Pebble in the Sky Read online

  Schwartz’s eyes fell. He turned to leave, and there was a hand upon his sleeve—

  Granz had seen Schwartz while the latter was still only a plump and wistful face at the window.

  He said, “What’s he want?”

  Messter, sitting across the little table, with his back to the street, turned, looked, shrugged his shoulders, and said nothing.

  Granz said, “He’s coming in,” and Messter replied, “So what?”

  “Nothing. Just mentioning it.”

  But a few moments later the newcomer, after looking about helplessly, approached and pointed to their beef stew, saying in a queer accent, “Food! Where? Please.”

  Granz looked up. “Food right here, bud. Just pull up a chair at any table you want and use the Foodomat. . . . Foodomat! Don’t you know what a Foodomat is? . . . Look at the poor jerk, Messter. He’s looking at me as if he doesn’t understand a word I say. Hey, fella—this thing, see. Just put a coin in and let me eat, will you?”

  “Leave him alone,” grunted Messter. “He’s just a bum, looking for a handout.”

  “Hey, hold on.” Granz seized Schwartz’s sleeve as the latter turned to go. He added in an aside to Messter, “Space, let the guy eat. He’s probably getting the Sixty soon. It’s the least I can do to give him a break. . . . Hey, bud, you got any money? . . . Well, I’ll be damned, he still doesn’t understand me. Money, pal, money! This—” And he drew a shining half-credit piece out of his pocket, flipping it so that it sparkled in the air.

  “Got any?” he asked.

  Slowly Schwartz shook his head.

  “Well, then, have this on me!” He replaced the half-credit piece in his pocket and tossed over a considerably smaller coin.

  Schwartz held it uncertainly.

  “All right. Don’t just stand there. Stick it in the Foodomat. This thing here.”

  Schwartz suddenly found himself understanding. The Foodomat had a series of slits for coins of different sizes and a series of knobs opposite little milky rectangles, the writing upon which he could not read. Schwartz pointed to the food on the table and ran a forefinger up and down the knobs, raising his eyebrows in question.

  Messter said in annoyance, “A sandwich isn’t good enough for him. We’re getting classy bums in this burg nowadays. It doesn’t pay to humor them, Granz.”

  “All right, so I lose point eight five credits. Tomorrow’s payday, anyway. . . . Here,” he said to Schwartz. He placed coins of his own into the Foodomat and withdrew the wide metal container from the recess in the wall. “Now take it to another table. . . . Nah, keep that tenth piece. Buy yourself a cup of coffee with it.”

  Schwartz carried the container gingerly to the next table. It had a spoon attached to the side by means of a transparent, filmy material, which broke with a slight pop under the pressure of a fingernail. As it did so, the top of the container parted at a seam and curled back upon itself.

  The food, unlike that which he saw the others eating, was cold; but that was a detail. It was only after a minute or so that he realized the food was getting warmer and that the container had grown hot to the touch. He stopped, in alarm, and waited.

  The gravy first steamed, then bubbled gently for a moment. It cooled again and Schwartz completed the meal.

  Granz and Messter were still there when he left. So was the third man, to whom, throughout, Schwartz had paid no attention.

  Nor had Schwartz noticed, at any time since he had left the Institute, the thin, little man who, without seeming to, had managed to remain always within eyeshot.

  Bel Arvardan, having showered and changed his clothes, promptly followed his original intention of observing the human animal, subspecies Earth, in its native habitat. The weather was mild, the light breeze refreshing, the village itself—pardon, the city—bright, quiet, and clean.

  Not so bad.

  Chica first stop, he thought. Largest collection of Earthmen on the planet. Washenn next; local capital. Senloo! Senfran! Bonair! . . . He had plotted an itinerary all over the western continents (where most of the meager scattering of Earth’s population lived) and, allowing two or three days at each, he would be back in Chica just about the time his expeditionary ship was due.

  It would be educational.

