Starman Read online

  The man’s fingers contracted, breaking the gray sphere he held. There was an explosive crackle. It sounded like a power transformer blowing up. A bright ball of light formed around the man’s fist.

  “Hey—ouch!” Heinmuller flung the wrench away as though it had bit him. Suddenly it was glowing a bright, cherry red. Behind him a forty-foot pine exploded like a torch. Both tree and wrench had been in a straight line with the man’s fist, but Heinmuller didn’t make the connection. His gaze traveled from his hand to the roaring blaze behind him to the now white-hot lug wrench. As he stared at it the steel dissolved into tiny metal balls of evaporating metal which sizzled and vanished into the air like spit on a hot stove. Seconds later there was only steaming earth where the wrench had been lying.

  Heinmuller gaped at the spot for another moment, to convince himself that he hadn’t imagined it, then turned and ran like hell for his van. Jenny slumped as the badly frightened young man burned rubber as he disappeared down the highway.

  Her captor helped her back onto her feet. His gentle touch even while fighting to keep her under control was just one more addition to the mass of contradictions that he was composed of. She didn’t scream anymore. There was no one around to hear her now, besides which she was more awed than frightened. When she turned to stare at him it was clear he wasn’t even upset by her attempt to escape. His expression was unchanged.

  “What did you do? How did you do that?” She pointed toward the ground where the wrench had—the only description she could think of that fit was “vanished.”

  He said nothing, directed her gently but firmly back into the car. This time he climbed in front of her and was waiting with the gun tucked back in the waistband of his chinos when she slid in behind the wheel. He gestured down the road. As far as he was concerned they might have stopped for a quick look at the scenery.

  “Okay, okay,” she said tiredly. “I know. Arizona-maybe.”

  “Yes, Arizona-maybe,” he repeated. He paused a moment before adding, “Define ‘okay.’ ”

  “Okay means all right, you win. We’ll do it your way.”

  He turned away from her and resumed his Buddhalike stare out the front window. As he did so the false smile she’d put on her face faded and she muttered under her breath, “In a pig’s eye we will.” She shifted into drive and the Mustang pulled back out onto the pavement.

  The huge Sikorsky workhorse hovered over the center of the impact crater. Several thick cables hung from its belly into the hole. Workers on the ground attached the dangling lines to the steel cage that had been built around the blackened object in the crater’s center.

  Mark Shermin watched until he was sure both cables and cage would do their job without snapping. Then he turned and jogged back to his own waiting helicopter.

  Once inside he turned back to the crater. The Sikorsky’s two big engines revved up. The meteor, or whatever it was, went up easily on the skycrane’s winch. He followed their progress until both chopper and cargo had disappeared over the trees. Then he turned to the waiting radioman and nodded.

  Lemon punched in a numerical sequence on the keyboard in front of him, waited until a series of lights winked to life atop the readout board. He spoke into the mike.

  “Communications Central, this is Project Visitor, Chequamegon Sighting. I have Mister Shermin here for you.” A pause, then he glanced back at his waiting charge. “Your director’s on the line.”

  Shermin recognized George Fox’s voice instantly. The director was talking to someone in the same room with him. “Are we on scramble? Okay.” Then, more loudly, “All right, Shermin, what is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? You’re not paid not to know, Shermin. I can not know myself. I’ve got a whole building full of bozos working for me back in Washington who don’t know. So don’t let me hear it from you.”

  “What I mean, sir, is that I’ve an idea what it is but I’d rather not speculate until I’ve had a chance to examine it fully. We just lifted it out of here. It’s on its way back to the base and I’m getting ready to follow it in.

  “I’ll tell you this much. If it is a meteor, it’s the funniest one I’ve ever seen. It’s not iron or nickel or any kind of stony matter, though again, I don’t want to commit myself firmly until we’ve had proper analyses run on it. I’m not even sure the composition is metallic. For one thing it’s got some kind of funny glaze all over it. Most of it burned off on reentry, but there’s still enough left to analyze. Some kind of weird ceramic or something. Like I said, it’s awfully early for speculation. I want to run a piece of it through a lab. Spectrograph, specific gravity, the usual stuff.

