Starman (21 page)

Behind her, the starman sneezed.

“You’d better get out of those wet clothes. Maybe you can heal others by waving your fingers over ’em, but if you let that body get good and sick you may not be able to do anything for yourself.”

“Why get out of clothes?”

“The water’ll chill your skin and make you do worse things than sneeze.”

“What is sneeze?” He did it again.

“That is ‘sneeze,’ and there’ll be worse coming if you don’t listen to me. I swear, you are the strangest blend of brains and stupidity I ever saw. Come on, like this.” She demonstrated what she wanted him to do by unbuttoning the top buttons of his shirt.

“We’ve got to get you warm. You know what pneumonia is?” He shook his head. “No? Well you’re liable to find out unless we get you dry in a hurry. It’s not something that’d be much fun to study firsthand.” She continued working on his shirt. “Come on, help me. You haven’t got a damn thing I haven’t seen a thousand times before.”

The starman just stood and let her do all the work. She finished with his shirt, then moved on to his shoes and pants. Finally he was standing in front of her, stark naked and utterly unself-conscious. To him she had merely removed the outer set of clothing, the one composed of artificial fibers.

She picked up the blanket and started wrapping it around him. He put out a hand to touch her gently in the hollow of her throat.

“You are wet also. You will not catch this pneumonia if you stay wet?”

She didn’t know how to reply. “I’m not immune to it, if that’s what you mean.” They were touching and she was acutely conscious of the warmth of his body. “I’m not going to catch cold, though.”

“Why not?”

“Well—because.”

“That is no reason.” She didn’t stop him when he reached for the zipper on her windbreaker.

There was nothing unnatural about it, nothing at all. She knew every inch of that body. It was like the first time because he didn’t know what to do or how to move, but the mechanism responded to her and he was a superb learner. Outside, the thunder rumbled and the train rattled on through the night and somehow it didn’t seem to matter. Images and visions careened wildly through her mind and it was all perfectly wonderful.

Though she didn’t think it was quite what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote, “There are more things in heaven and Earth than you’ve dreamed of, Horatio.”

It was calm by the time the helicopter touched down at the airfield. Clouds still hovered overhead, but the rain which had buffeted the chopper on its southward flight had moved off to the east.

Shermin jumped down and examined his surroundings, then started toward the hangar that loomed across the tarmac. Two guards flanked the entrance. Despite the fact that his helicopter had set down within punting range of their position, he still had to produce three separate pieces of identification before they would admit him.

Inside the hangar it was not calm. Soldiers and technicians were running, not walking, to their assigned stations. Desk and office equipment were being set in position, files full of papers placed atop the desks, telephone lines hooked up. All the activity conveyed the impression that something important was going on. It wasn’t, not yet.

There were no reference points for Shermin in the organized chaos of the hangar. Then he spotted the major from Wisconsin. At about the same time, the officer noticed him standing forlornly near the doorway and crossed to greet him.

“Hi. I’m Bell, remember?”

“Sure I remember. Hasn’t been that long. That’s what’s so crazy about this whole thing. Everything’s happened so damn fast. How come they brought you all the way down?”

“Because I’m more or less familiar with what this is all about. I guess they figure the fewer who have any idea what’s going on, the better.” He waved at the chamber behind them. “As you can see, it’s not slowing down. Oh, Mister Fox wanted you to know that he was delayed getting out of Washington. He’ll be late arriving.”

“What’s this all for? I didn’t get all the details. After we lost them at the roadblock in Colorado I was told to report here. Looks like you’re setting up for something major. No pun intended.”

Bel! grinned politely. “For the foreseeable future this is going to serve as a base of operations. Seems that while the rest of us have been running around trying to convince our visitor to give himself up quietly and with a minimum of fuss, intelligence has been doing its own work. They finally figured out that according to the speed and trajectory of the visitor’s craft—I think we can stop referring to it as a hollow meteorite—it was originally headed for someplace in northeastern Arizona or northwest New Mexico. Since leaving Wisconsin in the company of Mrs. Hayden, he’s been heading straight here. You put one and one together, you come up with thoughts of some kind of rendezvous. The powers-that-be think his friends may try to send another meteor to pick him up. Make yourself at home.”

