More Things in Heaven Page 13

  I glanced at Graubmayer. He had withdrawn to a polite distance, about ten feet, and there was no trace of expression on his granite face.

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  “Did you meet, or see, the creatures responsible for your changing?” I ventured.

  "Not that we knew of at the time. I suppose it’s likely that we’ve seen them since then.” And, when I looked blank, he added, “Sort of in silhouette, etched on the black of the sky. Don’t they show up from the surface of Earth?”

  Nobody had told me there had been any sky- monsters observed from orbit. I said as much, and he gave a laugh which came over remarkably human via the sound-converter.

  “You have the same trouble we have, hm? People don’t tell you things! It’s the weirdest feeling, you know, to watch one of those, and remember that that’s now a picture of yourself!”

  “Mahee!” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Graubmayer turn in astonishment. My monster-brother was quicker.

  “Mahi!" he exclaimed.

  “Maho/” I capped, and we continued in chorus.

  “Ma-rump-si pomadiddle mitkat nitkat heebo ibo wallahwallah cheesecake!”

  A pause; then a chuckle. “Good grief, I’d almost forgotten that. I can’t have been more than six when you taught me to recite that bit of nonsense.”

  “About that,” I said carefully. “Wasn’t it on the swing at the Fairwood house, the one under the apple tree?”

  “No, surely not! We didn’t have a swing at Fairwood. We had an apple tree okay, but it wasn't the one with the swing. That was at Posquahannet—don’t you remember, the gulls used to come into the garden when there was a gale out at sea?”

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  I remembered perfectly well. And the fact that he did too told me not a damned thing.

  Almost as though he’d read my thoughts, he said with a trace of bitterness, “Not a bad try, Dave. But it’s no use. I remember everything I remembered in my old body, as far as I and gill the psychologists can discover. And the hell of it is, I feel so completely goddamned normal now! Of course, for a while I was pretty mixed up, as who wouldn’t be after having this happen to him? But I wasn’t nearly as badly hit as Chandra Dan. Did they tell you about him—how they had to process everything they said to him through a computer, because he couldn’t latch on to the ordinary progress of time?"

  I nodded. I couldn’t trust myself to speak.

  “But even he’s recovered now. I was chatting with him myself just a short while back.”

  Desperately I struggled to think of some indisputable proof of his identity. Previously I’d got no further in my analysis of the problem than childhood memories; after all, a person is the sum of consciously and unconsciously remembered experience. But if that ground had already been covered to no purpose . . .

  “Ah—tell me something about the trip,” I said at random and felt the germ of a fresh idea sprout from the words. “I don’t mean the ‘we went and took a look and came back’ stuff—I’ve had all that. But how your predictions about the subjective effects of the drive turned out, for example. You were very excited about that when you left.”

  “Not half as excited as you were about Her- manos Iglesias’ sister,” he countered dryly. “Poor

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  Hermanos is one of the worst affected of us, of course, because he has this big thing about family ties. He got pretty homesick, and he’s not taking kindly to being cooped up here in the ship now the trip is over. Can I tell him that his sister is okay? What’s her name—Carmen, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “As far as I know she’s all right.”

  “Does she know about—about us?”

  I hesitated, but there was no point in tying. I gave a miserable nod.

  “Poor girl! If she’s anything like Hermanos, she’s taking it a hell of a sight worse than you are, you cold fish. Have you spoken to her

  lately?”

  “Last night—uh—I mean about twenty hours ago.” My tone of voice gave away more of my feelings than I’d intended.

  “Well, well, it sounds as though you never got over her!" He chuckled. “Lone Wolf Dave finally got his! Next you’ll be telling me you’re thinking about marriage.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” I admitted. “Though I don’t know yet whether she is.”

  “Well, I hope she says yes, and I hope you’ll be very happy—as happy as anyone can be in our crazy new universe. But sex and marriage are kind of null subjects for us right now. What were we talking about when the gracious senorita walked on stage?”

  “I was asking you a question,” I reminded him. Under the veneer of flippancy on, his voice which survived even passage through the sound- converter, I thought I’d detected a note of re

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  pressed anger when he spoke of sex and marriage as “null subjects”, and that was a problem I felt could better be left to the psychologists;

  I was eager to get away from it.

  “Ah yes; about the subjective effects of the drive.” He gave me a look which in human terms would have been a suspicious frown. “You didn’t go around quoting my ideas to everyone, did you? You didn’t put them in one of your shiny-but-superficial books? Because it would be a hell of a note for me to have to back down on my guesses in public! Not a single prediction I made was borne out in practice. The ship stayed the ship, we stayed ourselves —up to the last minute,” he amended wryly. “In short, our experience of hyperspace can be summed up by saying it’s like ordinary space only rather more so. It’s hard for me to explain it to someone who’s never been there, but I can give you an idea of just how paradoxical the situation was by saying that it looks as though we’re going to have to start treating our elaborate Einsteinian world-picture as a rather complicated special case of the traditional Euclidean one. There’s a nice snippet of news for you to expound to your public! Before we left we were thinking of hyperspace as a peculiar ‘elsewhere’ kind of phenomenon. From now on. I’m inclined to believe we must regard normal space as the ‘elsewhere.’ We just happen to have evolved in it. If you've done any homework on your cls-spatial math since I’ve been away, maybe I can show you what I’m driving at. Dave, is something wrong?”

