Dreamsongs. Volume I Page 15

  I got up in a hurry, and got between them. Dubowski turned to me, looking baffled and scared. “Wha—” he started.

  “Get inside,” I interrupted. “Get up to your room. Get to the lounge. Get somewhere. Get anywhere. But get out of here before he kills you.”

  “But—but—what’s wrong? What happened? I don’t—”

  “Mistfall is in the morning,” I told him. “At night, at sunset, it’s mistrise. Now go.”

  “That’s all? Why should that get him so—so—”

  “GO!”

  Dubowski shook his head, as if to say he still didn’t understand what was going on. But he went.

  I turned to Sanders. “Calm down,” I said. “Calm down.”

  He stopped trembling, but his eyes threw blaster bolts at Dubowski’s back. “Mistfall,” he muttered. “Two months that bastard has been here, and he doesn’t know the difference between mistfall and mistrise.”

  “He’s never bothered to watch either one,” I said. “Things like that don’t interest him. That’s his loss, though. No reason for you to get upset about it.”

  He looked at me, frowning. Finally he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He sighed. “But mistfall! Hell.” There was a short silence, then, “I need a drink. Join me?”

  I nodded.

  We wound up in the same dark corner as the first night, at what must have been Sanders’ favorite table. He put away three drinks before I had finished my first. Big drinks. Everything in Castle Cloud was big.

  There were no arguments this time. We talked about mistfall, and the forests, and the ruins. We talked about the wraiths, and Sanders lovingly told me the stories of the great sightings. I knew them all already, of course. But not the way Sanders told them.

  At one point, I mentioned that I’d been born in Bradbury when my parents were spending a short vacation on Mars. Sanders’ eyes lit up at that, and he spent the next hour or so regaling me with Earthman jokes. I’d heard them all before, too. But I was getting more than a little drunk, and somehow they all seemed hilarious.

  After that night, I spent more time with Sanders than with anyone else in the hotel. I thought I knew Wraithworld pretty well by that time. But that was an empty conceit, and Sanders proved it. He showed me hidden spots in the forests that have haunted me ever since. He took me to island swamps, where the trees are of a very different sort and sway horridly without a wind. We flew to the far north, to another mountain range where the peaks are higher and sheathed in ice, and to a southern plateau where the mists pour eternally over the edge in a ghostly imitation of a waterfall.

  I continued to write about Dubowski and his wraith hunt, of course. But there was little new to write about, so most of my time was spent with Sanders. I didn’t worry too much about my output. My Wraithworld series had gotten excellent play on Earth and most of the colony worlds, so I thought I had it made.

  Not so.

  I’d been on Wraithworld just a little over three months when my syndicate beamed me. A few systems away, a civil war had broken out on a planet called New Refuge. They wanted me to cover it. No news was coming out of Wraithworld anyway, they said, since Dubowski’s expedition still had over a year to run.

  Much as I liked Wraithworld, I jumped at the chance. My stories had been getting a little stale, and I was running out of ideas, and the New Refuge thing sounded like it could be very big.

  So I said goodbye to Sanders and Dubowski and Castle Cloud, and took a last walk through the mist forests, and booked passage on the next ship through.

  THE NEW REFUGE CIVIL WAR WAS A FIRECRACKER. I SPENT LESS THAN a month on the planet, but it was a dreary month. The place had been colonized by religious fanatics, but the original cult had schismed, and both sides accused the other of heresy. It was all very dingy. The planet itself had all the charm of a Martian suburb.

  I moved on as quickly as I could, hopping from planet to planet, from story to story. In six months, I had worked myself back to Earth. Elections were coming up, so I got slapped onto a political beat. That was fine by me. It was a lively campaign, and there was a ton of good stories to be mined.

  But throughout it all, I kept myself up on the little news that came out of Wraithworld. And finally, as I’d expected, Dubowski announced a press conference. As the syndicate’s resident wraith, I got myself assigned to cover it, and headed out on the fastest starship I could find.

  I got there a week before the conference, ahead of everyone else. I had beamed Sanders before taking ship, and he met me at the spaceport. We adjourned to the dining balcony, and had our drinks served out there.

