The Stardroppers (9 page)

“If you spent more time with your ’dropper and less time playing with words, Jerry, I think you might make it yourself,” Watson said.

Jerry didn’t seem to hear. He went on, “Now if Berghaus is right, it figures that the loudest signals on the ’dropper should be from the most highly evolved and most actively conscious species, right? So what’s human evolution? Basically a story of learning to impose a desired form on environment, right? But not just physical environment: also the sequence of events experienced. The more man evolves, the more he consciously plans ahead and—uh—manipulates randomness, trying to ensure that future experiences are desirable ones. But there’s a gap here, and I can’t fill it in.” He broke off, looking unhappy.

“Jerry,” Watson said again, and this time made the words sound more like an order than a piece of advice, “you need to spend more time with your ’dropper and less time talking.”

Acquiescently, Jerry got up and wandered away, lost in thought. Dan stared at Watson.

“You’re a lot more than a store manager, aren’t you?” he said. “These people treat you like a guru—a bonze.”

“Do they?” Watson countered in a casual tone. “Well, can you think of a better niche in a commercial society for someone who’s concerned to propagate knowledge he considers important?”

“Dangerous knowledge!”

“So tell me what makes knowledge dangerous. Which seems more innocuous, in your view—to teach a man to read and write, or to make gunpowder? Yet more revolutions have been carried through with literacy than with shot and shell.”

He stood up. “Well, you’ve had a very eventful first
visit to our club, haven’t you? Can I give you a lift home? I have the penthouse apartment over Cosmica Limited, if that’s anywhere in your direction.”

“No. No thank you. I’m going to walk. I think I need the night air to calm me down.” Dan heard his own voice tinged with bitterness. “But can’t you think of a stronger term to describe what’s happened than ‘eventful’?”

Watson fixed him with steely eyes. “I’m not callous, Mr. Cross. Leon was a good man, and I liked him. I simply have to face the fact that he wasn’t
better
. Good night.”

The phone in Dan’s hotel room rang at eight-thirty. He had slept very badly, and his eyes were stinging. He’d intended to try and doze for another hour, but it seemed like a waste of effort.

“Yes?” he said to the phone, half expecting the caller to be Redvers.

“Reception, Mr. Cross. A gentleman has left a package for you. It’s a Mr. Carlton, I think. He said you’d probably want it straight away, so I hope I haven’t disturbed you unnecessarily.”

“No, that’s all right,” Dan said tiredly. “It’s about the size and shape of a stardropper, is it?”

“I imagine so, sir,” the reception clerk said. “But it’s wrapped in brown paper.”

Dan thought for a moment. The events of last evening had haunted him night-long, and he was aware of a need for ordinary human company. He said at length, “Okay, I’m planning to come down for breakfast in the lounge—I’ll pick the thing up on my way past. In about twenty minutes, I guess.”

The reception clerk sounded embarrassed when he answered. “Ah—I sould advise against calling at the desk, sir.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, sir, we’re besieged by reporters. It appears that you were involved in something yesterday which has attracted a great deal of public interest.”

“Oh my God,” Dan said. He sat up and reached for a cigarette. “Can’t you tell them to go to hell?”

“Well, sir, we do our best to protect the privacy of our guests, but … Look, suppose I send up the morning papers. I think that might clarify matters.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, and added, “By the way, did you mean you’d rather not have me take breakfast downstairs?”

Slightly shocked, the clerk said, “Not at all, sir. Please do precisely as you wish. We for our part will do our utmost to ensure that no one disturbs you without your permission.”

“That sounds like service,” Dan grunted, and cut the connection.

He was in the shower when the bellboy brought up the promised papers, and shouted that the man should come back for his tip later. But the answer, in an offhand voice, was, “That’s all right, sir. Any time!”

When he emerged from the bathroom he discovered why. All of a sudden he was in the worst possible predicament for an Agency operative. He was a celebrity. From all the papers huge blue-and-red headlines shrieked:
STARDROPPER FAN VANISHES! DISAPPEARANCE OF WELL-KNOWN CITY PERSONALITY. REMARKABLE EVENT AT “STARDROPPER” CLUB. IT IS TRUE ABOUT STARDROPPING! (IS IT?)

“Christ,” he said aloud, and folded the papers under his arm. Before tackling the full texts, he needed something to clear his head.

When he came out of the elevator in the foyer, he found the reception clerk hadn’t been exaggerating to say that the desk was being besieged. At least thirty people were milling around in the hallway, many armed with portable recorders, and there were two TV camera teams as well. Fortunately none of them glanced his way as he hurried past and into the breakfast lounge.

