More Things in Heaven Read online

  More Things in Heaven

  John Brunner

  I

  I WAS still shaking as I walked into Chambord’s office a good ten minutes afterward. Ramona, the pretty local girl who served as barrier between Chambord and the outside world, put her hand up to her open mouth as I went past her. Her eyes enormously wide, she said, “Ma- dre de Dios!" Then she crossed herself rapidly. I looked as though I’d seen a ghost.

  As far as I could tell, I had seen a ghost.

  I caught Chambord at his desk when I opened his door. Behind him on the wall he had a giant blowup of the Andromeda Nebula—one of the famous series taken at the Lunar Observatory—so sited that when he sat upright it framed his head like a halo. I think he had it fixed that way on purpose. I half expected him to be angry at my marching in without knocking; instead, he was so proud of the fact that he recognized me after two years, he got right through his first sentence before he noticed the ghastly expression I was wearing. He said, “If anyone had asked me to bet who would be first in here when it was time. I’d have said, ‘David Drummond, of course!’ And—and in the name of the good God, David, what is wrong?” Catching on

  belatedly, he rose halfway to his feet. “Is it that the altitude has overcome you?”

  "Altitude be damned,” I said, and let myself fall into the visitor’s chair, taking off my dark glasses so that I could wipe my sweating face. The fact that Quito is nine thousand feet up had no more to do with my fit of the shakes than the fact that it’s on the equator had to do with my perspiring; I’d dutifully gulped down my day’s ration of oxygen-utilization pills and would have been a fool not to. Yet I could feel my heart hammering my ribs fit to break them apart.

  I said, “Henri! I just saw my brother—I saw Leon, right here in Quito!”

  Chambord stared at me. Being French-bom, he was too polite to tell me in so many words that I was insane, but I could see that it was a tough job.

  “Calm yourself, David,” he instructed solicitously. “A glass of water? A cigarette? You are all worked up."

  “Of course I am!” I snapped. I leaned on the edge of his desk and repeated my former statement, slowly and clearly. "I just saw my brother Leon, here in Quito!”

  “It must have been someone else, David.”

  I said, “Hell! My own brother! I saw him right there on the Calle Gagarin, no more than ten minutes back!”

  “At a distance, no doubt. You may have been thinking about your brother and fancied you saw a resemblance.”

  I drew a deep breath and let it out with deliberate patience; obediently, my heart went back

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  to something nearer its normal tempo. I said, “Have you any brothers yourself?"

  “Ah. . . . Yes, I have two brothers.”

  “Do you think you could mistake someone else for a brother of yours if you were no further from him than the width of the Calle Gagarin?”

  “My brothers are in France; I have not seen them for many years now. So—”

  “It’s only two years since I saw Leon,” I cut in. “We grew up in one another’s pockets. I’m saying it isn’t possible for me to be mistaken.” But by this time I was having trouble convincing myself. Chambord sensed this and produced his ace of trumps.

  “It is more than possible," he said. “It is certain. For your brother is aboard Starventure, and Starventure is crossing the orbit of Jupiter.”

  At that point my professional reflexes took over. I forgot the ridiculous notion that I could have seen Leon in Quito. I’d known all along that it must be an illusion. My mind jerked back to what Chambord had said when I came in: “If anyone had asked me to bet who would be first in here when it was time ..."

  I had my crystal recorder—flat, the size of two packs of cigarettes—out of my pocket on the instant. I said, “Since when? How long ago did they pick up her signal?”

  “Only a little over an hour ago. I was working on the release when you came in. ’’

  “Give me the bare facts. I’ll be back for more later.”

  He smiled, plainly relieved to see me acting

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  more like my usual self, and held out a regular UN message form. I’d learned to read space-code In my cradle, more or less—one glance was sufficient. Starventure had returned to normal space fifteen degrees above the plane of the ecliptic and five hundred million miles from the Sun; her direction of sublight travel was normal to Alpha Centauri and her signals were coming in strong and clear to say, “Crew well and mission successful!”

  “The biggest stoiy since Columbus,” I said, handing back the form and getting to my feet. “And I’m on to it ahead of the crowd. Maybe I should have myself tested for psi ability! Until I saw Leon—thought I saw,” 1 corrected myself as I noticed a disapproving curl of Chambord’s lip—“I hadn’t the slightest intention of calling here today. When do they expect to make actual contact?”

  "I have not yet been informed.” Chambord shrugged. “It all depends, of course, on the resultant speed with which she reentered normal space. If she is able to brake and turn under her own power in order to make the distance to Earth-orbit, then it may be as little, as forty hours; if they need to send her tugs it might easily be longer than a week.”

  “Fine! I’ll be back!”

  I went out in such a hurry I slammed the door, and the green United Nations shield on the outer side almost fell off its peg with the bang. Ramona jerked on her chair and glanced around, preparing to cross herself again; I gave her the most reassuring grin I could manage

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  and headed for the pay phonebooths in the foyer.