  “The other thing, sir, is that it’s hollow.”

  “How do you know? About the hollow, I mean.”

  “They drilled a little hole in it. Before I got here. Somebody got impatient. I didn’t authorize it and there was nobody here to tell them otherwise, but in any case it’s too late now. It’s done, and it doesn’t appear to have damaged anything. Not as far as I can tell just by looking at it, anyways.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” Fox said slowly, “is that my first instinct was right. It’s Soviet space-garbage, albeit a new variety. Maybe we’ve lucked into something valuable. If it was important, they’d do everything to make us think otherwise, up to and including denying that it’s theirs. Maybe they’re hoping they can get their people onto it and recover it or blow it up or something before we’ve had a chance to poke around inside it,”

  “No sir, with all due respect to your opinion, I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think it’s Soviet.”

  “Then what the devil have you got out there, Shermin?”

  “I’ll know more in a few hours, sir. Like I said, it’s on the way out of here now. I’ll have it cleaned up at the base and then covered up and shipped out. A lab’s being set up in Madison and everything should be ready by the time I get there with the object.”

  In his office, George Fox nudged a button on his desk. There were quite a few buttons on the console and several of them were marked in red. The one he touched now was not.

  “Stand by, Shermin.” He turned his mouth toward an intercom pickup. “Brayton? In here, please.” Back to the phone again. “Let me make sure I understand exactly what you’re telling me, Shermin. This meteor, or whatever it is, appears to be hollow.”

  “Not ‘appears to be,’ is hollow. There’s no question about that, sir.”

  Fox didn’t look up as Brayton entered. His assistant waited patiently, eying his boss with undisguised curiosity.

  “Okay, is hollow. Any idea what that means?”

  “I can think of several possibilities, sir.”

  “Among other things it’s an automatic affirmative two-oh-four. That puts the country, at least as far as this department is concerned, on a stage-one alert. You understand?”

  “Yes sir. I’ve read my briefing books.”

  “You’d be surprised how many consultants never even bother to pick the damn things up, let alone read any of ’em. I don’t have to go into detail about what’s at stake here, then. Keep me informed, and be damned sure of any conclusions you reach, Mark. Damned sure. I’m going to have to rely on your expertise in this matter, and you know it. So double-check everything before you make any final decisions. We go off half-cocked on this we could all end up with our balls in the bouillon.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “It’s good that you do. I know I can rely on you, Mark.” He hung up, considered his next move.

  “What’s up, chief?”

  Fox gave his assistant the jaundiced eye. “Either Shermin’s brain has imploded or else we’re sitting on a possible two-oh-four affirmative.”

  Brayton swallowed hard. “No shit? I thought that part of the bible was in there for amusement value.”

  “It’s no gag. Not this time. Better upgrade the alert to stage two. Cancel the rest of my appointments for the day and get me so
me transportation. I’m going on a little trip, and not for my health.”

  Brayton looked stunned. “Declaring a two-oh-four is pretty big stuff, chief. A lot of people are going to want to know the reason why.”

  “Keep it within the department as much as possible.” Fox rose from his chair and started around the desk. “Tell anyone who gets persistent that it might have something to do with some harmless but potentially interesting Soviet space-junk. That’s what I thought this was, so there’s no reason why any nosy-bodies won’t think the same. And for God’s sake keep the Press out of it. We don’t want them poking around until we know for sure what this is all about.”

  Brayton nodded and turned to leave when a sudden thought made him turn back to his boss. “What is it all about, sir?”

  Fox was hunting through a file cabinet drawer. “We don’t know yet. So far we’ve nothing but possibilities. You’ll know as soon as I know, and me, I’ll know as soon as Mark Shermin does.”

