The Stardroppers by John Brunner
Shaking his head, he waved Dan’s cab on to the main entrance.
He was paying the driver off when he heard his name called, and turned to find Jerry Bartlett hurrying down the steps from the wide glass front doors. He looked even more harassed than he had yesterday evening.
“Glad you could stop by!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been desperately trying to reach Wally Watson, but he’s nowhere to be found, and Angel has this trouble at the hospital with all these idiots who seem to think she can help them do what Leon did—if he did do anything, and didn’t have it simply happen to him. … Well, come on up to the lab and let’s see if we can thrash anything out, hm?”
“Such as what?” Dan, though he had far longer legs, was having difficulty keeping up with the pace Jerry was setting down the long corridors of the building.
“Christ, how should I know?” Jerry ran his fingers through his hair. “Whatever happened, however it happened, it doesn’t fit the orthodox laws of science. But you’ve at least met Berghaus, haven’t you? He may have mentioned something to you which he hasn’t published yet, for example. Up these stairs—just the one flight.” He pointed to the left.
“Why haven’t you tried to reach Berghaus himself, then?” Dan demanded.
“Think I haven’t? But everybody’s after him! I put a call through directly I got home last night—traced him in the Who’s Who of Physics—but he wasn’t in, and when I tried again an hour later I found he’d told his local exchange to block all incoming calls.”
“Well, how about Rainshaw?” Dan suggested as they reached the top of the stairs and Jerry marched ahead to fling open a door opposite.
“Rainshaw has an unlisted number, and has had ever since his son disappeared. I don’t suppose you know him, do you?”
“I’ve met him,” Dan admitted.
“Do you know where he lives?”
“I’m afraid not. I was taken to see him at his lab.”
“Blast! He’s at the DAPR place at Richmond, and you aren’t allowed to reach him at work without a Home Office authorization.”
“Dapper?” Dan echoed, puzzled.
“Department of Advanced Physical Research,” Jerry clarified. Swinging around the corner of a large desk cluttered with miscellaneous electronic parts, he dropped into a chair and waved Dan to take another facing him. “Well! Coffee? Beer? Cigarette? I don’t smoke, but I have some here for visitors.” He opened a box and pushed it in Dan’s direction.
Dan took one with a mutter of thanks and looked around the office. One wall was entirely of glass to below waist-height, its sill heaped with papers and files. Another was a single large Formica sheet on which a critical-path analysis of what seemed to be a very complex experimental program had been inscribed with a china-marking pencil. Next to the door were shelves on aluminum supports, containing about five or six stardroppers and boxes of spare parts for them, and behind Jerry’s desk were a case of reference books and two information-retrieval computer keyboards sited where he could reach them without leaving his chair.
Clearing a bulky file from the top of his desk intercom, he ordered coffee to be brought, and leaned back with a deep breath.
“I suppose I didn’t dream it, did I?” he said to Dan.
“I’ve been wishing the same thing,” Dan admitted. “Have you heard what’s happening at Cosmica this morning?”
“No, but I can imagine. There’s a little shop I pass on my way from home to the station every day, which sells stardroppers as well as radios and records, and at eight-thirty today there were at least a dozen people lined up outside waiting for it to open at nine.”
“You have the picture, then. And you saw the papers?”
“Naturally. It’ll be interesting to hear what the radio news says at one o’clock; they have an in-depth program then, instead of these two-minute snippets.”
“Interesting!” Dan gave a humorless smile.
“Yes.” Jerry stared out of the window at the upper level of the expressway; the lab was efficiently sound-proofed, and the traffic was roaring past in silence. “You know, that was all it was for me, to begin with. We got into this field—my firm, I mean—along with just about every other telecommunications company on the planet, purely because we wanted to know if this ‘Rainshaw effect’ might lead to some new kind of information-transmitting technique. I mean, the radio bands are so overcrowded nowadays, at least in the advanced countries. So one morning I was whistled into old Tinker’s office—the director of research—and asked if I’d like my own department and a fifty-thousand-pound initial budget to investigate these things, and obviously I said yes please, when can I start? So they gave me a couple of technicians and a secretary, and I built half a dozen of the damned things in a week—not realizing, to be honest, they were protected by a patent application. And of course that was before this horrible name ‘stardropper’ got hung on them. There are a couple of my originals behind you, on the shelf: the ones screwed to wooden baseboards.” He pointed, and Dan glanced at the instruments, laid out in extended order in typical breadboard style.
“And I’d been happily fiddling around with them for a month or more, measuring signal strengths, trying to correlate patterns from different instruments, and so on, when all of a sudden I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going on. I mean, I was like a kid in front of a big computer pushing buttons to see the pretty red and green lights flash! Which was what convinced me that looking for a new communications mode in stardroppers was futile. We were confronted by a totally new phenomenon, unforeseen, inexplicable. So I went back to Tinker and I told him straight out: you’re going to have to face the fact that this isn’t going to produce commercial results of the kind you’re after, but for all we can tell right now it may overturn the whole of traditional physics, so can I have twice the budget and an extra six assistants? And—bless him—he gave me the money and four more people. And then of course Berghaus published his theory, and I’d proved my point. But nothing else except that. Honestly, we’re no further forward than we were the day his theory appeared!”
Dan tapped his ash into a wastebasket. He said, “But I’d have thought—”
“We’d have established a few facts? Oh, sure! All negative. Whatever the signals may derive from, they incontestably do not travel by any conventional route. They are almost beyond doubt not subject to the inverse-square law. They may be truly instantaneous, though so far we haven’t figured out how to measure a speed greater than light’s. I wish someone would find the tachyon and give us information from the other side of the C-barrier! But didn’t Berghaus tell you about this kind of thing?”
