To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  At that same moment of Thursday morning Dr. Timothy Bryce’s house computer triggered an impulse and the alarm voice in his pillow said quietly but firmly, “It’s time to wake up, Dr. Bryce.” He stirred but lay still. After the prescribed ten-second interval the voice said, a little more sharply, “It’s time to wake up, Dr. Bryce.” Bryce sat up, just in time; the lifting of his head from the pillow cut off the third, much sterner, repetition which would have been followed by the opening chords of the Jupiter Symphony. The psychiatrist opened his eyes.

  He was surprised to find himself sharing his bed with a strikingly attractive girl.

  She was a honey blonde, deeply tanned, with light-brown eyes, full pale lips, and a sleek, elegant body. She looked to be fairly young, a good twenty years younger than he was—perhaps twenty-five, twenty-eight. She wore nothing, and she was in a deep sleep, her lower lip sagging in a sort of involuntary pout. Neither her youth nor her beauty nor her nudity surprised him; he was puzzled simply because he had no notion who she was or how she had come to be in bed with him. He felt as though he had never seen her before. Certainly he didn’t know her name. Had he picked her up at some party last night? He couldn’t seem to remember where he had been last night. Gently he nudged her elbow.

  She woke quickly, fluttering her eyelids, shaking her head.

  “Oh,” she said, as she saw him, and clutched the sheet up to her throat. Then, smiling, she dropped it again. “That’s foolish. No need to be modest now, I guess.”

  “I guess. Hello.”

  “Hello,” she said. She looked as confused as he was.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” he said, “but someone must have slipped me a weird weed last night, because I’m afraid I’m not sure how I happened to bring you home. Or what your name is.”

  “Lisa,” she said. “Lisa—Falk.” She stumbled over the second name. “And you’re—”

  “Tim Bryce.”

  “You don’t remember where we met?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  He got out of bed, feeling a little hesitant about his own nakedness, and fighting the inhibition off. “They must have given us both the same thing to smoke, then. You know”—he grinned shyly—”I can’t even remember if we had a good time together last night. I hope we did.”

  “I think we did,” she said. “I can’t remember it either. But I feel good inside—the way I usually do after I’ve—” She paused. We couldn’t have met only just last night, Tim.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’ve got the feeling that I’ve known you longer than that.”

  Bryce shrugged. “I don’t see how. I mean, without being too coarse about it, obviously we were both high last night, really floating, and we met and came here and—”

  “No. I feel at home here. As if I moved in with you weeks and weeks ago.”

  “A lovely idea. But I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “Why do I feel so much at home here, then?”

  “‘In what way?”

  “In every way.” She walked to the bedroom closet and let her hand rest on the touchplate. The door slid open; evidently he had keyed the house computer to her fingerprints. Had he done that last night too? She reached in. “My clothing,” she said. “Look. All these dresses, coats, shoes. A whole wardrobe. There can’t be any doubt. We’ve been living together and don’t remember it!”

  A chill swept through him. “What have they done to us? Listen, Lisa, let’s get dressed and eat and go down to the hospital together for a checkup. We—”

  “Hospital?”

  “Fletcher Memorial. I’m in the neurological department. Whatever they slipped us last night has hit us both with a lacunary retrograde amnesia—a gap in our memories—and it could be serious. If it’s caused brain damage, perhaps it’s not irreversible yet, but we can’t fool around.”

  She put her hands to her lips in fear. Bryce felt a sudden warm urge to protect this lovely stranger, to guard and comfort her, and he realized he must be in love with her, even though he couldn’t remember who she was. He crossed the room to her and seized her in a brief, tight embrace; she responded eagerly, shivering a little. By a quarter to eight they were out of the house and heading for the hospital through unusually light traffic. Bryce led the girl quickly to the staff lounge. Ted Kamakura was there already, in uniform. The little Japanese psychiatrist nodded curtly and said, “Morning, Tim.”

