The Stardroppers (6 page)

The sound when Redvers exhaled in relief was like a ray of light cutting brief but alarming darkness. Dan deduced that in the past he’d had a lot of trouble from people making tactless remarks to Rainshaw. However, the scientist himself appeared not to notice. He went on talking, looking at nothing.

“Robin—well, I’d have trusted Robin’s judgment as implicitly as I trust my own. He was never gullible, or easily deluded. He’d shown promise of more originality than I did at his age, and he was certainly a very dependable partner to work with. We were working together on my effect, you know, right up until the time he—ah—disappeared. And he did believe there was usable knowledge to be had from the signals.”

“Where did he get this idea?” Dan ventured.

“As far as I know, it was original with himself. I’ve been asked, over and over”—with a faint reproving smile at Redvers—“whether he’d fallen under the influence of one of these mystical cults, but I’m certain if he had, he’d have asked what I thought about their teachings, and he never breathed a word about anything of the sort.”

“Did he indicate what kind of knowledge he thought might be extracted from the signals?” Dan inquired.

“I can quote you exactly what he said, on our last evening together. We’d been arguing about this very point, and he said, ‘It’s so hard to capture in words—so remote from everyday experience—that I get the feeling it may really come from an alien mind.’ He’d been struggling for hours to persuade me to his way of thinking, you see. It seemed actively painful for him to admit that he was failing. He even began to doubt himself, and that was why he went to his room to listen again to his big stardropper, the
one he’d built himself. When I went to call him to dinner, he wasn’t there. And he definitely hadn’t left the house by any normal route.”

Recounting incredible things, his voice was mechanical—drained of emotional judgments like belief and skepticism.

“You didn’t hear anything?” Dan said. “No noise?”

Rainshaw seemed to come back to the present from a long way off. “No noise, Mr. Cross,” he said heavily. “I’ve heard the same stories you seem to have, about people who vanished with a clap of thunder. I don’t know anything about that. All I can say is my boy had gone, and he didn’t leave by a door or a window. Besides, he had nothing to run away from. He was working for his doctorate and he was fascinated by his research; he was engaged to marry a charming girl.… No, I can only accept that he was right. He learned something from his stardropper, and the knowledge enabled him to go—elsewhere. I haven’t any hope of following him. Young minds are flexible, and I’m growing old.”

Like all-too-obvious background music, a spray of rain rattled at the windows and settled to a steady depressing downpour.

Accompanying Dan to the exit, Redvers set a slow pace, as though vainly hoping the rain might be over by the time they reached the outside. He said abruptly, on the point of crossing the threshold, “Remember you asked whether I really believed those stories of people disappearing?”

Dan nodded.

“I desperately want not to! But—well, I was assigned to check on Robin Rainshaw, and you’ve heard what his father says about his case. Faced with that kind of thing, how the hell
can
I laugh the stories off?”

“I see what you mean,” Dan admitted. He had precisely the same reaction. Looking toward Redver’s bright-blue car, whose top had gone up automatically at the first spatter of rain, he added, “He said he couldn’t do what his son did because his mind isn’t adaptable enough. Have most of the—ah—disappearers been very young?”

“Some, not all,” Redvers said. He glanced at the sky.
“Come on, it’s not raining that hard.” But his shoes squelched in newly deep puddles as he led the way to the car. “Besides, it can’t just be a question of young minds being more flexible. A hell of a lot of youngsters go insane. There hasn’t been anything like it since that crazy outbreak of LSD addiction in the middle sixties. I was a brand-new detective-constable then, and I used to hate bringing those kids in—but what else could you do, when they were drooling and playing with their fingers? That, thank heaven, is over, but I’m not sure this new problem isn’t even worse.”

Seated at the wheel, he made no move to start the car, but sat watching raindrops trickle down the windshield.

“I can’t grapple with things on this scale any longer,” he said suddenly. “I’m forty-one years old, Cross, but I feel
ancient
. I just have this continual sensation that the world is shaking apart, cracking at the crust, and we’re going to drop into a bottomless fissure any moment.”

“We’ve felt that way for more than a generation,” Dan reminded him.