“I didn’t ask about this aspect of it much when I met him. I’m not a trained physicist, you see. I was more concerned with the results of people becoming convinced that the signals contain alien knowledge.”
Jerry nodded. “Shame! I’m sure that man must have new insights by now, which he hasn’t published yet. … But our main problem, you know, is simply not knowing where to begin! For instance, I came up with a hypothesis that the signals may possibly use local gravitational fields as—well, as a sort of resonator, even though it’s minuscule, and the likeliest source in my view is the potential energy of the stressed-space area surrounding this ball of rock, or maybe the entire solar system. Follow me?”
“Not really,” Dan confessed.
“Hmm! What can I compare it to? Oh, yes! Think of a piano. Or perhaps better would be a spring, under tension because a weight is hanging from it You hit the right frequency on a tuning fork, and you’ll get sympathetic vibrations from the spring. Take the weight away, so the spring goes slack, and it won’t react to the frequency you used before—probably won’t react detectably to any outside noise until you reach the point where the blast effect takes over.”
“So how would you go about checking that?” Dan asked.
“Obviously, fly a ’dropper aboard a satellite,” Jerry shrugged “So I’ve put in applicati
“And if you turn out to be right in your suspicion?”
Jerry gave a harsh chuckle. “One more on the list of negative facts! Yesterday I was overjoyed with my chance to get a ’dropper into space. Today I have this feeling Wally Watson was right all along, and I’m wasting my time digging into the microcosmic aspects when there are macro effects under my bloody nose!”
“Watson puzzles me,” Dan said slowly. “How did you first come to know him?”
“Oh, just by enrolling in Club Cosmica. You see, after they gave me my nice fat budget and my new staff, I ran out of ideas, and it really started to get under my hide, I can tell you. I mean, imagine me with all that money and these labs and five assistants, and sitting around chewing my nails! So—”
He was interrupted by a knock on the door, and without waiting for an answer a pretty girl came in carrying two cups of coffee. “Ah!” he said. “Thanks, Shirley. This is my secretary, by the way—Shirley Brown, Dan Cross.”
They exchanged nods.
“How are things outside?” Jerry asked.
“Oh!” She pulled a face. “I’m still spending half my time telling callers you’re not here, of course. Goodness knows how many there’ve been so far today, but I imagine over fifty. And as soon as you’re free, by the way, Charlie Potts wants you to come and see the signal he’s getting from that new ’dropper of his. He’s split it three ways and fed it to a color TV screen, and it’s making beautiful patterns.”
“Okay, I will,” Jerry sighed. “Meantime, don’t let him just sit in front of it, will you? He’s a dangerously good hypnotic subject, and he might go into a trance!”
“I’ll tell him,” Shirley said. And added, on the point of turning away, “Incidentally, Jerry—!”
“Yes?”
“I’ve—uh—I’ve decided I’d like to buy a stardropper. What would you recommend me to get, that isn’t too expensive?”
“Oh Christ,” Jerry said. “You too? Well, it’s supposed to be a free country. … Dan, what do you think? You have that very advanced Binton, I think Wally said.”
“Well, what he advised me to try was a Gale and Welchman,” Dan said. “And I must admit it’s about the only instrument I’ve run across which really impressed me.”
“Gale and Welchman,” Shirley repeated thoughtfully. “Thanks—I’ll try and pick one up.”
She went out.
“Where were we?” Jerry said, stirring sugar into his cup.
“I was asking how you met Wally Watson,” Dan said.
“Oh yes. Well, I was getting desperate for new angles to try, so I saw an ad for this new club—I think they’d just had their first or second meeting—and I enrolled, and as I’d hoped I found a whole bunch of people there who were in the same state as I was: baffled and infuriated and eager to swap suggestions. Matter of fact, you said you met Dr. Rainshaw, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Is he a member of Club Cosmica?”
“Oh no! But about the second person I met after Wally was Robin Rainshaw, his son. Angel’s fiancé, you know.”
Dan gave a thoughtful nod. “Did you know him well?”
“Not very. Casually and professionally. And then, of course, he—uh—disappeared. Angel was absolutely broken up by it. Who wouldn’t have been?”
“Did you believe at first that he’d really disappeared, like Leon Patrick?”
“Hell, of course I didn’t! I don’t even want to believe Leon disappeared!” Jerry gulped at his coffee, burned his tongue, and swore, grabbing for a pack of tissues.
“Have you any idea at all how it might have happened?”
“None. I went back with Jock to his hotel when the pub shut last night, and we sat in the bar there for an hour arguing, but the poor guy was dead beat because he’d come down on an overnight train and he hadn’t had much sleep, so I had to leave him in the end. And then I sat up myself half the night, cudgeling my brains, and answering phone calls from the papers and TV news service. … And I’m none the wiser. I really do think Wally’s been right all along.” He sounded depressed at making the admission.
“Talking about—what was your term?—the macro effects?”
“Exactly. His attitude has always been that—hmm! What was that nice analogy he once used? A biological one.” Jerry frowned briefly. “Ah, I have it. He said what I was doing was like the man who proved that grasshoppers hear with their legs because when he amputated the legs they didn’t jump in response to a sudden noise. I was a bit narked when he told me that, frankly, but the more I think about it, the more I feel he may have been right.”
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-c
XIV
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.