A Star Above It and Other Stories Read online

  He shook off the feeling and caught the lift to the roof. The cool night air was crisp and clean and there was a whisper of a breeze out of the north. A half moon hung in the night, framed by stars. He looked up at it and wondered how Johnny was getting along up there, and whether perhaps Johnny was even then looking down on Earth.

  Conan Lang climbed into his bullet and set the controls. The little ship rose vertically on her copter blades for two thousand feet, hovered a moment over the silent city, and then flashed off on her jets into the west.

  Conan Lang sat back in his cushioned seat, looking at the stars, trying not to think, letting the ship carry him home.

  Conan Lang relaxed in his armchair, his eyes closed, an icy bourbon and soda in his hand. The books he had requested—neat, white, uniform microfilm blowups from the Administration Library—were stacked neatly on the floor by his side, waiting. Waiting, he thought, sipping his drink. They were always waiting. No matter how much a man knew, there was always more—waiting.

  The room closed in around him. He could feel it—warm, friendly, personal. It was a good room. It was a room filled with life, his life and Kit’s. It was almost as if he could see the room better with his eyes closed, for then he saw the past as well as the present. There was the silver and black tapestry on the wall, given to him by old Maharani so long ago, on a world so far away that the very light given off by its sun when he was there had yet to reach the Earth as the twinkle of a star in the night sky. There were his books, there were Kit’s paintings, there was the smudge—the current one—on the carpet where Rob had tracked dirt into the house before supper.

  He opened his eyes and looked at his wife.

  “I must be getting old, Kit,” he said. “Right at the moment, it all looks pretty pointless.”

  Kit raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

  “We tear around all over the galaxy like a bunch of kids playing Spacemen and Pirates,” he said, downing his drink. “Push here, pull there, shove here, reverse there. It’s like some kind of half-wit game where one side doesn’t even know it’s playing, or on which side of the field. Sometimes—”

  “Want another drink?” Kit asked softly.

  “Yes. Kit—”

  “I know,” she said, touching his shoulder with her hand. “Go ahead and talk; you’ll feel better. We go through this every time there’s a new one, remember? I know you don’t really mean things the way you say them, and I know why you say them that way anyhow.” She kissed him lightly on the forehead, and her lips were cool and patient. “I understand.”

  Conan Lang watched her leave the room with his empty glass. “Yes,” he whispered to himself. “Yes, I guess you do.”

  It was necessary, of course. Terribly, urgently necessary. But it got to you, sometimes. All those people out there, living their lives, laughing and crying, raising children. It hurt you to think about them. And it wasn’t necessary for them, not for him, not for Kit. Or was it? You couldn’t tell; there was always a chance. But if only they could just forget it all, just live, there was so much to enjoy—

  Kit handed him a fresh bourbon and soda, icy and with just a trace of lemon in it the way he liked it, and then curled up again on the couch, smiling at him.

  “I’m sorry, angel,” he said. “You must get pretty sick of hearing the same sad song over and over again.”

  “Not when you sing it, Cone.”

  “It’s just that sometimes I chuck my mind out the nearest window and wonder why—”

  There was a thump and a bang from the rear of the house. Conan Lang tasted his drink. That meant Rob was home. He listened, waiting. There was the hollow crack—that was the bat going into the corner. There was the heavy thud—that was the fielder’s glove.

  “That’s why,” Kit said.

  Conan Lang nodded and picked up the first book off the floor.

  Three days later, Conan Lang went up the white steps, presented his credentials, and walked into the Buzzard’s Cage. The place made him nervous. Irritated with himself, he paused deliberately and lit his pipe before going on. The Cage seemed cold, inhuman. And the Buzzard—

  He shouldn’t feel that way, he told himself, again offering his identification before entering the lift to the Nest. Intellectually, he understood cybernetics; there was nothing supernatural about it. The Cage was just a machine, for all its powers, even if the Buzzard did sometimes seem more—or perhaps less—than a man. Still, the place gave him the creeps. A vast thinking machine, filling a huge building, a brain beside which his own was as nothing. Of course, men had built it. Men made guns, too, but the knowledge was scant comfort when you looked into a metallic muzzle and someone pulled the trigger.

