The Stardroppers (11 page)

He made for the first phone booth he spotted, and was on the point of dialing the number he found against her name—as Redvers had said, she was the only Angel Allen in the book—when he checked and turned instead to the number of the St. Wenceslas Hospital. There was a separate line listed for the PSW department, under “Outpatients and Aftercare.” He rang it.

To the voice that answered he said, “Miss Angel Allen, please.”

“Not another bloody reporter?” the voice snapped. “Because if so—”

“No, I’m not a reporter. It’s Dan Cross calling.”

“Just a second.” Muffled in the background, an exchange of question and answer, and then Angel herself came to the phone.

“Morning, Dan,” she said dispiritedly. “What is it?”

“I was wondering if I might drop by and talk to you,” Dan said.

“I’d rather you didn’t. This has been a hell of a morning. I ought to be out on my rounds, but when I tried to leave my office I was bloody pounced on by a crowd of—oh, I don’t know what to call them except
madmen
! Ex-patients, some of the people I’ve had in care in the past, practically all the current ones … We actually had to call the police to keep guard and stop them breaking into the building. It’s like a riot!”

“Are they after you personally?”

“Of course. It’s the—the magical contagion bit, I suppose. They think I’d be a sort of lucky charm for their own success.”

That figured. Dan glanced across the street toward Cosmica Limited. A bus had just pulled up, and a group of six or eight eager people had jumped off it, heading for the store entrance. On seeing the milling throng that blocked their way, they had stopped dead in simultaneous dismay.

“But”—Angel was continuing—“if you want to talk to someone about what happened last night, you should get on to Jerry Bartlett. He called me earlier and asked if I knew where you could be reached.”

“Fine. What’s his number?”

“Oh, you’ll find his firm in the directory. He works for Tarquin Telecommunications, at their research division in Chiswick.”

“Thanks very much. By the way, I don’t suppose you know how I can get hold of Walter Watson, do you?”

“No. If he’s neither in the store nor at home. Is he hiding out, then?”

“I imagine so.”

“Lucky devil,” she said with a trace of bitterness. “Wish I could. My phone was ringing all night from midnight on, and I lost half my sleep. And now, after what’s been happening here, I don’t know why in hell I bothered to come to the office today. I’m never going to get any work done in these conditions.”

She cut the connection with a snort of annoyance. There was a knock on the door of Dan’s phone booth, and he saw a face glowering through the glass. He scowled back and took out the directory S to Z, looking for Jerry’s firm.

He reached the physicist at once, and was promptly invited to come straight out to the lab.

“Thanks very much,” he said, and went to find a taxi.

The Tarquin Telecommunications research and development center was in a large 1930’s building partly overshadowed by a dual-level expressway. Weathered into its frontage, only half-concealed by a big new illuminated sign, were the outlines of letters which identified the place as having formerly belonged to a perfume manufacturer.

As well as a company watchman on duty at the main gate, there was also a harried-looking police constable. Dan was made to wait in his cab while the watchman called Jerry’s office and confirmed that he was here by invitation.

“Sorry about that, sir,” the man said when he’d done so. “But we’ve been plagued all morning by a gang of nuts. We only just managed to freeze them off.” He nodded at the constable. “Had to run three of them in because they threatened to start smashing the windows.”

“What was it all about?” Dan said, feigning ignorance.

“Oh, this stardropper nonsense.” The watchman was about fifty, and his tone was of elderly cynicism. “What it’s got to make them so worked up,
I
don’t know. Who’d want to vanish into thin air and never come back? I mean, if you’re that sick of life, there are lots of other ways of bowing out, aren’t there? Quietly, so you don’t cause anyone else any trouble!”

Shaking his head, he waved Dan’s cab on to the main entrance.

He was paying the driver off when he heard his name called, and turned to find Jerry Bartlett hurrying down the steps from the wide glass front doors. He looked even more harassed than he had yesterday evening.

“Glad you could stop by!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been desperately trying to reach Wally Watson, but he’s nowhere
to be found, and Angel has this trouble at the hospital with all these idiots who seem to think she can help them do what Leon did—if he
did
do anything, and didn’t have it simply happen to him. … Well, come on up to the lab and let’s see if we can thrash anything out, hm?”

“Such as what?” Dan, though he had far longer legs, was having difficulty keeping up with the pace Jerry was setting down the long corridors of the building.

“Christ, how should I know?” Jerry ran his fingers through his hair. “Whatever happened, however it happened, it doesn’t fit the orthodox laws of science. But you’ve at least met Berghaus, haven’t you? He may have mentioned something to you which he hasn’t published yet, for example. Up these stairs—just the one flight.” He pointed to the left.

“Why haven’t you tried to reach Berghaus himself, then?” Dan demanded.

“Think I haven’t? But everybody’s after him! I put a call through directly I got home last night—traced him in the
Who’s Who of Physics
—but he wasn’t in, and when I tried again an hour later I found he’d told his local exchange to block all incoming calls.”

“Well, how about Rainshaw?” Dan suggested as they reached the top of the stairs and Jerry marched ahead to fling open a door opposite.

