Star Bright

by Mark Clifton

  "I'm coming over, my friend." He remained grim as he said it. "And I'm coming over tonight. As soon as you will be home. It's no gag I'm pulling. Can you get that through your stubborn head? You say you got it from Star, and of course I believe you. But it's no toy. It's the real thing." Then, as if in profound puzzlement, "Only it isn't."

  A feeling of dread was settling upon me. Once you cried "Uncle" to Jim, he always let up.

  "Suppose you tell me what you mean," I answered soberly.

  "That's more like it, Pete. Here's what we know about the coin so far. It is apparently pre-Egyptian. It's hand-cast. It's made out of one of the lost bronzes. We fix it at around four thousand years old."

  "That ought to be easy to solve," I argued. "Probably some coin collector is screaming all over the place for it. No doubt lost it and Star found it. Must be lots of old coins like that in museums and private collections."

  I was rationalizing more for my own benefit than for Jim. He would know all those things without my mentioning them. He waited until I had finished.

  "Step two," he went on. "We've got one of the top coin men in the world here at the museum. As soon as I saw what the metal was, I took it to him. Now hold onto your chair, Pete. He says there is no coin like it in the world, either museum or private collection."

  "You museum boys get beside yourselves at times. Come down to Earth. Sometime, somewhere, some collector picked it up in some exotic place and kept it quiet. I don't have to tell you how some collectors are -- sitting in a dark room, gloating over some worthless bauble, not telling a soul about it -- "

  "All right, wise guy," he interrupted. "Step three. That coin is at least four thousand years old and it's also brand new! Let's hear you explain that away."

  "New?" I asked weakly. "I don't get it."

  "Old coins show wear. The edges get rounded with handling. The surface oxidizes. This coin shows no wear, no oxidation, no molecular change. This coin might have been struck yesterday. Where did Star get it?"

  "Hold it a minute," I pleaded.

  I began to think back. Saturday morning. Star and Robert had been playing a game. Come to think of it, that was a peculiar game. Mighty peculiar.

  Star would run into the house and stand in front of the encyclopedia shelf. I could hear Robert counting loudly at the base tree outside in the back yard. She would star at the encyclopedia for a minute.

  Once I heard her mumble: "That's a good place."

  Or maybe she merely thought it and I caught the thought. I'm doing that quite a bit of late.

  Then she would run outside again. A moment later, Robert would run in and stand in front of the same shelf. Then he also would run outside again. There would be silence for several minutes. The silence would rupture with a burst of laughing and shouting. Soon, Star would come in again.

  "How does he find me?" I heard her think once. "I can't reason it, and I can't ESP it out of him."

  It was during one of their silences when Ruth called over to me.

  "Hey, Pete! Do you know where the kids are? Time for their milk and cookies."

  The Howells are awfully good to Star, bless 'em. I got up and went over to the window.

  "I don't know, Ruth," I called back. "They were in and out only a few minutes ago."

  "Well, I'm not worried," she said. She came through the kitchen door and stood on the back steps. "They know better than to cross the street by themselves. They're too little for that. So I guess they're over at Marily's. When they come back, tell 'em to come and get it."

  "Okay, Ruth," I answered.

  She opened the screen door again and went back into her kitchen. I left the window and returned to my work.

  A little later, both the kids came running into the house. I managed to capture them long enough to tell them about the cookies and milk.

  "Beat you there!" Robert shouted to Star.

  There was a scuffle and they ran out the front door. I noticed then that Star had dropped the coin and I picked it up and sent it to Jim Pietre.

  "Hello, Jim," I said into the phone. "Are you still there?"

  "Yep, still waiting for an answer," he said.

  "Jim, I think you'd better come over to the hous right away. I'll leave my office now and meet you there. Can you get away?"

  "Can I get away?" He exclaimed. "Boss says to trace this coin down and do nothing else. See you in fifteen minutes."

  He hung up. thoughtfully, I replaced the receiver and went out to my car. I wa pulling into my block from one arterial when I saw Jim's car pulling in from a block away. I stopped at the curb and waited for him. I didn't see the kids anywhere out front.

  Jim climbed out of his car, and I never saw such an eager look of anticipation on a man's face before. I didn't realize I was showing my dread, but when he saw my face, he became serious.

  "What is it, Pete? What on Earth is it?" he almost whispered.

  "I don't know. At least I'm not sure. Come on inside the house."

  We let ourselves in the front, and I took Jim to the study. It has a large window opening on the back garden, and the scene was very clear.

  At first it was an innocent scene -- so innocent and peaceful. Just three little childern in the back yard playing hide and seek. Marily, a neighbor's child, was setpping up to the base tree.

  "Now look, you kids," she was saying. "You hide where I can find you or I won't play."

