A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  The charged air trembled and thunder blasted savagely across the plains. Great livid bolts of lightning slashed jaggedly down and tore at the crouching vegetation. The sound swelled to a shuddering roar that pounded the ears with physical force.

  “Merry Christmas to all,” Dale Jonston whispered dazedly. “And to all a—”

  He never finished. He had a split-second’s warning as a fresh wet smell hurtled in from the plains and then it hit. Rain! Rain such as no man on Earth had ever imagined—rain that slammed down in a blinding torrent, rain that thundered and pounded and choked.

  Ten years it had been pent up in a monstrous reservoir—and now the Gates of Hell were opened wide!

  He felt his feet slipping out from under him and he coughed desperately as water clogged his lungs. The rain beat at him with a million wet hammers and he knew he was going down. The ground under him was already a sea of mud.

  A strong arm came out of nowhere and supported him as he stumbled back toward shelter. He gasped and coughed and tried to wipe the blinding sky river out of his streaming eyes. He staggered into the main Post building and the door shut behind him.

  “Lkani!” he choked.

  He was alone—Lkani was gone.

  He leaned against the log wall, fighting to get his breath. The rain pounded down on the Post as if determined to rip it to shreds. Thunder roared as the gods went mad.

  Quite suddenly, Dale Jonston was chillingly aware that he was a long, long way from home.

  Dale Jonston paced up and down the floor of his office, puffing on his pipe and listening to the hammer of the rain on the roof. It never stopped, that rain—it ebbed and flowed with savage fury, but it never stopped. It made Earth’s mightiest cloudbursts seem like gentle drizzles and it went on forever.

  “Sit down, Dale,” said Tom Troxel. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Dale Jonston, seating himself behind his desk.

  “It’s only rain,” Troxel offered.

  “Sure—and the H-Bomb is only atoms.”

  “Take it easy—you can’t stop the rain and there hasn’t been any trouble yet.”

  “Yet—that’s the word I don’t like.”

  “What can happen? So it rains for six months or a year—it won’t kill anybody.”

  “Won’t it?”

  There was a splitting hiss followed by a jarring blast of thunder. The rain droned on and it was cold in the room.

  “I don’t follow you,” Troxel said.

  Dale Jonston got to his feet again and walked over to the duraglass window. He stood there and watched the rain wash across the glass like tiny breakers. That was all there was to see—the rain and the darkness.

  “Do you know what it’s like out there now?” he said quietly. “It’s been raining like this for three weeks now and no one knows for sure how long it will go on. Those lowlands have been saturated, drenched. They’re wild swamps now, filled with great white worms crawling up through the soft ground. The natives are all crowded together on the hilltops and the caves are roaring underground rivers. The natives call this the Time of the Terror and they’re not just coining phrases for the fun of it. There’s a reason—things happen.”

  “You think the natives will act up?”

  “No, they’re intelligent people and they’re better adapted to these conditions than we are. I’m not much worried about the natives.”

  “Then—”

  “You know man’s greatest enemy is not alien natives, not monsters, not the Others—but himself. Man is his own destroyer. He always has been, down through history back on Earth, out in space when he got to the planets of his own solar system, and now here. He won’t change just because he’s on a planet that belongs to another sun.”

  The rain thundered down and a cold wind whined around the little buildings of the Post. The light on Jonston’s desk threw blurred shadows on the log walls. Troxel shivered and lit a cigarette.

  “Yes,” Jonston went on, puffing slowly on his pipe. “I’m worried about us—us, the mighty Earthmen. I tell you, you take any group of selected spacemen, men who have been carefully conditioned and psychologically screened—you take ’em and coop them up somewhere for a year. Put pressure on them; don’t let them see a living person except themselves. They may come through O.K.—and they may not. And we’re not dealing with trained spacemen here, Tom. Intelligent workers, sure, but not trained spacemen.”

  “I’m receiving you.”

