A Scatter of Stardust

by E. C. Tubb

  I passed the major hurdle one night in a little hotel near the border. We had been traveling south because, as the professor said, Ginney needed the sun. I shared a room with the professor. Another had been booked for Ginney, and he was getting her ready for bed. I’d watched the play a dozen times, the undressing and putting on of the nightclothes, the undoing of the ribbons and the brushing of the hair. I sat and watched as his hands, thin with thick blue veins, the fingers long and sensitive, clutched the invisible brush and smoothed the invisible hair. I leaned forward.

  “Let me do that.”

  “You?” He hesitated, a flicker of doubt in his eyes.

  “Why not?” I grinned, not at him. “You don’t mind me brushing your hair, do you, Ginney?” I pretended to listen, then snorted. “Of course I won’t hurt you. I brush my own hair every day and I’m an expert.” My smile grew wider. “Look, I’ll tell you what. If I catch a snag I’ll tell you a bedtime story. Right?”

  I listened, nodded, reached for the brush.

  For a moment I thought that it wasn’t going to work. The professor hesitated, moving his hand beyond my reach, the doubt growing in his eyes. Then, very slowly, he moved his hand back toward me.

  I took the brush from his hand. I caught hold of Ginney and made her stand in front of me. I turned her and, carefully, I began to brush her hair.

  It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

  Because it wasn’t enough to playact. I had to really brush the hair of a real girl, and that meant it wasn’t enough just to pass the brush through the air. I had to turn it, to drag it, to move on the same plane, to avoid snags and to follow the contours of a head. I had to do that and, at the same time, control the wriggling of a cheeky ten year old. I had to do all this while being watched by a man who had based his sanity on a delusion which I was helping to maintain. A good pretense wasn’t enough. It had to be perfect.

  I was soaked with sweat by the time I had brushed the hair and my hands were trembling with strain. But there was more.

  You caught a snag, said Ginney in my mind.

  “I’m sorry,” I said aloud. “I didn’t mean it.”

  You promised me a story.

  “I know and I’ll tell you one.”

  Now?

  “Now.” Deliberately I put down the brush. “Go and kiss your Daddy good night.” I waited while the professor bent his head and then waited just long enough for her to return to me. I rose, stooped, picked her up and carried her toward the door. I opened it awkwardly, as a man would who carried a child, closed it and then, because I daren’t for one moment relax from the pretense, carried her into her bedroom, drew back the covers, tucked her in and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Almost I yielded then, but a sound, it may only have been the creaking of a floorboard or it may have been the professor following me, urged me to continue. So, sitting in the darkness, I told her the story of “The Three Bears,” then “Red Riding Hood,” and then, just to make certain, the one about “Mother Goose.”

  When I left that room I needed a drink more than anything else in the world.

  The professor was working when I re-joined him. He sat at the table and covered sheet after sheet of paper with abstruse mathematical symbols. The floor was littered with discarded sheets, each one of which I would have to gather and pass on. He smiled at me and laid down his pencil.

  “Ginney asleep?”

  “Like a top.” I lit a cigarette. “You’ve a very fine girl there, professor.”

  “I know it, Tom.” It was the first time that he had used my Christian name. “I’m glad that she’s taken to you.” He stared down at his hands, the veins were very prominent. “I’m really too old for her. Married late, you know, and missed the best part of life. I do my best, but Ginney’s young and needs the company of young people.” He shook his head, sighing. “It isn’t easy.”

  “I guess not.”

  “No.” He poked at the heap of papers. “Odd, but now I feel as if I can really get down to work. You know what all this is about?”

  “No.” I was deliberately casual. I didn’t want to know. I could see that he wanted to talk, but my job was to keep him working and he wasn’t going to do that while I stayed. So I yawned, stretched, and made for the door.

  Paper rustled as I closed it behind me.

  *

  Cottrell was waiting at the rendezvous. He didn’t say anything as I got into the car, but he had a bottle and I took a long drink as he drove to the edge of town. There he halted and, with the motor running, we talked.

  “Any luck?”

  “He’s working.” Neither of us were, worried about my leaving him alone. The entire area was lousy with security men who would make sure that no one approached him but me. Cottrell reached for the bottle, tilted it, handed it back.

  “How did you manage it?”

  I told him and he nodded.

  “Good. You’ve earned his trust and he’ll be dependent on you. A little more and you’ll have him jumping through hoops. Making friends with his delusion was a bright idea. Don’t forget to use the sympathy angle.”

  I looked at him in the light of the dashboard.

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “I don’t like what you’re doing,” he said harshly, and I caught the gleam of his eyes as he faced me. “I don’t like what’s being done to the professor. I’m a doctor of sorts and it’s my job to heal. What would you think of a doctor who deliberately encouraged the growth of a malignant cancer in a man because it increased his I.Q.?”

  “Doesn’t that depend on what he does with his increased I.Q.?”