  As afternoon began to decline he stepped into a Foodomat and, as he ate, observed the small drama that played itself out between the two Earthmen who had entered shortly after himself and the plump, elderly man who came in last of all. But his observation was detached and casual, simply noting it as an item to set against his unpleasant experience on the jet transport. The two men at the table were obviously air-cab drivers and not wealthy, yet they could be charitable.

  The beggar left, and two minutes later Arvardan left as well.

  The streets were noticeably fuller, as the workday was approaching its end.

  He stepped hastily aside to avoid colliding with a young girl.

  “Pardon me,” he said.

  She was dressed in white, in clothing which bore the stereotyped lines of a uniform. She seemed quite oblivious of the near collision. The anxious look on her face, the sharp turning of her head from side to side, her utter preoccupation, made the situation quite obvious.

  He laid a light finger on her shoulder. “May I help you, miss? Are you in trouble?”

  She stopped and turned startled eyes upon him. Arvardan found himself judging her age at nineteen to twenty-one, observing carefully her brown hair and dark eyes, her high cheekbones and little chin, her slim waist and graceful carriage. He discovered, suddenly, that the thought of this little female creature being an Earthwoman lent a sort of perverse piquancy to her attractiveness.

  But she was still staring, and almost at the moment of speaking she seemed to break down. “Oh, it’s no use. Please don’t bother about me. It’s silly to expect to find someone when you don’t have the slightest idea where he could have gone.” She was drooping in discouragement, her eyes wet. Then she straightened and breathed deeply. “Have you seen a plump man about five-four, dressed in green and white, no hat, rather bald?”

  Arvardan looked at her in astonishment. “What? Green and white? . . . Oh, I don’t believe this. . . . Look, this man you’re referring to—does he speak with difficulty?”

  “Yes, yes. Oh yes. You have seen him, then?”

  “Not five minutes ago he was in there eating with two men. . . . Here they are. . . . Say, you two.” He beckoned them over.

  Granz reached them first. “Cab, sir?”

  “No, but if you tell the young lady what happened to the man you were eating with, you’ll stand to make the fare, anyway.”

  Granz paused and looked chagrined. “Well, I’d like to help you, but I never saw him before in my life.”

  Arvardan turned to the girl. “Now look, miss, he can’t have gone in the direction you came from or you’d have seen him. And he can’t be far away. Suppose we move north a bit. I’ll recognize him if I see him.”

  His offer of help was an impulse, yet Arvardan was not, ordinarily, an impulsive man. He found himself smiling at her.

  Granz interrupted suddenly. “What’s he done, lady? He hasn’t broken any of the Customs, has he?”

  “No, no,” she replied hastily. “He’s only a little sick, that’s all.”

  Messter looked after them as they left. “A little sick?” He shoved his visored cap back upon his head, then pinched balefully at his chin. “How d’ya like that, Granz? A little sick.”

  His eyes looked askance at the other for a moment.

  “What’s got into you?” asked Granz uneasily.

  “Something that’s making me a little sick. That guy must’ve been straight out of the hospital. That was a nurse looking for him, and a plenty worried nurse, too. Why should she be worried if he was just a little sick? He couldn’t hardly talk, and he didn’t hardly understand. You noticed that, didn’t you?”

  There was a sudden panicky light in Granz’s eyes. “You don’t think it’s Fever?
”

  “I sure do think it’s Radiation Fever—and he’s far gone. He was within a foot of us, too. It’s never any good—”

  There was a little thin man next to them. A little thin man with bright, sharp eyes and a twittering voice, who had stepped out of nowhere. “What’s that, gents? Who’s got Radiation Fever?”

  He was regarded with disfavor. “Who are you?”

  “Ho,” said the sharp little man, “you want to know, do you? It so happens that I’m a messenger of the Brotherhood, to be sure.” He flashed a little glowing badge on the inner lapel of his jacket. “Now, in the name of the Society of Ancients, what’s all this about Radiation Fever?”

  Messter spoke in cowed and sullen tones. “I don’t know nothing. There’s a nurse looking for somebody who’s sick, and I was wondering if it was Radiation Fever. That’s not against the Customs, is it?”

