The Stardroppers (7 page)

“You mean drugs?” The young man tensed. “Don’t let anyone kid you into trying that sort of shortcut! Most of the bad cases you see around, the nutters babbling to themselves, thought they could save trouble by like getting stoned on acid before ’dropping. We had one like that ourselves, and the poor bastard wound up falling off the roof and breaking his pelvis! Since then we’ve made it an inflexible rule not to let drugs in the place. Oh, I don’t mean we’re puritanical about it, but—well, we allow beer and wine, but no spirits; the occasional joint of regular pot, but no high-concentration hash. You get me? And that’s only to unwind with, because you can get terribly tense if you’re straining after a difficult set of signals. Personally, I find the best time to use a ’dropper is about an hour or two after breakfast, when I’m well rested but back in tune with waking life. On the other hand some people like it best at two in the morning, when everything around is very quiet. It’s a matter of temperament, I imagine.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Dan murmured. There was a pause.

“By the way,” Nick said with a trace of diffidence, “while it’s on the premises, would you mind very much if I tried out your Binton too?”

“Sure,” Dan shrugged. “Provided Lilith’s through with it.”

“Oh, by now she must be,” Nick assured him. “We’ve been chatting”—he checked his watch—“Christ, nearly two hours! I’ll pop up and see how she’s doing. She may very well have fallen asleep, you know. Lots of people do, after a bout of intensive ’dropping. Barbie doll, fix some more coffee while I’m gone, hm?”

He left the kitchen door open behind him, and his feet could be heard on the stairs as he ran up to Lilith’s room. Accepting the offer of the coffee, Dan idly inspected the stardroppers ranked on the table before him, noting the individual design variations but unable to associate them with the different signals he’d had demonstrated.

His line of thought was suddenly cut short by a cry from Nick, shouting down from the upstairs landing.

“Dan! Barbie! Lilith’s gone out!”

Barbie almost dropped her kettle as she made to replace
it on the stove, and rushed to the door. “Are you sure?” she called back. Following her, Dan caught her arm.

“Does he mean she made off with—?”

“With your ’droper?” By this time Nick had reached the lowest flight of stairs and was coming down them two at a time, eyes shining. “No, I have it here. But there was a note tucked in the strap—see?”

He showed the instrument to Dan. The strap was tidily wound around the case, and between two turns the corner of a sheet of paper had been slipped, bearing the single-word message “Thanks!”

Suddenly the hallway was alive with people. Every door leading onto it, and onto the upper landings, opened, and the entire commune group hurried to assemble around Dan and Nick. He heard confusing remarks he couldn’t fathom—“Went out? Must have been a good one! What with? Binton! Hey do you suppose if I …?”

Eventually he sorted things out. These people believed, like Dr. Rainshaw, that Lilith had been able physically and literally to vanish. There seemed to be only one sensible thing to do. While everyone else was involved in the babble of excited discussion, he slipped out of the house to find a phone booth, and from there called Redvers at the Yard.

There was a long silence after he had recounted the afternoon’s events. At last the superintendent gave a heavy sigh.

“This is where it really starts, Cross. Not when a young genius like Robin Rainshaw goes out. When the word gets around that a mere schoolkid has done it—someone who most likely took up stardropping as a fad, because so many of her friends were doing it. I expect it to rain for forty days. And I don’t know where the Ark is, or even if there’s one being built.”

The flood image was one which Dan himself had in mind already. He’d just been mentally comparing his situation with that of a man who sets out to cross an apparently level street awash with rainwater, and finds the puddles up to his waist and still rising.

Compared to other assignments he’d undertaken for the Agency, this mission had seemed petty. Granting that the discovery of a means of instantaneous displacement could entrain all the consequences he’d discussed with Redvers, he hadn’t taken that aspect of the matter seriously. He’d been told to come to Britain and talk with stardropping fans, learn what he could about the rumors of researchers disappearing, but not with any expectations of confirming them—only with the intention of assessing whether the resulting social disturbance threatened to destabilize the precarious balance of world peace.

But according to what he’d been given so far—it would be an exaggeration to say “what he’d found out”—the Agency had fallen into a trap it had managed to evade for the first twelve years of its existence. It had taken for granted that something unprecedented couldn’t be true. Collectively, the Agency shared Dan’s original view of
stardropping: just another fad, which would have its day and wane, leaving no more than a few negligible traces of its passage.

What they’d mistaken for the rumble of traffic, in other words, had proved to be the harbinger of earthquakes.

Dry-mouthed, he said to Redvers, “You don’t seem to disbelieve these people’s acceptance that Lilith genuinely vanished.”

