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with you, but I’m sure you appreciate the strain we’re all under.”
We said we did, and he went out,
Suvorov cleared his throat as the door closed. He said, “A point has occurred to me, Mr. Drummond. You set a price on your cooperation, a chance to visit your brother. I can set that up for tomorrow or the next day. But there must be an impregnable excuse for your absence. It must not be allowed to leak out that you’ve been allowed to visit Starventure when none of the other relatives of crewmen has even been permitted to enter the spaceport.”
“I can fix that,” I said. “I can rely on Brian to spread some misleading excuses, can’t I?”—I glanced his way—“and there are some people in the Prensam office here who’ll say anything I ask and not want to know why.”
I snapped my fingers and added, “I can always put it about that I’ve been sent by Hank Sandler for first-hand coverage of the monster sightings in Chile.”
“Don’t trouble me with the details," Suvorov said. “Just make sure the story’s watertight.” He checked his watch. “I’d better get you back to Quito now. I’m due on duty in less than ten minutes, so 111 have to send you home with a staff driver. Will you be going to see Chambord?” Brian nodded. “We can’t put together our cover story without his help. He’s going to have to play Joseph to it, poor devil—which he certainly isn’t going to enjoy.”
He made to rise. Suvorov held out his hand, but not to shake with him.
“That photograph, please, Mr. Watchett! It’s
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an unbreakable rule that such a thing must not be allowed to leave the port. ”
Brian parted with the shiny sheet reluctantly. He said, "You know, the more I look at that picture, the more I’m convinced that none of what you’ve told me can be true.”
“I’m sure that will be a great help in preparing your cover story, ” Suvorov commented ironically. “By the way, one last point: you must of course let our experts know what you intend to say. You don’t know the entire story even now, so there’s a risk of your inventing something which is dangerously close to the truth. So send in your draft before you show it to Chambord, even, and never mind what time of day or night you have it ready. We shall have plenty of competent authorities to approve it. We have more top scientific talent within three miles of this spot, getting less sleep for a longer time, than ever in human history.”
“And if you don’t like what we suggest?" 1 had to say that, but a moment later I regretted it. For when Suvorov turned his face to me, it was the face of a haunted man.
“We shall have to like it, shan’t we?” he said quietly. “Really, we have no choice. It’s that, or worldwide hysteria. Goodbye for the present, then. I shall expect to hear from you in a few hours’ time.”
I helped Carmen, who was death-pale still, to her feet. Then, like pallbearers under the weight of a giant’s coffin, we stumbled out into the night.
X
OUR NEW driver made the return trip at a more reasonable speed than Suvorov when he was bringing us, but after what we had learned we were in no mood to be grateful for that. It might almost have been better to be pitched to our deaths uncaring than to confront this strange and terrible new universe.
I didn’t say or do anything for at least a couple of miles, but simply watched the rocky wall beside the road loom up, sidestep, vanish as the car’s lights played over it. At last I stirred and made to put my arm comfortingly around Carmen’s shoulders. It was like touching a wax dummy. When I looked at her at first I could not see her face; then, as the road curved, the car’s lights were thrown back and shed a brief illumination over us. Her eyes were wide, fixed straight ahead, and her lips were moving in soundless speech.
I said, “Carmen!”
She ignored me for a long moment. 1 guessed she must be reciting a prayer and taking the time to finish it. That was a new thing to me; I had never had any idea she was religious.
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“Leave me alone,” she said in a voice as dead as the moon.
I tried to object. She turned her head slowly—I could see as once again the headlights were reflected by rocks at the roadside—and bared her teeth in a near-snarl.
“David, you don’t own me,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
Once more I had the sensation of seeing her for the first time. Compliantly I withdrew my arm, feeling a sudden stab of miseiy as sharp as at the news of an old friend’s death. It seemed for the instant impossible that I should ever meet my Carmen again: laughing, affectionate, excited by me and by the world.
But Brian, leaning back in the seat beside the driver, was saying something, and I had to tear my attention free and direct it to him. I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
“I was asking if you have any definite ideas about the line we should take with Chambord. It’s going to be hard to enlist his cooperation.”
I put up my hand to rub my forehead.
“Ah . . . no,” I said at length. “Sorry. I’m still pretty shaken up by what’s happened to Leon. I’ll have to rely on you for ideas until I recover.”
“It seems to me there’s only one possibility. Here, have a cigarette. ” He half turned to reach the pack toward me, then twisted further to offer it to Carmen. I pushed his arm back.
“She wants to be left alone,” I muttered emptily. “Goon.”
He fumbled on the dash for the car’s lighter. “Well, it’s ridiculous”—he puffed smoke—“to try and pretend that nothing’s gone wrong. We have
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to pick on the least damaging of the convincing reasons for the long delay in the crew’s return to Earth. About the only thing I can think of right now is this quarantine I understand they were supposed to undergo. What’s the chance of their being infected with some alien organism, so that they can't land until the experts find a cure?”