  “Ho! You’re telling me about the Customs, are you? You better go about your business and let me worry about the Customs.”

  The little man rubbed his hands together, gazed quickly about him, and hurried northward.

  “There he is!” and Pola clutched feverishly at her companion’s elbow. It had happened quickly, easily, and accidentally. Through the despairing blankness he had suddenly materialized just within the main entrance of the self-service department store, not three blocks from the Foodomat.

  “I see him,” whispered Arvardan. “Now stay back and let me follow him. If he sees you and dashes into the mob, we’ll never locate him.”

  Casually they followed in a sort of nightmare chase. The human contents of the store was a quicksand which could absorb its prey slowly—or quickly—keep it hidden impenetrably, spew it forth unexpectedly, set up barriers that somehow would not yield. The mob might almost have had a malevolent conscious mind of its own.

  And then Arvardan circled a counter watchfully, playing Schwartz as though he were at the end of a fishing line. His huge hand reached out and closed on the other’s shoulder.

  Schwartz burst into incomprehensible prose and jerked away in panic. Arvardan’s grip, however, was unbreakable to men far stronger than Schwartz, and he contented himself with smiling and saying, in normal tones, for the benefit of the curious spectator, “Hello, old chap, haven’t seen you in months. How are you?”

  A palpable fraud, he supposed, in the face of the other’s gibberish, but Pola had joined them.

  “Schwartz,” she whispered, “come back with us.”

  For a moment Schwartz stiffened in rebellion, then he drooped.

  He said wearily, “I—go—along—you,” but the statement was drowned in the sudden blare of the store’s loud-speaker system.

  “Attention! Attention! Attention! The management requests that all patrons of the store leave by the Fifth Street exit in orderly fashion. You will present your registration cards to the guards at the door. It is essential that this be done rapidly. Attention! Attention! Attention!”

  The message was repeated three times, the last time over the sound of scuffling feet as crowds were beginning to line up at the exits. A many-tongued cry was making itself heard, asking in various fashions the forever-unanswerable question of “What’s happened? What’s going on?”

  Arvardan shrugged and said, “Let’s get on line, miss. We’re leaving anyway.”

  But Pola shook her head. “We can’t. We can’t—”

  “Why not?” The archaeologist frowned.

  The girl merely shrank away from him. How could she tell him that Schwartz had no registration card? Who was he? Why had he been helping her? She was in a whirl of suspicion and despair.

  She said huskily, “You’d better go, or you’ll get into trouble.”

  They were pouring out the elevators as the upper floors emptied. Arvardan, Pola, and Schwartz were a little island of solidity in the human river.

  Looking back on it later, Arvardan realized that at this point he could have left the girl. Left her! Never seen her again! Have nothing to reproach himself with! . . . And all would have been different. The great Galactic Empire would have dissolved in chaos and destruction.

  He did not leave the girl. She was scarcely pretty in her fear and despair. No one could be. But Arvardan felt disturbed at the sight of her helplessness.

  He had taken a step away, and now he turned. “Are you going to stay here?”

  She nodded.

  “But why?” he demanded.

  “Because”—and the tears now overflowed—“I don’t know what else to do.”

  She was just a little, frightened girl, even if she was an Earthie. Arvardan said, in a softer voice, “If you’ll tell me what’s wrong, I’ll try to help.”

  There was no answer.

  The three formed a tableau. Schwartz had sunk to the floor in a squatting posture, too sick at heart to try to follow the conversation, to be curious at the sudden emptiness of the store, to do anything but bury his head in his hands in the last unspoken and unuttered whimper of despair. Pola, weeping, knew only that she was more frightened than she had ever thought it possible for anyone to be. Arvardan, puzzled and waiting, tried clumsily and ineffectually to pat Pola’s shoulder in encouraging fashion, and was conscious only of the fact that for the first time he had touched an Earthgirl.

  The little man came upon them thus.