  I must have been ghost-pale; certainly I was

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  sweating all over and my hands were shaking. I couldn’t make it clear how I’d come to my conclusion, but I had, and it felt positive.

  I said, "Hell, you are my brother. I don't see how you can be—but you’re no one else in this cockeyed universe than Leon Drummond.”

  XVII

  AFTER THAT they plagued me to explain: Graub- mayer, Sico and Lenister by turns, separately or together. All I could say was that I had been convinced. Over and over I threw back what Graubmayer himself had said—that Leon and I had been even closer than most siblings; over and over I declared that I could have shut my eyes and forgotten it was a strange blue-black creature facing me.

  The nearest I could come to defining what for me had settled the matter was to compare it with an author’s style. Just as an experienced critic can tell by the flavor of a few paragraphs that they are the work of such and such a writer. I’d been compelled while listening to accept that Leon was talking. The turns of phrase were his, the little mannerisms of emphasis and hesitation could belong to nobody else.

  Still they pestered me, until at last I could stand their interrogation no longer and blew up.

  “For God’s sake!” I shouted. “What does it mean to go on asking whether this is really my brother? If there’s some kind of super-being that can imitate him well enough to satisfy me,

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  then by comparison we’re nothing better than insects, and we’ll have to learn to live with the fact!”

  They
exchanged frowns.

  “I—I've been arguing on those lines,” Lenister said at last. “But I can’t get people to agree with me. Either their pride rebels, or they jump to the conclusion that these super-beings must be hostile, like that horrible Quantrell woman. I don’t see that that follows. I think they’d be more inclined to be curious about us. Callous too, perhaps, as we are toward ants. But I doubt if they’d regard us as being worth interfering with."

  “If we become a nuisance . . .” Sico said in a dead voice and let the suggestion complete itself in our imaginations.

  “Yes. Then the comparison might not be with ants, but with—well, woodworm, or flour weevils.” Lenister wiped his glasses absently. “But how can we guess what might constitute nuisance value to a mind of that order?”

  The more I learned of this lunatic new cosmos, the less I liked it.

  “Their power terrifies me,” Graubmayer muttered. “The idea of them looking out of their own universe into ours—if that’s what they are doing—why, it’s fantastic!”

  “Does any of this make sense to you, Drummond?” Lenister demanded.

  “Sense?” I echoed. “No, but I can see a chain of reasoning which would explain what’s happened very neatly. Perhaps our unmanned shot across the solar system was what first attracted them to our next-door universe, like seeing a

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  mouse scuttle across the kitchen floor. So when Starventure intruded into their kind of space they were watching for it. They might have studied it during the journey, gathering information about the crew, so that when it reemerged near Earth they were able to—well, borrow their bodies."

  “Yes, that’s more or less the same conclusion we were coming to,” Graubmayer rumbled.

  “Then obviously we’ve got to locate the crew’s own bodies, down on Earth!” I was sweating, thinking how well it was possible to scatter sixty people across the continents in a full week.

  “Of course!” Sico rapped. “But you realize we were not immediately told of the appearance of members of the crew on Earth. We weren’t even informed about your seeing your brother until —oh, three or four days afterward!”

  Defensively, I said, “But I didn’t make a secret of it, you know. In fact I was so startled I walked straight into the UN press office. And something is finally being done to check out these stories, you know.”

  "Thank heaven!" Sico tensed. “Who is responsible for it?”

  "A colleague of mine, Brian Watchett. He volunteered last night to lake charge of the search for the”—I hesitated, because the turn of phrase was so eerie—“crew’s bodies.”

  “When we do track them down," Graubmayer said gloomily, “I don’t like to think what we may find inside.”

  There were two more confrontations, lasting longer than the first and for both of us even

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  harder to face. Once I’d accepted that this was indeed Leon, the idea of him being trapped in an artificial inhuman form by some unimaginable super-science became intolerable. And for him, of course, it was unspeakably frustrating to realize that even though he had convinced me of his identity I couldn’t in my turn convince the psychologists.

  I was so exhausted after the second meeting I asked to be allowed to sleep for a while and was assigned a spare cabin aboard one of the ferries. I had slept in space previously without the recurrent falling-dreams which often wake up novices and expected to be tired enough to do so again, but in the end I was compelled to resort to forced-sleep again, because eveiy time I shut my eyes I kept seeing visions of Leon as he used to be.

