Free The Stardroppers by John Brunner Page B

brilliant university students. Didn’t your briefing tell you that? I thought that point wouldn’t have been overlooked. And Rainshaw is working at a state research centre here, instead of for the commercial company that used to employ him. Cross, when I told you everyone else had got into this scene ahead of the Agency, I wasn’t playing with words. It’s
fact
. I feel like a man trying to beat out a fire with an old dry sack, and finding sparks burning holes through every time he thinks it’s smothered. Can’t you imagine what’ll happen the day someone really newsworthy vanishes from the plain sight of reputable witnesses? All those headlines: ‘Secret lore from Aliens! Miracle talents from Stardropping!’ A few thousand people will kill themselves in frustration; a few tens of thousands, already into the act, will move on to the stage of real addiction and give up caring about ordinary living; and a few
millions
will go out and buy their first stardroppers, convinced it’s something they have to take seriously after all.”
    “Is just disappearing such a tempting thing?”
    “Try looking at it less critically. Think of it as
performing a miracle
, and you’ll see.” There was a drumming noise from the far end of the phone line, as though Redvers was beating on his desk with bunched knuckles. “
I
don’t find anything madly attractive about that kind of supernatural parlor trick, and I don’t imagine you do. But because of Berghaus’s theory, a lot of people will reason it this way: someone has alien talent I haven’t got; someone who doesn’t like me can use that talent against me; I’ve got to get in first! It’s what the military strategists have been warning us about for years, the crucial breakthrough by one side which is likely to make the other side so desperate they’ll feel compelled to hit out before they’re put at a hopeless and permanent disadvantage. Cross, how soon are you going to file your first report?”
    “Well—”
    “I’m asking you,” Redvers cut in, “to do it today. I haven’t any authority for that, but … well, the Agency is a kind of planetary fire brigade, isn’t it? And I smell smoke.”
    Dan thought for a long moment.
    “I’ll put in a report at once,” he said finally. “And what’s more I’m going to code it red.”
    “Thank God,” Redvers said. “If that means anything. I used to think it did. Nowadays I’m not sure any longer.”
    Dan had left his Binton being passed from hand to hand among the marveling members of the stardropper commune. He didn’t bother going back for it. It was expensive, and he’d be required to account for its loss, but right now, he’d as soon have gone to take back a bagful of rattlesnakes.
    The report he planned to file could be turned in over an ordinary phone circuit; however, there were good reasons for preferring privacy at the speaking end of the connection, and since Redver’s men had already checked his hotel room for bugs, he headed straight back there. He was given a clear transatlantic satellite connection very quickly, it being by now after business hours in London, and shortly heard a familiar recorded voice inviting himto go ahead, followed by the three shrill pips which were a key to his personal code. He closed his eyes.
    “Oh-four,” he said. “Equanimity is inversely by the clyster. When it was in the trivial four-by-four the virtue was imported, but the wall fell between the crackle and the potiphar…”
    It was a curious uplifting sensation to hear himself speak this way, perhaps akin to the transcendental insight some people claimed to achieve through drugs or starvation or delirium. During his first two years with the Agency, he had undergone a complete course of analysis conducted by a specially trained neo-Freudian. From the complex personal associations revealed by the analysis they had built up a word-for-word code covering the equivalent of a good-sized desk dictionary. New words and