The Stardroppers (4 page)

She fell out from among her companions, as though giving up in despair, and came toward where Dan was standing, fumbling in her pocket. She withdrew her hand very swiftly as she pushed by.

A knife blade flashed. It severed the strap of Dan’s stardropper. She caught hold of it, tugged it loose, and took to her heels.

Half a dozen people saw the act and attempted to stop the girl, but the crowd around here was dense and she had eeled out of reach in a moment. If she had picked on anyone but a trained Agency operative she might have got away with it; as it was, he didn’t catch up with her until he’d followed her clear across the multiple traffic streams of Park Lane and well into Hyde Park.

Once out here on the open grass, he could keep her in sight all the time, and it simply became a matter of wearing her down. It didn’t take long. As soon as she saw he was still on her track, she gave up. He had expected her to distract him by throwing the stardropper down and making off without it; instead, she just stopped, panting like a bellows and plainly exhausted even by such a short run.

He came up to her, wondering at the defiance in her dark eyes, and noted how undernourished she looked—a strange sight in this prosperous city. He said nothing.

After a moment she hefted the stardropper in both hands, its cut strap trailing on the ground. As though she had read his mind, she said, “No, I wouldn’t have thrown it away. It might have been broken.”

Her voice was flat and emotionless. Dan went on looking at her steadily.

A few seconds of that and her self-control broke. She thrust the stardropper toward him violently. “Here you are, then!” she said with shrill impatience.

He made no move to take the instrument. Confused, she bit down on her lower lip. A crafty look crossed her face.

“You—uh—you aren’t going to turn me in,” she suggested.

“No, I don’t think so,” Dan said. At the words she brightened visibly.

“Would you …?” She had to swallow and start again. “Would you let me try it out?” she ventured, folding her arms over the stardropper and pressing it tight to her chest. “That’s all I wanted it for, I swear it was. To use it! I didn’t mean to
sell
it or anything!”

Dan sighed. This was just about the most peculiar thief he had ever run across.

Licking her lips, she added, “If you want anything—I mean, I’ll do anything you want if you let me just try your ’dropper. I need it so badly, honest I do!” Her voice broke on the last phrase.

Dan moved his right arm like a striking snake and caught hold of the broken strap, twitching the instrument out of her grasp before she could react. He brought it up short an inch above the ground, watching her face.

The expression of horror which overcame her was genuine; it was like a junkhead’s, seeing someone threaten to tip away his entire stash of heroin. So here was one of the young addicts mentioned in his briefing, whom Redvers had also referred to.

“You louse,” she said when she recovered. “Did you pull wings off flies when you were a kid?”

There was too much pathos in her attempted dignity for Dan to answer at once. He began to knot the strap of the instrument together.

“If you need stardropping that bad,” he said at length, “why don’t you have one of your own?”

“I did have. My mother broke it a week ago. Said I spent too much time with it. So I walked out. But I don’t have any money for a new one, and it’s sheer
hell
being without, because I was getting somewhere. I know I was getting somewhere. I’d tried for months and I’d finally begun to make it.”

“So you ran away from home. Where are you living now?”

“It’s none of your business!” she snapped. “Nor anybody else’s. I’m sixteen—it’s not illegal!” Then, relenting, she added, “With—with some friends. They run a commune. In Hackney.”

“Don’t any of these friends of yours have stardroppers they could lend you?”

“Of course!” Scornfully. “All of them do. That’s what the commune’s for, so we can ’drop as much as we like without anyone bugging us. But I’ve tried them all, and they don’t suit me. So I came into town today to see if I could find a place selling secondhand ones, work out how much I’d have to spend to get a model like what I had before. Only there aren’t many secondhand ’droppers, and the ones I did see were all types I know don’t do anything for me. Then this old man came by with the cart, and I thought I’d listen to his for a bit, see if that was any good, and it wasn’t, and then I saw yours and I realized that wasn’t any of the makes I’ve tried. I’m sorry, but—oh, I’m going through absolute bloody torture. Look!”

She held one thin hand out in front of her. It shook like a wind-tossed leaf.

“What model did you have?”

“Just a cheap one—a Gale and Welchman—but it was very good.”

