More Things in Heaven, Page 2

  But when I put that in my weekly column, almost a hundred people wrote in to say they didn’t believe it.

  I was sure I’d seen Leon!

  It wasn’t as though we were brothers in the same way as Henri Chambord and his brothers—

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  Henri happily settling in Quito, going home on vacation maybe once in three or four years, the others content to stay in France, where they’d been bom. Leon and I were six years apart in age, but we’d always been exceptionally close. Since my father disappeared when I was twelve, and my mother died when I was nineteen, I’d had to be as much a parent as a brother to him.

  I was studying physics and chemistry, but when Mom died I quit and went to work on a small-town paper, where I found that enough of what I’d learned in the lab had stuck for me to consider becoming a science writer, which I did. In the end I worked up to a Kalinga Prize and the top post in the business—on roving assignment for Solar Press—and ultimately was able to settle to a comfortable living from two popular-scientific books a year.

  Possibly it was hero worship that persuaded Leon to take up the physical sciences, or maybe I influenced him in his choice through my hangover of bitterness at having had to forgo a career in research. However it arose, he developed a strong yen to carry on where I’d left off, and it turned out he had the gift. His was one of the doctorates awarded for theses clarifying Liu Chen’s theories, and thanks to that he applied for, and got, a job with the team designing Starventure’s drive. And eventually they picked him as crew.

  They allowed only the crew’s immediate families and fiancees to see them board the ferry before departure, but since the crew numbered sixty, that was a fair-sized crowd. I was Leon’s

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  one close relative, of course, and I was proud as hell. About the only thing I was prouder of was the story I wrote afterward. Virtually everyone present sold their first-person impressions to some agency, to be ghosted for publication, but I was a reporter, and I was there, and the fact showed, and people could tell. I made my pile, left Quito, and set out to enjoy the rest of my life.

  Now, back in the foyer of the UN press office, I could close my eyes and recapture the exact scene on that epochal day two years earlier. I could see Rukeyser with his vast black beetling eyebrows; I could see the almost womanish grace of Chandra Dan; I could see Hobart and Efremov and Soo. Above all, I could see Leon.

  Alongside that recollection I could put the memory of the man I’d seen this very day, and make a point-for-point match right down to the expression on his features.

  What were the odds against that? I did some inaccurate mental calculations involving the total population figure and the per-generation mixing of the genetic pool, and came up with something around ten to the seventh power. Multiplied by the number of cities on Earth and the number of days in my lifetime—because this had happened today in Quito and nowhere else—the result became altogether ridiculous.

  So the hell with “odds against”; they didn’t enter the matter. More rational would be to assume my mind had played a trick on me. But why this particular trick on this particular day, which had brought me a piece of luck I craved more them anything else, a clear beat on the

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  news of the starship’s return? I’d joked to Chambord about being psychic, but I had little patience for ESP enthusiasts, and all the tests I’d had to undergo in the course of my job had shown me not to possess any detectable supernormal talent.

  I assured myself firmly I was making too much out of a coincidence. Thinking that I’d seen Leon could be ascribed to simple association of ideas and could as easily have happened yesterday or the day before. After all, I didn’t come very frequently to Quito, even though it was the spatial capital of Earth, chosen as such for several excellent reasons. To start with, it was on the equator near as damn it; it was over nine thousand feet high, so there was that much less air for ascending ships to batter through (though they had been compelled to slide a couple of small mountains into the adjacent valleys to make enough level ground for the spaceport); and, not least important, it was in a country small enough not to make the conceited big powers jealous of their national honor. Everyone could feel patronizing and patting-on-head, barring a handful of other nations on this same continent, and as no one had been listening to their complaints lately, they appeared to be giving up.

  I’d got to know it pretty well two years ago. On the two or three occasions I’d been back in the interim, I hadn’t noticed many changes. But if Staruenture’s mission had been really successful, there would be other trips, and other ships, and this city would be altered wholly out of recognition.

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  • * *

  The door of the ’fax room opened again. There

  was now a sound of jubilation from inside, and I distinctly heard the clink of bottles mixed up with the purring hum of facsimile transmitters and receivers. A girl emerged with a thick sheaf of the light brown heat-sensitive paper they use on the ’faxes, glanced around, and came over to inquire if I was the Senor Drummond.

  I assured her I was and accepted the packet she handed me. There was far more here than I’d expected; Sandler must be taking his hunch extremely seriously. Included were not only Solar Press stories but releases from rival agencies and even clips from papers which must have been cut out and put straight in the transmitter, for I could see the shadowed edges where the clipper’s scissors had gone off a straight line.

  Frowning, I leafed through them. Before I got halfway I was beinning to wonder whether Hank Sandler’s nose for a news story hrd at long last led him down a blind alley. I couldn’t for the life of me see why he had been so impressed as to make him page me—quoting Jimmy Weston— “all over Venezuela.”

