Starman (11 page)

He sensed the attention and stopped.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to disturb your rest. Just because we do not rest does not mean that I should interrupt yours. It was impolite of me. It will not happen again.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But I did awaken you.”

“Sure you did, but it’s okay. I—that was a nice song. Do they sing a lot where you come from?”

“Sing?” He considered the word, applied it to what he’d just been doing. “Yes, we sing. This body,” and he touched his throat, “is not right for our kind of singing. It is difficult, but the sounds are not so very different.”

She remembered the little bit of Mick Jagger he’d done for her back before she’d known what she was dealing with. “What about eating? Don’t you ever get hungry, either?”

“Hungry?”

“Empty. Here.” She touched her stomach. “Like a car needs gas. Remember the gas station? Well, people here on this world, we need food as well as rest. Energy. Fuel. Understand?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “We get energy differently. This body is strange, primitive. Oxydation of chemicals produces . . .”

“Spare me the chemistry lecture,” she said quickly, putting up a hand. “Are you feeling that way? Empty? Hungry?”

Another nod. “Yes. This body has a terrible emptiness. Different sensation than from when we need energy. This is called hungry?”

“That’s it. And when people get hungry they have to eat.” She made eating motions with hands and mouth.

“Eat. Yes, we must do that. I can prevent this body from needing rest, but I see now the connection with eating. We will stop at food station. You have hungry too?”

She let out a relieved sigh. “Are you kidding? Why do you think I brought it up? I’m starving. I haven’t had a thing to eat since,” her eyes suddenly bulged and she gestured wildly ahead with both hands, “my God, look out!”

There was a highway intersection in front of them. The light had turned from green to yellow and instead of slowing down, the starman was accelerating. The Mustang leaped toward the intersection.

“What are you doing?” she screamed at him. Because this time the intersection wasn’t empty.

The tractor-trailer rig approaching from the right was racing toward Michigan at sixty-five and, since he had both the light and the right-of-way in his favor, the driver wasn’t paying much attention to the intersecting lanes. He saw the Mustang rocketing toward him at the last possible instant, threw on his brakes and leaned hard on the air horn.

The howling rig jack-knifed without turning over. The Mustang scraped past the towering chrome grill, did a complete three-sixty on the rain-soaked pavement, and finished by pointing itself in the right direction. They’d gone through the intersection without suffering so much as a scratch.

Which was more than could be said for the cars that piled into the back end of the truck, not to mention each other. Horns and the sound of grinding metal filled the air.

The noise faded rapidly as the starman pushed the Mustang back up to sixty. Jenny sat next to him, breathing hard and fast. The starman was grinning back at her, looking at the world like a kid who’d just stepped out of an “E” ticket ride at Disneyland.

“Okay?” he said.

“Okay?” She fought to get her breathing under control. “Are you crazy? You almost got us killed back there! You said you’d been watching me, that you knew the rules. That’s the only reason I agreed to let you do some of the driving.”

“I do know the rules.”

“Like hell you do! For your information, that was a yellow light back there. It was yellow before we got near the intersection.”

He nodded agreeably. “I watched you very carefully, earlier. Red light, stop. Green light, go. Yellow light, go very fast.” He smiled confidently. “I know the rules good.”

She hesitated. How could she explain? She could hardly tell him that she’d been trying to attract the attention of a small-town cop by running that intersection.

“That was a mistake on my part,” she finally told him. “Yellow means slow down and get ready to stop. Okay?”

“Sure. Okay.” He sounded just the slightest bit puzzled by this sudden change in the rules.

“You better let me drive.”

“No.” He studied the road ahead and looked pleased with himself. “I will drive. Okay, no problem. Take it easy.” He leaned back in the seat, looking as though he’d been driving all his life.

She hesitated, turned to look out the back window. There was no sign of the truck that had nearly run them down and no suggestion of pursuit. Probably the drivers were too busy exchanging the names of their respective insurance companies to bother chasing the vehicle which had precipitated the pile-up in the first place.