  I was probably the first man to profit directly from the launching of Starventure; I mean, naturally, apart from those who had salaried jobs on the project. At that time—two years before—I’d had a science-news column syndicated in about thirty countries through Solar Press and its associated agencies. It was pure luck that, owing to my inside position, which in turn I owed to having Leon for a brother, I had made a small fortune out of my coverage of the launching—or, if “fortune” is too grandiose a word, what I counted as such: enough to turn freelance and concentrate on books instead of a grinding weekly schedule.

  1 remembered, as I waited in the phonebooth for my call to Solar Press’s New York office to go through, how Hank Sandler had received the news of my decision to leave his staff. I told him jokingly that he ought to be glad to see me go, because he was always complaining about my phone credit card. It was the most expensive the agency had ever guaranteed, being good for sound-and-vision A-l priority calls from any place on Earth to New York. (Once I’d tried to get them to extend it to Luna, but with tight- beam satellite-relay calls running at twenty bucks a second, they refused. Anyhow, the trip to the Moon that I’d had in mind fell through at the last moment.)

  So when I put the card in front of him, I expected him to try and talk me out of quitting. He did no such thing—just picked up the card

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  and handed It back and said, “Compliments of Solar Press.”

  I’d never used it since, but I’d never gone anywhere without it. Now I felt I was entitled to use it again.

  The face of one of the New York staff went up on the screen, and I fished in memory for the name: Jimmy Weston, that was it. He said, “Thank goodness we reached you, Mr. Drummond. Mr. Sandler’s been going half crazy.”

  I blinked. I said, “What do you mean, ‘you reached me’? Not that I know of, you didn’t.” “We’ve been paging you all over Venezuela. Isn’t that where you’re calling from?”

  “Haven’t been there since yesterday aftern
oon. Look, whatever it is you want me for can wait. Give me the copy desk—I have a clear beat, but it’ll only last a few minutes.”

  "I—I guess I’d better put you through to Mr. Sandler.”

  And before I could say any more, he did. Sandler’s face came up on the screen just as he was breathing out a huge cloud of cigar smoke, and it hung frozen around his head until the next picture-melt was due.

  I said, “Hank, it’s great to see you, but I> didn’t call for a social chat. I’ve been trying to tell Jimmy Weston that I have a monumental beat. Listen—Starventure is back!”

  His voice was absolutely level as he answered. “Maybe that accounts for it.”

  This was so far from the response I’d been anticipating, I was completely taken aback. “Accounts for what?” I said foolishly, and then recovered my sense of priorities. “No, don’t waste

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  time explaining—just put me onto the copy desk!”

  “Tell me instead.” I heard the rustle of paper; then the picture-melt caught him with an open pad of paper and a pen.

  I summed it up baldly, heard his message- tube click and knew that the information was on the way to the telefaxes. Stage one was safely over. The second stage would be to write the real story, but I’d been revising it in my head ever since the launching, and it would come out automatically.

  “Thanks, David,” Sandler said after a pause. "It’s the biggest. How far ahead of the competition are you?”

  “Not much more than a quarter hour, I guess. Henri Chambord is too strict for that. But it so happened I came into the UN press office here in Quito because I—”

  I hesitated. Should I say, “I saw my brother”? Or: “I thought I saw my brother”?

  I backed down. Part of me was still sure that it had been Leon I’d seen large as life in the bright noon sunlight. Part of me was perfectly aware that he was out near Jupiter’s orbit.

  “Well, the reason doesn’t matter,” I concluded. “It so happened I walked in on Henri just as he was drafting the press release. Coincidence. And, speaking of coincidence, how come you were trying to contact me? Have we all turned psychic?”

  “Not exactly.” Sandler sounded puzzled. “David, have you heard anything about the appearance of a monster in the sky over southern Chile? Panic in a fishing village down there?”

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  “No, not that I can recall. And If that’s what you were after me to check up on, I ought to warn you mass hallucination isn’t in my line.”

  “You know me better than to think I’d send you chasing after a routine silly-season story, don’t you?” Sandler let a trace of annoyance show in his tone. “The point is, David, this doesn’t—doesn’t smell like a phony. It’s too well documented; too many different accounts from various sources agree too closely on trivial details.”

  I didn’t try to argue. Hank Sandler might not be able to tell a nucleotron from an ergolyzer, but his instinct for what would make news bordered on the supernatural. All I said was, “Do you still want me to check on it? Henri says I have at least forty hours before they make direct contact with the starship.”

  “Heavens, no! You stay right where you are— and 111 expect your first thousand words before I go out for lunch, okay?”

  I chuckled; that sounded like the old Hank Sandler.

  “But 111 get someone else to look into it,” he added, and my amusement faded.

  “You don’t think there could be some connection between it and the return of Starventure?” I suggested.