  The two men exchanged a meaningful glance and then went their separate ways. There was much to do, and not all of it pleasant.

  Jenny looked over at her passenger. He seemed to have relaxed a little. Instead of staring straight ahead, he was starting to let his gaze roam lazily through the forest, the flowers growing on the highway shoulder, taking everything in. The gun rested in his lap again. Maybe it was too uncomfortable to keep stashed in his belt. Or maybe he just wanted to be able to get to it that much quicker.

  She found she was starting to tremble again and forced herself to clamp down hard on the wheel. “Do you have to keep that thing in your lap like that all the time?”

  He turned his attention away from the trees and back to her. “Something is wrong?”

  “You bet something is wrong.” She nodded toward the automatic. “Those things, guns, make me a little bit jumpy.”

  “Define ‘little bit jumpy.’ ”

  “Well, a little bit’s like,” she held up thumb and forefinger, keeping the ends slightly apart, “that’s a little bit. Small, not much of anything. And jumpy’s like nervous, afraid.”

  “Afraid, yes.”

  “You know that word?” She couldn’t recall his having used it in her presence. “Afraid?”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “How much English do you understand? You know more than you’ve said, don’t you?”

  “I am learning as I listen to you, and to your communicator.” He nodded at the radio, currently silent. “I understand greetings in fifty-four local languages. I understand more English language—little bit. I learn more.” He went quiet again. After several minutes he leaned forward and popped open the glove compartment door. Seeing that it was crammed full of interesting material, he put the gun aside, by his right hip and well out of Jenny’s reach, and began rummaging through the compartment’s contents.

  She watched him curiously. He appeared fascinated by the simplest everyday objects. “Nothing much in there.” He extracted a small leather wallet. “That’s mine. Wallet.” She reminded herself that he didn’t appear to be interested in thievery. Oh no, not at all. All he was stealing was the car—and her.

  He opened the wallet and examined the few bills. Then he started flipping through the plastic sleeves, pausing at the second one.

  “That’s my driver’s license,” she told him. “You need one of those in order to be allowed to drive a car. That’s my picture on it, and my name, Jenny Hayden.”

  He spared her a single emotionless glance just to let her know he heard, finished looking through the wallet. He replaced it in the glove compartment and resumed his foraging. Jenny watched him for a while longer and discovered she was more bored than anxious. The road was a more animated companion than her passenger.

  She stood the silence for a half hour before asking, “Look, what do you want, anyway?”

  He looked up from his work. Her small pen-lite flashlight lay disassembled on his lap. “I want to go to Arizona-maybe.”

  “No, I don’t mean now. What I meant was, why did you come here? To this place. To my world.”

  He put the flashlight back together before replying. “I come—to see inhabitants of planet Earth.” He put the light back into the glove compartment, swapping it for a bottle opener fashioned in the shape of a frog.

  “You mean you’re like, sort of an explorer? You’re just looking around?”

  “Looking around. Yes. I observe, study, have contacts maybe. Learn.” He traded the bottle opener for an old baseball cap, immediately recognizing it from the home movies he’d watched the night before. He turned the battered piece of material over in his hands. Jenny kept her gaze glued to the highway ahead.

  “I see. And, uh, when you go back to wherever it is you came from will you be taking any, uh—” She turned to him, wanting to finish the question but dreading the possible answers.

  What she saw made her forget everything else.

  “Oh my God.”

  The visitor had donned the baseball cap. Now he was grimacing at her with a passable copy of Scott’s sly smile. Even the angle of the cap on his head was exactly the same as it had been in the movies. She continued gaping at him until the right front wheel complained and she wrenched the Mustang back onto the pavement. Gravel went flying, ticked against the window. She didn’t care if she’d nicked the paint. She didn’t care about anything else except the impossible vision from the immediate past which sat on the seat next to her. She was starting to sweat.