  Then he blinked. “Good morning, Lisa. How come you’re here?”

  “You know her?” Bryce asked.

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “A deadly serious one.”

  “Of course I know her,” Kamakura said, and his smile of greeting abruptly faded. “Why? Is something wrong about that?”

  “You may know her, but I don’t,” said Bryce.

  “Oh, God. Not you too!”

  “Tell me who she is, Ted.”

  “She’s your wife, Tim. You married her five years ago.”

  By half past eleven Thursday morning the Gerards had everything set up and going smoothly for the lunch rush at the Petit Pois. The soup caldron was bubbling, the escargot trays were ready to be popped in the oven, the sauces were taking form. Pierre Gerard was a bit surprised when most of the lunchtime regulars failed to show up. Even Mr. Munson, always punctual at half past eleven, did not arrive. Some of these men had not missed weekday lunch at the Petit Pois in fifteen years. Something terrible must have happened on the stock market, Pierre thought, to have kept all these financial men at their desks, and they were too busy to call him and cancel their usual tables. That must be the answer. It was impossible that any of the regulars would forget to call him. The stock market must be exploding. Pierre made a mental note to call his broker after lunch and find out what was going on.

  About two Thursday afternoon, Paul Mueller stopped into Metchnikoff’s Art Supplies in North Beach to try to get a welding pen, some raw metal, loudspeaker paint, and the rest of the things he needed for the rebirth of his sculpting career. Metchnikoff greeted him sourly with, “No credit at all, Mr. Mueller, not even a nickel!”

  “It’s all right. I’m a cash customer this time.”

  The dealer brightened. “In that case it’s all right, maybe. You finished with your troubles?”

  “ I hope so,” Mueller said.

  He gave the order. It came to about $2,300; when the time came to pay, he explained that he simply had to run down to Montgomery Street to pick up the cash from his friend Freddy Munson, who was holding three bigs for him. Metchnikoff began to glower again. “Five minutes!” Mueller called. “I’ll be back in five minutes!” But when he got to Munson’s office, he found the place in confusion, and Munson wasn’t there. “Did he leave an envelope for a Mr. Mueller?” he asked a distraught secretary. “I was supposed to pick something important up here this afternoon. Would you please check?” The girl simply ran away from him. So did the next girl. A burly broker told him to get out of the office. “We’re closed, fellow,” he shouted. Baffled, Mueller left.

  Not daring to return to Metchnikoff’s with the news that he hadn’t been able to raise the cash after all, Mueller simply went home. Three dunning robots were camped outside his door, and each one began to croak its cry of doom as he approached. “Sorry,” Mueller said, “I can’t remember a thing about any of this stuff,” and he went inside and sat down on the bare floor, angry, thinking of the brilliant pieces he could be turning out if he could only get his hands on the tools of his trade. He made sketches instead. At least the ghouls had left him with pencil and paper. Not as efficient as a computer screen and a light-pen, maybe, but Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini had managed to make out all right without computer screens and light-pens.

  At four o’clock the door bell rang.

  “Go away,” Mueller said through the speaker. “See my accountant! I don’t want to hear any more dunnings, and the next time I catch one of you idiot robots by my door I�
�m going to—”

  “It’s me, Paul,” a nonmechanical voice said.

  Carole.

  He rushed to the door. There were seven robots out there, surrounding her, and they tried to get in; but he pushed them back so she could enter. A robot didn’t dare lay a paw on a human being. He slammed the door in their metal faces and locked it.

  Carole looked fine. Her hair was longer than he remembered it, and she had gained about eight pounds in all the right places, and she wore an iridescent peekaboo wrap that he had never seen before, and which was really inappropriate for afternoon wear, but which looked splendid on her. She seemed at least five years younger than she really was; evidently a month and a half of marriage to Pete Castine had done more for her than nine years of marriage to Paul Mueller. She glowed. She also looked strained and tense, but that seemed superficial, the product of some distress of the last few hours.