  The first two items were accounts of the phenomenon he’d mentioned on the phone—the panic-stricken fisherfolk of a Chilean coastal village had reported seeing a vast gape-jawed animal face luminous in the shy. I thought at first glance they were duplicates and was going past the second one when a name struck me and I checked back. In fact they weren’t duplicates. One was from a village called Mochasia,

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  the other from a place called San Felipe. They agreed on a remarkable number of essential points, but they’d been put on the wires by different agencies.

  But an obvious explanation for them was right here in the third item Sandler had included, concerning an extraordinary display of the Northern Lights. If there had been auroral phenomena around the South Pole as well last night, that would account for everything very neatly. I myself had seen auroral displays that resembled stage curtains, rainbows and many other things; there was no reason why an overactive imagination shouldn’t turn them into animal faces, too.

  The remainder of the various stories included here could easily be related to the same source: violent electrical storms, blanking out of radio transmission over the central and southern Pacific, reports of peculiar magnetic anomalies from widely separated observatories. . . .

  I must have been paying attention with only half my mind, for it wasn’t until I’d read the whole pile through a second time that I jolted in my seat and cracked my fingers in exasperation at my own dull-wittedness. Ordinarily, one would associate phenomena like these to a solar storm or flare—yet I knew perfectly well we were currently in a Quiet Sun period. Hell, it was precisely because I was intending to include a chapter on recent solar studies in my next book that I’d come to Quito; one of the world’s most famous solar observatories was a few miles down the road, and I had an appointment lined up to see its director.

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  But suppose these items Sandler had sent me were after all linked to the return of Starven- ture—say there were energies analogous to Cherenkov radiation preceding the emergence

  I’d
certainly have to inquire about that possibility. But not right now. Catching sight of a wall clock across the foyer, I realized I was going to be late for my lunch date, and that I declined to do, starships notwithstanding. Pocketing the bundle of papers, I made for the exit, and was almost knocked off my feet by the rush of newsmen coming in answer to Chambord’s press release.

  As I headed for the restaurant I reflected on

  the nature of luck.

  I ALMOST got married once, but we changed our minds and I thought afterward it was just as well. What with Leon and family troubles, I put in a good deal of kid-minding early in life and never felt much that way inclined again. My old man’s example didn’t equip me as a satisfactory father, and on top of that my roving job made the idea seem pretty silly anyway.

  But I’d met a good few women who liked me on those terms, and the second thing I’d done Qn arriving in Quito had been to call Carmen. The first, naturally, had been to fix my appointment with the man I’d actually come to see. I wouldn’t have made a trip to Quito specially to visit Carmen . . . but now I was about to see her, I was—as usual—wondering why not.

  One member of Starventure’s crew was Ecuadorian: a geologist-geophysicist called Hermanos Iglesias. He had two grandparents living, both parents, four uncles with wives and children, two aunts with husbands and one without, two brothers married with children, four sisters married with children and one married without children and one not married. They all came down to the ferry under the “close relatives”

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  clause, bubbling with happiness and boasting to everyone about their marvelous boy Hermanos who had won scholarships all through from first grade to university and was now going to the stars. Intermittently they invoked St. Christopher.

  Carmen was the unmarried sister. She was small, not at all pretty, with a sharp nose, a wry mouth, skin very faintly tinged with yellow and hair as black as space. She managed to get separated from the rest of the family in the crowd at the farewell ceremony, and I managed to catch up with her for long enough to make a date. I never figured out what it was that made her say yes, but whatever it was, I was grateful for it. 1 told her later that her ancestry must be one-quarter each Spanish, Irish, Amerind and puma, and she answered, “No, not puma. I think jaguar.”

  So that was always the second matter I had to attend to when something brought me to Ecuador. Sometimes I wished I came more often, and other times I told myself I ought to stay away for five years. However, a toted stay of about a month and a half in two years wasn’t exactly monopolizing her company.

  She was in the bar of the restaurant when I got there, drinking iced passionfruit juice, and on the faces of the men present was the inevitable puzzled look, as though they were wondering why they should go on staring at this girl who obviously wasn’t in any sense beautiful.

  Of course, the first thing I said after greeting her was, “Have you heard?”

  She raised one very black eyebrow, her fore

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  head wrinkling Into parallel ridges, and signaled the waiter to bring a drink for me.

  “Starventure is back!" I said.

  She took the news as calmly as though I’d said, “The sun is out today." She sipped at her own drink before answering.

  “So that explains it," she said.

  I had a momentary sense of dislocation; this was so like Hank Sandler’s reaction to the news.

  “Explains what?”

  “My thinking 1 saw Hermanos this morning.”

  I was just picking up the drink the waiter had set before me. The shock of her remark made me jump as though I’d been stabbed and I nearly lost my grip on the condensation-slippery sides of the glass. I said, “You saw your brother? Where? When?”

  She made a casual gesture. “Oh, I imagined that I saw him from my bedroom window this morning. I knew it could only be a vision, of course, and the fact that the ship is coming back would account for it. There has often been second sight in my family. My grandmother says it came from Ireland. Besides, I am the seventh child of a seventh child.”

