Starburst

24

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND IT HAD STOPPED raining. The President's Press Secretary was grateful for the latter, if not the former. She had been up all night printing the President's announcements, and now had the job of hand-delivering them before daybreak. There were only about eight that really had to be delivered, because their recipients were the important ones. But you never knew which eight were important in the President's eyes. So she had to deliver them all, forty identical little white envelopes, each containing a card that said:

THE PRESIDENT of The United States Takes pleasure in inviting

To attend the Reception of our Visitors from Alpha Cent. R.S.V.P.

As she bicycled along the broad, empty avenues she could see lights in some of the windows. A whickering from the stables of the Pennsylvania delegation, where the lordly Amish had deigned to interrupt their sleep. Everyone knew. Everyone could see. Any minute now— Yes! There it was! The storm past, the skies had cleared, and the news was there in the sky for all to see, a great new golden star that swung through the constellations at the rate of four degrees a minute, the width of the full Moon every eight seconds. She slipped an envelope under the door of Blair House (yes, lights there, too, as the people from Puget talked among themselves about the great event), and headed out toward the less important stops by the mosquito-ridden margins of the river—the homes of the Supreme Court justices, the lesser Cabinet members, the so-called "delegations" with suspect credentials who had turned up for the advertised Tenth Anniversary gala, and found themselves present for something far greater.

The satellite was almost out of sight again at the far horizon by the time she had finished the last of them and walked her bicycle to the top of the levee for the easy ride home, and there was the lander. A great gold marble. Sitting there across the river and waiting for morning.

It was not cold, but she shivered.

By dawn the city was wide awake. "They're getting ready to come out!" everyone was shouting to everyone else, but each time the rumor was false. There was a spotter leaning out the windows at the top of the Washington Monument with Army field glasses and a battery-powered walkie-talkie, and he kept everyone posted on what was happening. Which, so far, was nothing—fortunately, in the opinion of the Vice President, trying to get things ready for company. Half the Marine guard had been impressed into peeling potatoes for the great welcoming banquet planned for the evening, and the other half was sewing buttons on its uniforms for the grand dress parade on the White House lawn; and, in the middle of it all, the President sat like a stone.

"Oh, Jimbo," his wife cried as she came breathless into the Oval Office and found him unmoving there. "Can't you get yourself going?" She felt his coffee pot and found it was cold, nodded to the orderly for a refill. "What a day, honey! I been down to the levee to see them. Jimbo, that thing is big. And it's got no wings. All it looks like to me is the darlingest big flying pumpkin you ever saw—but please get yourself dressed, will you?"

She sat down happily, pulling off her galoshes. Even with the sandbags all around and the dikes along the banks of the river, the White House grounds stayed soggy. "You know, honey, this is going to be the nicest time we ever had! Better than your Second Inaugural. Better than when the wine ship got stuck down by the Kennedy Center. Better than anything!"

Her. husband shook his head. He said, "We weren't bothering them. What they got to bother us for?"

The Vice President scratched the soles of her feet, studying her husband. "It's going to be all right, honey. You'll see. Whatever it is you got on your mind. Now, you got to get out of that thing and get yourself dressed up." He was still sitting in his robe. It was made of pure silk and it had the Presidential seal on its breast, but it did not close across his belly; it had been made for a much smaller man. "Come on, Jimbo! What's the matter?" she demanded.

He said bitterly, "What should be the matter? I hear you got troops around the spaceship."

"Well, sure, Jimbo. Just Cousin Buzz's company. They look real nice, and you could look at it like they're a kind of guard of honor for them."

"I hope you don't get them sore at us."

His wife sighed. "If they're not sore now," she said reasonably, "I don't really see what we could do to make them that way. Now change your clothes. The gray suit's clean, and you've got some nice white shirts in the closet that I brought down from Virginia." She picked up his desk clock and shook it, then decided it was running. "You have time to take a shower, honey. Company won't be here for a couple hours, easy."

The President nodded thoughtfully, moving over to the window. His face was somber. He stared toward where the spaceship was, though of course it was not in sight—too many buildings, too many overgrown trees. "Everybody been told they got to dress up for this?" he demanded.

"Course they have, honey." His wife came up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Listen, put your happy face on, Jimbo. This is a party. We're going to give these folks the nicest damn formal reception this town's seen in twenty years. The fire department's got three big pumpers ready, and they're going to squirt hoses in the air, and that skinny little chick from Puget said she got some fireworks for us."

"Fireworks?" said the President, smiling for the first time.

