The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “I believed you,” said Dormu.

  The Jhan’s eyes stared. They widened, flickered, then narrowed down until they were nothing but slits, once more.

  “You believed me? You knew he was a Morah?”

  “I knew,” said Dormu. “I was Liaison Officer with the Intelligence Service at the time Edmonds was sent out—and later when his body was recovered. We have no missing agent here.”

  His voice did not change tone. His face did not change expression. He looked steadily up into the face of the Jhan.

  “I explained to the Morah Jhan, just now,” said Dormu, almost pedantically, “that through misapprehension, he had erred. We are a reasonable people, who love peace. To soothe the feelings of the Morah Jhan we will abandon our settlements, and make as many other adjustments to his demands as are reasonably possible. But the Jhan must not confuse one thing with another.”

  “What thing?” demanded the Jhan. “With what thing?”

  “Some things we do not permit,” said Dormu. Suddenly, astonishingly, to the watching Whin, the little man seemed to grow. His back straightened, his head lifted, his eyes looked almost on a level up into the slit-eyes of the Jhan. His voice sounded hard, suddenly, and loud. “The Morah belong to the Morah Jhan; and you told us it’s your privilege to play with their shapes. Play with them then—in all but a single way. Use any shape but one. You played with that shape, and forfeited your right to what we just buried. Remember it, Morah Jhan! the shape of Man belongs to Men, alone!”

  He stood, facing directly into the slitted gaze of Jhan, as the bugle sounded the last notes of taps and the screen went blank. About the docks, the Military Police lowered their weapons from the present-arms position.

  For a long second, the Jhan stared back. Then he spoke.

  “Til be back!” he said; and, turning, the red kilt whipping about his legs, he strode up the gangplank into his ship.

  “But he won’t,” muttered Dormu, with grim satisfaction, gazing at the gangplank, beginning to be sucked up into the ship now, preparatory to departure.

  “Won’t?” almost stammered Whin, beside him. “What do you mean . . . won't?”

  Dormu turned to the marshal.

  “If he were really coming back with all weapons hot, there was no need to tell me.” Dormu smiled a little, but still grimly. “He left with a threat because it was the only way he could save face.”

  “But you ...” Whin was close to stammering again; only this time with anger. “You knew that . . . that creation . . . wasn’t Edmonds from the start! If the men on this Outpost had known it was a stinking Morah, they’d have been ready to hand him back in a minute. You let us all put our lives on the line here—for something that only looked like a man!”

  Dormu looked at him.

  “Marshal,” he said. “I told you it was the confrontation with the Jhan that counted. We’ve got that. Two hours ago, the Jhan and all the other Morah leaders thought they knew us. Now they—a people who think shape isn’t important—suddenly find themselves facing a race who consider their shape sacred. This is a concept they are inherently unable to understand. If that’s true of us, what else may not be true? Suddenly, they don’t understand us at all. The Morah aren’t fools. They’ll go back and rethink their plans, now—all their plans.”

  Whin blinked at him, opened his mouth angrily to speak-closed it again, then opened it once more.

  “But you risked . . .’’he ran out of words and ended shaking his head, in angry bewilderment. “And you let me bury it— with honors!”

  “Marshal,” said Dormu, suddenly weary, “it’s your job to win wars, after they’re started. It’s my job to win them before they start. Like you, I do my job in any way I can.”

  THE MOUSETRAP

  There was nothing to do. There was no place to go. He swam up to consciousness on the sleepy languor of that thought. Nothing to do, no place to go, tomorrow is forever. Could sleep, but body wants to wake up. His body was a cork floating up from deep water, up, up to the surface.

  He opened his eyes. Sunlight and blue sky; sky so blue that if you looked at it long enough you could begin to imagine yourself falling into it. No clouds; just blue, blue sky.

  He felt as if he had slept the clock of eternity around and back again until the hands of time were in the same position they had held when he went to sleep. When had that been? It was a long time ago, too far back to remember. He stopped worrying about it.

  He lay supine, his arms flung wide, his legs asprawl. He became conscious of short blades of grass tickling the backs of his hands. There was a tiny breeze from somewhere that now and again brushed his face with its cool wing. And an edge of white cloud was creeping into the patch of blue that gradually filled his field of vision.

  Slowly, physical awareness crept back to him. He felt smooth, loose clothing lying lightly against his skin, the expansion and contraction of his chest, the hard ground pressure against the long length of his back. And suddenly he was complete. The thousand disconnected sensations flowed together and became one. He was aware of himself as a single united entity, alive and alone, lying stretched out, exposed and vulnerable in an unknown place.

  Brain pulsed, nerves tensed, muscles leaped.

  He sat up.

  “Where am I?”

  He sat on a carpet of green turf that dipped gradually away ahead and on either side of him to a ridiculously close horizon. He twisted his head and looked over his shoulder. Behind him was a gravel walk leading to a small building that looked very airy and light. The front, beneath a thick ivory roof that soared flat out, apparently unsupported for several yards beyond the front itself, was one large window. He could see, like looking into the cool dimness of a cave, big, comfortable chairs, low tables, and what might possibly be a viseo.

