The Stardroppers by John Brunner
“I see.” Dan glanced at Rainshaw, recalling what he’d said to evoke such fierce suspicion. “And the demonstrations and so on that you organize at the club are just a way of bringing particularly informationful signals to the members’ attention?”
“In a way,” Watson said judiciously. “The prime purpose of them is not to study the signals, but the audiences. You see—”
The buzzer on the door sounded. He glanced at Rainshaw.
“See you later,” he said. It was a command. Rainshaw nodded and vanished without even bothering to rise from his seat. Dan’s stomach turned over. It would take a long time for him to adjust to such a casual attitude.
“I think,” Watson said meditatively as he moved toward the door—conventionally, on his feet—“that our caller may be a policeman. In view of your work with the Special Agency, it may well be someone you know.”
“Redvers?” Dan said.
“That’s right.” Hand poised to unlock the door, Watson gave a glance around the room, and with another twinge of shock Dan saw Rainshaw’s red divine suit vanish. “I would have mentioned, only we’ve not had time, that I went out for a purpose this morning. Me and a few friends. I think we achieved what we intended. Just! We’ve had to be a bit cruder than we hoped, but I think we left a small margin of safety.” He was talking to himself rather than Dan as he opened the door.
Standing back, he said, “Hello, Hugo. Come on in.”
XVIII
Two points occurred to Dan as Redvers came in—apparently unrelated, but in their different ways significant. First: He called him Hugo, and I didn’t realize they knew each other personally. Second: Maybe it always happens like this, but one thinks of the world-shaking decisions being taken in palaces or generals’ tents, not in the familiar setting of a town apartment.
Redvers, on entering, hurled a fat portfolio from under his arm at the seat of a handy chair, and rounded on Watson, his eyes burning. He had barely spared Dan a glance.
“Well, Wally,” he choked out, “I suppose you’re pretty pleased with yourself!”
Closing the door, Watson shrugged. “Moderately,” he conceded.
“I see you got him on your side, too!” Redvers barked, gesturing at Dan. “That must make you bloody overjoyed!”
“I didn’t do anything to convert him,” Watson said peaceably. “He made it of his own accord. He went out.”
What was all this about “your side”? Blankly, Dan stared from one to the other of them.
Slumping into a vacant seat, Redvers wiped sweat from his face. He said, “Ah, shit, what does it matter anyway? We haven’t got much longer, that’s definite. Seventy-two hours at the outside.”
Whereupon his self-control broke apart and real passion flooded into his voice. “Jesus God!” he almost screamed at Watson. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done with this—this lunacy? Do you know what this bastard’s been doing all morning?” he added, swinging to face Dan. “Do you realize he’s wiped out everything your Agency’s been working for ever since it was founded?”
“What do you mean?” Dan jolted forward on his chair.
“I’m telling you! He’s been showing off—appearing and vanishing in plain sight of everyone he could reach! Fleet Street! Piccadilly! Lime Grove television center! Piccadilly in Manchester!”
“And Fifth Avenue, and Red Square, and the Boulevard Mao Tse-tung in Peking, and a good few other places,” Watson said as calmly as though describing a world cruise, “But I wasn’t the only one, of course. There were over fifty of us working together. I couldn’t have done it by myself—not in the time available. If I tried to go from here directly to the street, I’d be just as smashed up as if I’d jumped out of the window; the other way, it’s as exhausting as running upstairs at full pelt”
His face crumbling with incredulous dismay, Redvers said, “It’s driven you out of your mind, Wally. You don’t seem to care what harm your so-called fun might cause! I suppose, now you’ve got your godlike powers, you don’t sympathize with us ordinary mortals any more—you can just amuse yourself by stirring us up, like a man kicking an ants’ nest to watch them run about in panic! You, Cross!” He shifted his accusing gaze. “What do you think the result is going to be?”
Dan got slowly to his feet, so appalled he could barely speak. He said, “It is lunacy! Why …! Well, this is calculated to drive people crazy with fear. It makes a mockery of international frontiers, of all security, secrecy, and even personal privacy. Did you say seventy-two hours? I wouldn’t bet on our having more than twelve!”