So her pitiable state was due to Watson’s pet brand of stardropper, was it? Dan scowled. How had things been allowed to progress to this point? On this showing, stardropping ought to be legislated against, like a dangerous drug.

“What is it about stardropping that fascinates you so?” he demanded, not really expecting a coherent answer.

“How can I tell you if you don’t know? You’re a ’dropper yourself, aren’t you?”

“To me it’s no more than mildly interesting. I could live without it. Why can’t you?”

Making a helpless gesture, she closed her eyes and swayed a little. She said thinly, “Suppose you had a dream, a very important dream, in which you saw something you desperately wanted to remember—a bit of the future, say. And you woke up and you remembered you’d seen it, but not what it was. It’s a little bit like that, except that what you can’t quite remember is a matter of life or death. If you don’t get back to it, you might as well cut your throat.”

“Or starve, hm?” Dan suggested. “When did you last eat anything?”

“Oh … yesterday, I guess. Maybe the day before. I’m too worried to be hungry.”

Dan looked past her. Among trees a short distance away a flag fluttered limply in the breeze, bearing a trademark of a catering company, and people could be seen coming away from that direction carrying sandwiches and cartons of soft drinks.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “There’s a snack-bar over there, isn’t there? You come with me and eat something, and afterward you can borrow my instrument for a while. Fair?”

She paused before replying, her dark eyes enigmatic. Eventually she said, “I told you, I’m sorry I tried to steal your ’dropper. But you don’t have to make me feel so small, damn you. Cosmica isn’t far from here. I’ll go there and pretend I have some money to buy a ’dropper and see if they’ll let me try some out for a while.”

He sighed and took her by the arm. She didn’t resist.

Even with coffee in one hand and sandwiches in the other and on her lap, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from his stardropper for more than seconds together. He was sure that if he’d allowed her she would have thrown the food aside and put the earpiece in immediately.

“What’s your name?” he said when she had wolfed two chicken sandwiches and emptied her paper cup.

“Lilith Miles.”

“And you said you’re sixteen. So I guess you’re in school.”

“Was. I quit.”

That fitted, too, thought Dan. She went on, “I had this bargain with my mother, you see—I said I’d keep up with my schoolwork if she let me go on ’dropping. Not that what they tell you at school seems very important after you begin to get results from a ’dropper. Then she went back on what she promised, and smashed it up while I was out. I suppose I should have taken it with me. I usually used to. So, like I told you, I walked out.”

“You keep talking about these results you were starting to get. What sort of results?”

Lilith made a frustrated gesture. “Things that don’t go into words. And yet they make this weird kind of sense!
Oh, sometimes you do get very clear impressions, like a friend of mine got news that his father was going to die in an accident, but that doesn’t happen very often, and anyhow it’s not terribly important.”

“I’d have thought death was pretty important,” Dan said, lighting a cigarette. The day was bright, and people in bright clothes, many with children, were coming and going on the bright-green grass of the park, but the air felt cold on his skin.

“Sure it is. But it seems to be completely random, so what’s the good of it? If you could rely on it happening regularly, that’d be different.”

A valid point, Dan conceded. He said after a pause, “Some people go out of their minds, don’t they?”

“Oh, plenty.” She didn’t seem to find the thought disturbing, which was if possible more shocking than what had gone before. “I guess they get stuck halfway. They get impatient, and can’t wait to see the whole thing clear. Another friend of mine—she started fixing nonsene names on things and went around telling them to everybody, thinking they’d mean something. But of course they didn’t. What comes out of a ’dropper simply doesn’t belong in words!”

“But aren’t you frightened that the same thing might happen to you?”

“No. It’s like being killed in a car crash—you always think of it happening to someone else.”

Which wasn’t in itself a reason for taking crazy risks, Dan countered silently. He said, “I keep hearing stories about people who—who actually disappear. You too?”

A note of real envy crept into her voice. “They’re the ones, aren’t they?” she said. “They’ve got it and gone!”

“Where?”

“If I knew, wouldn’t I be there too?” She looked at him, puzzled. “Say, I think you’re putting me on!”

“I’m not. I honestly want to know your views. These people who’ve disappeared—did you know any of them?”

She shook her head.