  For the second and third meetings, Sico and Graubmayer briefed me beforehand with lists of questions they wanted me to slip into the conversation. As far as I could tell from the pattern they implied, they were struggling to find out whether Leon’s new body had entrained changes in his personality subtler than I could detect by simply listening to him talk. That made sense, since Leon had himself referred to one such change when he cited his inability to feel different in spite of his extra limbs.

  But what Graubmayer seemed to place his greatest faith in was the question of sexuality. To reduce the risk of emotional friction between the members of the crew, the sex drive had been deliberately depressed, by tranquilizers and hormone treatments. In consequence everyone

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  aboard Starventure had an extraordinarily low index of involvement with sex. But the repression was only a surface phenomenon. Underneath they must remain—if they ever had been—members of a vigorous bisexual species, and if we were dealing with aliens rather than transferred personalities, he argued, here was where their pretense was most likely to wear thin.

  Null subject. I heard Leon’s words in memory and shuddered.

  Sico’s line of attack was related to Graubmayer's, but he weis primarily concerned at present with aggressive tendencies. I gathered that he was deliberately needling the crew, one by one, after analyzing their psychologiced records smd computing approximately when they might be expected to lose their tempers. Being held effectively prisoners aboard the ship when they’d been looking forward to a hero’s welcome home itself was fraying their nerves; he hoped to discover, he said, whether their breaking-point matched his predictions, whether they were possessed of inhuman—by implication, nonhu- man—patience, or whether in fact they were likely to develop overt enmity.

  I hoped not to be up here in the ship when the first of his results CEune in. So f£u however, he admitted he’d been unable to distinguish between this nonhuman patience he was looking for, Eind apathy accountable by the after- math of shock. Most of the crew, like Leon, were on the surface as eager to reach a definite conclusion about themselves as he was.

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  I was limp with relief when it came time for the ferry to depart. Lenister, by contrast, was half minded to beg permission for a longer stay. There were two reasons why he reluctantly refrained: the limited facilities up here wouldn’t allow anyone to mount a third research program as elaborate as Graubmayer’s or Sico’s, and both the latter had as much routine help as they needed; and someone must, after all, analyze the data being amassed up here with better computers than could be shipped up to orbit. Already, in a single day, he said he’d accumulated enough fresh material to keep his groundside staff busy for a week.

  I’d gone to the lock as early as I reasonably could, and put on my suit. I debated with myself whether to go to Leon’s cabin and say goodbye, but the third of our meetings had been harrowing for us both, and I decided against it. Hanging in air in the corridor near the lock, I waited impatiently for Lenister to arrive and accompany me aboard the ferry.

  Suddenly there was a commotion. A stream of people from the after ferry hold came diving up the corridor, whitefaced. I jammed myself back against the bulkhead to get out of their way, hearing shouts from the noseward direction. Reflexive alarm started me in the wake of the others.

  The slow curve of the corridor ensured that only about fifty feet of it were in clear sight at one time. I’d gone about that distance when I saw that the people who had passed me had met another group coming from the forward ferry hold and were turning along the branch

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  passage leading to the midships external vision blister. Both Sico and Graubmayer were among them. Glancing behind me, I saw there was another batch of half a dozen excited people approaching, including Rokossovsky.

  1 crowded along with everyone else into the vision blister. I’d had no chance to ask anyone what was going on, but the moment I entered the blister, I knew anyway.

  Spanning a third of the visible sky, which in the ship’s present attitude was centered on the constellation Argo, was a monster.

  It was like Leon, and like the Quito monster, and like the Santadonna monster, and different from all of them. The first difference to strike me was its color. It was much greener than the earlier
ones, and there were only a few small areas which showed black and vacant because they were radiating in the invisible ultraviolet. I was immediately chilled by the horrible suspicion that the things might be getting better at peering into our space, and energies of longer wavelength were passing through whatever fantastic window they had opened on the solar system.

  Before I’d had more than a quick glimpse, however, the blister became so crowded that my view was blocked. Crossing and recrossing, a tangle of arms and legs flailed in the air as everyone struggled for a sight of the monster. An authoritative voice—I couldn’t see whose— rang out, ordering everyone without a specific task to pull back against the inship bulkheads. Mechanical whirring began as automatic recorders were triggered; Starventure’s vision blisters

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  were all equipped for spectroanalysis in every band of radiant energy.

  Silent now. we obeyed, leaving a small group of technicians floating close to the busy machines. Into this sudden hush an announcement crackled from the PA system.

  “Report from Earthside! Naked-eye observation shows nothing, repeat nothing, in the indicated direction. Scans with infrared, ultraviolet and radiofrequency ’scopes are being arranged as quickly as possible.”

  AD around me I saw grim-set mouths, wide eyes and wondering expressions. What could it be out there, insubstantial as though painted soap-bubble thin on the fabric of space—this monster whose mouth might open to devour Starventure like a toad gulping a fly?

  It began to fade within minutes. Just as it was vanishing the voice from the PA blared out again.

  “AD Earthside reports are negative, repeat negative. Nothing can be detected from down below.”