The major moved off to direct the installation of additional equipment. Shermin noticed a couple of white-coated lab techs hauling something glassy and complex toward the far side of the room. Curious, he pushed his way through the crowd toward them.

“Whatcha got?”

“Pathology supplies,” one of the techs replied with a grunt. “Cryogenic suspension system elements. Stuff like that.”

“Uh-huh.” Tagging along behind, Shermin found himself in a screened-off section of the hangar where other techs were setting up additional gear. Three of them were very carefully unpacking an electron microscope. Another was busy at a hastily installed stainless steel sink, washing out containers and glass beakers. Next to him a nurse was supervising the unloading of an impressive array of surgical instruments.

In the center of the room was a gleaming operating table equipped with leather straps. An electrician was working on the big mirrored light that hung over the table. Shermin stayed out of the man’s way as he examined one of the leather straps.

“Welcome to planet Earth,” he murmured. No one overheard. They were too busy.

The clouds over northern Arizona had vanished eastward to reveal the desert night sky, alive with the stars city-dwellers only see on the bowls of planetariums. Train wheels rattled musically against the rails. Somewhere out in the barren mountains a coyote howled, the faint
yip-yip
rising and falling with comical speed.

Clad in his almost dry shirt, chinos, and shoes, the starman sat by the open door of the boxcar, staring out into the darkness. From time to time he would turn to check on Jenny. She slept soundly, rolled up in the cocoon of the old blanket and shielded from the wind by the little wall of empty crates and containers he had piled up around her.

The train whistle screamed, more for the engineer’s amusement than out of necessity. In this country, even the sight of a steer on the tracks was an event. Jenny groaned, rolled over and stretched. Halfway through the stretch she opened her eyes, woke up, the turned over and stared at her silent companion.

“Where are we? What time is it?” She looked past him at the stark, moonlit countryside. “At least the rain’s stopped. We won’t drown when we get out.”

“It isn’t late,” he told her softly. “Time passes swiftly when one is able to use it for contemplation.”

“Really?” She sat up, holding the blanket around her. “And what have you been contemplating?”

“Various things.” He gestured outside. “I think your world is at its most attractive when both it and its inhabitants are at their quietest. I think we come to Winslow soon.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I like to watch you sleep. That was also for contemplation. It must be an interesting state of being for an intelligent person to experience. I cannot experience it, I can only hypothesize what it must be like, but I enjoy watching you do it.” He hesitated before continuing. “I do not know why. It is very strange. Adaptation works both ways. I was chosen explorer because I am very adaptable, more so than most of my kind. But the more time I spend in this body, the more I become like a planet Earth person. To me this is both an enjoyment and a danger.”

She shuffled around, trying to get comfortable on the hard floor. “Do you have to go back? Isn’t there some way you could stay here, like a permanent observer or something?” Still holding the blanket around her, she crawled over to be next to him. He reached out and touched her lightly.

“No. I must go back. Even if I could remain in this body, I could not stay in this mind.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“I miss my own kind. This is not my world, not my home. Not my way of life. I was not designed for it. My adaptation to your form is as temporary as my adaptation to your ways. Spirit does not follow shape.” He looked away from her, back out into the night. When he spoke again there was a new solemnity in his voice.

“There is something I must tell you. I do not know how such things are said, so I will simply say it. I gave you a baby tonight.”

She inhaled sharply. “No. That’s impossible. Even if you were human it’d be impossible. I can’t have a child. I told you, I’ve been to a half dozen doctors and they all say the same thing. It’s not a matter of choice; it’s a matter of bad plumbing.”

“This is outside their experience.”

She thought back to what had happened earlier that evening. “Well, I don’t think any of them would argue that one with you, but still . . .”

