To Follow a Star

by Terry Carr

  In Liam’s mind was the memory of a vast, echoing corridor so big it looked like a street. It was clean and brightly lit and empty. There was a sort of crane running along the roof with grabs hanging down, a bit like the ones he had seen lifting coal at the docks, only these were painted red and yellow, and on both sides of the corridor stood a line of tall, splendid unmistakable shapes. Rockets.

  Rockets, thought Richard excitedly: that was the answer, all right! Rockets were faster than anything, although he didn’t quite see how the toys would be delivered. Still, they would find that out easily now that they knew where the secret cavern was.

  “Did you look inside them for toys?” Greg broke in, just ahead of the others asking the same question.

  Liam had. Most of the rockets were filled with machinery and the nose had sort of sparkly stuff in it. All the ones he had looked at were the same and he had grown tired of floating about among the noses of the rockets and gone exploring instead. At the other end of the corridor there was a big notice with funny writing on it. He was standing in front of it when two grown-ups with guns started running at him and yelling nonsense words. He got scared and left.

  When Liam finished, the girls began congratulating him and the hole in the chest of his sweater grew bigger. Then Greg tried to cut him down to size again by stating, “They weren’t nonsense words. What the guards yelled at you, I mean. If you could remember better how they sounded, I could tell you what they said . . .”

  Just when things were getting exciting, Richard thought impatiently, another argument was going to start about what were nonsense words and what weren’t. Buster, Liam and he could make themselves understood to each other whether they were speaking or thinking, but when any of the others spoke aloud it was just nonsense. And they said the same thing about words Richard, Liam and Buster spoke aloud. But the funny thing was that Loo, Mub and Greg couldn’t understand each other, either.

  Richard had an idea that this was because they lived in different places, like in the pictures he had studied in his daddy’s National Geographic magazines. He had tracked down Liam’s place from some of those pictures—Liam lived in a fishing village on the North Irish coast. Why they spoke a funny, but recognizable, form of American there, Richard didn’t know. Loo and Mub were harder to pin down; there were a couple of places where the people had slanty eyes or had dark brown skin and black curly hair. Greg was the hardest because he didn’t have any special skin or hair or eyes. His folks wore furry hats in winter, but that wasn’t much to go on . . .

  “What do we do now, Richard?” Liam broke in. “Keep thinking about the cavern, huh? Not your daddy’s old books.” For a moment Richard thought into himself, then he opened his mind and asked, “How much time have you all got?”

  Mub said it was near her dinnertime. Greg had just finished breakfast and was supposed to be playing in the shed for the next three or four hours. Loo’s time was about the same as Greg’s. Liam thought it was nearly breakfast time, but his mother didn’t mind if he stayed in bed these cold mornings. And Buster, like Richard, had practically the whole of the night to play around in.

  “Right,” he said briskly when all the reports were in. “It looks like the cavern Liam found isn’t the right one—the rockets don’t have toys in them. Maybe it’s a place for sending toys out, but they haven’t arrived from Santa’s workshop yet. That workshop is the place we’re looking for, and it shouldn’t be hard to find now that we know the sort of place to look for—an underground place with rockets.”

  His thoughts became authoritative as he went on. “You’ve got to find these underground places and see what goes on in them. We can’t be sure of anything we’ve been told about them, so there might be a lot of secret caverns. When you find one, try not to let anybody see you, look around for toys and see if you can get to the office of the man in charge of the place. If it’s Santa or he looks like a nice man, ask him questions. And remember to say please and thank you. If he’s not a nice man or if there’s nobody there, try to find out things whatever way you can. Everyone understand?”

  Everybody thought, “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. Greg will go to the cavern Liam found, because he can understand what the people say there. Liam and Buster will look for caverns on their own. But remember, once you see that a place doesn’t have toys in it, leave and look somewhere else. Don’t waste time. Mub and Loo will stay here and be ready to help if you need them; they can go to new places as easily as you men can.”

