The Stardroppers (10 page)

“What?” The man’s eyes bulged. But he complied, and gingerly reclaimed the weapon from the floor, handing it with truly British uncertainty. It was a source of never-ending wonder to Dan that in this country almost nobody had seen, let alone handled, a sidearm. As soon as the gun was in safe hands, he let Ferrers get up.

“What—happened?” the bellboy demanded.

“Oh, he was waiting for me in the bathroom,” Dan sighed. “How do I reach the police in this town?”

“You just dial three nines, sir,” the bellboy said. “It puts you straight through to Scotland Yard. But if you’d like us to attend to all that …” Gathering assurance, he turned the gun around and made as though to point it at Ferrers.

Dan deprived him of it politely. “I think I may be more used to these than you are,” he murmured. “All right—call the Yard for me. But make sure you reach Superintendent Redvers. He thas a particular interest in bastards like this one.”

Ferrer’s face crumpled like wet paper and he sat down on the bed and started to sob.

It was all attended to very discreetly; Redvers arrived in person as Dan had hoped, accompanied by two plain-clothes detectives who formally arrested Ferrers on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, to wit one Walther automatic pistol, and took him sniveling away. When he’d gone, Dan glanced at Redvers.

“You were late today,” he said. “I expected you to call me up in the small hours.”

“I was the one who got called up in the small hours,” Redvers grunted, and rubbed his eyes. They were red-rimmed for lack of sleep. “Get me a drink on Agency funds. I need one.”

“Sure.” Dan went to the phone and told room service to bring up some Scotch and a bucket of ice. Sitting down, he continued, “You did know I was next to this man who went out, didn’t you?”

“Next to him?” Redvers echoed. “I knew you were there, naturally, but—literally next to him?”

“In the next chair.”

“Christ.” Redvers gave a humorless smile. “Makes you seem like some kind of grim reaper, doesn’t it? Two in one day!”

“You don’t honestly think that I …?” Dan let the words go before he realized. After Lilith’s disappearance, and then Patrick’s, the idea must have been simmering in his subconscious, ready to emerge on cue.

“No, I don’t,” Redvers interrupted. “But then, to be frank, I don’t know what the hell to think. Any more than I did yesterday. What did that little fascist want, by the way?”

“Ferrers? Oh, he said they were conducting an inquiry
into the Patrick case, and wanted me to tell them anything I’d noticed.”

“Did you notice anything?”

“I was preoccupied with the stardropper that was being demonstrated.”

“You mean you were getting something out of its signals?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Dan shrugged. “But I was concentrating on it, naturally—inasmuch as one could concentrate on such a noise.”

The helpful bellboy returned at that moment, bringing the promised whisky, and Dan tipped him five pounds. Looking at the money, the man said diffidently, “Mr. Cross, are you—?”

“Am I sure that’s the bill I meant to give you?” Dan said gruffly. “Isn’t it enough? What fee do you usually charge for saving someone’s life?”

“I didn’t …” The man swallowed hard. “Did I?”

“If you hadn’t knocked when you did, I’d never have had the chance to jump the guy,” Dan shrugged. “But—ah—that isn’t all it’s for.”

“Anything else I can do for you?” the man said eagerly, folding and pocketing the money.

“Help keep those reporters out of my hair.”

“Yes,
sir
!”

“He won’t be able to,” Redvers said as Dan handed him his drink.

“Why not?”

“You don’t have the least idea what a hornet’s nest has been let loose in this village. Cheers.”

“I saw the morning papers—all of them.”

“Most of it didn’t happen until the papers were on sale,” Redvers sighed. “That’s how people heard, and the reaction … Oh Christ, it’s terrifying!”

“Such as?” Dan crossed his legs and reached for a cigarette. Belated reaction to what Ferrers had done was making his hands shake and his stomach churn. But a tranquilizer would take care of that in a moment.

“You go out and see for yourself.” Redvers gulped his drink and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. “But while I think of it: is there anything you can tell me that might be helpful? Did you have any—any premonition
that something big was about to happen, for instance?”

Dan thought for a while, and finally shook his head. “I can’t recall anything like that,” he admitted. “I was taken completely by surprise.”

“And the other people present? I’ve seen some of them, of course, but not all by any means.”

“As far as I could tell, none of them were affected any differently from me. Some of them looked physically as well as mentally shocked, and one in particular blew her stack.”