  “I seem to have lost my key,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t understand you, Paul.”

  “I mean why’d you come here?”

  “I live here.”

  “Do you?’ He laughed harshly. “Very funny.”

  “You always did have a weird sense of humor, Paul.” She stepped past him. “Only this isn’t any joke. Where is everything? The furniture, Paul. My things.” Suddenly she was crying. “I must be breaking up. I wake up this morning in a completely strange apartment, all alone, and I spend the whole day wandering in a sort of daze that I don’t understand at all, and now I finally come home and find that you’ve pawned every damn thing we own, or something and—” She bit her knuckles. “Paul?”

  She’s got it too, he thought. The amnesia epidemic.

  He said quietly, “This is a funny thing to ask, Carole, but will you tell me what today’s date is?”

  “Why—the fourteenth of September—or is it the fifteenth—”

  “2002?”

  “What do you think? 1776?”

  She’s got it worse than I have, Mueller told himself. She’s lost a whole extra month. She doesn’t remember my business venture. She doesn’t remember my losing all the money. She doesn’t remember divorcing me. She thinks she’s still my wife.

  “Come in here,” he said, and led her to the bedroom. He pointed to the cot that stood where their bed had been. “Sit down, Carole. I’ll try to explain. It won’t make much sense but I’ll try to explain.”

  Under the circumstances, the concert by the visiting New York Philharmonic for Thursday evening was cancelled. Nevertheless the orchestra assembled for its rehearsal at half past two in the afternoon. The union required so many rehearsals—with pay—a week; therefore the orchestra rehearsed, regardless of external cataclysms. But there were problems. Maestro Alvarez, who used an electronic baton and proudly conducted without a score, thumbed the button for a downbeat and realized abruptly, with a sensation as of dropping through a trapdoor, that the Brahms Fourth was wholly gone from his mind. The orchestra responded raggedly to his faltering leadership. Some of the musicians had no difficulties, but the concertmaster stared in horror at his left hand, wondering how to finger the strings for the notes his violin was supposed to be yielding, and second oboe could not find the proper keys, and the first bassoon had not yet even managed to remember how to put his instrument together.

  By nightfall, Tim Bryce had managed to assemble enough of the story so that he understood what had happened, not only to himself and to Lisa, but to the entire city. A drug, or drugs, almost certainly distributed through the municipal water supply, had leached away nearly everyone’s memory. The trouble with modern life, Bryce thought, is that technology gives us the potential for newer and more intricate disasters every year, but it doesn’t seem to give us the ability to ward them off. Memory drugs were old stuff, going back thirty, forty years. He had studied several types of them himself. Memory is partly a chemical and partly an electrical process; some drugs went after the electrical end, jamming the synapses over which brain transmissions travel, and some went after the molecular substrata in which long-term memories are locked up. Bryce knew ways of destroying short-term memories by inhibiting synapse transmission, and he knew ways of destroying the deep long-term memories by washing out the complex chains of ribonucleic acid, brain-RNA, by which they are inscribed in the brain. But such drugs were experimental, tricky, unpredictable; he had hesitated to use them on human subjects; he certainly had never imagined that anyone would simply dump them into an aqueduct and give an entire city a simultaneous lobotomy.

  His office at Fletcher Memorial had become an improvised center of operations for San Francisco. The mayor was there, pale and shrunken; the chief of police, exhausted and confused, periodically turned his back and popped a pill; a dazed-looking representative of the communications net hovered in a corner, nervously monitoring the hastily rigged system through which the committee of public safety that Bryce had summoned could make its orders known throughout the city.

  The mayor was no use at all. He couldn’t even remember having run for office. The chief of police was in even worse shape: he had been up all night because he had forgotten, among other things, his home address, and he had been afraid to query a computer about it for fear he’d lose his job for drunkenness. By now the chief of police was aware that he wasn’t the only one in the city having memory problems today, and he had looked up his address in the files and even telephoned his wife, but he was close to collapse. Bryce had insisted that both men stay here as symbols of order; he wanted only their faces and their voices, not their fumble-headed official services.

