A Star Above It and Other Stories Read online

  THE ANT AND THE EYE

  NICO: Saidyah, do you know what space is?

  SAIDYAH: It is the little road the ant travels between two blades of grass: it is the great empty road my eye travels on its way to the stars.

  From “Time is a Dream,”

  by Henri-René Lenormand

  Robert Quinton could feel it coming.

  He opened his eyes, yawned, and tried not to look at the multiple color tones that rioted over the walls of the sleep sphere. He let the fresher work him over briefly and tried to pretend that this was just a day like any other day. He selected a predominantly blue-toned tunic, which was downright hypocrisy, and checked to make sure all the viewers were off. Then he secretly lit a cigarette.

  “Getting to be a regular sot,” he observed.

  It was curious how the local customs got under your hide. The Merans on Procyon III took their stimulants via the smoking route, with a fair-sized cigarette being about the equivalent of a straight shot of high-powered Scotch. He had to be cautious about his smoking. By now, he actually did feel like he was sneaking a quick one whenever he fired up for a smoke.

  Quinton finished the cigarette, carefully destroyed the butt in a disposer, and walked out of the sleep sphere into the open air. It was morning on Meran, and the primary sun was radiating a cheerful greenish-yellow. Cool, fresh breezes whispered up from the valley floor, and the world smelled like flowers. Quinton took a tube to a Five Transfer, where Ncarl was waiting for him.

  “Blue harmony,” greeted Ncarl, smiling. He was dressed in a gray tunic, indicating that he was in rather mediocre spirits.

  “Blue harmony,” Robert Quinton returned the greeting, quite as naturally as he would have said “good morning” on Earth.

  “An odd time for a message, I believe,” Ncarl said courteously. “I hope nothing is clashing.”

  “That makes two of us,” Quinton agreed, settling himself in the tube for Communications.

  Ncarl shook his head, somewhat self-consciously. It was a trick he had picked up from Quinton. “Black is in the air, “he said.

  “It may just be a routine message,” Quinton suggested, knowing full well that it wasn’t.

  “You’re a liar,” Ncarl said.

  “Isn’t everybody?” asked Quinton.

  The tube hummed to a halt. Quinton tried to ignore the cold knot of worry that chewed his stomach, and followed his friend into the hum of Communications.

  Quinton kept his mouth thoroughly shut. Even now, he did not trust himself to attempt casual contacts with Merans he did not know. The system was too intricate; he let Ncarl guide him through the color maze to the Contact Booth. Speaking a bit too rapidly to enable Quinton to follow his words, he checked with the booth operator, a dour-looking individual dressed almost entirely in black. Not for the first time, Quinton was grateful that he had Ncarl around. In making relatively early connections with diverse cultures, you saved a lot of time by having a more or less objective informer on hand—in the case a man who corresponded to the Meranian version of a fellow anthropologist.

  “All harmony,” Ncarl said finally, as the black-clad operator left. “He’s got it all set up for you.”

  “Thanks, Ncarl, I’ll check with you as soon as I find out what the deal is.”

  Robert Quinton stepped into the booth and closed the door behind him. He sat down in the operator’s chair and closed the contact switch. For a long moment, there was nothing. Quinton sat there, a tall, rather thin man, beginning to gray at the temples, with his usual quiet smile absent from his face. He was outwardly calm, but he wasn’t kidding himself. The boys wouldn’t call him off schedule just to pass the time of day. Of course, they might just be after information …

  A bell dinged with its customary abruptness and the communicator rattled briefly. Quinton read the message: THIS IS BAC XII. IDENTIFY.

  He jabbed the keys in return. QUINTON BAC UN. PROCYLON III. XX5L. WHAT’S COOKING, DAN?

  Again a moment of silence. Then: UN BAC IMPERATIVE OFFICIAL. RETURN AT ONCE VIA BAC XII PICKUP POINT SIX UNIT 12.7. REPLACEMENT CUMMINGS. REPEAT IMPERATIVE. END OFFICIAL. THE JIG IS UP DARLING. MY HUSBAND KNOWS ALL.