  Hesitantly, he rose to his feet and approached the building.

  At the entrance he paused. There was no door, only a variable force-curtain to keep the breezes out; and he pushed his hand through it carefully, as if to test the atmosphere inside. But there was only the elastic stretch and sudden yield that was like pushing your fist through the wall of a huge soap bubble, and then a pleasant coolness beyond, so he withdrew his hand and, somewhat timidly, entered.

  The room illuminated itself. He looked around. The chairs, the tables, everything was just as he had seen it from outside, through the window. And the thing that looked like a viseo was a viseo.

  He walked over to it and examined it curiously. It was one of the large models, receiver and record-player, with its own built-in library of tapes. He left it and went on through an interior doorway into the back of the house.

  Here were two more rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. The bed was another force-field—expensive and luxurious. The kitchen had a table and storage lockers through whose transparent windows he could see enough eatables and drinkables stored there to last one man a hundred years.

  At the thought of one man living in this lap of luxury for a hundred years, the earlier realization that he was alone came back to him. This was not his place. It did not belong to him. The owner could not be far off.

  He went hurriedly back through the living room and out into the sunlight. The green turf stretched away on every side of him, empty, unrelieved by any other living figure.

  “Hello!” he called.

  His voice went out and died, without echoes, without answer. He called again, his voice going a trifle shrill.

  “Hello? Anybody here? Hello! Hello!”

  There was no answer. He looked down the gravel path to his right, to the short horizon. He looked down the path to his left and his breath caught in his throat.

  He began to run in a senseless, brain-numbing, chest-constricting panic.

  The grass streamed silently by on both sides of him, and his feet pounded on the gravel of the path. He ran until his lungs heaved with exhaustion and the pounding of his heart seemed to shake his thin body, when at last fatigue forced him to a halt. He stood and l
ooked around him.

  The building was out of sight now, and he found himself on the edge of a forest of tall flowers. Ten feet high or more, they lay like a belt across his way, and the path led through them. Green-stemmed, with long oval leaves gracefully reaching out, with flat, broad-petaled blue blossoms spread to the bright sky, they looked like the graceful creations of a lost dream. There was no odor, but his head seemed to whirl when he looked at them.

  Somehow they frightened him; their height and their multitude seemed to look down on him as an intruder. He hesitated at that point where the path began to wind among them, no longer straight and direct as it had been through the grass. He felt irrational fear at the thought of pushing by them—but the loneliness behind him was worse.

  He went on.

  Once among the flowers, he lost all sense of time and distance. There was nothing but the gravel beneath his feet, a patch of blue sky overhead and the flowers, only the flowers. For a while he walked; and then, panic taking him again at the apparent endlessness of the green stems, he burst into a fear-stricken run which ended only when exhaustion once more forced him to a walk. After that, he plodded hopelessly, his desire to escape fighting a dull battle with increasing weariness.

  He came out of it suddenly. One moment the flowers were all around him; then the path took an abrupt twist to the right and he was standing on the edge of a new patch of turf through which the path ran straight as ever.

  He stopped, half disbelieving what he saw. With a little inarticulate grunt of relief, he stepped free of the flower-shadowed pathway and went forward between new fields of grass.

  He did not have much farther to go. In a few minutes he topped a small rise and his walk came to an end.

  There, in front of him, was the building.

  The very same building he had run away from earlier.

  He approached it slowly, trying to cling to the hope that it was not the same building, that he had somehow gone somewhere else, rather than that he had traveled in a circle. But the identity was too complete. There was the large window, the chairs, the viseo. There was the door to the bedroom and the one to the kitchen.

  Moving like a man in a dream, he walked forward and into the house.

  He knew where he was going now. He remembered what he had seen before—a bottle of light, amber-colored liquid among the stores in the kitchen. He found it among a thickly crowded bank of others of its kind and took off the cap humbly. He put the bottle to his lips.

  The liquor burned his throat. Tears sprang to his eyes at the tire of it and he was glad, for the sensation gave him a feeling of reality that he had not yet had among the dreamlike emptiness of his surroundings.

  Taking the bottle, he went outside to the grass in front of the building.

  “This is good,” he thought, taking another drink, and sitting down on the grass. “This is here and now, a departure point from which to figure out the situation. I drink, therefore l am. The beginning of a philosophy.”

  He drank again.

  “But where do I go from there? Where is this? Who am I?”

  He frowned suddenly. Well, who was he? The question went groping back and lost itself in a maze of shadows where his memory should have been. Almost, but not quite, he knew. He shook his head impatiently.

  “Never mind that now. Plenty of time to figure that out later. The thing is to discover where I am, first.”

  Where was he, then? The drink was beginning to push soft fingers of numbness into his mind. The grass was Earth grass and the building was a human-type structure. But the flowers weren’t like anything on Earth. Were they like anything on any other planet he’d ever been on?

