was suddenly not tired at all. He sat down at his desk and leaned forward in his swivel chair.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “This is confidential.” Moravia looked at him with nervous brown eyes. “You swear to it?”

  “If that’s the way you want it,” Schaefer said, feeling a little silly. “What is it? Something about the Pollux stuff—they haven’t gotten back yet, have they?”

  “Not yet.” Moravia shook his head. The light gleamed on his black hair. “The diplomatic mission won’t return for another three years.”

  Schaefer fumbled for his pipe, stuck a cube of tobacco in it, and inhaled until he could taste the smoke. There was a taut emptiness in the pit of his stomach.

  “You’ve got a new one.”

  Moravia didn’t answer him directly. He reached behind him, to a table Schaefer kept in the office for students who had to take special exams, and picked up a heavy briefcase. He unlocked it, took some glossy three-dimensional photographs out of it. He handed them to Schaefer without a word.

  Schaefer looked at the top one and swallowed hard.

  Words weren’t necessary.

  There were no words.

  A riot of color: green from chlorophyll, yellow and orange and violet from flowers, red-brown from the soil, blue from the sky.

  Faces: a man’s, a woman’s, a boy’s. Hesitant smiles, shyness, uncertainty. Darkish skins, wide eyes, tiny noses. Gray hair—no, it was fur, with white stripes in it. Canine teeth that gleamed in the light when mouths were opened.