Star, Bright by Mark Clifton (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) ๐
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- Author: Mark Clifton
Read book online ยซStar, Bright by Mark Clifton (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) ๐ยป. Author - Mark Clifton
How to begin? What in hell could I say?
"It's not exactly fair," I told them. "Marily can't follow you there." I was shooting in the dark, but I had at least a glimmering to go by.
Star turned pale enough for the freckles on her little nose to stand out under her tan. Robert blushed and turned to her fiercely.
"I told you so, Star. I told you so! I said it wasn't sporting," he accused. He turned to me. "Marily can't play good hide-and-seek anyway. She's only a Stupid."
"Let's forget that for a minute, Robert." I turned to her. "Star, just where do you go?"
"Oh, it's nothing, Daddy." She spoke defensively, belittling the whole thing. "We just go a little ways when we play with her. She ought to be able to find us a little ways."
"That's evading the issue. Where do you goโand how do you go?"
Jim stepped forward and showed her the bronze coin I'd sent him.
"You see, Star," he said quietly. "We've found this."
"I shouldn't have to tell you my game." She was almost in tears. "You're both just Tweens. You couldn't understand." Then, struck with contrition, she turned to me. "Daddy, I've tried and tried to ESP you. Truly I did. But you don't ESP worth anything." She slipped her hand through Robert's arm. "Robert does it very nicely," she said primly, as though she were complimenting him on using his fork the right way. "He must be better than I am, because I don't know how he finds me."
"I'll tell you how I do it, Star," Robert exclaimed eagerly. It was as if he were trying to make amends now that grownups had caught on. "You don't use any imagination. I never saw anybody with so little imagination!"
"I do, too, have imagination," she countered loudly. "I thought up the game, didn't I? I told you how to do it, didn't I?"
"Yeah, yeah!" he shouted back. "But you always have to look at a book to ESP what's in it, so you leave an ESP smudge. I just go to the encyclopedia and ESP where you didโand I go to that placeโand there you are. It's simple."
Star's mouth dropped open in consternation.
"I never thought of that," she said.
Jim and I stood there, letting the meaning of what they were saying penetrate slowly into our incredulous minds.
"Anyway," Robert was saying, "you haven't any imagination." He sank down cross-legged on the floor. "You can't teleport yourself to any place that's never been."
She went over to squat down beside him. "I can, too! What about the Moon People? They haven't been yet."
He looked at her with childish disgust.
"Oh, Star, they have so been. You know that." He spread his hands out as though he were a baseball referee. "That time hasn't been yet for your daddy here, for instance, but it's already been for somebody likeโwell, say, like those things from Arcturus."
"Well, neither have you teleported yourself to some place that never was," Star was arguing back. "So there."
Waving Jim to one chair, I sank down shakily into another. At least the arms of the chair felt solid beneath my hands.
"Now, look, kids," I interrupted their evasive tactics. "Let's start at the beginning. I gather you've figured a way to travel to places in the past or future."
"Well, of course. Daddy." Star shrugged the statement aside nonchalantly. "We just TP ourselves by ESP anywhere we want to go. It doesn't do any harm."
And these were the children who were too little to cross the street!
I have been through times of shock before. This was the sameโsomehow, the mind becomes too stunned to react beyond a point. One simply plows through the rest, the best he can, almost normally.
"Okay, okay," I said, and was surprised to hear the same tone I would have used over an argument about the biggest piece of cake. "I don't know whether it's harmful or not. I'll have to think it over. Right now, just tell me how you do it."
"It would be so much easier if I could ESP it to you," Star said doubtfully.
"Well, pretend I'm a Stupid and tell me in words."
"You remember the Moebius Strip?" she asked very slowly and carefully, starting with the first and most basic point in almost the way one explains to an ordinary child.
Yes, I remembered it. And I remembered how long ago it was that she had discovered it. Over a year, and her busy, brilliant mind had been exploring its possibilities ever since. And I thought she had forgotten it!
"That's where you join the ends of a strip of paper together with a half twist to make one surface," she went on, as though jogging my undependable, slow memory.
"Yes," I answered. "We all know the Moebius Strip."
Jim looked startled. I had never told him about the incident.
"Next you take a sheet and you give it a half twist and join the edge to itself all over to make a funny kind of holder."
"Klein's Bottle," Jim supplied.
She looked at him in relief.
"Oh, you know about that," she said. "That makes it easier. Well, then, the next step. You take a cube"โHer face clouded with doubt again, and she explained, "You can't do this with your hands. You've gotta ESP it done, because it's an imaginary cube anyway."
She looked at us questioningly. I nodded for her to continue.
"And you ESP the twisted cube all together the same way you did Klein's Bottle. Now if you do that big enough, all around you, so you're sort of half twisted in the middle, then you can TP yourself anywhere you want to go. And that's all there is to it," she finished hurriedly.
"Where have you gone?" I asked her quietly.
The technique of doing it would take some thinking. I knew enough physics to know that was the way the dimensions were built up. The line, the plane, the cubeโEuclidian physics. The Moebius Strip, the Klein Bottle, the unnamed twisted cubeโEinsteinian physics. Yes, it was possible.
"Oh, we've gone all over," Star answered vaguely. "The Romans and the Egyptiansโplaces like that."
"You picked up a coin in one of those places?" Jim asked.