"You bet. And we're going to have a real fine state banquet. Smell the cooking?" He nodded, but did not turn around, and the Vice President said softly, "What is it, Jimbo? Something to do with that fellow you buried a couple-three weeks ago? Is that it?" He shrugged morosely. "You been real edgy ever since then," she persisted. "You want to tell me who he was?"

The President turned and looked at her, then shook his head. The President was not a bad man. He wasn't a particularly good one, either—you couldn't be altogether good and still do what you had to do to rise to the top in the yeasty bubble of the world as it was—but he tried to deal fairly with everyone. Usually. And a little more than fairly with his Vice President-and-wife.

He threw off the brocaded robe and scratched his chest for a moment before heading for the shower. "Let it lay, honey," he said. "You're better off if you don't know."

The skinny little chick from Puget, whose name was Darien McCullough, was busy deploying her forces. She had come to Washington with a party of five—you hardly traveled across a continent with fewer than that these days—and every one of them had a job. The present job of the two strongest of them was to carry the load of skyrockets and Roman candles she had picked up in York State on the way down to the White House. Another was being wired for instant communication, as Darien was herself, and the fifth was given the job of staying home and keeping an eye on things while Darien gave in to her curiosity.

It was a good long walk to the banks of the Potomac, but if you stayed to the main streets you could manage it without getting your good shoes wet. Of course, you had to climb the side of the dike of sandbags to see across the Potomac, because the tides were now running six feet above what used to be the riverbank. But it was worth it.

The golden globe lay there, faintly luminous, in the shadow of what had once been the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. Darien was not alone as she stared. The levee was filled with sightseers, members of the delegations who had come for the President's Tenth Anniversary gala as well as Washington natives. She joined them in studying the great globe. It was, after all, precisely what she had crossed the continent to see.

"Good morning to you, Miss McCullough," said someone beside her, and she turned to greet the head of the Amish delegation, a tall old man with a beard and broad-brimmed hat. There was a whole wagonload of the stately Amish there, and heaven knew how many back in the Amish embassy on K Street. After the disaster the Amish, along with the Mennonites, the Doukhobors, and a few other sects, came into their own. They hadn't needed much from modern technology even before the power plants slagged down; they needed even less later on. While Iowa corn farmers stared in dreary despair at the fields they could neither plant nor sow without power for the tractors and a whole spectrum of chemicals to feed the plants and kill the pests, the Amish brought out their teams and prospered. Darien spoke politely to the Amishman. She was on good terms with their government, as she was with nearly every government in North America and a few which were not; that was one of the reasons why Puget stayed as healthy as it did.

Darien McCullough had been a teenager when the world as she knew it came to an end. She was in high school in Ottawa, firmly intending to become either a nuclear physicist or perhaps a world-champion tennis player . . . unless she went into the family business. Which was politics. Like all good Canadians, she both despised and loved the wretched giant to the south. She had seen a lot of the United States from her father's embassy residence in Washington, D.C., as a small child. She was not anxious to see more. Quebec was more interesting. So was tennis. So were boys. When the kaons sluiced into every fissionable atom on the surface of the Earth, Darien's first thought was that it was a pretty good joke on the U.S.A. The mighty American muscle had simply melted away. All over the hemisphere U.S. bomber crews were parachuting to the ground, dozens of them over Canada, as their nuclear warheads dissolved their casings and the aircraft became uninhabit­able. School closed early that day. At home, the telly showed CBC reporters following stunned generals around the Pentagon, asking questions that had no answers at all.

Then even CBC went off the air.

Forty percent of North American, not just Canadian, electric power came from nuclear reactors. As the cores softened and slumped, the turbines stopped turning. CANDUs were no luckier than the Westinghouses or the breeders. The power net failed. The grid died.

There was a bad week then, even in Ottawa. Nothing at all, compared to Detroit or L.A. But bad. When it became clear to her parents that it would be easier to stay alive in their home province than in Ottawa, they simply bought a train ticket and got on board. (A few weeks later it got harder.) The rail trip was normal enough— wheat fields do not riot—although there were delays and the restaurant car offered little choice. But Vancouver, when they got there, was wholly blacked out.

