The Stardroppers (12 page)

Dan chuckled. He made a mental note to track down
Watson, however long it took. Everything he had so far been told by members of the club, added to what he himself had figured out while talking to Watson, indicated that this man was indeed far more than a mere store manager.

“Would you say Watson has a lot of influence on the stardropping movement?” he asked.

“Nobody I know has more,” Jerry declared. “Apart from running the store, he edits the club’s bulletin, and that’s the most authoritative publication in the field in Britain, much more influential than any of the commercial magazines. It’s the nearest approach to a proper scientific journal in the field; most of the published papers apart from that have been in regular physical journals, not specialist ones.”

“Is he a scientist himself?”

“Funnily enough, yes. He mentioned it once. He trained as a neurophysiologist, and gave it up.”

“To manage Cosmica Limited?”

“Manage? He owns the whole bloody show—owns the building, lives in the penthouse. But I don’t know whether he genuinely set out to become a crusader, or whether he just saw there was going to be a terriffic boom in stardroppers and talked other people into investing in his idea. Not that it makes much difference. You’re new to this game, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s habit-forming. Believe me. I’ve been eating, breathing, and sleeping stardroppers for months—not because I’m hooked, the way some of these poor bastards are that you see wandering around in a permanent daze or having hysterics on the street, but simply because knowing something is going on in the universe which the theories I was brought up to believe in don’t account for gives me a kind of itch inside my skull, and I have to—to keep scratching it. Follow me?”

“I’m getting to the same state,” Dan acknowledged with a sigh.

“We all do. And I think that may have happened to Wally. However he got into the game in the first place, there’s no doubt he’s utterly convinced of the importance of what he’s doing. What’s more, he conveys a sense of confidence to other people. I’m not sure I really like him,
because sometimes he’s offhand—almost contemptuous—about my work. But if I get discouraged, if I start to think I’m being a fool spending so much time on this subject, he’s the guy I’d go to, to get talked out of my fit of the blues.”

There was a pause, during which Dan finished his coffee. Suddenly Jerry slapped his desk and rose.

“Well, since you’re here, you might care to look over the labs. Not that this is a typical day, I’m afraid. So far just about
no
work has been done. The first hour after I got here I spent assuring everybody that yes, as far as I can tell someone did physically vanish from Club Cosmica, and no, I haven’t the least idea how it happened. Which has kind of spread a pall of gloom around the premises. But come on anyway. You can at least see Charlie’s pretty three-color patterns.”

At any other time the tour of the laboratory might have been fascinating. The colored display on the TV screen was indeed pretty, reminding Dan of some of the computer-programmed cosmoramic projections he’d seen, just coming into fashion in the States thanks to the availability at long last of TV tubes no deeper than a picture frame. And certainly everyone on Jerry’s team seemed to have a deep personal involvement with his work; they barely interrupted their heated discussions to acknowledge his presence.

But Jerry had said in almost so many words that they didn’t really know where their research was taking them, and in view of what he knew to be going on all over London, and perhaps by now all over the world, he found himself growing more and more impatient.

There had been that passing reference to Charlie Potts as a good hypnotic subject; the words had taken root in his subconscious and were sprouting ideas. They did not in fact come across him in trance before his color screen—he was too busy making adjustments to the conventional electronic equipment connecting the TV to the stardropper, changing the relationship betwen the incoming signal and the projected image and recording the effects. But …

Well, it was notorious that in certain abnormal mental states, including a hypnotic trance, the human being was capable of improbable feats: displays of incredible strength, for example, or recollection of the minutest details of some otherwise long-forgotten past event. Could stardropping induce some form of trance, then, in which data were put together by the mind which ordinarily the rational faculties would dismiss as ridiculous?

It was worth making inquiries about. And, of all the
sources of information he had access to, the best would be the Agency’s own headquarters in New York. Long experience with ultra-advanced mental techniques such as the personal codes provided for its operatives implied that there if anywhere he could get an immediate and authoritative verdict on his guess.

Accordingly he took his leave of Jerry, with many thanks, and returned to the center of London. The Agency had an office here, as in all the major capitals of the world, and even though according to Redvers its staff had stoutly denied knowledge of his existence, it was the best place to put in a plain-language call from to his headquarters. Whether or not his hotel room was bugged, he didn’t want to have to wait for a connection over regular commercial circuits.