  “Lang,” he said to himself, “you’re headed for the giggle ward.”

  He smiled then, knowing it wasn’t so. Imagination was a prime requisite for his job, and he just had more than his share. It got in the way sometimes, but it was a part of him and that was that.

  Conan Lang waded through a battery of attendants and security personnel and finally reached the Nest. He opened the door and stepped into the small, dark room. There, behind the desk where he always was, perched the Buzzard.

  “Hello, Dr. Gottleib,” said Conan Lang.

  The man behind the desk eyed him silently. His name was Fritz Gottleib, but he had been tagged the Buzzard long ago. No one used the name to his face, and it was impossible to tell whether or not the name amused him. He spoke but seldom, and his appearance, even after you got used to it, was startling. Fritz Gottleib was squat and completely bald. He always dressed in black and his heavy eyebrows were like horizontal splashes of ink against the whiteness of his face. The Buzzard analogy, thought Conan Lang, was more than understandable; it was inevitable. The man sat high in his tower, in his Nest of controls, brooding over a machine that perhaps he alone fully understood. Alone. He always seemed alone, no matter how many people surrounded him. His was a life apart, a life whose vital force pulsed in the shifting lights of the tubes of a great machine.

  “Dr. Lang,” he acknowledged, unmoving, his voice sibilant, almost a hiss.

  Conan Lang puffed on his pipe and dropped into the chair across from Gottleib. He had dealt with the Buzzard before and most of the shock had worn off. You could get used to anything, he supposed. Man was a very adaptable animal.

  “The smoke doesn’t bother you, I hope?”

  Gottleib did not comment. He simply stared at him, his dark eyes unblinking. Like looking at a piece of meat, thought Conan Lang.

  “Well,” he said, trying again. “I guess you know what I’m here for.”

  “You waste words,” Fritz Gottleib hissed.

  “I hadn’t realized they were in short supply,” Lang replied, smiling. The Buzzard was irritating, but he could see the justice in the man’s remark. It was curious the number of useless things that were said all the time—useless, at any rate, from a purely communicative point of view. It would have been sheerly incredible for Gottleib—who after all had been checking his results in the computer—not to have known the nature of his mission.

  “O.K.,” said Lang, “what’s the verdict?”

  Fritz Gottleib fingered a square card in his surprisingly long-fingered hands, seeming to hover over it like a bird of prey.

  “It checks out,” he said sibilantly, his voice low and hard to hear. “Your plan will achieve the desired transfer in Sirius Ten, and the transfer integrates positively with the Plan.”

  “Anything else? Anything I should know?”

  “We should all know many more things than we do, Dr. Lang.”

  “Um-m-m. But that was all the machine said with respect to my proposed plan of operations?”

  “That was all.”

  Conan Lang sat back, watching Gottleib. A strange man. But he commanded respect.

  “I’d like to get hold of that baby sometime,” he said easily. “I’ve got a question or two of my own.”

  “Sometimes it is best not to know the answ
ers to one’s questions, Dr. Lang.”

  “No. But I’d like to have a shot at it all the same. Don’t tell the security boys I said that; they’d string me up by the toes.”

  “Perhaps one day, Dr. Lang. When you are old like me.”

  Conan Lang stood up, cupping his pipe in his hand. “I guess that’s all,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Fritz Gottleib.

  “See you around.”

  No answer. Cold shadows seemed to fill the room.

  Conan Lang turned and left the way he had come. Behind him, drilling into his back, he could feel the eyes of Fritz Gottleib following him, cold and deep like the frozen waters of an arctic sea.

  The ship stood on Earth but she was not of Earth. She was poised, a mighty lance of silver, a creature of the deeps. She waited, impatient, while Conan Lang slowly walked across the vast duralloy tarmac of Space One, Admiral White at his side. The sun was bright in a clean blue sky. It touched the ship with lambent flame and warmed Conan Lang’s shoulders under his uniform. A slight puff of breeze rustled across the spaceport, pushing along a stray scrap of white paper ahead of it.