“Tell me why,” Watson invited.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Dan stamped his foot. “What government is going to risk the other side getting hold of the secret of teleportation ahead of them? You could be deliberately stampeding the world into war!”
Watson took a cigarette from a box on a table near him, but didn’t light it. Holding it thoughtfully between finger and thumb, he said, “That’s the general idea, actually.”
“You are insane,” Dan said, his mouth going dry. “Don’t you know that at this very moment there’s nuclear potential equivalent to—?”
“A hundred and sixty tons of TNT for everyone on earth, man, woman, and child,” Watson said in a bored tone. “Yes, it was in the papers. And enough bacterial toxins to kill everyone about three times, and enough chemical weapons to do the job twice more on top of that. I do follow the news, you know.”
“Cross, for God’s sake!” Redvers was almost moaning. “Is there any way to stop what this maniac has started?”
There was a curious empty feeling in Dan’s guts. He had to shake his head.
And yet Watson remained quite composed, toying with his unlit cigarette. He said, “So you didn’t get what you thought you would out of your stardropper—is that the sum of it, Hugo?”
Redvers crushed the heels of his hands against his temples, as though hurting himself might make him believe this was actually happening.
“What’s that?” Dan snapped.
“Out of my stardropper …” Redvers said in a choking voice. “Damned crazy nonsense—oh, I’ve been such a fool! You were all I ever got out of a stardropper, Cross.”
“Me? I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t so clever I could be waiting for a Special Agency man the moment he came off his plane. I heard about you beforehand, through the stardropper I used to own. Remember Grey, who spouted all that nonsense at you? I modelized him on the way I damned nearly got to be. I had this one piece of comprehensible information, that a big cross man was going to come out of the west and bring us the answer to our problems. By that time I was on my way to a breakdown, so I had myself treated, but I remembered very clearly, so when I saw the name ‘Cross’ on the plane’s passenger list I checked up, and found out who you were by conventional means. And I wish now I’d never bothered.”
He beat his closed fist into his palm. “Yet it seemed so reasonable! Who was more likely to help us than the Special Agency? And you still might have done it, I suppose, only this crazy idiot beat you to it, and thanks to him the world’s going to go smash and all of us along with it.”
Dan thought of hardened missile sites pitting the planet like the sores of some disease, of the submarines on patrol each with enough power to wipe out half a country, of the spy satellites and the canisters of botulinus and the pressurized tanks of nerve gas …
Any of a thousand individuals, perhaps ten thousand, might be driven to the irrevocable decision by what Watson had just done, and the moment one of those key persons’ self-control snapped, it would let loose a worldwide landslide of disaster.
And yet a tiny itch of doubt remained at the back of his mind. Thinking he might be clutching uselessly at a straw, he turned to Watson. Surely, while a maniac might be calm, he wouldn’t be so sardonically amused? Though if Redvers had been right he might by this time regard himself as above the affairs of ordinary men.
He looked a pleading question, and wait
Holding his cigarette before him with one elbow on the side of his chair, Watson said meditatively, “if you hadn’t lost heart, Hugo, and had yourself proofed against stardropping, you might not be so abjectly miserable now. From what you told me, I too figured out that this man called Cross might contribute toward saving us. I admit I didn’t see what help he could offer until a little while ago, when he did something spectacular and unprecedented, but now he’s told me who he is I can see all sorts of exciting possibilities. … Cross, have you worked things out yet, or are you still where poor Hugo is, stuck in a morass of pointless despair?”
A spark of wordless hope flickered in Dan’s mind, but he could not bring himself to speak.
“Look!” Watson said in a commanding tone, and held the cigarette out at arm’s length.
It disappeared.
“There are a practical infinity of points in the universe,” Watson said didactically, “where the gravitational potential corresponds to that of any given point on Earth. There is positively nothing easier than to distribute a small object’s constituent particles randomly among a number of those points. Compared with sending the object to a specific destination it’s literally no trouble.”
“And a small object can be—uh—pretty crucial,” Dan suggested.
“Exactly.” Watson smiled. No, this wasn’t a maniac. This was a man with so much common sense you automatically didn’t believe it. Dan smiled back. He couldn’t help it.
“What the hell do you two have to grin about?” Redvers demanded hysterically.