  Richard’s mouth felt suddenly dry. He ended, “All right, take off.”

  Buster flicked out of sight in the middle of a “Wheee-e-e” of excitement. Liam held back for a moment thinking, “But why do they have guards in the caverns?” To which Greg replied, “Maybe to protect the toys against juvenile delinquents. I don’t know what they are exactly, but my daddy says they steal and break things, and if I had kept that tractor I took from the shop I would grow up to be one.” Then Liam and Greg quietly disappeared. Loo and Mub began gathering up Buster’s teddy bear and toys. They floated into Buster’s cot with them and started to play house.

  Richard got into bed and lay back on his elbows. Buster was the member of the gang most likely to get into trouble, so he listened in for him first. But his brother was in a place where each rocket was held out level by a little crane instead of standing straight up. The sound of voices and footsteps echoed about the place in a spooky fashion, but his brother had not been spotted. Buster reported that he had looked into the noses of the rockets and they were filled with a lot of junk and some stuff which sparkled and frightened him away.

  The stuff didn’t sparkle really, of course, but Buster had a talent for looking through things—like brick walls and engine casings—and when he looked into the rocket nose in that way, the stuff sparkled. Like the electric wiring at home, he thought, only worse. There were no toys or any sign of Santa, so he was going to try some other place. Richard switched to Greg.

  Greg was in the cavern originally found by Liam. Two of the guards were still talking about seeing a boy in pajamas. Greg was going to look around some more and then try another place. Liam’s report was much the same, right down to the stuff in the rocket noses, which made him afraid to go too close. Richard stopped listening to them and began thinking to himself.

  Why had the caverns guards in them? To protect the toys against damage or theft, as Greg had suggested? But where were the toys? The answer to that question was, some of them were in the shops . . .

  A bit of conversation between his mother and father, overheard yesterday when they were in one of the shops, popped suddenly into his mind. Richard hadn’t known exactly what was going on because he had been watching to see that Buster didn’t knock over anything. Daddy had asked his mother if she would like something—beads or a shiny broach or something—for Christmas. Mummy had said, “Oh, John, it’s lovely but . . .” Then a man from behind the counter had come up to Daddy, said a few words and gone away again. Daddy had said okay. Then Mummy had said, “But, John, are you sure you can afford it? It’s robbery, sheer robbery! These storekeepers are robbers at Christmas time!”

  Guards all over the place, Greg’s theory, and storekeepers who were robbers at Christmas time. It was beginning to make sense, but Richard was very worried by the picture that was forming.

  Loo and Mub had the cot pillow and the teddy bear floating in the air above the cot, with Buster’s broken truck doing a figure-of-eight between them. But they were being careful not to make a noise, so Richard did not say anything. He began listening in for the others again.

  Buster had found another cavern; so had Liam. Greg had gone through three more—they had all been small places and plainly not what the gang was looking for. All reported rockets with the same puzzling load, no sign of toys and no Santa. And so it went on. Richard’s eyes began to feel heavy and he had to sit on the edge of the bed again to keep from falling asleep.

  Mub was lying in Buster’s cot being a sick
Mommy and Loo was kneeling beside her being the Nurse. At the same time they had taken the truck apart and now a long procession of parts was in orbit around the pillow and teddy bear. Richard knew they would put the truck together again before they went home, and probably fix it, too. He wished that he could do something useful like that, and he began to wonder if Loo could move people, too.

  When he mentioned the idea to her, she stopped being a Nurse long enough to do some experiments. Richard tried as hard as he could to stay sitting on the edge of his bed, but Loo forced him to lie flat on his back. It was as if a big, soft cushion were pushing against his arms and chest. When he tried to prop his elbows behind him, other cushions pushed his arms out straight. After he had been forced to lie flat three times, Loo told him she wanted to go back to playing Nurse. She didn’t like this other game because it made her head hurt.

  Richard went back to listening to the searchers again.