He was doing a good job of keeping his voice casual. I knew the excitement he must be feeling, the vision of the wealth of knowledge which must be opening before his eyes.
"I found it, Daddy," Star answered Jim's question. She was about to cry. "I found it in the dirt, and Robert was about to catch me. I forgot I had it when I went away from there so fast." She looked at me pleadingly. "I didn't mean to steal it, Daddy. I never stole anything, anywhere. And I was going to take it back and put it right where I found it. Truly I was. But I dropped it again, and then I ESP'd that you had it. I guess I was awful naughty."
I brushed my hand across my forehead.
"Let's skip the question of good and bad for a minute," I said, my head throbbing. "What about this business of going into the future?"
Robert spoke up, his eyes shining. "There isn't any future, Mr. Holmes. That's what I keep telling Star, but she can't reasonโshe's just a girl. It'll all pass. Everything is always past."
Jim stared at him, as though thunderstruck, and opened his mouth in protest. I shook my head warningly.
"Suppose you tell me about that, Robert," I said.
"Well," he began on a rising note, frowning, "it's kinda hard to explain at that. Star's a Bright and even she doesn't understand it exactly. But, you see, I'm older." He looked at her with superiority. Then, with a change of mood, he defended her. "But when she gets as old as I am, she'll understand it okay."
He patted her shoulder consolingly. He was all of six years old.
"You go back into the past. Back past Egypt and Atlantis. That's recent," he said with scorn. "And on back, and on back, and all of a sudden it's future."
"That isn't the way I did it." Star tossed her head contrarily. "I reasoned the future. I reasoned what would come next, and I went there, and then I reasoned again. And on and on. I can, too, reason."
"It's the same future," Robert told us dogmatically. "It has to be, because that's all that ever happened." He turned to Star. "The reason you never could find any Garden of Eden is because there wasn't any Adam and Eve." Then to me, "And man didn't come from the apes, either. Man started himself."
Jim almost strangled as he leaned forward, his face red and his eyes bulging.
"How?" he choked out.
Robert sent his gaze into the far distance.
"Well," he said, "a long time from nowโyou know what I mean, as a Stupid would think of Time-From-Nowโmen got into a mess. Quite a messโ
"There were some people in that time who figured out the same kind of traveling Star and I do. So when the world was about to blow up and form a new star, a lot of them teleported themselves back to when the Earth was young, and they started over again."
Jim just stared at Robert, unable to speak.
"I don't get it," I said.
"Not everybody could do it," Robert explained patiently. "Just a few Brights. But they enclosed a lot of other people and took them along." He became a little vague at this point. "I guess later on the Brights lost interest in the Stupids or something. Anyway, the Stupids sank down lower and lower and became like animals." He held his nose briefly. "They smelled worse. They worshiped the Brights as gods."
Robert looked at me and shrugged.
"I don't know all that happened. I've only been there a few times. It's not very interesting. Anyway," he finished, "the Brights finally disappeared."
"I'd sure like to know where they went," Star sighed. It was a lonely sigh. I helplessly took her hand and gave my attention back to Robert.
"I still don't quite understand," I said.
He grabbed up some scissors, a piece of cellophane tape, a sheet of paper. Quickly he cut a strip, gave it a half twist, and taped it together. Then rapidly, on the Moebius Strip, he wrote: "Cave men. This men, That men, Mu Men, Atlantis Men, Egyptians, History Men, Us Now Men, Atom Men, Moon Men, Planet Men, Star Menโ"
"There," he said. "That's all the room there is on the strip. I've written clear around it. Right after Star Men comes Cave Men. It's all one thing, joined together. It isn't future, and it isn't past, either. It just plain is. Don't you see?"
"I'd sure like to know how the Brights got off the strip," Star said wistfully.
I had all I could take.
"Look, kids," I pleaded. "I don't know whether this game's dangerous or not. Maybe you'll wind up in a lion's mouth, or something."
"Oh, no, Daddy!" Star shrilled in glee. "We'd just TP ourselves right out of there."
"But fast," Robert chortled in agreement.
"Anyway, I've got to think it over," I said stubbornly. "I'm only a Tween, but, Star, I'm your daddy and you're just a little girl, so you have to mind me."
"I always mind you," she said virtuously.
"You do, eh?" I asked. "What about going off the block? Visiting the Greeks and Star Men isn't my idea of staying on the block."
"But you didn't say that, Daddy. You said not to cross the street. And I never did cross the street. Did we, Robert? Did we?"
"We didn't cross a single street, Mr. Holmes," he insisted.
"My God!" said Jim, and he went on trying to light a cigarette.
"All right, all right! No more leaving this time, then," I warned.
"Wait!" It was a cry of anguish from Jim. He broke the cigarette in sudden frustration and threw it in an ashtray. "The museum, Pete," he pleaded. "Think what it would mean. Pictures, specimens, voice recordings. And not only from historical places, but Star men, Pete. Star men! Wouldn't it be all right for them to go places they know are safe? I wouldn't ask them to take risks, butโ"
"No, Jim," I said regretfully. "It's your museum, but this is my daughter."
"Sure," he breathed. "I guess I'd feel the same way."
I turned back to the youngsters.
"Star, Robert," I said to them both, "I want your promise that you will not leave this time, until I let you. Now I couldn't punish you if you broke your promise, because I couldn't follow you. But I want your promise on your word of honor you won't leave this time."
"We promise." They each held up a hand, as if swearing in court.
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