The Stardroppers (14 page)

“Come on!” Watson barked. “You know some of what we can do! How would you like me to pick you up and hang you a hundred feet above Oxford Street until you talked? You’d have to be bloody quick, wouldn’t you? You’re heavy, and I’m already pretty tired, so I might have to let you drop without warning! Want me to show you?
Do
you?”

Rainshaw made as though to voice an objection. Watson silenced him with a glare.

“All right,” he said to Dan after a pause. “You’ve had your chance. See how you like this!”

There was a kind of snatching sensation—not feeling that someone had taken hold of him, but more that all of his body was being moved against his will, like the express-elevator feeling but
sideways
. By reflex, Dan resisted, and for a moment he was seeing blackness.

Blackness?

Not just the lack of light caused by blinking, though it lasted no longer than a blink lasts, but blackness of an intensity he had never imagined:
dazzling
blackness. His eyes stung. His whole skin felt as though it had been pounded with wet leather straps. There was a straining tension in his ears, and he
had
to exhale as though he had been punched in the belly. His sinuses hurt like blazes, and he was simultaneously baking hot and freezing cold.

But he had seen something in the blackness, very sharply thrown into relief, like a fantastically overexposed photograph. He had seen a shape like a spreadeagle man.

And all this happened so quickly he had no time to be puzzled by it before there was light again, and he found he was not facing Watson and Rainshaw. He was in the same room with them, and they were just turning to each other with expressions of blank amazement.

“But he can!” Rainshaw said, and then, seeing where Dan was, swung to look at him and changed the words. “But you can!”

Into the frozen tableau the phone bell stabbed again, a dagger of brilliant sound. Watson stopped it this time without even looking toward the instrument.

He said, “I think—”

And broke off, putting his hands to his forehead.

Rainshaw, not less taken aback, said, “But I thought that was impossible! I mean, I’ll swear that was a first time—it
smelled
like a first time! And no one has ever gone out for the first time when not actually listening to a ‘dropper!”

Watson rocked back and forward on his heels. He said, “I think this man is an exception. An exception to everything. Cross, Cross, for pity’s sake,
who the hell are you?”

Dan wiped tears from his tortured eyes. He did not understand. He did not know how it was he had gone from where he had been, facing Watson, to here on the other side of the room; he did not know the meaning of the vision of darkness that had seemed to punctuate his journey. And all that mattered now was that Watson and Rainshaw apparently did know what this crazy pattern added up to.

He shivered, as though belatedly responding to a gust of ice-cold wind, and said in a voice that creaked like an unoiled door, “I’m an operative of the United Nations Special Agency.”

“Thank goodness for that, at least,” Rainshaw said, forcing a chuckle without humor. “I was half afraid you might be one of those bastards from the Blue Front who’ve been infiltrating the club recently.” He glanced at Watson, but the older man disregarded him.

He said, “Are you really a stardropper fan, or are you using that Binton of yours merely as cover?”

“I was given a stardropper by my chief about four days ago. I never more than dabbled before then.”

“Then all I can say is, you’ve set a record for speed of assimilation which is absolutely unbelievable.” Watson was recovering his poise. “Robin, can you think of anything to explain it? Congenital predisposition? And you needn’t have worried about the Blue Front, by the way: Ferrers and people like him will never make it, or if they do they’ll have to give up their narrowminded prejudices. Xenophobia and this can’t coexist.”

Rainshaw bit his lip. Now the first panic reaction was past, Dan felt the two of them were regarding him as some sort of natural curiosity. He burst out, “Will you for God’s sake tell me what this is all about?”

Watson hesitated. “First, you tell me something,” he said. “What happened just now, when you went from here to there?”

Dan summed it up briefly.

“Fine!” Watson said with an air of satisfaction. “No one could have dreamed
that
up without seeing it. Fantastic that you should actually have spotted one of the failures, though!”

“Failures?”

Watson nodded. “Perhaps it was even Leon Patrick, poor devil—though come to think of it, it can’t have been: the point must have shifted by now. So more likely it was someone we don’t know about who went out near here a little while ago. They’re making it thick and fast now. It looks as though all that was needed was one key event to tip a lot of people past the point of incredulity. Which of course was what we guessed might happen …” He looked suddenly tired and sad, and moved to take the chair Rainshaw had been using.

“Explain things to him, will you, Robin?” he added over his shoulder.