On his way—not directly to the office, but to an intersection within easy walking distance—he realized it was as well he’d left his stardropper at the hotel. All along the sidewalks he saw people carrying ’droppers being accosted by total strangers, some blatantly and some shyly inquiring whether they were willing to part with them. He saw a placard for an evening paper which headlined a rocketing rise in the shares of stardropper manufacturers, and another which announced the theft of a truck loaded with twenty thousand pounds’ worth of the instruments.

Checking his watch, he found that it was just on one o’clock, and asked the driver of his cab to switch on the radio news. The calm voice of the BBC announcer purred from a speaker in the roof of the vehicle.

“—but there was no comment from Professor Viktor Berghaus at his Long Island home. Elsewhere expert opinion appears to be divided, some authorities regarding the whole affair as a hoax, others stating that the Berghaus hypothesis implies the possibility of such events although they are unwilling to commit themselves without further study of the matter. Later in the program we shall be hearing interviews with a number of leading scientists. Meantime, there is no doubt about the general public’s unqualified acceptance of the story. Most shops selling stardroppers sold out their entire stock this morning, and in some cases queues are reported to have stretched for hundreds of yards. On the London Stock Exchange the
shares of all stardropper manufacturers at least doubled in price, and one of the leading international producers—”

“Here you are, guv!” the driver called.

Dan roused himself and got out. By the sound of it, he wasn’t likely to learn more from the radio news than what he’d already deduced: Redvers’s gloomy prophecy was being borne out.

Waiting for the cab to lose itself in the stream of traffic, he reviewed what he was going to say to New York, and then headed down the sidestreet in which the local office of the Agency was located.

The duty officer was not pleased to see him. Checking his credentials, he said, “Weren’t you supposed to be here on a Grade E mission?”

“Yes.”

“So why have you come openly to—?”

“I’ve upgraded the mission,” Dan snapped. “Dammit, man, haven’t you seen what’s happening? This country’s going collectively out of its skull! The so-called ‘experts’ are running in little circles—I’ve spent the morning talking to one of them—and just about everyone else is completely convinced a stardropper gives you the power to work miracles!” He consciously echoed Redvers’s phrase. “Can you think of a more sensitive area for such a thing to happen, except maybe Israel? Come on, get me to a phone and give me a direct line to New York.”

The man handed the credentials back. He said defensively, “Well, I was only—”

“Sticking to the book,” Dan cut in. “This isn’t
in
the book. It’s incredible, impossible, and unscientific, but it’s happening!”

Fortunately, although it was still barely breakfasttime in New York, one of the Agency’s top psychologists was in his office. Dan had rather hoped for the man who had prepared his own personal code, but this was a better break than he had any right to expect.

“Milton Gauss here,” the man said. “You landed in the middle of a hornet’s nest, didn’t you? I’ve spent the past hour using your report as a lever to budge people from their cozy beds, but so far I haven’t managed to get anything constructive done. These news stories—they’re true?”

“Yes.”

“Any ideas?”

Dan ran briefly over his day’s experiences, stressing the prompt reaction of the Blue Front, and Gauss whistled.

“They’re a nasty bunch, aren’t they? Have you checked out the various Maoist countries’ reaction yet?”

“I intend to. Superintendent Redvers promised me contacts at any embassy I asked for.”

“They’ll have plenty in the London office,” Gauss said. “Use those up first. Go on.”

Dan continued, ending with his guess about hypnosis, and could almost hear Gauss’s frown when he answered.

“I think some work’s been done on that,” he said. “Can’t remember who did it, but I can punch for the reference. And, speaking of punching: I was just having your yesterday’s report computed for trends, so I might as well add in what you’ve just been saying. It’s on tape, of course. Hang on while I make up a keyword list for it.”

There was a pause. Faintly, Dan could hear clicking noises. What Gauss was doing was feeding a recognition program into one of the Agency’s computers, instructing it to sift the material of his report and propose the optimum series of further steps.

“There,” the psychologist said at length. “That’ll only take a moment. Now I’ll get you that reference I mentioned; you can probably track down the journal in one of the big London libraries. Ah—‘hypnosis’—‘stardropper/ing’—and I guess we’d better have ‘Rainshaw effect’ too. …”

Click-click.