“Oh, hell!
I
know we’re lucky not to have blown ourselves up long ago! But it’s one thing to be scared of what other people may do in the mass—an incompetent government, or a mob led by some hysterical rabblerouser. That’s humanity, and we’re stuck with it. Underneath everything you can’t really think of it as alien, and I believe what’s saved us for so long is the plain undeniable fact that we’re all human beings. Here, though, you’ve got something with no precedent. Alien knowledge, they tell us. Is it?
I
don’t know. But it does change people in subtle ways. You were telling me that this girl Lilith scares you because she cares so little about the risk of going crazy. That’s not ordinary human, Cross. Most people would rather be dead than insane. Am I making sense, or just rambling?”

“I think you’re making a lot of sense,” Dan said. His mouth was very dry.

“And we can’t know”—Redvers had only paused for the answer, not listened to it—“what goes on in these minds that are being changed. Not unless we get involved ourselves. I did. I found you can go so far, and then you have to make a choice: quit cold and seek help to prevent you
going back, which is what I did, or decide that the rewards you can’t yet understand are going to be worth more than your home, your family, your job.… Ah, let’s go. I have work to do back in town.”

He let the stored steam from earlier into the main cylinder with a faint hiss and seesawed the car out of its parking space. He didn’t say anything else until they were on the road back toward central London. Then, without warning, he said, “That address your—ah—girl friend gave you. It sounded familiar. What was it again?”

Dan had memorized it; to repeat it he didn’t have to consult his memo book. Redvers gave a nod.

“Yes, I place it now. It’s a kind of commune, isn’t it?”

“That’s what Lilith said,” Dan confirmed. “Why do you know about it? Have the people there given you any trouble?”

“Funnily enough, no. Apart from the fact that once a boy who was staying in the house went out of his head in the middle of the night and tried to walk off the top of the roof into midair. But they called us up at once, and—” Redvers shrugged. “That’s the trouble with a bloody ‘free country’! You can’t do things to people for their own good! I hate to think what’s becoming of the kids who are roosting there, in that high-pressure environment full of mystical nonsense, but there isn’t a thing I can do to make them go home to their parents.”

“Are there a lot of stardropper communes?”

“Dozens. Maybe hundreds by this time.”

“And are all the people in them young?”

“Nope. I know one, so help me, which is full of lapsed Benedictine monks—broke with their Order and set up house in a derelict railway station which they bought on a mortgage. Most of them are as old as I am. But the one you’re going to this afternoon is run by a fellow of—oh—twenty-four, twenty-five, name of Nicholas Carlton. Comes of a very good family. Ex-public-school prefect, captain of games, that sort of thing. Married. Wife lives there too and acts as housekeeper. There’s a floating population of around a dozen, I think. But he runs it very efficiently, no doubt of that. Don’t go expecting to find a kind of flophouse.”

“That’s interesting,” Dan nodded.

“Interesting!” Redvers snorted. “I could think of another word. Carlton has intelligence and talent, and he ought to put his gifts to better use. But I’ll let you form your own judgment; that’s what you’re here for, after all.” He hesitated.

“Come to think of it,” he went on, “it’s a long time since I checked that place out. Must be three months at least. Do me a favor: when you leave, call me at the Yard and tell me what things are like there now.”

Dan nodded. It didn’t seem like too much to ask.

Glancing at the clock on the dash, Redvers said, “I’d take you to lunch out of public funds if I could, but I’m afraid I simply can’t spare the time. I’ve been working a twelve-hour day as a matter of course recently, and I’m only scheduled for eight-plus-two. And once or twice it’s gone up to fifteen.”

“Don’t expect me to burst out crying,” Dan said wryly.

“Sorry. I deserved that. You Agency chaps are on permanent standby, aren’t you?”

“Every day of the year, every hour of the day. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the world suddenly came to the boil all at once. My estimate is that I’d be working a forty-eight-hour day.”

Redvers chuckled without humor. “That’s an alien skill,” he commented. “And if we already have people who can pull that sort of trick, why the hell anyone should bother going hunting for anything even more extraordinary beats me. … Well, we’re getting into the middle of town. Where’s the best place for me to drop you off?”