Saunders McCullough, Darien's father, was well equipped for the problem. He had been given the ambassadorship as a reward for political service, and the best of his service was with the national power authority, with an engineering degree from McGill before that. He was the one who put together the hydroelectric network that gave most of British Columbia and parts of the former states of Oregon and Washington a head start on returning to industrial civilization—or something fairly like it—after the disaster. Darien's mother was also an exceptional individual. Burned-out women's­rights revolutionary turned housewife, she sparked to life again and led the secessionist movement that put Puget together as an independent nation. The McCulloughs were certainly the first family of Puget, and the daughter was the logical choice to pick up the torch when the old folks died. Puget didn't have a President. It had a Council, but if there was a first among equals among them it was Darien McCullough. And when they unscrambled the Hawaiian Kingdom's message from space, she was the logical one to bring it to Washington.

A remote beepbeepbeep interrupted her thoughts.

The Amishman glanced disapprovingly at her purse, where the sound came from, but approvingly enough at Darien herself as he removed himself a few paces for politeness' sake. She held the purse up to her mouth to respond, then to her ear. It whispered to her, in the voice of Jake Harris, the anchorman back at Blair House, "Darien? You better get back here, ay? Looks like they're going to have a parade and we're supposed to be in it."

She frowned at the thought of walking down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the President's prized cavalry. "They don't need me, Jake."

"Course not. But you know how His Nibs gets."

"He's.got plenty on his mind today. He won't even notice I'm not there." She peered past the Amish family to judge distances and then nodded to herself. "Look, I'll pick up the procession at the Arlington Bridge if I have to. So make my excuses till then, right? I have to sign off now."

There was a faint squawk of protest from the walkie-talkie in her bag, but she paid no attention. Like a proper sightseer, she concentrated on the great golden globe across the river.

The soggy ground beneath the sphere was cracked and dry. Tremendous heat had boiled the water out of the mud, between and over the old runways, for a distance of fifty yards around the spacecraft. Darien studied the caked mud thoughtfully. That meant waste heat, surely, but from what? Some immense energy had cushioned the fall of that globe, but there was no external sign of how it was applied. It had no wings, no visible rocket nozzles. Jake, who had watched the orbiting parent sphere the night before, thought that there had seemed to be some huge, wavy sort of aurora behind it—plasma? Darien could not guess, and shook her head regretfully. It was more important than ever, she thought, that she get to the people in the globe before anyone else did.

There were mottled irregularities on the globe that might have been windows, but if they gave a view at all it was only from the inside looking out. What did they look like, the people who undoubtedly were peering at her even now? Great golden gods and goddesses, as bronzed as their spaceship? Two-headed mutants? She felt a shudder run up her back, in spite of the muggy heat.

What the spacefarers were seeing was far less impressive. The pathetic rabble that was the President's picked corps of commandos was knotted around the ship, their oddly assorted weapons pointed at the ship, at the sky, at each other in random directions as they whispered to each other and strained to look inside the ship; and it was beginning to rain.

Darien sighed, rummaged in her purse, and took out a camera. It did not look any different than any other of those Japanese minis that still existed in quantity; cameras were not rare. But she attracted glances when she peered through its viewfinder at the ship because it was rare enough to see one used; film had not been in the stores for twenty years. For Darien's camera that didn't matter. It didn't use film. She clicked away, as a dozen generations of tourists had before her in that spot, and then she noticed what images she was storing on the magnetic tape.

A door in the golden globe was opening.

There was a gasp, then a shout, from the watchers on the levee. Even the Amish. Darien saw one of the levee policemen turn and wave frantically toward the top of the Washington Monument, but even he turned right back to see the most exciting group of tourists to enter Washington D.C.'s National Airport in at least two decades ... or ever!

"What a funny bunch!" cried one of the Amish women, earning a reproving look from her husband.

But she was right. They came strutting out of the entrance and each one—at precisely the same point—stopped, and stared slack-jawed at the immense sky overhead, and was bumped out of the way by the person behind him. It was not just the infinite overhead sky. Most of the interstellar wayfarers were experiencing rain falling on their heads for the first time ever.

They were all very young. Not just young. The operative word, Darien thought, was "weird." Some of them were darker than the President himself, some almost albino white. They had features that ranged from emaciated aquiline -to puffy blobs of noses surrounded by bulging cheeks—and yet, Darien thought, how could that be? There should not be such differences! They were all children of the same eight astronauts. All of them had been white, looking about as interchangeable as any NASA crew. How did the kids come to be all so different?

And, above all, how come they were so young? Barring one middle-aged woman, they were children—some of them surely no more than three or four years old. She had expected perhaps the original eight, now surely in their fifties or beyond, with perhaps a leavening of the more mature, teenagers . . . but not this kindergarten!