“Rainshaw has an unlisted number, and has had ever since his son disappeared. I don’t suppose you know him, do you?”

“I’ve met him,” Dan admitted.

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I’m afraid not. I was taken to see him at his lab.”

“Blast! He’s at the DAPR place at Richmond, and you aren’t allowed to reach him at work without a Home Office authorization.”

“Dapper?” Dan echoed, puzzled.

“Department of Advanced Physical Research,” Jerry clarified. Swinging around the corner of a large desk cluttered with miscellaneous electronic parts, he dropped into a chair and waved Dan to take another facing him. “Well! Coffee? Beer? Cigarette? I don’t smoke, but I have some here for visitors.” He opened a box and pushed it in Dan’s direction.

Dan took one with a mutter of thanks and looked around the office. One wall was entirely of glass to below waist-height, its sill heaped with papers and files. Another was a single large Formica sheet on which a critical-path analysis of what seemed to be a very complex experimental program had been inscribed with a china-marking pencil. Next to the door were shelves on aluminum supports, containing about five or six stardroppers and boxes of spare parts for them, and behind Jerry’s desk were a case of reference books and two information-retrieval computer keyboards sited where he could reach them without leaving his chair.

Clearing a bulky file from the top of his desk intercom, he ordered coffee to be brought, and leaned back with a deep breath.

“I suppose I didn’t dream it, did I?” he said to Dan.

“I’ve been wishing the same thing,” Dan admitted. “Have you heard what’s happening at Cosmica this morning?”

“No, but I can imagine. There’s a little shop I pass on my way from home to the station every day, which sells stardroppers as well as radios and records, and at eight-thirty today there were at least a dozen people lined up outside waiting for it to open at nine.”

“You have the picture, then. And you saw the papers?”

“Naturally. It’ll be interesting to hear what the radio news says at one o’clock; they have an in-depth program then, instead of these two-minute snippets.”

“Interesting!” Dan gave a humorless smile.

“Yes.” Jerry stared out of the window at the upper level of the expressway; the lab was efficiently sound-proofed, and the traffic was roaring past in silence. “You know, that was all it was for me, to begin with. We got into this field—my firm, I mean—along with just about every other telecommunications company on the planet, purely because we wanted to know if this ‘Rainshaw effect’ might lead to some new kind of information-transmitting technique. I mean, the radio bands are so overcrowded nowadays, at least in the advanced countries. So one morning I was whistled into old Tinker’s office—the director of research—and asked if I’d like my own department and a fifty-thousand-pound initial budget to investigate these things, and obviously I said yes please, when can I start?
So they gave me a couple of technicians and a secretary, and I built half a dozen of the damned things in a week—not realizing, to be honest, they were protected by a patent application. And of course that was before this horrible name ‘stardropper’ got hung on them. There are a couple of my originals behind you, on the shelf: the ones screwed to wooden baseboards.” He pointed, and Dan glanced at the instruments, laid out in extended order in typical breadboard style.

“And I’d been happily fiddling around with them for a month or more, measuring signal strengths, trying to correlate patterns from different instruments, and so on, when all of a sudden I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t have the
foggiest
idea what was going on. I mean, I was like a kid in front of a big computer pushing buttons to see the pretty red and green lights flash! Which was what convinced me that looking for a new communications mode in stardroppers was futile. We were confronted by a totally new phenomenon, unforeseen, inexplicable. So I went back to Tinker and I told him straight out: you’re going to have to face the fact that this isn’t going to produce commercial results of the kind you’re after, but for all we can tell right now it may overturn the whole of traditional physics, so can I have twice the budget and an extra six assistants? And—bless him—he gave me the money and four more people. And then of course Berghaus published his theory, and I’d proved my point. But nothing else except that. Honestly, we’re no further forward than we were the day his theory appeared!”

Dan tapped his ash into a wastebasket. He said, “But I’d have thought—”

“We’d have established a few facts? Oh, sure! All negative. Whatever the signals may derive from, they incontestably do not travel by any conventional route. They are almost beyond doubt not subject to the inverse-square law. They may be truly instantaneous, though so far we haven’t figured out how to measure a speed greater than light’s. I wish someone would find the tachyon and give us information from the other side of the C-barrier! But didn’t Berghaus tell you about this kind of thing?”

“I didn’t ask about this aspect of it much when I met him. I’m not a trained physicist, you see. I was more concerned
with the results of people becoming convinced that the signals contain alien knowledge.”

Jerry nodded. “Shame! I’m sure that man
must
have new insights by now, which he hasn’t published yet. … But our main problem, you know, is simply not knowing where to begin! For instance, I came up with a hypothesis that the signals may possibly use local gravitational fields as—well, as a sort of resonator, even though it’s minuscule, and the likeliest source in my view is the potential energy of the stressed-space area surrounding this ball of rock, or maybe the entire solar system. Follow me?”

“Not really,” Dan confessed.