“The secretary, Mrs. Towler?” And, on Dan’s nod, Redvers sighed, “Yes, we had her contact us, with some wild complaint about the misconduct of the club in canceling the rest of the evening’s program. … Ah, she’s a nut, I’m afraid.”

Dan hesitated. He said, “Did you talk to Angel Allen?”

“On the phone. I know her from before, of course. Why?”

“I was wondering whether I ought to go and talk to her myself. Do you have her address?”

“She’s the only Angel Allen in the London phonebook,” Redvers shrugged. “But you won’t reach her at home right now—she works.”

“Where?”

“At a mental hospital. Or rather, she works
out
of a mental hospital. She’s a PSW.”

“Psychiatric social worker?”

“Correct. And, since her fiancé’s disappearance, she’s been specializing in stardropper addicts.”

“I see.” Dan frowned. “Which hospital anyway?”

“St. Wenceslas.”

There was a pause. Draining the last of his drink, Redvers broke it, and rose.

“Well! I don’t suppose I have to tell you this is the event which has been giving me nightmares—the disappearance we can’t keep quiet?”

“I learned that from the papers,” Dan muttered.

“So do what I told you—go out and look the scene over for yourself. And if you draw any conclusions, I’d appreciate being the first to hear them. … You did file your report to the Agency, I presume?”

“Yes,” Dan agreed.

“And—?”

“They’ll react in their own sweet time,” he snapped. “Did you look at any of the rest of today’s news? We’re dealing with another crisis in the Middle East, two others in black Africa, a revolution in—”

He broke off. His guard had been pierced for a moment. No outsider was supposed to comprehend the full extent of the Special Agency’s operations.

But Redvers took it as a matter of course. He, at least, seemed prepared to accept the Agency at its face value.

“I guess it’ll take them a day or two to figure out that this is the crisis which could trigger the big blowup,” he said. “Those other things—they’re routine, aren’t they? I mean, we’ve had lots of them before and we’re still on a habitable planet But this one …!” He grimaced.

“One thing I have been forgetting to say,” he added. “Do you need spokesmen from the Chinese, Russian, or any other embassy here? I can set that up for you whenever you like.”

Accustomed to working in a country which was very definitely the opposite of neutral, Dan hadn’t considered that point. He hesitated. “I’d have to clear that first,” he said at length. “But I think it might be a good idea.”

“Say when, and I’ll lay it on.” Redvers started to the door. “But don’t forget, under any circumstances: whatever cooperation you need, I’ll provide if it’s in my power. All right?”

Departing, he left a lingering impression which greatly puzzled Dan. He seemed—as nearly as it could be defined—to be looking to Dan for something: not to the Agency, which would have been logical, but to Dan Cross personally.

Why?

Pouring himself another drink, he unwrapped the Binton ’dropper which Nick Carlton had brought back for him. He checked it over. It was exactly as he had last seen it, down to the knot in the sling which Lilith had slashed. For a few minutes he listened to it absently, as though he could retrieve the answers to all his questions from the random noises it emitted.

Abruptly he cut the power, shut the case, and emptied his glass. It was useless making guesses, more useless still
sitting here with the earpiece in and concentrating on weird—alien?—sounds. He needed to do what Redvers had suggested, look the scene over for himself and draw what conclusions he could.

And Cosmica Limited, in easy walking distance, would be an excellent place to start.

Cosmica Limited was full. People were struggling and jostling one another not only inside but on the street in front of the store, and two policemen were trying to prevent them interfering with the passage of cars. Occasionally they had to force a way for someone trying to leave. As Dan approached, he saw them perform this service for a middle-aged man with a shiny new white-cased instrument—a Gale and Welchman of the type Watson had demonstrated (and also the type Lilith had been hooked by, he reminded himself). Hurrying away, the man was trailed by a half a dozen other people offering to pay inflated prices for the instrument rather than wait their turn in the long line outside the store.

Redver’s gloomy prophecy was being fulfilled.

One couldn’t yet call the situation hysterical. It was no worse than what could be seen at the bargain sales of a big department store. But already there was a fearful greed in the eyes of the purchasers who were emerging from the shop, an obsessional tightness about the hands which clutched their new possessions. It made Dan’s scalp crawl.

He was well above average height, and as part of his Agency training he had been taught to exploit this fact when necessary. He bore himself commandingly into the midst of the crowd, and people gave way without quite realizing why, even apologizing when he pushed in front of them. He contrived to enter the store ahead of at least twenty who had arrived earlier.