  Quinton grinned and tapped out his acknowledgment of the orders. Dan had a way of taking the bite out of unpleasant situations—but the situation remained. He opened the contact switch again and took a deep breath. Back to Earth again, after less than a year. What could have gone wrong? He didn’t fool himself—no man was utterly indispensable in the UNBAC setup. If they had to yank him home in a hurry, that meant that things were in the stage where shades of ability and slight favorable factors were considered vital. And that meant—

  He got slowly to his feet. The old uncertainty flooded him with doubt, but it didn’t show on his face. He kept his thoughts to himself and left the booth. Ncarl was waiting for him and guided him out of Communications back to the tube.

  “I’ve got to go home, Ncarl,” he answered his friend’s unspoken question. “They’re sending a replacement—name is Lloyd Cummings, a good man—and I don’t know when I’ll get back.”

  The hum of the tube filled the silence.

  “When?” Ncarl asked finally.

  “Tonight. I’d appreciate it if you’d come along to the pickup and let me introduce you to Cummings. This doesn’t mean the end of our work, of course—but I regret the delay.”

  “No. But I will miss you, Bob.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  The two men parted at the Five Transfer. Ncarl walked off through the green forest, and Robert Quinton went back to his Meranian home to pack his gear. It would be good to be with Lynn and Baby again—a man needed his family. And Earth, old Earth, for all his acid comments, was still his planet—and the strangest of them all.

  But—What had gone wrong?

  It was a soft night on Meran, and sad as only the hush of night can be. The warm wind played in the summer grasses and the crystal stars looked down. There was something infinitely poignant about the night. It reminded a man of all the things that he had not done, all the loves he had never known. Sometimes, Quinton felt pretty sharp during the day—but the night whittled him down to size again.

  “I hear her,” said Ncarl.

  Quinton looked up, although he knew that he could not possibly see the great cruiser against the stars. He could hear her, though; or, more properly, he could feel her. From far out in space, she was only a rumbling vibration, a muted murmur. Invisible, she yet dominated the land—massive, poised.

  The two men watched, and shortly a tiny streak of flame arched through the night sky and hissed out of the heavens above them. The jet flames winked out and a small spaceboat hummed in on her copter blades, landing with scarcely a jar in the open field in front of them. The entry port hissed open and warm golden light spilled out of the ship. Two men stepped down, and Quinton and Ncarl went to meet them.

  “Good to see you, Bob,” greeted Lloyd Cummings, the UNBAC man. And then, switching easily to Meranian: “You must be Ncarl; I have looked forward with great harmony to meeting you.”

  Quinton smiled, seeing that Cummings knew his stuff as usual. Cummings introduced him to Engerrand from the spaceboat, and that was that. Quinton had left complete notes and advice in his sphere, and Cummings was fully competent to go on from there. Quinton didn’t waste his time asking questions—Cummings wouldn’t know the answers, of course. He shook hands all around and followed Engerrand into the spaceboat.

  Looking back, he could see Ncarl and Cummings walking off together under the stars. The soft Meranian night touched his face. It seemed to know that he was leaving, that he would not be back. It was trying to say good-by.

  If it were important enough to call him home, it would definitely not be a case of elementary-my-dear-Watson and back to Meran again.

  This was for keeps.

  The entry port hissed shut behind him. Robert Quinton sank into a seat and lit a cigarette. The spaceboat lifted on her copter blades for what seemed
to be a long time, and then the jets erupted with a slamming roar that dwindled slowly down into a muted rumble.

  “It won’t be long now,” Engerrand said. “I’ll bet you hate to leave.”

  Quinton smiled. “No,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”

  Twenty-three days later, Robert Quinton by-passed the sprawling, wheeling Space City by switching over at Lunaport, and an UNBAC shuttle landed him at the divisional headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

  He had a quick look at New York before entering the Shaft, and the New York of 2034 was the same town it had always been. It was reassuring, somehow, to know that Little Old New York was still there. The shining copters lazed along in six-level traffic under the bright afternoon sun and a transcontinental rocket flashed by high overhead. The women’s skirts were a trifle longer this year, with a faint filmy area at the knees—quite daring, really. The air was fairly clean with the piped-in solar energy, but he could see traces of New York “fog” hanging over the city. Several large freight copters were sluggishly lumbering along the lower levels, headed toward the coastal sub bases. The colorful old art vendors, with their natural-abstraction projectors, were everywhere.

