A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  Nolan sighed, fixing his gaze on the ceiling. “Your little creation—it’s written as one word now, ‘Fullcircle,’ you know—has spread to six more communities in the last two weeks. It’s winning every blasted election. A great, great system!”

  “Great,” George agreed, in utter despair. “Still the same routine?”

  “Yeah. Nobody puts it on the ballot, since nobody can get any royalties on it after the first time around; but the thing keeps winning as a write-in candidate. No advertising, no promotion, no nothing!”

  “The best advertisement,” George repeated wearily, “is a satisfied customer.”

  “Great.” Nolan paused, at a loss for words. “Great.”

  “Will, what have I done? I’m just an average kind of guy, just trying to make a living; I’m no revolutionary, dammit!”

  “Well, George—”

  “That monstrosity—that Full Circle—I mean Fullcircle—is too good, that’s what’s wrong. It’s got everything! All the joys of rural living, all the joys of the city—how can you beat it? I can’t beat it, and I thought it up! Where will the damned thing end, Will? Where will it end?”

  “I strongly suspect,” Will Nolan said in complete seriousness, “that it’s going to take over the world.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Too late to invoke the Deity, my friend. We’re headed for technological unemployment. A great, great situation.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a pension,” George said.

  “I’ll work on that angle. I should get one too; I sold it in the first place. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  “So long, Will.”

  George cut the screen off and walked unsteadily back to his hammock. He closed his eyes but he could not relax.

  “Survival of the fittest,” he remarked to the wall.

  He was no fool. He saw what was happening, saw it with hideous clarity. There was a fight for survival among social systems as well as in the animal kingdom; there were no primitive hunters left in London. The setup in the United States, with its emphasis on local variations, would work fine, until a social organization came along that was markedly superior to all the rest. And then—

  And then it spread.

  Everybody wanted one.

  It was the end of an era.

  “I am Achilles’ heel,” George said.

  The empty rooms began to get on his nerves. He slipped into his rainsuit and went down and out the little-used street entrance. The rain was a gray drizzle in the air, and Washington was hushed and colorless.

  George walked, aimlessly.

  His feet squished wetly on the old cement.

  He didn’t even feel like smoking.

  It was two hours before he saw another human being. At first, the figure was just a dark shadow, coming toward him. Then, as it walked nearer, it took on substance and features.

  It was Henry Lloyd. A few short years ago, he had been the most successful social inventor in the country.

  Lloyd was looking very old.

  “Hank!” George called out. “It’s good to see you.”

  Lloyd stared at him icily.

  “Monopolist,” he said, and made a small detour to get around him. He said nothing more, and vanished up the wet street.

  George Sage put his head down.

  He walked slowly through the gray rain-haze, walked until night had come to the city. Then he headed back toward home, because he knew that Lois would be worried.

  That wasn’t the only reason, he supposed.

  There just wasn’t anywhere else for him to go.

  So you see (Robert Sage said to the historian as they finished their third glass of beer) that it wasn’t all milk and honey after Dad invented our way of life. There was a tough transition time, when Fullcircle was just catching on and a lot of people hated Dad’s guts.

  I’ll tell you, getting that pension wasn’t the easiest stunt in the world; there was a time when I thought we were all going to starve to death. People get sore when I mention that; they figure I’m just some spoiled brat who likes to tell lies, but it’s the truth.

  All that Father of His Country stuff came later—much later.

  Well, that’s the way it was. I could tell you wanted the facts, so I’ve given ’em to you straight. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

  What’s that? Sure, if you insist. I’ll get ’em next time—that a deal?

  Tell you what. Old George doesn’t live far from here. Mother’s dead, you know, so Dad is all alone. He still won’t admit to himself that it’s all over; that’s the way artists are, I guess. Like as not, he’ll be sitting at that old desk of his, making notes and cussing the weather. He’ll look busy, Dad will, but don’t let that fool you.

  He’s lonesome, and likes to be able to talk to people.

  I’m going over there now. Won’t you come along?

  NIGHT

  Bob Wistert found the steel axes quite by accident.

  He had been poking around in the station storehouse back of Thunderton’s, looking for a replacement battery for his electric typer, when he had moved a crate and found the trapdoor. It pulled open easily, and there they were.

  Steel axes.

  Hundreds of them.

  Their metallic heads gleamed in the white light.

  “Good God,” Bob Wistert breathed. Quickly, he slammed the trapdoor shut and shoved the crate back in position to hide it. He wiped his sweating hands on his trousers and stood very still. Listening.

  A bird trilled cheerfully, digesting a worm. The twilight breeze rustled across the sand and lost itself in the tall trees beyond. The sea muttered and whispered insistently in its ancient conversation with the shore.

  That was all.

  He switched off the light in the storehouse and locked the door behind him. Soundlessly, he moved down the pathway. Both Sirius and her white dwarf companion were below the horizon now, but the sky was still a blaze of blue-white with sunset clouds laced with flame. Tony Thunderton’s house was ahead of him, a bubble in the pinelike trees, and its plastic was clear. He searched the house with his eyes, but Tony wasn’t there. He hurried on, anxious to get past the house.