Rainshaw, not taking his eyes off Dan, licked his lips. He said, “Ah … well, just now, you ‘went out.’ That’s to say, you found yourself at that particular point between here and the sun—in empty space—where the potential of the solar gravitational field is equivalent to that here in this room. Through luck, or subconscious understanding of what had happened, you were able to come back before
much harm was done. But I see your eyes are watering, and you came back gasping like a stranded fish, and you’d be bloody well advised to go to a drug store right away and get a heavy dose of Radinox or some other reliable anti-radiation drug—”

“I have some in the bathroom cabinet,” Watson muttered. He rose ponderously to his feet. “I’ll fetch it. And a broad-spectrum antibotic, too.”

“What for?” Dan demanded, still hopelessly muddled.

“You were out in space,” Rainshaw repeated patiently. “Without a spacesuit, what’s more! You were exposed to the full unshielded ouput of Old Sol, and that’s fierce! Quite apart from any cellular damage, there’s the risk of some of your tolerated bacteria having been mutated—though admittedly you’re much better off than if you’d gone to the same place in a spaceship, because the primary cosmic just went through your body as though you were a window, and inside a ship you’d have stopped a lot of slow secondaries. … Hell, I’m rambling! Give me another cigarette, will you?”

Numbly, Dan complied, waiting for sense to emerge from what Rainshaw was telling him.

“All right,” Rainshaw said, breathing his first smoke. “Now this is what happens to the bad ones, as we call them. A person ‘goes out’ to that equipotential point, just as you did, for the excellent reason that it’s the easiest place to aim for in the entire solar system, far easier than an equipoint on the surface of the earth, for example. What’s more, it has the attraction of being a spectacular first jump. There must be some sort of subconscious admiration for space travel built into the human psyche, I suppose. But what’s most important is that accurate aiming over short distances takes practice. Out there, there’s nothing to crash into and accuracy follows automatically from the least-resistance principle.

“But at that stage a bad one panics, or fails to comprehend what he’s done. And he dies. There’s no helping him. I wish there were!”

“Me too,” Watson said gruffly, returning from the bathroom with a glass of water and two small capsules, one yellow, one pink. “Here,” he added to Dan. “Swallow these.”

Dan complied, and Watson continued, “Yes, I really do wish we could help the bad ones! Someone like Leon … he was a good friend of mine, and I liked him. But he simply didn’t have the mental flexibility which you have, for example.”

“But I still don’t see—”

“What makes you a good case, and him a bad one?” Rainshaw supplied. “Nor do we, really. Except we know it has something to do with openmindedness. But what happens to a good case, like yours, is easy to describe, even if we can’t explain it.

“Out there at the equipotential point, a good case recovers from the initial shock, recalls what he did to arrive there, and repeats the journey in the opposite direction, back to Earth.”

“But—my God!” Dan wiped his forehead. “It takes energy to move a man from the surface of the earth into orbit!”

“Certainly it does,” Rainshaw said. “But simple reflex balances the energy account Think for a moment, and you’ll see that the most economical way for someone who goes out quietly is to exchange places with an equivalent volume of air.”

“You mean like from one point on Earth to another?” Dan was struggling, but little by little memories that seemed to be engraved in the bones and muscles of his body, rather than in his brain, were taking on a pattern.

“Primarily,” Rainshaw agreed. “And that, more or less, is what you did, overelaborating slightly because you took a long way around … but then, so did I, the first time, And there was scarcely a whisper of sound during your trip. You’re good—or you’re going to be, once you’ve practiced enough.”

“But I don’t know
how
I did whatever I did!” protested Dan.

Watson broke in before Rainshaw could answer. He looked as though a great light had dawned on him. Pointing a finger at Dan, he said, “I think I know what made the learning process so rapid in your case. If there’s one thing everyone knows about the Special Agency—from TV and movies—it’s that each of the operatives has a
personal-association code, tailored to the individual. Is this true?”

“Yes, though I don’t see—”

“And it’s hypnotically locked away from consciousness until it’s triggered by some prearranged signal?”

“Yes!
But I don’t see—”

“Then that makes sense,” Watson said, continuing as though Dan hadn’t spoken. “Memory of a code like that, circulating nonstop in your subconscious, would free you from the worst tyranny of language and short-circuit what I suspect to be the biggest obstacle most people meet in trying to comprehend stardropper signals.” He sat forward on his chair with an earnest expression. “Human knowledge is transmitted in words, yes? Arbitrary labels chosen by someone other than the user! Even neologisms are made up of spare parts, so to speak—they’re not truly original. But a personal-association code refers directly to the user’s private experiences. That’s halfway to the basic prerequisite for understanding stardropper signals. You see, those signals aren’t labels, like words in a human language. They’re analogue processes, corresponding to real experience on a one-for-one basis. Right, Robin?”