  “Well?” I asked him, after we had traded amenities. “You know what Dubowski’s going to announce?”

  Sanders looked very glum. “I can guess,” he said. “He called in all his damn gadgets a month ago, and he’s been cross-checking findings on a computer. We’ve had a couple of wraith sightings since you left. Dubowski moved in hours after each sighting, and went over the areas with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing. That’s what he’s going to announce, I think. Nothing.”

  I nodded. “Is that so bad, though? Gregor found nothing.”

  “Not the same,” Sanders said. “Gregor didn’t look the way Dubowski has. People will believe him, whatever he says.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that, and was about to say so, when Dubowski arrived. Someone must have told him I was there. He came striding out on the balcony, smiling, spied me, and came over to sit down.

  Sanders glared at him and studied his drink. Dubowski trained all of his attention on me. He seemed very pleased with himself. He asked what I’d been doing since I left, and I told him, and he said that was nice.

  Finally I got to ask him about his results. “No comment,” he said. “That’s what I’ve called the press conference for.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “I covered you for months when everybody else was ignoring the expedition. You can give me some kind of beat. What have you got?”

  He hesitated. “Well, okay,” he said doubtfully. “But don’t release it yet. You can beam it out a few hours ahead of the conference. That should be enough time for a beat.”

  I nodded agreement. “What do you have?”

  “The wraiths,” he said. “I have the wraiths, bagged neatly. They don’t exist. I’ve got enough evidence to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.” He smiled broadly.

  “Just because you didn’t find anything?” I started. “Maybe they were avoiding you. If they’re sentient, they might be smart enough. Or maybe they’re beyond the ability of your sensors to detect.”

  “Come now,” Dubowski said. “You don’t believe that. Our wraith traps had every kind of sensor we could come up with. If the wraiths existed, they would have registered on something. But they didn’t. We had the traps planted in the areas where three of Sanders’ so-called sightings took place. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Conclusive proof that those people were seeing things. Sightings, indeed.”

  “What about the deaths, the vanishings?” I asked. “What about the Gregor Expedition and the other classic cases?”

  His smile spread. “Couldn’t disprove all the deaths, of course. But our probes and our searches turned up four skeletons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Two were killed by a rockslide, and one had rockcat claw marks on the bones.”

  “The fourth?”

  “Murder,” he said. “The body was buried in a shallow grave, clearly by human hands. A flood of some sort had exposed it. It was down in the records as a disappearance. I’m sure all the other bodies could be found, if we searched long enough. And we’d find that all died perfectly normal deaths.”

  Sanders raised his eyes from his drink. They were bitter eyes. “Gregor,” he said stubbornly. “Gregor and the other classics.”

  Dubowski’s smile became a smirk. “Ah, yes. We searched that area quite thoroughly. My theory was right. We found a tribe of apes nearby. Big brutes. Like giant baboons, with dirty white fur. Not a very succ
essful species, either. We found only one small tribe, and they were dying out. But clearly, that was what Gregor’s man sighted. And exaggerated all out of proportion.”

  There was silence. Then Sanders spoke, but his voice was beaten. “Just one question,” he said softly. “Why?”

  That brought Dubowski up short, and his smile faded. “You never have understood, have you, Sanders?” he said. “It was for truth. To free this planet from ignorance and superstition.”

  “Free Wraithworld?” Sanders said. “Was it enslaved?”

  “Yes,” Dubowski answered. “Enslaved by foolish myth. By fear. Now this planet will be free, and open. We can find out the truth behind those ruins now, without murky legends about half-human wraiths to fog the facts. We can open this planet for colonization. People won’t be afraid to come here, and live, and farm. We’ve conquered the fear.”

  “A colony world? Here?” Sanders looked amused. “Are you going to bring big fans to blow away the mists, or what? Colonists have come before. And left. The soil’s all wrong. You can’t farm here, with all these mountains. At least not on a commercial scale. There’s no way you can make a profit growing things on Wraithworld.