  “Hello, Bob,” Tony said.

  Bob Wistert stopped short. Tony was sitting in the yard, reading. He put aside his scanner and stood up. He was not a tall man and he was getting stout. His skin was bronze in the slowly fading light and his hair was black. He did not smile.

  “Find what you were after?” Tony asked.

  “Yes. Sure. Needed a battery.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Got to get back to Helen,” Bob said. “Time to eat.”

  “Give her my regards.”

  He walked on, trying not to hurry. He could feel Tony’s dark eyes following him down the path. When the trees screened him, he broke into a run. He entered his own house by the station wall and locked the door behind him.

  “Helen! Where are you?”

  She came out of the bedroom, straightening a clip in her brown hair. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was taut, as though wound too tightly on a spring. “You look like Hamlet’s old man filled you full of ectoplasm.”

  He took her hands, his tall, thin frame towering over his wife. “Honey, I’ve got some bad news.”

  “I can believe it. Are we in for a native uprising? Am I going to be burned at the stake like Jeanne d’Arc?”

  “Dammit, I’m not kidding.”

  “Spill it, then. The suspense is killing me.”

  “Over in the storehouse,” Bob said quickly, “I was looking for a battery. I pushed a crate out of the way and found a trapdoor. There’s a cellar under there. It’s full of steel axes.”

  Helen’s face paled under her tan. She sat down.

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered.

  “You tell me,” Bob said.

  Together, moved by a common impulse, they turned and looked at the door.

  Toward Anthony Thunderton’s.

&nb
sp; “He must be insane,” Helen said.

  Outside, the wind was gentle in the trees and an alien sun was lost beneath an old and lovely sea.

  Almost imperceptibly, the twilight deepened. Night would not fall for ten Earth-days. When it did come, it would last for a long, long time.

  There was no hurry.

  “I knew there was something fishy about this place,” Bob said. “I knew it the minute I got off that ship, the minute I spotted Thunderton.”

  “We’ve only been here a month. Maybe we ought to give Tony the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Look,” he said. “When you see some joker coming at you with a lead pipe in his hand and blood in his eye, the only doubt you’re entitled to is whether you can bash him before he bashes you.” He hesitated and then spoke slowly. “It’ll be over nineteen Earth-years before that ship comes back for us, Helen. We’re the only people from Earth on this planet except for Tony—and Tony’s been here for ten years. He’s been alone here for five years, ever since his wife died. He’s been a god—he’s had absolute power if he wanted it. If he’s flipped his wig out here, we’ve got to know about it—and fast.”

  Helen looked away. She looked at their home, at the soft blue chairs and the pictures on the walls and the lazy couch before the fireplace. Something died in her eyes. “We can’t be sure he’s using those axes,” she said.

  “He’s using them all right, and he’s not using them to shave himself with, either.”

  There was a long silence, broken only by the wind and the beat of the sea.

  “I’ll just have to go out and get some proof,” Bob said finally. “We’ll need photographs.”

  “He took you out to meet one group, didn’t he? You didn’t tell me about anything wrong there.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Bob Wistert admitted. “That figures, though. He wouldn’t show me the ones he’d been working on, not unless he’s cracked more than I think he has. There’s another band of them about twenty miles east of here according to the contact map. I can get to them before night. We’ve got to know.”

  “Take me with you, Bob. I don’t want to stay here alone.”

  He kissed her lightly, ruffling her fragile brown hair with his hand. “No, lady. I can make better time alone, and you’ll be all right here. Just keep the door locked and keep a gun handy. Don’t let him in, Helen, no matter what happens.”

  She didn’t argue. “You’ll need some food,” she said.

  Packing was simple enough. He put his bed roll in his pocket and slipped the force field generator on his wrist. The food pills went into his belt slots. He pulled on his boots and was ready to go. Weapons were not permitted off the station, and it did not occur to him that he could smuggle one out in his pocket if he wanted to.

  In any event, he wasn’t worried about the natives.

  “Don’t worry, baby. Everything will be all right.”

  “Of course.” she said.

  He went out into the bright blue twilight, light-years from the planet Earth. When he had gone, Helen locked the door behind him and sat down in one of the blue chairs.

  She began the wait that has never been measured.

  She looked toward Anthony Thunderton’s. “Damn you,” she said in a flat, cold voice. “Damn you for killing the only thing we ever had. Damn your soul.”

  It took Bob Wistert five Earth-days to find the natives.

  Through the tall green trees ahead of him, he saw a curl of blue woodsmoke in a grassy plain. He walked faster, his force field protecting him from the thorny brush that guarded the cool forest floor. Once, not long ago, the scene before him would have thrilled him with excitement.

  Now, there was only a nameless dread.

  The wind was in his face and he saw them before they saw him. They were few—perhaps thirty men, women, and children squatting around low orange fires. Their crude lean-tos with thatched grass tops were almost invisible against a soft backdrop of swaying grasses and incredible weeds and flowers.