“Yes, here we are.
The Cosmica Papers
, No. 12—”

“What?” Dan jerked in his chair.

“Cosmica Papers
, No. 12,” Gauss repeated. “Are you getting this? ‘Reactions of Hypnotized Subjects to the Emanations of Stardroppers,’ by Walter K. Watson, B.Sc., Dipl. Neur. Oh!” Gauss checked. “The same Watson who runs that store over there?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” Dan muttered.

“Hmm! Interesting! And what’s more, here comes your printout of immediate next steps, and guess what heads the list?”

“Find Watson.”

“Precisely. Think you can?”

“I’ll do my best. Are you going to send me some reinforcements?”

“Yes. Want me to put the local operatives under your direction?”

Dan hesitated. “I’m not sure I’d tell them to do more than I imagine they’re doing already,” he said.

“Well, I’ll make double-sure they
are
doing it,” Gauss said. “I’ll telex a memo to London rating this stardropper thing an A-1 Red priority. You’ve seen what the Chinese and Russians have been saying, have you?”

“I only caught a snatch of the radio news at one. I imagine the noon papers will be carrying it, though. But tell me the gist.”

“Oh, mainly that this is a filthy plot to undermine the confidence of their people in the leadership. The whole story is rumor, rubbish, garbage—” Gauss snorted. “But they’re alarmed, to put it mildly. They’ve never been able to make sense of the British since they went neutralist, any more than the American government can. What do you make of the country, by the way? It’s your first visit, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And
I
don’t know what the hell to make of it, either. It could be a giant madhouse, or it could be full of people who are so far ahead of the rest of us we can’t keep up.”

“Speaking of madhouses, we’ve got one in California, apparently. The National Guard is out in Berkeley again—first time in five years. And things look bleak in India and Japan, too. There’s rioting.”

“Oh, Christ,” Dan sighed wearily. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. … Well, never mind. I’ll go chase Watson.”

“Just pray he hasn’t disappeared down his stardropper too,” Gauss said caustically, and broke the connection.

On his way back from the Agency office to Oxford Street and Cosmica Limited, Dan bought the evening papers and found that Gauss hadn’t been exaggerating. For some reason this scrap of news had triggered off a worldwide reaction, and it wasn’t confined to the countries where stardropping was a popular private pastime, either.
Reading between the lines of the statements issued from Peking—where stardropping was considered “antisocial”—and Moscow—where it was considered “antiscientific”—one could see that an incredibly violent response must have been generated, as though this was exactly what everyone had been waiting for without realizing. There was reference to people filching the necessary electronics parts to make ’droppers from state-owned factories; these “enemies of the people, robbing their brothers,” were promised the full rigor of the law. Absentees from work were also threatened, and that meant that literally thousands—conceivably, millions—must have stayed away from their jobs. Ordinarily, the Eastern countries, both Leninist and Maoist, kept labor problems very quiet.

And in Hong Kong and Osaka, the two big Oriental centers of stardropper manufacture, employees were reported to be switching on the completed instruments and listening to them with mad desperate hunger, while empty trucks waited at the gates to take away the day’s output. And in Paris …

Dan rolled the papers together and shoved them into a litter basket. How long before the governments of the great powers realized that the rumors were finally confirmed as truth, and
someone else had the secret first?

Because when that moment came …

Outside Cosmica Limited the crush was worse than ever, and police had had to be called to control the line of eager would-be purchasers. The recent arrivals appeared to be office-workers who had decided to sacrifice their lunch hours; by the look of things, they wouldn’t be back to work on time.

From the opposite side of the roadway Dan surveyed the building. It was almost brand-new. The whole of this area had been redeveloped as part of the government’s massive program to absorb the manpower and materials liberated by their disarmament policy. To eliminate congestion caused by delivery trucks unloading, most such modern blocks, he knew, were designed around an access road or tunnel parallel to the street. So where was the nearest entrance to the back of Cosmica?

He found it about a quarter-mile along the street, where a sloping ramp dived sharply under a small public arcade, with benches, a fountain, and flowering shrubs in stone pots. There was a railed-off pedestrian way; he marched smartly down it.