  “Here we go again,” said Conan Lang.

  “That’s what you get for being good,” the admiral said with a smile. “You get good enough and you’ll get my job—which ought to be a grim enough prospect even for you. If you’re smart, you’ll botch this job six ways from Sunday and then we’ll have to give you a rest.”

  “Yeah—play a little joke, strictly for laughs, and give ’em an atom bomb or two to stick on the ends of their hatchets. Or take ’em back to the caves. There are plenty of delicious possibilities.”

  The two men walked on, toward the silver ship.

  “Everything’s set, I suppose?” asked Conan Lang.

  “Yep. Your staff is already on board and the stuff is loaded.”

  “Any further instructions?”

  “No—you know your business or you wouldn’t be going. Just try to make it as quick as you can, Cone. They’re getting warm over on Research on that integration-acceleration principle for correlating data—it’s going to be big and I’ll want you around when it breaks.”

  Conan Lang grinned. “What happens if I just up and disappear one day, Nels? Does the galaxy moan and lie down and quit?”

  “Search me,” said Admiral Nelson White. “But don’t take any more risks than you absolutely have to. Don’t get the idea that you’re indispensable, either. It’s just that it’s tiresome to break in new men.”

  “I’ll try to stay alive if you’re positive that’s what you want.”

  They approached the ship. Kit and Rob were waiting. The admiral touched his cap and moved on, leaving Conan Lang alone with his family. Kit was lovely—she always was, Conan Lang thought. He couldn’t imagine a life without her.

  “Bye, darlin’,” he whispered, taking her in his arms. “One of these days I’m coming back and I’m never going to leave you again.” “This is till then,” Kit said softly and kissed him for keeps.

  Much later, Conan Lang released her and shook hands with his son.

  “So long, old-timer,” he said.

  “Hurry back, Dad,” Rob said, trying not to cry.

  Conan Lang turned and joined Admiral White at the star cruiser. He did not look back.

  “Good luck, Cone,” the admiral said, patting him on the back. “I’ll keep the medals warm and a light in the cabin window.”

  “O.K., Nels,” said Conan Lang.

  He swung aboard the great ship and stepped into the lift. There was a muted hum of machinery as the car whispered up through the pneumatic tube, up into the hollowness of the ship. Already it seemed to Conan Lang that he had left Earth far behind him. The endless loneliness of the star trails rode up with him in the humming lift.

  The ship rested, quiescent, on Earth. Ahead of her, calling to her, the stars flamed coldly in an infinite sea of night.

  II

  Conan Lang walked down the long white corridor to the afterhold, his footsteps muffled and almost inaudible in the murmur of the atomics. It would be a long white corridor, he thought to himself. Wherever man went, there went the long white corridors—offices, hospitals, command posts. It was almost as if he had spent half a lifetime walking through long white corridors, and now here was yet another one—cold and antiseptic, hanging in space eight light-years from Earth.

  “Halt.”

  “Lang here,” he told the Fleetman. “Kindly point that thing the other way.”

  “Identification, please.”

  Lang sighed and handed it over. The man should know him by now; after all, the ship was on his mission, and he was hardly a subversive character. Still, orders were orders—a principle that covered a multitude of sins. And they couldn’t afford to take chances, not any chances.

  “All right, sir,” the Fleetman said, returning the identification. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Forget it,” said Conan Lang. “Keep your eye peeled for space pirates.” The guard smiled. “Who’d want to steal space, sir?” he asked. “It’s free and I reckon there’s enough to go around.”

  “Your inning,” acknowledged Conan Lang, moving into the afterhold. The kid was already there.

  “Hello, sir,” said Andrew Irvin.

  “Hi, Andy—and cut the ‘sir,’ what do you say? You make me feel like I should be extinct or embalmed or something.”