“A million to one against is the lowest odds I’ve been quoted,” I said with a sigh. “Anyway, the quarantine gimmick stinks. It’ll be taken for granted that the crew are all at death’s door. Their families will scream blue murder, and what’s worse every biologist on Earth will prick up his ears and start howling for data on this marvelous alien bacterium. Something from another planet capable of preying on terrestrial protoplasm would be the biggest news of the century in biology, biochemistry, paleobiology . . . No, we couldn’t sustain a lie like that."
Brian slapped his open palm on his knee. “Damned fools!” he exploded. “Sometimes I think it’s true what they used to say about scientists living in an ivory tower! Wouldn’t you have thought that the moment the boarding party found what had happened to the starship’s crew they’d have realized a fiction like this would become necessary? If they’d only taken some competent PR man like Henri into their confidence right away, they’d have saved us having to build on seven days’ worth of half-truths and falsehoods!”
I nodded agreement.
“Well, let’s see,” Brian went on, scowling worse than ever. “What about psychological break-
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down? They couldn’t endure the stresses of the unfamiliar environment of hyperspace."
“Oh, Brian, for heaven’s sake!” I muttered. “You must be even more worn out than I am. Can’t you see what’s wrong with that? Damn it, people still have this instinctive revulsion against insanity; you couldn’t put it about that the crew had been unbalanced by their experience without undermining public support for any kind of spaceflight.”
“Don’t you think that's going to happen anyway?" Brian said softly.
I tried not to admit even to myself that his prediction was likely to be right. It wasn’t that I myself had much personal involvement with spaceflight—I’d never been further than orbit— but Leon did, and maybe to a greater extent than I’d formerly recognized, Leon represented my proxy, making the
progress in science which I’d hoped to make myself but which circumstances compelled me only to report.
In any case, Starventure had been seen as an achievement of the “because it’s there” type, possibly the first in history in which the whole population of the world had a vicarious share. No matter how ingenious a lie we concocted, the disappointment at our failure was going to be appalling.
I said, “I don’t think the idea would work for smother reason, you know. People would promptly start asking why, if hyperspace is so intolerable, the crew managed to survive the outward trip, when the strain would have been much worse because they were bound for an unknown
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destination. On the way home, there would have been journey’s end to look forward to."
“Blast it, you’re right,” Brian conceded. By this time his eyebrows were nearly meeting above his nose. “Well, it’s your turn now since you’ve shot down my first suggestions. Suppose you stop moping and start thinking—or have you got out of the habit since you set up in business on your own?”
By the time we reentered the city, we had the skeleton of our story, which could be developed according to circumstances in three ways: it could prepare the world for the truth, it could become a permanent lie with downbeat implications designed to depress public interest in future starflights and discourage questions about the first one, or on the billion-to-one level it could be dropped and forgotten in a day following a resolution of the problem through some new discovery.
I was so engrossed in fleshing out this skeleton, feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in my own unexpected ingenuity, that I almost forgot about Carmen. When I suddenly realized how long it was since I’d even glanced at her, we had turned off the main road toward Chambord’s home, where Suvorov had of course instructed our driver to take us first.
I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in Spanish to pull up. Turning to Carmen, I asked if I should find her a cab to take her home.
She nodded without speaking. The driver suggested backing up to the highway again, because there were more likely to be cabs there
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than here, but Carmen simply opened her door and climbed out.
I jumped out after her and tried to catch her by the arm, but she avoided me. I said, “Carmen! Why are you treating me as though it’s all my fault?”
“You think I’m lying to you," she said stonily. “I did see my brother, as clearly as you saw yours. Not a vision, not a monster, but my Hermanos alive and well. ”
The weight of her words crushed my mind. What the devil was I to do? I hesitated, wondering whether to send Brian to see Chambord by himself and leave me to take Carmen home and comfort her; she was clearly in a state of extreme shock.
But, all of a sudden, she conjured up a smile and laid a hand on my arm. “Dear David!” she said. “Go and do what you have to do, and don’t woriy about me. I shall be all right. Look, there’s a cab right now!”
She had spotted, with eyesight that had sometimes surprised me before, the faint distant glow of a lighted sign on a car roof. Breaking loose from me, she ran toward the highway shouting and waving. The driver spotted her and slowed down.
Hurrying after her, unable to catch her up, I called out. “Carmen! Don’t go home by yourself and brood! Go and spend the night with your family!"
I couldn’t be sure whether she heard me, but she waved and slipped into the back seat of the cab, which took off with a roar and shortly was lost to sight.
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Turning back to rejoin Brian, I wondered whether my idea had been such a good one after all. The vision of Carmen fighting her personal devils alone in her apartment through the darkest hours of night had prompted me to suggest it. But it was, come to think of it, from her family that she had this streak of—what to call it—mysticism, credulity, superstition. . . .
“Think she’ll be okay?" Brian asked as I reentered our car. “She seemed terribly shaken up.”
“Carmen’s just about the most resilient person I know,” I assured him. Which was true, in normal circumstances—she possessed fierce independence and inexhaustible determination. But what was there that was normal about this situation?
