A Scatter of Stardust Read Free

understand? The bushes!”
    She didn’t understand.
    “Silicone,” I said. “Leaves like razors. The valley is covered with them and the ground falls sharply away. Two more steps and you would have fallen among them.” I gripped her shoulders and turned her so as to face the valley. “There is a good reason why this place is out of bounds. Too many people act as you acted, believe as you believed.” I pointed to where something white gleamed among the pale green vegetation. “We call this place the Valley of the Singing Bells. A better name would be the Valley of Death.”
    *
    For a long moment she stared at the bleached bones. The wind had died and only a faint chiming rose from the valley, and when she spoke, her voice seemed very loud.
    “You come here,” she said. “Why?”
    “For the sake of a dream.” I gave her my reasons. “But now I know that I have wasted five years. Don’t do the same, Laura. Don’t live in the past. Live for the present and the future. Don’t try to keep memory awake and hurting. Let the dead rest in peace.”
    “And you?”
    “I’ll follow my own advice.”
    I stared for one last time over the glistening expanse of the valley and, for perhaps the first time, saw it as it really was. Not, as rumor had it, the resting place of the departed, the one spot in the universe where they would return and speak in the old, remembered voices to those who had known them, but as Holman had emphasized again and again. The Bells were a natural wonder, no more. They were a freak of evolution utterly devoid of the supernatural, as obvious and as normal as a Japanese lantern.
    Laura was smiling as we returned to the ship. I learned the reason for that smile long before we reached Earth.
    I had forgotten that Holman was a psychologist. I had underestimated my own importance and ignored the fact that my acquired skill was not to be lightly cast aside. Not by the government which, apparently, needed me. But wanted me sane.
    “It was a trick,” said Holman during our last night in space. “I make no excuses, a practitioner does not have to justify his cures. Laura isn’t a widow. She is an actress.” He looked sharply at me. “Are you surprised?”
    “No,” I said truthfully. Tm not surprised.”
    An intelligent man does not lose all his intelligence because one facet of it is dulled. I had had time to think, and little things, seen in a new light, had become obvious. Holman’s hints, the coincidence of her being missing, even the doctor’s conviction as to where she could have gone. She had heard me coming, of course, and had timed things well. She had never been in any danger but I hadn’t known that. In my anxiety for her I had destroyed my own illusion, faced it and recognized it for what it was. But I had found in return something of infinitely greater value.
    I smiled down at Holman and left him staring, his eyes perplexed. I could have enlightened him, but there was no time.
    Laura was waiting.
     

 
    Anne
     
    There is a place where there is no hurt, no sorrow, no fear, no regret. There has always been such a place. Some call it Heaven.
    One man found it.
    He fled the Cygni battle in a broken ship splotched with corrosive blue fire, the main drive screaming like a woman in pain as it kicked him through space away from the beams, the fire, the expanding flowers of atomic disruption. He wasn’t old. Space fighter pilots are never old. He wasn’t strong. He had no need of muscle. He was a scrap of soft, commanding jelly locked in the protective womb of his ship.
    His name was Argonne.
    He had chosen it himself after much searching through old books of forgotten wars. He wasn’t alone in this. All his companions of that time had adopted the names of famous battles, driven by the notion that a thing takes on the attributes of its name. Earlier his type had chosen to wear the names of great heroes, later of noted weapons. All hoped to gain power and strength from their choice.