All around the ship was now a scene of confusion. Half a dozen state coaches were being galloped across the taxi strip by agitated drivers, the unmatched teams surging and tangling with each other under the whip. The guards were trying to come to attention. All the old rifles were at port arms now, not actually pointed at the visitors but ready, and the soldiers were looking to their lieutenant for orders —who, in turn, was peering through opera glasses at the top of the Washington Monument. Darien caught a flicker of light from one of the little windows under the shaft's aluminum cap. If it was a signal, the lieutenant did not seem to find it helpful. He was arguing with a teenager from the ship, trying to keep his eyes on the Monument at the same time, and the discussion collapsed entirely when the horses and carriages pulled up. The children from the ship wailed and fled. Only the physical obstruction of the older woman at the door, trying to calm them, kept them from retreating into the ship. The teenager had joined the panicky retreat, but he recovered quickly and began shouting commands. Slowly the others came back toward the carriages. Those huge snorting animals in the traces were less terrifying than the teenager, it seemed.

Darien picked up her purse and held it to her lips. "I'm going to the bridge now," she murmured.

"Good idea, Derry. They're starting to move here—" The voice was lost in a blare of band music.

"Say again, Jake," she ordered, wincing at the noise.

"You can hear for yourself," his voice shouted. "Jesus God, what a racket! But you'd better get on over there, because they're on their way!"

The head of the President's parade was approaching the bridge by the time Darien got there, and the traffic congestion was considerable. Darien pushed her way through a knot of government employees in dungarees and cotton flannel shirts, no doubt given the day off to swell the crowd, and found herself behind a line of twenty or thirty soldiers doing traffic duty. They were keeping farm wagons off the bridge but allowing pedestrians to pass. Darien glanced at the approaching parade, studied the reviewing stand just across the road which was obviously where it was going to wind up, and decided the pedestrians had the right idea. For one thing, they were farther from the parade's two bands.

She walked out onto the span just as the first mounted soldiers in the escort appeared at the other end.

From the District end of the Arlington Bridge you could see right up the weedy hill that had once been America's best-kept cemetery. A later administration had built a small cinder-block fort commanding the bridge itself, and the outriders turned aside to gather under the fort, leaving the carriages with the visitors to enter the bridge alone.

And there they stopped.

There was some argument going on. It appeared the people from the spacecraft were arguing with their drivers, and, although Darien was too far to know which side won, the debate was resolved by the spacefarers' getting out of the carriages and lining up to cross the bridge on foot.

Even from that distance, Darien could see that they were not enjoying themselves. The rain had more or less stopped, but what was left in its place was a muggy, buggy heat. Some of them were sneezing violently, and had to be helped along by soldiers from the guard detachment. All of them were swatting at the insects.

Even so, they started off across the bridge bravely enough. Before they were halfway the bold marching step had slowed down, and even the arrogant teenager from the scene at the airport was beginning to limp. They reached the point where Darien stood, and that was the end of it. Two small children sat down in the middle of the road, weeping. The teenager snapped angrily at them without effect, then shrugged. His gaze wandered over the crowd on the curb, with incurious loathing, pausing briefly to meet Darien's eyes.

Darien McCullough could count on her fingers as well as any neighbor gossiping about a pregnant bride. She knew that it was unlikely that any of the children could be as much as twenty years old, yet there was a grownup ferocity in the man's stare. It shook her. She looked away quickly, but when she glanced back his eyes were still on her.

The carriages were beginning to approach from the far end of the bridge, and the noise distracted him, freeing her to look more attentively at the rest of the group. There seemed to be seven of them in all, two quite small boys, three young girls surrounding the age of puberty, the angry- eyed young man—and, good heavens!, Eve Barstow!

For Darien McCullough, the sight of Eve Barstow was a personal shock, saddening and complete. How different she looked! The slim, smiling bride who had taken off so bravely for Alpha Centauri was now transmuted into a plump, faded woman who limped as though her feet hurt. No doubt they did. Even her Earth-born muscles had lacked practice for twenty years. And there, behind her, there was— -

There was what, exactly? Darien could not be sure. The day was still warm, but surely not hot enough to be producing mirages over the pavement. And yet there was something behind Eve Barstow, between her and the approaching carriages, that was making the hillside across the bridge creep and waver, like a view seen through flawed glass. It was too small to be heat refraction, too well defined to be a blurring of her own vision—why, she thought in amazement, it almost looked like the outline of a human form!

That was the first time anyone on Earth saw Uncle Ghost.