Speaking of which . . . “I’m going to have a great time with my insurance guy when one of those people back there reports this car. I can hear it now. ‘Well, no sir, I wasn’t driving at the time. It was this fellow from outer space. No sir, that’s not near Madison. No sir, I don’t believe he did have a valid Wisconsin driver’s license at the time, but I figured if he could drive a flying saucer he ought to be able to handle a Mustang. Well, yes sir, he did run a yellow light, but that was my fault. I didn’t explain about lights too well and I was a little scared at the time because he happens to . . .’ ”

She stopped there. She didn’t know how he’d react to learning that the body he’d duplicated and was now inhabiting was the perfect double of her recently deceased husband. Probably she was worrying needlessly. He might not make anything of the information at all. He might not give a damn one way or another.

But she would. It mattered to her, and every time she let herself think about it it depressed the hell out of her. Since she was depressed enough by the situation she found herself in, she determined to try not to think about it anymore.

A small restaurant materialized off to their left. Still shaken by the near accident, she wasn’t ready to face other people just yet.

“Is that a food station?” he inquired.

“Yes, but keep going. We can do better.”

And I’ll have to do better, she told herself firmly, or I’m going to go off the deep end.

Fox mulled his advisor’s words over in his mind, looking for the simple way out. There was always a simple way out, if you were patient enough to hunt for it. He was something of a master at finding quick, simple solutions to complex problems, but for the life of him he couldn’t conceive of one now.

He consoled himself a little by noting that there were no precedents for what was facing them. George Fox was a tidy man. It was useful for a man in his position to be tidy. But there was nothing very tidy about the current situation. Not if Shermin was right. It rankled Fox that he couldn’t see a tidy, easy way out. He’d always been able to see the easy way out.

When he finally replied to the information he’d just been given he spoke with forced patience. “Do you seriously expect me to ring up the president of the United States and tell him that an alien has landed here, has assumed the identity and body of a dead house painter from Madison, Wisconsin, run off with his widow, and is presently out tooling around the countryside in a hopped-up green seventy-seven Mustang?”

Shermin was glad of the hangar’s openness. In a small room Fox’s presence could become overpowering. The spaciousness of the hangar limited the intimidation factor.

Besides which, he knew that he was right.

He also had the moral support of Dave Goldman, a colleague working silently nearby. It wasn’t much. Not against Fox. But what else could he tell the director? Truth was truth, whether he liked it or not. Whether the president liked it or not.

But sometimes it took more than the obvious to convince men like Fox. So Shermin explained one more time.

“We have the following givens, sir.” As he talked he was leading Fox over to the table where Goldman was working. Pictures and reports were lined up neatly atop the plastic. “That man, Scott Hayden, was killed last April. He died in a construction accident. He’s dead and buried. That’s easily verified. His co-workers witnessed the accident, and it’s pretty hard to fake a morgue photograph, much less the opinions of the fifty or so eyewitnesses who viewed the embalmed body before the funeral. I could order the body exhumed, of course, but in my opinion that would constitute the most grievous sort of investigatory overkill.”

“All right,” said Fox curtly, “I accept the fact that the original Scott Hayden is deceased.”

“He has no brothers,” Shermin went on, “no look-alike cousins. We checked that out right away. Despite all that, at approximately six o’clock this morning . . .”

Fox waved a hand at nothing and turned away from the table. “All right. We’ve been through all that. It’s just that it takes a while to get used to dealing with the impossible. What I want to know now, what I’m asking you now is—how can it be?”

Goldman looked up from his work. “Has to be some kind of cloning deal. The replication’s too perfect to have been accomplished just from the viewing of pictures.” He assumed a schoolmasterly tone. “You know about cloning? Replication of an entire organism from the DNA contained in a single cell?”

Fox glanced back at him. “I keep up as best I can, Mister Goldman, just don’t get too technical on me.”

“We found some hairs from Scott Hayden’s head,” Shermin reminded his boss. “They’d been kept in a photo album next to a picture of him as a boy. The plastic container had been opened and the individual hairs were scattered across the floor, as if they might have been dropped by someone working in a hurry.”

