Starman

by Alan Dean Foster

  Fox mulled his advisor’s words over in his mind, looking for the simple way out. There was always a simple way out, if you were patient enough to hunt for it. He was something of a master at finding quick, simple solutions to complex problems, but for the life of him he couldn’t conceive of one now.

  He consoled himself a little by noting that there were no precedents for what was facing them. George Fox was a tidy man. It was useful for a man in his position to be tidy. But there was nothing very tidy about the current situation. Not if Shermin was right. It rankled Fox that he couldn’t see a tidy, easy way out. He’d always been able to see the easy way out.

  When he finally replied to the information he’d just been given he spoke with forced patience. “Do you seriously expect me to ring up the president of the United States and tell him that an alien has landed here, has assumed the identity and body of a dead house painter from Madison, Wisconsin, run off with his widow, and is presently out tooling around the countryside in a hopped-up green seventy-seven Mustang?”

  Shermin was glad of the hangar’s openness. In a small room Fox’s presence could become overpowering. The spaciousness of the hangar limited the intimidation factor.

  Besides which, he knew that he was right.

  He also had the moral support of Dave Goldman, a colleague working silently nearby. It wasn’t much. Not against Fox. But what else could he tell the director? Truth was truth, whether he liked it or not. Whether the president liked it or not.

  But sometimes it took more than the obvious to convince men like Fox. So Shermin explained one more time.

  “We have the following givens, sir.” As he talked he was leading Fox over to the table where Goldman was working. Pictures and reports were lined up neatly atop the plastic. “That man, Scott Hayden, was killed last April. He died in a construction accident. He’s dead and buried. That’s easily verified. His co-workers witnessed the accident, and it’s pretty hard to fake a morgue photograph, much less the opinions of the fifty or so eyewitnesses who viewed the embalmed body before the funeral. I could order the body exhumed, of course, but in my opinion that would constitute the most grievous sort of investigatory overkill.”

  “All right,” said Fox curtly, “I accept the fact that the original Scott Hayden is deceased.”

  “He has no brothers,” Shermin went on, “no look-alike cousins. We checked that out right away. Despite all that, at approximately six o’clock this morning . . .”

  Fox waved a hand at nothing and turned away from the table. “All right. We’ve been through all that. It’s just that it takes a while to get used to dealing with the impossible. What I want to know now, what I’m asking you now is—how can it be?”

  Goldman looked up from his work. “Has to be some kind of cloning deal. The replication’s too perfect to have been accomplished just from the viewing of pictures.” He assumed a schoolmasterly tone. “You know about cloning? Replication of an entire organism from the DNA contained in a single cell?”

  Fox glanced back at him. “I keep up as best I can, Mister Goldman, just don’t get too technical on me.”

  “We found some hairs from Scott Hayden’s head,” Shermin reminded his boss. “They’d been kept in a photo album next to a picture of him as a boy. The plastic container had been opened and the individual hairs were scattered across the floor, as if they might have been dropped by someone working in a hurry.”

  Fox still had a hard time accepting. “Is that possible? To clone a living organism from the hair of a dead man? When it’s removed from the body, doesn’t the hair die?”

  Shermin took a deep breath. “Well, human hair consists of keratinzed cells. The follicular activity is cyclic and involves hormones. Retention of the genetic code by the cells in hair and fingernails is better than it would be in the softer tissues of the body. Remember that only one complete cell is required. Given the millions of available cells in a single strand of hair and sufficiently advanced techniques, theoretically the genetic code could be reproduced.

  “As far as actual duplication of the complete, living structure, I can’t imagine how that could be done, even with sequential photographs for a guide. The speed at which cell growth would have to take place would be a necessary function of . . .”

  “I asked you a simple question,” Fox growled, interrupting. “Is it possible to clone a living body from the hair of a dead man?”

  “For us? Given our present state of recombinant DNA technology, no. We can’t even begin to imagine the requisite techniques, let alone postulate a workable procedure.”

  “Then what the hell are we talking about? Magic?”

  Goldman allowed himself a slight smile. “You know, Mister Fox, the line between science and magic is pretty thin. I once saw an equation that measured magic as a function of time. Putting it another way, if you’d shown up in fifteenth century Paris with that calculator watch on your wrist and a flashlight in your pocket, you’d probably have been condemned to the stake as a warlock instead of being hailed as a master of some unfamiliar science.

  “What we have here is a technology that’s probably a hundred thousand years ahead of us. That’s a conservative guess. We’re the ancients, Mister Fox. The primitives, the Neanderthals. We’re standing around gaping at the flashlight and wondering where the light comes from. Could you see yourself trying to explain the workings of a flashlight to an Egyptian pharaoh? You could talk yourself hoarse without ever convincing him it was anything other than a mystic manifestation of the god Ra.

  “We’re just barely advanced enough to realize how primitive we are.”

  “Ancients.” Fox clearly found the idea disturbing.