  "But where can we go, Marily?" Robert was arguing loudly. Like all little boys, he seems to carry on his conversations at the top of his lungs. "There's the garage, and there's those trees and bushes. You have to look everywhere, Marily."

  "And there's going to be other buildings and trees and bushes there afterward," Star called out with glee. "You gotta look behind them, too."

  "Yeah!" Robert took up the teasing refrain. "And there's been lots and lots of buildings and trees there before -- especially trees. You gotta look behind them, too."

  Marily tossed her head petulantly. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't car. Just hide where I can find you, that's all."

  She hid her face at the tree and started counting. If I had been alone, I would have been sure my eyesight had failed me, or that I was the victim of hallucinations. But Jim was standing there and saw it, too.

  Marily started counting, yet the other two didn't run away. Star reached out and took Robert's hand and they merely stood there. For an instant, they seemed to shimmer and -- they disappeared without moving a step!

  Marily finished her counting and ran around to the few possible hiding places in the yard. When she couldn't find them, she started to blubber and pushed through the hedge to Ruth's back door.

  "They runned away from me again," she whined through the screen at Ruth.

  Jim and I stood staring out the window. I glanced at him. His face was set and pale, but probably no worse than my own.

  We saw the instant shimmer again. Star, and then immediately Robert, materialized from the air and ran up to the tree, shouting, "Safe! Safe!"

  Marily let out a bawl and ran home to her mother.

  I called Star and Robert into the house. They came, still holding hands, a little shamefaced, a little defiant.

  How to begin? What in hell could I say?

  "It's not exactly fair," I told them. "Marily can't follow you there." I was shooting in the dark, but I had at least a glimmering to go by.

  Star turned pale enough for the freckles on her little nose to stand out under her tan. Robert blushed and turned to her fiercely.

  "I told you so, Star. I told you so! I said it wasn't sporting," he accused. He turned to me. "Marily can't play good hide-and-seek anyway. She's only a Stupid."

  "Let's forget that for a minute, Robert." I turned to her. "Star, just where do you go?"

  "Oh, it's nothing, Daddy." She spoke defensively, belittling the whole thing. "We just go a little ways when we play with her. She ought to be able to find us a little ways."

  "That's evading the issue
. Where do you go -- and how do you go?"

  Jim stepped forward and showed her the bronze coin I'd sent him.

  "You see, Star," he said quietly. "We've found this."

  "I shouldn't have to tell you my game." She was almost in tears. "You're both just Tweens. You couldn't understand." Then, struck with contrition, she turned to me. "Daddy, I've tried and tried to ESP you. Truly I did. But you don't ESP worth anything." She slipped her hand through Robert's arm. "Robert does it very nicely," she said primly, as though she were complimenting him on using his fork the right way. "He must be better than I am, because I don't know how he finds me."

  "I'll tell you how I do it, Star," Robert exclaimed eagerly. It was as if he were trying to make amends now that grownups had caught on. "You don't use any imagination. I never saw anybody with so little imagination!"

  "I do, too, have imagination," she countered loudly. "I thought up the game, didn't I? I told you how to do it, didn't I?"

  "Yeah, yeah!" he shouted back. "But you always have to look at a book to ESP what's in it, so you leave an ESP smudge. I just go to the encyclopedia and ESP where you did -- and I go to that place -- and there you are. It's simple."

  Star's mouth dropped open in consternation.

  "I never thought of that," she said.

  Jim and I stood there, letting the meaning of what they were saying penetrate slowly into our incredulous minds.

  "Anyway," Robert was saying, "you haven't any imagination." He sank down cross-legged on the floor. "You can't teleport yourself to any place that's never been."

  She went over to squat down beside him. "I can, too! What about the Moon People? They haven't been yet."

  He looked at her with childish disgust.

  "Oh, Star, they have so been. You know that." He spread his hands out as though he were a baseball referee. "That time hasn't been yet for your daddy here, for instance, but it's already been for somebody like -- well, say, like those things from Arcturus."

  "Well, neither have you teleported yourself to some place that never was," Star was arguing back. "So there."

  Waving Jim to one chair, I sank down shakily into another. At least the arms of the chair felt solid beneath my hands.

  "Now, look, kids," I interrupted their evasive tactics. "Let's start at the beginning. I gather you've figured a way to travel to places in the past or future."

  "Well, of course, Daddy." Star shrugged the statement aside nonchalantly. "We just TP ourselves by ESP anywhere we want to go. It doesn't do any harm."

  And these were the children who were too little to cross the street!

  I have been through times of shock before. This was the same -- somehow, the mind becomes too stunned to react beyond a point. One simply plows through the rest, the best he can, almost normally.

  "Okay, okay," I said and was surprised to hear the same tone I would have used over an argument about the biggest piece of cake. "I don't know whether it's harmful or not. I'll have to think it over. Right now, just tell me how you do it."