  He wrinkled his forehead in a frown, trying to remember. If only he could recall where he had been before he woke up! He thought he had been on Earth, but he wasn’t sure. The things he wanted to remember seemed to skitter away from his recollection just before he touched them.

  He lay back on the grass.

  Where was he? He was in a place where one walked in circles. He was in a place where things were too perfect to be natural. The grass looked like a lawn and there were acres of it. There were acres of flowers, too. But the grass was real grass; and from what he’d seen of the flowers, they were real and natural as well.

  Yet there was something wrong. He felt it. There was a strange air of artificiality about it all.

  He lay back on the grass, staring at the sky and taking occasional drinks from the bottle. Without realizing it, he was getting very drunk.

  His mind cast about like the nose of a hunting dog. Something about the place in which he found himself was wrong, but the something continued to elude him. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he couldn’t seem to remember things. Whatever it was, it was something that told him clearly and unarguably that he wasn’t on Earth or any of the planets he’d ever known or heard of.

  He looked to the right and he looked to the left. He looked down and he looked up, and realization came smashing through the drunken fog in his mind.

  There was no Sun in the sky.

  He rose to his feet, the bottle in his hand, for a horrible suspicion was forming in his mind. He turned away from the house, looked at the chronometer on his wrist and began to walk.

  When he got back to the house, the bottle in his hand was empty. But all the alcohol inside him could not shut out the truth from his mind. He was alone, on a tiny world that was half green grass and half great blue flowers. A pretty world, a silent, dreaming world beneath a bright, eternal sky. An empty world, and he was on it—

  Alone.

  He went away from the world, as far as drink would take him. And for many days—or was it weeks?—reality became a hazy thing, until the poor, starved body could take no more and so collapsed. Then there was no remembrance, but when he came back to himself at last, he found a little miracle had happened during that blank period.

  Memory of a part of his life had come back to him.

  Born and raised on Earth, in Greater Los Angeles, he had been pitched neck and crop off his native planet at the age of twenty-one, along with some other twenty million youngsters for which overcrowded Earth had no room. Overpopulation was a problem. Those without jobs were deported when they reached the age of maturity. And what chance had a poor young man to get an Earthside job when rich colonials wanted them? For Earth was the center of government and trade.

  He was spared the indignity of deportation. His family scraped up the money for passage to Rigel IV and arranged a job in a typographers’ office for him there. They would continue to pull strings, they said, and he was to work hard and save as much as he could in the hope of being able eventually to buy his way back—although this was a forlorn hope; the necessary bribes for citizenship would run to several million credits. They saw him off with a minimum of tears; Father, Mother, and a younger sister, who herself would be leaving in a couple of years.

  He went on to Rigel IV, filled with the determination of youth to conquer all obstacles; to make his fortune in the approved fashion and return, trailing clouds of glory, to his astounded and delighted parents.

  But Rigel IV proved strangely indifferent to his enthusiasm. The earlier colonists had seen his kind before. They resented his Earth-pride, they laughed at his squeamishness where the local aliens were concerned, and they played upon his exaggerated fears of the Devils, as the yet-unknown alien races beyond the spatial frontier were called. They had only contempt for his job in the typographers’ office and no one liked him well enough to offer him any other occupation.

  So he sat at his desk, turning out an occasional map copy on his desk duplicator for the stray customers that wandered in. He stared out the window at the red dust in the streets and in the air, calculating over and over again how many hundreds of years of hoarding his salary would be required to save up the bribe money for citizenship, and dreaming of the lost beauty of the cool white moonlight of Earth.

  Above all else, he remembered and yearned for moonl
ight. It became to him the symbol of all that he wished for and could not have. And he began to seek it—more and more often—in the contents of a bottle.

  And so the breakup came. Though there was little to do at his job, a time came when he could not even do that, but sprawled on his bed in the hotel, dreaming of moonlight, while the days merged one into the other endlessly.

  Termination came in the form of a note from his office and two months’ salary.

  Further than that, his recovered memory would not go. He lay for the equivalent of some days, recuperating; and when he was able to move around again, he discovered to his relief that he was now able to leave the remaining bottles in the liquor section alone.

  Shortly after, he discovered that the house walls were honeycombed with equipment and control panels, behind sliding doors. He gazed at these with wonder, but for some reason could not bring himself to touch them.

  One in particular drew him and repelled him even more than the rest. It was by far the simplest of the lot, having only four plain switches on it. The largest one, a knife switch with a red handle, exerted the strongest influence over him. The urge to pull it was so strong that he could not bear to stand staring at it for more than a few minutes, without reaching out his hand toward it. But no sooner did his fingertips approach the red handle than a reaction set in. A paralysis rooted him to the spot, his heart pounded violently, and sweat oozed coldly from his pores. He would be forced then to close the panel and not go back to it for several hours. Finally, he compromised with his compulsion. There were three smaller switches: and finally, gingerly, he reached out his hand to the first of these, one time when he had been staring at it, and pulled it.