  “Besides, there are hundreds of colony worlds crying for people. Did you need another so badly? Must Wraithworld become yet another Earth?”

  He shook his head sadly, drained his drink, and continued. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Doctor. Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t freed Wraithworld. You’ve destroyed it. You’ve stolen its wraiths, and left an empty planet.”

  Dubowski shook his head. “I think you’re wrong. They’ll find plenty of good, profitable ways to exploit this planet. But even if you were correct, well, it’s just too bad. Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know.”

  “Maybe,” Sanders said. “But is that the only thing man needs? I don’t think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions to make him brood and wonder.”

  Dubowski stood up abruptly, and frowned. “This conversation is as pointless as your philosophy, Sanders. There’s no room in my universe for unanswered questions.”

  “Then you live in a very drab universe, Doctor.”

  “And you, Sanders, live in the stink of your own ignorance. Find some new superstitions if you must. But don’t try to foist them off on me with your tales and legends. I’ve got no time for wraiths.” He looked at me. “I’ll see you at the press conference,” he said. Then he turned and walked briskly from the balcony.

  Sanders watched him depart in silence, then swiveled in his chair to look out over the mountains. “The mists are rising,” he said.

  SANDERS WAS WRONG ABOUT THE COLONY TOO, AS IT TURNED OUT. They did establish one, although it wasn’t much to boast of. Some vineyards, some factories, and a few thousand people; all belonging to a couple of big companies.

  Commercial farming did turn out to be unprofitable, you see. With one exception—a native grape, a fat gray thing the size of a lemon. So Wraithworld has only one export, a smoky white wine with a mellow, lingering flavor.

  They call it mistwine, of course. I’ve grown fond of it over the years. The taste reminds me of mistfall somehow, and makes me dream. But that’s probably me, not the wine. Most people don’t care for it much.

  Still, in a very minor way, it’s a profitable item. So Wraithworld is still a regular stop on the spacelanes. For freighters, at least.

  The tourists are long gone, though. Sanders was right about that. Scenery they can get closer to home, and cheaper. The wraiths were why they came.

  Sanders is long gone, too. He was too stubborn and too impractical to buy in on the mistwine operations when he had the chance. So he stayed behind his ramparts at Castle Cloud until the last. I don’t know what happened to him afterward, when the hotel finally went out of business.

  The castle itself is still there. I saw it a few years ago, when I stopped for a day en route to a story on New Refuge. It’s already crumbling, though. Too expensive to maintain. In a few years, you won’t be able to tell it from those other, older ruins.

  Otherwise the planet hasn’t changed much. The mists still rise at sunset, and fall at dawn. The Red Ghost is still stark and beautiful in the early morning light. The forests are still there, and the rockcats still prowl.

  Only the wraiths are missing.

  Only the wraiths.

  THREE

  THE LIGHT OF DISTANT STARS

  HERE’S THE THING OF IT,. I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN BAYONNE, NEW JERSEY, AND NEVER went anywhere… not till college, at any rate.

  Bayonne is a peninsula, part of New York City’s metropolitan area, but when I was growing up it was a world unto itself. An industrial city dominated by its oil refineries and its navy base, it was small, three miles long and only one mile wide. Bayonne adjoins Jersey City on the north; elsewise it is entirely surrounded by water, with Newark Bay to the west, New York Bay to the east, and the narrow deepwater channel that connects them, the Kill van Kull, to the south. Big oceangoing freighters travel along the Kill by night and day, on their way to and from Elizabeth and Port Newark.

  When I was four years old, my family moved into the new projects on First Street, facing the dark, polluted waters of the Kill. Across the channel the lights of Staten Island glimmered by night, far off and magical. Aside from a trip to the Staten Island Zoo every three or four years, we never crossed the Kill.

  You could get to Staten Island easily enough by driving across the Bayonne Bridge, but my family did not own a car, and neither of my parents drove. You could cross by ferry too. The terminal was only a few blocks from the projects, next to Uncle Milty’s amusement park. There was a secret “cove” a kid could get to by walking along the oil-slick rocks during low tide and slipping around the fence, a grassy little ledge hidden from both the ferry and the street. I liked to go there sometimes, to sit on the grass above the water with a candy bar and some funny books, reading and watching the ferries go back and forth between Bayonne and Staten Island.