“Didn’t you see that cigarette vanish?” said Dan. “Go on, Watson—spell it out. I think I know what you’ve been up to, but I’ll need to hear you tell me before I really believe it’s true.”
“Yes, it’s like waking up from a nightmare, isn’t it?” Watson replied. “Tell me this first, though. I’ve been assuming that if anybody knows where it all is, the Special Agency does. Am I right?”
“Sure. I can tell you myself, down to a mile or two, the map references for every hardened missile site, every major stockpile of bacterial and chemical weapons, and every sizable troop concentration—correct up to about eight days ago, which is when I last went for a refresher. And if necessary I can get you into the Agency’s local office, where they keep a computer solely to record movement of military material.”
“What’s been giving us headaches is the submarines,” Watson said.
“No sweat. They need orders from their home bases. I can tell you how to put out the transmitters over which they’d receive the command to fire, and make it look like a coincidence of part failures. We’ll have to make it snappy, though. There are a hell of a lot of the bloody things.”
“What the hell do you expect?” Watson said with sudden vehemence. “We’ve been in the killing business for more generations than we can count—plenty of time to make it impossible to save the world! Only somehow, praise be, I get the impression that our hearts have never really been in it.”
“How many—uh—how many people are in this?” Dan inquired. He had almost said: “How many of us?”
“So far, around three hundred, with more coming in all the time. We’ve had a terribly high wastage rate, but thanks to the new insights you’ve given me, I think we can start training people as soon as things have settled down. Use hypnosis to build an individual perceptual code for each separate subject. But that’s for later.” Watson chuckled. “Know where our best recruits are coming from? Government projects, eastern, western, and neutral! It’s the first thing you seem to learn from a stardropper, even before information you can act upon—this sense that in a universe full of who knows how many intelligent life forms this is one small pebble and it’s too small to contain narrow local loyalties. And, by the way—”
“Yes?”
“I was at the Chinese nuclear testing ground at Lop Nor this morning along with someone I think you know. A kid of about sixteen, seventeen.”
“Lilith Miles?”
“That’s right. She said I should thank you for lending her your Binton ’dropper. She went out, safely, the second time she tried it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dan said slowly, staring into nowhere. He gave a sudden snort of laughter. “Oh, hell! I wonder how they’re going to react to having kids with superpowers taking away their deadly little toys!”
Already he was thinking in terms of “they” and we.” And yet that wasn’t correct. Not already, but always. Watson was right to say that mankind’s hearts hadn’t been in the extermination business. It had always been “they”—someone else somewhere else—who did such stupid, dangerous things.
Watson turned to Redvers. “Have you caught up with us yet?” he asked.
Face buried in his hands, Redvers moaned a negative.
“Oh, for—!” Watson caught him by the shoulder and shook him bodily. “Listen, you idiot! Didn’t it occur to you that this would be the first useful purpose we found to apply our new talents to? We’ve been planning this for months! I’m already certain there isn’t going to be a war—not a nuclear war, anyway. There can’t be. There aren’t any weapons left. Ever since the news of Patrick’s disappearance made it certain there’d be a crisis, we’ve been working that trick I showed you with my cigarette. Only we’ve been working it on plutonium cores in H-bombs, and military bacteria, and the remote-firing switches of ICBM’s, and we don’t intend to stop until we’ve taken the bloody bullets out of every soldier’s rifle and scattered them to the four corners of the universe! And now let’s see what the armies do with nothing but their bare fists!”
He turned to Dan and beckoned.
“Come on! I’m afraid we’ve missed something—I mean we must have, because there’s so much of it! So let’s get to the Agency computer you mentioned, as fast as we can.”
“But—” Dan began.
“Oh, Hugo will get over it in the end,” Watson said pityingly. “All of us will. This isn’t fatal, after all. But the other thing was! Ready? I’ll give you a shove, but I don’t think you’ll need much help—you have all the right reflexes waiting to be used.”
He was right, as Dan discovered a heartbeat later.
And eventually, of course, there would be the stars.
THE END
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Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Avengers of Carrig
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreaming Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions o
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934–1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1972
All Rights Reserved.
The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1972
This eBook first published in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10156 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.