More Things in Heaven Page 6
There was a growling sound in the distance, and people stopped talking for a moment to listen to it. I did the same. When it died away, I jerked my head in the direction of the spaceport.
“Another thing. I’ve been counting takeoffs and landings at the port. They’ve made enough trips to bring down the entire crew and all their records and geological specimens—anything the starship could have carried in her holds. That was another landing, the tenth since she was brought into orbit. Brian, what do you suggest we do?”
“We’re going to have to blow it open,” he said matter-of-factly. “Have you heard some of the rumors that are going around? I was talking to Hank Sandler a few minutes ago, and he chilled my blood. People are getting impatient, and the monsters are fraying their nerves. They’re avenging angels sent to punish man for trespassing in heaven—or, a bit more scientifically, they’re creatures from Centaurus looking us over while they get ready to invade. Hank said he’d been approached by the high brass and asked to put out a denial of any connection between the monsters and the ship!” He added the last comment in a tone that suggested he’d been personally affronted.
“I suppose he told them what they could do with the idea?”
“Of course. Practically threw them out of his office. He was still fuming when I spoke to him, though. Said he wasn’t a hired liar, he was an
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honest reporter, and if the the public didn’t get some solid facts to satisfy them after the big buildup, there was bound to be trouble. In fact, he told me to get together with you and see what we could do to improve the situation.”
“Such as?"
“I was hoping you’d tell me that,” Brian countered wryly. “Perhaps we could go and challenge Chambord.”
“Henri wouldn’t play,” I said. "I’ve known him long enough to be sure of that.”
“Then how about this mein Brandt, the assistant chief of personnel? He strikes me as a weak point in their organization—all surface and no substance. Or if we must we can go right to General Cassiano, so long as we talk to someone who takes us seriously. Hank says, and I agree with him, that we’ve got to issue a warning. We’ve got to say that unless we’re immediately given convincing reasons to the contrary tomorrow morning we’re going to publish our grounds for believing that important facts are being kept from the public. We’ve got to force the truth into the open, David. If there has been a disaster, delaying the announcement will only make matters worse by allowing these rumors to outstrip the truth.”
I pushed back my chair. I had suddenly realized I was far too badly worried about Leon to waste time on something trivial like food.
Carmen came with us. Neither of us thought of telling her to stay behind, and she probably wouldn’t have agreed anyway.
We did go to see Chambord first after all,
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because on reflection I felt it was only fair to let him know of our decision, and—good pressman that he was—his reaction when he heard our ultimatum was a sigh of relief.
“Believe me, my friends,” he said, “I’m not sorry you’ve decided on this course. I myself have pestered General Cassiano till I’m exhausted. I’ve pleaded to be told at least why I could have no more news—you understand, I've passed on every fact I’ve been given. But you must get inside the—the Maginot Line which surrounds the base. You must try someone like Captain Brandt. Put pressure on him. He’s a weak man. He will cave in and let you through to higher authority, where anyone else at a similar administrative level would adroitly set you running in circles.”
He hesitated. Then, rising to offer his hand to us, he concluded, “And, if I might add a request for one small favor . . .? Whatever you are told, let me know as well, will you? Isn’t it ironic that / have to ask you for information?”
Pleased that his estimate of Brandt squared with mine, I thanked him for his advice and good wishes, and we headed for the spaceport personnel department. This was located in a clump of ugly low concrete buildings which also included the main administrative offices for the port and barracks for the technical personnel, several miles away from the port proper, at which for fear of accidents there was only an irreducible minimum of accommodation. It took us some time to get anyone to rout Brandt out for us, but persistence and a lot of name-dropping managed it.
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Appearing in a crumpled open-necked shirt, leisure pants and down-at-the-heel slippers, he reacted as Chambord had predicted. His first pretense of delight at having such distinguished visitors faded swiftly, and gave way to blustering about our abuse of press privileges. We wore that down, and he switched from prevarication to threats about having us forcibly thrown off the premises and denied access to any more UN-sponsored press conferences. Brian, who was a great deal better at handling recalcitrant bureaucrats than I was, silkily reminded him that even if he denied us press privileges our employers wouldn’t, and asked if he wanted to see his name splashed all over the world’s newspapers and TV screens as the man responsible for keeping information about the starship’s crew from their families. At that point he started to scream at us, and that was what unexpectedly won us our victory.
He had received us in an office on the ground floor of a building which also contained bachelor quarters for senior staff not living in Quito with their wives. The walls were badly soundproofed; when Brandt raised his voice he could probably be heard three or four rooms away.
All at once the door of the office was thrown open and an angry man strode in. "Brandt!” he snapped. “I’m trying to get an hour’s rest before I go back to the port! How can I when you’re yelling like a madman?”
The newcomer was tall, thickset and brownhaired. On the shoulders of his olive-green UN uniform he wore two general’s stars. He looked
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familiar, but I was still trying to place him when Brian rose to his feet.
“So sorry to have disturbed you. General Suvorov, ’’ he said, and went on to summarize why we had come. I hardly heard him because I was so annoyed with myself for not immediately recognizing General Cassiano’s second-in-command.