“I told you this morning: what Rainshaw believes, I’m driven to believe myself. You too?”

“I—I don’t
want
to,” Dan muttered.

“Want or not want, it doesn’t make any difference. This is damned well
happening
! I appreciate your giving me an early warning of this latest case, but all I can do is drop some heavy hints to the various news media, and sooner or later hints will stop being any use. People are beginning to get scared, you know.”

“Of what? Disappearing?”

“Hell, no! Someone else getting at this secret first.”

“I saw two Chinese in Cosmica Limited yesterday,” Dan said. “I wondered about that. Doesn’t the Chinese government discourage stardropping?”

“True, but they have a crash research program staffed by brilliant university students. Didn’t your briefing tell you that? I thought that point wouldn’t have been overlooked. And Rainshaw is working at a state research centre here, instead of for the commercial company that used to employ him. Cross, when I told you everyone else had got into this scene ahead of the Agency, I wasn’t playing with words. It’s
fact
. I feel like a man trying to beat out a fire with an old dry sack, and finding sparks burning holes through every time he thinks it’s smothered. Can’t you imagine what’ll happen the day someone really newsworthy vanishes from the plain sight of reputable witnesses? All those headlines: ‘Secret lore from Aliens! Miracle talents from Stardropping!’ A few thousand people will kill themselves in frustration; a few tens of thousands, already into the act, will move on to the stage of real addiction and give up caring about ordinary living; and a few
millions
will go out and buy their first stardroppers, convinced it’s something they have to take seriously after all.”

“Is just disappearing such a tempting thing?”

“Try looking at it less critically. Think of it as
performing a miracle
, and you’ll see.” There was a drumming noise from the far end of the phone line, as though Redvers was beating on his desk with bunched knuckles. “
I
don’t find anything madly attractive about that kind of supernatural parlor trick, and I don’t imagine you do. But because of Berghaus’s theory, a lot of people will reason it this way: someone has alien talent I haven’t got; someone who doesn’t like me can use that talent against me; I’ve got to get in first! It’s what the military strategists have been warning us about for years, the crucial breakthrough by one side which is likely to make the other side so desperate they’ll feel compelled to hit out before they’re put at a hopeless and permanent disadvantage. Cross, how soon are you going to file your first report?”

“Well—”

“I’m asking you,” Redvers cut in, “to do it today. I haven’t any authority for that, but … well, the Agency is a kind of planetary fire brigade, isn’t it? And I smell smoke.”

Dan thought for a long moment.

“I’ll put in a report at once,” he said finally. “And what’s more I’m going to code it red.”

“Thank God,” Redvers said. “If that means anything. I used to think it did. Nowadays I’m not sure any longer.”

Dan had left his Binton being passed from hand to hand among the marveling members of the stardropper commune. He didn’t bother going back for it. It was expensive, and he’d be required to account for its loss, but right now, he’d as soon have gone to take back a bagful of rattlesnakes.

The report he planned to file could be turned in over an ordinary phone circuit; however, there were good reasons for preferring privacy at the speaking end of the connection, and since Redver’s men had already checked his hotel room for bugs, he headed straight back there. He was given a clear transatlantic satellite connection very quickly, it being by now after business hours in London, and shortly heard a familiar recorded voice inviting him
to go ahead, followed by the three shrill pips which were a key to his personal code. He closed his eyes.

“Oh-four,” he said. “Equanimity is inversely by the clyster. When it was in the trivial four-by-four the virtue was imported, but the wall fell between the crackle and the potiphar…”

It was a curious uplifting sensation to hear himself speak this way, perhaps akin to the transcendental insight some people claimed to achieve through drugs or starvation or delirium. During his first two years with the Agency, he had undergone a complete course of analysis conducted by a specially trained neo-Freudian. From the complex personal associations revealed by the analysis they had built up a word-for-word code covering the equivalent of a good-sized desk dictionary. New words and personal names could be spelled out; for every letter of the alphabet and for every number up to a hundred there were a dozen associated phrases. Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs.

The memorizing had taken a mere three months. Now, at the Agency’s main office in New York, there was a computer—number 04—into which they would feed the tape bearing his report, and it would print out in clear.

The method wasn’t perfect. It was fat, to begin with, running a minimum twenty percent longer than clear language and occasionally as much as sixty percent, and sometimes sentence structure survived the coding procedure. But because the equivalence depended on Dan’s personal memories and not on a process that could be attacked statistically it would probably take longer to break than it had taken to build up. Even Dan himself could not decipher a transcript of one of his own reports; it required a post-hypnotic trigger, such as the three pips he’d heard on the phone this time, to make the code accessible to his conscious mind.

