McIlvaine's Star

by August Derleth

always came back. Richardsoncalled the story in; he took a special delight in deviling McIlvaine,and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.

  "You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."

  "But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the starcomes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.

  "Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably thefirst writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his wereconsiderably larger, though."

  "Go on."

  "Well, I talked with McIlvaine for quite a while. He told me all abouttheir civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought hewas talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

  "Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boysthere. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up aconnection to McIlvaine's machine and do a little talking to the oldfellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meantto give McIlvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believingeverything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and lethim make a fool of himself.

  "It didn't work out quite that way, however...."

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine, can you hear me?"

  McIlvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Gurubecame confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as iffrom no distance at all.

  "Yes," he said hesitantly.

  "Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enoughinformation from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, theinhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination againstEarth...."

  "But, why?" cried McIlvaine, astounded.

  The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features ofGuru betrayed anger.

  "There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave themachine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

  Before he left the machine, McIlvaine had the impression of a greatermachine being attached to the means of communication which theinhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blindingflash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also arun of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he hadcollected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There wasnothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound--as if, as heput it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in andexamined the space from the window to the machine; there were two thinlines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had beenattached to the machine and led outside.

  "Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson outthere, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machinerepresented the wires he had attached to his microphone while McIlvainewas at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, notfiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappearedfrom that night on."

  "You investigated, of course?" I asked.

  Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might havedone better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, andRichardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relativesweren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell thetruth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried abouthim. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them.

  "Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through hishouse with a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, andgenerally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murderrap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn'tmanufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that McIlvaine everknew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.

  "And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but McIlvaine'sword that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't havevolunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him,they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happenedto Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."

  "People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And nevercome back."

  "Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out ofhis life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. Somuch was missing from his effects, nothing more."

  "And McIlvaine?"

  Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to doanything less. After all, he had worked most of his life trying tocommunicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention ofresigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearanceupset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegratedRichardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust hadvanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machineand Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's...."

  * * * * *

  "What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, whenMcIlvaine came in.

  "They want to rejuvenate me," said McIlvaine, with a certain shypleasure.

  "What's that?" asked Alexander sourly.

  "They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They neverdie. They just live so long, and then they rejuvenate, they begin allover. It's some kind of a process they have."

  "And I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there andgive you the works, is that it?" asked Alexander.

  "Well, no," answered McIlvaine. "Guru says there's no need for that--itcan be done through the machine; they can work it like thedisintegrators; it puts you back to thirty or twenty or wherever youlike."

  "Well, I'd like to be twenty-five myself again," admitted Leopold.

  "I'll tell you what, Mac," said Alexander. "You go ahead and try it;then come back and let us know how it works. If it does, we'll all sitin."

  "Better make your will first, though, just in case."

  "Oh, I did. This afternoon."

  Leopold choked back a snicker. "Don't take this thing too seriously,Mac. After all, we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you, too."

  McIlvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't change," he hastened to assurehis friends. "I'd just be younger, that's all. They'll just work on methrough the machine, and over-night I'll be rejuvenated."

  "That's certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands,"conceded Alexander, grinning.

  "Those little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific progress,I'd say," said Leopold.

  "They're not bugs," said McIlvaine with faint indignation. "They'repeople, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just thesame."

  He went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just whathe had promised himself he would do, arranging everything for hisrejuvenation. Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earthsimply died when there was no necessity of doing so; he had made theoffer to rejuvenate McIlvaine himself.

  McIlvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until hewas en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed,before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through.

  "Are you ready, McIlvaine?" he asked soundlessly.

  "Yes. All ready," said McIlvaine, trembling with eagerness.

  "Don't be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru.

  "I'm not alarmed," answered McIlvaine.

  And indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration akin tomysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be theexperience above all others in his prosaic existence.

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's gave us abeautiful story," said Harrigan. "The only trouble was, it wasn't newwhen the _Globe_ got around to it. We had lost our informant inRichardson; it never
occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us oranyone about McIlvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally,Leopold went over to McIlvaine's house to find out whether the oldfellow was sick.

  "A young fellow opened up.

  "'Where's McIlvaine?' Leopold asked.

  "'I'm McIlvaine,' the young fellow answered.

  "'Thaddeus McIlvaine,' Leopold explained.

  "'That's my name,' was the only answer he got.

  "'I mean the Thaddeus McIlvaine who used to play cards with us over atBixby's,' said Leopold.

  "He shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.'

  "'What're you doing here?' Leopold asked then.

  "'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.

  "And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to goaround with him to McIlvaine's lawyer, we found that the old fellow hadmade a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake. Thestipulations were clear enough; among them was the express wish that ifanything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus McIlvaine, of no matterwhat nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt ofhis death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediatepossession of the property and effects."

  "Of course, you called on the nephew," I said.

  Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated course, in any event. Itwas routine for both the press and the police. There was nothingsuspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except forone or two little details. He never did give us any precise address; hejust mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papersthere and put him up to looking up Thaddeus McIlvaine; the only youngman of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as thepresent inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well."

  "There was a resemblance, then?"

  "Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine hadlooked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. Butdon't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep animpression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get ridof that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having donesomething like that?"

  * * * * *

  I shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing itwould have been if there had been something to McIlvaine's story, and inthe process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had notbeen rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, in which case hewould have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had beenput. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of McIlvaine'sstar, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping thiscontact with Earth open and failed to realize that McIlvaine'sconstruction differed appreciably from theirs.

  "He virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for,and didn't know how to operate it."

  "And the telescope?"

  "Oh, he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meantto develop that if time permitted."

  "So much ran in the family, then."

  "Yes. More than that. Old McIlvaine had a trick of seeming shy andself-conscious. So did this nephew of his. Wherever he came from, hisorigins must have been backward. I suspect that he was ashamed of them,and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or theOzarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, andhis thinking would have been considerably more natural at the turn ofthe century.

  "I had to see him several times. The police chivvied him a little, butnot much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there wasnothing for them in him. And the search for the old man didn't lastlong; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, sinceeveryone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a littleoff center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere,probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is indicatedin the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, saidBarnevall, who drew it up for him.

  "I felt sorry for him."

  "For whom?"

  "The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know--like a man who wanted toremember something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when Itried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there wassomething he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim ofhis awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put itinto words. He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his fingeron."

  "What became of him?"

  "Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter offact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come fromwork and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed tothe window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold andAlexander were sitting inside--a couple of lonely old men looking out.And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in McIlvaine'sface--that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind ofexpression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know,something he ought to remember, to do, to say, but there was no way inwhich he could reach back to it."

  "Or forward," I said with a wry smile.

  "As you like," said Harrigan. "Pour me another, will you?"

  I did and he took it.

  "That poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only goback where he came from."

  "Wouldn't we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. PerhapsMcIlvaine never had a home like that."

  "You'd have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in atLeopold and Alexander. Oh, it may have been a trick of the streetlightthere, it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, andI keep thinking how alike the two were--old McIlvaine trying sodesperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew nowtrying just as hard to find someone to accept him or a place he couldaccept on the only terms he knows."

  THE END

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ July 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.