More Things in Heaven, Page 3

  It was then nearly time for me to start for the solar observatory, but before setting out I called Chambord and learned that there was nothing to add to the story I’d filed earlier, except that they were going to have to bring the ship in by tug. Orbits for ten tugs were being computed and their crews were on standby. I asked about human interest on the members of those crews and was told that there would be names and biographies going out by evening, but that un

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  til Staruenture was safely in orbit around Mother Earth, space-radio traffic was going to be too heavy for frills like personal interviews with tug pilots.

  Fair enough. I returned to my car and headed out of the city in the direction opposite to the spaceport. I was a good distance along the road to the observatoiy when I realized that I’d omitted to do precisely what I’d told Carmen I intended to—to wit, rethink completely the questions I was going to put to the astronomer I was due to visit. It was clear that my current book was about to be shelved in favor of ghosting Leon’s first-person reminiscences of the journey to Alpha Centauri. But this was no reason at all to waste a prearranged appointment with an internationally known scientist; by tomorrow there would be reporters waiting on line outside every laboratory and observatoiy on Earth. I trod hard on the gas pedal, letting the wind of my passage blow away the questions I’d been meaning to ask and substituting some more topical ones.

  I didn’t think these were going to be so easy to answer.

  IV

  NATURALLY I’D often heard of Professor Rodrigo Acosta, but I’d never met him before—which made him something of an exception among scientists of planetary standing. He had taken over as director of the observatory since my last visit to Ecuador. He received me in the same office as his predecessor, and I noted that he’d kept the same decorations: a blowup of a satellite picture showing a Pacific typhoon brewing, so perfect it looked like an artist’s impression rather than the real thing, and a magnificent full-color photograph of the solar corona during an eclipse, round the edge of which Bailey’s Beads stood out like a fine pearl necklace.

  He was a little dry man in shirtsleeves, who wore gold-rimmed glasses and spoke very good English. That didn’t surpise me; according to Who's Who in Science he’d worked at both Flagstaff and Greenwich.

  “I have been trying to reach you all the morning,” he began when I was seated. “Since the news about the starship, I am being plagued by reporters who seem to think I have a private line into Captain Rukeyser’s cabin, so I had intended to cancel our appointment. But since

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  you are here . . He shrugged. “Well, let me say there Is none among your colleagues for whom 1 would prefer to have to make the exception.”

  He took his glasses off rapidly, grinned and blinked at me, and put them on again. I thanked him sincerely; I’d trade a hundred compliments from laymen for one from a working scientist.

  "And now,” he went on, “what is it you wish to discuss? You had planned, according to your letter, to inquire about our latest solar data, but after the news of the starship I imagine you’d rather talk about that first. Not, I must warn you, that I will have a great deal to tell you.”

  I looked thoughtfully down at the ciystal recorder I had on my knee, as usual, during my interviews. I had the impression that Acosta didn’t entirely approve of my recording him, but couldn’t think of grounds for an objection.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I want to talk about both your latest solar data and the star- ship. We’re in the middle of a Quiet Sun period right now, aren’t we? So why should there be sudden violent solar activity at just this time?”

  His face told me, before his voice, that my stab in the dark had found its target. I made a mental note to thank Sandler; once again his nose for news had proved correct.

  With obvious reluctance, Acosta said, “Well, yes, it is true that for the past day the sun has been exceptionally active, but only for this stage of the sunspot cycle, you understand.”

  “Active in what way? Fluctuations in the co

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  rona? Flares, magnetic anomalies, that kind of thing?”

  “Yes, all of those.”

  “Could there be a connection between this and the emergence of the starship into normal space?”

  “1 suppose there could, ” he agreed with reluctance. “It is naturally far too early to do more than make guesses, so please do not go away and tell the world that there is a connection. But . . . Well, while we can’t rule out coincidence, we have to remember that this is the first time such a massive body has returned to normal space after so long a trip. Except, of course, when the ship arrived at Alpha Centauri, and the light which will inform about that has still a good three years to spend on its way here.”

  “I seem to recall the suggestion being made that energies analogous to Cherenkov radiation might precede a body driven faster than light. Have you any comment on the idea?”

  “No such radiation was detected, that I know of, during the testing of the robot ship which preceded Starventure. But certainly a—an influx of energy might account for the sudden burst of solar activity we’re experiencing.” He hesitated. “My turn to ask you a question, Mr. Drummond. From whom did you learn about this unusual solar activity? I’d not have thought it sufficiently newsworthy to feature in the newspapers or on television.”

  “It isn’t. But some of its consequences have been.” I handed him the pile of material Sandler had 'faxed to me. While he was thumbing

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  through the pile, I ran over my half-formulated idea.