Paying off his cab outside the address Lilith had given him, Dan glanced up at the house he’d been brought to. It was large, probably Victorian, in a district which he guessed would have been developed for the aspiring middle class—prosperous tradesmen and people of that kind. The tall, five-story brick buildings had mainly been subdivided, at least judging by the number of cars crammed into what had once been the front gardens but were now uniformly concrete parking areas.

This one, in particular, was very well kept, the window-frames recently painted white, the brickwork carefully repointed. At one of the upper windows he caught a flash of movement, and thought he recognized Lilith; she must have been watching out for him.

He walked up the path to the front door, having to thread his way between a couple of small Morrises so close together it was a wonder the driver of the second one to arrive had been able to get out when he stopped. His ringing of the bell was answered almost instantly, by a girl of twenty-five or so, not very pretty but with attractive long fair hair, wearing what had once been a red-and-white jumpsuit but was now red-and-pink after much washing.

“Yes?” she said.

“Are you—uh—Mrs. Carlton?” Dan hazarded.

“Yes,” the girl confirmed. “And what—?”

She was interrupted by a shout from behind her. Lilith had made it to the first-floor landing. “It’s for me, Barbie!” she called, and came down the final flight of stairs in three eager bounds. Rushing forward, she seemed to have to restrain the impulse to hug Dan.

“I thought you weren’t going to come after all!” she exclaimed.

Standing aside, Barbie Carlton looked puzzled, and a trifle put out. Noticing, catching at Dan’s hand to draw him inside, Lilith said, “Oh,
Barbie!
This is the guy I was expecting, the one with the American fuel-cell ‘dropper!’”

Instantly Barbie showed excitement. “Ah!” she murmured, her eyes fastening hungrily on the instrument Dan carried, its strap still in a crude knot as a memorial to Lilith’s unsuccessful attempt at theft. “Yes, Nick said something about that. Shall I call him? I’m sure he’d be interested.”

Lilith’s face fell, For her, plainly, the whole point of bringing Dan here was to have another private session with his stardropper. But it was her turn to be interrupted. A door at the far end of the hallway—giving onto a kitchen-living room, by the brief glimpse Dan had of what lay beyond—opened and revealed a young man with a shaven head, rather thin, wearing neat but old black pants and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“Is that your American friend, Lil?” he inquired, and on Lilith’s nod advanced, hand outstretched. His accent had already indicated he was probably Nicholas Carlton before he gave Dan his name.

“And you’ve got a Binton!” he said. “Which does something for Lil that all the other twenty-nine instruments in this house can’t! It must be quite a gadget, I must say. Well, come on in. Barbie, don’t let the guy stand there on the step! You’ve met my wife Barbara, I take it?”

During this, Dan had been taking in a series of quick impressions. They fitted what Redvers had told him. He’d been vaguely expecting something like the drug-using communes he’d occasionally visited, rather squalid, inevitably untidy, with at least the smell of decay if no actual overt garbage in the corners. This hallway, however, was starkly clean, recently painted white, and the tiled floor glistened as though it had been washed within the past hour or two. There was little furniture in sight but the hat stand—a Victorian relic—and the bookcase which he could see were well dusted, and there was a coarse Irish sisal carpet on the stairs, neatly secured by
brass rods. There was a faint odor of disinfectant, piney and pleasant.

Whether or not one can tell a man by the company he keeps, Dan had long ago decided, one can certainly learn a lot about him by examining the place where he has chosen to live. At first sight, this house corresponded exactly to what Redevers had told him about Carlton; ex-prefect in an expensive boarding school. There was something school-like, or even barracks-like, about the starched inhuman, but at least it wasn’t sordid.

Lilith was standing beside him quivering with impatience, and Barbie eying him with a hint of suspicion. It was time he said something, preferably affable.

“You heard how I ran into Lilith, I guess?” he said, and read from her face that she hadn’t told the whole story.

“I gather you ran into her in Oxford Street, near Cosmica,” Nick Carlton said, “and kindly let her try out your Binton.”

“And promised to let me have another go with it today,” Lilith said meaningly.

