CHAPTER ONE
Barron dumped the last of his gear into a duffel bag, pulled the straps tight, and said to nobody in particular, “Well, that’s that and the hell with all of them.”
He straightened, taking a last look around the neat, tight little world of spaceport living quarters. Built to conserve materials (it had been the first Terran building on Darkover, in the zone later to become Trade City), it had something in common with a spaceship’s cabin; it was narrow, bright, clean and cramped; the furniture functional and almost all built-in. It would have suited a professional spaceman perfectly. Ground crews were another matter; they tended to get claustrophobia.
Barron had complained as much as anyone else; saying the place might be a decent fit for two mice, if one of them were on a stiff diet. But now that he was leaving it, he felt a curious pang, almost homesickness. He had lived here five years.
Five years! I never meant to stick to one planet that long!
He hoisted the duffel bag to his shoulder and closed the door of his quarters for the last time.
The corridor was as functional as the living quarters; reference charts and maps papered the walls up to the height of a tall man’s eye level. Barron strode along, not seeing the familiar charts, but he did cast a brief bitter glance at the dispatch board, seeing his name there in red on the dreaded rep-sheet. He had five reps—official reprimands—when seven would put one out of the Space Service for good.
And no wonder,
he thought.
I didn’t get any dirty deal; in fact, they went easy on me. Pure luck, and no credit to me, that cruiser and the mapping skip didn’t crash and blow the damned spaceport right off Darkover, and half Trade City with them!
He set his mouth tight. Here he was, worrying about demerits like a kid in school—and yet it wasn’t merely that. Many people in Terran Space Service went through their whole twenty years without a single rep—and he’d piled up five in one disastrous night.
Even though it wasn’t his fault.
Yes it was, damn it. Who else could I blame it on? I should have reported sick.
But I wasn’t sick!
The rep-sheet read: gross neglect of duty, grave danger of causing accident to a landing spacecraft. They had found him literally napping on duty.
But damn it, I wasn’t asleep either!
Daydreaming?
Try telling them that. Try telling them that when your every nerve and muscle should have been alert over the all-important dispatch board, you were—somewhere else. You were caught up in a deep dream, bewildered with colors, sights, sounds, smells, blazes of brilliance. You were leaning into an icy wind, under a deep purple sky, a blaze of red sunlight overhead—the Darkovan sun—the sun that the Terrans called The Bloody Sun. But you’d never seen it like that, reflected in rainbow prisms through a great wall of crystalline glass. You heard your own boots ringing on ice-hard stone—and your pulse was pounding with hate, and you felt the surge of adrenaline in your blood. You broke into a run, feeling the hatred and blood-lust rise to a crest inside you; before you something reared up—man, woman, beast—you hardly knew or cared—and you heard your own snarl as a whip came crashing down and something screamed——
The dream had dissolved in the thundering nightmare noise of klaxons, the all-quarters alarm of sirens and whoopers and bells, the WRECK lights blazing everywhere, and your reflexes took over. You’d never moved so fast. But it was too late. You had slammed the wrong button and the dispatch tower was fouled up by that all-important eight-second margin, and only a minor miracle of seat-of-the-pants navigation by the young captain of the mapping ship—he was getting three medals for it—had saved the spaceport authority from the kind of disaster that waked people up—what people were left—in screeching nightmares for twenty years afterward.
Nobody had wasted words on Barron since. His name on the rep-sheet had made him a pariah. He had been told to vacate his quarters by 2700 that night and report for a new assignment, but nobody bothered telling him where. It was as simple as that—five years in Darkover Spaceport and seventeen in the service had been wiped out. He didn’t feel especially mistreated. There wasn’t room in the Terran Spaceforce for that kind of mistake.
The corridor ended in an archway; a plaque, which Barron ignored after seeing it every day for years; told him he was now in Central Coordinating. Unlike the building where quarters were located, this one was constructed of native Darkovan stone, translucent and white as alabaster, with enormous glass windows. Through them he could see flaring, blue spaceport lights; the shapes of groundcraft and resting ships, and, far beyond the lights, pale greenish moonlight. It was a half an hour before dawn. He wished he’d stopped for some breakfast; then he was glad he hadn’t. Barron wasn’t thin-skinned, but the way the men ignored him in the cafeteria would put anyone off his food. He hadn’t bothered eating much in the last couple of days.