  The starman—might as well call him that as anything else, she thought wildly—looked pleased with himself. “I look like—Scott?”

  She had the Mustang under control again, which was more than she could say for herself. She inhaled deeply several times before she trusted herself to speak rationally.

  “Yeah, you do—I guess.” Something caused her to frown and stare more closely at him. “At first you do, anyway. But not really. Not if you look hard. Your nose is different because it’s straight. He broke his twice. And there’s something else, I dunno, something spooky about your eyes.”

  “Define ‘spooky.’ ”

  That much was easy. “Spooky is what you are. You’re spooky.” She glanced back at the road, chewed on her lower lip. “I saw you last night, in there on the living-room floor. You know. Flopping around, growing. Turning from a baby into a boy into a man.” She was amazed at the sound of her own voice. How calm she was, how quiet. How controlled. Easier to relate to the impossible from a distance, she thought.

  “Tell me something. Could you have made yourself into anything you wanted? Like a dog or a bird?”

  He nodded. “If duplicatable material of sufficient quality available, yes.” He was watching her now, not the woods, not the road ahead. Watching for her reactions.

  “Then why be what you are? Why do you want to look like Scott?”

  “Difficult to explain. I have not enough right words yet. I want to look like Scott because I see you in images last night with Scott. I want you not be little bit jumpy. You not little bit jumpy in pictures with Scott.”

  She stared at him, then reached down to switch on the radio. She needed to mull that one over, because it implied a great deal. Among other things, it suggested that he was concerned about her state of mind. Well, he had company on that one. But it wasn’t the sort of reaction you’d expect from someone who meant you ill.

  The radio picked up an oldie but goodies station. That was fine with her. The last thing she wanted to listen to just then was the news.

  Bing Crosby was crooning at her from out of a simpler, more comprehensible past. Good old Bing. The song was familiar: “and would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams . . .”

  Uh-oh, wrong lyrics. Hastily she leaned over to punch up another station.

  The hangar reminded Shermin of a football stadium on a Thursday morning: vast, empty, and quiet. Within its cool high depths the S-76 looked like a nesting sparrow on the West Texas plains. Not that it was devoid of activity. He strode
briskly toward the center of the hangar. Uniformed technicians were hard at work there, moving equipment into place, uncrating electronics, setting up and testing instruments. Within the hangar, a complete chemical and physics laboratory was being erected.

  Resting nearer the back was the meteor, or whatever it was. It was already surrounded by sophisticated electronics. More were being cabled together and set in place as he drew close. By the end of the day the entire setup would be on-line and ready to go.

  Three men were hard at work atop the meteor. He recognized Bell and two technicians who had taken the place of the two airmen from the impact site. They’d drilled a larger hole in the top of the object and were trying to create a wider gap by using a hydraulic jack on the opening.

  Despite being well anchored the jack was showing a disconcerting, not to say dangerous, tendency to jump all over the place. Bell was sweating profusely and wore the look of someone trying to facet a hundred-carat diamond with a jackhammer.

  Another figure came up behind Shermin, drawing his attention. He recognized the radioman from his chopper.

  “Hi.” Lemon looked past him, toward the meteor. “What are those guys trying to do?”

  “Doing the best they can, Lemon.”

  The radioman made a face. “You’re just a regular fountain of information, aren’t you, Mister Shermin?”

  He grinned apologetically. “Sorry. In my field volubility’s considered something of a drawback.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Shermin nodded toward the sheet of paper Lemon held. “Something for me, Lemon?”

  “What?” The radioman forced himself to tear his attention away from what was going on atop the meteor. “Oh, yeah. I remembered what you told me about police calls. You did say you wanted to hear about anything weird, out of the ordinary?”

  Shermin nodded. “Anything.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know that it’s worth much, but since you didn’t exactly give me specific guidelines I figured I might as well use my own judgment.” He looked down at the paper. “I got this one off the general channel the cops around here use. Just picked it up from Ashland.”