Spotting the rear entrance to Cosmica posed no problem, either. Backed up to one of the delivery bays was a large truck lettered with the name
GALE AND WELCHMAN, BIRMINGHAM
, and several eager would-be stardropper owners were clustered around it, trying to bribe the men unloading its cargo to sell them instruments straight from the packing cases.

Dan took advantage of the distraction they were causing to make his way unchallenged to the door through which the cases were being taken. Shortly, a harassed apprentice in brown overalls came toward him pushing a huge cardboard carton on a hand trolley. With all the aplomb
he could muster Dan held the door open for him, and the boy noticed him only long enough to mutter thanks. He did not question Dan’s right to follow him inside.

There, Dan found himself facing more doors, swinging shut, which presumably gave onto Cosmica Limited’s stockrooms. To his right, however, there was a narrow corridor. He followed it, turned a sharp corner, and discovered a flight of dusty stairs—logically, a fire exit. Without hesitation he started up them. It was a long climb, and at every bend of the stairs he half expected to meet a reporter, or a member of the Blue Front, or someone else who had located Watson’s home address and was equally eager to get hold of him.

Of course, maybe that had already happened during the morning, and by now everyone else was satisfied that Watson was not in fact in his apartment.

Dan didn’t care whether he was or not. A vacant home could often be nearly as informative as its occupier.

At the very top of the stairs, he found himself on a luxuriously carpeted landing. There was hardly a sound. Efficient insulation plus the effect of height muted even the busy roar of Oxford Street. There was an elevator door, closed. There was a frosted-glass window, alongside which a red-handled hammer hung in a glass-fronted case; a notice said that if the internal stairs were blocked by fire, the hammer should be used to smash the window and gain access to an outside escape. Glancing back, he realized he had left footprints in a faint layer of dust on the staircase by which he had climbed up.

Dead opposite the elevator shaft was the only other door. It bore neither a number nor a name, but there was a buzzer in the middle of it.

He thumbed it, heard it faintly inside the apartment, and waited. Nothing happened. While waiting an extra couple of minutes for safety’s sake, he inspected the edge of the doorframe. Tiny metal tabs were visible between the door and the jamb. He identified them as the terminals of one of the commonest European alarm systems, an Italian brand called Protex. In which case he could get inside with only a little trouble.

He took out his pocket knife, gave it the twist and slide which opened its hidden interior compartments, and selected
a number of very fine wires, which he used to link the alarm tabs. Then he applied multiple picklocks to the various locks on the door—there were three—and gently, gently eased it open. He raised the carpet just inside the door to make certain he wasn’t about to step on a pressure-sensitive pad—there wasn’t one—and went in.

The apartment was small, but furnished and decorated. Leaving the door ajar, he walked rapidly around it once to confirm that in fact the place was unoccupied. All clear. Shutting the door, he began a more intensive inspection. First, he needed an emergency escape route, and that was simple enough to find: Watson’s bedroom had an openable window from which it was possible to reach the fire escape.

Feeling no need to hurry, because Watson was almost certainly planning to stay away for some while to elude the press, he worked his way around the lounge, paying special attention to an unlocked bureau in which he found a great many papers, books, and notebooks. Some of them referred to stardropping, but as far as a cursory inspection revealed they were connected with Watson’s job or with the Club Cosmica, which was only to be expected. It wasn’t until he had gone out to the bedroom that he ran across anything peculiar.

What in hell was the man doing with a diving suit hung up in his wardrobe?

Dan stared in disbelief. Yes, a diving suit. He recognized it as one of Siebe and Gorman’s modern ultralight-weight outfits, made of scarlet imperviflex for easy seeing under water. It looked almost new. On a shelf above it he found the goldfish-bowl helmet, a quarter the weight of a conventional metal one, and also a sealed camera, and propped in the back corner of the closet a set of oxygen tanks. According to the meters, they were full and ready for use.

Who in the world would make a hobby out of suit-diving nowadays? Who had ever done so?

He looked again, some incongruity itching at the back of his mind, and realized: no boots. For suit-diving boots with weighted soles were essential. There were none here, nor in any of the other closets.