  9

  Conflict at Chica

  Lieutenant Marc Claudy of the Chica garrison yawned slowly and gazed into the middle distance with an ineffable boredom. He was completing his second year of duty on Earth and waited yearningly for replacement.

  Nowhere in the Galaxy was the problem of maintaining a garrison quite so complicated as it was on this horrible world. On other planets there existed a certain camaraderie between soldier and civilian, particularly female civilian. There was a sense of freedom and openness.

  But here the garrison was a prison. There were the radiation-proof barracks and the filtered atmosphere, free of radioactive dust. There was the lead-impregnated clothing, cold and heavy, which could not be removed without grave risk. As a corollary to that, fraternization with the population (assuming that the desperation of loneliness could drive a soldier to the society of an “Earthie” girl) was out of the question.

  What was left, then, but short snorts, long naps, and slow madness?

  Lieutenant Claudy shook his head in a futile attempt to clear it, yawned again, sat up and began dragging on his shoes. He looked at his watch and decided it was not yet quite time for evening chow.

  And then he jumped to his feet, only one shoe on, acutely conscious of his uncombed hair, and saluted.

  The colonel looked about him disparagingly but said nothing directly on the subject. Instead he directed crisply, “Lieutenant, there are reports of rioting in the business district. You will take a decontamination squad to the Dunham department store and take charge. You will see to it that all your men are thoroughly protected against infection by Radiation Fever.”

  “Radiation Fever!” cried the lieutenant. “Pardon me, sir, but—”

  “You will be ready to leave in fifteen minutes,” said the colonel coldly.

  Arvardan saw the little man first, and stiffened as the other made a little gesture of greeting. “Hi, guv’ner. Hi, big fella. Tell the little lady there ain’t no call for the waterworks.”

  Pola’s head had snapped up, her breath sucked in. Automatically she leaned toward the protecting bulk of Arvardan, who, as automatically, put a protective arm about her. It did not occur to him that that was the second time he had touched an Earthgirl.

  He said sharply, “What do you want?”

  The little man with the sharp eyes stepped diffidently out from behind a counter piled high with packages. He spoke in a manner which managed to be both ingratiating and impudent simultaneously.

  “Here’s a weird go outside,” he said, “but it don’t need to bother you, miss. I’ll get your man back to the Institute for you.”

  “What institute?” demanded Pol
a fearfully.

  “Aw, come off it,” said the little man. “I’m Natter, fella with the fruit stand right across the street from the Institute for Nuclear Research. I seen you here lots of times.”

  “See here,” said Arvardan abruptly, “what’s all this about?”

  Natter’s little frame shook with merriment. “They think this fella here has Radiation Fever—”

  “Radiation Fever?” It came from both Arvardan and Pola at once.

  Natter nodded. “That’s right. Two cabbies ate with him and that’s what they said. News like that kinda spreads, you know.”

  “The guards outside,” demanded Pola, “are just looking for someone with fever?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And just why aren’t you afraid of the fever?” demanded Arvardan abruptly. “I take it that it was fear of contagion that caused the authorities to empty the store.”

  “Sure. The authorities are waiting outside, afraid to come in, too. They’re waiting for the Outsiders’ decontamination squad to get here.”

  “And you’re not afraid of the fever, is that it?”

  “Why should I be? This guy don’t have no fever. Look at him. Where’s the sores on his mouth? He isn’t flushed. His eyes are all right. I know what fever looks like. Come on, miss, we’ll march out of here, then.”

  But Pola was frightened again. “No, no. We can’t. He’s—he’s—” She couldn’t go on.

  Natter said insinuatingly, “I could take him out. No questions asked. No registration card necessary—”

  Pola failed to suppress a little cry, and Arvardan said, with considerable distaste, “What makes you so important?”

  Natter laughed hoarsely. He flipped his lapel. “Messenger for the Society of Ancients. Nobody’ll ask me questions.”

  “And what’s in it for you?”

  “Money! You’re anxious and I can help you. There ain’t no fairer than that. It’s worth, say, a hundred credits to you, and it’s worth a hundred credits to me. Fifty credits now, fifty on delivery.”