There was always the Old Town, the Darkovan part of Trade City where he sometimes slipped away for exotic food when he was tired of the standard fare of the quarters; there were not a few restaurants which catered to spacemen and tourists who came for “exotic delicacies.” But he hadn’t felt like trying to pass the guards; he might have been stopped. They might have thought he was trying to escape an official process. He wasn’t officially under arrest, but his name was mud.
He left the duffel bag outside the narrow bank of elevators, stepped in and pressed the topmost button. The elevator soared up, depositing him outside the dispatch room. He lowered his head, passing it without a glance inside and headed for the coordinator’s office in the penthouse.
And then, without warning—he was standing on a high parapet, winds flowing icily around his body, ripping at him with enough force to tear his clothes off, ridging his skin with gooseflesh and pain. Below him, men screamed and moaned and died over the sounds of clashing steel; and somewhere he heard stone falling with a great crunching rumble like the end of the world. He could not see: He clung hard to the stone, feeling frost bite with fiery teeth at his stiff fingers, and fought the sickness rising in his throat.
So many men. So many dead, all of them my people and my friends . . .
He let go of the stone. His fingers were so cramped that he had to pry them off with his other hand. He caught his blowing garments around him, feeling an instant of incongruous physical comfort in the thick fur against his cold hands, and went swiftly, on groping feet, through the blind dark. He moved as in a dream, knowing where he was going without knowing why; his feet knew the familiar path. He felt them move from flagstone to wood parquet to thick carpeting, then down a long flight of stairs and up another flight—farther and farther, until the distant sounds of battle and falling walls were muffled and finally silenced. His throat was thick and he sobbed as he went. He passed through a low archway, automatically ducking his head against the stone arch he had never seen and would never see. A current of chill air blew on him. He fumbled in the darkness for something like a loose hood of feathery textures; he drew it downward swiftly and he thrust his head through the feathers, pulling it down.
He felt himself falling back and in the same instant he seemed to rise, to soar upward and swoop outward on the wings of the feathery substance. The darkness suddenly thinned and was gone, and light broke around him—not through his darkened eyes, but through the very skin of his body—and he felt cold reddish light and frosty clouds. Weightless, borne on the feather dress, he soared outward, guiding himself through the sudden brilliance of dawn.
Quickly he grew accustomed to the bird dress, and balancing on one wing (
It’s a long time since I dared to do this
), he turned to look below.
The colors were strange, flat, shapes distorted and concave; he was not seeing them with ordinary mortal eyes. Far below a swarm of men in rough, dark clothing clustered around a rude tower covered in skins, next to an outwork. Arrows flew, men screamed; on the wall a man toppled with a long despairing shriek, and fell out of his sight. He beat harsh pinions, trying to swoop down, and ...
He was standing on firm flooring, wiping the sweat of terror from his face.
He was here. He was Dan Barron. He was not flying bodiless except for a few feathers over a weird tipping land-scrape, fighting a biting current of wind. He stared at his fingers and put one into his mouth. It felt numb, frostbitten.
The stone was cold.
It had happened again.
It was so real,
so damnably real
. His skin was still gooseflesh and he mopped eyes still streaming from the bitter wind.
Good God
, he thought, and shuddered. Had someone been slipping him hallucinogenic drugs? Why would anyone do that? He had no enemies, as far as he knew. He had no real friends—he wasn’t the type to make them at a strange outpost—but no enemies either. He did his work and minded his own business, and he knew no one who envied him either his few possessions or the tough and somewhat underpaid job he had been doing. The only explanation was that he was mad, psychotic, freaked-out, off his landing base. He realized that in that weird dream, obsession or hallucination, he had been speaking and thinking in Darkovan—the strong accented mountain Darkovan which he understood, but could not speak except for the few words necessary to order a meal or buy some knickknack in Trade City. He shivered again and mopped his face. His feet had carried him within a few feet of the coordinator’s office, but he stopped, trying to get his breath and his bearings.
This made five times.