  “Technologically, anyway. We’ve just begun to understand how the universe works. We’re still in kindergarten and suddenly there’s a university professor among us. Two hundred years ago if you wanted to go from New York to Philadelphia you got a horse or booked passage in a carriage, right? Average speed, say, six miles an hour. A hundred years later you got on a railway train. Sixty miles an hour. Today you get on a jumbo jet that goes six hundred, and shuttle crews orbit the Earth at eighteen thousand.

  “That’s what we’ve done in two hundred years. Two long lifespans. Try to imagine what our technology will be like in a thousand years, or in a hundred thousand.”

  “Assuming we’re still around,” Shermin put in.

  Goldman grinned at him. “I was talking about our technological maturation. Emotionally, we’re lagging way behind.”

  Fox was subdued. “Given everything you’ve said, I still have problems with this. What about his knowledge of everyday English, for example? He spoke to this guy Heinmuller out loud. No telepathy, no hypnotism. Plain old English.”

  Shermin escorted him over to another bench. On top was a complex looking setup that resembled an audiophile’s dream. Inside one box of black metal was a single golden disk.

  Fox frowned. “What’s this? Top forty?”

  “Something like that, only on an interstellar scale. Remember the gold information disks that went with the Voyagers?”

  “Oh.” He shook his head. “I remember all the yelling and screaming because it showed a nude man and woman.” He leaned over to study the player. “This is a copy?”

  Shermin smiled. “One of the originals.” Turning, he gestured toward the meteor that had been revealed as a spacecraft. “It was in there. Not stamped ‘return to sender,’ but you get the idea. Ever listen to the contents of one of these?”

  “Not my department. I remember reading about it in briefings, but they didn’t go into detail. What’s it like?”

  “Touch the second button from the top.”

  Fox did so. Speakers began to hum. Silence gave way to soft violin music. Fox listened thoughtfully.

  “A lot of people contributed to the recording,” Shermin mused aloud. “I was one of those who helped put the final package together.”

  Fox’s eyebrows rose. “You never told me that, Mark.”

/>   He shrugged. “My contribution was small. I was a collator, not a creator. It’s not the sort of thing that comes up in general conversation at cocktail parties. Go back and reread my resume. It’s in there.” He nodded toward the softly humming player.

  “The package was designed so that any species intelligent enough to recover it and decipher its contents would be able to pick up a working knowledge of basic English, along with a few words of this and that in half a hundred other languages. I would’ve opted to include more English and less of the peripheral terran tongues, but the final decision on what to include was as much political as scientific. So anyone decoding the English therein would obtain a rough idea of syntax and a few hundred words and that’s all. There’s not enough in there to enable a listener to gain fluency.”

  “This guy seems to be making himself understood.”

  “So does Clint Eastwood, and he doesn’t talk much either. He’s learning, every day, sir. It’s quite an achievement, when you think about it. He’s not only employing an alien language, his own means of communication may consist of something entirely different from modulated sound waves. We’ve no idea, remember, of what his real body is like.”

  “When he duplicated this Scott Hayden,” Fox asked, “how come he didn’t duplicate his memories as well as his brain?”

  “Memories consist of stored series of electric impulses. They’re not part of the genetic code. He could duplicate Scott Hayden’s brain, but not his experiences.”

  “Have you any idea,” Goldman suddenly broke in, “what it would mean to talk to a being from a civilization like that? If their moral and aesthetic development advanced on a par with the technological, think of what we could learn from . . .”

  He broke off as the music ceased and a new voice addressed them from the speakers.

  “As the secretary-general of the United Nations, an organization of one hundred and forty-seven member nations who represent nearly all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings . . .”

  “Greetings.” Shermin reached over to nudge the mute control, shutting out the rest of Waldheim’s speech. “That’s what he said to Heinmuller out there on the road. I don’t see what you’re so concerned about.”

  “Because that’s also what the cannibal said to the missionary just before he ate him.”

  “The question in this case,” Shermin said deliberately, “is: who is the missionary and who are the cannibals? Remember, we shot at his ship, he didn’t shoot at us.”

  “We didn’t know it was a ship, and the directives concerning unauthorized intrusions into U.S. air space are pretty straightforward. Particularly when the intruder is of an unfamiliar type and likes to go flying over nuclear submarine bases.”

  “Paranoia,” muttered Goldman.

  Fox turned on him sharply. “Is it? Whatever you want to call it, it’s my business and I’m charged with seeing that it doesn’t threaten the security of this country. Why don’t you ask this Jenny Hayden if I’m being paranoid?” Goldman didn’t have a ready reply for that one. The matter of Jenny Hayden’s possible abduction had been giving him and Shermin a lot of trouble.

  Fox took the mute off the player and ran through the fast-forward. Snatches of greetings in many different languages ran together in a rapid-fire, meaningless babble. Finally they gave way to more music. Symphonic at first, then ethnic, then Mick Jagger rasping out, “I can’t get no, sat-is-fac-tion.”

  Fox shook his head dubiously. “I can’t believe that grown men actually sent this crap into space.”