  Still as calm as could be, she sipped her drink again.

  I took a deep breath. I said, “f haven’t any Irish in me, and I never heard that any of my Scots forebears were fey. I’m not even a seventh child—we haven’t had such big families for generations. But. . .”

  I hesitated, unable to screw up the courage to make the foolish-sounding admission I’d in

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  tended, until something in her piercing dark eyes forced me to complete the statement.

  I said finally, feebly, “I saw Leon today.”

  “You too?”

  “You saw Leon as well as Hermanos?”

  “No, no, no!” She laughed. “I mean, you had a vision of your brother just as I did of mine. How strange!”

  “Strange!” I said and swallowed my drink in one gulp in case she had any more shocks in store for me and next time I didn’t retain my grip on the glass. “I was so convinced it was really Leon, I went straight to the UN press office all set to accuse Henri Chambord of conspiring to deceive the public!”'

  “How ‘deceive’?”

  “Why, if I’d seen Leon here with my own eyes, that must have meant either that Starventure had already returned and the news was being kept secret, or else she’d never gone anywhere in the first place and the whole project was a vast hoax.” I signaled the waiter as he passed again. Almost embarrassed, I added, “I didn’t think it far enough through to work out why anyone should want to perpetrate a hoax on that scale. I think my horse-sense belatedly caught up with me. I mean, the moment I heard the news from Henri I realized I must have suffered a hallucination.”

  “David, you still don’t really believe that,” she said quietly. “My vision also seemed perfectly real. Are you hungiy, or shall we go find out whether anyone else with relatives aboard the ship has seen them today?”

  That was another shock—this time, a nega-

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  tive one: that she could conceive such an idea and prepare to act on it. She was completely serious; she was already reaching for the gloves and purse which the somewhat old-fashioned firm she worked for preferred their lady employees to display during business hours.

  But it was in keeping with the rest of her, of course.

  I put my hand on top of her purse an instant before her fingers touched it. I said, “The hell with that. Yes, I’m very hungry. Also, I haven’t seen you in months and I want to know what’s news. Also I haven’t much time right now—this afternoon I have to go and interview a professor, and my old boss at Solar Press has sent me a bunch of material I’ve got to study up on before I actually see the guy because I think it contains some extra questions for me to put to him.” I half-drew the sheaf of ’fax paper from my pocket.

  “Very well.” She gathered her belongings and rose. “Shall we go in?”

  We went into the restaurant and were shown to the table she’d reserved for us. I’d never been here before—Carmen had suggested the place when I called her up this morning. It was plushy and gilded, and there was a band which I found rather irritating, but the food and wine proved to be excellent.

  “You asked me what is news,” Carmen said. "You know I still have the old job, since you called me at the office. But I have my own apartment now. I would have told you on the phone, but each time you are away I think maybe you

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  will change, so I preferred to see you face to face before mentioning It. ’’

  “And have I changed?”

  “You? No!” She wrinkled her nose amusingly. “You will have dinner with me at home tonight? This is to cause scandal, of course, if my family learns of it. And will you be here long enough to call on them?”

  I had to smile. “You don’t change, ei
ther,” I said. “You remain exactly as astonishing as always."

  “You,” she retorted, “are not astonishing at all. Always you come here for some excellent reason—an interview, a visit to some laboratory—and always you talk about it first and me second. That's the reason I like you. Most men talk about themselves first and go right on talking.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t like men,” I said. The memory of how much better I did know startled me as I spoke, and I found myself wondering how I ever managed to stay away from Quito, the place where there was Carmen.

  1 decided to change the subject.

  “As to how long I’m staying . . . Well, now Starventure is back, indefinitely. I’d intended three days at the most, but I promised Hank Sandler long ago that I’d cover the ship’s return for him, and even if they hadn’t contracted to pay ten thousand a week for as long as it takes— quarantine, landing, debriefing, whatever—I’d still stay right here. After all, my brother’s on board, and not everyone is going to have the

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  chance to hear at first hand what the first star- trip was like. ’’

  It still had power to make my voice shake a little, fill my guts with a chill of awe. The first starship is backJI repeated the words to myself under my breath. Then I said aloud, “Carmen, doesn’t it excite you, thinking of the sheer scale of the whole thing? More than eight light-years there and back, men circling under a different sun . . . Doesn’t it?”

  She fixed me squarely with the pools of midnight she had for eyes. She said in a level voice, “I saw Hermanos this morning, David. I have never experienced second sight before. Nor have you. I believe in it. You don’t. I’m—worried.”

  I drove her back to her office after arranging to find my way to her new apartment for dinner at seven-thirty—and later rather than earlier, she said, if I didn’t want to interfere with her cooking. I wished very much there was something I could say as we parted that might ease her troubled mind.

  But I couldn’t think of anything that made any sense.