A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  You know how men are.

  I know, I know.

  “I will show you greater wealth,” Schaefer said slowly.

  He led the way back through the dawning life to the copter. He reached into the cabin and pulled out a sack.

  “Hold out your hands, Marin.”

  He poured a pile of glittering gold coins into the waiting hands.

  “I will teach you to make these. And there are other things you must learn about the land you live on.”

  They got into the copter, and it lifted into the air. They flew back over the plains that were living again, pale green in the spring sun.

  And all the way back the sunlight glinted on the shiny gold coins that the priest-king ran through his fingers, over and over again.

  Another year rushed by in Home-of-the-World. For Schaefer, it was a year of hard work and worry. He pulled a lot of cultural strings, getting across the idea that his gold coins were pleasing to the gods, while the woodpecker scalps were not. He showed the people where to find the gold in the streams, and what to do with it when they had it. He had some of the UN men demonstrate what could be done with a plot of land if the people would adopt a few improved farming techniques. There was a great deal of disease in the town, but he knew better than to introduce modern medicines which would only result in a population explosion that would negate everything else that had been done.

  He worried as hard as he worked. Perhaps he was a natural worrier; Lee had always told him that he was. But it was an explosive situation, and it was only a matter of time before the fuse caught fire. His only hope was to finish his work and get out before disaster struck.

  Fortunately, there were no pregnancies among the girls of the town who were running around with the crewmen of the ship. The men had sense enough to take their pills, and that helped.

  Unfortunately, it look time for grass to grow, time for forests to come back, time for the water to seep down into the reservoirs of the mountains.

  Sandy and his men nursed the trees along, and readied the different animals for the grasslands and the forests.

  And, miraculously, the thing that Schaefer feared did not come for many long months.

  But it finally came.

  It came with shattering abruptness.

  Two men from the ship, drunk on native beer, attacked a respected daughter of a nobleman. The girl crawled home through the garbage in the streets, and she died horribly.

  The young men of Home-of-the-World did not wait for Marin to tell them what to do. They had seen their women taken from them for too long and they had swallowed their pride until it stuck in their throats.

  Their rage was a flame swinging along the walls of the town.

  Hundreds of them shouted together and became a mob, an avalanche of vengeance. They caught four innocent crewmen in their streets and they killed them very slowly, pulling their bodies apart with their immensely strong arms.

  Then they took the pieces and threw them into a dark shop where other men from Earth were drinking.

  Riot thundered in the walled adobe town, and out into the fields beyond. Within two hours the streets were deserted, the square windows black. There was silence in Home-of-the-World, the silence of the death that had been and the death that was yet to be.

  All but one of the living crewmen ran from the town and rode their copters back to the ship. But the people caught one of them, and kept him alive. A hundred men bound his arms and dragged him out into the fields. Torches were lighted and songs were chanted, and the whole mob set out across the plains toward the ship, waving their spears and bows and clubs.

  Schaefer was hidden in a tiny room beneath the temple. He did not dare show his face in the streets, for his face was white and that was enough for the men of the people.

  “We’ve got to stop them,” he whispered. “We’ve got to stop them before they reach the ship. They’ll be wiped out, every last one of them.”

  Old Loquav, his short-sighted eyes blinking in the dim light of the lamp, shook his silver-furred head sadly. “It is said among my people that death can race between two tribes faster than the wind.”

  “Could you stop them, if you could reach them in time?”

  The old priest shrugged. “Marin has already left Home-of-the-World to advise his people. But words spoken in a storm are torn from the mouth and are not heard.”

  “He won’t make it, Loquav. Is my copter safe?”

  “The machine has not been harmed.”

  “Could we get to it?”

  “There is a way.”

  The gloom pressed in upon them with the weight of centuries.

  “Come on! We’ve got to do what we can.”

  Loquav shook his head. “I must do what must be done,” he said, looking at Schaefer. “You, my friend, must rejoin your people. That is the way of the world.”

  There was no time for argument.

  The old priest led the way, and the two men hurried along a dark twisting tunnel toward the stars.

  The copter overtook the mob when it was a little over a mile from the ship. From the air, the people were a blaze of orange torches in the night, a nightmare of phantom shadows against the starlit silver of the plains.

  “Put me down between my people and your people,” Loquav said. “Be careful that you do not get trapped within range of the arrows, for an arrow asks not a man’s motive.”

  Schaefer could not see the captive crewman, but he knew he was there. He toyed with the notion of trying to land the copter in the midst of the torches in an attempt to snatch the man to freedom, but he knew that the plan would not work.

  He flew on, then skidded the copter to a halt on the level plains a few hundred yards from the marching men. He could hear the drums now, and the chants that filled the night with sound. There was grass under the copter where there had been dust two years ago, but that counted for nothing now.

  Loquav touched his shoulder. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said. “I will remember you with kindness in my heart.”

  The old priest climbed down from the cabin, turned his near-sighted eyes toward the torch-flames, and began to walk steadily to meet his people.

  Schaefer skimmed the copter over the grass until he reached the ship. He left it with the other copters and the airlock opened to take him in.