  New York hadn’t changed a bit.

  At the Shaft, Quinton energized his credentials and went straight up to the Fifteenth Level, detouring around the showy administrative and public areas. His code signals admitted him directly into Lorraine’s private office, which was situated in an inconspicuous part of the Shaft that nobody paid much attention to. The office itself was on the prosaic side, except for the man sitting in it.

  “Hi, Boss,” Quinton said, extending his hand—three weeks and two days after receiving the UNBAC imperative on Procyon III, eleven light-years from the Earth.

  “What kept you?” grinned the Boss, shaking hands.

  “Lovely intergalactic spy, as per usual,” Quinton said. “Good to see you, Mart.” He surveyed the Boss. A bit more gray at the temples, perhaps, but otherwise Martin Lorraine looked about the. same—which was to say that he looked like the tri-di conception of a handsome scientist, which in turn was one good reason why he fronted UNBAC. Another good one was that he knew his stuff six ways from Sunday.

  “Sit down,” said Mart, “and I’ll try to fill you in. I guess you’re wondering what the score is.”

  Quinton smiled. “You might say that, yes,” he said. “What’s up—is the world coming to an end?”

  Martin Lorraine looked him right in the eye. “Something like that,” he said, and didn’t smile.

  Quinton sat down. He took his time, lit a cigarette, and blew a neat smoke ring at nothing in particular. He didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll give you a quick outline,” the Boss said, leaning forward, his hair studiously awry as though to cover up his indecent good looks. “We’ll smuggle you out to New Mexico to take over pronto, if the brass doesn’t spot you first. There won’t be time to make a report on the Meranian stuff, but I’ll get Rog to fake something for the front office to keep the Wizards of Finance happy.”

  Robert Quinton waited silently. He was an outwardly slow man, and had often been called a lazy man due to his habit of doing nothing when there was nothing to do. He had heard the end of the world announced before—but not by Mart. He thought of his child.

  “No Judgment Day junk, of course,” the Boss said, reading his thoughts. “No end in any sense if we can catch it in time. But we’re stumped, Bob—it’s getting away from us.”

  “Facts,” suggested Robert Quinton.

  “You live with ’em a while, then. One year ago, the computer survival probability curve took a nose dive. It’s still going down.”

  A little man with an ice hammer began to beat on Quinton’s stomach with monotonous precision. “Figures?” he asked—outwardly calm.

  “Point ten,” Lorraine said.

  Robert Quinton didn’t move. He was stunned, literally. Point ten. That meant the odds were nine to one against the survival of civilization as he knew it. And computers didn’t make mistakes.

  “Time?”

  “Hard to say. Thirty, forty years, maybe.”

  On the face of it, to the untrained eye, that didn’t look so bad; forty years was a long time. It was like worrying about another Ice Age. But the catch was that with every second the odds got worse. When things got that critical, it was act fast—or not at all.

  “Any leads?”

  “Precious few. We can’t find—”

  The viewer buzzed and lit up, and broad brass-encrusted shoulders with a head on them came into view. Martin Lorraine smiled politely as though he hadn’t a care in the world, promised that he’d check on the ore constants the very second that he saw Robert Quinton, and switched off after a few concluding pleasantries.

  Neither man paid the slightest attention to the interruption.

  “Nobody knows?” Quinton asked.

  “Outside of Little UNBAC, no. The stock market is rising, the papers are full of rhapsodic editorials, the Space City weightless games came out as expected. The economy’s sound, most everybody is happy within human limits, and there are no ominous clouds on the horizon. There isn’t even a horizon. In short, this isn’t a crisis period. No one is viewing with alarm. Everything is just ginger-peachy.”