The first three times had struck him as abnormally vivid daydreams, born of boredom and hangover and based on his infrequent but colorful excursions into the Old Town. He had dismissed them without much thought, even though he woke shuddering with the reality of the surges of fear or hatred which possessed him in these dreams. The fourth—the fourth had been the near-catastrophe of the spaceport. Barron wasn’t an imaginative man. His possible explanations went as far as a nervous breakdown, or someone with a grudge slipping him a hallucinatory drug as a grim joke, and not a step further. He wasn’t paranoid enough to think that someone had done it for the purpose it achieved, his disgrace and a spaceport catastrophe. He was confused, a little scared and a little angry, but not sure if the anger was his own or part of the strange dream.
He couldn’t continue to delay. He waited a minute more, then straightened his shoulders and knocked at the coordinator’s door. A light flashed a green COME IN, and he stepped in.
Mallinson, Coordinator of Spaceport Activities for the Terran Zone of Darkover, was a hefty man who looked, at any hour of day or night, as if he’d slept in his uniform. He appeared unimaginative and serious. Any notion Barron might have had about revealing his experiences to his superior died unspoken. Nevertheless, Mallinson looked straight at Barron, and he was the first person who’d done so for five days.
Without preamble he said, “All right, what the hell happened? I pulled your file; you’re listed as a damned good man: In my experience, men don’t pile up a perfect record and then rack it up like
that
; the man who’s heading for a big mistake starts out by making dozens of little mistakes first, and we have time to pull him off the spot before he really piles something up. Were you sick? Not that it’s an excuse—if you were you should have reported and requested a relief man. We expected to find you dead of a heart attack—we didn’t think anything else would slow you down like that.”
Barron thought about the dispatcher’s room and its enormous board which patterned all traffic in and out of this spaceport. Mallinson said, not giving him time to answer, “You don’t drink or drug. You know, most men last about eight months on the dispatch board; then the responsibility starts giving them nightmares, they start making little fumbles, and we pull them off and transfer them. When you never made even a little fumble, we should have realized that you just didn’t have sense enough—the little fumbles are the mind’s way of yelling for help, yelling ‘This is too much for me, get me out of here.’ When you didn’t, we should have pulled you off anyway. That’s why you weren’t cashiered, kicked out with seven reps, and slapped with a millicred fine. We left you on the board five years, and we should have known we were asking for trouble.”
Barron realized that Mallinson hadn’t expected any answer. People who made mistakes of that caliber never could explain why. If they’d known why they could have guarded against it.
“With your record, Barron, we could transfer you out to the Rim, but we have an opening here; I understand you speak Darkovan?”
“Trade City language. I understand the other, but I fumble in it.”
“Even so. Know anything about Mapping and Exploring?” Barron jumped. It had been a ship from M &E which had nearly crashed five days ago, and that sector was in his mind, but a second glance at Mallinson convinced him that the man was simply asking for information, not needling. He said, “I’ve read a book or two on xenocartography—no more.”
“Lens grinding?”
“The principles. Most kids make a small telescope some time or other; I did.”
“That’s plenty. I didn’t want an expert,” Mallinson said with a grim smile. “We’ve got plenty of them, but it would put Darkovan backs up. Now, how much do you know about general Darkovan culture?”
Wondering where all this was leading, Barron said, “Orientation Lectures Two, Three and Four, five years ago. Not that I’ve needed it much, working in the port.”
“Well then, you know the Darkovans never bothered a great deal with small technology—telescopes, microscopes and the like? Their supposed sciences go in other directions, and I don’t know much about them either; nobody does except a few anthropologists and sociological experts. The facts remain; we, meaning the Board of Terran Affairs, sometimes get requests for minor technological help from individuals. Not from the government—if there is any government on Darkover, which I personally am inclined to doubt—but that’s beside the point. Somebody or other out there, I’m not sure about the details, decided that for forest-fire control and fire watching, telescopes would be handy little gadgets to have around. Somehow the idea crawled up whatever channels it had to come through, and came to the Council of Elders in Trade City. We offered to sell them telescopes. Oh, no, they said politely, they’d rather have someone teach their men how to grind them, and to supervise their construction, installation and use. It’s not the sort of thing we can send up a slip to Personnel for and find, just like that. But here you are, out of a job, and lens grinding listed in your comprehensive file as a hobby. Start today.”