  Cherenkov radiation: the result of passing particles at extremely high speed through a substance in which they were effectively exceeding the speed of light. Compare it to ripples produced on water by the passage of a ship: as well as the wake astern, there are also ripples running ahead of the actual vessel. Theory said that a ship driven faster than light could not be reacting with objects in real space because the latter were in a different order of existence. But surely—I’d always intuitively balked at the dogmatic certainty of that assertion—if the ship could “find its way” to a definite location in real space, there must be if not a connection, then at least an association with the normal universe. Particularly when it was slowing down, crossing that indefinable threshold between its two possible states of being, it must. . .

  I roused myself to the realization that Acosta was handing back my papers.

  “A well-educated guess, hm?” He sighed. “The reasoning is clear, I think—blackout of radio communications, a panic due to some strange lights in the sky, brilliant displays of the aurorae, et voild: you correctly deduce the bout of hiccups afflicting Old Man Sol. I am most impressed, though, by the speed with which you have news from such widely scattered sources delivered to you in a foreign country!”

  “Oh, that’s none of my doing,” I admitted. “It was the New York bureau chief of the firm I used to work for who put this bunch together.

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  At first T thought he was talking nonsense, but on reflection I decided he was absolutely right.”

  I had been going to move on to a whole series of further questions, but I was forestalled by the shrilling of a phone on Acosta’s desk. With a murmured apology he reached for the come-in switch.

  The sound from the speaker was directiona- lized, so that I caught only a blurred word here and there. The importance of the message, though, could be read on his face, which registered first annoyance at the interruption, then surpise, and finally unaccountable gravity.

  He ended the conversation with a curt “Pronto!” and turned back to me.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Drummond,” he said awkwardly. “But I can spare you no more time. Ah—that was one of my assistants. There is a new and very violent solar flare
beginning, and my presence is required at the main telescope.”

  Rising, he extended his hand across the desk. I shook it obediently and took my leave.

  All the way back to Quito I kept wondering why he’d lied to me. From the half-dozen words I’d managed to catch, it had been perfectly definite that the call came not from anywhere within the observatory precincts, but from the main spaceport.

  My head was buzzing with a horde of contradictory ideas. I struggled to sort them into logical patterns, but it was like sifting through three jigsaw puzzles mixed together. I sat for a long while in the bar of my hotel hoping that a few margaritas would help, but they didn’t. I got no

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  further than the stage I’d reached in Acosta’s office: the conclusion that stray energies running ahead of Starventure could account for the activity in the sun, and that this in turn could explain the various news items Sandler had sent me, particularly the radio blackout and the aurorae—among which, presumably, one must count the so-called monster in the sky.

  So, then: what form would the energy take? Would there have been a burst of visible light? Conceivably. But it was too much to hope that one of the observatories here or on the Moon would have had a telescope pointing in the right direction to catch it.

  There might, though, have been a brief shower of cosmic rays, and that would have shown up on someone’s detectors, either in space or at one of the mountain monitoring stations. Assuming, of course. Earth had been in the path of the rays. I thought of calling the High Andes station to inquire, but then I remembered that they only culled their records at thirty-day intervals and wouldn’t yet be able to give me an answer.

  Continuing: if there had been any radiation at all, there would almost beyond doubt have been neutrinos in quantity. Hmm! What would be the effect if a sizable neutrino flux struck the sun? I could only guess, but the guess suggested it would be rather dangerous to point a returning starship at it, or even at Earth.

  Could that have been what so upset Acosta— news that the interior of the sun had in fact been disturbed by the ship’s return? I consid

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  ered the possibility for some while and eventually dismissed it. If that were the case, he’d have been one of the people who first found out, not needed to be told by a caller from the spaceport.

  Thinking of the spaceport. . .

  I went in search of a phone on the slim chance that I might be able to contact one of my many acquaintances on the port staff, but after several minutes’ fruitless trying I wound up with the answer I’d expected in the first place: all the phones were tied up with important traffic. I didn’t really have the nerve to dispute the assertion.

  Anyway, by now it was time to find my way to Carmen's place.

  I got there seven minutes late, in accordance with her instructions, and that was exactly right. Carmen was exactly right too—she was wearing crimson, a color I detest on women who can’t carry it off like her. I admired her, I admired her new apartment, I admired her cooking and choice of wines. It was all set to be a hell of a fine evening. She seemed to have forgotten the unease she had felt earlier about her vision of Hermanos.

  We were just finishing off with coffee and a fiery local cognac, and thinking about turning down the lights and playing some music, when there was a sound of shouting from outside. At first we ignored it. Then it grew—grew like a rising tide. When it was loud, we stopped talking and listened. When it was like a whole city crying out, we stared at each other and decided simultaneously to go out on the balcony.

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  The instant we opened the windows, we saw the light it was shedding—unearthly blue-green light, somehow sickly. We looked out, looked up. I felt Carmen’s hand close suddenly and painfully on my wrist.

  It was a monster in the sky.

  I had been staring at it in total disbelief for a good half minute before I thought of recording it. I managed to break Carmen’s grip on my wrist—she was just frozen, gazing upward with her mouth a little open and her eyes as wide as they would go. I tugged the recorder out of my pocket, turned the master switch from voice to vision recording, and began to scan. My hand was shaking so badly I wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble; anyway, the damned thing filled so much of the sky I could barely fit it all in even with the lens at its widest setting.