Dan chuckled. “Well, here you are!” he said, unslinging it. Continuing to Nick, he added, “I was very interested when she said she was in this—this commune, by the way. I’ve only just started digging around in the field, and I thought it would be worth my talking to some people who take it really seriously.”

“You don’t?” Nick said in surprise, and Dan saw the light of the dedicated proselytizer come into his eyes. “And yet you shelled out for a Binton? Man, either you’re rolling in money or you’re the kind of guy who never does anything by halves!”

Dan smiled. “Well, not the former, that’s for sure. But I like to think I might be the latter. So since I’d promised Lilith she could try my instrument again, I thought I might as well take the chance of talking to the people here. If it’s not an imposition.”

“Imposition hell,” Nick said. “I
love
talking about stardroppers.” He glanced at Lilith, who was practically trembling with her eagerness to make herself scarce with Dan’s instrument. “You’re about to bust a gut, aren’t you?” he commented. “Suppose you make it on up to your room,
and I’ll entertain Mr. Cross for a bit. Barbie, can you find us a drop of wine, or beer?”

“Tea or coffee,” Barbie said firmly.

“Either will be fine,” Dan said, realizing an answer was expected of him.

“Bless you, Nick!” Lilith exclaimed, and headed for the stairs at a dead run. Checking on the first landing, she blew Dan a kiss, and vanished. A door slammed high overhead.

“Well, come into the kitchen, then,” Nick invited, and led the way. “We have to entertain visitors here, I’m afraid, because we let out all the rooms—or rather, we don’t exactly
let
them. But I don’t suppose I have to explain that this is a genuine commune, and we all put into it what we have to spare.”

Closing the door as he waved Dan to a chair at the end of a plain wooden dining table, Barbie gave an audible snort.

“Barbara isn’t quite as dedicated as I am,” Nick said apologetically. “I do happen to be quite well off, actually—inherited it—and I can’t think of anything better to do with what I’ve got than run this place. But when there isn’t quite enough to go around, it’s poor Barbie who has to figure out how to make ends meet. Still, she’s a miracle-worker, aren’t you, doll?”

Giving her an affectionate pat on the bottom as he passed, he dropped into a chair facing Dan. Meantime, she began to fill a kettle.

“So you wanted to talk to the people here,” Nick resumed. “I imagine I’ll probably have to do—I’m notoriously not only the most articulate but also the most loudmouthed of the members of this little group. Also I turn off reporters very efficiently.
You’re
not a reporter, are you?”

Dan shook his head, and repeated his standard cover story about how he’d been hooked by a friend recently, just before coming to London for a vacation.

“What really intrigued me,” he concluded, “was being told by Lilith that only one kind of stardropper suited her. I find this hard to believe. Didn’t you say you have—was it twenty-nine in this house alone?”

“Right. And all different,” Nick confirmed.

“Well, if everyone here is getting
something
out of—”

“Oh, we haven’t got twenty-nine people,” Nick interrupted. “If that’s what you’re thinking. We have eleven. And they all have at least one instrument apiece, and I have six. The total is due to hit thirty in a day or two; we have someone working on a big kit-built wall-outlet unit. Show it to you later if you like—I think the guy went out for a meal.”

Dan nodded. “But are all these ’droppers of different makes?” he inquired.

“Nope. Some of the manufacturers are simply in it for the money. There’s a firm called Glory Joy, for instance, out in Hong Kong. If anyone offers you one of their products, drop it and run. You can’t even say the repertoire of a Glory Joy stinks because it doesn’t
have
a, repertoire. So what we have is a selection of what we’ve found to be the best and most versatile instruments, and we have—oh—five or six duplicates, at least.”

“But not including a Gale and Welchman?”

“Funnily enough, no. That’s the one Lil keeps singing the praises of, but everyone in the house has tried a sample of it out, and nobody else gets what she got from it. You?”

“I find it the most attractive instrument I’ve listened to,” Dan admitted after a brief pause.

“Weird,” Nick said with an air of satisfaction. “Because for me it does nothing. Nothing at all.”

“If Lilith gets so much out of that particular model, though,” Dan suggested, “couldn’t you have—well—maybe loaned her the money for a secondhand one? She was in a terrible state when I met her yesterday, and she said it was due to being without her ’dropper.”