“Hmm! What can I compare it to? Oh, yes! Think of a piano. Or perhaps better would be a spring, under tension because a weight is hanging from it You hit the right frequency on a tuning fork, and you’ll get sympathetic vibrations from the spring. Take the weight away, so the spring goes slack, and it won’t react to the frequency you used before—probably won’t react detectably to any outside noise until you reach the point where the blast effect takes over.”

“So how would you go about checking that?” Dan asked.

“Obviously, fly a ’dropper aboard a satellite,” Jerry shrugged “So I’ve put in applications to everywhere I can think of where they’re launching spacecraft—Kennedy, Woomera, Baikonur … I
think
I may have struck lucky with the Swedes at Kiruna; they wrote me the other day to say that if I can cut the mass of the experiment down below a hundred and sixty grams, I can have space in their next meteorological satellite. But I’m waiting now to find out what other instruments they’re flying, because I’ll need to know how much shielding from local interference I have to build into the ’dropper. I’m afraid it may be too much to meet the weight limit.”

“And if you turn out to be right in your suspicion?”

Jerry gave a harsh chuckle. “One more on the list of negative facts! Yesterday I was overjoyed with my chance to get a ’dropper into space. Today I have this feeling Wally Watson was right all along, and I’m wasting my time digging into the microcosmic aspects when there are macro effects under my bloody nose!”

“Watson puzzles me,” Dan said slowly. “How did you first come to know him?”

“Oh, just by enrolling in Club Cosmica. You see, after they gave me my nice fat budget and my new staff, I ran out of ideas, and it really started to get under my hide, I can tell you. I mean, imagine me with all that money and these labs and five assistants, and sitting around chewing my nails! So—”

He was interrupted by a knock on the door, and without waiting for an answer a pretty girl came in carrying two cups of coffee. “Ah!” he said. “Thanks, Shirley. This is my secretary, by the way—Shirley Brown, Dan Cross.”

They exchanged nods.

“How are things outside?” Jerry asked.

“Oh!” She pulled a face. “I’m still spending half my time telling callers you’re not here, of course. Goodness knows how many there’ve been so far today, but I imagine over fifty. And as soon as you’re free, by the way, Charlie Potts wants you to come and see the signal he’s getting from that new ’dropper of his. He’s split it three ways and fed it to a color TV screen, and it’s making beautiful patterns.”

“Okay, I will,” Jerry sighed. “Meantime, don’t let him just sit in front of it, will you? He’s a dangerously good hypnotic subject, and he might go into a trance!”

“I’ll tell him,” Shirley said. And added, on the point of turning away, “Incidentally, Jerry—!”

“Yes?”

“I’ve—uh—I’ve decided I’d like to buy a stardropper. What would you recommend me to get, that isn’t too expensive?”

“Oh Christ,” Jerry said. “You too? Well, it’s supposed to be a free country. … Dan, what do you think? You have that very advanced Binton, I think Wally said.”

“Well, what he advised me to try was a Gale and Welchman,” Dan said. “And I must admit it’s about the only instrument I’ve run across which really impressed me.”

“Gale and Welchman,” Shirley repeated thoughtfully. “Thanks—I’ll try and pick one up.”

She went out.

“Where were we?” Jerry said, stirring sugar into his cup.

“I was asking how you met Wally Watson,” Dan said.

“Oh yes. Well, I was getting desperate for new angles to try, so I saw an ad for this new club—I think they’d just had their first or second meeting—and I enrolled, and as I’d hoped I found a whole bunch of people there who were in the same state as I was: baffled and infuriated and eager to swap suggestions. Matter of fact, you said you met Dr. Rainshaw, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Is he a member of Club Cosmica?”

“Oh no! But about the second person I met after Wally was Robin Rainshaw, his son. Angel’s fiancé, you know.”

Dan gave a thoughtful nod. “Did you know him well?”

“Not very. Casually and professionally. And then, of course, he—uh—disappeared. Angel was absolutely broken up by it. Who wouldn’t have been?”

“Did you believe at first that he’d really disappeared, like Leon Patrick?”

“Hell, of course I didn’t! I don’t even want to believe Leon disappeared!” Jerry gulped at his coffee, burned his tongue, and swore, grabbing for a pack of tissues.

“Have you any idea at
all
how it might have happened?”

“None. I went back with Jock to his hotel when the pub shut last night, and we sat in the bar there for an hour arguing, but the poor guy was dead beat because he’d come down on an overnight train and he hadn’t had much sleep, so I had to leave him in the end. And then I sat up myself half the night, cudgeling my brains, and answering phone calls from the papers and TV news service. … And I’m none the wiser. I really do think Wally’s been right all along.” He sounded depressed at making the admission.

“Talking about—what was your term?—the macro effects?”

“Exactly. His attitude has always been that—hmm! What was that nice analogy he once used? A biological one.” Jerry frowned briefly. “Ah, I have it. He said what I was doing was like the man who proved that grasshoppers hear with their legs because when he amputated the legs they didn’t jump in response to a sudden noise. I was a bit narked when he told me that, frankly, but the more I think about it, the more I feel he may have been right.”