More Things in Heaven Page 14

  I turned away with the eellike wriggle I was finally getting the knack of, and found myself face to face with Lenister.

  “We ought to get along to the ferry.” he said. “It’s time to go.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

  XPIII

  DREAMLIKE, THE return flight slipped by me. Not the scream of air on the hull as we made our braking passes; not the way the racing world vanished in a cloud of flame as the forward rockets blazed; nothing could break my mood of solitary desolation. It was only after I had mechanically climbed down from the electric trolley which this time had been on hand to fetch us back from the ferry that I snapped back to normal awareness.

  What triggered the reaction was the sight of Brian Watchett standing impatiently beside the orrery in the briefing room.

  “Brian!” I called, hurrying toward him. “Have you heard anything from Carmen?”

  “Who?” he countered, and my heart sank. “Oh—your girlfriend, you mean. No, I haven’t seen her. Listen, though, David! We’ve found your brother!”

  It was my turn to be at a loss. For long seconds the words made no sense. As far as I was concerned, Leon was up at the starship. Then I reacted.

  “You mean he’s been seen again? By whom? Where?”

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  “We have a report from Athens, Greece. He was recognized there a few hours ago. I’ve been half-killing myself with waiting for you to get back.”

  He jabbed his finger at my spacekit. “Lose that stuff, quickly, and meet me in Cassiano’s office as fast as you can. Don’t waste time asking questions now—you’ll have plenty of time when we’re on our way.”

  It was all set up: a fast car to the hotel to collect my gear and the mail that was waiting for me, then a UN plane—a ramjet stratodiver— specially assigned to Brian for his project. Things had been happening with incredible rapidity since I left for orbit.

  Correction: not incredible. With Brian’s determination reinforced by the spreading mood of alarm among all Earth’s top officials, it was rather to be expected.

  After a period of cudgeling his brains, he had come up with a simple but ingenious means of enlisting the public’s aid in his search without revealing the truth. He had had it announced that there were impostors about, claiming to be members of the starship’s crew—confidence tricksters, in effect, some of whom were alleged to have been planning for this moment for years, to have undergone plastic surgery and voice alteration in the hope of deceiving even the families of the men they were imitating.

  Some of them—so said the official handout which Brian showed me in the car—had already tried to trade on people’s credulity. Others were lying low, awaiting a chance to emerge.

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  Anyone who saw a man whose resemblance to one of the crew was too complete to be coincidence was therefore asked to notify,the authorities straight away.

  The handout included a complete set of pass- port-size pictures of the crew, plus fingerprints, descriptions and lists of mannerisms and distinguishing marks. It was a remarkably thorough job considering how quickly it must have been prepared.

  “But that’s only the half of it,” Brian said. “Last night we put clips of those crewmen—like Leon and Hermanos—who have already been reported, on a worldwide TV linkup, and ad- most at once we started getting these reports from Athens.”

  “Is there anything to them?” I demanded.

  “We’re going to have to find that out when we get there.”

  Which was true enough. I turned my attention to the mail I’d collected from my hotel. There was only one item of importance: a ’faxed note from Hank Sandler. I read the opening paragraph, and that was enough.

  "You are on retainer for Solar Press to cover the landing of Starventure’s crew. The enormous public interest at present in this story led us to expect that you would honor our contract. We have heard nothing from you for more than a day, and according to our associate Manuel Segura of Prensam you have in fact left Quito on another story without informing us. We must therefore conclude that you wish to terminate our agreement. Our legal advisors are of the opinion ...”

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  And so on. Sandler must have been boiling with rage; It was only when he was very angry that he used such stilted turns of phrase. I balled the letter up and stuffed it into the car's waste slot.

  “Did Hank decide to fire you?” Brian asked.

  I nodded and shrugged.

  “I’m sorry. I talked to him last night and tried to calm him down, but he was too damned furious to listen to reason. Don’t worry about him suing for breach of contract, though. I told Kaye and Don, and we agreed that if he tried to push it that far we’d resign en bloc.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I couldn’t keep the bitterness from showing in my voice. All my working life I’d done my best to tell the truth to the world. Now for the first time ever I was engaged in promoting what I believed to be a justifiable lie, and this was the immediate result.

  There was a gray silence until the car pulled in at the airport gates. Then Brian said, “I hope to heaven it really is your brother we find in Athens.”

  “That’s exactly the point,” I said. “It won’t be. It’ll be someone—or something—using his body. ”

  Paling, Brian stared at me. “What did you find up there, then?"

  “Ill tell you on the plane,” I said. “And it won’t make you any happier than I am.”

