The Stardroppers Page 5

  Of course, as he’d been informed, Rainshaw had never claimed his discovery was other than a chance one. He had been working on the relationship between gravity and magnetism, which accounted for his having brought together a powerful magnet, a chamber containing a hard vacuum into which he was introducing counted quantities of ionized and non-ionized particles, and delicate instruments for tracking those particles, whose signals required amplification before they could be recorded.

  He also had the research scientist’s prime gift: a talent for seeing things when they happened, rather than what he expected to happen. Finding signals being generated in a way he could not account for, he hadn’t done what the majority of people in his place might have done—shipped his equipment back to the manufacturers with a letter of complaint—but instead had followed them up, determined to isolate their cause. It was a matter of a few weeks to eliminate the nonessentials and package “the Rainshaw effect” in a box. It was a matter of months before Berghaus formulated a theory which fitted the facts, even if it didn’t properly explain them. But it seemed as though it was only a matter of hours thereafter that the Rainshaw effect was forgotten and the stardropper was part of man’s way of life.

  Dan’s first impression of the scientist was disappointing. He was a lean man, hollow-cheeked in a way which suggested he was not naturally thin but had worried himself into losing weight. He received them in an office from which a half-open door gave access to a laboratory, where a man and a girl could be seen working on a breadboard device and heard talking in low voices, and Rainshaw’s eyes kept straying that way as though to make it clear he was enduring, not enjoying, the intrusion of these visitors. Having conversed politely but icily for some minutes, he contrived to impress on Dan the unmistakable impression that he tolerated such events purely because he was now a state employee, but would far rather have been free to tell them to go to hell.

  Then, just as he was about ready to count the visit a waste of time, Dan happened to mention Berghaus.

  Rainshaw’s frozen manner changed on the instant. “You know Berghaus?’ he demanded. “Were you a student of his?”

  “I guess you might say so,” Dan exaggerated. “Certainly he taught me what little I know about stardroppers.”

  “He taught all of us, including me, what we know about stardroppers,” Rainshaw declared, and added in passing, “What a ridiculous name that is—don’t you agree?” But his annoyance at the nickname his discovery had been afflicted with didn’t wipe the new warmth form his voice. “Oh, yes—Berghaus is purely a genius! I know he maintains it was no more than a guess which led him to link his theory of precognition with my own peculiar discovery, but since then everything I’ve turned up, at least, can be tied neatly into his hypotheses. Oh dear! I do wish you’d mentioned this when you first came in. I must have been awfully churlish to you. But, you see, I thought I was dealing with another of this string of nosy officials who’ve been plaguing me for months and months.” He beamed. “What precisely is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Dan breathed a silent sigh of relief. He said, “To be candid, Doctor, I want a straight answer to a question I suspect doesn’t have one. I mainly want to know whether you yourself believe these claims that have been made for stardropping—about the chance of usable knowledge being learned from listening to the machines—and, if you do take the idea seriously, whether you think the chance is good enough to justify all the suffering the habit is known to cause.”

  Rainshaw twisted his hands together. He said, “I sometimes wonder if I ought to feel guilty.… But it was pure accident, you know, and I’ve never claimed otherwise. So: is there information to be gained from stardropping? Well, Mr. Cross, all I can say is that my son—”

  He broke off, and the most extraordinary expression came to his face. Dan couldn’t tell whether it indicated shock, or dismay, or only a kind of weary sadness. Redvers caught his eyes and scowled, as to imply, “I warned you!”

  Before Dan could frame any kind of commiserations, though, Rainshaw recovered himself, and continued in a perfectly normal tone.

  “Yes, my son thought so,” he said. “And I suppose in a way he proved that he was right.”

  VI

  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?”

  VII

  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 h
allway—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.