Fox still had a hard time accepting. “Is that possible? To clone a living organism from the hair of a dead man? When it’s removed from the body, doesn’t the hair die?”

Shermin took a deep breath. “Well, human hair consists of keratinzed cells. The follicular activity is cyclic and involves hormones. Retention of the genetic code by the cells in hair and fingernails is better than it would be in the softer tissues of the body. Remember that only one complete cell is required. Given the millions of available cells in a single strand of hair and sufficiently advanced techniques, theoretically the genetic code could be reproduced.

“As far as actual duplication of the complete, living structure, I can’t imagine how that could be done, even with sequential photographs for a guide. The speed at which cell growth would have to take place would be a necessary function of . . .”

“I asked you a simple question,” Fox growled, interrupting. “Is it possible to clone a living body from the hair of a dead man?”

“For us? Given our present state of recombinant DNA technology, no. We can’t even begin to imagine the requisite techniques, let alone postulate a workable procedure.”

“Then what the hell are we talking about? Magic?”

Goldman allowed himself a slight smile. “You know, Mister Fox, the line between science and magic is pretty thin. I once saw an equation that measured magic as a function of time. Putting it another way, if you’d shown up in fifteenth century Paris with that calculator watch on your wrist and a flashlight in your pocket, you’d probably have been condemned to the stake as a warlock instead of being hailed as a master of some unfamiliar science.

“What we have here is a technology that’s probably a hundred thousand years ahead of us. That’s a conservative guess. We’re the ancients, Mister Fox. The primitives, the Neanderthals. We’re standing around gaping at the flashlight and wondering where the light comes from. Could you see yourself trying to explain the workings of a flashlight to an Egyptian pharaoh? You could talk yourself hoarse without ever convincing him it was anything other than a mystic manifestation of the god Ra.

“We’re just barely advanced enough to realize how primitive we are.”

“Ancients.” Fox clearly found the idea disturbing.

“Technologically, anyway. We’ve just begun to understand how the universe works. We’re still in kindergarten and suddenly there’s a university professor among us. Two hundred years ago if you wanted to go from New York to Philadelphia you got a horse or booked passage in a carriage, right? Average speed, say, six miles an hour. A hundred years later you got on a railway train. Sixty miles an hour. Today you get on a jumbo jet that goes six hundred, and shuttle crews orbit the Earth at eighteen thousand.

“That’s what we’ve done in two hundred years. Two long lifespans. Try to imagine what our technology will be like in a thousand years, or in a hundred thousand.”

“Assuming we’re still around,” Shermin put in.

Goldman grinned at him. “I was talking about our technological maturation. Emotionally, we’re lagging way behind.”

Fox was subdued. “Given everything you’ve said, I still have problems with this. What about his knowledge of everyday English, for example? He spoke to this guy Heinmuller out loud. No telepathy, no hypnotism. Plain old English.”

Shermin escorted him over to another bench. On top was a complex looking setup that resembled an audiophile’s dream. Inside one box of black metal was a single golden disk.

Fox frowned. “What’s this? Top forty?”

“Something like that, only on an interstellar scale. Remember the gold information disks that went with the Voyagers?”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “I remember all the yelling and screaming because it showed a nude man and woman.” He leaned over to study the player. “This is a copy?”

Shermin smiled. “One of the originals.” Turning, he gestured toward the meteor that had been revealed as a spacecraft. “It was in there. Not stamped ‘return to sender,’ but you get the idea. Ever listen to the contents of one of these?”

“Not my department. I remember reading about it in briefings, but they didn’t go into detail. What’s it like?”

“Touch the second button from the top.”

Fox did so. Speakers began to hum. Silence gave way to soft violin music. Fox listened thoughtfully.

“A lot of people contributed to the recording,” Shermin mused aloud. “I was one of those who helped put the final package together.”

Fox’s eyebrows rose. “You never told me that, Mark.”

He shrugged. “My contribution was small. I was a collator, not a creator. It’s not the sort of thing that comes up in general conversation at cocktail parties. Go back and reread my resume. It’s in there.” He nodded toward the softly humming player.