  “Take any two ordinary people—good friends, maybe—and lock them in a room for a year. Watch what happens; the growing tensions, the little arguments, the brooding hostility that develops. Multiply that by a hundred or so, toss in this infernal rain and a planet light-years away from home, complicate the situation with great worms and God only knows what else, add a few natives—”

  “And don’t forget the Others,” Troxel added with a grin.

  “I’m not forgetting them—not for a minute. They’re an unknown factor, and hence doubly dangerous. Tom, I wish you were in charge of this Post. I’d sit around with a fiendish leer on my face and concoct enough gruesome situations to make your hair stand up on end and sing the ‘Deep Space Blues’.”

  “I hear the swamp is full of dinosaurs, too.”

  Dale Jonston looked at his prematurely bald junior officer and gave up. He was glad he had a man like Troxel around. It took a lot to panic a man with a sense of humor, and Troxel was no fool. Jonston realized that Troxel was deliberately forcing him to relax, and he appreciated it. He needed to calm down, and no mistake. It wouldn’t do for the commander of the Post to blow his top at a time like this.

  He opened the bottom left-hand drawer of his plastic desk and took out a bottle and two glasses.

  “We’ll see if we can conjure up a couple of pink elephants to add to your menagerie,” he said. “Have a drink.”

  Troxel’s eyes brightened as he hitched his chair up to the desk.

  “Hm-m-m—Old Rocket Fuel,” he enthused. “That’s what Admiral Groten was drinking just before he passed away, poor man. You know what his last words were?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “He said, ‘I don’t see how they can make a profit on this stuff at twenty cents a fifth’.”

  “I told you that man was his own worst enemy,” Jonston said with a smile. “Jokes like that might well destroy civilization.”

  “Right you are,” Troxel agreed cheerfully. “Let’s drink our first drink to the Others.”

  Jonston raised his glass.

  “To the Others,” he said quietly.

  Outside, the great storm lashed out at the planet, churning the lowlands into swampy ooze and pelting the mountains with a driving deluge of rain. It was a chaos of thunder and lightning and wind. And, if you were of an imaginative turn of mind, you could hear, between the Post and the Hills of the Dead, the slithering of the great white worms …

  It was night on Rohan and the Post was still. Dale Jonston sat alone at his desk, listening to the monotonous hammer of the rain on the roof. There was no visible difference between night and day, but you always knew, somehow, when night had come. You felt a strange chill in your blood and your mind did odd things with the shadows on the walls.

  He permitted his tired body to relax. It had been a hard day; they were all hard. Conferences with psychologists and anthropologists—anthropologists were indispensable in space-travel, he reflected, since they were the only scientists on Earth who were trained to understand alien cultures—supervision of projected entertainments, paper work, and the thousand and one urgent little problems that were forever coming up in the management of any community. He fired up his pipe. Funny how much civilized man depended on tobacco …

  He had held up pretty well, he figured. He had been keyed up to start with and had stayed more or less at the same pitch, while the rest of the Post had grown progressively more tense as the weeks and the months dragged by. Even Troxel was showing it now—there was a report on his
desk from Dr. Moreland that noted the chief psychologist’s concern over Troxel’s condition.

  All he could hear in the night silence of the Post was the sound of the thunder, the rain, and the wind—all scrambled together into a roaring awareness of the storm that never stopped. The lightning teamed up with his desk lamp to throw grotesque shadows on the log walls.

  Sometimes, the distance got you. You wouldn’t think about it for days; you might even kid yourself into thinking that you had it licked, that you were conditioned to the deeps of space. Then it would hit you—if the great double star of Procyon should happen to explode, it would take over eleven years for the light of the explosion to reach the Earth. That’s a long way to be from home—a long way from the green fields and the trout streams and the girl you hoped would be waiting …

  He sat back in his chair, puffing slowly on his pipe, eyes closed. You could never explain a planet like Rohan to the people back on Earth; it was one of those places that only the spacemen would ever know. You might show them pictures, talk to them. You could tell them that Rohan was a world where everything was adapted to a peculiar, seasonal rain cycle. Due to the pull of the double star, an odd inclination of the planet’s axis, and great quantities of the spongelike substance frondal in the upper atmosphere, it only rained once every ten years—and then it really rained.

