More Things in Heaven Read online

  Chambord picked up the only draft in existence of our superlative lie and folded it into his pocket, looking gloomy.

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  “So 1 will take this down to the press office and have it ’faxed," he said. “And at eight o’clock it will be released. After which ...”

  “What?” I said, dropping into an armchair because my legs would suddenly not bear my weight.

  “After that I think I shall resign!” Chambord snapped and strode out.

  “Come to think of it,” Brian said, crossing the room to the phone, “we ought to call off any hounds Hank still has on the scent.” I nodded. I’d been meaning to suggest it myself, only somehow I hadn’t found the energy.

  Eight a.m. was just about the right time for the release, I figured. Reaction was likely to be strongest in this hemisphere. The morning papers would have gone out and been read; the noons and evenings would carry it. of course, but the facts would now trickle into the public awareness; hints would have prepared the majority of people before they got the story in full either on leaving work or from seeing a TV bulletin on their arrival home. In Western Europe and Eastern Russia, where reaction was likely to be next strongest, it would hit in the early afternoon, and would again be tempered by leaking through in installments before TV and the next day’s papers filled in the gaps. The reaction in China and Japan was all that worried me, but over that side of Earth there was, after all, a long tradition of respect for the authority of the expert, which I’d just so flagrantly abused.

  I closed my eyes, but despite my exhaustion I had no urge to sleep. Across the room I could

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  hear Brian asking our New York office (amazing how rapidly I'd fallen back into the habit of thinking of it as “our") for Sandler or whoever was on duty. The voice which answered wasn’t Sandler’s, but I didn’t look to see if I recognized the face on the screen.

  "Release at eight a.m. your time?” I heard. “But—hell, our morning editions will be printed and wrapped by then!"

  “Tell Hank this is what we got for being pushy,” Brian said in a convincingly dispirited tone. “He gave me this ultimatum last night, and we acted on it. So we get the release at eight a m. and a bond of secrecy until then.”

  “I've half a mind to rout out Hank and have him draft the piece he planned to do tomorrow! Then we could get the demand for the release on the beams ahead of the actual text. Be good prestige-wise, wouldn’t it?”

  “Good for nothing else, though. They’d jump to the conclusion I tipped you off, and Solar’s press facilities down here would be up the creek. Henri Chambord’s in charge. You may have heard of him."

  “Are you joking? Yes, you’re right, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t put it past Chambord to blacklist even Solar. But can’t you at least make sure Kaye gets the text immediately? Then maybe tomorrow’s mornings will carry our own version instead of the plain official handout."

  “I guess we could do that,” Brian agreed, wiping his face with one hand and reaching to cut the circuit with the other.

  A thought struck me, which would have occurred to me much earlier if I hadn’t been two

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  years out of touch. I said, "Brian, this piece the guy was just talking about—the demand for full details about the ship, yes?”

  "Yes. What about it?”

  “Whose name was Hank planning- to hang on it? His own? It would have needed a name—a plain agency credit wouldn’t have got it any space.”

  “Since when has a Solar bureau chief used his own name on a story?” Brian countered wryly. "And what would it mean to the public if he did? No, the question’s academic, but in fact he was going to use your name as a peg. I was supposed to talk you into giving permission. It would have gone out as a straight release, not a Solar feature, licensed for unlimited rewriting, in the hope of catching the public mood and sparking off a worldwide reaction.

  “Hank’s a clever bastard,” I said. The trick might have worked, too, and it hadn’t even occurred to me. I forced myself out of my chair and stretched to the tips of my toes.

  “Well, that’s that,” I said around a yawn.

  “No, it's not,” Brian contradicted, swiveling around on the stool by the phone. “I took on a job, remember? I propose to start right now. I want the fullest details you can remember concerning your encounter with your brother the day of Starventure’s return.”

  Slowly I sank back into the chair I’d just left. I said, “I wish to God you’d mentioned these other stories you’d heard. I might have taken my own experience a bit more seriously."

  “As of now, you take it seriously,” Brian said.

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  He took out his recorder, checked that there was a clean crystal in it, and set it going.

  “And when you’ve finished telling me about seeing Leon,” he concluded, “you can tell me what you know about your friend Carmen and her nephew. I’m determined to get to the bottom of this.”

  It was almost eight when I got back to my hotel. I bought all the available papers and took them up to my room. While I was filling a tub to soak away my exhaustion, I leafed through them. The two big stories of the day were connected, I knew that for certain now. I wondered how many people were making the connection by guesswork.

  Some amateur radio-astronomers, doing daytime work on meteor reflections, had found unaccountable short-range signals bouncing back from just the other side of the blue sky, as though there were something solid there, such as a sky-monster. One of the papers had contrived to reach Professor Acosta, which surprised me, and secured from him a grudging admission that other similar phenomena had previously been observed.

  And in Jakarta the parents of one of Starven- ture's engineers had been provoked into making accusations of deception against the officials at the starship base. There was a four-column picture in most of the papers showing a very handsome middle-aged woman weeping over a bunch of flowers.