Four pips on a lower tone followed his signing off, and he instantly forgot again how to speak in the code. His sense of elation lingered, though. It was sometimes very strong, as he imagined the aftermath of a vision might be to a mystic—a feeling that he had been briefly in closer
touch with reality. He’d asked the analyst who had laid the foundations for the code about this, and had been told that in fact there was a more mundane explanation. Most people, the analyst asserted, had the ability to recall in the proper context a word they hadn’t thought of for years, even decades: perhaps a technical term, perhaps a foreign name. Given the right stimulus, up it would pop. And this of itself usually made the person affected feel pleased. In the case of an Agency code, there was a reinforcement Ordinary language was a series of labels invented by other people; Agency codes were derived from remembered events that were exclusively significant to the user, so recovering the knowledge of them and knowing them to have been usefully employed was a little like the case of a composer, say, who while walking down the street heard other people, total strangers, humming a song he had made up so long ago he’d almost forgotten about it.

Whatever explanation might account for the experience, it was a valid one. Dan felt like a cat full of cream as he lounged in his armchair after completing his report. It wasn’t until, feeling for his cigarettes, he discovered a slip of paper in his pocket that he snapped back into contact with reality.

He’d abandoned his stardropper at the Carlton’s commune. But he’d claimed the note Lilith had left, with its single scribbled word bold and black on the narrow white page.

Had she slipped away like a mouse into a hole, wanting perfect privacy for some reason of her own? Or had she gone as Dr. Rainshaw alleged his son had gone—“miraculously”? If so, should he pity her?

Or envy her?

Which?

Through the main bar of the Hunting Horn pub, up a flight of stairs, he reached the meetingplace of the Club Cosmica. At the head of the stairs a girl volunteer was taking admission fees—a student, by the look of her. She was furnished with a list of recognized guests on which she found his name, and waved him by without charging anything.

He passed on into a large room, divided by a heavy curtain three-quarters drawn into a meeting hall with rows of chairs facing a dais and a kind of antechamber where there was a bar. It was still nearly twenty minutes before the advertised time of starting, but already there were some forty people standing around in knots of four to six.

The people he’d met at the commune this afternoon had been—congruous? Was there such a word? The hell with it. They fitted. He recalled Redver’s wry joke about “stardropping out.” The members of the commune were the Carltons’ age or younger, clean but shabbily dressed, with the indefinable stamp of the social rebel. Here, in utter contrast, the atmosphere was that of a heavily patronized bar in some prosperous business district: the men wore well-tailored suits, the women and girls had fashionable outfits and expensive coiffures, not to mention jewelry restrained enough to be very valuable. And they were drinking vodkatinis or dry sherry.

The sheer paradox of it confused him terribly. When else in all of history had people joined smart social clubs to meddle with something equally dangerous?

Oh, maybe in ancient China they had fireworks parties and amused themselves elegantly with that newly discovered substance, gunpowder!

Affable, Watson spotted him and came over to greet
him. Having bought him a drink, he invited him to meet some of the members. As he was piloted from group to group, Dan caught snatches of conversation, but like the articles in the hobby magazines he’d read, it all seemed dismayingly remote from the reality of a girl who had vanished from her tiny attic room, or a father mourning the loss of a son he did not believe dead yet never expected to see again.

“—but the whole question of subjective-objective comes in here, so let’s not get metaphysical. Objective so far as we are concerned means you can make it do things. Postulate a field such that—”

“—concede that an installation like his certainly uses a lot of power, but where’s the benefit in that? Anyone could hook a ’dropper on a thirty-two-thousand-volt power cable and the signals would be heard from here to Yucatan, but it’s a waste of effort,
I
think—”

Those speakers were both serious, intense young men, illustrating their points with slipsticks. Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express. They seemed infinitely distant from anything Dan had encountered in other contexts.

“—nature of the signal in Berghaus’s view. I mean, identity of function isn’t identity of nature. Department of truisms now open.” This was a man of about thirty in an old suit, his hair rumpled, his eyes fierce and bright behind strong glasses. “To say this is what the signals are
like
tells you precisely nothing. Any day now someone may work up an explanation without reference to psychic continua at all.”

On his left a girl with shoulder-length fair hair, dressed in lounging culottes and a fashionable tunic of imitation feathers, gave a slow headshake. “I think you should try being a bit more humble, Jerry. To my mind the first thing the signals convey is what they are. Just by listening you get this instinctive sense you’re eavesdropping on the minds of the universe at work.”