  You could tell them of the wonderful storage roots of the plant life, and of how they cast off millions of globular seeds just before the storm. The plants were largely destroyed by the pelting rain, but the seeds floated in the black muck and germinated after the storm.

  You might describe the intelligent, blue-skinned natives of Rohan, and tell how deceptive their simple culture was from an anthropological point of view. Their economy was a standard hunting-and-gathering one, and they lived in small groups on the great plains. When the rains came, they retreated to the hilltops, where the unusual crowding and emotional tensions brought about the periodic Time of the Terror. They lived then from storage bins and small mammals which took refuge with them on the high ground and fish in the few caves which were not transformed into torrential underground rivers.

  You could tell them about how the great plains turned into abysmal swamps filled with the crawling white worms that had been dormant underground during the dry season. You could tell them all about everything—except what counted. You couldn’t tell them how it felt.

  Dale Jonston nodded sleepily, too tired to go to his room.

  Men flamed up from the Earth and fought their way to the stars for many reasons—ambition, greed, glory. But there was only one thing that kept them on a planet once they had reached it—and that was a composite reason of economics. It might not always be so but now, in the infancy of interstellar travel, that was how it was working out.

  The planet had to produce. So it was with Rohan, a planet rich in mineral substances and medicinal plants nowhere else available. The Proclamation of Equal Rights for All Intelligent Life had nipped exploitation in the bud, to man’s everlasting credit. Trade was carried on pretty much on a mutual-benefit basis, within the limits of human failings and the alien psychologies and cultures found on the far-flung worlds. The natives of Rohan were indifferent; they had their culture and were perfectly content to let the men from Earth have theirs. Earth had nothing to offer them except terrestrial civilization, and Dale Jonston often considered that to be at best a dubious blessing. He thought of Lkani, with his shrewd intelligence and quick humor. Lkani was by no stretch of the imagination an “inferior being”—indeed, Dale Jonston sometimes wondered just which race was tolerating which on Rohan….

  The storm roared on, tearing at the building. The rain poured down until you couldn’t remember a time when the sun had shone and the sky had been any other color than black. The men were getting sick of the sight of each other. They laughed too much and too loud. You’d be sitting around and all of a sudden get an almost uncontrollable urge to sock somebody—anybody.

  And then you would remember that you were a man, and that the Others were watching.

  The Others. Who were they, what did they want? No man had ever seen them, but they were there—there in the vastnesses of space, waiting, watching. They were there in strange contacts on radar screens, there in alien artifacts found on distant worlds, there in the whispered legends that a thousand thousand primitive tribes whispered around their campfires in the sky.

  It was rather painfully obvious that man, despite his once self-centered assumptions, was not the only intelligent race in the galaxy. He was out to carry his civilization to the stars—and someone was already there! Somewhere, sometime, they must meet. And then—what?

  The best minds on Earth had wrestled with the problem and had come up with a few simple propositions which were unusual only in that they began to show the common sense of man’s maturity. One, there was already in existence a galactic civilization of a high order. Two, Earth could not hope to fight it—it must join it. Three, the men from Earth must first prove that they had finally grown up before they could expect any overtures from the Others.

  Always, down the black rocket trails between the stars, men could feel their presence. Somewhere, lost in infinity, the Others watched and judged.

  Dale Jonston got wearily to his feet and switched out the light. He walked slowly through the long halls to his room, nodding at the sentries as he passed them. The rain beat down with a terrible relentlessness and lightning hissed down on the swamps.

  Here he was, he thought—one tiny man in this outpost on the edge of forever. And something big was going to happen; he knew it positively with that subconscious sixth sense that made him a leader. Something big—something that might well change the whole future history of that strange species that the universe called man.