“Then how did you hear about them?”

“Oh, everybody knows. You don’t talk about it much. It’s—sort of scary, follow? But that’s
it
, that’s the thing.”

“Well …” Dan was groping for the right questions now.
“Well, what do people think may happen when someone disappears?”

“Oh, there are lots of theories,” she said scornfully. “But me, I suspect it’s something you can’t understand until you get there yourself. Sometimes, listening to a ’dropper, you
almost
see how it could be done. You nearly get it. You make to catch hold, and it’s gone again. It’s like trying to catch a wriggly fish with your bare hands. You miss it ten times, a hundred times, but you get closer, you get better at it. You have to keep plugging away. You have to be so hungry for fish, you daren’t get impatient; you have to keep calm, and concentrate, and stick at it. Can I try your ’dropper now?”

She tossed her coffee cup in a litter basket and reached for the instrument without awaiting an answer. Reluctantly, Dan surrendered it to her.

“This is a beaut!” she said in an impressed tone. “I thought it looked pretty good from the outside, but inside it’s a dream, isn’t it? I never used a fuel-cell model before. How do you switch on the power?”

He showed her the little sliding switch on the cell, and she tucked the earpiece into position, leaned back on the bench, and closed her eyes.

All the premature hardness went out of her face; the taut, nervous lines beside her sullen mouth faded and she began to smile a little. Dan watched her anxiously. He had an obscure sense of guilt, as though he were conniving at the corruption of a minor, and yet it was pleasant to see the change that had come over her.

She moved the adjuster knob with such patient care, seeking the right setting with such miniscule motions, that at first he did not realize she had stopped turning it. Then he began to wonder how long he should let her continue, whether it was dangerous to interrupt her, and even—the thought was ridiculous, but it crept eerily into his mind—whether she might here and now find what she was after … and vanish.

He shivered. It was growing genuinely cool as evening approached, and the rush-hour traffic was filling all the nearby streets. But that wasn’t what caused it. He lit another cigarette and compelled himself to be as patient as Lilith. Sometimes the people coming and going around
the park gave a second glance as they passed the bench, but not often. Lilith was far from the only person in sight listening to a stardropper; idly, he counted seven in direct view.

Almost half an hour elapsed, and he was preparing himself to take the risk of turning the knob and taking the instrument away, when she stirred and opened her eyes. She looked vaguely disappointed. Removing the earpiece, she closed the box with a sigh.

“It didn’t work out,” Dan said.

“Oh, it did!” she exclaimed. “It was great! This is a far more powerful instrument than my old one, but it’s the first I’ve tried which does anything at all for me apart from that.”

“What difference does the extra power make?” Dan asked, thinking of the confused state of the “art” reflected in those letters he’d read in
Starnews
.

“It feels—uh—harder to sort out what matters,” Lilith said, and bit her lip. After a moment, she shrugged. “But it was great anyway. Right now I simply can’t concentrate any more. But I’d love to try it again sometime. Please say I can!”

Dan hesitated. If this kid started to pester him for the use of his stardropper, she could clearly become a damned nuisance. On the other hand, his brief required him to investigate the impact of the craze in as much detail as possible, so it would be very useful to have an entrée to this commune she’d said she was staying at, where everyone was involved with stardropping. He spread his hands and nodded.

Grinning like a monkey, she jumped to her feet. “I’m terribly sorry about—about what happened,” she said. “If I’d had any sense I’d just have walked up and asked you, wouldn’t I? Can I try again in the morning?”

“On one condition.”

“That I don’t become a nuisance? I promise.”

This kid was definitely a character, whatever kind of mess she’d got herself into. “That’s right,” Dan said. “So how can I reach you?”

“It’d be easier for me to reach you, I think—we don’t have a phone in the house where I’m living. Tends to
ring at the worst possible moment, if you follow me. You are an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So I suppose you’re in a hotel. Which?”

He told her, and she walked off across the grass with her hands in her pockets, humming a cheerful tune. After a little she began to skip on every other step, as though joy had made her too light to stick to the ground.

When she was out of sight, he opened the stardropper again and, out of curiosity, put in the earpiece. The knob was still on the setting which had given her so much pleasure. He upped the power and waited.