Troubled Star
Copyright© 2026 by George O. Smith
Chapter 5
Barbara Crandall opened the door for a quick glance, then opened it wide. “Oh. It’s you!”
Dusty nodded glumly. “Yeah. Surprised?”
Barbara shrugged. “A bit. When did they let you out?”
“This morning.”
“Rough?”
“You said it. Was it rough on you?”
“A little, but it’s been made up for.”
“How come?” asked Dusty looking up.
She smiled quietly. “I’ve got legs and a figure,” she chuckled. “I’ve been cheesecaked all over town as the Star Girl and there’s talk of my getting a part in the Jack Vandal series over at Cosmic Studios.”
“How so? Seems to me that we’re both sort of washed up.”
Barbara shook her head. “Jack Vandal is a sort of cheerful villain, you know. He takes delight in bumping off the well-protected crook who can’t be touched by the law. He’s hunted by the police and hated by the underworld—”
“Spare the gruesome details. They haven’t changed in a couple of thousand years. How come you’re not in the dog house?”
Barbara smiled. “Because the woman in that kind of opus is always a sort of shady lady herself. It wouldn’t do to have an innocent virgin for the companion of a buccaneer. So with my slightly tarnished reputation I’m a natural. What happened to you?”
“The lie detector test.”
Barbara blinked. “Then didn’t that prove your point?”
“I thought it did. But I forgot one thing. Seems that the lie detector, no matter how good, is capable only of showing whether the character is telling a falsehood or not.”
Barbara smiled confidently. “So you were telling the truth. Weren’t you?”
“Sure,” grunted Dusty. “Sure I was. But, quoting what’s-his-name in the Bible: ‘What is Truth?’ One of the court psychologists pointed it out very clearly. If I firmly believe that the moon turned bright purple at ten o’clock last night, under a lie detector I’d be credited with a ‘Truth’ when I said so. In fact, the damned thing would say that I was telling a lie if I believed that the moon was purple and tried to cover up by saying that it hadn’t changed. Follow?”
“So what was the verdict?”
“The verdict was to the effect that I was suffering under some hallucination—possibly induced by alcohol—which led me into this story. Therefore my lie-detector acquittal was valid only to prove that my call for help was, at the time, due to my personal conviction of danger. I was adjudged temporarily incompetent.”
“What kind of sentence? They didn’t just let you go.”
“I’ve been two weeks in the observation ward of the federal looney locker. You see, to prove me guilty, they had to show that I had willfully and maliciously transmitted a false signal, with intent to deceive and/or for some personal reason. Willful tampering of this nature comes out as malicious mischief; malicious tampering becomes a federal offence. Maybe I’ve got my terms mixed up, but I think you get the idea, anyway. The end-up was this: Dusty Britton was convinced of his personal danger, his emission of a distress signal cannot be called malicious. I am no longer the top star I was once—in fact Gramer has cancelled my contract on the moral turpitude clause and the McDougall Office has black-balled me from all productions. So after a couple of weeks of observation at the spin-bin, they let me free with an admonition to leave the stuff alone. Barb, have you got a drink?”
“Sure thing. Look, Dusty, I know what you must think, but please don’t ask me to corroborate your story. Not again.”
Dusty nodded soberly. “I won’t. The first time I thought we could convince ‘em. But not any more, kid. One of us in the mud is enough. We’ve got to find a new attack.”
Barbara handed Dusty a highball which he sipped before he said, “Barbara, we’ve got to do something.”
“Why?”
He looked at her, stunned. “Why?” he cried.
Barbara took a sip of her own highball. “We won’t lose a damned thing and you know it,” she said quietly.
“A thousand years—”
“So what?” she asked simply. “Supposing that they were a bit more accurate than Scyth predicted. Suppose that they took this thousand years out of our life at a time when you weren’t looking at the sun. Do you realize—” Barbara’s voice lowered a bit dramatically, “—or have you been watching the night sky to see whether they have already?”
“I have,” he admitted with rising excitement.
“All right,” she replied complacently. “Then you surely must realize that this thousand years out of your life isn’t going to change the stock market a point, or anything else.”
Dusty nodded. “This I can realize. But do you think I like losing everything but my other shirt? Do you realize that as of this moment I’ve got only a couple of thousand bucks tucked away and about as much prospect of landing another job as a dead fly?”
“You’re not really worried, are you, Dusty?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Because as soon as this barytrine field goes on and off and we find ourselves around another sun, in another sky, you’ll be corroborated.”
He looked at her. “Of course—and I’ve kept my big trap shut, too.”
“You’ve what?”
“You don’t think I’d be nuts enough to go around telling people ‘Well, if you don’t believe me, just wait until next month!’ do you?”
“Why not?”
“Because then they’d have carefully kept me on ice until after the big event.”
“After which your story would be corroborated and you’d—”
“I’d have nothing,” said Dusty sharply. “It’s not good enough. Sure, I’d be corroborated, but then I’d be blamed for not being effectual enough to convince people in the first place. I’d be blamed for not being the guy I’ve been depicting on the stage. I’ve been Dusty Britton, The Great Hero. But when it comes down to really doing something, I’m Dusty Britton, Liar First Class. Next it is going to be Dusty Britton, Helpless Incompetent. I can’t just fold my hands and tell ‘em that they can wait and see, and then yelp ‘I told you so!’ because if there’s anything that people hate it’s ‘I told you so!’ characters.”