  Buster was working on his fourth cavern, Liam and Greg on their seventh and ninth respectively. The sudden speeding up of the search was explained by the fact that they no longer walked from place to place inside the caverns, they just went. Tired legs, Richard discovered, had been the reason for them all thinking of this time-saving idea. It seemed to get the guards all excited, though. Everywhere the gang went there were guards who got excited—it was hard to stay hidden with so many guards about—but they had not stayed anywhere long enough to be caught. They had found lots of rockets but no sign of a toy workshop, or Santa.

  Richard was now pretty sure that the guards were soldiers. In some of the caverns they wore dark-green uniforms with black belts and red things on their shoulders, and only Greg could understand the nonsense words they said. In another place, the cavern Liam had searched where you could hear planes taking off, they’d had blue-gray uniforms with shiny buttons and rings on their sleeves and Liam had been able to understand them. Then in a lot of other caverns they had been dressed like that picture of Daddy downstairs, taken when he had been working in a place called Korea.

  But where was Santa?

  During the next three hours the search still failed to reveal his whereabouts. Mub went home for her breakfast and Loo for her dinner, both with orders to come back tomorrow night or sooner if Richard called them. Liam had another two hours before his mother expected him out of bed. Greg had to break off for dinner.

  But he was back to searching caverns again within half an hour, and it was then that Richard noticed something funny about the reports that were coming back. It was as if he were seeing the same caverns twice—the same red-painted cranes, the same groupings of rockets, even the same guards’ faces. The only explanation he could think of was that caverns were being searched which had been searched before.

  Quickly he told the gang of his suspicions and opened his mind to receive and relay. This meant that Buster, Greg and Liam knew everything that was in each other s minds having to do with the search, including the total number of caverns found up to that time, together with their identifying characteristics. Knowing this they would no longer be in danger of going over ground already searched by another member of the gang. Richard then told them to go looking for new caverns.

  They tried, and couldn’t find one.

  Altogether they had uncovered forty-seven of them, from big underground places with hundreds of rockets in them down to small places with just a few. And now it seemed plain that this was all the caverns there were, and there was still no trace of Santa Claus.

  “We’ve missed something, gang,” Richard told them worriedly. “You’ve got to go back to the biggest caverns again and look around some more. This time ask questions—”

  “B-but the guards run at you and yell,” Greg broke in. “They’re scary.”

  Buster said, “I’m hungry.”

  Richard ignored him and said, “Search the big caverns again. Look for important places, places where there are lots of guards. Find the boss and ask him questions. And don’t forget to say please and thank you. Grown-ups will give you practically anything if you say please . . .”

  For a long time after that, nothing happened. Richard kept most of his attention on Buster, because his brother had a tendency to forget what he was looking for if anything interesting turned up. Buster was becoming very hungry and a little bored.

  His next contact with Liam showed the other hiding behind a large metal cabinet and looking out at a big room. Three walls of the room were covered from floor to ceiling with other cabinets, some of which made clicking, whirring noises and had colored lights on them. The room was empty now except for a guard at the door, but it had always been that way. In Liam’s mind Richard could see the memory of two men in the room who had talked and then left again before Liam could ask them questions. They had been wearing blue-gray uniforms and one of them had had gold stuff on his cap.

  Liam had remembered every word they said, even the long ones which he didn’t understand.

  The cabinets with the flashing lights on them were called a Director-Computer, and it worked out speeds and Tradge Ectories so that every rocket in this cavern, and in about twenty others just like it, would be sent to the spot it was meant to go and hit it right on the button. It would tell hundreds and hundreds of rockets where to go, and it would send them off as soon as there was a blip. Liam didn’t know what a blip was, however. Did Richard?

  “No,” said Richard impatiently. “Why didn’t you ask one of the guards?”