“Maybe it does to you, Angel. To me it says nothing of the kind. You’re just oversusceptible. Your imagination was caught by Berghaus’s idea, and bang! It was revealed truth.”

The girl he had called Angel raised one eyebrow. She was very pretty, but her face was drawn and tired. She said, “Well, well! Jerry Berghaus plus, I presume! You know as well as I do that Berghaus approached the matter with an open mind—”

“And leapt miles ahead of any objective evidence!” snapped Jerry.

“Because he experienced for himself the self-identifying information in stardropper signals!” the girl flared.

Watson excused himself to Dan in a whisper and went through to the other half of the hall; there were some sort of preparations going on the dais, presumably for the promised demonstration.

“Look,” the man Jerry said with careful patience, “no one disputes that Berghaus accounted neatly for precognition. What I’m saying is that when he came to stardropping he applied Occam’s razor needlessly and stretched his precog theory to include that too simply because of the one factor they had in common: neither could be explained in traditional terms.”

A lean, fiftyish man on the other side of Angel took a pipe from his mouth and frowned. “But is Berghaus what you’d call an enthusiast?” he said. “I gather he’s not.”

“He told me—” Dan said, and broke off, because instantly all the eyes of the group were on him. Well, it was a fast way of staking his claim in the conversation. “He told me he thought that if the signals are of alien origin they’ll probably be intrinsically incomprehensible.”

“You know Berghaus?” Angel said in a wondering voice.

“Well, I’ve met him and talked about this to him.”

“And that louse Wally Watson didn’t bother to mention it to us?”

“I don’t think I told him,” Dan said. He felt the mood of the group shift toward awe:
here’s a man who knows Berghaus and is modest about it!
All the dogmatism went out of Jerry. He spoke in a changed voice.

“Well—uh—I’m Jerry Bartlett, and this is Angel Allen. And Leon Patrick,” the man with the pipe offered his hand for a foursquare shake. “And …”

The other two in the group muttered names Dan barely heard; they both seemed to be listeners, not talkers. Angel kept her eyes on his face.

“But he must take his theory seriously,” she insisted.

“I assume he does. But he certainly doesn’t pin as much faith to it as most people seem to.”

“So much for your ‘self-identifying’ bit,” Jerry said to Angel.

“Not at all.” She rounded on him sharply. “Can you tell me how it feels to ride a bicycle?”

“Don’t be irrelevant. You sit astride it, you put one foot—”

“I didn’t ask you to explain the mechanics of it. I said tell me how it feels. You can’t verbalize the balancing sensation you experience. But you can learn it when it happen to you. Human beings
can
absorb nonverbal knowledge. We just aren’t very good at it.”

“You’re not falling for this supernatural-wisdom bit, are you?” Jerry’s bluster was beginning to return.

“If you’ve started to resort to loaded words like ‘supernatural,’ it seems to me you’re afraid of being convinced. In which case, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m a physicist. Stardropper signals are a phenomenon in my province, obviously. What annoys me is people like you telling me I ought to be humble—when did
I
claim to know more than Berghaus?”

Angel sighed. “What gives you the impression that
I
did? All I’m saying is that he proposed his theory because the signals convey a hint of their own nature, which I’ve experienced myself. If Berghaus does have reservations, that’s what I’ve always been taught to regard as a proper scientific attitude. Now let’s hear your reasons for contesting
that
!”

Before Jerry could utter his counterblast, plainly boiling at the tip of his tongue, they were interrupted by Watson’s voice calling them to take their places for the demonstration, and they joined a slow shuffling procession into the other half of the room. Dan hoped the argument might resume later. There was something reassuring about the fact that some people at least were approaching the subject from this highly critical standpoint, instead of simply swallowing Berghaus’s theory whole in the manner displayed by the members of the Carlton’s commune.

At Angel’s invitation, he took a place in the front row
between her and the pipe-smoking Leon Patrick. On the dais stood a huge stardropper on a rubber-tired trolley, attended by Watson and a roly-poly man in shiny-seated slacks and a green sweater; while Watson made delicate adjustments to its controls, the latter was listening intently through earphones, gesturing vigorously.

The adjustments satisfactorily completed and the audience settled down, Watson called the meeting to order and read a set of formal minutes, which were largely concerned with routine matters such as raising the membership fee and organizing a charter flight for members of the club to attend a stardropping congress in Oslo. Then he called for a report from the membership secretary, a drab woman of young middle age, noticeably worse-clad than most other people here, about whom the only touch of color was her hair—faded carroty-red, and probably dyed. Dan gathered that her name was Mrs. Towler.