  But on the plane I managed to catch a couple of hours’ natural sleep, and when we arrived I felt a good deal better. We were, of course, expected. There were police waiting, who piled us into a car and escorted us with shrieking si

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  rens along the coast road from the airport. That brief journey was like being in a crazy time machine. The road ran beside the sun-dappled Mediterranean, so blue and beautiful in the summer sunlight it was hard to credit that it was so polluted one dared not swim in it without an aqualung, and on the inland side children came running to the windows of handsome post-turn-of-the-century villas to wave at our noisy cavalcade. Then we made a sharp right turn toward the center of Athens, and a broad boulevard stepped on three levels carried us a couple of miles. Ahead I saw a carefully preserved group of ruins: the Arch of Hadrian, nearly two thousand years old. A police car was parked nearby, and our driver slowed to wave at a man standing beside it. The man gave a thumbs-up sign in reply, and we accelerated again.

  “He is still in view of the police,” explained the Greek who had taken us in charge at the airport.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “In the Odeion Herodou Attikou. It is the classical theater below the Acropolis.”

  The time machine was still at work: now we went jolting down the narrow streets of the Plaka, which apparently hadn’t changed in the past centuiy. It was midaftemoon, so there were few people about.

  “It is the third day he has been there," our escort went on. “Of course, we knew what was happening, but there was no reason to be interested until we heard from Quito about these impostors who have been seen. We do not know

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  how it all began, but the first day there were nearly two hundred people who gathered to listen, and yesterday twice as many. Today the Odeion is almost full.”

  “What’s he doing?" I demanded.

  "He talks. He answers questions from the crowd. But I’m afraid I have not listened to him myself.”

  “Have you any idea who he really is?” Brian asked, in pursuance of his story that this man must be a fake.

  “None. Though we know various things about him. He has not used the name of‘Drummond,’ but when people in the crowd address him I understand that they call him ‘Leon.’ Last week he came here on a plane from the United States. He has b
een remembered by people who saw him in the museum on the Acropolis the day after he arrived. He has bought a great many books in several languages. He has asked several people about our famous ancient philosophers. He has visited the Stoa which is rebuilt near the Acropolis, and he has been seen sitting on a broken pillar and thinking in the sun. And now, suddenly, he has begun to act as a philosopher himself. And they listen!”

  The car came to a halt just behind an identical one which was parked at the end of the winding stone-flagged path up the magnificent side of the Acropolis itself. I’d visited it before when I was covering a scientific congress here, many years ago. But I’d forgotten what a terrific impact it had, crowned with its supreme architectural masterpiece, the Parthenon.

  Our driver and his companion leaped out to

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  speak to a senior police officer sitting in the other car. On hearing that we’d arrived, he also got out and came to greet us. He spoke good English.

  “The man who is posing as your brother is in the Odeion at the moment," he said. “It is very hot in the sun, but there are seven hundred people listening to him. It is probable that he is preparing some confidence trick, as has been suggested. Perhaps mystical knowledge from the stars, or some such rubbish.”

  I licked my lips, glancing up the hill toward the entrance of the theater. From here it was not possible to see the vast crowd which had assembled.

  “Please come with us,” the policeman invited me. “Come to a place where you can look down and recognize him. If he is indeed disguised as your brother, we shall be able to arrest him for questioning. And he will need to explain himself very cleverly!” He reached through the window of his own car to retrieve a pair of binoculars from the seat.

  “This way!”

  There were two shocks awaiting me at the top of the steep path leading to the Odeion. The first was the one I was prepared for. I knew, even before I was handed the binoculars for a closer look, that this was my brother’s physical form. It was like a blow in the stomach to see that familiar face, hear that familiar voice ringing out over the audience.

  The second was entirely different. He was speaking Russian. I’d never gained more than a

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  halting knowledge of that language, but—as I remembered when I thought about it—Leon must of course have become reasonably fluent in it, because of the volume of scientific literature published in it

  “There are many Russian tourists here this afternoon,” the policeman whispered to me. “A group of about a hundred came from Tashkent yesterday.”

  I nodded, looking around. This was an amphitheater of purest classical form—indeed, for the past century or so the ancient dramas had been performed here every summer. On the steep- ranked stone benches, little more than steps, were at least the seven hundred people I’d been told of—native Athenians and tourists intermingled, filling all but the topmost rows. And at the head of every aisle leading down between the seats there were uniformed police sweating in the afternoon heat.

  The policeman tapped me on the shoulder. “Mr. Drummond, is he disguised as your brother?”

  “Ah . . . Yes," I said. “He looks exactly like my brother.” And wondered how much of a truth that was.

  The Leon-person, standing on the low checker- tiled stage—hardly more than a dais, in fact— paused. At once a question was shouted at him, and he began to answer at length, still in Russian.

  “Then we can proceed,” the policeman said with grim satisfaction. “Would you like to accompany me when I make the arrest, Mr. Drummond?”

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  “I’d rather not," I said.

  “As you like.” He drew a whistle from the pocket of his uniform, and poised it to blow.

  “Be careful,” I whispered, thinking of what might be hiding behind the Leon-face. “He's—"

  Brian nudged me, as though warning me to hold my tongue, and I abandoned' the sentence.

  “We shall be very careful,” promised the policeman. “I have brought here my most experienced men.”

  He blew the whistle. At the signal, the men standing at the top of every aisle started to march in step toward the stage. Behind the Leon-person, from the actors’ entrances, half a dozen more police emerged.