  "It would be so much easier if I could ESP it to you," Star said doubtfully.

  "Well, pretend I'm a Stupid and tell me in words."

  "You remember the Moebius Strip?" she asked very slowly and carefully, starting with the first and most basic point in almost the way one explains to an ordinary child.

  Yes, I remembered it. And I remembered how long ago it was that she had discovered it. Over a year, and her busy, brilliant mind had been exploring its possibilities ever since. And I thought she had forgotten it!

  "That's where you join the ends of a strip of paper together with a half twist to make one surface," she went on, as though jogging my undependable, slow memory.

  "Yes, I answered. "We all know the Moebius Strip."

  Jim looked startled. I had never told him about the incident.

  "Next you take a sheet and you give it a half twist and join the edge to itself all over to make a funny kind of holder."

  "Klein's Bottle," Jim supplied.

  She looked at him in relief.

  "Oh, you know about that," she said. "That makes it easier. Well, then, the next step. You take a cube" -- Her face clouded with doubt again, and she explained, "You can't do this with your hands. You've gotta ESP it done, because it's an imaginary cube anyway."

  She looked at us questioningly. I nodded for her to continue.

  "And you ESP the twisted cube all together the same way you did Klein's Bottle. Now if you do that big enough, all around you, so you're sort of half twisted in the middle, then you can TP yourself anywhere you want to go. And that's all there is to it," she finished hurriedly.

  "Where have you gone?" I asked her quietly.

  The technique of doing it would take some thinking. I knew enough physics to know that was the way the dimensions were built up. The line, the plane, the cube -- Euclidian physics. The Moebius Strip, the Klein Bottle, the unnamed twisted cube -- Einsteinian physics. Yes, it was possible.

  "Oh, we've gon all over, Star answered vaguely. "The Romans and the Egyptians -- places like that."

  "You picked up a coin in one of those places?" Jim asked.

  He was doing a good job of keeping his voice casual. I knew the excitement he must be feeling, the vision of wealth of knowledge which must be opening before his eyes.

  "I found it, Daddy," Star answered Jim's question. She was about to cry. "I found it in the dirt, and Robert was about to catch me. I forgot I had it when I went away from there so fast." She looked at me pleadingly. "I didn't mean to steal it, Daddy. I never stole anything, anywhere. And, I was going to take it back and put it right where I found it. Truly I was. But I dropped it again, and then I ESP'd that you had it. I guess I was awful naughty."

  I brushed my hand across my forehead.

  "Let's skip the question of good and bad for a minute," I said, my head throbbing. "What about this business of going into the future?"

  Robert spoke up, his eyes shining. "There isn't any future, Mr. Holmes. That's what I keep telling Star, but she can't reason -- she's just a girl. It'll all pass. Everything is always past."

  Jim stared at him, as though thunderstruck, and opened his mouth in protest. I shook my head warningly.

  "Suppose you tell me about that, Robert," I said.

  "Well," he began on a rising note, frowning, "it's kinda hard to explain at that. Star's a Bright and even she doesn't understand it exactly. But, you see, I'm older." He looked at her with superiority. Then, with a change of mood, he defended her. "But when she gets as old as I am, she'll understand it okay."

  He patted her shoulder consolingly. He was all of six years old.

  "You go back into the past. Back past Egypt and Atlantis. That's recent," he said with scorn. "And on back, and on back, and all of a sudden it's future."

  "That isn't the way I did it." Star tossed her head contrarily. "I reasoned the future. I reasoned what would come next, and I went there, and then I reasoned again. And on and on. I can, too, reason."

  "It's the same future," Robert told us dogmatically. "It has to be, because that's all that ever happened." He turned to Star. "The reason you never could find any Garden of Eden is because there wasn't any Adam and Eve." Then to me, "And mand didn't come from the apes, either. Man started himself."

  Jim almost strangled as he leaned forward, his face red and his eyes bulging.

  "How?" he choked out.

  Robert sent his gaze into the far distance.

  "Well," he said, "a long time from now -- you know what I mean, as a Stupid would think of Time-From-Now -- men got into a mess. Quite a mess --

  "There were some people in that time who figured out the same kind of traveling Star and I do. So when the world was about to blow up and form a new star, a lot of them teleported themselves back to when the Earth was young, and they started over again."

  Jim just stared at Robert, unable to speak.

  "I don't get it," I said.

  "Not everybody could do it," Robert ex
plained patiently. "Just a few Brights." But they enclosed a lot of other people and took them along." He became a little vague at this point. "I guess later on the Brights lost interest in the Stupids or something. Anyway, the Stupids sank down lower and lower and became like animals." He held his nose briefly. "They smelled worse. They worshiped the Brights as gods."

  Robert looked at me and shrugged.