  Maybe the thing those Chilean fisherfolk had seen overhead was an auroral phenomenon. This wasn’t.

  We were on the top floor of an eight-story building. Opposite, across a wide avenue, was another building similar except that it had three more stories and a huge lush roof garden where tall palms grew. Behind the trees was the monster’s body. Its legs would be below the skyline, if it had legs. Sprawling up from there came hideously ridged folds of unhealthy blue, dim, like the phosphorescence of putrid fish. A mouth opened greeny-black, forty-five degrees above the horizon, and seemed enormous enough to gulp down our petty planet in a single devouring swallow. Within the mouth things writhed and

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  dripped. And on either side of that tremendous opening there were eyes.

  I say eyes, not knowing what else to call them. They were like blobs of blue-green quicksilver running around in black orbital pits, movement of colored light over their surface giving the impression that they were round and rolling as though on the inner curvature of a bowl. If one of the blobs switched to the upper half of its black pit, so did the other in perfect unison; it was this which convinced me they were eyes.

  Even through the viewfinder of the recorder, I felt that this was really a monstrous animal looking Earth over as though to decide where first it should sink its teeth.

  And then it began to fade.

  The shouting and screaming in the city faded with it, and I realized for the first time that there were people on other balconies all along the street, and in the roof garden across the way from us, staring up at the sky and uttering groaning prayers. Traffic in the road, as far as I could see in both directions, had stopped. People were clambering on the roofs of cars for a better view.

  I kept on recording till the last smear of blue- green was gone, and the same familiar stars which the monster had obscured shone reassuringly down. Then I lowered the recorder and discovered that I had cramps from holding it still. I was also, for the first time in my life, literally soaked with sweat. I’d often been clammy from heat or tension, but now I could hardly have been wetter if I'd walked an hour in falling rain.

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  I moved my arms up and down, feeling the agony of cramp yield to the agony of returning circulation. Sure that Carmen would have retained her self-possession even in the face of what had just happened, I contrived to make my first remark flippant. I said,“Talk about signs and portents! Halley’s Comet was nothing compared to that!”

  She turned blindly to me, threw her arms around me, and burst into tears. As I’d told her this morning, she was always astonishing.

  After I’d soothed her for a minute or so, she recovered and drew away from me. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, stroking a tear from each eye with swift dabbing gestures. “But . . . David, I did not tell you the whole truth when we had lunch. I am more than worried. I am frightened, and that—what we saw—broke me down.”

  “It would break anybody.” I said. “What in hell do you imagine it was?”

  Giving another fearful glance at the sky— finding it clear and starry and normal—she fumbled out a cigarette from a nearby box. I had to light it for her, her hands were trembling so.

  “I—I thought, you see," she went on, “when I saw Herman os this morning, it must be what I have always been told about. I thought: yes, I must have the power my grandmother talks about.” She sounded more like herself now; I relaxed a trifle.

  “But it proved that you had had a vision too, and now it seems—so have all the
people in Quito! It must have been a vision, no? It can’t have been real?”

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  For me, a vision capable of being seen by thousands of people must ipso facto possess reality. But I restricted my answer to a shrug, feeling my sweat-damp shirt move stickily on my back.

  “What can it mean?" she cried suddenly. “What can it mean?”

  ‘7 don’t know. But I’ve Just realized we can find out whether it was a mass hallucination or whether there was something actually up there.” I hefted my recorder in my hand and strode across to the phone on the other side of the room. I wasn’t sure that phones in Quito had recorder-playback attachments, and half expected to have to peel the insulation off the cables, but as it turned out this was an up-to- date model with full accessory equipment. I clipped the recorder to the vision strand of the cable and set it to replay.

  In the half-second that followed. I hoped desperately that it had been a mass hallucination, and that the screen would show I had recorded only the buildings and the sky. But I had the monster—mouth, eyes and all. Three full minutes of it had gone down on the crystals.

  I looked around at Carmen when it was over. She was staring at the now blank screen as fixedly as she had stared at the thing in the sky. Alarmed, I spoke her name.

  She gave a forced laugh and reached to drop her forgotten cigarette in an ashtray. She said, ‘Thank you, David, I’m all right. But—but does this mean the thing was real?”

  “It means,” I said, choosing my words with care, “that there really was a pattern of lights

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  in the sky. We didn’t imagine that. But as to the pattern corresponding to a solid substantial monster—no, that’s out of the question.” “Just as impossible as it was for me to see Hermanos today, or you to see your brother?” Carmen spoke in a tone I remembered. I knew better than to contradict outright, so I just put on a skeptical expression. It didn’t last.

  There was a pause. At length she said, “David, do you think many people would have had the presence of mind to take pictures?” “Probably,” I said, though I rather thought not. The thing could only have lasted six or seven minutes altogether, and in spite of having my recorder in my pocket I’d practically forgotten to record it myself.