  Because the man with the gold stuff on his cap had told the guard that the situation was getting worse, that there were reports from all over of bases being Infil Trated, and that some sort of Halloo Sinatory weapon was being used because the guards had insisted that the saboteurs were not adults. He had said trust them to play a dirty trick like this just before Christmas, and he had told the guard to kill any unauthorized personnel trying to enter the computer room on sight. Liam didn’t know what an unauthorized personnel was, but he thought it might mean him. And anyway, he was hungry and his mother would be expecting him down from bed soon and he wanted to go home.

  “Oh, all right,” said Richard.

  Maybe it was a sleigh and reindeer he used in Daddy s young days, he thought excitedly, but now it is rockets. And computers to tell them where to go, just like the deputy Santa told us!

  But why were the guards being told to kill people? Even unauthorized personnel—which sounded like a very nasty sort of people, like juvenile delinquents maybe. Who was pulling what dirty trick just before Christmas? And where were the toys? In short, who was lousing up his and everyone else’s Christmas?

  The answer was becoming clearer in Richard’s mind, and it made him feel mad enough to hit somebody. He thought of contacting Greg, then decided that he should try to find out if he could fix things instead of just finding out more about what had gone wrong. So he called up Loo and Mub, linked them to each other through his mind, and spoke:

  “Loo, do you know the catapult Greg keeps under his mattress? Can you send it here without having to go to Greg’s place to look for it?”

  The grubby, well-used weapon was lying on Richard’s bed.

  “Good,” he said. “Now can you send it b——”

  The catapult was gone.

  Loo wasn’t doing anything special just then and wouldn’t have minded continuing with the game. But it wasn’t a game to Richard, it was a test.

  “Mub, can you do the same?”

  Mub’s daddy was at work and her mother was baking. Mub was waiting to lick the spoon with the icing sugar on it. A little absently she replied, “Yes, Richard.”

  “Does it make your heads tired?” he asked anxiously. Apparently it didn’t. The girls explained that it was hard to make people, or pussycats, or goldfish move because live things had minds which kind of pushed back, but dead things didn’t have anything to push back with and could be moved easily. Richard told them thanks, broke away, then made contact with Greg.

  Through Greg’s eyes and mind he
saw a large desk and two men in dark-green uniforms behind it—one standing behind the other, an older and bigger man who was sitting down. Greg was in a chair beside the desk and only a few feet away from the bigger man.

  “Your name is Gregor Ivanovitch Krejinski,” said the big man, smiling. He was a nice big man, a little like Greg’s daddy, with dark-gray hair and lines at the corners of his eyes. He looked as if he were scared of Greg but were trying to be nice anyway. Greg, and through him the watching Richard, wondered why he should be scared.

  “And you say your parents have a farm not far from a town,” the big man went on gently. “But there are no farms or towns such as you describe within three hundred miles of here. What do you say to that, little Gregor?

  “Now suppose you tell me how you got here, eh?”

  That was a difficult question. Greg and the other members of the gang didn’t know how they got to places, they just went.

  “I just . . . came, sir,” said Greg.

  The man who was standing lifted his cap and rubbed his forehead, which was sweating. In a low voice he spoke to the big man about other launching bases which had been similarly penetrated. He said that relations with the other side had been almost friendly this past year or so, but it was now obvious that they had been lulled into a sense of false security. In his opinion they were being attacked by a brand-new psychological weapon and all firing officers should be ready with their finger on the big red button ready for the first blip. The big man frowned at him and he stopped talking.

  “Well, now,” the big man resumed to Greg, “if you can’t say how you came, can you tell me why, Gregor?”

  The big man was sweating now, too.

  “To find Santa Claus,” said Greg.

  The other man began to laugh in a funny way until the big man shushed him and told him to phone the Colonel, and told him what to say. In the big man’s opinion the boy himself was not a threat but the circumstances of his appearance here were cause for the gravest concern. He therefore suggested that the base be prepared for a full emergency launch and that the Colonel use his influence to urge that all other bases be similarly prepared. He did not yet know what tactic was being used against them, but he would continue with the interrogation.