  The late afternoon sun was bright as it shone through the Mustang’s windshield, but it no longer troubled the starman. Not with the bill of the baseball cap pulled down low to shield his eyes. It was tugged down almost too far, but he needed all the help he could get. He had yet to get used to the spectrum of the local sun, even though he was viewing his surroundings through eyes engineered to make use of it. For one thing, the atmosphere was full of water vapor that played tricks with the fading light.

  Jenny had been thinking quietly for some time. Now she looked over at him. “I was wondering: you’ve pretty much got the hang of driving down, and if you meant it about not wanting to, you know, take me up there with you, then why don’t you just let me out? You could take the car and a credit card and I could . . .”

  “No!” Aware he’d spoken with unwarranted harshness, he hastened to soften his tone. “You look for food station, please.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Disappointed, she settled back in her seat.

  The road veered due west, leading them straight into the orange ball of the setting sun. She watched as the starman squinted tighter and tighter, until tears began to trickle down his cheeks. He must know so much about other things, things I can’t even imagine, she thought, but here he’s like a fish out of water. Not to mention his present body.

  She reached over to lower the sun visor. Relief was immediate. He studied it for a second, then turned to her. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Listen, when do you have to be there?”

  “What?”

  “Arizona. Where you’re meeting your friends. Is there some special time you have to be there by?”

  “I will explain.” He nodded forward. “You see this little star ahead of us?”

  She peered hard through the windshield, but the sun was still too high for anything else to be out. “What little star? Where?”

  He pointed this time, at the setting sun. “You must see it. You see it every day. That little star, there.”

  “That’s not a star. We call that the sun.”

  “Call it what you like. It is a star. A very small one. Of no cosmological importance. Except to you, of course.” He hunted around on the floor until he located a crumpled piece of paper. “Do you remember showing me this before?”

  She recognized the road atlas. “So?”

  “You called this a map. There are other kinds of maps. Maps of stars. Your map shows big cities, little cities. Other maps show important stars, small stars.” Again he nodded forward. “Very small star. Isolated. Away from the center. Not important.”

  “Well, we like it,” she mumbled, abashed.

  He considered her reaction. “I do not say this to make you feel bad. My star is not big either. Facts are not designed to make anyone feel bad. They are for explaining.” He reached over to pat her knee, copying a gesture he’d observed another couple executing. “When this little—when the sun appears,” and he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, “back there, three times more, I must be in Arizona-maybe.”

  “It’s just Arizona,” she corrected him absently. “You’re talking about daybreak. You have to be there at dawn, in two days?”

  He nodded. “Yes. No longer.”

  “What happens if you don’t make it? If you don’t get there in time? Don’t you have any leeway? Any extra time at all?”

  “No. If I am not there at that time, they will go. My friends. They must. They strain the law by coming even this one time.”

  “They’ll go—without you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do then?”

  There was no expression on his face at all. “Then the component chemicals which make up the being that is me will return again to the ever-changing brew of elements of which the universe is comprised.” She frowned at this and he added simply, “I will die.”

  “But why? Can’t you stay here like you are, in that body?” She let her gaze rove over him, saw no sign of incipient disintegration, no hint of decay to come. “You look healthy enough.”

  “I am glad of that, but it is much easier to maintain outward appearances than interior functions. My continuing occupancy of this form is maintained partly by illusion, partly by constant effort. I am under a continual strain. It is painful and daily becomes more so. I can only live this way, inside this body, for a very short time. Soon after the third dawn I will lose my ability to keep it functioning, and it will fail as a m
ind-support system. I will be dead. Body will be dead, mind will die. Understand?”

  She didn’t reply. Not for the first time, he wondered what she must think of him. He turned his attention back to his driving.

  “You look for food station,” he told her softly.

  Another five minutes’ drive brought them within sight of a sign. It was insistent, and a bit too big for the road.

  BOWDARKS BUS STOP

  CAFE GOOD EATS BILLIARDS 2MI AHEAD

  “There’s a place up ahead that looks good,” Jenny told him. “Besides, it’s getting late and I don’t think I can go much further without something to eat, even if it’s full of grease.”

  “Emptiness inside,” the starman agreed.

  She wondered if he was just talking about his stomach.

  There were only a few cars in the lot when they pulled in. That did not necessarily imply criticism of the cuisine; they were a long ways from the nearest town. The terrain surrounding the restaurant was heavily forested, just like the country they’d been driving through for several hours now. Then too, it was not quite dusk. Early for fellow long-distance travelers to be stopping to eat.

  One of the cars, a beat-up old sedan of indeterminate lineage, had a dead five-point buck strapped to the left front fender. The car’s owner was locking his rifle in the trunk as they pulled in. Jenny watched him test the latch to make sure the trunk was secured before he turned and headed for the roadhouse door.

  As they came around the sedan the starman had his first sight of the dead deer. Having no reason to expect anything abnormal, Jenny was startled when he slammed on the brakes.

  “Whoa, take it easy, friend. The idea with brakes is to . . .” she broke off, seeing the expression on his face. It was twisted. Horror, fear and utter confusion were all mixed up together by someone who was uncertain of just how to manipulate his facial muscles to achieve the exact look he was seeking. There was nothing mysterious about the cause, however. He was staring at the dead animal as though hypnotized.