  “Glad you made it, Schaefer,” an officer said. “We were worried about you.”

  Schaefer tore off his mask. “Where’s Hurley?”

  “Control room. They’ve got the negatives on the scope. Bill Bergman is still alive, but he looks bad.”

  “Bergman the one they caught?”

  “That’s right. He’s a good kid, Dr. Schaefer.”

  “They’re all good kids.”

  He ran through a ship tense with excitement and hurried into the control room. It was fully staffed and ready for action. Admiral Hurley stared at a viewscreen, his face taut with worry.

  “Schaefer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to look at this.”

  Schaefer looked. The people were clear in the screen; he could see their thin faces, their long arms, their eyes burning in the torch-light. He saw Bill Bergman too—hardly more than a boy, with close-cropped hair and wide, terrified eyes. Four of the people were carrying Bergman, one for every arm and leg.

  They were going to tear him apart.

  He saw old Loquav, his back to the ship, waving his arms and talking to them. The people pushed him out of the way and came on.

  The admiral’s voice was surprisingly hushed when he spoke. It was the voice of an honest man who faced his mistake squarely. “I was wrong, Dr. Schaefer. That will not bring those boys back.”

  “No, it won’t. It’s too late now.”

  He stared at the people. A maddened mob of savages—yes, if you looked at it that way. But they were men as well, men who had taken all they could take, men who had been pushed too far. They were remembering their wives and daughters, and the men who had come among t
hem in friendship.

  “Our fire is accurate,” Hurley said. “We can pick them off without touching Bergman.”

  Schaefer nodded, his stomach a sick knot inside him. A simple choice. A hundred men who would never have a chance for a boy who had meant no harm.

  The torches came closer. The people stopped.

  They held Bergman’s body up, ready to pull it to pieces.

  Hurley turned to Schaefer with a stricken face.

  “You decide,” he whispered.

  The four men began to pull, slowly.

  Schaefer closed his eyes. “Don’t hit the priest,” he said. “He was only trying to stop them.”

  The admiral straightened up.

  “Fire!” he ordered.

  VI

  There on that shadowed night-land, beneath the radiance of the stars, the men of the people fell like wheat severed by the scythe. They fell one by one, the shock of amazement on their faces, when they still had faces. They fell and they writhed briefly in the cool green of the grass, and then they moved no more.

  It was over in seconds.

  Perhaps it was an accident, perhaps not. Schaefer never knew. But old Loquav fell with the rest, his close-sighted eyes at last giving up the struggle to see.

  Only the boy named Bill Bergman remained on his feet, while the torch-flames flared and sputtered around him like the fires of hell. He covered his face with his hands and stumbled toward the ship.

  “Go out and bring him in,” Hurley ordered. There was no triumph in his voice.

  “I’m going too,” Schaefer said.

  The admiral nodded. “Yes. Maybe we ought to see it up close. Maybe we owe them that, at least.”

  They left the ship and walked through the starlight across the grass they had planted. They walked up to the pile of bodies and there was nothing to say.

  Schaefer found the old priest, and cradled Loquav’s silver head in his arms. He could not even cry.

  “Shall we bury them?” Hurley asked finally.

  “No. No, I don’t think so. We can’t give them a burial that would have any meaning for them. These are not our dead. Their people will come for them.”

  “What can we do?”

  “We can get the blazes out of here before there’s any more killing. It’s all over, Carl. I can never go back to the town again, even if Marin himself would be willing—he couldn’t control the others after what’s happened here tonight.”

  Hurley seemed to be searching for some words that didn’t exist. He finally said, “Were you nearly finished?”

  “It all depends. I think Sandy has his end pretty well taken care of. I thought I had Marin ready to do what was necessary—now I don’t know.”

  “I wish there was something I could do.”

  You’ve done enough, pal, Schaefer thought, then choked off the feeling. Hurley at least knew when he had made a mistake, which was more than could be said for most men. “You can get this ship away right now, tonight, as fast as you can. That’s all there is left to us.”

  Schaefer looked across the starlit plains toward the town the people called Home-of-the-World. He knew those rolling plains were far from empty. Out there in the long silence of the night, Marin was standing, watching him, wondering.

  Don’t let it all have been for nothing, old friend, Schaefer prayed. Try to remember the good with the rest. Try not to think too badly of me when you grieve for your dead. Keep your land always, priest-king, and use it well.

  He touched Loquav’s wet shoulder in a last goodbye. The flames of the torches hissed in the grass, burning themselves out. The other dead, the nameless ones, were stacked like cordwood in the shadows.

  Schaefer remembered words from long ago. “It is my prayer that there will always be friendship between your people and my people.”

  Had there been other men, in other times, who had voiced that prayer in vain?

  He turned and followed the living back toward the ship. The stars were bright above him, and they had never seemed so far away.

  The men from Earth could not leave that night.

  It was late the next afternoon before Sandy agreed to come in from his forest, where he had been adjusting the wildlife balance in the ecological system he had set up. When he got out of his copter he walked over to the terrible dark pile under the hot red sun and looked at it in tight-lipped silence.