  “Maybe.” He seemed torn between the desire to talk and caution against talking too much. Desire won. “I’m sticking my neck out in saying this, but I personally believe that the professor would be better off dead than the way he is. Oh, he’s happy enough while he can maintain his delusion, but what about when it ups and hits him in the face? Anything can do it, a stranger, an incident, any one of a thousand things, and he’ll realize that he’s been living in a dream. Then...” He made a chopping motion.

  “The nut house?” He nodded. “So what? Would he be any the worse off?”

  “If you can’t live with a thing,” said Cottrell tightly, “you escape from it. The only way the professor can escape is by forgetting. The trouble is he will never be able to forget enough. But he’ll keep on trying until he’s forgotten everything. They call it dementia praecox. It isn’t nice.”

  “Then isn’t it better to let him keep his delusion?”

  “Not if we want to save his mind.” He looked away from me, his fingers drumming on the wheel. “Don’t misunderstand me. With proper therapy he can be made to accept his loss and learn to live with it. He can be cured of his delusion and mentally he wouldn’t be harmed. But that takes time, and they won’t give him the time. They want what he can do now. So they let him have his dream until he’s done the dirty work and then they’ll drop him like a hot brick.” He must have sensed my disbelief.

  “Why not? What better way to safeguard that knowledge than by letting the brain which discovered it lapse into total insanity? What possible use could he be then to any foreign power?”

  “It’s too dirty. We wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “No?” He shrugged. “I’ve talked too much and you could get me canned if you wanted to. But I’m a psychologist and I know what makes men tick. One man wouldn’t do it. A group of men would. Split responsibility which means that no one need blame himself and all manage to avoid guilt. Add the desire for security, fear, expediency, patriotism, the natural desire to take the easy path and the even more natural desire to be the top dog, and the professor doesn’t stand a chance. You’ll see.”

  He engaged the gears and let in the clutch. He didn’t speak on the way back and I had plenty of time to think. I did a lot of thinking, too, not about what he had said but about something quite different.

  About Ginney.

&
nbsp; *

  It’s funny how you can get used to a thing. Once you convince yourself that what you are doing is right then the rest comes automatically. Actors have a name for it. They call an actor who can really live the part a darfstella. Only such an actor doesn’t really act at all. If he’s supposed to be an old man, then he is an old man. He walks, talks, even thinks like one. It makes for wonderful acting but it’s hard on the nerves. To do what I had to do I had to believe in a ghost. So I believed in it. I got so that I could really see Ginney, sense when she was near me, consider her in everything I did. I accepted the professor’s delusion and in so doing it became my own.

  We stayed at the hotel for ten days and the professor worked all the time. While he was working I took charge of Ginney, taking her out and showing her the town. It was a small town with a little old mission built during the Spanish occupation, the usual markets, the usual things for tourists to see. We saw them all. There were snags, of course, like the time I bought two ice cream cones, one for me and one for Ginney. I passed it to her and, naturally, it fell to the ground. It was a mistake, and I was lucky that the professor wasn’t with me. I wasn’t so lucky the time we all went out to eat.

  Maybe security had fallen down on the job or maybe it was one of those things, but the restaurant we chose was pretty busy and seats were at a premium. We had a table and three chairs, one for the professor, one for me and, of course, the other for Ginney. We ordered. Ginney wasn’t hungry so she just sat and watched, and while we were eating a man came up and started to sit in the empty chair. I stopped him just in time.

  “Sorry, mister, but that seat’s taken.”

  “Is it?” He looked at the empty place, then at the crowded floor, then back at the empty seat. He was a big man, arrogant, and I could see that he was going to argue. I rose and pulled him away as he reached for the chair.

  “I said that it’s taken.”

  “In a pig’s eye it is! Look, mister, I’m hungry and I’m going to eat.” He reached for the back of the chair.

  I thought of Cottrell and what he had said about the fragility of a delusion. I could have compromised. I could have asked Ginney to sit on my lap or go out to play or done any of a dozen things to make the incident a logical outcome of a crowded restaurant. But I thought of the professor and how he would feel at seeing his little girl pushed around. And I wasn’t keen on the idea myself. I jerked the man away from the chair.

  It was a mistake. It was hot, he was bad tempered and he didn’t like being pulled. He swung at me, his fist driving low into my stomach, and I gagged as the air rushed out of my lungs. He grinned and drew back his fist to finish the job, and I cursed my crippled leg as I tried to brace myself. It wasn’t necessary. A waiter came rushing up, full of apologies, and caught the man by the arm. He didn’t look strong, but there must have been something in the way his fingers dug against the nerves because the man winced and allowed himself to be led to a suddenly vacant table. Security, of course, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

  The professor was very quiet during the remainder of the meal.

  “You know, Tom,” he said over coffee, and I was glad that he’d broken the silence, “the world is full of nasty people.”

  “That character?” I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Forget him.” I winked at Ginney, very small and quiet in her chair. The professor took no notice.

  “Your leg,” he said. “Pardon me if it is a delicate subject, but how did it happen?”

  “Hit-and-run driver,” I lied curtly, “I never did find out who it was.”

  “You, too?” His knuckles turned white as he gripped his cup. “You know, Tom, the world is full of murderers and criminals who will never be punished. Sometimes I wish that something would happen so that they would all die. All of them!”

  I was surprised at the emotion in his voice. It was the first time I had seen him really angry, and he was, burning with that helpless, frustrated rage which makes you feel all sick and twisted inside. I tried to change the subject.

  “Don’t think about it, professor. It takes all kinds to make a world. How’s the work progressing?”

  “It’s finished.” He didn’t sound like a man glad to have ended a chore. “You can have the final results after we’ve eaten.” He smiled at my expression. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? The last set of equations so that they can begin the tests for controllable fission of nonradioactive materials. Bigger and better bombs at a fraction of the cost. The fools!”

  “Please!” I’d begun to sweat. There was no way of telling who could be listening, but one thing I was sure of. This was information which I wasn’t supposed to know about. I crushed out my cigarette. “Let’s get out of here and go for a walk or something.”

  “Yes,” he said and rose from the table. “I’ll give you the papers and tomorrow we’ll leave. Will you buy a car? I want to drive myself for a change.”

  I nodded and we left. It wasn’t until after he had given me the papers covered with their potential dynamite and I’d passed them on to my contact that I began to get worried. Not about the information. That would be flown straight back to the laboratories where they stood by to make the first tests. Not about the incident in the restaurant. Not even about the fact that we were leaving in the morning. But about Ginney.

  The professor seemed to have forgotten all about her.

  *

  We left the hotel early next morning in a cheap coupé guaranteed to fall apart after ten thousand miles. It wasn’t important. The car, like the professor, like me, like Ginney, was expendable. As long as it did its job I couldn’t complain. The professor drove, handling the wheel with a surprising skill, and I slumped in the seat beside him, my hat over my eyes and those eyes glancing from time to time in the rear view mirror. Somewhere behind us, a spurt of dust on the horizon, Cottrell was still on the job. He would stay on until he received word that the tests had proved satisfactory, and then he would move in and take over.

  Once I’d satisfied myself that the professor could handle the car I relaxed and busied myself with thoughts. I was still worried by the professor’s lack of attention to his little girl. For the first time since I’d been with him he hadn’t kissed her good night. He hadn’t asked after her this morning, either, though I had made a point of settling her in the dickey with the baggage and asking her whether or not she was comfortable. But the professor seemed to have something else on his mind.

  Strange about a delusion. I’d known others who had their own private belief, and to me it had always seemed that they had a trick of justifying or rationalizing away anything which tended to shatter it. Cottrell had said that the professor was different. He had warned me that a word could shatter his belief in Ginney and I wanted to discover why. The answer was surprisingly simple.

  It was me.

  My interference, my bolstering of the delusion, my own playacting so as to make fantasy a concrete reality. I had taken over as nursemaid, and by so doing I had relieved the professor of the need to adapt what wasn’t to what was. I believed in Ginney. To me she was alive and so to the professor she was alive, too. No need for him to convince himself any longer. He could sit back and watch me do all the little things he’d had to do and, naturally, just as a mother with a trusted nurse no longer worries about her child, so the professor had ceased to work at his delusion. Because to him it was nothing but the proven truth. I saw her, didn’t I? I talked to her, played with her, protected her. So he had returned to work freed of his anxiety and left me with the burden. But if I let him down, showed him that I thought it was all stark lunacy and that I’d been acting with my tongue in my cheek in order to get him to work then...?

  I straightened with a vague impression that something was wrong. I opened my eyes and stared at the speedometer. We were going fast, too fast, but I didn’t realize just how much too fast until I looked at the scenery.

  We were on a narrow road winding down the side of a succession of hills which, without an
y straining of the imagination, could have been called baby mountains. The road was bad and to one side it fell away toward the rocky bottom of a gorge. The car was slithering from side to side as the wheels strained to hold the loose surface of the road. Even as I watched we veered to the wrong side, sent dirt pluming over the edge, then drifted back to the stony verge. And we were going faster all the time.

  What I did then was dictated by instinct. I cut the ignition and hauled on the hand brake. I grabbed the wheel and jammed my foot against the gear lever so that it couldn’t slip out. I hung on while the engine compression helped to slow the car, and while I clung to the wheel, I prayed. We stopped three inches from eternity.

  “You were going too fast,” I said stupidly. “You might have killed both of us.”

  “I know.” His face was dripping with perspiration.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I took over the wheel. He didn’t argue about it and neither did I. He was shaken but not anywhere near as badly as I was, and I had the impression that he was disappointed about something. I drove slowly after that, handling the car like a matron on her first time out on the public highway, and it wasn’t until almost dark that we came to a village tucked away in the foothills. I stopped the car before an apology of a hotel and climbed stiffly from behind the wheel.

  The proprietor was more dark than white but he made us welcome, and the native cooking blended with the local wine as good cooking should. After the meal the professor excused himself and went up to bed. I saw him to his room then went back downstairs and sat on the veranda, smoking, thinking and waiting for Cottrell to catch up. Something must have delayed him because it was almost midnight before he arrived.