  “Like the guy shooting marbles in that nice sunny place below the reservoir,” Quinton offered after a brief pause. “Having a fine time, but he unfortunately isn’t on to the fact that someone has opened the dam a short distance up the valley.”

  “Exactly. Someone—or something.”

  There was a long silence in the little office room. It was much too still. Quinton could hear his watch ticking, and he didn’t like the sound. “I’ll be going, Mart.”

  “Catch a copter on the roof. The transcon for New Mexico will be waiting at the port, and I’ve already notified Lynn and your daughter that you’re coming. I’ll be down as soon as I get through another round of bigwig conferences to get money for you guys.” He paused. “I don’t have to tell you to watch your step.”

  “No., You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Take care of yourself, Bob—and give Lynn a kiss for the Boss.”

  “See you shortly, Mart. Maybe we’ll both get back to Meran one of these years.”

  He left Lorraine’s office. No one paid any attention to him, save for a casual nod here and there; everyone was busy with Big Problems. He caught the lift for the roof. Maybe we’ll both get back, his voice echoed in his mind as he smiled vacantly at the lift’s other passenger. And another echo laughed at him:

  And maybe we won’t.

  When Robert Quinton stepped off the transcon at New Mexico Station, Lynn and Baby were waiting for him in the desert sunshine. He walked toward them, heart pounding, the old thrill racing like electricity through his veins.

  He never remembered afterward what they did or what they said in those first magic moments together after their periodic separations. There were only impressions, confused and fleeting, and the smell of the sun and the sky. Lynn was incomparably beautiful because he loved her, and Baby was ten years old and beginning to look like her mother.

  “We’ve been lonely, Bob—”

  “Daddy, Daddy, did you bring me a surprise—”

  “Getting old, gray hairs, supper’s waiting—”

  Being apart was no fun, but maybe it had its compensations. Any two people got pretty used to each other when they were together every day, but when they were forced apart and then came back to each other it was like falling in love all over again. These meetings, these first breathless moments, were beyond value—and what else, in all the worlds, really mattered?

  Nothing, nothing, nothing, his mind whispered exultantly.

  But already, as they walked slowly across the tarmac to where their copter waited, the long shadows of the afternoon sun crept blackly at their side, and a cool north wind rustled across the land.

  Early the next morning, Robert Quinton walked into t
he UNBAC computer station and went directly to Carr Siringo. Siringo hardly looked up when he entered, and Quinton didn’t try to hurry him—having found from long experience that Siringo had a distinctly negative reaction to being pushed. Quinton deposited himself on a metal stool, lit a cigarette, and waited.

  If Martin Lorraine looked like a tri-di conception of a clear-eyed, noble scientist, it was equally true that Carr Siringo reminded one instantly of the prototype of all mad fiends out to blow up the planet with an invisible ray. He had been compared variously with the Devil and a cockeyed angel, usually the former, and it didn’t take much imagination to see why. Siringo was short, fat, and bald, and he was never still. He ate prodigiously, worked hugely, and lived in Gargantuan style. He worked on problems because he loved problems for their own sake, and once he had the solution he lost interest completely and launched himself into something else. He didn’t care a hoot for the world, humanity, or anything else apart from the incredible world of his own mind. There was a firm conviction among his co-workers that he would never die as other men died, but would simply vanish in a puff of blue flame on some distant day when he really got wound up on a problem he couldn’t solve. He was indispensable, or course, and Quinton respected him for what he was, although he never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. On his part, Siringo called Quinton a “humanitarian,” and when he said it, it was an insult.

  “Back to save the world, hey?” Siringo said finally, without looking up from the computer, in precisely the tone of voice he would have used to remark, “I hear your wife has leprosy.”

  “Probably not,” Quinton said slowly, declining to lose his temper. “There’s always a chance—a good chance—that the factors will change favorably without any help from us. There’s always a chance that a broken copter will fix itself if you just let it sit and swear at it every day as you walk to work. I just like to play Hero, that’s all.”

  Siringo laughed shortly and changed the subject. “What’d you get on Meran?” he asked with a flash of interest. “How about that consanguineous family system? What about the mental tri-di? What is the significance of banded clothing? What are—”