  He said nothing to Hurley when he entered the ship, and his only question to Schaefer was about Benito Moravia. After that he was silent and withdrawn, as though seeking to disassociate himself from the men around him.

  The great ship lifted on the soundless power of her antigravs, a silver giant drifting up the ladder of the sky. She rose into flame-edged clouds, and beyond them through the peaceful blue of the atmosphere.

  She entered the bright silence of space, and her atomics splashed white flame into the sea that washed the shores of forever.

  She was going home.

  Where the ship had been, there was a hushed quiet. It was a hot and windless day, and the grass hardly moved under the glare of the red sun. Miles away, toward the mountains, a herd of animals snorted nervously, and lifted their heads from the clean streams that chuckled down from the hills where new forests grew.

  And the dead were very still.

  The people came with the evening shadows. Brothers and wives and sweethearts and fathers and mothers, they picked through the bodies, searching for faces they had known. And then they carried their dead back through the merciful darkness to Home-of-the-World.

  Marin the priest-king went directly to his temple, where torches flamed around the walls and he could not hear the mourning songs of his people. He knelt before the dark altar and closed his eyes.

  He saw old Loquav, who had padded through these corridors when Marin was yet a boy. He saw all his people, who had trusted him, and now were gone.

  He saw other things as well.

  He saw sweet grass where there had been no grass. He saw streams with clear water, where you could count the pebbles on the bottom and drink until your eyes ached. He saw trees and flowers where there had been only naked fire-blackened ghosts.

  He saw children of his people, no longer hungry and frightened, and he saw their children beyond them, fading into the gray mists of all the years that were to come.

  Marin the priest-king prayed a very hard prayer. He prayed for the safety of the ship that had come from the skies, and now was going back to a land he would never see.

  Then he opened his eyes and prayed a much easier prayer.

  He prayed that the ship would never again come to the people who lived in Home-of-the-World.

  The ship sailed a starbright sea, and the years whispered by like windblown sands where winds and sands could never be.

  Schaefer lay frozen in his slot, with tubes in his nostrils and a mask covering his sightless eyes. He felt nothing now, and there are no dreams in death.

  But before the nothingness had come, when the doctor had taken his body from the warm slab and the medics had carried him through the lock and into the glistening catacombs where he would spend the voyage to Earth in not-life, he had seen faces before his freezing eyes.

  Lee’s, framed by soft brown hair, warming him even as the blood slowed in his veins.

  Sandy’s, lost in self-accusation that reached far back into the past, back into a time when his own people had been visited by ships that had sailed strange seas.

  Hurley’s, lean and composed now beneath his balding head, hiding the failure that crawled through his chest.

  Loquav.

  Marin.

  And, most of all, the haunted face and tortured eyes of Benito Moravia.

  Moravia, waiting and wondering and fearing, as the long years crept by …

  The ship touched down on Earth twelve years and two months from the day of its departure. It landed at night, in secrecy. No bands played, no one greeted them.

  Its arrival was never publicly announced.

&nb
sp; Moravia, of course, was informed that it had landed.

  Schaefer and his wife hurried home, knowing that he would be waiting for them there.

  Their house floated at five thousand feet, a cool green island in the gold of the sun. Time had passed it by, and it was unchanged, waiting for them.

  This was like a thousand other homecomings they had know. They had gone out, perhaps to eat at Rocky Falls, as they had done so often now that they were alone. They were coming back, on an ordinary afternoon in a familiar world, with only a threat of rain blowing in from the west to hint at anything unusual.

  Bur there was already a copter in the garage.

  They landed and went inside. Schaefer held his wife’s arm; Lee was very tired, although she was trying not to show it. Their home was soothing around them, its redwood walls warm and welcoming.

  An old man rose from his chair as they entered. A cigarette trembled slightly in his blue-veined hand. The hair that had been black was a faded gray. The haunted brown eyes were tired, and the lines in the face had deepened.

  For Benito Moravia, it had been twelve tough years.

  “Lee,” he said. “Evan.”

  Moved by an impulse she did not attempt to understand, Lee went to him and kissed him on the cheek. Schaefer stepped forward and gripped a hand that had little strength left in it.

  “Hello, Ben,” he said.

  “I heard about everything,” the old man said. “Got an abstract of Hurley’s report. Is Sandy with you?”

  Schaefer hesitated. “He didn’t want to come,” he said finally.

  Moravia nodded. “I can understand that. I knew he would feel that way.”

  Lee broke the silence. “Can I get you a drink, Ben?”

  “I could use one.” He smiled faintly. “Ulcer or no ulcer. How does it feel to see a man get old while you stay young, Evan?”

  Schaefer didn’t answer that one.

  They sat and sipped at their drinks, sensing the tension in the room. Schaefer could not face the old man before him and ask the questions that had to be asked. He was certain of the answers, and Ben had been hurt enough already.

  The house swayed with a barely perceptible motion as a gust of wind hit it. It was darker outside now, and the sun was hidden behind a bank of black-edged clouds. It was going to rain, and rain hard. Schaefer could have lifted the house over the storm, but he made no move, letting it come.