  The boats made frequent crossings. Often one would be coming as the other one was going, and they would pass each other in the middle of the channel. The ferry line operated three boats, named the Deneb, the Altair, and the Vega. For me, no tramp steamer or clipper ship could have been any more romantic than those little ferries. The fact that they were all named after stars was part of their magic, I think. Although the three boats were identical, so far as I could tell, the Altair was always my favorite. Maybe that had something to do with Forbidden Planet.

  Sometimes, after supper, our apartment could seem crowded and noisy, even if it was just me and my parents and my two sisters. If my parents had friends over, the kitchen would grow hazy with cigarette smoke and loud with voices. Sometimes I would retreat to my own room and close the door. Sometimes I’d stay in the living room, watching TV with my sisters. And sometimes I’d go outside.

  Just across the street was Brady’s Dock and a long, narrow park that ran beside the Kill van Kull. I would sit on a bench there and watch the big ships go by, or I’d stretch out in the grass and look up at the stars, whose lights were even farther off than those of Staten Island. Even on the hottest, muggiest summer nights, the stars always gave me a thrill. Orion was the first constellation that I learned to recognize. I would gaze up at its two bright stars, blue Rigel and red Betelgeuse, and wonder if there was anyone up there looking back down at me.

  Fans write of a “sense of wonder,” and argue over how to define it. To me, a sense of wonder is the feeling I got while lying in the grass beside the Kill van Kull, pondering the light of distant stars. They always made me feel very large and very small. It was a sad feeling, but strange and sweet as well.

  Science fiction can give me that same feeling.

  My earliest exposure to SF came from television. Mine was the first ge
neration weaned on the tube. We might not have had Sesame Street, but we had Ding Dong School during the week, Howdy Doody on Saturday mornings, and cartoons every day of the week. On Andy’s Gang Froggy the Gremlin plunked his magic twanger. Though I watched Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy, cowboys were more my father’s passion than my own. I preferred knights: Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and Sir Lancelot. But nothing could match the space shows.

  I must have seen Captain Video on the Dumont network, since I have a vague memory of his nemesis, Tobor (“Robot” spelled backward, of course). I don’t recall Space Cadet, though; my memories of Tom Corbett derive from the books by Carey Rockwell that I read later. I did catch Flash Gordon, for certain…the TV show, not the movie serial. In one episode Flash visits a planet whose people are good by day and bad by night, a concept that I thought was so cool that I used it in some of my own earliest attempts at stories.

  All of these paled, however, before Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, the crème de la crème of the SF shows of the early ’50s. Rocky had the best-looking spaceship on the tube, the sleek, silvery Orbit Jet. I was devastated when the Orbit Jet got destroyed one episode, but fortunately it was soon replaced by the Silver Moon, which looked exactly the same. His crew included the usual comic co-pilot, simpering girlfriend, pompous professor, and annoying little kid, but he also had Pinto Vortando. (Anyone who thinks Gene Roddenberry brought anything fresh to television should take a look at Rocky Jones. It’s all there, but for Spock, who owes more to D. C. Fontana than to Roddenberry. Harry Mudd is just Pinto Vortando with the accent toned down.)

  When I wasn’t watching spacemen and aliens on television, I was playing with them at home. Along with the usual cowboys, knights, and green army men, I had all the space toys, the ray guns and rocket ships and hard plastic spacemen with the removable clear plastic helmets that were always getting lost. Best of all were the colored plastic aliens I bought for a nickel apiece from bins in Woolworth’s and Kresge’s. Some had big swollen brains and some had four arms, and some were spiders with faces or snakes with arms and heads. My favorite guy had a tiny little head and chest on top of a gigantic, hairy lower body. I gave them all names, and decided they were a gang of space pirates, led by the malignant big-brained Martian I called Jarn, who was not nearly as nice as Pinto Vortando. And of course I dreamed up endless stories of their adventures, and even made some halting attempts at writing one or two of them down.