“No.” The tone was final. “There’s one absolutely inflexible rule about this commune of ours; regardless of what else you put into it, you
must
contribute at least one stardropper. Lilith is a special case because she would have brought hers except that her mother smashed it up. You haven’t met her mother, have you? No, I suppose you couldn’t have. Christ, what a nasty woman!” Nick grimaced. “So, to be perfectly candid, Lil is—ah—on probation here. We had a spare room, and we discussed it, and we decided if she was really serious about living with us she’d find the wherewithal to buy a ’dropper of her favorite
make. Since we don’t have one already, it would be a valuable addition to our range.”

“How?” Dan countered. “By saving up out of her state unemployment benefits?” He knew she was entitled to those; anyone in Britain over the legal age to leave school was, though for people whose parents were prepared to go on accommodating them the weekly allowance was a pittance. “Or—”

He suddenly recollected what Lilith had said about doing anything he wanted her to do if he’d let her use the Binton ’dropper.

“Or going on the streets?” he finished savagely.

Neither Nick nor his wife was shocked by the accusation; instead, they were mildly amused. “You must be joking,” Nick said. “What makes you think there’s still money to be made on the game in this country? All the prostitutes’ old customers have died off—in London, mean. It’s different in a place like—oh—Bradford.”

“Or where you were at school,” Barbie said. The kettle had boiled, and she was making cups of instant coffee.

Nick chuckled. “True, true! My school was allegedly very enlightened and progressive, but when it came to my trying to take a girl to bed with me in the dormitory, they drew the line. Which is how I happened to become one of the few survivors of the old guard who lost their virginity to—ah—professional therapists. Barbie’s never got over that. But what the hell has this to do with what we’re supposed to be talking about?”

Accepting sugar for his coffee, Dan said, “Well, I was about to ask why one has to have this vast range of different instruments, when everyone seems to settle on a personal favorite. Only we got sidetracked.”

“Good question,” Nick nodded. “Part of the answer is that people are different, too. My favorite isn’t Barbie’s, let alone that thing Lil likes so much, which I consider grossly overrated but which nonetheless is the second or third most popular brand of all. But, contrariwise, I
like
the one Barbie prefers, and I’m coming around to the suspicion that when I’m through with my current phase it may offer me something my present favorite doesn’t. Are you with me?”

“One can—uh—go stale on some particular instrument?” Dan suggested.

“Oh, surely!
I
think Lilith had gone stale on her Gale and Welchman, if she got so much out of a very advanced machine like your Binton at her first attempt. Have you tried many different instruments?”

Dan shook his head. “My friend who hooked me has a Binton, and recommended it so highly I went straight for that.”

“If I gave you, this minute, twice what you paid for it, would you sell it to me?” Nick inquired.

“Ah … I probably would,” Dan conceded.

“In that case you ought to have shopped around. Bintons are very powerful—at least I’ve heard so; I never actually tried one. Ideally, you should be so much in love with the ’dropper you’re currently using you’d rather part with your right arm. I’d let five of our six go with a smile, but the other one—
oh
, no!” He grinned engagingly. “Though ask me again in six months, and it may well be a different one I like. Let me bring in my own collection, and I’ll show you some of the differences between them.”

Fortunately, Dan wasn’t asked outright which were his own favorites among the assorted instruments the Carltons made him experiment with. Large and heavy or small and light, plastic or wood, metal or cloth, they seemed very much alike to him, although Nick kept making such comments as “This has a magnificent repertoire!” or “I can’t think what Barbie sees in this one, but she’d slaughter me if I let anything happen to it!”

Becoming much involved herself now in this display of their treasures, Barbie pulled a face at him and launched into an attempted explanation of her preference. Having found that all the noises he was invited to listen to were as enigmatic—and occasionally as unpleasant—as those he could find in his own stardropper, Dan hardly made an effort to follow her; instead, he took the chance of asking some questions that had been troubling him.

“Ah … does anything that you know of help in figuring out the signals?” he ventured.

“What do you mean?” countered Nick.

“Well—is there anything one can take, for example?”