What he did find during his further search, however,
was a small portable file unit, the type designed to be carried like a dispatch case. It was locked, but the catch yielded to a few seconds’ work with his pocket knife. Inside he found a great many typed notes, mostly headed “CPF” and bearing various dates from a year ago to about two months ago. Most of them were lists of numbers with brief notes in a comments column at the right, such as “Unconfirmed” and “This one definite!!!”

What was unconfirmed or definite, there was nothing to explain. Abandoning that problem for the moment, he investigated the last closet. Here he found a box of color slides, the right size to fit the sealed camera he had already seen. But these were not underwater scenes. Where the landscapes might be which they showed, he could only guess; he hazarded they were from places he hadn’t visited, in Australia or South America, for they showed thick dark greenery and red-yellow desert with eroded rock formations. Without a magnifying glass or a proper projector, their scale was too small for him to make out the fine detail, so after glancing through a score or so he put them back.

And the only other peculiar thing in the closet was a sack of rocks, which equally told him nothing since he knew little about mineralogy.

Replacing them precisely as they had been, he went to take another look at the file of notes, the only promising thing he’d so far chanced across. This time he found a handwritten sheet he had previously disregarded, and on it found what the abbreviation “CPF” stood for. The writer—Watson, presumably—had put:

“Straightforward enough. It’s the cocktail-party factor, and there’s no avoiding that.”

Dan frowned. That was a standard slang term in information theory, the nickname for the process of sorting a particular series of data from a jumble of background noise, like carrying on a conversation with one other person in competition with fifty more talking at the top of their lungs. It might, obviously, be relevant to stardropper investigations, but what the actual relevance might be …

A point suddenly struck him. Putting the notes away as neatly as he could, he made another round of the apartment, looking for a stardropper. There wasn’t a single one
in the place, and that seemed strange. Granted, Watson could have his pick of the stock held by the firm downstairs, but even so the typical pattern seemed to be that each user of a stardropper became attached to some particular instrument. Nick Carlton, for example, owned six jointly with his wife. Was Watson so fond of all those he owned that on going to hide from the press he’d taken the lot? But you’d think he must have one or more which was too big to carry around, one of the home-current-powered installations!

Well, that left only the bathroom and kitchen to check out, and after that, since Watson wasn’t available, it might make sense to go back to the Carltons’ commune and find out whether any of the other members of the group had taken the same road as Lilith and Leon Patrick.

The kitchen was just a kitchen. It held nothing in the least peculiar—

A man-shape moved across the open door.

A bright-red man-shape.

Dan froze, wondering frantically where he could hide, and had still not had time to decide on a course of action when the man-shape came back on its tracks. A pleasant, rather tired voice said, “Wally? Wally, is that you?”

And the new arrival glanced into the kitchen.

He was young—not more than twenty-five—and he was wearing a diving suit identical to the one in Watson’s closet. In place of the lead-soled boots which should have gone with the suit, he was wearing ordinary rock-climbing boots with cleated soles. He had taken off the helmet and now clasped it under his arm like Ann Boleyn carrying her head around the Bloody Tower.

He smiled at Dan. “Oh, I thought you were Wally. Do you know where he is?”

“No, he’s—” Recovering from the shock of being caught here, Dan’s mind was suddenly working like a super-efficient computer. “He’s keeping out of the way of the press. Someone went out at the club last night, and that was too public for the news to be kept quiet.”

The stranger turned away, nodding, to lay his helmet on a nearby table. Warily, Dan emerged from the kitchen to join him in the lounge.

“Give me a hand with these bottles, will you?” the young
man said, unfastening the harness holding his oxygen supply. Dan helped him to wriggle free of the heavy tanks, and he stretched luxuriously.

“Not being able to crack the damned suit for twenty-four hours at a time is a bit wearing,” he said lightly. “How big a splash has this affair caused, incidentally?”

“Enormous. It’s on the way to being an international incident, and everyone and his uncle is out buying stardroppers.”

Unzipping and peeling off his suit, the stranger sighed. “Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. …. By the way, I don’t think we’ve met”

Superstitiously, Dan visualized crossed fingers and gave his name. The other nodded. “You’re a member of the club?” he suggested.

“Only a recent recruit.”

“Ah-hah. Well, I’ve been away up at Sixty-one so much lately it’s not surprising I don’t know you. I’m Robin Rainshaw, in case you hadn’t guessed.”