  Scowling, I turned off the tub and went to the phone. I called Carmen’s family’s number.

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  which I still had from my previous visits to Quito. I got her mother on the line. She spoke no English, and what with my lack of fluency in Spanish and her Indian accent and vocabulary it took a hell of a long time to make myself understood, but eventually I discovered that Carmen had indeed spent the night there, and also that she had gone out a quarter hour earlier, presumably intending to go to work. I thanked Sra. Iglesias and tried Carmen’s office number, but got no reply. It was barely eight, and the staff, I figured, wouldn’t be in yet. I decided to take my bath and try again at half past.

  Wondering who it was who had managed to break down Acosta’s reticence, I checked that story again, and was pleased to see that one of Manuel Segura’s staffers had the byline. That meant, naturally, Solar had the North American rights if they wanted them. It was ridiculous how quickly the habits due to two years of freelancing had faded; I was once again a loyal Solar Press employee—for the time being.

  I wasn’t sure I liked being an employee of any kind.

  Throwing aside the papers, I stared through the steamy air at nothing in particular. Thinking of Manuel had reminded me that I was supposed to plant a cover stoiy for myself, as well as the grand one, to disguise my absence in space. From my mental note to call him and request his help, my mind had suddenly leaped to the impending reality of that trip.

  Now I was beginning to sense a little of what Carmen must have endured last night. I whis

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  pered under my breath, tiying to make facts come real by dressing them in words.

  “Listen! Today, or more likely tomorrow, they’re going to take you down to the spaceport and load you on an orbital ferry and fly you out to Starventure. There they are going to show you a—a creature, a half-shapeles
s thing with metallic eyes and too many limbs, which they will say is Leon. How can it possibly be Leon?”

  I’d been in space before, so the flight itself didn’t frighten me. But the thought of what was promised to me out there brought back visions from the past. By the time I was old enough to take notice, the Mars flight was a routine matter and there were permanent colonists on the Moon. I was vaguely aware, though, that in the early days of spaceflight some people had seriously feared the consequences— whether for the comparatively rational reason that Mars might be inhabited by dangerous monsters, or because they regarded the heavens as God’s private domain and spacemen as impious trespassers.

  Well, so far God had kept quiet. But here were the monsters with a vengeance.

  The phone went. I started, making the water in the tub slosh back and forth with little waves that broke against my chest. I’d forgotten to switch my incoming calls through to the sound- only circuit serving the bathroom. For a minute I was inclined to let it ring; then I realized it might be Carmen calling and climbed out of the bath.

  Swathed in towels, leaving wet footprints on

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  the carpet, I went to answer. It wasn’t Carmen. A uniformed man showed in the screen.

  “Mr. Drummond?”

  “Yes—what is it?”

  “General Suvorov for you. Hold the line.”

  The screen blanked; then the image re-formed, catching Suvorov passing his fingers tiredly through his hair.

  “Good morning, Mr. Drummond,” he said. “We owe you our congratulations—you and Mr. Watchett. Your cover story is exactly what the situation called for.”

  “How long it will stand up is anybody’s guess.” I shrugged. “Henri Chambord saw through it right away. ”

  “At least it has gained us a breathing space. So I will fulfill my part of our bargain, not only because I am a man of my word but also because when 1 put the idea to our psychologists they said it would be very helpful to study the reaction not only of yourself to your brother in his—ah—new shape, but also of your brother himself.”

  I said nothing. The water drying on my skin was chilling me despite the warmth of the air.

  “We have an orbital shot scheduled for 1650 hours this afternoon. Please report to the spaceport at noon for a medical examination and to be kitted out. Have you flown space before?”

  I must have gaped. Luckily the picture-melt didn’t catch me, so Suvorov didn’t see my surprise. But either he had been pulling strings very hard, or the psychologists up at the ship were ready to grasp at any straw.

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  Swallowing, I contrived to answer. “Yes, a couple of times. No further than orbit, though.” “That’s where you’ll be going this time. I’ve made no arrangements for Miss Iglesias, by the way. I judged by her attitude last night that she might be uncooperative.”

  “I don’t think she would want to go,” I agreed. The picture-melt caught me with a dispirited expression; I was very unhappy about Carmen right now. Suvorov, frozen in a frown, commented.

  “Did you get any sleep last night?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “Then take an hour’s forced-sleep before you come out to the port. Otherwise the doctors will veto your flight. And have you arranged this excuse for your absence which I asked for?”

  “I was intending to, directly I’d had my bath. But I just realized: I didn’t ask how long I’m likely to be away.”

  “Twenty-four hours, not longer.”

  “All right. Shall I make my own way to the port, or will you send a car for me?”

  “I’ll have a car waiting for you at eleven-thirty.” When he had broken the connection, it didn’t seem worth getting back in the tub. I dried and put on clean clothes and returned to the phone. First I ordered breakfast and asked someone to go to a drugstore and get me some forced-sleep capsules, and then I called Manuel Segura.