We reached Chambord’s home in another few minutes—a new smart bungalow set back from the road in a garden riotous with gaudy flowers. A light was on in one of the front windows, and as we shut the car doors behind us a dark figure appeared in silhouette on the step of the porch.
“David?” Chambord’s voice inquired. “Ah, I heard from General Suvorov that you were coming to see me—and Mr. Watchett, I believe. So I presume you have got results from your visit to the base. Please come in, but go quietly because my wife is sleeping at the back of the house.”
He led us into the hallway. There we could see how puffy his eyes were, how haggard his expression, infinitely worse than when we’d spoken with him only a few hours earlier. The
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sight of his overtiredness made me check my watch for the first time in hours. I was dismayed to see that it was already well after one A.M.
In the room where we had seen the light on, he gave us chairs and brought us cups of cafe- cognac. It was exactly what I needed. I felt my head clear and my spirits revive.
“Eh Men!” he said, taking another chair facing ours. “All I know so far is what the general told me: that to forestall further rumors it's been decided to make a further release about the starship, and that you two and I must prepare a draft by eight o’clock this morning. Well, I am ready to listen. Of course, I am certain that what I shall hear isn’t going to be palatable.”
He folded his hands on his lap and looked at us expectantly.
Well, now for the first test of our big lie. I cleared my throat; Brian and I had agreed that since I was a science writer I stood the better chance of putting our story over.
"Yes. Well . . . Well, it looks as though our decision to force a showdown coincided with their decision to come clean. It’s clear to everyone by now that something has gone wrong, and when we marched in and threatened to raise hell they swung clear around amd asked for our cooperation. They’ve been completely at a loss, apparently, because of some of the effects that the crew have suffered which nobody anticipated, and they simply haven’t had time to think about trying to explain things to the public."
“What sort of effects?” prompted Chambord.
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“Partly physical and partly psychological. Remember these are the first men who’ve spent any length of time in hyperspace, and conditions there are completely different from our normal universe. The psychological effects sound as though they’re going to be the easiest to cope with, because the human mind has a limited range of responses to stress. The main trouble is acute agoraphobia. For many of he crew the voyage was unbroken; only a small landing-party set down on the Centaurian worlds, and the rest had to stay cooped up for two solid years Inside the ship. They simply can’t face being brought down to Earth, to large open spaces and sky above their heads. But of course now they’re being treated by experts, and that wouldn’t present much of a problem if it weren’t for the physical effects complicating matters."
I had to pause and lick my lips.
“You see, just as the pioneer astronauts suffered unforeseen consequences of free fall, such as bone softening due to the piezoelectric effect of gravity on the accumulation of calcium in the skeleton, so there have been metabolic disorders discovered in hyperspace. The tissues of the crew’s bodies have been affected; their injuries haven’t healed normally, their digestion has been affected, and there sure all kinds of other side effects which make it impossible for them to be brought straight back to Earth without grave risk of permanent incapacitation.”
There was a long silence. Finally Chambord gave a nod.
“Very well,” he said. “If that’s the story, I
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must take it as it stands. But I warn you, I don’t believe a word.”
Brian and I exchanged looks of dismay.
“I’ll tell you why," Chambord pursued. “First of all, David, I am an old hand at detecting a falsehood. I know your work especially well. I can say that in speech you do not use such a word as—oh—‘incapacitation.’ You may write it, because it is precise, but you do not say it. And, second, I have been in the UN press service most of my working life. I have seen international crises of all sizes from ruffled diplomatic tempers to incipient nuclear wars, and not one of them has created such a panic. No innocent metabolic disorder could account for what I have seen this past week. Am I perhaps entitled to the truth, even if I have to stand godfather to a lie?”
He shot questioning glances at each of us in turn. “Well? Are we to be invaded from the stars tomorrow? Did the starship find heaven and learn that mankind is excluded? What then?”
Neither Brian nor I moved a muscle.
“As you prefer,” he sighed. “Now we must set to work on this story you tell me, and conspire to deceive the public. There are few people who could persuade me to this, you know, David. But if you come to me, even me, and retail me this nonsense, then what has really happened must be very terrible indeed. I am perhaps happier not knowing.”
XI
BY ITS third draft that release was a masterpiece. It was thick and ponderous, yet hollow; it was like an elephant made out of fog. It said all kinds of depressing things in a tone of horrible optimism. According to mood, one might read into it, either a permanent epitaph for star-travel, or a paean of praise for the brave members of the crew who had opened the doors of the universe, or a sober and neutral record of fact.
At about five-thirty, red-eyed and shaking with the effort of concentrating on every single word, we got it licked and read it to Suvorov over the phone, using Chambord’s scrambler line to the spaceport through which he could take predeadline confidential data.
Suvorov recorded it, promised to call together all available heads of department to approve it and left us to await their verdict with all the nervousness of expectant fathers. It came at six-ten: not merely approved, but warmly welcomed because it left so many options open.