  A dozen or so miscellaneous citizens had accumulated in Bryce’s office too. At five in the afternoon he had broadcast an all-media appeal, asking anyone whose memory of recent events was unimpaired to come to Fletcher Memorial. “If you haven’t had any city water in the past twenty-four hours, you’re probably all right. Come down here. We need you.” He had drawn a curious assortment. There was a ramrod-straight old space hero, Taylor Braskett, a pure-foods nut who drank only mountain water. There was a family of French restaurateurs, mother, father, three grown children, who preferred mineral water flown in from their native land. There was a computer salesman named McBurney who had been in Los Angeles on business and hadn’t had any of the drugged water. There was a retired cop named Adler who lived in Oakland, where there were no memory problems; he had hurried across the bay as soon as he heard that San Francisco was in trouble. That was before all access to the city had been shut off at Bryce’s orders. And there were some others, of doubtful value but of definitely intact memory.

  The three screens that the communications man had mounted provided a relay of key points in the city. Right now one was monitoring the Fisherman’s Wharf district from a camera atop Ghirardelli Square, one was viewing the financial district from a helicopter over the old Ferry Building Museum, and one was relaying a pickup from a mobile truck in Golden Gate Park. The scenes were similar everywhere: people milling about, asking questions, getting no answers. There wasn’t any sign of looting yet. There were no fires. The police, those of them able to function, were out in force, and antiriot robots were cruising the bigger streets, just in case they might be needed to squirt their stifling blankets of foam at suddenly panicked mobs.

  Bryce said to the mayor, “At half past six I want you to go on all media with an appeal for calm. We’ll supply you with everything you have to say.”

  The mayor moaned.

  Bryce said, “Don’t worry. I’ll feed you the whole speech by bone relay. Just concentrate on speaking clearly and looking straight into the camera. If you come across as a terrified man, it can be the end for all of us. If you look cool, we may be able to pull through.”

  The mayor put his face in his hands.

  Ted Kamakura whispered, “You can’t put him on the channels, Tim! He’s a wreck, and everyone will see it!”

  “The city’s mayor has to show himself,” Bryce insisted. “Give him a
double jolt of bracers. Let him make this one speech and then we can put him to pasture.”

  “Who’ll be the spokesman, then?” Kamakura asked. “You? Me? Police Chief Dennison?”

  “I don’t know,” Bryce muttered. “We need an authority-image to make announcements every half hour or so, and I’m damned if I’ll have time. Or you. And Dennison—”

  “Gentlemen, may I make a suggestion?” it was the old spaceman Braskett. “I wish to volunteer as spokesman. You must admit I have a certain look of authority. And I’m accustomed to speaking to the public.”

  Bryce rejected the idea instantly. That right-wing crackpot, author of passionate nut letters to every news medium in the state, that latterday Paul Revere? Him, spokesman for the committee? But in the moment of rejection came acceptance. Nobody really paid attention to far-out political activities like that; probably nine people out of ten in San Francisco thought of Braskett, if at all, simply as the hero of the first Mars expedition. He was a handsome old horse, too, elegantly upright and lean. Deep voice; unwavering eyes. A man of strength and presence.

  Bryce said, “Commander Braskett, if we were to make you chairman of the committee of public safety—”

  Ted Kamakura gasped.

  “—would I have your assurance that such public announcements as you would make would be confined entirely to statements of the policies arrived at by the entire committee?”

  Commander Braskett smiled glacially. “You want me to be a figurehead, is that it?”

  “To be our spokesman, with the official title of chairman.”

  “As I said: to be a figurehead. Very well, I accept. I’ll mouth my lies like an obedient puppet, and I won’t attempt to inject any of my radical, extremist ideas into my statements. Is that what you wish?”