  “I’m not going to make any off-the-top-of-the- head guesses,” he countered firmly. “Anyway, the timing’s wrong—this thing appeared last night, and you just told me Starventure got back an hour or so ago. Still . . .” He made chewing noises. “Tell you what: I’ll ’fax you the story care of the UN press office, and put in one

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  More Things In Heaven

  or two other puzzling items as well, which have the same feel about them. You might at least find them provocative. ”

  Another picture shift caught him leaning back with a lugubrious expression which didn’t match his warm voice as he concluded, “Well, that’s irrelevant. What I ought to be saying, of course, is thanks for remembering the old firm. But I don’t seem to have enough words.”

  “Save yours,” I said. “I have plenty. Get me the copy desk and I’ll write your main release over the phone.”

  The picture wiped and a sign came on saying, “Solar Press copytaking—please start talking at the third tone.” I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to fumble, or work from notes—not on this story. I knew exactly what I needed to say and how it could best be said.

  “A dream as old as civilization has come true. Man has thrown down his challenge to the stars. . . .”

  I WAS still talking when the door of the ’fax room across the foyer opened and a messenger headed for Chambord’s office. He came back at a dead run, shouting and waving a sheet of paper. In the soundproof booth I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and my Spanish—though reliable—was a trifle rusty. But I didn’t have to hear a word to deduce that inside half an hour every reporter in Quito from the agency men to the frowsiest legmen off the locals would be cramming themselves into this building the way they used to two years ago.

  Two years ago ...

  I finished my dictation. Sandler came back to say that the bundle of material he’d promised me was on the ’faxes, and to thank me again, but now the storm was about to break in earnest, he had other things to attend to and there was no chance for casual chat. I signed off with a promise to call back in the evening and left the booth.

  There was now going to be a long period of weary waiting until actual contact was made with the returning ship. I decided I might as well put myself in the mood by hanging around

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  until the promised material from New York came through on the ’faxes. Regardless of how it compared with the news about Starventure, it would at least be interesting to see if I could work out why Sandler took it so seriously. Accordingly I sat down on one of the comfortable padded benches around the foyer to smoke a thoughtful cigarette and to worry again about the reason for my coming here today.

  Damn it, after two years I couldn’t not have known my own brother—not in bright sunlight across the width of a street! Yet all logic said I must have done just that. I’d seen Leon go aboard the ferry with my own eyes, and that ferry had lifted to Starventure orbiting at three thousand miles, and had snicked into the after hold—because it was going to serve as one of the landing-boats if Alpha Centauri turned out to have planets men could walk on.

  Then the tugs had dragged the starship’s vast hull out of orbit. I’d seen that, too—all of Earth had, on the planet-wide TV linkup covering the departure. Beyond Mars’ orbit and slanting Centaurus-ward, the tugs had dropped off. Captain Rukeyser had called a nervous-sounding goodbye, and all the news commentators the following day had said how his nervousness was a wonderful reminder that after all it was ordinary men who were going to the stars.

  And they went.

  Where? How? Even to me—and I’ve spent my working life making science and technology comprehensible to the man in the street—it was a hell of a job putting the thinking behind that stardrive into everyday language. Liu Chen, who

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  laid the foundations for it, spoke nothing but his native Mandarin, and expounded his theories in symbology so abstruse more than one doctorate was awarded for theses clarifying it. I was once told by a linguistics expert whom I was interviewing that Liu Chen’s nationality probably had a lot to do with this difficulty; Chinese thinking, even after a century of writing with letters, was heavily conditioned by the structure of the Chinese language, he told me.

  As simply as possible, though: Liu Chen developed a system for identifying
individual particles by describing their relationship to other particles. He began with atoms, and in the general theory—which took him another ten years— extended his range to cover photons, mesons, the whole gamut down to and including neutrinos. Then he came most of the way back again and produced statistical tools for handling local relationships between substantial numbers of particles. He received a Nobel Prize, a United Nations award and a lifetime pension from the Chinese government, and retired to write a commentary on the book I Chlng and yarrow-stalk divination.

  Then a Chukchi Eskimo studying theoretical physics in Ljubljana and a Mexican at Columbia independently saw what Liu Chen had overlooked: that one of the characteristics he had proposed for identifying individual particles could be isolated from the rest, since it depended on the location of other particles so distant that they were effectively at infinity. And if this characteristic were real, then it could

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  be altered by the application of certain local stresses in the continuum.

  On that fragile foundation they built a robot ship which crossed the Solar System four times as fast as the radio signal announcing it had been launched. And next they built Starventure.

  When Rukeyser hit the stardrive control, every atom of the ship and its crew, plus the associated energy, shifted into a different state of being. The ship’s “proper” location, so to speak, became somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri—and there it went, simply because it “wanted” to belong to our ordinary universe again and until it was in the right place it couldn’t.

  It was clearer in mathematical symbols. The same linguist who told me about Liu Chen’s Chinese thought patterns also predicted that in another century we’d cheerfully be describing stardrive operation verbally. “What’s more,” he went on, “we’ll be using words we use already. We’ll simply understand different conceptual referents for them.”

  I asked him to give me an example, and he suggested, “Take the word ‘engine.’ Originally that meant the same as ‘gadget’ or ‘contrivance.’ Now it's taken over the meaning of ‘motor’ and extended it.”