Once inside, progress became more difficult, but he had the advantage that he was not interested in buying one of the stardroppers on display, only in working his way to the main sales counter at the back, whereas everyone else had at least half an eye on the rapidly diminishing range of instruments available. Three or four of the dozen-odd shelves had already been stripped bare.

The staff—supplemented by four young men who didn’t
look like sales clerks, but more like warehousemen—were growing harassed and irritable. Arriving within a few places of the counter, Dan caught the eye of the pretty brown girl who had served him before, as she shook back hair from her face. Recognizing him, she rolled her eyes skyward as if to say, “This is a madhouse!” And was at once called back to her job, even though a moment earlier she had sold another instrument to a client so eager to try his purchase out that he hadn’t waited for her to make change before turning and struggling back toward the exit.

Directly between Dan and the counter were two men in business suits, one of them carrying what Dan took at first glance to be a stardropper. It wasn’t. It was a press camera, and—as became clear when the brown girl came to attend to his companion—the pair were journalists who hadn’t yet given up hope of finding some new slant on the big story of the day.

He didn’t catch what the photographer’s companion said, but he heard the girl’s answer because it was shrill with impatience. Probably she’d answered the same question fifty times already this morning.

“No, Mr. Watson
isn’t
available, I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know when he’ll be back!”

The reporter persisted. Obviously bored, the cameraman nudged him.

“Jack, why don’t you just put it down that he vanished up his stardropper too?” he suggested cynically.

Jack gave him a scowl. Other customers clamored for the girl’s attention, and she made to move on. But the reporter tapped her arm, delaying her.

“Miss! Uh—while I’m here, I think I’ll take the chance and buy one of your stardroppers!”

The girl slammed the firm’s catalog down before him. She said in a hard voice, “Numbers five through nine, twenty-nine, and forty-two are out of stock. We have all the others. I’ll be back when you’ve made up your mind.

“Jack, you’re not falling for this too?” said the cameraman.

“I don’t know,” Jack said slowly, turning the pages. “I don’t know.”

It took Dan nearly ten minutes to get out of the store again, and the crush around the entrance was worse than ever. Seeing he had bought nothing—he had left his own instrument at the hotel—a sly-faced man hanging around the fringe of the crowd sidled up to him.

“Say, I have good bargains in stardroppers if you want one. I have good, scarcely used instruments of the highest quality. Prices ridiculously low, you understand.” He winked. “Not so many in stock but I can always get you whatever you want in two-three days for slight extra charge. Give you examples. Hand-made American ’droppers for fifty pounds in cash. Regular British instruments for twenty-five and up—”

Dan ignored him. The chances were excellent he was offering stolen goods. That was another inescapable consequence of the impact of the news about Leon Patrick. Overnight a profitable black market would have been created in the instruments.

“Well, you might at least have said a polite thank you!” the sly-faced man said huffily to Dan’s retreating back, and turned to accost another, more tractable prospect.

On most other people’s faces there was a look of eager excitement. Dan, by contrast, felt his own features fold into a scowl. Suddenly there was an unhealthy odor in the air: the smell of frenzy.

It made him want to call up his headquarters on a clear line and file another report, in plain language this time, underlining everything he’d said yesterday about the dangers inherent in the situation here. But there seemed to be no point. The Agency maintained around-the-clock news-monitoring service; they’d have heard about Patrick’s disappearance the moment it went out on the satellite beams, and they’d have noted, without doubt, that he’d already foreshadowed such an occurrence in his report of a few hours earlier.

Which would have enchanced his reputation as one of the Agency’s outstanding operatives. But right now that felt like small comfort. All too probably, when
this
crisis reached critical mass, there wouldn’t be an Agency to pick up the pieces. …

Time hadn’t yet run out, though. And until it finally did it was his job to keep the data flowing in. The press had
tracked down Angel, Jerry, and Watson; he ought, he decided, to do at least as much. Watson, he could assume, was out of reach—he’d heard as much from the girl in the store, and had no reason to doubt what she’d said to the reporter. If he’d been in Watson’s position, he’d have gone into hiding.

It might be worth checking with Angel, though. Not simply because she’d been engaged to Robin Rainshaw, but—far more importantly—because she, like Jerry, was a long-time stardropper fan, and being much better educated and more articulate than Lilith might be able to clarify things that he still found confusing.