Feeling as though he had just won some sort of petty victory, he sat down at a vacant table, spreading the papers out, and said to the waiter hovering beside him, “Coffee. Black. A lot of it, and quickly.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, and added softly, “You are Mr. Cross, aren’t you? Because the manager said that if you came down we were to ask you if you’re willing to talk to those reporters out there.”

“Tell the manager that as far as I’m concerned they can go jump in the Serpentine,” Dan grunted. “And I’d appreciate them being kept well away from me, at least until I’ve had breakfast.”

“Well do our best, sir,” the waiter said, though not very optimistically. “And what can I bring you anyway? Smoked haddock, ham and eggs, vegetarian savory—?”

“Just the coffee for now. I’ll decide about the rest later.”

“Very good, sir.”

Now that was what you might call service, Dan thought as he set to studying the papers in detail. It was clear from the start that this was what Redvers had been so afraid of—the disappearance of someone newsworthy. For Patrick, it seemed, had been a director of a nationally famous real estate agency, and his son was a champion glider pilot.

He had a sickening sensation that he was sliding helplessly toward disaster.

The press had been quick, and thorough. They had got hold—by the look of it—of a membership list for Club Cosmica, and they’d tracked down Jerry Bartlett, Watson, and Angel Allen. No paper had comments from all three, but they had all got hold of at least one of the trio and one or more of the other club members. Doubtless it had taken them until this morning to locate himself only because he’d been a visitor, not a regular.

So the accolade of press authority had finally been given to all those long-stifled rumors. Now anything could happen.

Worse yet, someone had been digging in the morgue and had uncovered the human-interest angle of Angel’s engagement to Robin Rainshaw. Clearly Redvers—or possibly his father—had planted a story to cover up his disappearance, and it had been accepted without question until now. Some reporter, however, had put one and two together and made four, and here was the inevitable result under a bright red subhead:

“Can it be coincidence that brilliant Robin Rainshaw, his famous father’s co-researcher, was working on stardroppers too? Up to now no one has dared to pose that question, but now it MUST BE ANSWERED!”

Oh, lord. …

“Mr. Cross,” a mild voice said, and he glanced up. Taking the vacant place at his two-person table was a non-descript
man in a cheap suit, with sandy hair and glasses and a wisp of beard on his sharp chin. Could this be a reporter who had evaded the vigilance of the staff?

Then a relay of memory clicked, and Dan recalled seeing this character among the forty or fifty in the audience at Club Cosmica last night. No good denying his identity, then. He said, “Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Norman Ferrers, Mr. Cross. We were introduced at the club last night, as you’ll probably recall.”

Oh, yes. This had been one of the people in the same group as Angel and Jerry, whom he’d put down as a listener rather than a talker. He said, “So what do you want?”

“Merely to talk to you, that’s all. You were actually sitting next to Mr. Patrick, weren’t you?”

“If you know that much, you know everything I know. And I hate being plagued by people before breakfast.”

Not at all put out, Ferrers reached for one of the papers Dan had discarded. He said, turning to a center page, “This is very important, Mr. Cross. I think you should read this leader, which says what I want to say much more cogently than—”

“Waiter!” Dan said, snapping his fingers. Arriving with the promised coffee, the man looked an inquiry.

“Is this—person—a client of the hotel?”

“Not that I’m aware of, sir,” the waiter murmured.

“Then what the hell is he doing bothering me? Get rid of him!’

Taking his time over setting down the coffee pot, the waiter said, “Certainly, sir.” And continued to Ferrers: “The gentleman wishes to be undisturbed, and he is a guest in the hotel. I believe you’re not.”

There was a frozen pause; then, seeing Ferrers was not complying, he signaled to the stately maître d’ on duty at the entrance, and the latter marched over. He stood about six-five, and was muscular with it, and doubtless could act as his own bouncer when required—not that this was the kind of hotel which employed bouncers. Faced with this giant, Ferrers rose, his features twisting into a nasty glare.

“I don’t know whether you’re a conscious traitor, Cross,
or just a fool!” he snapped. “But I promise you haven’t heard the last of me!”

With pathetic dignity he allowed himself to be escorted to the door.

“What in hell did he mean by that?” Dan said under his breath, and looked at the article Ferrers had recommended as he sipped his coffee. This, he knew, was one of the more conservative of the London dailies, but carried relatively little influence.

“Not since the advent of nuclear energy has there been a new power so pregnant with possibilities and so fraught with danger as the miraculous talent which—we must now believe—is hidden in the signals from ‘stardroppers.’

“Fraught with danger, because not yet brought under rational control. Pregnant with possibilities, because if such control can be obtained, the implications will be limitless. …”

Who could take such cliché-ridden pontificating seriously? Dan dropped the paper on the floor and continued with the rest of them.