  The children were naked. The adults, however, were too sophisticated for nakedness. Their skin loin cloths were simple and unadorned, but both men and women were scarified and wore wooden ear plugs the size of half-dollars within their stretched ear lobes. Their teeth were filed and darkened. They were a small people, and their skins were faintly greenish.

  All in all, they looked quite human.

  Stones had been heated in the fire until they were good and hot, and had then been dumped into bark containers full of water. The water boiled and cooked a varied assortment of plants, insects, and meat. There was no pottery. The only visible weapons were stone-tipped spears and curved throwing sticks.

  Bob Wistert made no attempt to hide himself. He walked straight toward the camp, his arms swinging easily at his sides. When the natives spotted him, they melted into the grass as though they had never been.

  He stood by the bubbling bark basket and waited. These people knew Thunderton; they would soon recognize that he was of the same tribe.

  Shortly, a young man stepped out of the grass, clapping his hard hands in greeting. A young man! Bob, even after only a month, knew how wrong that was.

  He clapped his hands in return. “I come in peace,” he said, speaking the language he had learned before coming to the seventh world of Sirius. “I am called Robert. I am the brother of Anthony, who is your brother.”

  “My brother, you are welcome here with the Nwarkton, the people. I am called Entun.” His voice was clear and liquid. Bob had no difficulty understanding him, although the dialect was different from what he had heard before.

  The others came out of the grass and shyly resumed their cooking. He noticed that the old men—there were four of them—seemed hesitant and confused. He kept his eye peeled, and he soon saw what he had come to see.

  Steel axes.

  Six of them.

  Five of them were in the possession of young men. One was being used by a woman to knock clumsy branches from firewood. Bob kept talking politely, but he got all the pictures he needed with his ring camera.

  “It is ready,” Entun said. “Eat with us.”

  He could not refuse. He sat with the young man and ate some of the stew from a bark bowl. It was just as bad as it looked. When he had eaten, he stayed a decent interval with the Nwarkton, making the small talk that is the same everywhere. He told lewd stories, but only to the proper relatives. He could not tell which of the girls might be his “sisters,” so he carefully avoided speaking to any of them.

  He stayed for one sleep period, and then left, after a grim struggle with his breakfast.

  No one had said anything about the steel axes.

  He walked through the forest and the air was sweet and clean. It was darker now and the long shadows were less distinct. Sirius was only a glow of electric light in the west. It was strange, he thought. He, so close to that great star, could not see it. On Earth, light-years away across a sea of desolation, it was the Dog Star, the brightest in the heavens. And the light that could be seen on Earth, by some boy and girl in a hovering copter, had left the star almost nine years before Bob Wistert had set foot on the seventh world of Sirius …

  He shivered in a growing twilight hush.

  When he got home, Helen was waiting for him.

  “I got the pictures,” he said, sinking down on the couch. “There’s no doubt of it now; I guess there never was.”

  “Tony came to see me,” she said.

  He sat up straight. “What did he want?”

  She fixed him a drink and put it in his hand. “He wanted us to come over for dinner when you got back. I didn’t let him in.”

  He knows. He must have seen me go.

  Helen moved about the room, giving a poor imitation of calm unconcern. “How now, Horatio? Do we ride into the valley of death, all two of us?”

  “Well, there’s only one of him.”

  “We’re going to go, then?”

  He hesitated. “First, I’m going to log a little s
ack time. Second, I’m going to take a bath. Third, we’ll go over and sample the cuisine at Tony’s. Fair enough?”

  “I’d just as soon got it over with.”

  He finished his drink and arranged himself on the couch, too tired to go to bed. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep.

  Sleep was slow in coming. Thoughts came instead.

  What is Thunderton up to? Is he going to ruin everything for all the people here? Is he going to ruin everything for us? Did Helen and I make a mistake in coming here? So many years to go—and what can we do? What can we do?

  He tossed restlessly on the couch. Impatiently, he tried to sleep, tried to relax his mind.

  The thoughts kept coming, nagging at him.

  Questions, memories, promises, fears—

  And dreams seemed very far away …

  In 1975, the first man set foot on the moon of Earth.

  Mars had been reached by 1981, and a landing had been made in 1983. By the year 2000, the solar system had been pretty well explored. It had proved to be fascinating, in much the same way as the Grand Canyon is fascinating. It was wild and good to look at, but it was desperately empty.

  Some fifty years later, in 2051, the first expedition got back from Centaurus. After that, a more practical interstellar drive was only a matter of time. In 2062, the first of the true starships was launched. It moved with a new kind of motion through a new kind of space. It was more than just a faster spaceship, just as an airplane is more than just a faster automobile.

  The starships were different.

  From 2062 until 2090 was the period of the initial investigation of the nearer star systems. Life had sought out life.

  One hundred and three Earth-like planets were found and there were humanoid people on every one of them. No planet was located that had a culture higher than Earth’s, at least in a technological sense. As might have been suspected from Earth’s history, Earth had specialized in technological development. Out of the one hundred and three planets which had intelligent life, only seventeen had attained an agricultural, Neolithic culture—and none had passed beyond that stage.

  It became very clear why Earth had never been contacted from space.