I glanced at Carmen’s face. She was absolutely still and very white. I tried to give her a reassuring smile, but she didn’t notice.
Suddenly Brian uttered my name, nudging me to pick up my cue. I did so, leaning back in my chair with Suvorov’s hard eyes on me.
“I happen to be both a reporter and brother to a member of the starship’s crew,” I said. “Starventure has been in orbit for a week, and all I’ve heard from my brother is a message of a few words and a vague assurance that he’s all right. I don’t believe he’s all right. I don’t believe anything is all right. And if I don’t get positive information tonight, I propose to tell the world what I think tomorrow.”
Suvorov gestured at Carmen, asking me a question with his eyebrows. “Senorita Iglesias,” I said. “You should recognize the name. She also has a brother among the crew.”
I could see tiredness driving a decision to the front of his mind; the instant he reached it, his expression altered from anger to grim determination. “Very well,” he said heavily. “You can have the facts. I warn you, we shan’t permit you to publish the information . . . but your better judgment will confirm that it’s wiser not to. Brandt, get me a car at once. The hell with
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my trying to rest—how can anyone rest at a time like this?”
Brandt gulped and snatched at his phone. He was a different person when a general was in the room. Suvorov looked briefly at Carmen again.
“I’m sorry for you, Miss Iglesias,” he said after a pause. “We are all sorry for everyone.”
Puzzled, hesitant, and—speaking for myself— afraid of what we were going to learn, we went out to the car when it arrived. Suvorov told the driver to move over into the front passenger seat and t
ook the wheel himself; Brian, Carmen and I got in behind. I could feel Carmen trembling when I put my arm around her shoulders.
Suvorov switched on all four headlights and the spots as well, spun the car almost in its own length, and sent us plunging down a beam of yellow-white light into the dark fastness of the mountains.
He was a terrifying driver. Although the spaceport was only fifteen miles distant, the road was twenty-five miles long, and clung crazily to the edge of precipices, twisting and writhing. Previously I’d only traveled it by day, and even then I’d thought I would rather not have traveled it at all. To ride with someone who treated it like a straight and level parkway was so alarming that I nearly brought back what little of my dinner I’d swallowed before Brian urged us away.
Other vehicles approached, and Suvorov hit a switch on the dash which flashed the car’s lights in a coded rhythm. The oncoming drivers pulled
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to the side and we went swaying past without slowing. None of us said anything.
The road swooped down toward the starship base. Fierce arc lights bathed the three-mile- wide artificial plateau of the port, revealing two ferries on the ground, one being unloaded of some cargo, the other being fueled for a return leap into the sky. At a barrier blocking the road, sentries signaled with flashlights, and Suvorov made the tires cry out as he braked. He looked out of the window and shouted something I didn’t catch; the sentries saluted and waved us by.
Just beyond the barrier, he parked the car and curtly told us to get out. We obeyed, and followed him around a narrow concrete path to an opening in the side of a vast rock—part of the mountains themselves, apparently. Huge soundproof and airtight doors stood open, giving access to a wide corridor. There was a smell of electricity and a noise of machinery; the solid stone floor vibrated a trifle underfoot.
He led us for perhaps five minutes along the corridor, acknowledging salutes from junior personnel coming in the opposite direction with a mere sketched wave of his weary right arm, until at last he halted before a sliding door. He pressed a stud set into its surface and it squeaked aside.
Beyond was a low-ceilinged room where men and women with tense faces sat around a table stacked with large colored photographs. There was a computer keyboard in the far comer. One woman was on her feet, as though she had been addressing her companions; both she and
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the rest of the group looked astonished and a little angry at the interruption.
“Sorry to break in on you,” Suvorov said brusquely. “But I want to show these people a copy of forty-nine.”
The woman sighed and shuffled through a pile of pictures in front of her. She selected one and handed it to the general, who passed it to me without saying anything. I stared at it.
I saw a thing with eyes like pale blue pits, many jointed limbs disposed around a blocky body. A cold suspicion began to crush my mind, frigid, petrifying.
I said, “What has a picture of one of the skymonsters to do with—?”
Suvorov’s brown eyes were suddenly full of melting pity, and his voice was gentle as he interrupted me.
“No, Mr. Drummond. That is not a sky- monster. That—so far as we can establish—is the present form of your brother Leon Drummond.”
VIII
I SAID, “My—my brother?" And had to finish the question in my mind, because I couldn’t bear to hear the words spoken aloud.
My brother turned to a many-legged monster? How? In the name of God, how?
For a long while—it seemed an eternity—the sound hung in the still air. No one moved or spoke. I could not even blink my eyes, I was so horribly fascinated by the picture in my hand.
Suddenly Carmen broke the spell. She snatched the photograph from me and looked at it. Her mouth worked. Her eyes widened.
And then she screamed.
It was the most dreadful noise I had ever heard in my life—a raw, throat-tearing cry as uncontrollable as sobbing, but fierce. In the low-ceilinged, rock-walled room its echoes battered back at us.