Barbara Crandall looked at Dusty pityingly. “Dusty,” she asked softly, “Just what do you hope to accomplish?”
“I hope I’ll be able to—”
“No. I know what you want to do. But what I want to know is how.”
“There must be some way—” his voice trailed off.
“I can’t see it. Scyth has probably gone to Marandis to get his generator. Dusty, do you know where the hell is Marandis?”
“Somewhere towards the galactic center.”
“I’m told that the galaxy is a hell of a big place. You’ve about as much chance of getting there as you have of swimming the Pacific Ocean with one arm tied behind you. Scyth is gone from here so far that it takes light thousands of years to get that far. Hell, Dusty, at this moment, the best resources of all the science of the Earth and the so-called planetary income couldn’t move a housebrick from here to Venus in less than a matter of months. Alpha Centauri is actually no more than a dreamer’s symbol so far as we’re concerned. In fact, you and I know that Scyth’s little friends are somewhere on the dark side of Mercury getting ready to make Sol a variable. We couldn’t get there for months and months, and then we’d have a hell of a time locating them, even if we had whatever it might take to get there.”
Barbara thought for a minute and then went on, “And if we could direct the entire Earth, and could call upon anything or anyone, we wouldn’t know where to start. What is a phanoband? Why is a barytrine field? Even I know that there are a couple of dozen rather brilliant men who believe that the speed of light is not a limiting velocity, but this is only a conviction, not founded on any experimental evidence. So maybe you’ve got a firm inner drive to go out and prove yourself. But how in the hell are you going to make headway against a race that considers us primitive?”
“We’ve got to make contact.”
“How? Shall we call Mercury on the phanoband communicators? And what was that intermediary step? The machinus fields? It sounds like double-talk to me.”
“It was something about abandoning general relativity for the machinus theory of space-time,” said Dusty, bringing into focus all the science fiction he had ever read.
“Got any theories?” asked Barbara pointedly. “Frankly, Dusty, I’d like to help, but I feel too much like a man trying to come all the way from the stone age to the atom bomb in ten days. In order to circumvent their foul plan we’ve got to abandon a very workable theory in favor of an unknown something called the machinus theory of space-time, and then from that we develop something called phanoband radiation, which produces factors enabling us to reduce the theory to practise and eventually we take to deep space, find Marandis, and put our case in front of some sort of bureaucratic something-or-other. Can’t see it, Dusty.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Sit and take it. What else can you do? Darn it, Dusty, you can’t fight them, and you aren’t in any position to join them. We haven’t got the initiation fee, we don’t have the address, and we hardly talk the language.”
Dusty looked at her sourly. “I’d hoped you’d help,” he said unhappily. “You at least know what the score is.”
“Dusty, I’d like to help. I do know what the score is. It’s hopeless. You’re trapped in an awkward position. And like a lot of other people, you are in a position where you can’t do a damned thing about it. So you might as well save your high blood pressure and start looking around to see what you can make out of it.”
Dusty finished his drink and left. In a trash-can by the alley was a Dusty Britton Blaster, complete with holster and a tin medal for sharpshooting. The school-store across the street was displaying a Jack Vandal mask and a small case containing ten candy cigarettes and a secret compartment suitable for concealing ten-thousand dollar bills lifted from lawless characters who might have used the dough to bribe juries or buy professional gunmen.
Dusty made his way along the street unrecognized.
The guard at the front gate looked at Dusty with suspicion. Dusty looked back defiantly; for a number of years the guard had practically bowed thrice as Dusty approached, Dusty hoped that the habit of deference was well established.
“Have you a pass, Mr. Britton?”
“Now see here, Sam, I don’t need a pass and—”
“Mr. Britton, I’ve got orders to—”
“Look Sam. Let’s not stall. I want in and I’m going to—”
“One minute, Mr. Britton. I’ll have to call.”
Dusty grunted. “I want to see Doctor Ross.”
“Oh. Well, just a minute.”
The guard called, and Dusty could hear the roar of Martin Gramer, “Throw the louse out!”
“Sorry, Mr. Britton. We can’t let you in.”
“Look, Sam, I’ve got trouble. You’ve got trouble. Do you remember your younger days, Sam? When you were the top boy at Graphic Arts?”
“Sure do. Great days, too.”
“What happened, Sam?”
The smile faded from Sam’s face. “I got too old.”
“Sam, all I want is to gab with Dr. Ross for a minute or two. I’ve got a great idea. And I’ll make you a promise, Sam.”
“Promise?”
“Sure. I’ll promise you that if you let me in right now, and this idea of mine goes through, that I’ll see that you get a good bit in anything I’m in. We’ll work it up from character actor until you’re playing bigger and bigger bits. You can make a comeback, Sam, and I’ll help you then if you help me now. How’s about it?”
Sam looked through the studio gates for a moment, and the thinking could almost be seen in operation. He had darned little to lose; he could always blame Dusty’s entrance on some dreamed-up excuse, and if Dusty’s idea worked, he might even be able to take credit for having used some initiative.
“It’s a deal, Mr. Britton. But don’t forget me.”
“I won’t.”
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