“Believe what I tell you, Jennyhayden. When you were shot by the policeman, I healed you. When our car struck the big truck filled with gas you would have burned but I prevented it. Both times I repaired your body. This time I fixed earlier damage. It was not difficult. To you your system may seem terribly complicated. To me it is no more so than the innards of this train.

“You will have a baby. A boy baby. Not a
probrecita.
I was very careful. It is a matter of careful engineering.”

She didn’t know what to do, how to react. She would have laughed if not for the blatant absurdity of what he was saying. There was too much warmth surrounding her for her to scream. So she just sat and stared.

“He will be human, this child of your dead husband. The only genes involved are his and yours. But at the same time he will also be my—new person. Offspring. Baby.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, baby. That word is best. He will be mine because I engineered those genes.
That
is difficult to do, but not impossible. Biochemistry. There is much about your own makeup, your own DNA, that you do not understand. Much that is not used properly by your bodies. There are parts of your genetic code that are blank, like pieces of paper. I wrote on the blank pieces. That part of the baby will be me.” He turned to look deeply into her eyes.

“There is one more thing I can do. If you do not want this baby, say so now and I will stop it. I can do that as painlessly as I started it. It will be as if it never was.”

She considered quietly, realizing that here was something Important she was going to have to deal with even if she didn’t quite understand.

“He’ll look normal? Like any other human baby? Like the one belonging to the woman who gave us the blanket?”

“Like any normal human child, yes,” he assured her. “Except that it will not hurt when it gets its teeth. I fixed that, too.”

Now she did laugh, softly, out of amazement. “I’ve had some surprises dumped on me early in the morning, but this . . .” She took a deep breath and looked past him, tilting her head back to stare up into the brilliantly clear sky. “Tell me, which of those is your star? Your sun? Can you see it from here?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’ll want to show him where his other father came from—if he’ll believe me.”

“When he has matured, he will understand.” He searched the heavens. “There—no, wait—over to the right a little, near that bright grouping low on the horizon. Your atmosphere is so thick and variable that sometimes it is hard to be certain. But if you look hard you can see.”

She strained her eyes. “Where? There are so many.”

He pointed to a saddle between two hills. “Down there. See it? just above that notch in the rocks and slightly to the right. It is not very bright from here, but it is much like your own star, though older. As our world is older. As we are.”

“I see it. I see it.”

Intervening hills cut off her view as the train swept around a wide curve. Pink light began to wash out the sky anyway, a sure indication that they were coming into a good-size town.

“You’d better get dressed,” he told her, leaning out the opening to look past the distant engine. “I think we must be coming into Winslow.”

Jenny ignored her clothing to stare at the city lights that were growing steadily brighter ahead of them. She frowned. “I didn’t think Winslow would be so big. ’Course, the geography of the southwest isn’t exactly my specialty. I have a tough time finding my way around Madison. I just hope to God we’re on the right train.”

“Something is the matter?”

“I hope not, but those lights are
so
bright. And there are so many of them.” Now she turned away and retreated back into the boxcar to get dressed. He was watching her again, but she no longer minded his stare.

An hour passed before the starman cautiously slid the door aside and peered out into the railyard. The train had been at rest for some time now and still no one had come along to check the empty cars. He hopped out, reached back up and in to help Jenny down.

They started walking toward the bright glow in the sky. “There are a lot of tracks.”

“Maybe Winslow’s a major siding. That’s where they put trains that are waiting to go someplace else. A Sot of small towns are like that; a grocery, a couple of bars, gas station at each end, maybe a cafe—and twenty acres of track.”

They crossed a parking lot. “There’s a building up ahead. Looks like it might be a station.” Her stomach was churning. This didn’t feel right. A town like Winslow shouldn’t rate a station.

But that’s what the building turned out to be; a terminal, and much too big to belong to any town the size of Winslow. Though empty of people at this early morning hour, it. was brightly lit and well cared for. A single sign above the double doorway said it all: