To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  Harry Gardner. The son of the dead man.

  “Murderer!” Gardner shrilled. “You killed him! He would have lived if you’d used anesthetics! You phony, you murdered him so people would have thrills on television!”

  Northrop glanced up the lobby. Someone was coming around the bend. Northrop felt calm. He could stare this nobody down until he fled in fear.

  “Listen,” Northrop said, “we did the best medical science can do for your father. We gave him the ultimate in scientific care. We—”

  “You murdered him!”

  “No,” Northrop said, and then he said no more, because he saw the sudden flicker of a slice-gun in the blank-faced man’s fat hand. He backed away, but it didn’t help, because Gardner punched the trigger and an incandescent bolt flared out and sliced across Northrop’s belly just as efficiently as the surgeon’s scalpel had cut through the gangrenous leg.

  Gardner raced away, feet clattering on the marble floor. Northrop dropped, clutching himself. His suit was seared, and there was a slash through his abdomen, a burn an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps four inches deep, cutting through intestines, through organs, through flesh. The pain hadn’t begun yet. His nerves weren’t getting the message through to his stunned brain. But then they were, and Northrop coiled and twisted in agony that was anything but vicarious now.

  Footsteps approached.

  “Jeez,” a voice said.

  Northrop forced an eye open. Maurillo. Of all people, Maurillo.

  “A doctor,” Northrop wheezed. “Fast! Christ, the pain! Help me, Ted!”

  Maurillo looked down, and smiled. Without a word, he stepped to the telephone booth six feet away, dropped in a token, punched out a call.

  “Get a van over here, fast. I’ve got a subject, chief.”

  Northrop writhed in torment. Maurillo crouched next to him. “A doctor,” Northrop murmured. “A needle, at least. Gimme a needle! The pain—”

  “You want me to kill the pain?” Maurillo laughed. “Nothing doing, chief. You just hang on. You stay alive till we get that hat on your head and tape the whole thing.”

  “But you don’t work for me—you’re off the program—”

  “Sure,” Maurillo said. “I’m with Transcontinental now. They’re starting a blood-and-guts show too. Only they don’t need waivers.”

  Northrop gaped. Transcontinental? That bootleg outfit that peddled tapes in Afghanistan and Mexico and Ghana and God knew where else? Not even a network show, he thought. No fee. Dying in agony for the benefit of a bunch of lousy tapeleggers. That was the worst part, Northrop thought. Only Maurillo would pull a deal like that.

  “A needle! For God‘s sake, Maurillo, a needle!”

  “Nothing doing, chief. The van’ll be here any minute. They’ll sew you up, and we’ll tape it nice.”

  Northrop closed his eyes. He felt the coiling intestines blazing within him. He willed himself to die, to cheat Maurillo and his bunch of ghouls. But it was no use. He remained alive and suffering.

  He lived for an hour. That was plenty of time to tape his dying agonies. The last thought he had was that it was a damned shame he couldn’t star on his own show.

  NEIGHBOR

  Also for Fred Pohl: written in January, 1964, published in the August, 1964 Galaxy. I was being faithful to our agreement, writing s-f stories only when the mood took me, not just because it was time to knock something new out for one of my regular markets. Science fiction is always best written by part-time writers: the need to save the world from plunging asteroids or berserk robots three times a week isn’t conducive to creating classic literature.

  And here in 1964 I was very much a part-time science-fiction writer. The occasional story for Fred and an equally infrequent novel for young readers (such as 1964’s The Time of the Great Freeze) was all I was doing in that line. The science-fact books had become my main enterprise. 1964 saw me do a book on Antarctica, a biography of Socrates (which would stand me in good stead decades later when I wrote my Hugo-winning story “Enter a Soldier”), a book on famous scientific hoaxes, an enormous history of the Great Wall of China, and, late in the year, an account of the Pueblo Indians. It was an incredibly grueling schedule, a constant grind of research and typing and correcting galleys and doing the research for the next one, but I was young and thought nothing of it. I was setting myself up for real exhaustion and physical collapse, but that was still a couple of years in the future.

  ~

  Fresh snow had fallen during the night. It lay like a white sheet atop the older snow, nine or ten feet of it, that already covered the plain. Now all was smooth and clear almost to the horizon. As Michael Holt peered through the foot-thick safety glass of his command-room window, he saw, first of all, the zone of brown earth, a hundred yards in diameter, circling his house, and then the beginning of the snowfield with a few jagged bare trees jutting through it, and then, finally, a blot on the horizon, the metallic tower that was Andrew McDermott’s dwelling.

  Not in seventy or eighty years had Holt looked at the McDermott place without feeling hatred and irritation. The planet was big enough, wasn’t it? Why had McDermott chosen to stick his pile of misshapen steel down right where Holt had to look at it all his days? The McDermott estate was large. McDermott could have built his house another fifty or sixty miles to the east, near the banks of the wide, shallow river that flowed through the heart of the continent. He hadn’t cared to. Holt had politely suggested it, when the surveyors and architects first came out from Earth. McDermott had just as politely insisted on putting his house where he wanted to put it.

  It was still there. Michael Holt peered at it, and his insides roiled. He walked to the control console of the armament panel, and let his thin, gnarled hands rest for a moment on a gleaming rheostat.

  There was an almost sexual manner to the way Holt fondled the jutting knobs and studs of the console. Now that his two-hundredth year was approaching, he rarely handled the bodies of his wives any more. But, then, he did not love his wives as keenly as he loved the artillery emplacement with which he could blow Andrew McDermott to atoms.

  Just let him provoke me, Holt thought.

  He stood by the panel, a tall, gaunt man with a withered face and a savage hook of a nose and a surprisingly thick shock of faded red hair. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of a daydream.

  He imagined that Andrew McDermott had given him offense. Not simply the eternal offense of being there in his view, but some direct, specific affront. Poaching on his land, perhaps. Or sending a robot out to hack down a tree on the borderland. Or putting up a flashing neon sign mocking Holt in some vulgar way. Anything that would serve as an excuse for hostilities.

  And then: Holt saw himself coming up here to the command room and broadcasting an ultimatum to the enemy. “Take that sign down, McDermott,” he might say. “Keep your robots off my land,” perhaps. “Or else this means war.”

  McDermott would reply with a blast of radiation, of course, because that was the kind of sneak he was. The deflector screens of Holt’s frontline defenses would handle the bolt with ease, soaking it in and feeding the energy straight to Holt’s own generators.

  Then, at long last, Holt would answer back. His fingers would tighten on the controls. Crackling arcs of energy would leap toward the ionosphere and bound downward at McDermott’s place, spearing through his pitiful screens as though they weren’t there. Holt saw himself gripping the controls with knuckle-whitening fervor, launching thunderbolt after thunderbolt, while on the horizon Andrew McDermott’s hideous keep blazed and glowed in hellish fire, and crumpled and toppled and ran in molten puddles over the snow.

  Yes, that would be the moment to live for!

  That would be the moment of triumph!

  To step back from the controls at last and look through the window and see the glowing red spot on the horizon where the McDermott place had been. To pat the controls as though they were the flanks of a beloved old horse. To leave the house, and ride
across the borderland into the McDermott estate, and see the charred ruin, and know that he was gone forever.

  Then, of course, there would be an inquiry. The fifty lords of the planet would meet to discuss the battle, and Holt would explain, “He wantonly provoked me. I need not tell you how he gave me offense by building his house within my view. But this time—”

  And Holt’s fellow lords would nod sagely, and would understand, for they valued their own unblemished views as highly as Holt himself. They would exonerate him and grant him McDermott’s land, as far as the horizon, so no newcomer could repeat the offense.

  Michael Holt smiled. The daydream left him satisfied. His heart raced perhaps a little too enthusiastically as he pictured the slagheap on the horizon. He made an effort to calm himself. He was, after all, a fragile old man, much as he hated to admit it, and even the excitement of a daydream taxed his strength.