  After congratulating him on getting one of his men into Acosta’s office, I mentioned casually that since, after the morning news release, it didn’t look as though there would be many

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  further developments here for a while, I was considering dropping down to Chile to check up on the first of the epidemic of sky-monsters. That started him off on a recital of the latest monsters to be reported, and without my saying anything more I was sure by the time he was through that he’d remember me promising to disappear to Chile for at least a day and possibly longer. I could rely on Brian to reinforce the impression.

  So that was taken care of. And by now, surely. Carmen must have arrived at work.

  I called the firm again, and this time a pretty receptionist answe.red me. No, Senorita Iglesias had not come in this morning. No, she had not called to say she was unwell. She had simply not put in an appearance. They had called her home to inquire, but her mother had been very surprised to learn she wasn’t at work. Was there any message?

  Dismayed, I mumbled something and rang off.

  XII

  WHAT HAD that crazy girl taken it into her head to do now?

  I’d always pictured Carmen as being one of the most levelheaded and self-possessed people I knew. She had seemed to me to look on life from a refreshingly cynical viewpoint—not unpleasantly cynical, but wiy. detached, tolerant of human failings.

  Now all of a sudden I found myself wondering whether part of my opinion had been due to a kind of sociological trick of the light. Latin America was, after all, still a very conservative area of the world; possibly part of my image of Carmen was due to her being somewhat more emancipated than the average . . . ?

  I couldn’t be sure. What I could be certain of, however, was that what had happened to her brother had stripped away a mask and laid bare beneath something archetypally older. She had talked of having second sight because she was the seventh child of a seventh child, but I’d never regarded that as being meant to be taken seriously. I’d dismissed it as a pose adopted pour epater les scientistes—like me—and if circumstances had been different I’d have gone on thinking so.

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  Now, having had my own nice tidy world- picture blown to smithereens, I was even beginning to wonder how much of a joke it had been when she talked of her ancestry being one- quarter jaguar.

  I spent a few terrifying minutes thinking about the changes that were going to take place in the world I'd known. All my life I’d believed in the ideal of progress—that we were ridding ourselves of an ancient burden, replacing superstition and dogma with reason and fact. I remembered the ringing phrases I’d used to describe Starventure’s return, about “man throwing down his challenge to the stars," and I shivered.

  It looked as though the stars had failed to recognize our challenge, and the outcome would be the collapse of all our pride.

  I’d shared that pride. Somewhere in the back of my mind, and I imagined in the minds of most people of this twenty-first century, there had been a dream of Man encompassing the universe by the power of his intelligence. That was the vision which had inspired Starventure.

  Could we have been deluding ourselves? Had we truly been misled into thinking that because we seemed to understand our own little comer of the cosmos we were on the way to understanding the whole of it?

  Suppose that our “laws of nature” were mere anomalies! Suppose that our planet Earth was a statistical variation, and the rest of the universe operated on totally different principles!

  My imagination was being drawn irresistibly down such paths as these, leading to who could tell what appalling conclusions, when I was pro

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  saically Interrupted by the arrival of the breakfast I had ordered, and the capsules of forced- sleep drug.

  I was so relieved to be distracted from my gloomy musings that I tipped the girl who brought the
breakfast with absurd generosity. I poured a full cup Of scalding black coffee, gulped it down, and followed it with another. My raging thoughts began to stabilize. I told myself that it was no good speculating about the future—I’d had most of my assumptions reduced to nonsense. I would be far better advised to wait until I’d satisfied myself that Leon was really and truly in this monstrous form he was alleged to have acquired. I wasn’t looking forward to the experience, but at least it offered me escape from this limbo of uncertainty.

  Meantime . . . Carmen.

  There was little I could do where she was concerned. In the two and a half hours before the staff car which Suvorov had promised came to fetch me to the spaceport, I had to get at least the full hour of forced-sleep he’d insisted on. I dared not lose the opportunity of going up to Starventure, even though I wasn’t going to be allowed to write anything about what I saw on the trip. The space-service doctors would certainly refuse to allow me aboard the ferry if I was dropping with weariness; I had previous knowledge of the thoroughness with which they screened passengers going up to orbit. And in any case it seemed that the psychologists up there at the ship were depending on my encounter with Leon for valuable fresh informa

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  tion. It would be unfair to go up in less than peak physical condition.

  Yet how I could face dropping off to sleep when I wanted most of all to brace myself, argue with myself, convince myself that I must trust these people who were making the ridiculous claim: that thing in the many-legged body is your brother .../

  And also I wanted to be with Carmen.

  Where could she have gone?

  I considered asking Brian to trace her, on the specious excuse that he must want to obtain further details of her vision of her brother. But right now I had no idea how to contact Brian except by leaving a message which he might get while I was too deeply asleep to answer his call. He might be at the spaceport, or at Chambord’s office, or anywhere: he might in fact already have started going around to call on the people from whom he’d heard rumors about the appearance of Starventure’s crew in Quito.