Read Online The Stardroppers by John Brunner - Free Book Online

with attractive long fair hair, wearing what had once been a red-and-white jumpsuit but was now red-and-pink after much washing.
    “Yes?” she said.
    “Are you—uh—Mrs. Carlton?” Dan hazarded.
    “Yes,” the girl confirmed. “And what—?”
    She was interrupted by a shout from behind her. Lilith had made it to the first-floor landing. “It’s for me, Barbie!” she called, and came down the final flight of stairs in three eager bounds. Rushing forward, she seemed to have to restrain the impulse to hug Dan.
    “I thought you weren’t going to come after all!” she exclaimed.
    Standing aside, Barbie Carlton looked puzzled, and a trifle put out. Noticing, catching at Dan’s hand to draw him inside, Lilith said, “Oh,
Barbie!
This is the guy I was expecting, the one with the American fuel-cell ‘dropper!’”
    Instantly Barbie showed excitement. “Ah!” she murmured, her eyes fastening hungrily on the instrument Dan carried, its strap still in a crude knot as a memorial to Lilith’s unsuccessful attempt at theft. “Yes, Nick said something about that. Shall I call him? I’m sure he’d be interested.”
    Lilith’s face fell, For her, plainly, the whole point of bringing Dan here was to have another private session with his stardropper. But it was her turn to be interrupted. A door at the far end of the hallway—giving onto a kitchen-living room, by the brief glimpse Dan had of what lay beyond—opened and revealed a young man with a shaven head, rather thin, wearing neat but old black pants and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
    “Is that your American friend, Lil?” he inquired, and on Lilith’s nod advanced, hand outstretched. His accent had already indicated he was probably Nicholas Carlton before he gave Dan his name.
    “And you’ve got a Binton!” he said. “Which does something for Lil that all the other twenty-nine instruments in this house can’t! It must be quite a gadget, I must say. Well, come on in. Barbie, don’t let the guy stand there on the step! You’ve met my wife Barbara, I take it?”
    During this, Dan had been taking in a series of quick impressions. They fitted what Redvers had told him. He’d been vaguely expecting something like the drug-using communes he’d occasionally visited, rather squalid, inevitably untidy, with at least the smell of decay if no actual overt garbage in the corners. This hallway, however, was starkly clean, recently painted white, and the tiled floor glistened as though it had been washed within the past hour or two. There was little furniture in sight but the hat stand—a Victorian relic—and the bookcase which he could see were well dusted, and there was a coarse Irish sisal carpet on the stairs, neatly secured bybrass rods. There was a faint odor of disinfectant, piney and pleasant.
    Whether or not one can tell a man by the company he keeps, Dan had long ago decided, one can certainly learn a lot about him by examining the place where he has chosen to live. At first sight, this house corresponded exactly to what Redevers had told him about Carlton; ex-prefect in an expensive boarding school. There was something school-like, or even barracks-like, about the starched inhuman, but at least it wasn’t sordid.
    Lilith was standing beside him quivering with impatience, and Barbie eying him with a hint of suspicion. It was time he said something, preferably affable.
    “You heard how I ran into Lilith, I guess?” he said, and read from her face that she hadn’t told the whole story.
    “I gather you ran into her in Oxford Street, near Cosmica,” Nick Carlton said, “and kindly let her try out your Binton.”
    “And promised to let me have another go with it today,” Lilith said meaningly.
    Dan chuckled. “Well, here you are!” he said, unslinging it. Continuing to Nick, he added, “I was very interested when she said she was in this—this commune, by the way. I’ve only just started digging around in the field, and I thought it