His spirits lightened a little as he read further. This wasn’t quite the catastrophe he’d at first feared. There was a hint of jocularity in some of the news stories, and he guessed that if it hadn’t been a quiet day on the international political front—at least, as quiet as one could hope for nowadays, what with umpteen brushfire wars in progress, the usual Arab-Israeli backbiting and other small change of modern times—it would never have been given such prominence. One columnist suggested that Patrick might turn up in the Bahamas suffering from loss of memory and two others hinted that someone was hoping to sell a lot of stardroppers to people needing colorable excuses to dodge the taxman.

If only I could believe that too. …

But he couldn’t. He’d been convinced. And he was frightened.

He abandoned the breakfast he’d barely nibbled at, gathered his papers, and sneaked back up to his room. He needed to talk to someone in authority, and Redvers was the first choice.

Slamming the door behind him, he marched toward the phone, tossing the papers on the bed. He was just about
to dial the Yard, when there was a click behind him, and he whirled to find Ferrers looking at him from the doorway of the bathroom.

He held a gun.

It was a somewhat elderly weapon—a P-38 Walther—but Dan drew slender consolation from that Having assumed he was being sent on a mere fact-finding mission, his superiors in New York had suggested he bring nothing more lethal with him than a regular operative’s toolkit—a neat little gadget disguised as a six-blade pocketknife, which required either the right preliminary information or a very high-powered X-ray machine to reveal its internal secrets.

There was only one logical thing to do; Dan did it. He turned, slowly, to face Ferrers, and held his hands out at his sides.

“That’s better,” Ferrers said with a sour chuckle, and emerged from the bathroom. He had been transformed by putting the gun in his hand, as though confidence flowed from its butt. “Now maybe we can talk properly. Sit down, keep your mouth shut, and listen to what I’ve got to say.”

He perched on the corner of the bed and waved Dan to take the armchair near the phone.

“Did you read that article I recommended?” he went on.

“Yes,” Dan said curtly. “A lot of hot air.”

“You think so? Then you’re either stupid or insanely optimistic. Think carefully. I know that over the past decade or so there’s been a divergence of policy between your country and ours, but at bottom there remains a real identity of interest which some of us have worked to preserve. All of a sudden, it’s turned out that there actually is some strange knowledge to be had from stardropper signals, and that means that those of us who care about the community of interest I mentioned have got to move
fast
. Because if somebody in the eastern bloc, and worst of all in the Maoist countries—”

By this time Dan was coming to the boil. Gun or no gun. He said, tight-lipped, “Who are you with—what group?”

“I’m a member of the Blue Front, Mr. Cross. We’re the people who believe, as I imagine you do, that our
anti-American policy of the past ten years or so has been calculated to deliver us into the hands of the Reds. I’m appealing to you as an American to tell us everything you can about what happened last night. We’re conducting an emergency inquiry into the Patrick case, and any tiny snippet of information—”

It took Dan that long to marshal what he wanted to say, and to draw a breath deep enough to say it in one go. The Blue Front, notoriously, was one of the most reactionary groups in Europe; the Agency had tangled with it on more than one occasion. But if there was one thing which any Agency operative was required to believe, it was that a nationalist in the nuclear age was as much of an anachronism as a crusader waving his sword and yelling, “Death to the infidel!”

It was a view that Dan subscribed to without reservation.

He said, “No wonder you have to hold a gun on somebody before you can get him to listen to you! Well, it’s your turn to listen to
me!
This is the twentieth century, chum! This is the age of rockets and satellites and moonships and nuclear bombs, which means it’s the age when we have to give up thinking with our muscles and start using our brains! You talk about ‘community of interest’—well,
my
community of interest is with the whole human race! I’m a human being first and an American second, which is the right order.
Go away!”

For a heart-stopping instant he thought he’d overdone his counterblast to the point where Ferrers was about to shoot him down, and the hell with the consequences. But at the same instant there came a knock at the door. Over-tense, like a watchspring on the point of breaking, Ferrers jerked his head around and gave Dan his chance.

Launching himself low, he hurled himself out of the chair with the full force of both arms and butted Ferrers in the chest, hurling him back on the bed. Cracking his own arm forward, he connected with Ferrer’s at the elbow, and the gun went thud on the carpet. He was much heavier than Ferrers, and in addition was extremely well trained in man-to-man combat—the Agency was jealous of its operatives’ ability to take care of themselves. When the bellhop, who had knocked, opened the door with a
passkey, he found Dan holding Ferrers flat on his back on the bed.

“Ah—” the intruder said, and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry! When I didn’t get an answer, I thought you must still be downstairs.”

He offered a brown-paper package in mute justification of his entry: the Binton stardropper which Nick Carlton had brought back for him and left at the desk.

“Put that over there and come pick up this bastard’s gun,” Dan said, panting.