But he didn’t pay much attention to these proceedings; they seemed appallingly banal.

Eventually, however, all that was disposed of, and Watson rose again to introduce their guest speaker for the evening: the roly-poly man, whom he presented as Dr. Jock Neill from the University of Strathbran in Scotland.

Neill was very excitable; he talked fast, with a great deal of jargon, and what was worse from Dan’s point of view with a ferocious Scots accent. After the first few minutes it hardly seemed worth trying to follow his discourse in detail; accordingly he let his mind drift back to the line of argument Angel and Jerry had been pursuing.

The girl’s contention that the signals were self-identifying was as useful a piece of logic as a medieval schoolman’s. If you didn’t accept the postulate, it fell down; if you did, it was a perfect defense against any contrary assertion. She seemed to have accepted it
in toto
. Did her obvious tiredness indicate that she was in an obsession-state akin to Lilith’s, and merely better equipped than a simple schoolgirl to put her opinions into convincing words? There was no way, as yet, that Dan could tell, but he made a mental note to engage her in further conversation.

It would be very reassuring to find that in some cases,
at least, stardropper “addiction” could co-exist with enduring rationality.

Was Jerry an example of that? Dan rather thought not. He was such a contrast with Angel. Clearly he was a skeptic, waiting for the evidence of some special personal experience before conceding that there were truths not accounted for in his scientific canon. He had said he was a physicist, investigating a phenomenon in his own province, but on the basis of what he’d been told in his briefing, let alone what he had more recently learned, Dan would have been prepared to argue the contrary. Even Berghaus agreed that a stardropper transcended orthodox physics. That might well be what was making Jerry so dogmatic and aggressive—the suspicion that his cherished beliefs were about to be overturned.

A painful process!

Neill reached the end of his exposition, to the relief of some people in the audience who had apparently lost track in the same way as Dan, and the lights went down and the demonstration began. From a speaker hung on the side of the stardropper trolley there swelled a vast busy noise suggesting a factory, or perhaps a whole industrial town. Having spared it his full concentration for a minute or two, Dan decided it was just a noise as far as he was concerned, and reverted to wrestling with his own complex thoughts.

One thing was clear: not everyone gave credit to the notion that stardropping was a key to mystic alien knowledge. Jerry had specifically pooh-poohed the idea. And this man beside him, Leon Patrick, formal of manner and well past the excitable age, had seemed to incline to the same view. Dan marked him down also on the list of people he wanted to have another talk with; one would assume him to be a successful business executive—not,
a priori
, a very credulous type.

There was a tremendous racket coming from the loudspeaker now. It kept driving his thoughts into channels he didn’t want them to wander down, but perfect concentration was out of the question. He recalled the snatch of conversation he had overheard about an installation which used a lot of power. Could the equipment referred to have been Neill’s? If so, what benefit might the extra power
offer? Granting Berghaus’s hypothesis of a non-Einsteinian continuum, was there a linear relationship between power and range in the case of a stardropper? If there were, it followed that increasing the power would defeat the object of the exercise. The more power you used, the lower would be the chance of receiving signals from one single source, into which the linearly organized human brain might conceivably read a clear meaning without distraction, and the greater the risk of picking up two, ten, or a thousand signals overlaid one on top of the other. Therefore the optimum approach should lie in employing the minimum quantity of power, to reduce equipment noise, and …

He was beginning to feel giddy. He had a curious sense of frustration, as though he had a word on the tip of his tongue, due to contemplating the improbability of a linear power-range relation in a Berghausian continuum. Given that this was a genuine problem, however, that didn’t mean it was insoluble. As Jerry had rightly said, identity of function isn’t identity of nature, and the fact that stardropper signals were conveniently presented through an earpiece was due to an accidental human predisposition. Words and mathematical symbols and variables in an analog computer went through the same motions as their real-world counterparts and were not those counterparts. The resemblance between a stardropper and a portable radio was coincidence. If some brand-new mode of conveying the information had been adopted, such as direct input through the skin, would …?

With an effort as tremendous as heaving up a gigantic weight, Dan seized control of his mind. He had had a momentary impression that he was thinking in several directions at once, his consciousness ballooning out from a center. It was one of the most shocking sensations he had ever experienced.

For a few seconds he remembered where he was and what was going on, and heard the sound the stardropper on the dais was now emitting; a liquid pulsating noise with a definite but irregular rhythm, like bubbles coming to the surface of a pan of boiling water. Then he felt himself tugged back into his stream of speculation.