  He walked away from the panel, back to the window. Nothing had changed. The zone of brown earth where his melters kept back the snow, and then the white field, and finally the excrescence on the horizon, glinting coppery red in the thin midday sunlight. Holt scowled. The daydream had changed nothing. No shot had been fired. McDermott’s keep still stained the view. Turning, Holt began to shuffle slowly out of the room, toward the dropshaft that would take him five floors downward to his family.

  The communicator chimed. Holt stared at the screen in surprise.

  “Yes?”

  “An outside call for you, Lord Holt. Lord McDermott is calling,” the bland metallic voice said.

  “Lord McDermott’s secretary, you mean.”

  “It is Lord McDermott himself, your lordship.”

  Holt blinked. “You’re joking,” he said. “It’s fifty years since he called me. If this is a prank, I’ll have your circuits shorted!”

  “I cannot joke, your lordship. Shall I tell Lord McDermott you do not wish to speak to him?”

  “Of course,” Holt snapped. “No…wait. Find out what he wants. Then tell him I can’t speak to him.”

  Holt sank back into a chair in front of the screen. He nudged a button with his elbow, and tiny hands began to massage the muscles of his back, where tension-poisons had suddenly flooded in to stiffen him.

  McDermott calling? What for?

  To complain, of course. Some trespass, no doubt. Some serious trespass, if McDermott felt he had to make the call himself. Michael Holt’s blood warmed. Let him complain! Let him accuse, let him bluster! Perhaps this would give the excuse for hostilities at last. Holt ached to declare war. He had been building his armaments patiently for decade after decade, and he knew beyond doubt that he had the capability to destroy McDermott moments after the first shot was fired. No screens in the universe could withstand the array of weaponry Holt had assembled. The outcome of a conflict was in no doubt. Let him start something, Michael Holt prayed. Oh, let him be the aggressor! I’m ready for him, and more than ready!

  The bell chimed again. The robot voice of Holt’s secretary said, “I have spoken to him, your lordship. He will tell me nothing. He wants to speak to you.”

  Holt sighed. “Very well. Put him on, then.”

  There was a moment of electronic chaos on the screen as the robot shifted from the inside channel to an outside one. Holt sat stiffly, annoyed by the sudden anxiety he felt. He realized, strangely, that he had forgotten what his enemy’s voice sounded like. All communications between them had been through robot intermediaries for years.

  The screen brightened and showed a test pattern. A hoarse, querulous voice said, “Holt? Holt, where are you?”

  “Right here in my chair, McDermott. What’s troubling you?”

  “Turn your vision on. Let me have a look at you, Holt.”

  “You can speak your piece without seeing me, can’t you? Is my face that fascinating to you?”

  “Please. This is no time for bickering. Turn the vision on!”

  “Let me remind you,” Holt said coldly, “that you have called me. The normal rules of etiquette require that I have the privilege of deciding on the manner of transmission. And I prefer not to be seen. I also prefer not to be speaking to you. You have thirty seconds to state your complaint. Important business awaits me.”

  There was silence. Holt gripped the arms of his chair and signaled for a more intense massage. He became aware, in great irritation, that his hands were trembling. He glared at the screen as though he could burn his enemy’s brain out simply by sending angry thoughts over the communicator.

  McDermott said finally, “I have no complaint, Holt. Only an invitation.”

  “To tea?”

  “Call it that. I want you to come here, Holt.”

  “You’ve lost your mind!”

  “Not yet. Come to me. Let’s have a truce,” McDermott rasped. “We’re both old, sick, stupid men. It’s time to stop the hatred.”

  Holt laughed. “We’re both old, yes. But I’m not sick and you’re the only stupid one. Isn’t it a little late for the olive branch?”

  “Never too late.”

  “You know there can’t be peace between us,” Holt said. “Not so long as that eyesore of yours sticks up over the trees. It’s a cinder in my eye, McDermott. I can’t ever forgive you for building it.”

  “Will you listen to me?” McDermott said. “When I’m gone, you can blast the place apart, if it pleases you. All I want is for you to come here. I—I need you, Holt. I want you to pay me a visit.”