1 would have moved to comfort her, put my arm around her or uttered soothing words, but for the moment I was still too dazed. Suvorov, to whom this horror had long ago ceased to be a surprise, reacted at once. He brought the flat of his spade-shaped hand against her cheek with surgical accuracy. The slap, like a switch oper-
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ating, ended the screaming, and Carmen’s eyes closed as she rocked on her heels. The patch of cheek he had hit began to color angry red against the pallor of the rest of her face.
“Sorry," Suvorov said curtly. “But hysteria is the last thing we need right now. ”
“If you’ve quite finished. General ..." ventured the woman standing at the table.
“Yes, of course. We’ll go somewhere out of your way.” He turned to us. “Come on, let’s leave these people in peace. They have rather a lot on their minds.”
Brian, his hand shaking a little, rescued the photograph of what was alleged to be Leon from Carmen’s lax grasp the instant before she let it fall, and asked with his eyes whether he might take it with him. The woman standing at the table gave an impatient shrug of permission, and he fell in behind Suvorov as the latter made for the door. I stepped to Carmen’s side, put my hand on her arm, and urged her gently to accompany us. She obeyed like a marionette, unsteadily placing one foot in front of the other, not looking where she was going.
Again Suvorov led us down a stone-walled corridor carved from the heart of the mountain, this time bringing us to what was obviously a technical section where armor-glass windows faced on to the actual port. We caught a glimpse of the night outside, the floodlights and the work in progress on the rocket ferries, as he gestured us into a small brightly lit office.
There were just enough chairs for all of us to sit down. He took his place behind a bare desk
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and slid a box of cigarettes toward us before tilting back his own chair and running his hands through his cropped brown hair.
He said, “Believe me, you aren’t as shocked at this moment as we were a week ago.”
The statement sounded to me like a lie, lost as I was in my white fog of dismay. How could anyone be more shocked than I was—or Carmen, whose trembling I could feel through my fingers, whose teeth I could clearly hear chattering? But my mind was too numb for me to be able to say what I was thinking.
I looked at Brian, envying the fact that he had no brother among the crew. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring down at the picture he held in both hands. He was visibly sweating, but he sounded calm enough when he spoke.
Without raising his eyes, he said, “Are they all like this?"
Carmen tensed fractionally, victim of an access of futile hope. But Suvorov said, “They differ in details, that’s all. Not one of them has escaped the change."
“Why?” Brian snapped. “How?”
“What do you think we’re trying to find out?” Suvorov countered. He took a cigarette, not from the box he’d offered us but from his pocket: a long Russian one with a built-in pasteboard holder. Having bent the tube at right angles, he lit it and continued out of a cloud of smoke.
“You still understand, I hope, that telling you the facts isn’t giving you a license to publish them? Your argument is probably that the of
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ficially imposed silence gives rumors a chance to spread—but what rumors could be worse than a truth of this kind?”
Brian slapped the picture down on the desk with an angry gesture. He said, “I don’t believe in lies. General! White, or any other color! You’re going to have to do better than this before I shut my mouth. You’re going to have to tell me a great deal more.”
“If I knew more, I’d tell you, ” Suvorov snapped. “Do you think we’re miracle
workers? Try me with a question or two, and I’ll promise to be honest about our ignorance. Will that suit you?”
Realizing that Suvorov was close to losing his temper, Brian spoke again in a less forceful tone. He said, “Have you no idea, at least, whether this change is a natural consequence of starflight? For instance, have the interior fittings of the ship changed along with the crew?”
It was an important question and deserved an answer, but that was the moment when I found my own voice, and burst out, “How can that thing be my brother? What grounds have you for saying so?”
Suvorov closed his eyes, the Russian cigarette jutting up from the comer of his mouth. He said, “They aren’t equipped for normal speech at present, and there are psychological problems —what those are exactly I can't say because I’m not an expert. Though who the hell is an expert on this?” he added with sudden violence. “But most of them can write fairly well. He’s one of the ones who can.” He pointed at the desk top without looking.
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“Excuse me,” Carmen said thinly. “Why are you talking as though these things are people in different forms? Why are you sure they’re not alien creatures that have taken the place of the crew?”
Suvorov said tiredly, “Did you have a message from your brother, Miss Iglesias? Some messages have been released.”
Carmen nodded.
"Did it strike you as being in character?”
“Yes.”
“So did mine,” I cut in, “but that proves nothing. The message could have been faked by someone who’d studied up on the psychology of the crewmen before departure.” I sounded doubtful even to myself. Could anyone have selected that of all possible comments—except Leon, whom it fitted so well I could practically hear his voice speaking it, slightly bored, slightly mocking, but patiently accepting the need for long surveillance after their journey into the unknown . . . and contriving to slip a double meaning into it, moreover: a reference not just to the intensive study he was undergoing, but also to the giant faces in the sky!
But before I could pursue my point any further, Suvorov opened his eyes and gave a weary sigh. “Why are you so ready to assume we’re against you, Drummond? We’re on your side, damn it. We’re just as eager to get to the bottom of the problem as you are. We haven’t achieved much so far because, of all the emergencies we prepared for, this wasn’t on the list. Suppose you give me five minutes without interruption and I’ll tell you all I can.”