Rainshaw nodded. “What you have to do,” he amplified, “is learn how to—to
skew
them along a human axis. Some of those minds out there are a hell of a lot different from us, that’s for sure. But they’re still minds!

Dan sat in silence for a moment, thinking of Lilith’s pathetic attempts to make him understand why she was so determined to get back to stardropping.

Lucky kid! Going out quietly, presumably she must have survived! But it feels like a million-to-one chance!

“I knew a schoolkid who made it,” he said after a pause. “Why could she go out where so many adults have to fail?”

“Fewer preconceptions is the simplest answer,” Watson grunted. “But also one of the least accurate. It’s partly that the experiences the signals correspond to are, in everyday human terms, impossible; and partly that one man plus one stardropper is like one fisherman trying to catch
only
one species of fish in an ocean that contains thousands, all hungry.”

“The cocktail-party factor,” Dan suggested.

That’s exactly what we call it,” Watson said with some respect. Dan decided not to say how he knew that already.

“And if you lose track of your fish?” he said.

“You may make no sense of the signals at all; you may be permanently tantalized by a suggestion of meaning, a hint of sense, until you can’t stand it any longer and break down. Or you may do something stupid like trying to stardrop under drugs, and you’ll almost certainly become clinically insane. I say clinically: what I mean is that you may very well make a
terrific
breakthrough, clear into the psyche of some alien species. But what consolation is it to find yourself thinking like a green Sagittarian octopus when you
aren’t
one?”

Rainshaw gave a bitter chuckle. He said, “Christ, I’m glad I’m not a psychiatrist right now!”

“Me too,” Watson murmured.

“But if you succeed,” Dan said, frowning, “what it means is …?”

“That you’ve kept hold of one strong, clear sequence of signals long enough to acquire the vicarious experience needed to interpret alien techniques into human actions.”

Dan remembered Angel’s metaphor: “Tell me how it feels to ride a bicycle.” She was probably going to make it if she had formed that close an analogy. He wondered in passing whether she knew what had become of Robin, as his father did, or whether she had given him up for lost.

“The clearest and strongest signals,” Watson was continuing didactically, “presumably come from the most highly evolved minds. Now, as Jerry Bartlett was saying last night, evolution is a matter of improving one’s species’ degree of control over the environment. The commonest talent to learn from stardropping, to start with, is teleportation, and the next commonest is telekinesis. I have both of these, as you noticed, and I think I’m on to something else I don’t have a name for—but that’s by the way. The point is: control of environment is also control of probability. I can’t put the mechanics of it into words for you, because it doesn’t belong in words; if it did, you wouldn’t have to learn it through a medium like the stardropper.

“But I can give you some hints. You know, for example, that there’s a vanishingly small statistical likelihood that
a given subnuclear particle might be elsewhere than where it’s observed to be? This can only be demonstrated on a microcosmic scale—or
could
only be, until the advent of the stardropper.”

“Jerry told me you’d said he was wasting his time on micro effects, when there were macro ones under his nose,” Dan said.

“And there are!” Watson smiled. “Aren’t there?”

“I have to believe it now,” Dan sighed.

“I should bloody hope so. And I hope Jerry will catch on soon, too—we need people like him. I think he may, what’s more. Last night he showed signs of appreciating that control of one’s location by an act of will is the terminal point of a continuous sequence, which begins with toolmaking and the planting of seeds in spring against harvest time in autumn. It’s a question of envisaging a future event, and taking the necessary present action to ensure that it’s the desired outcome. It doesn’t matter if we can’t verbalize the action we’re taking. We used fire for untold generations before it occurred to anyone to formulate a theory of combustion, and the early theories were wrong anyway.”

“I’m still hung up,” Dan said, his frown by now so deeply etched that his head was beginning to ache. “On this question of energy supply. I mean, to go from here to a
star
—it must take some fantastic expenditure of energy!”

“I let that slip,” Rainshaw murmured apologetically to Watson.

Watson shrugged. “Fallacy,” he said. “I’ll show you why. It’s another prime example of how traditional thinking can interfere with your accepting the information available from a stardropper. Not that it seems to have bothered you. …

“Imagine a planet as smooth as a billiard ball and totally airless—yes? Now imagine a satellite one millimeter above its perfectly level surface, in orbit. Is there any reason why it shouldn’t continue forever without expending energy? I mean in ideal space; forget the other bodies in the universe.”

“In orbit at one millimeter! But … yes, all right.”

“At any given point on its orbit, it has the same potential energy as at any other, doesn’t it?”