  The kid smiled almost shyly. Conan Lang had half expected to find him there in the hold; Andy was always poking around, asking questions, trying to learn. His quick brown eyes and alert carriage reminded Conan of a young hunting dog, frisking through the brush, perpetually on the verge of flushing the grandfather of all jack rabbits.

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” asked the kid.

  Conan Lang raised his eyebrows.

  “All this, I mean,” Andy Irvin said, gesturing at the neat brown sacks stacked row upon row in the brightly lighted hold. “To think that a couple of sacks of that stuff can remold a planet, change the lives of millions of people—”

  “It’s not just the sacks, Andy. It took man a good many hundreds of thousands of years to learn what to do with those sacks.”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said, hanging on every word.

  “No ‘sir,’ remember? I’m not giving you a lecture, and you don’t have to look attentive. I’m sure that elementary anthropology isn’t too dumfounding to a guy who took honors at the Academy.”

  “Well—”

  “Never mind.” Conan Lang eyed him speculatively. The kid reminded him, almost too much, of someone else—a kid named Conan Lang who had started out on a great adventure himself too many years ago. “I … um-m-m … guess you know you’re going to work with me on Ten.”

  Andy looked like Conan had just handed him a harem on a silver platter. “No, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know. Thank you, sir.”

  “The name is Conan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hellfire,” said Conan Lang. How did you go about telling a kid that you were happy to have someone around with stars in his eyes again? Without sounding like a fool? The answer was simple—you didn’t.

  “I can’t wait,” Andy said. “To really do something at last—it’s a great feeling. I hope I’ll do O.K.”

  “It won’t be long now, Andy. Twenty-four hours from now you and I go to work. The buggy ride is about over.”

  The two men fell silent then, looking at the neat brown rows of sacks, feeling the star ship tremble slightly under them with the thunder of her great atomics.

  It was night on Sirius Ten—a hot, humid night with a single moon hanging like frozen fire in the darkness. A small patrol craft from the cruiser floated motionless in the night sky, her batteries pouring down a protective screen around the newly-cleared field. Conan Lang wiped the sweat from his forehead and washed his hands off in the clean river water that gurgled through the trench at his feet.

  “That about does it, Andy,” he said wearily. “To
ss ’em a Four signal.”

  Andy Irvin turned the rheostat on his small control board to Four and flipped the switch. They waited, listening to the faint murmur of the night breeze off the river. There was no change, nothing that they could see, but they could almost feel the intense radiation pounding into the field from the patrol ship, seeping into the ground, accelerating by thousands of times the growth factor in the seeds.

  “That’s got it,” said Conan Lang. “Give ’em release.”

  Andy shot the patrol craft the release signal and shut off his control board. The little ship seemed to hover uncertainly. There was a humming sound and a spot of intense white light in the sky. That was all. The ship was gone and they were alone.

  “It’s been a long night, kid,” yawned Conan Lang. “We’d better get some sack time—we’re liable to need it before morning.”

  “You go ahead,” Andy Irvin said. “I’m not sleepy; the sunrise here ought to be something.”

  “Yeah,” said Conan Lang. “The sunrise ought to be something.”

  He walked across the field and entered a structure that closely resembled a native hut in appearance but was actually quite, quite different. Too tired even to undress, he piled into bed with his clothes on and rested quietly in the darkness.

  The strange, haunting, familiar-with-a-difference sounds of an alien world whispered around the hut on the soft, moist breeze from the sluggish river. Far away, an animal screamed hoarsely in the clogging brush. Conan Lang kept his eyes closed and tried not to think, but his mind ignored him. It went right on working, asking questions, demanding answers, bringing up into the light many memories that were good and some that were better forgotten.

  “Kit,” he said, very softly.

  Tired as he was, he knew there would be no sleep for him that night.

  The sunrise was a glory. The blue-white inferno of Sirius hung in the treetops across the field and then climbed into the morning sky, her white dwarf companion a smaller sun by her side. The low cumulus clouds were edged with flame—fiery red, pale blue, cool green. The fresh morning winds washed the field with air and already the young plants were out of the ground, thirsty for the sun. The chuckling water in the trenches sparkled in the light.