  “Why don’t you come here, then?” Holt jeered. “I’ll throw my door wide for you. We’ll sit by the fire and reminisce about all the years we hated each other.”

  “If I could come to you,” McDermott said, “there would be no need for us to meet at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Turn your visual on, and you’ll see.”

  Michael Holt frowned. He knew he had become hideous with age, and he was not eager to show himself to his enemy. But he could not see McDermott without revealing himself at the same time. With an abrupt, impulsive gesture, Holt jabbed the control button in his chair. The mists on the screen faded, and an image appeared.

  All Holt could see was a face, shrunken, wizened, wasted. McDermott was past two hundred, Holt knew, and he looked it. There no flesh left on his face. The skin lay like parchment over bone. The left side of his face was distorted, the nostril flared, the mouth corner dragged down to reveal the teeth, the eyelid drooping. Below the chin, McDermott was invisible, swathed in machinery, his body cocooned in what was probably a nutrient bath. He was obviously in bad shape.

  He said, “I’ve had a stroke, Holt. I’m paralyzed from the neck down. I can’t hurt you.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A year ago.”

  “You’ve kept very quiet about it,” Holt said.

  “I didn’t think you’d care to know. But now I do. I’m dying, Holt, and I want to see you once face to face before I die. I know, you’re suspicious. You think I’m crazy to ask you to come here. Well, maybe I am crazy. I’ll turn my screens off. I’ll send all my robots across the river. I’ll be absolutely alone here, helpless, and you can come with an army if you like. There. Doesn’t that sound like a trap, Holt? I know I’d think so if I were in your place and you were in mine. But it isn’t a trap. Can you believe that? I’ll open my door to you. You can come and laugh in my face as I lie here. But come. There’s something I have to tell you, something of vital importance to you. And you’ve got to be here in person when I tell you. You won’t regret coming. Believe that, Holt.”

  Holt stared at the wizened creature on the screen, and trembled with doubt and confusion. The man must be a lunatic! It was years since Holt had last stepped beyond the protection of his own screens. Now McDermott was asking him not only to go into the open field, where he might be gunned down with ease, but to enter into McDermott’s house itself, to put his head right between the jaws of the lion.

  Absurd!

  McDermott said, “Let me show
you my sincerity. My screens are off. Take a shot at the house. Hit it anywhere. Go ahead. Do your worst!”

  Deeply troubled, chilled with mystification, Holt elbowed out of his chair, went beyond the range of the visual pickup, over to the control console of the guns. How many times in dreams he had fondled these studs and knobs, never firing them once, except in test shots directed at his own property! It was unreal to be actually training the sights on the gleaming tower of McDermott’s house at last. Excitement surged in him. Could this all be some subtle way, he wondered, of causing him to have a fatal heart attack through overstimulation?

  He gripped the controls. He pondered, considered tossing a thousand-megawatt beam at McDermott, then decided to use something a little milder. If the screens really were down all the way, even his feeblest shot would score.

  He sighted—not on the house itself, but on a tree just within McDermott’s inner circle of defense. He fired, still half convinced he was dreaming. The tree became a yard-high stump.

  “That’s it,” McDermott called. “Go on. Aim at the house, too. Knock a turret off. The screens are down.”

  Senile dementia, Holt thought. Baffled, he lifted the sight a bit and let the beam play against one of McDermott’s outbuildings. The shielded wall glowed a moment, then gave as the beam smashed its way through. Ten square feet of McDermott’s castle now was a soup of protons, fleeing into the cold.

  Holt realized in stunned disbelief that there was nothing at all preventing him from destroying McDermott and his odious house entirely. There was no risk of a counterattack. He would not even need to use the heavy artillery that he had been so jealously hoarding against this day. A light beam would do it easily enough.

  If would be too easy this way, though.

  There could be no pleasure in a wanton attack. McDermott had not provoked him. Rather, he sat there in his cocoon, sniveling and begging to be visited.

  Holt returned to the visual field. “I must be as crazy as you are,” he said. “Turn your robots loose and leave your screens down. I’ll come to visit you. I wish I understood this, but I’ll come anyway.”