  It seemed as though he had hardly dropped off to sleep when Dale Jonston came to his senses with a start. He sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The storm sounded wet and unpleasant outside and he was glad that he had the warmth of the Post to protect him. He glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. Four in the morning. What in the world—

  Then it came again, whining dismally through the night. The alarm siren!

  He leaped out of bed and pulled on his uniform, his mind spinning with half-formed conjectures. He ran out of his room into the hall. Lights were coming on all over the Post.

  “What’s up?” panted Lin Carlson, catching up to him in the corridor.

  “Don’t know—come on.”

  Carlson—chief anthropologist at the Post—nodded and they pounded down the hall to Jonston’s office. The siren was wailing like a lost soul. Jonston flipped on the telecom.

  “Hello, Control,” he said tensely. “Get me the Watchtower and stand by.”

  The steady, relaxed face of the defense co-ordinator flashed on the screen.

  “O.K., Williams—Jonston here. Let’s have it.”

  “Over at the main gate, sir. Two sentries knifed—don’t know what the deal is yet but I figured I’d better turn in the alarm. I’ve already told Control to call a red alert.”

  “Check. Anything else?”

  “That’s about it—too early to tell what happened. Can’t get a thing on the radar. Should I turn the floodlights on?”

  “I’ll handle it, Williams. Stand by. Over.”

  Jonston jiggled the telecom switch.

  “Hello, Control. See that the floodlights are turned on and get hold of Lieutenant Burks—I want an immediate personnel check. Tell the radio room to try to get through to Earth. Tell Burks I’ll expect a report here in half an hour—Carlson is here with me. That’s all.”

  He switched off and turned to Carlson.

  “Any ideas, Lin? Natives?”

  Carlson shook his head and finished buttoning up his ETS shirt. “Don’t think so. Of course, I can’t tell for sure—but I’d bet a considerable fortune if I had one that those natives are safe. I’ve studied them for years—it’s unthinkable.”

&
nbsp; “That’s my opinion too, frankly. But we can’t take chances with that atomic pile in here.”

  “The Others, maybe?”

  “They’re still an X factor, Lin—there’s no way to tell. Where the devil is Troxel?”

  “Still pounding his ear probably. He could sleep right straight through Armageddon.”

  Jonston drummed his fingers on his desk and thought of Dr. Moreland’s psychological report on Troxel. It couldn’t be, of course. Still—

  “Let’s get down there to the main gate and see what goes,” he said.

  Carlson nodded and they hurried through the Post together. Jonston noted that all the men were properly deployed and that there was no panic—yet.

  The sentry house at the main gate was connected to the rest of the Post by a log tunnel. The gate was simply a door in the palisade wall, and the sentry house was a lonely place indeed during the Time of the Terror; visitors from across the swamps were few and far between.

  They went down the tunnel and the storm was very close. The logs were moist and cold. Five armed men greeted them in the sentry house. Their faces were pale. The two bodies on the floor were covered with uniform coats. Jonston looked them over.

  “Knife wounds all right,” he said slowly. “In the back.”

  “It’s Marks and Richards, sir,” one of the men said needlessly. His voice was taut. “They … they—”

  “They came a long way to die,” Jonston finished softly. “All quiet out here now?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Take it easy, then—but keep your eyes open.”

  He turned away, beckoning to Carlson, and they made their way back to his office. Lieutenant Burks was waiting for them.

  “What did you find, Burks?”

  “‘All present and accounted for, sir, as far as I can tell. Except—”

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t locate either Lieutenant Troxel or Dr. Moreland, sir. I thought perhaps that you’d seen them somewhere.”

  “No,” Jonston said slowly. “No, I haven’t seen them.”

  He sat down behind his desk and began to fill his pipe. The thunder and the rain seemed to isolate the little room, as though it were all by itself, drifting in infinity. He felt an awful chill race through his veins. Two men knifed in the back and—