  The blowing of the whistle had attracted the attention of most of the audience. Now almost everyone took notice, and a babble of curious questions broke out.

  Stolidly the police closed on my “brother.” He showed no reaction, apart from breaking off his discourse and looking at the encircling men with a quizzical half-smile. That smile belonged to Leon, too. The recognition was heartbreaking.

  From the edge of the stage, the officer who had been beside me turned and addressed the crowd, first in Greek, then English; he would presumably have gone on in any other tongue he knew, but before he had completed his second version of the announcement, I could smell the anger of the crowd beginning to rise.

  He had told them that this man was using the name of one of Starventure’s crew and had copied his appearance, but that the real Leon Drummond was still up in orbit; that he was

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  going to take the impostor in for questioning—

  “Ochi! Ochi!" the shouting began quickly: "No! No!” And as the sense of his words reached more people, the tumult swelled, in English, Greek, Russian: "No, let him go on! We want to hear more!”

  The moment the first policeman laid hands on “Leon,” the anger exploded, and the stage was swamped by a furious mob. It took fully ten minutes for order to be restored . . . and by then, nobody knew how, the creature in my brother’s body had disappeared.

  XIX

  WHEN TEMPERS had cooled to the point where it was possible to think coherently again, a search was mounted, though I was already sickly certain it would fail. Some of the police fanned out around the approaches to the Acropolis, while others radioed to alert the entire local force and ordered roadblocks and street-corner checkpoints to be set up. Meantime, furious, the officer in charge questioned members of the audience whom he had managed to detain on the convenient charge of obstructing his men in the execution of their duty.

  It became clear at once that it was no good asking about the disappearance of “Leon.” For one thing, the people being interrogated seemed to be perfectly honest in denying that they’d seen where he went—the confusion had been tremendous. For another, even an ordinary criminal could fade into the mazes of the Plaka and evade anything short of a house-to-house search by a small army. And this creature we were seeking might well be able to take to escape routes where we had no hope of following. . . .

  Attempting to salvage something from the fiasco, Brian closely questioned as many as pos-

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  sible of the people who had been listening to “Leon,” hoping for clues to the nature of the body’s present occupant. From the Russians who had occupied most of the front rows of the theater, we could learn little. Sullenly they pretended to miss the point, or not to understand what was being said to them. I reflected that they were a people with long memories, inclined to distrust policemen.

  From some of the Athenians, however, we got better results, and particularly from a pleasant- mannered elderly woman named Iris Argyros, a language teacher and amateur Greek classicist. She seemed dreadfully upset to find herself under arrest, but clung doggedly to the belief that it was all due to a misunderstanding, and was voluble in her attempts to persuade us that this was so.

  “It was like being transported to the Golden Age!” she declared, eyes glowing. “I’ve dreamed all my life of sitting at the feet of another Socrates and hearing him expound the nature of the world with crystalline logic. And today my dream has come true”

  “But what was he talking about?” Brian pressed.

  “Much of the ti
me today he was speaking Russian, and I didn’t understand everything he said. But I speak English, as you hear, and he also addressed us in that language.” She bit her lower lip and rolled her eyes upward as though seeking inspiration. “His arguments are impossible to summarize, because they were so rigorous, one step following another like notes of music. In any case it wasn’t the substance of

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  what he was saying that impressed me so, but the beautiful logic and the vivid metaphors and analogies which he—”

  “Yes, but rnhat mas h.e talking about?” Brian was running out of patience.

  "Oh!” She looked vaguely surprised. “The nature of truth, mankind’s place in the universe, our habit of forming inflexible opinions and clinging to them because admitting we can ever have been wrong offends our vanity and our self-esteem. In particular, he was demonstrating how scientific orthodoxy can conflict with the concept of objective truth.”

  Brian gave me a blank look. Drawing me aside, he asked in a low tone, “David, how do you imagine he held his audience with such diy stuff as that?”

  “God knows,” I muttered. “I've spent my working life trying to prepackage ideas for the great and wonderful public, but I’ve never tackled philosophical concepts of that order. I wouldn’t dare.”

  Brian clenched his fists. “If only those knuckleheaded police had thought of recording what he said!” he exclaimed.

  But they hadn’t, and apart from a handful of inferior tourist-type visual recordings which the police confiscated for us we were able to get nothing more concrete from the dozens of people we questioned. It was as though they had been spellbound, and then awakened to find the words they had heard fading like images from a dream.

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  Or like the—creature—which had uttered them.

  As hopes of locating our quarry faded. I began to be aware of just how much had been going on since I went up to Starventure. Coming on top of the shock of meeting Leon in his alien form, the news Brian had given me on the way to Athens had barely sunk in, although I’d been much impressed by his ingenious scheme to have the crew’s bodies spotted. Now I found him putting in A-l priority ceills to Quito, New York and Tokyo, issuing orders to top UN officials to track down other crewmen about whom there had been rumors, while I sat exhaustedly in the background.